Star Wars: Survivor's Quest

CHAPTER 17

Mara was on her knees, studying the scattered bones and trying to visualize what the owner of the charric might have looked like, when she felt the faint and distant sensation.

She paused, closing her eyes as she stretched out to the Force. Bits and pieces flowed into focus—fear, surprise, anger, violence—then flowed away again into the general roiling fog. She worked harder at it, trying to pull back from the details to get a bigger picture.

The larger view refused to come, and a moment later the sensation itself faded into the darkness and dust and ancient bones. But that moment had been enough.

Somewhere nearby, someone had died. Violently.

She opened her eyes and looked at Luke. His eyes were still closed, his mouth tight as he, too, chased after the last wisps of the vision. She waited, fingering her lightsaber and fighting for patience, until he too had lost the contact. "How many?" she asked.

"Several," he said, climbing hastily to his feet. "No injuries, either, just deaths. Quick ones, too, as if the victims were ambushed."

"You think it's real, then?" Mara asked as they headed back across the bridge and into the monitor anteroom. "I mean, it couldn't have been something from the past, could it?"

"You mean like an echo of what happened to Outbound Flight fifty years ago?" Luke shook his head. "No. One of us might possibly pick up something like that, but not both of us at the same time. No, this was real, and it happened just now."

They had to do some climbing through the rubble at the bottom of the turbolift shaft in order to reach their car, but they'd made sure to leave adequate hand- and footholds, and within a few minutes they were once again inside. "Were you able to tell where it happened?" Mara asked as the car began moving sluggishly upward.

"No," Luke said. "Someplace above us, but it all went by too quickly to pin it down any better than that. You?"

Mara shook her head. "All I could tell was that the deaths didn't seem human, somehow."

"Really," Luke said, looking at her thoughtfully. "Interesting. I had something of that same feeling, but I couldn't decide whether that part was real or just the fact that there are so many Chiss and Geroons around."

"Or maybe it was a little of both," Mara said. "If someone decided to start shooting at Jinzler or the Five-Oh-First, they wouldn't be likely to let Formbi and Bearsh just walk away."

The car lumbered to a halt in the storage core. "Where exactly are we headed?" Mara asked as they hurried through the silent storage rooms.

"We'll try the turbolift Fel and the stormtroopers used to go to D-Six," Luke said over his shoulder. "We should be able to reach either D-Six or D-Five with that one."

"Yes, that part I'd already figured out," Mara said. "I was asking which of the two Dreadnaughts you think we should start with."

"I don't know," Luke said as they reached the turbolift lobby where they'd taken their leave of the Imperials. "Fel went to D-Six; Jinzler and Formbi are probably on D-Five. Pick one."

The turbolift door slid halfway open and stopped. "Let's make it D-Five," Mara decided as they squeezed inside. "Even with three Chiss warriors along, the civilians are likely to be harder pressed if things have gotten messy."

"Sounds good," Luke said. Using the Force to pull the doors at least partially closed, he tapped the key for D-5.

The car didn't move.

"Uh-oh," he said, trying the key again. Still nothing.

"Terrific," Mara growled, pulling out her comlink. A quick on-off showed that the jamming was still in place. "Well, so much for the easy approach," she said. "Looks like our choices are to climb the shaft or head aft and hope the turbolifts back there are still working."

"Or to continue around to the turbolift Pressor had us trapped in," Luke reminded her. "Actually, given that we've already cut some of the repulsor controls in that pylon, it might be the easier one to climb."

"Probably safer, too," Mara pointed out, pushing the doors open again.

"Right," Luke agreed as they squeezed back out into the turbolift lobby and took off at a run toward the next turbolift lobby over. "It would be a little tricky to play Hilltop Emperor if the repulsor beams came back on."

Mara stiffened. Suddenly, unbidden, a horrible revelation had come like a thundering of blaster bolts chewing their way into her stomach. The Geroon ship—Bearsh's farewell to the rest of his people as the Chaf Envoy prepared to head into the Redoubt—the vague and nameless puzzle that had bothered her so tantalizingly at the time—

And the image of a Geroon child triumphantly waving a red headband.

"What is it?" Luke asked, his own step faltering at the abrupt spike he felt in her. "Mara?"

"Blast it," she bit out, sprinting past him as she doubled her speed. "Come on—no time to waste. Blast them all."

"What—?"

But she had left Luke and his bewildered question behind her. So simple; so embarrassingly simple.

And yet Mara Jade Skywalker, former Emperor's Hand, had missed it completely. Musing on the Empire that had been, and her former place in it, she had missed it completely.

She was nearly to their target turbolift, and over her panting breath she could hear Luke's footsteps as he caught up to her. Steady, his thought came, flowing calmness over her as he tried to soothe some of her agitation.

But even Jedi calm couldn't help her now. People had already died because of her carelessness. Unless they hurried, others would suffer the same fate.

Maybe even all of them.

The turbolift lobby was almost completely dark when Pressor and Trilli arrived. "This is crazy," Pressor declared, looking around in disbelief. Even some of the emergency permlights were out, which should have been well-nigh impossible. "What could have caused all this?"

"You got me," Trilli said. "The power's all right at the generators—that was the first thing the techs checked. It's just getting lost somewhere along the way."

"So, what, we've got a short in the wiring?"

"It'd take a lot more than just one," Trilli pointed out. "And that wouldn't explain the permlights, anyway."

