Faylin pushed her long dark hair up under the Imperial hat. “I’m good. I’m good.”
Isval squeezed Faylin’s shoulder, stripped off her own clothes, and donned a makeshift Imperial uniform of her own, including boots and gloves. She couldn’t do anything about her lekku or her blue skin, but she’d use Grolt’s body to help her with that.
“Get to the door, people,” she said, and her team drove the pallet up to the second hatch, where they waited for her.
She inhaled deeply and armed the charges. The timers started counting down immediately. They had forty-two standard minutes to get out of the blast zone.
A boom on the hatch they’d entered through indicated the use of some kind of ram, but the door did not give way. Another boom and still it held.
“Drim?” she called.
“I don’t hear anything out here,” he said, indicating the other hatch. “But then I’m not sure I would. The door’s thick, Isval.”
“All right, then,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“And quickly,” Eshgo added.
Isval slung Grolt’s body over her shoulder, grunting under the burden, and hustled up the stairs to join her team.
—
Vader rushed through the ship, his anger going before him and parting the crew that otherwise choked the halls. He reached the hatch to the hyperdrive chamber. Four dead stormtroopers lay on the deck, and another group of stormtroopers and armed security personnel used a portable grav-ram in an attempt to force open the hatch. The control panel and door switch were dead, probably sabotaged from the other side.
The corporal in charge of the security team saw Vader approach and stepped out to meet him. Meanwhile, the ram powered up with a hum and slammed into the hatch, doing nothing.
“Lord Vader,” the corporal said. “The door’s been secured from the inside and the switch has been disabled. There’s only one other way into the chamber and I’ve sent a team around—”
Vader ignited his lightsaber.
“Move,” he said, not slowing, and the security personnel and stormtroopers nearly tripped over themselves as they scrambled out of his way.
He took his lightsaber in a two-handed grip, channeled the Force, channeled his rage, and slammed the blade into the hatch. It sank an arm’s span into the metal. The heat from the weapon made a red-hot circle in the hatch around the blade. Vader held on to the hilt and poured in his power. The metal started to surrender to the heat of his weapon, the heat of his wrath.
He would cut through the hatch within a sixty count, and then the traitors would be his.
—
A sizzle from the direction of the hatch through which they’d first entered turned all their heads. The hatch was reddening with heat, at first a small circle, but expanding.
They were cutting their way in.
Isval cursed.
The circle expanded. Smoke poured off the door as whatever tool they were using to cut started to slag the metal.
“Nothing should be able to cut through that door,” Eshgo said.
Isval consulted the map in her head and formulated a way back to their ship. It seemed a parsec away, given the challenges that stood between them and it. She wasn’t sure they had enough time.
Behind them, the glowing red tip of a line of energy poked through the hatch. Isval recognized it: the blade of a lightsaber. Vader was out there, the Vader who’d wiped out Pok’s entire crew single-handedly. The realization at once thrilled and terrified her. She thought of Pok’s face, of vengeance, but Eshgo’s voice brought her back.
“Isval, we need to leave!”
She blinked, nodded.
“Open it,” she said to Drim, and everyone on the team took their positions, weapons ready, as the hatch parted along its seam.
—
Melted metal pooled on the floor near Vader’s boots, bubbling and smoking, as his lightsaber bored through the hatch. He felt the fear of the traitors in the hyperdrive chamber. No doubt they’d seen his lightsaber, and they knew he was coming. They were right to fear. And their fear fed his anger. The steady rhythm of his respirator tolled the passage of time, the moments remaining to the traitors before he had them.
“Tell your team the traitors are to be taken alive,” Vader said to the corporal. “Their final disposition is to be left to me.”
“Yes, Lord Vader.”
—
The hatch yawned open. There was no one there.
Isval realized she’d been holding her breath. Everyone else must have been, too, for they exhaled as one.
“Eshgo, Drim, Crost, you’re in the pallet,” she snapped. “Weapons hot.”
