Timothy Zahn - Survivor's Quest

"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. Evlyn 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?"