Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [50]
Viqi scrambled around on the floor, turned toward her original direction of flight, and crawled as fast as paralysis gripping her arms and legs would let her. It occurred to her that it would be better to die than flee, better to face her tormentors rather than have to continue running, but the rational side of her mind, forcing its way to the forefront, kept her moving.
She made it a few meters, until the curve in the corridor made it impossible to see the man and woman.
She heard them scream, heard the snap-hiss of lightsabers igniting.
There was a maintenance panel ahead of her, set in the wall at ground level. She reached it and tugged at its handle. It resisted, probably held in place by simple magnetic bolts or locks.
She put all her slight frame into it, yanking, and the panel came loose; her effort sent the panel skittering across the floor. Beyond the new hole was a vertical shaft not more than a meter in diameter, steel rungs making a ladder of the far side.
Viqi crawled into the shaft and climbed. Her arms and legs trembled, threatening every instant to fail her.
She heard the man and woman scream again, then heard the noise of lightsabers chopping. As she ascended, the noise faded, but the fear and loathing did not.
By Luke’s chrono, it had taken them four hours to find the first evidence of the thing or things they sought. They stood in the main manufacturing chamber of a furnishing concern and looked down at the dismembered bodies of Yuuzhan Vong warriors—and voxyn.
It was not evidence or deduction or luck that had led them here. Luke and the other Jedi could feel lingering dark-side energy imbued in the walls, the machines, the corpses. The sensation, so like what Luke had experienced within a certain cave on Dagobah, caused the hair on the back of his neck to rise.
Mara dispassionately looked at the body of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior who had been cut into at least eight pieces. The wounds were all burned, cauterized. “Our Dark Jedi again. Or whatever they are.”
“Dark Jedi might be able to impose their will on normal people,” Tahiri said. She had her arms crossed, and Luke suspected her pose was an effort to keep herself from trembling. “But not on fully trained Jedi. This was like jumping into an ocean of the dark side of the Force. It was like feeling Anakin die again. And wanting again to die with him.” More tears came, and she looked away so that the others would not see them.
“I wonder,” Luke said, “what it’s going to be like to confront them face-to-face.” He prodded a severed Yuuzhan Vong leg with his toe. He hadn’t always done well when faced with the dark side. “The Yuuzhan Vong are invisible to the Force. They couldn’t feel it. We aren’t. Especially the Jedi.”
“I had a thought on that.” Face was on guard duty, blaster rifle in hand, his attention on the entryway. “A tactic I’ve used from time to time in bad situations.”
“What’s that?” Luke asked.
“Snipers. Set up a couple of kilometers away in a blind with a laser rifle and someone who really knows how to use it, and when your enemy wanders by, ‘zap.’ ”
Luke smiled. “Not exactly fair.”
“Who wants to be fair?”
Viqi woke up in absolute blackness and thought for a moment that she might be dead. In a panic, she sat up, but before she came upright her head banged into something, resulting in a sharp pain to her forehead and a hollow metallic noise.
Then she remembered. She’d climbed and climbed, hearing the roars and the lightsaber hums of her pursuit. Her pursuers had cut their way through durasteel bulkheads to follow her, but she’d found side channels from the access duct—ventilation ducts that were smaller and smaller, adequate for a diminutive Kuat woman but too constricting for whatever followed her.
After a long time of groping along in the dark, she had let exhaustion