Star Wars: Survivor's Quest

CHAPTER 14

The doorway opened into another storage room, identical to the one they'd come in through except that in this one there was no turbolift access door. It also didn't appear that any of the supply crates piled behind their meshwork panels had ever been touched.

Neither had the crates in the next room back. Or in the room behind that. "It's one thing to talk about ten years' worth of supplies for something this big," Luke commented as they walked past the stacked crates toward the next door leading aft. "It's something else to actually see them."

"And this is just one level," Mara murmured, an odd sensation creeping through her as she gazed at the rows of stacked cartons. All those people—nearly fifty thousand of them—all gone. Destroyed in a matter of seconds or minutes or hours.

Murdered on the orders of the man she'd once proudly served.

"Hey?"

She shook off the mood. Luke was looking at her, concern in his face. "You all right?" he asked.

"Sure," she assured him. "I'm fine."

Like she could actually fool him. "More ghosts from the past?" he asked quietly.

She looked over at Drask, off examining a stack of crates a few meters away. "It's strange," she told her husband softly. "I thought I'd been through this already. That I'd put it all behind me. But back on the Chaf Envoy, I actually started feeling... I don't know. It's hard to explain."

"You started feeling comfortable?" Luke suggested.

Mara tried out the word in her mind. "Yes, I suppose that's it," she agreed. "Fel and this new Five-Oh-First Legion seemed so different from what Palpatine had created that it felt like something I could actually enjoy being a part of."

Luke's forehead creased. "You're not seriously thinking of taking Parck up on his offer of a job with the Empire of the Hand, are you?"

"Of course not." Mara hesitated. "Well, no, that's not entirely accurate," she confessed. "I mean, I certainly wouldn't go anywhere without you. But at the same time..." She shook her head.

"I know," he said. "The New Republic hasn't exactly been a shining example of how to run a galaxy lately, has it?"

Mara snorted. "The understatement of the month," she said. "All those stupid little brush wars and conflicts—I thought they'd all die down after we finally found that intact copy of the Caamas Document. But half of them are still simmering, and the Senate hasn't done a thing to stop them."

"That's not entirely true," Luke said. "But you do have a point. Things were a lot quieter under the Empire, weren't they?"

"At least until your Rebellion got going," Mara countered. "Then it got noisy again."

"We tried," Luke said, smiling back. The smile faded, and he shrugged fractionally. "You can't play the what-ifs, Mara. Palpatine may have suppressed all those regional conflicts, but he also suppressed freedom and justice, especially for nonhumans. If someone else had been in charge... but we'll never know."

"I understand all that," Mara said. "But that's not really the point. The point is that I was just starting to feel kindly, even nostalgic, toward the Empire."

She gestured at the dusty stacks of crates around her. "And then I come face to face with something like this: supplies carefully laid in for people he knew he was going to have murdered." She let her hand drop to her side. "There was just something about the cold-bloodedness of it that was a sudden kick in the teeth, that's all."

"I know," Luke said, taking her hand and squeezing it gently. "You never really saw the results of Palpatine's policies, did you?"

"No, not usually," Mara said with a sigh. "Not the big ones, anyway. Alderaan and that sort. Mostly I dealt with individuals or small groups, and half of them were Imperial officials suspected of embezzlement or treason. I never saw anything on Outbound Flight's scale."

"It makes sense that he shielded you from as much of that as possible," Luke pointed out. "You might have started having doubts, and he couldn't risk that."

"Jedi?" Drask called.

Mara turned around. The general had moved to another stack of crates near the aft set of doors and was shining his glow rod on one about halfway to the ceiling. "Come."

"What is it?" Luke asked as he and Mara crossed to the other.

"These two stacks," Drask said, indicating them with his glow rod. "They have been moved here from somewhere else."

Mara frowned at Luke, getting a similarly puzzled look in exchange. "What do you mean?" Luke asked. "How do you know?"

"In the previous storerooms these stacks all followed a specific pattern," Drask said. "Foodstuffs of several particular types, clothing, replacement components, various other types of supplies, emergency equipment, and so on. They were all placed in specific positions, with the proportions of each type always the same."

Luke looked at Mara. "Is this making any sense to you?" he asked.

"Actually, yes," she said. "If you proportion out each room according to the rate of expected supply usage, you can more or less empty one area at a time and don't have to keep going back and forth among half a dozen storerooms for what you want. That would also make it quicker and easier to apportion things if you decided to plant a colony somewhere."

"Ah," Luke said, nodding. "I get it. You give your colonists a Dreadnaught and, say, two levels' worth of supplies. No sorting needed: you just take aboard everything from those two levels."

