Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [72]
“I can’t accept this.” A flash of anger ignited within Luke, but he calmed himself, willed it away. “You’re suggesting that this entire mission is a failure!”
“Not a failure.” Danni carefully considered her words. “The mission didn’t match the reality we found. It’s like any scientific investigation. You observe evidence, you come up with a theory to explain the evidence, you put the theory to the test … and in most cases, the theory has to be revised. We arrive at truths one faltering step at a time.”
“Just like Jedi training.”
“That’s right.”
Luke sighed. “I have to think about this.”
Luke was still thinking about it two days later when he went on another vehicle hunt with Face and Bhindi.
They weren’t always traveling in Yuuzhan Vong armor anymore; now that they had a base of operations and less need to travel in a large group through unknown territories, Luke and the others often made do with civilian clothing. It was lighter and far more comfortable than the Yuuzhan Vong armor, especially in the increasingly steamy atmosphere of Coruscant’s lower levels. Kell and Face were the exceptions—quite taken with just how horribly dashing they were in the armor, they insisted on wearing it during all missions, evidently a competition to see which one would give up and admit discomfort first.
With initial objectives achieved—the team had a base of operations and its members were interacting with the local non-Yuuzhan Vong population—they could begin implementing the plan for their eventual escape from Coruscant.
Their insertion method had not included a getaway vehicle, for they knew that, given how many millions of vehicles still remained here, in varying conditions of preservation, they would be able to find, salvage, or steal a working vehicle—or, with Tahiri’s help, perhaps even a Yuuzhan Vong vessel.
Logic dictated that there had to be thousands if not millions of vehicles in the wreckage that was Coruscant. The trick was in finding them, since all vehicles visible from the air had been strafed and destroyed by coralskippers. Only those that had been hidden or buried had a chance to be intact.
And so far, though they’d found hundreds of vehicles in their searches, not one was even remotely likely as an escape vehicle. They’d found scores of airtaxis, numerous crashed starfighters, the remains of a hangar with a troop transport—and troops—crushed beneath incalculable tonnage of collapsed building. Luke thought that, with a month to work on it, he could cobble together enough parts from various destroyed starfighters to make one working model … which would get one of them offplanet when the time came.
That was just one more failure to weigh upon him. He sat in a fiftieth-story viewport of what had once been a Starfighter Command recruiting office, staring out into the cavernous street beneath, while Face and Bhindi struggled to get the office’s computer operational, and he wondered why he’d bothered with this mission.
His son Ben was light-years away, hidden out of sight—out of Yuuzhan Vong sight, but also out of his sight—in a secret Jedi base in the Maw, a region of space surrounded and concealed by black holes. Mara had to be questioning his competence. The Jedi, whom he had hoped to inspire and unite in this bold mission into the territory most strongly held by the Yuuzhan Vong, would lose faith in him.
Something attracted his attention, just the merest sensation that there were eyes upon him, and he looked up from the rubble-strewn depths he’d been regarding.
Across the avenue, at about the same altitude, someone stood in a viewport staring at him. At this distance, about a hundred meters, Luke could not be sure, but he thought it was a man. A very pale man. Luke pulled out his macrobinoculars and trained them on that person.
He stared into a face that was half-strange, half-familiar.
This man was pallid, with curly dark hair, sea-blue eyes, and a prominent nose that suggested old aristocracy. He was young, barely twenty, if that old. He wore a pale