Survivor's Quest

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cloud's head twitch. "Commander?" the stormtrooper asked. "Did you get that?"

"Get what?" Fel asked, straining his ears against the rumbling.

"My comlink just chirped," Cloud said.

"Mine, too," Shadow confirmed. "Sounded like someone sending a message burst."

Fel frowned. He hadn't heard any such noise from his own comlink; but then, the pervasive rumbling could easily have masked it. The stormtroopers, with their comlinks built into their helmets, would be less affected by outside noises. "Could you get any kind of fix on it?" he asked. "Either direction or distance?"

"Negative," Cloud said. "My gear wasn't rigged for that."

"Well, rig it now," Fel ordered, looking around. Suddenly, the car seemed a little smaller and a lot more vulnerable. "And let's risk a little more speed," he added. "If Pressor's talking to his friends, I want us out of here as soon as possible."

"And if it wasn't Pressor?" Shadow asked.

Fel looked up at the ceiling. "Then I want us out of here even faster."

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 fu

"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, ru