Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II (16 page)

Viqi scrambled around on the floor, turned toward her original direction of flight, and crawled as fast as paralysis gripping her arms and legs would let her. It occurred
to her that it would be better to die than flee, better to face her tormentors rather than have to continue running, but the rational side of her mind, forcing its way to the forefront, kept her moving.

She made it a few meters, until the curve in the corridor made it impossible to see the man and woman.

She heard them scream, heard the
snap-hiss
of lightsabers igniting.

There was a maintenance panel ahead of her, set in the wall at ground level. She reached it and tugged at its handle. It resisted, probably held in place by simple magnetic bolts or locks.

She put all her slight frame into it, yanking, and the panel came loose; her effort sent the panel skittering across the floor. Beyond the new hole was a vertical shaft not more than a meter in diameter, steel rungs making a ladder of the far side.

Viqi crawled into the shaft and climbed. Her arms and legs trembled, threatening every instant to fail her.

She heard the man and woman scream again, then heard the noise of lightsabers chopping. As she ascended, the noise faded, but the fear and loathing did not.

   By Luke’s chrono, it had taken them four hours to find the first evidence of the thing or things they sought. They stood in the main manufacturing chamber of a furnishing concern and looked down at the dismembered bodies of Yuuzhan Vong warriors—and voxyn.

It was not evidence or deduction or luck that had led them here. Luke and the other Jedi could feel lingering dark-side energy imbued in the walls, the machines, the corpses. The sensation, so like what Luke had experienced
within a certain cave on Dagobah, caused the hair on the back of his neck to rise.

Mara dispassionately looked at the body of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior who had been cut into at least eight pieces. The wounds were all burned, cauterized. “Our Dark Jedi again. Or whatever they are.”

“Dark Jedi might be able to impose their will on normal people,” Tahiri said. She had her arms crossed, and Luke suspected her pose was an effort to keep herself from trembling. “But not on fully trained Jedi. This was like jumping into an ocean of the dark side of the Force. It was like feeling Anakin die again. And wanting again to die with him.” More tears came, and she looked away so that the others would not see them.

“I wonder,” Luke said, “what it’s going to be like to confront them face-to-face.” He prodded a severed Yuuzhan Vong leg with his toe. He hadn’t always done well when faced with the dark side. “The Yuuzhan Vong are invisible to the Force. They couldn’t feel it. We aren’t. Especially the Jedi.”

“I had a thought on that.” Face was on guard duty, blaster rifle in hand, his attention on the entryway. “A tactic I’ve used from time to time in bad situations.”

“What’s that?” Luke asked.

“Snipers. Set up a couple of kilometers away in a blind with a laser rifle and someone who really knows how to use it, and when your enemy wanders by, ‘zap.’ ”

Luke smiled. “Not exactly fair.”

“Who wants to be fair?”

   Viqi woke up in absolute blackness and thought for a moment that she might be dead. In a panic, she sat up,
but before she came upright her head banged into something, resulting in a sharp pain to her forehead and a hollow metallic noise.

Then she remembered. She’d climbed and climbed, hearing the roars and the lightsaber hums of her pursuit. Her pursuers had cut their way through durasteel bulkheads to follow her, but she’d found side channels from the access duct—ventilation ducts that were smaller and smaller, adequate for a diminutive Kuat woman but too constricting for whatever followed her.

After a long time of groping along in the dark, she had let exhaustion overcome her.

Now she was alone, weaponless and friendless, surrounded by kilometers of crumbling duracrete and metal in all directions.

Not to mention thirsty, hungry, and blind.

She forced herself to become calm and went through a ritual checklist that helped her regain control of whatever situation troubled her. Checklist, she began. One extravagantly capable political strategist whose skills are of no use here. One Yuuzhan Vong robeskin, a living garment whose sole virtue is that it’s better than running around naked, and matching footwraps
.

That’s about it
.

