Survivor's Quest

by Timothy Zahn

  "Don't worry about it," Luke assured him. "What about Bearsh? Did you see him?"

  "I didn't, no," Fel said, glancing around at the others. There was a general murmur of agreement. "He must have made it to D-Four before we were able to deal with their rear guard."

  "Rear guard?" Mara asked. "You saying there are still more of them up there?"

  "Definitely," one of the stormtroopers said. "We could hear them working in the turbolift pylon while we were bringing the car in."

  "I don't suppose you got a head count," Luke said.

  The stormtrooper shook his head. "We were too busy getting the car moving and laying out the flash paste to give them much attention."

  "I have done a rough calculation, however," Drask said. "From the size of the three inaccessible rooms aboard the Vagaari vessel, I estimate Bearsh could have brought as many as three hundred troops with him."

  Luke whistled. "Three hundred? They must have been stacked like data cards in there."

  "With their hibernation technology, that would be entirely possible," Drask agreed.

  "What were they doing in the pylon?" Evlyn asked.

  They all looked at her. "What?" Fel asked.

  "You said they were working in the turbolift pylon," the girl reminded them. "You said you didn't count them, but didn't you at least look to see what they were doing?"

  The two slightly-less-injured stormtroopers looked at each other. "Not really," one of them confessed. "We could see the lights, and they were definitely working on the tube and not on any of the cars. But that was all we got."

  "We had more pressing things to think about at the time," the other stormtrooper added.

  "Well, let's think about it now," Luke said. "What could Bearsh be up to?"

  "Maybe there's a quick way to find out," Mara said, stooping beside one of the Vagaari bodies and pulling off his helmet. "Let's ask him."

  She glanced over the controls, then keyed on the built-in comlink. "Hello, Bearsh," she called toward the voice pickup. "This is Mara Jade Skywalker. How's it going up there?"

  There was a long pause. "Bearsh?" she called again. "Come on, Vagaari, look alive."

  "I'm sorry, but General Bearsh is unavailable at this time," a voice replied, sounding distant and oddly hollow as it came from the helmet's headphones. "So you still live, Jedi?"

  Luke grimaced. General Bearsh, no less. "That's right, Estosh," Mara said. "We still live, you're up and around again—it's just a glorious day for us all."

  "Not for all, Jedi," Estosh said, an edge of malicious pleasure in his voice. "But for the Vagaari, this is indeed a day of satisfaction. Where precisely are you?"

  "We're standing around on a Vagaari-free Dreadnaught," Mara told him. "You want something more precise?"

  "No need," Estosh said. "I see you now, there in the corridor beside the Number Two Turbolaser Coolant Room."

  Luke glanced at the marker beside the nearest door in mild surprise. Apparently, the Vagaari had very precise locators built into their troops' helmets. "What do you mean, Vagaari-free?" Estosh went on.

  "Oh, didn't you know?" Mara said. "Your rear guard's dead. All of them."

  "Really," Estosh said. "Interesting. You Jedi are more effective warriors than we realized. Our mistake."

  "A mistake others paid for," Mara pointed out. "But I suppose that's typical. I don't suppose you're brave enough to come down here and take any of the risks yourself?"

  Estosh chuckled melodiously. "Thank you for your invitation, but no. The Supreme Commander never takes the same risks as the common soldiers. I have my duty, and they have theirs."

  "Supreme Commander, you say," Mara said. "I'm impressed. Speaking of duty, you surely didn't sacrifice forty-odd troops just to kill off a couple of hundred humans and a few Chiss, did you?"

  "Of course not," Estosh said. "Tell me, is Master Skywalker there with you?"

  Luke hesitated, sensing the trap lying beneath the question. Estosh was willing to talk, but only if he knew he didn't have a Jedi running loose and unaccounted for.

  On the other hand, if Luke confirmed he was here listening, his own freedom of movement would be severely limited, at least for the length of the conversation. With Fel and the stormtroopers largely out of commission, it would be a bad idea to let the Vagaari pin both him and Mara down to this one particular spot.