"Yes," Pressor conceded. "Have we got a tech crew on the way?"

"One's already here," Trilli told him. "They're a deck up, checking out the turbolifts. Apparently, that's where the outages started."

Pressor scratched his cheek. "The turbolifts that the two Jedi and Imperials were able to get past?"

"I thought about that, too," Trilli said. "But the power was just fine earlier after they got out."

"Maybe it's some sort of delayed reaction," Pressor suggested. "Something they set up to cover their tracks."

"I don't know," Trilli said doubtfully. "Seems kind of a waste of effort. Especially for Jedi."

Across the lobby, the faint sound of a ventilator fan went silent. "There goes another one," Pressor said, peering in that direction. "You know what this reminds me of? That infestation of conduit worms we had a few years after the landing."

"That's impossible," Trilli insisted. "We exterminated them thirty years ago."

"Unless we've just imported a new batch," Pressor said, jerking his head back down the corridor.

Trilli muttered something under his breath. "Uliar's not going to be happy about this at all."

"No kidding." Pressor started to reach for his comlink, remembered the jamming in time and headed instead toward one of the wall-mounted comms. "We'd better get a couple more tech teams down here," he said. "If it's conduit worms, we want them gone, and fast."

"Right," Trilli said. "You want me to wait here while you go tell Uliar the good news?"

Pressor made a face. "Let's both wait," he said. "There's no point in starting rumors until we know for sure what we've got."

"Besides which, you don't want to spring this on Uliar alone?"

Pressor keyed the wall comm for the tech section. "Something like that."

The center portside corridor on D-6 was as snarled with rusted debris as anything Fel had seen up on D-4. The center starboard corridor, in contrast, was almost perfectly clear.

"They've definitely been using this one," Watchman commented as the group made their cautious way aft. "Not very much traffic, but it's steady."

"How do you figure that?" Fel asked.

"From the pattern of dust on the deck," Drask told him. "There are places where occasional footsteps have lifted or moved it. No more than twenty people come this way each day. Possibly fewer."

"Possibly as few as ten," Watchman agreed. "The two guards we left stunned back there, running three shifts a day, plus a few more would pretty well cover it."

"Commander?" Grappler, in the lead, called back over his shoulder. "I'm picking up voices ahead."

"Extend formation," Watchman ordered. "Not too far—make sure to stay in sight."

"I see a light," Grappler announced. "Looks like it's coming from one of the crew bunkrooms."

"Watch for trouble," Fel warned. "They may have had time to get reinforcements in position."

Apparently, they hadn't. A minute later, the group had arrived.

At a prison.

Fel hadn't been particularly impressed by Luke's claim that there had been an old prison down in the supply core, and Drask's description of the setup hadn't done anything to modify that skepticism. But about this place he had no doubts at all. The door to the old crew quarters had had a pair of narrow slits cut into it, one at eye level for observation, the other just above the floor and wide enough to pass a tray of food through. Supplementing the door's original lock was a heavy add-on with the kind of twin access ports that implied two separate codes were necessary to open it.

"Hello?" a woman's voice called tentatively from behind the door. "Perry? Is that you?"

Fel stepped to the door and pressed his face to the upper slit. The bunkroom had been divided into at least three sections, two of which were currently closed off by light, hand-movable panels. The center section, the one visible from the observation slit, had been set up as a recreation area, with chairs, a couple of small tables, games, and toys. Seated in two of the chairs were a pair of women, one in her twenties, the other much older, watching as four children with ages ranging between six and ten years old played or talked. The younger woman was leaning toward the door, squinting to try to see Fel through the narrow slit.

Abruptly, she stiffened. "You're not Perry," she said, her voice quavering a little. "Who are you?"

"I'm Commander Chak Fel of the Empire of the Hand," Fel identified himself as the children all paused in their activities and turned to see what was going on. "Don't worry, we aren't going to hurt you."

"What do you want?" the older woman asked.

"We're here to help," Fel assured her, frowning as he looked around. These certainly didn't look like hardened criminals who deserved to be kept behind a double-coded lock and supplied through a zoo-style feeding slot. In many ways the room reminded him of the nursery they'd passed down the corridor, in fact, or perhaps a special classroom of some sort. "Who are you people?"

"We're the remnant of the Republic mission called Outbound Flight," the older woman said.

"Yes, we know that part," Fel said. "I mean you and the children. What are you doing in there?"

"Why, we're the dangerous ones, of course," the younger woman said bitterly. "Didn't you know?" She waved a hand to encompass the children. "Or rather, they are. That's why they're in Quarantine. We're just here to take care of them, poor dears."

"The dangerous ones, huh?" Fel asked, eyeing the children. As far as he could tell, they looked like any other kids he'd ever known. "What exactly did they do?"

"They didn't do anything," the older woman said quietly. Apparently she'd been at this long enough for her bitterness to decay into resignation. "All they were was a little bit different from everyone else. That's all. Director Uliar's imagination and hatred did all the rest."

"And what exactly does his imagination and hatred tell him?" Fel asked. "What does he think they are?"

"Why, pure evil, of course," the younger woman said. "Or at least, that's what he's afraid they'll grow up to be."

Fel looked at the kids again. "Pure evil?" he asked.

"Yes," the older woman added, her forehead creasing as if it should be obvious. "You know.

"Jedi."