Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 04_ Exile - Aaron Allston [124]
Luke shook his head over that choice. Was Niathal simply making use of an available resource? Or, recalling that the Voyager had once been the flagship of Admiral Ackbar, was she trading on the revered strategist’s name to promote herself? Luke didn’t know.
But thinking about that was much better than wondering about Ben.
ZIOST
Ben and Kiara rested the remainder of the day, and from the top of the rock pile, just inside the citadel entrance, they watched the shuttle.
It descended from the clouds less than fifteen minutes after Ben, Kiara, and the revitalized Shaker reached the entrance. It was an old shuttle with fold-up wings and a bronze paint job, and it did not land. It circled the crash site endlessly, then took off for the skies once more.
Ben was curious about that. Were the crew members afraid to touch down on Ziost? That actually made sense.
Hungry as they were, Ben insisted that they eat no more than half the rations they had scavenged from the TIE fighter. The rest they could eat over the next three or four days. Perhaps by then they’d be able to find more food, or find their way offplanet.
They slept well that night, with Shaker keeping its sensors alert for nocturnal movement. But there was none.
In the morning, glow rods attached to new power packs, they went searching.
It didn’t take long. All Ben had to do was open himself up to the voices. They led him down several levels, to where the corridor floors were coated in ancient muck, to a long side shaft that carried them well away from the citadel proper. It led them to an unlit circular chamber. Its walls were decorated with eighteen niches, each large enough to hold a life-sized statue of an average human, but all empty.
“It’s gone,” Kiara said.
Ben shook his head. The images in his head were clear. The ship was here. “Come out,” he said.
He heard laughter.
Kiara seemed to sense it, too. She drew back to stand next to Shaker and stared all around, looking for the source.
Ben frowned. His instincts, and what the voices had whispered to him when he only half understood their words, told him that emotion was the key. Nor would kind, soft, welcoming emotion do.
He deepened his voice, put some anger into it. “Come out!”
Had he tried it the day before, when he’d been at his weakest from lack of food, he doubtless would have failed. But now there was a rumble in the ground, and a crack appeared in the half-dried muck of the floor—a crack as straight as a laser beam, bisecting the room.
Shaker, whose legs straddled the crack, gave a tweetle of alarm and quickly moved to one side. Kiara joined him.
The gap widened more quickly at the room’s center than toward the edges. There it became circular, and up from it, inadequately illuminated by Ben’s glow rod, came a segmented metal arm several meters long…and then the top portions of a vehicle’s spherical main body. Its circular central viewport, lit from behind and glowing an unhealthy yellow, seemed to be an eye regarding them. The sphere was some ten meters in diameter, half of it protruding above floor level; a gap of three meters separated the edge of the floor from the nearest portion of vehicle hull.
Ben swayed, both from weakness and relief. The vehicle was here, it was real…and if the presence he felt within it, a malevolent set of emotions detectable through the Force, was any indication, it was functional, even after centuries in the ground.
“Open,” he commanded.
After a moment, a vertical line appeared beneath the viewport and lowered as a hatch, its near end just reaching the edge of the floor.
Ben bounded across and up into the vehicle.
But if he’d anticipated finding a control couch, a pilot’s yoke, hyperspace and weapons controls,