That wasn’t quite it. She’d been given something a million years ago, shortly before starting her run. She dug around under the robeskin neckline and held the object that pretty, doomed boy had handed her. It fit her palm so that a button fell under her thumb; there were two others on the reverse side. She pressed the first button.

A tiny red screen lit up on the remote, illuminating her
surroundings—a sheet-metal duct, layered with dust, a meter wide by half a meter high. The screen showed a wireframe sphere with one bright red dot at its center and another at one point on its circumference. She slowly rotated her hand and saw the second dot move around, always staying at the circumference, always pointed in the same cardinal direction.

It was a location finder of some sort. A distant object transmitted a regular signal, and this device always pointed in the direction of that object.

She pressed one of the buttons on the reverse side. The wire-frame image disappeared, replaced by the words
OUT OF RANGE
.

She pressed the last button. The device spoke with the voice of a woman: “Remember, pick up a new charge for the speeder, and we’re having dinner with the Tussins tonight.”

Viqi supposed that the recording would have depressed someone of less personal strength. She didn’t even bother to wonder how dinner had gone. The woman who’d recorded the message was gone, either crushed or vaporized or in some slavering idiot’s stew-pot, and her sole virtue was that one of her possessions was now going to benefit Viqi Shesh. Whatever it might lead to, it was, for now, a light source.

She rolled over onto her stomach, shining the light in front of her, and began crawling.

   Viqi stood at the center of what had once been a large living chamber, centerpiece of the apartment of some wealthy business family. There were numerous doors and
hallways off this chamber, all leading to bedchambers, refreshers, recreation areas—all now wrecked by looters and invasive plant life.

To Viqi’s right, a few meters away, was a huge hole in the wall that had once been a viewport half again the height of a man, and twice as broad as it was high. Now creepers growing on the building’s face hung over the gap, and pieces of shattered transparisteel littered what had once been heated flex-carpet.

Fungus was everywhere, grayish mushroomlike growths that were larger toward the hole. She’d stepped on one of the tiny ones and it had detonated beneath her foot, making her instep very sore and damaging the living footwrap she wore. She was careful not to touch any more, and it was clear that much of the damage to the chamber had come about because of the fungi—obviously, many of them had exploded over the last several weeks. Perhaps vibrations in the crumbling buildings set them off, perhaps they simply detonated when they reached a certain size.

The wall in front of Viqi was ferrocrete that had once been decorated, its utilitarian strength disguised, by a thick layer of flexible sheeting decorated in a starfield pattern. Attached to building power, the sheet’s stars and nebula would glow. Now the sheeting hung in strips. She’d torn most of it away and could find nothing beyond but ferrocrete.

On the other side of it was another crumbling skyscraper. In her explorations, she’d managed to get onto the corresponding floor of that building, but on its far side; collapsed hallways and walls had prevented her from getting closer.

The tracking device had led her here, and this was the point that was closest to whatever it indicated. On the little screen, the white dot representing that object and the dot indicating her current position were almost one point.

She shrugged. So she hadn’t been able to find her way to the object. It might just be a matter of ascending one floor, descending one, searching more diligently to find the spot that gave her access.

Then she remembered the
OUT OF RANGE
message she’d received. She held up the remote and depressed that button again.

There was a noise, a faint “ponk” of some mechanical apparatus being activated, from above her head. She looked up and then jumped aside just in time to avoid a descending ceiling panel. Its bottom edge came down to rest against the floor. She moved around to look up.

It was a set of metal stairs, narrow and without rails, leading up into darkness.

Breath catching in her throat, she hurried up the staircase. She found herself in a narrow, low corridor that led for three meters straight to the wall she had found so impassable—straight to a corresponding gap in that wall, a gap that was lit from the other side.

Before moving on, she looked around and found a small button control by the top of the hidden staircase. She pressed it and the stairs rose, locking into place behind her.

The gap in the wall opened into a cylindrical chamber a few meters across. Occupying most of the chamber, resting on its stern, was a vehicle—about twelve meters
long, squat at its stern and tapering toward the bow, all in a uniform deep matte blue that made it difficult for Viqi to make out details of its hull. There were protrusions everywhere, plates and hemispherical antennae and maneuvering or braking flaps.