"Right," Mara said. "And you say these stacks are out of order?"

"Yes." Drask gestured. "This group consists of electrical and fluid maintenance supplies. It should instead be foodstuffs."

"I'll take your word for it," Luke said, looking around. "Well, it doesn't look like they came from anywhere in here."

"Unless someone rearranged the whole room," Mara pointed out.

"No," Drask said. "The other stacks are properly placed."

"Maybe the next room back, then," Luke suggested. "Let's take a look." He led the way back to the smaller of the two aft doors and touched the release.

Nothing happened.

"That's funny," he said, frowning as he touched the release again. Again, the door didn't budge.

"Let's try the big door," Mara suggested, moving over to the cargo hatchway and tapping the release for that one.

It didn't move, either. "Now that," Luke said thoughtfully, "is very peculiar. All the other doors have worked just fine."

"Perhaps there is something in there the survivors do not wish us to see," Drask suggested, his voice ominous. "You have lightsabers. Cut it open."

"Let's not be too hasty," Luke said, running a hand along the smaller door. "Maybe we can do it the easy way. Mara?"

Mara pulled her lightsaber from her belt and stepped to the doorway. "Ready."

"Okay." Luke took a deep breath, and Mara could sense him stretching out to the Force. A moment later, with a creak of metal that had been sitting too long in one spot, the door began to slide up into the ceiling.

Mara was ready. The gap was barely waist-high when she ducked under the rising panel, igniting her lightsaber as she leapt into the room.

But there was nothing there except another storeroom, empty except for the usual stacks of boxes, exactly like all the previous four storerooms they'd looked at.

She frowned, lowering the lightsaber blade a little. No; not exactly. Back toward the center of the room, half a dozen sections of the mesh had been cleared out.

And inside them...

"Mara?"

"All clear," she called, closing down her lightsaber and looking around. Lying against the near wall was a piece of slightly twisted girder. Stretching out to the Force, she lifted it and set it upright beneath the door Luke was still holding up. "See if that'll hold it," she said.

Carefully, Luke lowered the door onto the girder. The metal creaked but held. "Odd thing to have lying around," he commented, frowning at the girder as he ducked under the door and into the storeroom. "I haven't seen anything like that in any of the other rooms."

"You haven't seen anything like this, either," Mara said as Drask came in behind Luke. "Take a look."

"Furniture storage?" Drask asked, frowning past Luke's shoulder.

"It's a little more interesting than that," Mara said as the three of them crossed over to the cleared sections. The contents were little more than a jumbled mess of broken furniture and tangled furnishings. But to her the signs were obvious. "You can see three cots in that first one—they've been a little broken up, but there are definitely three of them. Looks like there were four in the next. Probably four in that back one there, too."

"That round thing was probably part of a small table," Luke said, pointing. "I don't see any chairs, though."

"Perhaps they had only stools," Drask suggested. "Those short pieces, perhaps."

"Right," Mara agreed. "There are probably a lot of other pieces tangled in with those blankets and draperies, too. And of course, those boxy things have got to be portable 'fresher stations."

"But this makes no sense," Drask objected. "What you are describing are living quarters. Yet the vessels above are adequately intact. Why would anyone have chosen to live here instead?"

"Maybe all the Dreadnaughts were too badly damaged right after the battle," Luke suggested. "It may have taken a while for the droids to make them livable again."

Mara shook her head. "You're both missing the point. What did we have to do to get in here?"

"We had to lift—" Luke broke off. "Are you saying this was a prison?"

"What else?" Mara asked. "Small cubicles with minimal furnishings and not much privacy, stuck away from everywhere else in the place, all of it behind a door that doesn't open. What else could it be?"

"Interesting," Drask commented. "It would seem that your Outbound Flight experiment was a failure from the start. For there to have been a need for a prison so quickly implies the passengers were not well chosen."

"Or that something drastic happened to them," Mara said. "Some kind of space madness or something."

"Any chance it could have been a medical quarantine instead?" Luke suggested.

"Unlikely," Drask said. "There are not enough beds here for a large disease outbreak. A smaller problem would surely have been better dealt with in the vessels' own facilities."

"He's right," Mara agreed. "Besides, I don't see any sign of medical equipment in here." She gestured into the area. "And you see what else isn't here?"

Luke frowned. "No."

"I see," Drask said grimly. "There are no bodies."

"Or even the remains of bodies," Mara confirmed. "Which either means someone got in through that door sometime in the past fifty years and disposed of the dead—"

"—Or else they got out on their own," Luke finished for her.