“And try not to shoot each other,” Eshgo said as Drim and Crost piled into two of the pallet’s tool compartments. “Gonna be close,” he added to Isval.
She knew. To Faylin, she said, “You’re driving, Fay.”
“And you?” Faylin asked while Eshgo contorted himself into the last compartment.
“I’m wounded or dead,” Isval said. “I’ll lie on top. Your backup if you need it. Cover me with Grolt.”
Faylin wrinkled her nose but nodded.
Isval activated her comm and reached out to the decoy teams. “Ship is hot and set for half an hour. If you can, get off now.”
She got no response.
“Anyone copy?”
Nothing. She didn’t dwell on what it must mean. She had no time to dwell on anything. The opposite door was melting. Vader was coming.
She lay atop the pallet and Faylin covered her with Grolt’s body, arranging him such that her head was hard to see. Faylin put Grolt’s hat over Isval’s head, also helping to hide her lekku.
“Anybody looks hard at us, they’ll notice you,” Faylin said. “Nix that. They won’t even have to look hard, just look at all.”
Isval knew, but the pallet couldn’t hold her inside, too. Covering herself in a corpse was her only play.
“Just move fast,” she said.
“Count on that,” Faylin said.
Behind them, Isval could hear metal dripping from the door that Vader was cutting through, hitting the floor in sizzling dollops. She could hear voices through the small hole Vader had already cut. She resisted the urge to run across the chamber, stick the barrel of her blaster in the hole, and start firing blind. She needed to get her team out even more than she needed to kill Vader. The Imperials would be through in moments, and they’d see the explosive charges.
An idea struck her.
She was thinking through her exit. Cham would have smiled.
“Faylin, get us out of here, into a side hall, and wait.”
“Wait? Isval, we only have half an hour.”
“I know, but do it.”
“Isval…”
“Just do it!”
“You sure?” Eshgo said, from inside the pallet.
“He asks that again and you can shoot him, Drim,” Isval said.
Drim chuckled, and Faylin steered the pallet out into the network of halls that connected the hyperdrive chamber to one of the Star Destroyer’s main corridors. Isval, covered in a corpse, breathed into Grolt’s neck. She had to fight down a wave of sickness.
Before they’d gone ten meters, she realized she’d forgotten something and cursed.
“What?” Faylin asked, alarmed. “What is it?”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing. In the rush, she’d neglected to destroy the mechanism that would have sealed the hatch behind them. Once Vader cut his way through the first hatch, there was nothing to slow his pursuit.
“Which hall?” Faylin said.
“Just pick one!” Isval said.
But Faylin seemed paralyzed with indecision. From somewhere ahead they heard the heavy tread of boots—stormtrooper boots.
“That one,” Isval hissed. “Right there. Just get us out of the hall.”
The boots grew louder, the murmur of voices. Isval felt Eshgo, Drim, and Crost shifting their weight inside
the pallet, no doubt trying to position themselves to fire should things go bad.
Faylin turned the pallet down a narrow maintenance hall. The overhead lights were flickering like strobes.
They waited there in silence as the voices and boots got louder. After a few seconds, a group of stormtroopers and security personnel ran past in the direction of the hyperdrive chamber.
When they were gone, Isval said, “Get us a little closer to the main corridor, then park it again.”
“What are you waiting on?” Eshgo said, his voice muffled through the sides of the pallet. “This is our chance.”
“No it’s not,” Isval said. “Not quite yet.”
Careful not to dislodge Grolt’s body, she twisted her head and moved her arm slightly to check the timepiece she wore on her wrist. Thirty-two minutes.
—
Vader’s blade soon cut a large enough hole in the hatch. A circular portion of the door fell to the floor with a clang and he ducked through, the stormtroopers following him through the breach.
The traitors were gone, having fled out the door opposite. Dead Imperials lay all around the hyperdrive chamber, several of them missing pieces of their uniform, but the hyperdrive itself seemed intact.
