Star Wars_ Tales of the Bounty Hunters - Kevin J. Anderson [110]
She found Samoc standing in a back corner of the ship, her face and hands wrapped in white bandages. They hugged.
“You found a way to save us all,” Samoc said.
“We’re not out of this yet,” Toryn said.
She would be responsible for ninety Rebels at Darlyn Boda, fifty-two of them seriously wounded. There was a strong Rebel underground there—but the Empire still claimed Darlyn Boda. It controlled its government.
She looked at Samoc. Toryn doubted her ability to do all she had to do. Twice she had put her personal interest in Samoc’s well-being above the interests of the many she was responsible for: the first time, when she sent Samoc the medical droid; the second, when she tried to get 4-LOM to put Samoc on his list of twenty-six Rebels. She knew, standing there with her sister, that she would do it again. It was not fair to the others. She had to give up her command as quickly as possible. She hoped to find Rebels on Darlyn Boda who outranked her.
She returned to Zuckuss and 4-LOM.
“Estimated arrival at Darlyn Boda. 2.6 Standard hours,” 4-LOM told her.
This ship is fast, Toryn thought, even with a heavy load.
Zuckuss suddenly began coughing in his suit. He could not stop. Soon he doubled over in his pilot’s seat, coughing uncontrollably.
Toryn saw blood spatter the faceplate of his helmet.
She knelt and put her arms around him. “What’s wrong?” she said. “What can we do?”
4-LOM stood and began examining the seals on Zuckuss’s suit. “Is there an oxygen leak?” he asked Zuckuss.
“No,” Zuckuss said between coughs.
Toryn patched into the ship’s comm system. “Two-Onebee,” she said. “I need you on the flight deck, now.”
Little by little, Zuckuss gained control of his coughing. By the time the medical droid got to him, he had nearly stopped. He ended up telling the Rebel medical droid all about the injuries to his lungs.
“With the proper medical facilities, I could treat you,” Two-Onebee said. “However, those facilities are, at present, unavailable. Rebel military researchers have discovered ways to genetically trigger the regrowth of damaged tissues.”
“Clone them?” Zuckuss asked.
“No. That is illegal. Regrow them inside you. If our medical facilities survived the evacuation, I will be able to treat you at the rendezvous point when we get there. You will have new lungs in only a few days.”
Zuckuss leaned back in his pilot’s chair and thought about that. He began to meditate, but soon went to sleep. In his dreams he thought he was still meditating. The mists around all his possible futures lifted for a moment.
There were so many again, so many bright possibilities branching out ahead of him.
Darlyn Boda was much as 4-LOM remembered it: steamy, muddy, shadowy. It was the perfect place to have begun a life devoted to crime. He walked alone down the streets of a city with the same name as the planet, remembering the day he had jumped ship to start his new life. It had seemed to him then that he had the power inside him to pursue numberless possibilities. He had made decisions that had contracted those possibilities, but he regretted few of them.
Zuckuss was too sick to leave the ship. The Rebel medical droids, Two-Onebee and Effour-Seven, attended him. The Rebels had all disappeared, though soon he was to meet Toryn Farr and five of her hand-picked fighters. Together, they would fly to the Rebel rendezvous point.
And Han Solo, and the end of the Hunt.
Toryn had found the leaders of the Rebel insurrection. Its officers outranked her, took charge of her people, and ordered her on to the rendezvous point.
With a sealed letter she was to hand-deliver to the Rebel command.
4-LOM had arranged to meet Toryn