29: Exit Strategy

ABOARD THE MILLENNIUM FALCON

Namyr and Kevv both heard the change in the tone of the Falcon’s engines, and they felt the slight shift in gravity as the inertial dampers changed their direction. “We’re turning around,” Kevv said. “Calrissian and whoever else is up there is turning this ship around!”

Namyr said nothing. She waited, hoping that the Empire had not gotten them locked in a tractor beam. Moments ago, Commander Fera had contacted her, and assured her that wasn’t possible, that Midra’hara had successfully hacked the Executor’s tractor beams and they would be stalled for at least a few minutes, long enough for the Falcon to get clear of Bespin and make the jump to lightspeed.

Then, minutes later, they heard footsteps running above them. The floor panel above them slid to one side and Calrissian stood above them. He kept his voice low. “We’ve turned around to pick up a friend. Looks like he got away from the Empire but he’s hanging from the bottom of Cloud City. I’m going to reel him in, and then we’ll be on our way. Just wanted you to know so you don’t think something’s wrong.”

“We need to get out of here, Calrissian!” Namyr said.

“I know that. And we will. Just as soon as we reel in Skywalker.”

He slid the panel shut on her question, and she looked over at Kevv, barely noticeable by the light of his datapad, which he was using to read the headlines from HoloNet news sites, trying to figure out how the evacuation was going. “Skywalker?” the Duros said. “Did he say Skywalker?”

Namyr shrugged. “I guess he got away.”

“Do you think that means…Ageless…?”

She shrugged again. “We can’t know.”

Then, as though the Force itself had heard them and summoned destiny to speak, they both heard a crackling voice over their commlinks. “This is Ageless! I’m—” He broke off for several seconds before returning. “—repeat, I have returned to Platform 327 and found the Falcon gone! I’m assuming—got out. So I’m now heading—” Another long break. Then, “—found the Hard Leaf. No sign of Lobot or any other Cloud City security officials. Looks like they didn’t make it back to—taking the Hard Leaf out myself! I’ll be airborne in thirty seconds—”

Kevv’s face was hopeful. “Hey! He made it!”

Namyr tried calling back to him, but it seemed that the range became too great, or else Bespin’s radiation spikes were just too much for the commlinks. “Sounded like he said Lobot wasn’t there.”

“Think maybe he was captured?”

Namyr had no answer. She hoped not. For all the help the cyborg had given them, what a terrible tragedy it would be if he had been taken prisoner by the Empire. They were not known to treat Rebels well, and they treated traitors even worse.

Once more, she sent a prayer out to whatever beings might live in the Force, and asked them to protect Lobot. Wherever he was.

* * *

ABOARD THE HARD LEAF

The YT-2300 was empty. Lobot and Calrissian must have taken the Ugnaught crew and the maintenance droids to the holding tower, as well. The Hard Leaf’s life-support was only good for one person, so Ageless hoped it would be able to handle two people, as long as one of them was unconscious for a while, taking up less oxygen. If not, he would have to vent his Human captive into space and be done with it. But the Hard Leaf’s hyperdrive was in perfect condition, and he figured if he made a straight shot to the Hoth system, he might be able to live there for a while in the shell of Echo Base, repairing the life-support using the components of some of the downed aircraft still there.

The idea of returning to Hoth did not fill him with joy. But in a pinch, we all must suffer to endure. Another of his grandmother’s pieces of wisdom.

Ageless lifted off from the platform and turned the ship towards the sky and kicked all power to main thrusters. Hard Leaf roared to life, and he soon left Cloud City behind him. Tied in the copilot’s seat beside him was Sark, who obviously had suffered major head trauma and was still sound asleep.

He looked to the darkling sky, thinking, Now I just have to hope Commander Fera and her people clear us a way.

* * *

ABOARD THE MIDRA’HARA

ORBITING BESPIN

Fera said, “Do it.”

Her team went to work, activated the computer worms they had inserted into the Executor’s tractor beams. The slice attack would be found momentarily, surely, but it would at least free up some of the ships that were already being reeled in. Minutes later, she saw them all scattering, and TIE fighter squadrons were sent after all the fleeing Cloud City citizens.

“May the Force be with them,” Kajjak said.

