Survivor's Quest

"Great," Mara said. "Then all we have to do is cut our way through two hundred Vagaari soldiers and take over the ship."

"Something like that," Luke agreed. "You game?"

Mara shrugged. "Sure, why not? I didn't have anything else pla

"Good," Luke said, wiping his fingers and mouth with his napkin and dropping it into the empty ribene container. "Then all we have to do is plot out our intercept point, maybe use some Jedi navigation technique to make up a little more time, and we'll be in."

"Right," Mara said, slipping the last half of her choclime twist back into its wrapper and resealing it. "Except that I'll be doing all that. Your job right now is to finish healing."

Luke grimaced. But she was right. "Fine," he said with a theatrical sigh as he adjusted his chair to horizontal position. "You always get all the fun stuff."

"I know," Mara said sweetly. "And I appreciate you indulging me that way. Now, go to sleep."

"Okay." Luke took a deep breath and stretched out to the Force. "Just don't forget to wake me when we get there."

"You'll be the first to know," she promised. "Pleasant dreams."

His last view before the darkness of the healing trance folded over him was of her red-gold hair shimmering in the light as she bent over the navigation console.

CHAPTER 24

"I love you."

Luke jerked slightly as he came out of his healing trance. "Are we there?" he asked, working moisture into his mouth.

"We're there," she confirmed. "More importantly, so is our wayward Dreadnaught. It came into the system about fifteen minutes ago and is angling around the star to get into position for the next jump. It should be crossing our bow in about half an hour."

Luke peered out the canopy at the asteroid Mara had settled the Skysprite beside. "Nice location," he complimented her. "How'd you manage to sneak in without them spotting you?"

"Actually, we were a little ahead of them," Mara told him. "They weren't anywhere in sight, so I gambled that they hadn't picked up an hour or two somewhere along the way and settled in to wait."

"Good," Luke said, stretching again and bringing his seat back to a sitting position. "Where exactly are we?"

"Well, that's the bad news," Mara admitted. "We're only another hour or two outside the Brask Oto Command Station. If we let them get back into hyperspace, we're going to be pushing it to take back the ship in time."

"Okay, so it'll be a challenge," Luke said, offhandedly. "I think we can handle it."

Mara frowned suspiciously at him. "You're not going all super-Jedi on me, are you?"

Luke gave her an i

"Skywalker—" she said warningly.

He gri

"We proved it to the ones who didn't survive," Mara pointed out. "I'm not convinced Bearsh and Estosh will have gotten the message. You're not really expecting them to just surrender, are you?"

"No, not really," Luke said regretfully. "But I don't think their troops will just stand there and get themselves slaughtered, either. If we can push them back to the bridge, I'm going to offer Estosh a deal: we'll let him and his people leave the Dreadnaught, get back into their carrier, and leave in peace."

"Under Chiss escort, of course," Mara said. "And if he doesn't go for it?"

Luke grimaced. "Then we'll just have to take them out."

"Sounds reasonable," Mara said. "Come on; you've got just enough time for a quick snack before we have to get ready."

They were in their vac suits and back at their chosen control boards when the Dreadnaught appeared around the side of the asteroid. It was, Luke noted, nearly five minutes ahead of Mara's estimate. Estosh was apparently pushing the ancient ship for all it was worth.

"Okay," he muttered, watching the huge mass of metal lumber past and trying to gauge the best moment to swing out of their partial concealment. The massive sublight engines blazed into view—

He threw power to the Skysprite's drive, blasting them away from the asteroid on a vector paralleling the Dreadnaught's course. Keeping them clear of the larger ship's ion emissions, he swung them around the starboard side and underneath. The stumps of the four broken turbolift pylons looked like sections of a model maker's mounting stand in the light from the distant star. "Anything?" he asked as he swung toward the aft-portside tube.

"No course twitching; nothing tracking us," Mara reported. "Of course, the aft sensors are the ones the Colonists would probably have skipped if they hadn't felt like fixing everything."

"Or they may just have skipped the point-defense weaponry back here," Luke reminded her, easing up to the shattered end of the pylon for a closer look. It didn't look like there was going to be enough room for him to lift the Skysprite straight upward, canopy-first, as he would into a standard docking bay.

But if he rotated the ship ninety degrees, standing it on its drive nozzles and taking it in nose-first...

"I hope," Mara said, "that you're not thinking what I think you're thinking."

"I am," Luke said. "Hang on."

He gave the engines a burst of power, pushing the small craft ahead a dozen meters along the Dreadnaught's underside. Then, shutting down the main drive, he shifted power to the forward-ventral maneuvering jets, pitching the Skysprite's nose upward. The pylon stump slid past, and he fired one final burst from the main drive, ru

To the accompaniment of a horrendous screech of torn metal.

Luke fought back a wince as he activated the forward landing claw, firing it past the turbolift cars to a more solid co

"Let's just say we'd better not need a quick exit," Mara said. "Aside from that, it was a classy maneuver."

"Thanks," Luke said, shutting the Skysprite's systems back to standby and making sure his vac suit was sealed. "At least we don't have to wonder whether or not they heard us coming. Grab the sealant kit and let's go."

The Skysprite's canopy was, fortunately, reasonably flat, and they were able to get it open in the cramped space without having to cut their way out. Working his way up the landing claw cable, Luke maneuvered between the parked turbolift cars to that last-second gash he'd carved with his thrown lightsaber and squeezed through it.

The damage turned out to be even more impressive than he'd expected. The lightsaber handle had apparently bumped the top of the door a fraction of a second before the blade had closed down, swinging it up and nicking a small hole in the lobby ceiling.

"Nice," Mara said, nodding to the latter as she handed Luke the sealant kit through the opening and then eased her own way through it. "You cut off not only the turbolift lobby, but a section of the next deck up, too. Anything up there they would have particularly missed?"

"Just the next turbolift lobby up," Luke said, looking around. His lightsaber was lying over in a corner beside four dead Vagaari who had been in the wrong place when the Dreadnaught broke free and the lobby depressurized. The blast doors that had reacted to the emergency were about five meters away down each of the three corridors leading away from the lobby. "I think one of the aft electronics supply rooms is just down the corridor from it, though, and a droid maintenance facility is off in the other direction," he added, starting across the lobby. "Depending on which blast doors reacted up there, either or both of those might have been locked away from them, too."