Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [52]
She shrugged. So she hadn’t been able to find her way to the object. It might just be a matter of ascending one floor, descending one, searching more diligently to find the spot that gave her access.
Then she remembered the OUT OF RANGE message she’d received. She held up the remote and depressed that button again.
There was a noise, a faint “ponk” of some mechanical apparatus being activated, from above her head. She looked up and then jumped aside just in time to avoid a descending ceiling panel. Its bottom edge came down to rest against the floor. She moved around to look up.
It was a set of metal stairs, narrow and without rails, leading up into darkness.
Breath catching in her throat, she hurried up the staircase. She found herself in a narrow, low corridor that led for three meters straight to the wall she had found so impassable—straight to a corresponding gap in that wall, a gap that was lit from the other side.
Before moving on, she looked around and found a small button control by the top of the hidden staircase. She pressed it and the stairs rose, locking into place behind her.
The gap in the wall opened into a cylindrical chamber a few meters across. Occupying most of the chamber, resting on its stern, was a vehicle—about twelve meters long, squat at its stern and tapering toward the bow, all in a uniform deep matte blue that made it difficult for Viqi to make out details of its hull. There were protrusions everywhere, plates and hemispherical antennae and maneuvering or braking flaps.
The floor of this chamber was some four meters below Viqi’s feet. She stood directly opposite a hatch that opened into the vehicle’s interior, one-third of the distance from the stern.
The thing looked like some sort of oversized military landspeeder, enclosed to protect its crew, but since it rested on its tail—with no machinery evident to allow it to be lowered into a horizontal position—Viqi suspected that it was equipped for flight; she could not tell if it was an atmospheric vehicle or spaceworthy. On the side was stenciled the vehicle’s name, Ugly Truth.
She looked up. The cylindrical chamber continued upward another thirty meters beyond the vehicle’s nose, ending in a jumble of fallen metal beams and duracrete blocks. Viqi could see faint sunlight through that deadfall.
Scarcely able to believe her good fortune, she moved forward across a narrow span of metal that gave her access to the open hatch and clambered into the vehicle. As the vehicle was resting at a ninety-degree angle to its intended orientation, when she stepped down from the hatch she stood on what was obviously meant to be the main cabin’s rear bulkhead. A crudely constructed ladder of spare metal parts wired together allowed her to climb up to the pilot’s seat at the bow.
Under her touch, the secondary power switch engaged without hesitation or resistance. The cabin lights came up; the vehicle’s navigation computer went through its power-up sequence.
Viqi felt a slow, wondering smile spread across her face. This was an emergency evacuation vehicle, cunningly hidden away in the event of disaster … but its owners had not been able to get to it in time as Coruscant fell. Perhaps they had died, perhaps they had been off-world already.
Who was the youth who’d given her the locator? Son of the vehicle’s owners? A builder who’d known and kept the secret of this hidden chamber, and later intended to use the vehicle when it became clear that its owners would be unable to? He’d probably been prevented from escaping by the collapse of the access above him. Perhaps he’d been working all this time to dig his way clear of that obstacle. Now he was dead, and the vehicle was hers.
She was free of the Yuuzhan Vong and in possession of an escape from their world.
A thought hit Viqi and her hands fell away from the controls. If this vehicle was designed as a last-ditch opportunity for survival,