“Here comes the Millenium Falcon,” said Mynyra. “I’ve got her on scopes and she’s moving fast…she ought to be cleared to activate her hyperdrive…that’s funny.” She tapped a few more keys. “Calrissian isn’t going to lightspeed. Wonder why that is.”

Fera had a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. The Falcon had been down there long enough for the Empire to have sabotaged the vessel. And any number of other things might have happened to it.

“Tractor beams are almost reestablished,” said Denzen. “Can’t hold them off forever. Executor is about to reactivate all tractor beams!”

“We need to leave, Commander,” the pilot said. “I’ve got incoming TIEs on scopes. They’re pretty upset about what we did to those Phantoms.”

“Just a few more minutes. We need to keep the tractor beams offline as long as we can. Long enough for the Falcon to go to lightspeed—”

“But she’s not, and she should have already, which means something is wrong! We need to go! Now!” His hands went to his controls.

“Don’t touch that lever, Captain!” Fera said.

“Commander, I cannot risk the lives of—”

“I am in command of this operation, Captain! I have operational control! No one else!”

The captain glared at her. “We’ve pushed it as much as we can. We’ve overstayed our welcome, Commander.”

Fera said nothing. They needed the Millennium Falcon to get free. She did not also want to add that they owed it to Ageless to keep him alive. If she said that, others on her team might think she actually respected the man who had killed countless of their Rebel brothers and sisters. But deep down, she felt she owed him. Because of her own past. Because of the tattoo just behind her ear, the tiny one that signified redemption.

If I can change, so can he.

It was as simple as that. She felt obligated to get Ageless Void out because she felt, deep down, that he was on their side now. At least, he’s not on their side, and I’ll take that. And if the Rebellion could not find a way to forgive him, then they would never find a way to forgive her. She could not be the only Imperial regretting her decision to defend Palpatine’s Empire. She refused to believe it. It was possible for others to change.

Mynyra shouted, “Hard Leaf is on her way up—and the Falcon just made the jump to lightspeed!”

A quick cheer went up.

Fera let out a sigh of relief.

“Executor tractor beams back online!” screamed Kajjak. “And we’re being targeted!”

Everyone looked at her. The only person left to escape was Ageless Void. She wanted to hold out just a little longer. She looked out the viewport, silently willing him to escape.

“Commander?”

“All right, folks,” she said reluctantly. “Start looking for an exit strategy.” She looked to the pilot. “Captain?”

“Already getting a move on.”

Fera took one more glance at Mynyra’s sensor screen. She watched as the Hard Leaf made it into orbit, and then banked away from a grouping of TIEs coming Ageless’s way. Looked like twelve or fifteen. She saw their many target locks. Saw them open fire. Saw Ageless disappear around to the dark side of the planet.

That’s it, then. His fate is in his hands now.

“Got the coordinates from the navicomputer,” said the copilot.

“Copy that,” the pilot responded. “Making the jump to lightspeed in four, three, two, one—punch it!”

Fera watched as the stars elongated into starlines, and they were sucked into that swirling, mottled blue pit of hyperspace. They were free. They had made it. But what of Ageless?

* * *

ABOARD THE HARD LEAF

And here they come. Ageless prepared the forward-facing laser cannons. The ship had a turret, but he had no one to man it. And even if he did, life-support systems could not support such a crew at the moment. Oxygen levels were already dangerously low. He checked his sensor screen. Thirteen unfriendlies. This is going to be tight. The TIE fighters were faster than his ship, and gaining speed all the time. An alarm told him that the Executor, which loomed not too far to the left of his viewport, had just cued up her tractor beams and they were seeking targets. Luckily, there was at least a hundred other ships now vying for an escape route, so it might take some time before the Executor picked him out.

But I don’t have a way out.

The space ahead of him was empty. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. And the navicomputer was reporting that he would not be ready for a safe jump to lightspeed for six and a half minutes.

He looked at his scopes. The TIEs were too close.

Not going to have enough time.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

He pushed Hard Leaf’s engines to their limits, rerouting power from nonessential systems and redlining the thrusters. It still wasn’t going to be enough.

Ageless closed his eyes and sighed. “Okay,” he said to himself. “All right. But you tried. And you got Zumter out. You got him—”

Suddenly, the door at the rear of the cockpit opened, and Ageless instantly stood and spun around in a combat stance, ready to kill whoever the stowaway was—

“Oh, hello, zzzzzir,” said R-3PO. “We hope we did not disturb you, but it appearzzz your commlink isn’t working and we—”

“Where the blazes did you come from?!” he shouted.

