Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [344]
“I’m sorry, Lord Vader,” the helmeted stormtrooper was saying, “but we’re trapped inside the facility with several hundred reactivated infantry and destroyer droids.” The commander dodged blaster bolts and returned fire at something distant from the holocam’s transmission grid. “All accesses sealed when the facility powered up.”
“Where are the Jedi?” Vader asked.
“They left before the facility went online. We’re trapped in here until we find a way to blow one of the doors.”
“Did you destroy the ship the Jedi arrived in?”
“Negative,” the commander said as bolts lanced the air around him. “The smugglers detonated a magpulse while the second squad was advancing. My troopers were expecting it, but in the time it took our hardware to reboot, the Jedi got their ship airborne.”
Off cam a trooper said: “Fallback positions two and three have been overrun, Commander. We’ll have to make a stand here.”
“There’s just too many of them!” the commander said as diagonal lines of noise began to interfere with the transmission.
Abruptly, it derezzed completely.
Armand Isard and the ISB technicians busied themselves at the beacon controls, if only to avoid having to look at Vader.
“Lord Vader,” Appo said, “Jaguada base reports that jump points are limited in that system, and that they are scanning for vagrant traces of the Jedi ship. They may be able to calculate possible escape vectors.”
Vader nodded.
Infuriated, he turned and stormed from the beacon room, wishing he had the power to simply reach out and pluck the Jedi from the sky.
Conclude their extermination.
Sidious was wrong, he told himself as he hurried through the empty hallways.
They are a threat.
The Drunk Dancer tore through mottled hyperspace, leaving desolate Jaguada light-years behind. Skeck had sustained a nasty blaster burn to his right arm during the troopers’ attempt to disable the drop ship, but no one else had been hurt. Emerging from the facility moments before Filli’s time delay initiated the power generator, Shryne and the others had raced upvalley to the landing platform and had arrived in time to catch a squad of Imperials in a crossfire.
Sealed inside the facility, the remaining squads were up to their T-visors in reactivated battle droids.
After Skeck’s wound had been bandaged, Shryne had retired to the dormitory cabin space Jula had provided for the Jedi. He had always had a fondness for hyperspace travel—more, the sense of being outside time—and was kneeling in meditation when he sensed Starstone approaching the cabin. Simultaneous with her excited entry he rose to his feet, eyes on the sheaf of flimsiplast printouts she was holding.
“We have data on hundreds of Jedi,” she said, rattling the printouts. “We know where more than seventy Masters were at the end of the war—when the clone commanders received their orders.”
Accepting the proffered flimsies, Shryne thumbed through them, then glanced at Starstone. “How many of these hundreds do you think might actually have survived the attacks?”
She gave her head a quick shake. “I’m not even going to try to guess. We can begin our search with systems closest to Mossak, and fan out from there toward Mygeeto, Saleucami, and Kashyyyk.”
Shryne shook the flimsies. “Has it occurred to you that if we have this information, then so does the Empire? What do you think our adversaries were doing in the Temple beacon room, playing hide-and-seek?”
Starstone winced at the harshness of his tone, but only briefly. “Has it occurred to you that our adversaries, as you call them, were there precisely because a good many Jedi survived? It’s crucial that we reach those survivors before they’re hunted down. Or are you proposing that we leave them to the Empire—to Vader and his stormtroopers?”
Shryne made a start at replying, then bit back his words and motioned to the edge of the nearest cot. “Sit down, and try for a moment to stop thinking like a HoloNet hero.”
When Starstone