  Mara, he could sense, had come to the same conclusion. Fortunately, she'd also come up with the answer. Smiling wickedly at Luke, she pulled out the comlink Pressor had given her and lifted her eyebrows.

  He nodded understanding, taking a rapid couple of steps aft down the corridor as he pulled the matching device from his own belt. Clicking hers on, Mara held it near the helmet's voice pickup and nodded. "Yes, I'm here, Estosh," Luke said into his comlink. "What do you want?"

  "Nothing in particular," Estosh said offhandedly, his voice coming more faintly now from the comlink as Luke continued down the corridor toward the aft turbolift lobby. It was time, he decided, to see what exactly was going on up there. "I merely didn't want to have to repeat all of this for you later. You're right, we did indeed come here for revenge. But certainly not for the few ragged handfuls of humans who will soon be dying alongside you. No, our revenge will be against the entire Chiss race."

  The colonists, Luke saw, were beginning to emerge now from the various nooks and crannies they'd been hiding in. Most of them shied back again at their first sight of him. "Nice to have goals in life," Mara commented. "But I find it hard to believe there's anything aboard Outbound Flight that's going to help you take down the Chiss Ascendancy. Or are the Vagaari in the habit of using high-flying words that don't really mean anything?"

  "Mock me all you wish, Jedi," Estosh snarled. "But I am up here, and you are down there."

  Luke had reached the turbolift lobby now. There was a single car waiting there behind the piles of Vagaari bodies, a car with an oddly shaped hole blown in the front part of the roof. He stepped inside and turned back toward the control panel.

  It was only then that he saw that Evlyn had followed him.

  He blinked at her in surprise, cutting off his comlink's voice pickup. "What are you doing here?" he demanded.

  "I want to help," she said. "What can I do?"

  His first instinct was to tell her to get back to Mara where she'd be safe. The only way he was going to be able to find out what the Vagaari were up to would be to go up to D-4 and take a look for himself. If they'd left a reception committee watching that approach, it could get messy.

  But there was something about the expression on the girl's face that was stirring old memories...

  "And up there is about as far as you're going to get," Mara's voice scoffed over the comlink, the tone carefully designed to draw Estosh out still further. "Or had you forgotten we're in the middle of the Chiss Redoubt?"

  "I want to go with you," Evlyn said. "Please?"

  Luke smiled as the memory clicked. I want to go with you. He could still remember his eagerness and frustration as he'd said those same words to Ben Kenobi, way back on the first Death Star. But Ben had refused him, going alone to shut down the tractor beam that was preventing the Millennium Falcon from escaping.

  And thereby going to his death.

  Would things have been different if he'd allowed Luke to go along? Of course they would. Leia might never have been found and rescued, for one thing. Han certainly wouldn't have gone out on a limb for her back then, at least not alone.

  Still, there had been many times over the years when he'd lain awake in the dark hours of the night, visualizing how he and Ben together might have been able to defeat or at least neutralize Vader, then go on to free Leia from her cell, then take R2-D2 and the precious Death Star data to Yavin 4.

  "Ah, so there are things even the great Jedi don't know," Estosh scoffed back. "Perhaps it was merely your basic combat skills I underestimated."

  There was really no question as to what the logical, practical decision should be. Evly
n would be at risk up there, as well as being a possibly crucial distraction for Luke himself.

  And yet, despite all the logic, his instincts were whispering the exact opposite.

  Trust your instincts, Luke...

  "Get ready to stop the turbolift," he told her. Bending his knees, stretching to the Force for strength, he jumped through the ragged opening up onto the car's roof. The reason for the odd shape of the hole became clear the instant he saw the multicolored wires crisscrossing the roof. Like the forward turbolifts, this one had been wired as a trap. The stormtroopers who had made the hole had rearranged and extended some of the lines, then shaped their explosive ribbon to avoid damaging the rest of them. "And if I tell you to get out of here, you immediately take the car back down and get Mara and the Imperials, without question or argument. Understood?"

  Evlyn nodded. Stretching to the Force again, Luke reached down through the opening and keyed the switch.