Beside the red-plated protocol droid, the R4 unit came trundling up, tweeting indignantly.

“Oh, zzzo sorry, zzir. Arfour and I heard your transmission to the otherzzz, but our own commlink wazzz damaged in our crash. We’ve been able to hear everything you’ve been saying to one another, but unable to tranzzzmit. I heard you say you were on your way to the Hard Leaf, and with the city mostly evacuated, we found plenty of abandoned airspeeders, and commandeered one. We flew it to the landing platform and have been waiting inside the crew’s quarters this whole—”

“Never mind all that! Can you man the controls?”

“I…well, I’m not pilot—”

“Not what I asked! Can you just take the controls and occasionally jink us side to side? Think you can do that while I man the turret?”

“Oh, well, I should that think that’zzzz not too difficult to—”

“Good! Do that! Arfour, find this ship’s computer terminal and see if you can help the navicomputer to spit out some coordinates any faster!” He ran past them, down the corridor, shouting, “And angle the deflector shields to the rear when I tell you! It’s the blue screen on the right side of the console!”

Ageless climbed the ladder up into the laser turret. He pulled on the headset and spoke to the cockpit’s intercom as he strapped himself into the seat. “I’m in! Screens are up!” He saw the thirteen tiny dots that represented thirteen determined TIE fighters coming to slag or cripple him.

The turret rotated at the slightest nudge, but was still a little sluggish. It was clear the Ugnaughts had not needed the turrets very much when hauling dozens of slabs of frozen tibanna gas. He set his targeting to the lead fighter. An alarm blared in Ageless’s ear, telling him the Hard Leaf was being painted.

“They’ve targeted us! Here we go! Angle the deflector shields!”

The first three came in a zonal attack pattern and split off at the last second, letting loose a salvo that bled off the Hard Leaf’s pitiful deflector shields. Ageless fired at them, missing all three. They were just too fast for the slow-moving turret. The next three came in on a strafing run identical to the first—presumably figuring why mess with success—but Ageless was prepared to lead them a little, and they splashed left and right, cutting their strafing run short. But the third group was more creative, zigging and zagging in more unpredictable patterns and giving the Hard Leaf’s shields a walloping from all angles, overworking them to the point of failure.

In his headset, Ageless heard R4 bleat something.

“Arfour sayzzz shields are almost depleted!” R-3PO interpreted.

“I know that! How much longer till we can make the jump to lightspeed?”

“Arfour says two minutezzz.”

“That’s too long! Make it sooner!”

“We can’t, zzzir. Arfour sayzzz—”

The rest was lost in the bashing the ship took from the fourth and final group. And now all thirteen TIEs were swarming around the Hard Leaf. Ageless was able to tag one of them. The targeting computer was struggling to queue them all. Could really use Kevv’s flying skills right about now, he lamented to himself, watching helplessly as another TIE performed a strafe against the rear engines. All he could do was fire at the tail end of the ship, keeping them away from the hyperdrive and hoping against hope the Hard Leaf did not completely come apart before they made the jump.

He tried to think of something, anything, to make them go faster or fight harder. Maybe if we dump the tibanna slabs, we can conserve power, since the inertial dampers and artificial gravity systems won’t have to strain to contain them all. We could reroute the extra power to—

Then, it hit him.

“Threepio! Arfour! One of you get down to the cargo bay right now and open the ramp door! Do it now!”

“But, zzzzir, that will vent our air into space! Arfour doesn’t need air, but you—”

“Do it now, I said! Or we’re dead!”

Another strafing run. He managed to predict the angle of deflection from one of the TIEs, and winged it on its way out, and then hit its exhaust port as it tried to flee. It spiraled out of control, and he then targeted another one. Winged it. It sailed away, still alive but temporarily out of the fight while the pilot orbited the Hard Leaf and tried to troubleshoot whatever was wrong. All Ageless could do was hope to thin them out, just a little, just enough to buy a few more seconds—

“I’m in the cargo bay,” R-3PO called over comms. “The door izzz opening. I’m being sucked out into—”

“Hang on to something!”