The door opposite slid open, and the squad of Imperials the corporal had sent around to intercept the traitors rushed into the chamber and looked around at the bodies. Questions twisted the expressions of the faces not hidden by helmets.
“Sir,” the corporal said, “we didn’t see anyone. We—”
Vader ignored them. He sensed the danger and leapt down to the bottom of the hyperdrive well. Immediately he saw the dozen charges attached to the drive and its adjacent field amplifiers. The timers on each showed a mere twenty-seven minutes before they exploded.
He knelt and examined the charges more closely, saw the fail-safes. If engineers attempted to move or disarm the charges, they’d explode. If they did nothing they’d explode.
He stood, the sound of his respirator bouncing off the walls of the hyperdrive well. He activated his comlink.
“Captain Luitt, the hyperdrive is rigged to explode and it can’t be stopped. Order an immediate evacuation.”
A long pause, then, “What? No, I can send a team of engineers to—”
“You heard me, Captain. It’s too late for that.”
“You’re…certain?”
“Give the order, Captain. The Perilous will explode in half an hour. And Captain, the Emperor is your priority. If he is not evacuated safely, I will hold you personally responsible.”
“I…I understand, Lord Vader,” said Luitt. “But…the Emperor has already left the bridge.”
Vader considered that. “Thank you, Captain.” He activated his private comm channel to the Emperor. “Master, the ship is going to explode in less than thirty minutes.”
“Yes,” the Emperor said. “I’m awaiting you aboard my shuttle.”
“Your shuttle? But—”
“I had a second shuttle readied in the forward landing bay. You should hurry, my friend. There’s little time.”
“Yes, Master.”
Vader hadn’t known about the second shuttle, but he was unsurprised. His Master prepared for almost every contingency.
The evacuation alarm began to sound, shrill and prolonged. Countless drills had prepared the crew, and Vader imagined all of them scrambling for their assigned escape pods. The already chaotic state of affairs aboard the Star Destroyer would be still more chaotic now.
No doubt the traitors would try to make their escape in the tumult. Vader had no intention of letting them get off the ship.
—
The shrill sound of the evacuation alarm echoed down the halls, the death scream of a doomed ship. An automated voice gave a monotone recitation of the order to evacuate.
“Now we go,” Isval said from under Grolt’s corpse.
The corridors would be thronged. No one would look twice at the pallet. They might, might have a chance to get clear.
“That is well done,” Eshgo said from inside the pallet.
She ignored him and said to Faylin, “Get to the main corridor. Fast. We don’t have time to circle back to our repair ship. You see anything likely, any ship at all that we can use, a repair ship, fire suppression, whatever, you head for it. Understood? If we have to take it by force, we do that.”
“Got it,” Faylin said, and maneuvered the pallet back out into the corridors.
“Speed is your friend,” Isval said, echoing Cham’s words to her. “Move, Faylin.”
Faylin propelled the pallet as fast as it would go—about jogging speed—out into the main corridor.
Crew members were everywhere, already rushing along the halls in a torrent, heading for their assigned escape pods and ships. Droids walked and rolled among the crew, likewise heading to their evacuation points. No one even slowed to look at the pallet or ask any questions.
Isval began to think they might actually be able to pull it off.
But if they escaped the ship, so, too, would many, probably most, Imperials. Vader and the Emperor would get clear, she had no doubt. She needed to reach Cham. They would need to improvise something. Taking down the Perilous was big, but not big enough. The still-experimental droid tri-fighters, maybe.
She bit down to activate the direct comm she had with Cham.
“Cham?” she whispered.
Static, then a syllable. “…val?”
“Can you hear me?”
More static, a garbled word.
They were still too far out to get much of a signal. “If you can hear me, I’ll call you again in a moment.”
Only white noise for an answer.
—
Vader used the Force to leap up to the walkway that surrounded the hyperdrive’s well.
The stormtroopers and security personnel looked at one another in puzzlement, the evacuation order blaring.