The floor of this chamber was some four meters below Viqi’s feet. She stood directly opposite a hatch that opened into the vehicle’s interior, one-third of the distance from the stern.

The thing looked like some sort of oversized military landspeeder, enclosed to protect its crew, but since it rested on its tail—with no machinery evident to allow it to be lowered into a horizontal position—Viqi suspected that it was equipped for flight; she could not tell if it was an atmospheric vehicle or spaceworthy. On the side was stenciled the vehicle’s name,
Ugly Truth
.

She looked up. The cylindrical chamber continued upward another thirty meters beyond the vehicle’s nose, ending in a jumble of fallen metal beams and duracrete blocks. Viqi could see faint sunlight through that deadfall.

Scarcely able to believe her good fortune, she moved forward across a narrow span of metal that gave her access to the open hatch and clambered into the vehicle. As the vehicle was resting at a ninety-degree angle to its intended orientation, when she stepped down from the hatch she stood on what was obviously meant to be the main cabin’s rear bulkhead. A crudely constructed ladder of spare metal parts wired together allowed her to climb up to the pilot’s seat at the bow.

Under her touch, the secondary power switch engaged without hesitation or resistance. The cabin lights came
up; the vehicle’s navigation computer went through its power-up sequence.

Viqi felt a slow, wondering smile spread across her face. This was an emergency evacuation vehicle, cunningly hidden away in the event of disaster … but its owners had not been able to get to it in time as Coruscant fell. Perhaps they had died, perhaps they had been off-world already.

Who was the youth who’d given her the locator? Son of the vehicle’s owners? A builder who’d known and kept the secret of this hidden chamber, and later intended to use the vehicle when it became clear that its owners would be unable to? He’d probably been prevented from escaping by the collapse of the access above him. Perhaps he’d been working all this time to dig his way clear of that obstacle. Now he was dead, and the vehicle was hers.

She was free of the Yuuzhan Vong and in possession of an escape from their world.

A thought hit Viqi and her hands fell away from the controls. If this vehicle was designed as a last-ditch opportunity for survival, perhaps it was carrying …

She scrambled down the makeship ladder to the vehicle’s stern. A hatch into the stern compartment lay at her feet. She struggled with its locking bar and then hauled the heavy hatch open.

Below was a storage compartment with restraining nets to either side and a hatch at the far end. Doubtless the hatch gave access to the vehicle’s thrusters. Viqi didn’t care. Her attention was riveted by what she saw in the nets.

Rations. Military rations, carefully packed into individual
meals, guaranteed to survive for years on the shelf.

With a moan, she clambered down into the compartment, grabbed the nearest meal at hand, and tore into the wrapping flimsy around it.

Aphran IV was a heavily forested world whose green landmasses stood out in stark contrast from her blue seas. She was a warm world, lacking polar ice, with no moons to contribute tides. And she was a comparatively poor world whose people were noted chiefly for mastery in woodworking, whose artistic inlays were prized by collectors.

All this Han knew from a brief look at the star map records in the
Falcon’
s computer. The records suggested that Aphran would never survive even a weak Yuuzhan Vong attack. Considering how close she was to the Yuuzhan Vong zone of control, not far from Bilbringi, only her relative unimportance had kept her from being conquered by the enemy.

Han glanced at his wife. She looked very different than usual: her hair was long, black, and straight, her eyebrows broader and darker to match, and she wore garments that Senator Leia Organa Solo would never have been caught dead in.

They started with a bodysuit that was black and glossy.
Though synthetic, it creaked like hide when she moved. Her boots, low-slung blaster holster, and gloves were of a similar material, but matte rather than glossy. In the spirit of the character she was to portray, she had her feet up, crossed at the ankle, on the copilot control board before her. She fixed Han with a forbidding stare. “What are
you
looking at, ground-pounder?”

Han shook his head. “If your daughter could see you now …”