"That's what I'm thinking," Mara agreed soberly. "I'm also wondering if the timing of the breakout might have had an effect on the battle."

"Or perhaps it is connected with the unexplained appearance of this vessel in Chiss space," Drask pointed out. "That mystery has still not been solved."

"No, it hasn't," Mara said. "Luke, do you have any idea what sort of justice system was in place during that era? Specifically, what sort of people might the Jedi on Outbound Flight have locked up this way?"

"I don't know," Luke said, shaking his head. "But I can't see why anyone but the most violent or psychotic sorts would be buried this far away from the rest of the expedition. There would certainly have been a brig on each of the Dreadnaughts for dealing with standard lawbreakers."

A whisper of sensation touched Mara's mind. "Someone's coming," she said, unhooking her lightsaber from her belt.

"Who?" Drask asked, drawing his charric. "Guardian Pressor and his forces?"

Mara focused her mind, trying to isolate and identify the approaching minds. They definitely seemed familiar, but they were still too far away to identify.

Luke got there first. "It's all right," he said, returning his own lightsaber to his belt. "It's Fel and the stormtroopers."

"Is Aristocra Chaf'orm'bintrano with them?" Drask asked.

"No," Mara said. "Neither are Feesa or the Geroons. It's just the five Imperials."

"They pledged to protect him," Drask said ominously. "Why are they not with him?"

"I don't know," Luke said, heading for the propped-open door. "Let's go ask them."

They met up with the Imperials two rooms back toward the turbolifts. "Well, well," Fel commented as the two groups crossed the room toward each other. "I certainly wasn't expecting to find you three here. Not that I'm displeased, of course. What did you think of our host's little trap?"

"Where is Aristocra Chaf'orm'bintrano?" Drask cut in before either Luke or Mara could answer. "Why are you not protecting him?"

Fel seemed taken aback. "Relax, General," he said. "He's hardly alone up there. Your three warriors are with him, remember?"

"Besides, if Pressor wanted any of us dead, he could have done it long before now," Mara added.

"She's right," Fel agreed. "I'm sure the Aristocra's fine."

"Your calmness is very reassuring," Drask bit out. "Do you even know where he is?"

"Not exactly," Fel said. "But from the sounds their turbolift car made as it headed down, we're pretty sure they're on D-Five, the next Dreadnaught around the circle from where we came in."

"Then why did you not follow them after you made your own escape?" Drask asked.

"Because I thought it might make more tactical sense to come in from a direction they weren't expecting," Fel said, starting to sound a little annoyed himself. "There are three other turbolift tubes we can use to get up to D-Five: one straight aft along this deck, the other two fore and aft around that direction." He gestured to his right.

"Wait a minute," Mara said. "If the Dreadnaughts are in a ring, shouldn't the turbolift connections be on a lower deck instead of this one?"

Fel shook his head. "It has to do with the way the gravity directions were set up," he explained. "All the Dreadnaughts are oriented with their bellies pointing inward toward the supply core, while the supply core runs its own gravity toward its own center, sort of like a cylindrical planet, with the lower decks 'down' from the upper ones. That means that from any of the Dreadnaughts, 'down' is always toward the core, while from the core 'up' is always toward the nearest Dreadnaught."

"Strange approach," Mara commented.

Fel shrugged. "My guess is that they probably figured doing it any other way would mean attaching the connecting pylons in different places on each of the Dreadnaughts. This way, all the ships could be modified in exactly the same way, with two turbolift pylons connecting to the starboard belly, fore and aft, and the other two to the port-side belly, fore and aft. It certainly doesn't matter to the crew; all the gravity changes are handled automatically as you travel from one place to another, with the turbolift cars rotating so that you're matched with your destination by the time you get there."

"So Formbi and the others are where, exactly?" Luke asked.

"Dreadnaught-Five," Fel said. "D-Five for short. The one we came into from the Chaf Envoy was D-Four."

"So that wasn't the primary command ship?"

Fel shook his head. "I assumed it would be, too, but the labels on the turbolift controls clearly showed we came in on either D-Four or D-Five. Given the ships' orientations, the one on the surface is definitely D-Four."

"I presume you are getting this information from the Outbound Flight data cards you have in your possession?" Drask asked.

"The data cards that used to be in my possession, yes," Fel corrected. "Fortunately, we'd studied the layout before they were stolen."

"They were stolen?" Drask asked, his eyes narrowing. "When?"

"While we were helping put out that fire just after we left Crustai," Fel said. "Whoever set it apparently did so as a diversion to get aboard our transport."