  The car began to lumber its way toward D-4, "downward" from where Luke was currently sitting. Pulling out his glow rod, he adjusted it to tight beam and waited.

  "That's a little unfair, Estosh," Fel's voice came from the comlink. "Even Jedi can't be expected to know everything. That's why they have allies like us. You see, we know all about the recorder you tapped into the navigational repeater lines."

  Luke frowned at the comlink. A recorder in the navigational lines, that Fel and the 501st had known about?

  And that they hadn't mentioned to anyone else?

  "Ah, so that's what the diversion with the line creepers was all about," Mara said. Even at this distance, Luke could sense her own surprise and annoyance that Fel hadn't let them in on the secret. But nothing but interested professionalism was coming out in her voice. "You knew you might be leaving this party early, so you made sure you'd have a recording of the route back to the Brask Oto Command Station. And your little chat with Jinzler in the forward observation lounge was because he happened to be too close to the action?"

  "Yes," Estosh said, sounding grudgingly impressed that she'd caught on so quickly. "If he'd left at the wrong moment, he would have seen Purpsh installing the device. Master Skywalker, are you still there?"

  Luke clicked the comlink voice pickup back on. "Still here, Estosh," he assured the other. "But even that recording isn't going to get you all the way out of the Redoubt, you know. We were half an hour into the flight before you got it tied in."

  "That last part will be easy enough," Estosh said offhandedly. "Leaving the edge of a star cluster is not nearly as difficult as navigating one's way inside."

  The turbolift car had hit the main gravity eddy field now and was rotating around in the darkness. A moment later it finished its turn, leaving Luke with a clear line of sight all the way to the curve where the pylon entered the underside of D-4.

  He frowned. Even though he couldn't see the far end of the tube, he ought to be able to hear the sounds of any activity going on around the curve. But all was silence. Whatever the Vagaari had been doing, they were apparently finished.

  That was probably a bad sign. Flicking on his glow rod, he shined it upward.

  And caught his breath. There, packed around the tube a few meters out from the curve, he could see a solid ring of flat gray boxes.

  Boxes like the ones he and Mara had run into on their initial trip through D-4. Boxes Mara had identified as being full of explosives.

  The Vagaari had mined the pylon.

  CHAPTER 22

  Luke gazed upward, feeling his throat tighten. There was undoubtedly an orderly and systematic method for detaching Dreadnaught-4 from the rest of Outbound Flight. Clearly, the Vagaari weren't interested in finding out what that procedure was.

  The car was approaching the ring now. "One thing that puzzles me, Estosh," Luke said into his comlink, holding his free hand horizontally over the hole in the ceiling where Evlyn could see it. "You couldn't have known any of the Dreadnaughts would even be in one piece when we set off on this trip, let alone ready to fly. And you certainly didn't need all these troops just to track the Chaf Envoy's path into the Redoubt." The car reached the explosives, and he jabbed at the air with his finger. Evlyn was ready, and the car settled tentatively to a midair halt.

  "That's right," Mara said. Luke could sense her concern as she picked up on his sudden tension, but again all of it was carefully filtered out of her voice. "So what was the original plan? Just out of curiosity, of course."

  "You humans are strange creatures," Estosh said, his melodious voice starting to pick up an edge of suspicion. "Here you are, about to die, and yet instead of struggling to postpone your fate, you sit quietly and ask about things that cannot possibly help you."

  Slowly, Luke ran the light from his glow rod along the explosives. The detonator wiring seemed straightforward enough, the kind of arrangement he'd seen demolitions techs use during the Rebellion. In theory, he should be able to simply pull it out of all the packages within reach.

  The problem was that the detonator box itself was a quarter of the way around the tube from him.

  There is no emotion; there is peace. Taking a careful breath, Luke tried to think. He could, of course, easily use the Force to maneuver his lightsaber over to the box and cut it away from the boxes of explosives. But the Vagaari might have wired it with a collapsing release to prevent any last-minute tampering. If it was rigged that way, cutting it free would instantly trigger a detonation.

