Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights 01_ Jedi Twilight - Michael Reaves [115]
A moment later the shock wave hit them. The Far Ranger bucked, the view of the fireball bobbing crazily for a moment. The A-grav field held the internal environment steady, and they were already too high for the freighter to be thrown off-course.
I-Five checked the readouts. “Explosion yield was approximately twelve kilotons. No sign of hull damage; radiation levels minimal; shields holding.”
“We made it,” Laranth said. “With a whole ten seconds to spare.”
“Do you always have to shave it so close, Five?” Den commented.
“Have you no sense of drama?”
Kaird entered. “Your friend’s back in the crew’s quarters,” he said to Jax. “Still breathing, still unconscious.”
I-Five stood. “I’ll do what I can to stabilize him. If any of you know someone with access to a bacta tank, now would be a good time to call in a favor when we get to wherever we’re going.”
Jax slid into the pilot’s seat that I-Five had just vacated. “I hope he knows enough medical procedure to help Nick.”
“He does,” Den said. “He spent six months in a Rimsoo, and he’s a quick learner, as you’ve probably noticed.”
“He’s also raised an important point,” Jax said. “Where are we going? Downlevel? Uplevel? Or offworld?”
There was a moment of silence as the others digested this. It was true; there was no real reason to return to the Yaam Sector. He had failed Master Piell’s mission: he hadn’t retrieved the data 10-4TO had been carrying.
Laranth was looking at a sensor readout. “The blast left a crater eighty meters across,” she said. “I think we can assume that Vader is dead.”
Jax shook his head. “No,” he said. “He’s not.”
forty-six
They ultimately decided to head for a safe haven that the bird man knew of: a place used occasionally by Black Sun to hide beings toward whom other beings harbored ill will. The flight was taking several hours, due to the decision to avoid a suborbital trajectory in favor of flying low and cloaked. Den wasn’t complaining; he was grateful for the chance to rest. The past twenty-four hours had been quite a ride—as intense as anything he’d experienced in the Clone Wars.
They’d acquired two new passengers: Kaird the Nediji and Haninum Tyk Rhinann, an Elomin. The latter said little, preferring to huddle by himself somewhat away from the others. Neither Jax nor Laranth could sense any clandestine motives from him, and so there was no reason not to believe his story that he had deserted Vader’s ship at the last possible moment to escape the reactor explosion.
Ah, yes—Vader. At first, no one had believed Jax’s conviction that the Sith Lord lived; the reactor core explosion had reduced a considerable amount of the Factory District to radioactive rubble. But Jax had brought up the playback of the last few moments before the blast, as recorded by the ship’s rear cam. Just as the Far Ranger had taken off, it was possible to see the blurred image of a life pod ejecting from the rear of the shuttle, heading in the opposite direction from the freighter.
“He’s alive,” Jax said. “I’m sure of it.”
Den had been sorry to hear that. But the big question, as far as he was concerned, wasn’t so much What do we do about Darth Vader? as When do we space? Because the only course that made any sense at all to him was to pile as many parsecs between them and the Core Worlds as possible.
The bird man, Kaird, understood that. His argument, which Den agreed with, was that they shouldn’t even bother with the safe house; they should just haul back on the stick right now. Den was willing to wait long enough to be sure that Rostu would live, but after that his vote was for the same action, even though I-Five pointed out that such unauthorized flight plans tended to disrupt air and space traffic, which in turn tended to bring the system police, and usually not in the best of humor.
The Elomin was also anxious to leave Coruscant. He was hoping Jax could somehow help him accomplish that. Toward that end, he