Drask looked at Luke and Mara, then back at Fel. "Why was I not informed?"

Mara sensed Fel's hesitation, and wondered if he would have either the honesty or the audacity to tell Drask that he hadn't been told because he was one of the suspects. She rather hoped he would; Drask's reaction would probably be very interesting.

To her mild disappointment, Fel went with the diplomatic answer instead. "It didn't seem likely the thief could be found regardless," he explained. "I thought we might have an advantage if the culprit didn't know we'd noticed the loss."

"What advantage did you expect to have?"

"I don't know, exactly," Fel conceded. "I just thought there might be one."

"You just thought there might be one." In a being of lesser inherent dignity, Mara reflected, Drask's words and tone might have sounded small-minded or even childish. But from a command officer of the Chiss, it came across as bitingly and righteously angry. A neat trick, that. "In the future, Commander Fel, you will not think when aboard a vessel of the Chiss Ascendancy. You will instead bring any and all concerns of this sort to the commanding officer at once. He will decide what thinking is to be done. Is that understood?"

"Completely, General," Fel said, his voice under careful control.

"Good," Drask said, not sounding particularly mollified. "Now. You will lead us to these alternative turbolifts so that we may rejoin Aristocra Chaf'orm'bintrano."

"Just a moment," Luke said. "Would the command ship have been designated D-One?"

"Right," Fel said.

"So with six Dreadnaughts, D-Four would be all the way on the far side of the circle from it?" Luke persisted.

"Right again," Fel said, his forehead wrinkling.

"Is this important at this precise moment?" Drask put in impatiently.

"It might be, yes," Luke told him. "Because, logically, D-One is where they should have been flying Outbound Flight from. So why is that ship the one that ended up farthest underground when they crash-landed?"

"Interesting question," Fel agreed thoughtfully. "They must have been having some serious control problems there at the end."

"Maybe," Luke said. "Or maybe they had unwanted help on the command deck."

"Indeed," Drask said, the impatience in his voice temporarily subdued by a touch of interest. "The criminals, perhaps?"

"Criminals?" Fel asked, blinking.

"There seems to be a makeshift prison back there," Luke said, gesturing aft. "No human or alien remains, though."

"Hmm," Fel said. "And considering the shape the Dreadnaughts would have been in after the battle, they might well have been in the best position to get to the command deck and make trouble."

"Or we could have it completely backward," Mara warned. "Maybe the prisoners were the ones in command, and someone else managed to get Outbound Flight flipped over this way trying to stop them."

"Interesting speculation," Drask said. The moment of interest had passed, and he was getting impatient again. "But this is all ancient history."

"Perhaps," Luke said. "But then, ancient history is why we're here, isn't it?"

"We must rejoin Aristocra Chaf'orm'bintrano," Drask insisted.

"We will," Luke promised. "But first, I want to go have a look at D-One. Anyone going with me?"

Mara looked around the group. From Fel's expression she could tell that he wanted to go, and she could sense definite interest from the four stormtroopers, as well.

But Drask's agitation was practically bouncing off the stacks of crates, and once again Fel's sense of diplomacy won out. "Thanks, but we'll wait for the second tour," he said, turning to Drask. "Whenever you're ready, General, we'll escort you to D-Five."

For a moment Drask's eyes bored into Luke's face, as if estimating his chances of either talking him or ordering him out of going on what he clearly considered a time-wasting side trip. Apparently, he decided it wasn't worth trying. "Thank you, Commander," he said, turning back to face Fel. "You said there were three other turbolifts available?"

"Yes," Fel said. "Actually, the best approach would probably be to go a little farther around the core and escort Luke and Mara to the turbolift they'll need to get to D-One. We can use the same one to get to D-Six, from which we can then travel to D-Five."

"It sounds as if that will be a longer trip than going directly to D-Five," Drask pointed out.

"It will be, a little," Fel conceded. "But it's occurred to me that if Pressor's people are hiding any surprises we ought to know about, they'll most likely be on either D-One, D-Two, or D-Six."

"Why?"

"Because they're the three farthest underground, which means they have the best radiation shielding," Fel explained. "Luke and Mara will already be checking out D-One; if we at least take a look at D-Six on our way to D-Five, we'll have two of the three covered."

Drask hesitated, then nodded. "Very well," he said. "Provided you do not propose to search the entire Dreadnaught with only the six of us."

"We'll just take a quick look," Fel promised. "If they're using the other Dreadnaughts for anything at all, it should be obvious pretty quickly."

"Very well," Drask said again. "Lead on."

Fel nodded. "Stormtroopers: escort formation. This way, General."