  In addition, there was something else pressed up against the metal beneath the boxes, something he could see but couldn't get to without disassembling everything on top of it. Unknowns were always to be considered dangerous, especially in explosives work.

  "The thing is, you see, we Jedi don't die nearly as easily as you might like," Mara told Estosh calmly. "There's a good chance we'll be seeing you again, and the more we know about you, the easier it'll be for us to peel your epaulets back for good when we do."

  Still, Luke decided, unknowns or not, if he could get over to the box he stood a good chance of figuring out how to disarm it. The problem was that the turbolift pylon was perfectly smooth, with no protrusions anywhere nearby that would hold his weight. The cluster of buried cables he and Mara had used for their climb up the forward pylon weren't situated close enough to the box, either. He probably could have rigged up something out of liquid cable, but he'd used up most of his supply when he and Mara had sealed off the edges of that first turbolift car.

  But if his particular car was too far away, one of the other cars in the cluster should be positioned to pass right next to it. All he and Evlyn had to do was continue up to D-4, where the Vagaari had presumably locked the rest of the cars, transfer to the correct one, and ride it back down again. He wouldn't even have to expose them to enemy fire by going into the lobby; he could use his lightsaber to cut through the sides of the cars until they reached the one they needed.

  He looked down into the car and gestured upward. Evlyn nodded and touched the switch, and the car began to rise again. They lifted past the explosives, around the curve—

  "How very confident of you," Estosh said, his voice suddenly silky smooth. "My only regret is that I will not actually witness your deaths. Farewell, Jedi." There was a click from Luke's comlink as the Vagaari broke the connection—

  And suddenly, below him, the turbolift pylon erupted in an eerie, flickering greenish-blue light and the sound of metallic hissing.

  "Luke!" Mara called over the comlink. "What's going on?"

  "I think they're about to blow the pylons," Luke said grimly, gesturing Evlyn to stop the car. The other five cars of the cluster were visible now directly above him, along with the gap the car they were riding would normally slip into. "You know any type of detonator that hisses and gives off blue-green light?"

  "Sounds like a scorch stick," Mara said. "It's an acid-based, high-temperature paste used to burn a score mark in something to help the explosives crack it more cleanly."

  "How long until it burns around a py
lon this size?"

  "Half a minute," Mara said. "Maybe a little more. If you're anywhere near it, get out now."

  Luke listened to his heart thudding in his throat as he weighed his options. If he could just get to the detonator before the scorch stick finished its burn...

  But no. Not in half a minute. Certainly not with Evlyn along to slow him down.

  He shouldn't have brought her with him. For the first time in a long time, his instincts had played him false.

  But this wasn't the time for questions or recriminations. "Right," he said, jabbing downward. "We're on our way."

  Evlyn didn't need to be told twice. She hit the switch, and the car headed down again. On sudden impulse, Luke snatched his lightsaber from his belt and ignited it. If the Vagaari were going to get away, at least they weren't going to get away clean. Using the Force to hold down the switch, he hurled the weapon upward toward the gap in the cluster of cars. It hit the upper part of the turbolift lobby, and he had just enough time to see the wobbling blade carve out a large hole in the metal before the curve in the tube blocked it from his sight. The car dropped past the ring of explosives—

  And with a jolt, he saw that Mara had overestimated how much time they would have. The scorched section already extended over more than half the circle, with the flickering fire seeming to pick up speed as it worked its way around toward the detonator.

  They had maybe five more seconds before it finished.

  "On the floor," Luke shouted to Evlyn, jumping in through the hole in the roof. The car wouldn't be nearly enough protection from the explosive power about to be unleashed, he knew, but it was all they had. "Come on, get on the floor," he repeated.

  But to his surprise, Evlyn ignored him, remaining by the control panel as she punched keys on a command stick she'd plugged into the droid socket. He reached out a hand for her, wondering if she didn't understand or if she'd simply frozen in fear.

  But even as his hand closed on her arm, he caught the sense of desperate determination in the girl. As he started to pull her down, she touched one last key on the command stick—