Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [136]
“Who are we after, Sarge?” That from Dash.
Nova didn’t know. Who were they after?
Well, kark it, he’d know them if he saw them.
“Just shoot who I tell you to,” he told the trooper. Then he raised his voice to include the rest of the squad: “Double-time it, people!”
They ran through the gray-and-black halls, following the four guards on point, their sidearms held up, fingers outside the trigger guards, as per regulations. The ceilings and floors were covered with blaster-proof absorbital, so if somebody accidentally cooked off a round it wouldn’t do any damage. If you carried your weapon pointed at the floor, however, there was a good chance in a crowd that you’d shoot somebody’s foot off, and the walls and vent grates weren’t all that sturdy, either.
The corridor branched ahead. As they approached, Nova desperately tried to remember which one led to D-Unit. Ahead, a blaster bolt sizzled through a cross corridor, and the four guards on point skidded to a stop, then moved ahead slowly toward the intersection to peer around it.
Nova suddenly realized that this was one of his dreams. It was as if he had been here before, seen the events that were now unfolding.
“Aaahhhh!” Somebody beyond the bend in the corridor screamed, and a moment later half a dozen troopers barreled around the corner of the hallway intersection, heading toward Nova.
They were being chased by a single man with a blaster, yelling like a berserker as he ran. The man—Nova saw that he was dressed like a down-on-his-luck spacer—stopped, realizing that there were suddenly overwhelming odds in front of him. Then he turned and ran back the other way, putting on a burst of speed as he disappeared around the corner.
“After him! Go!” Nova led the pursuit, followed by his squad and the others. Once around the bend, he saw that the fleeing spacer had been joined by a Wookiee, and both of them were now shooting back at their pursuers as they fled. They returned fire, but no one was hitting anything; the excited troopers were just spraying blasterfire.
They wouldn’t hit the two. He was sure of it. But how could he know that?
They rounded a corner. “Close the blast doors!” somebody yelled.
The heavy durasteel panels ahead began to iris shut, but the running man and the Wookiee managed to leap through before they closed completely.
“Open the blast doors! Open the blast doors!” somebody was now shouting. It was almost comical. Since he was the closest, Nova reached for the controls.
But in that moment, he hesitated. He knew—felt it in a way that he couldn’t explain but also could not deny—that the man and the Wookiee they were after had to escape. That somehow it would be, as the old archivist had said, part of the solution and not part of the problem.
How could he know this? Was it part of the connection to the Force that the doc had talked about? Nova didn’t know … it seemed crazy, but he had to acknowledge what he felt.
One of the troopers said, “Sarge? You gonna open the doors?”
“I’m trying. The switch is jammed.” He moved his armored hand over the controls, pretending to try to move them, knowing that none of his men could see what he was doing.
A few more seconds might make the difference. He could give them that much.
“Still not working,” Nova said. He activated his comlink. “Blast Control, this is Sergeant Stihl, operating number four-three-nine-five-seven-zero-four-three-seven. I need an override on the blast doors, Level Five, Corridor Six. Open them.”
“Manual controls appear to be functional on all doors in that corridor,” came back the reply through his helmet’s commset.
“And I’m telling you they aren’t. You gonna open it or let the terrorists we’re chasing escape?”
“Acknowledged.”
The blast doors opened. “Let’s go!” Nova said.
Ahead, the corridor branched. Again, he could not say how he knew, but he was sure the