“Go,” Vader said to them. “The ship is lost.”
Most of them nodded, turned, and headed off immediately, but three of the stormtroopers remained.
“Sir, we should accompany you to an escape pod.”
“Unnecessary,” Vader said. “I’ll find my own way. Now go. That’s my order.”
The stormtroopers saluted and reluctantly headed off. Vader turned and looked at the hatch through which the traitors must have fled. At least one of them was wearing an Imperial uniform—maybe two. He didn’t have much time, but he had enough to catch them and kill them and still get off the Perilous.
He drew on the Force and strode after them. They couldn’t have gotten far. They’d be heading for the main corridor, to an escape ship or pod.
When he reached the main corridor, he found it bustling with pale-faced crew, officers, troops, and droids rushing along their designated evacuation routes. The dull repeated thwump of launching escape pods sounded loud in his ears.
He leapt up to a third-floor walkway, startling the crew hurrying past. They whispered his name in hushed tones as they moved away.
He perched there, a dark bird of prey looking down on the bustle for Twi’leks or anything else unusual.
—
Isval shifted her body a bit so she could see better and take her bearings. Crew rushed past the pallet in both directions, a blur of uniformed legs and tense voices. She tried to get a look at one of the location stamps on the bulkhead without moving much and finally saw one: 183B.
They weren’t far from the bay where one of the decoy teams had docked. Possibly the team’s repair ship was still there. Maybe the team hadn’t evacuated yet or maybe—given the comm silence—they wouldn’t evacuate.
“Make for One-Thirty-Seven-B,” she said to Faylin, raising her voice to be heard over the hubbub in the corridor. “Decoy Team A docked there.”
More legs hurried by, dark uniforms, the white armor of a group of stormtroopers.
“Got it,” Faylin said, and steered them through the chaos.
Isval watched
the location stamps disappear behind them. One Fifty-Seven. One Fifty-Three. One Forty-Seven. Almost there.
The low bass notes of launching escape pods sounded steadily, the sound like a drumbeat. The monotone voice of the computer announcing the time remaining—ten minutes—provided counterpoint.
One Forty-One.
A male voice sounded from right next to the pallet. Isval’s face was turned the other way and she dared not move. She worried that Grolt’s body was not covering her lekku.
“You all right?” the man asked. “Are they wounded? Do you need help?”
Faylin did not stop the pallet. “No, I’ve got them, sir. Thank you.”
Isval’s grip tightened on her blaster. If the officer examined Faylin’s mismatched uniform or spotted Isval’s blue skin…
The automated voice announced nine minutes.
The officer kept pace with the pallet. “Are you sure…Corporal?”
Isval imagined him puzzling over Faylin’s uniform.
“Wait. What’s your unit? Are you…what are you—”
Whatever question he planned to ask never got past his lips. Faylin’s blaster sounded—a muffled discharge, as if she’d fired it while holding it against the man’s stomach—and the man collapsed atop Grolt and Isval.
“Don’t move!” Faylin said to her, and kept the pallet moving. “I don’t know if anyone heard in all the noise.”
A voice from behind rose above the tumult. “Hey! You there! Stop!”
Isval cursed.
“What’s going on?” Eshgo asked from inside the pallet.
“Don’t do anything,” Faylin said. “Be still. All of you.”
The voice calling out for them to stop faded, lost behind them in the ambient noise.
“He wasn’t talking to us,” Faylin explained.
Isval’s heart hammered against her ribs. Between the stress of the situation and the weight of two dead Imperials lying on top of her, she could hardly breathe. She twisted her head to look out to the side and saw what she wanted to see: 137. Her hopes rose, but only for a flash.
“It’s gone,” Faylin said, sounding defeated.
“What?” Isval asked. “The ship?”
“Yes,” Faylin said. “There’s nothing here.”
Isval cursed. She must have misremembered the bay number, or the Imperials had moved the ship, or the decoy team had already gotten off, or their docking bay assignment had changed after Isval had checked it.