And the Hard Leaf shuddered and Ageless felt his ears pop as the pressure differential took hold throughout the ship. And he aimed his turret behind them, into their exhaust wake. And there, on his targeting screen, he saw twenty or thirty new blips appear. The rectangular slabs of tibanna gas poured out into the vacuum, tumbling back towards the planet of Bespin. About six or seven TIEs happened to be swarming around in that area.

Ageless targeted just one slab. That was all he needed. It was easy, because it was just tumbling in a straight line.

He fired.

The resultant explosion was small at first, but then it caught on to the other tumbling slabs in a chain reaction, and the volatile tibanna gas, formerly frozen, now liquefied and gasified and detonated in a silent plume of pink-and-white light, which expanded so wide and so fast that Ageless thought it would consume the Hard Leaf herself, but it stopped after it had swallowed almost all of the TIEs on their tails. The remaining two TIEs, not knowing what they had just seen, probably worried about space mines or the like, and now spun away for their own safety.

“Close the cargo bay door!” Ageless shouted, hoping the protocol droid had not been sucked out yet.

“Doorzzz closed,” R-3PO reported.

Ageless was already out of his seat and sliding down the ladder. He bounded down the corridor and returned to the cockpit just as he heard the multiple alarms that said they were being re-targeted. It had bought them time, perhaps only thirty seconds.

But it was enough! The navicomputer reported ready, thanks to R4.

“Here we go! Punching it…now!”

He pushed the lever to activate the hyperdrive, and the thin white starlines elongated in front of them, pulling them into the black pit of space before the mottled blue corridor of hyperspace welcome them.

Ageless’s whole body sighed. He could not believe it. They had done it. He sagged back into his seat. He looked at his hands. Steady. Or maybe not. Maybe there was a slight tremor there.

Moments later, both of the droids entered the cockpit and stood there, waiting for some sort of command from him. Ageless patted R-3PO on the shoulder, and R4 on his red dome. He pushed past them and walked down the hall and found a medkit, and used an auto-injector to give Sark a sedative, which ought to keep him out for several more hours. He then dragged his prisoner into the cargo bay, now emptied of all the tibanna slabs, and tied him to a metal pipe using spare superconducting wire from a parts locker.

“You have the ship,” Ageless told the droids. “Wake me up if anything else goes wrong.”

He went to the captain’s quarters, which had a bed only big enough for the much shorter Ugnaught captain. He sat on the edge of the bed, unclipped the lightsaber from his belt, and examined it, wondering about its history.

I am your father, Vader had said.

It made no sense. But it was also irrelevant at the moment. Ageless laid the weapon on the bedside table. It could be a useful tool later.

He laid down on the bed, feet hanging over the edge. He closed his eyes and slept. And he dreamed of Dathomir and his grandmother around the campfire, spinning her stories. He dreamt of being lost in a long, dark ocean, with eels swimming beneath him. And he felt something. A strange force that rose in him, causing the cells of his body to tingle. Every molecule of his body hummed and vibrated, and it was like an awakening. An awakening while being asleep.

And he dreamt of Hoth. He dreamt of how this all began. And, strangely, he believed he saw glimpses of the future. He felt the future. He saw his own death, and the death of others he knew. He saw the death of everything, and then a rebirth. It made no contextual sense but he felt it in every part of his being. And there was…a voice. A Dark Voice, loud and taunting. It called to him from behind a dark veil, teasing him, luring him.

Ageless was somehow able to close his ears from this creature. For now.

He ignored this energetic force for the time being, and chose to rest. Yet, somewhere in the periphery of his mind, faces stared at him. They were the faces of everyone he had ever killed in service to the Empire. Distantly, he thought, I’ll talk to you all later.

He fell deeper into sleep, and soon all thought was gone.

* * *

REBEL RENDEZVOUS POINT

ABOARD THE NEBULON-B FRIGATE REDEMPTION [ROLE: MEDICAL FRIGATE]

TWO DAYS LATER…

Namyr opened her eyes. She had dozed fitfully for only a few hours, and the dreams had been gray and mysterious. Someone had been following her down a long, dark street where lamps moved like lightning bugs all around her and a deep fog surrounded her. Enemies were everywhere, she could sense them, but she could not feel them. And she heard a voice. A Taunting Voice, one that tried to lure her down a dark alleyway or something…

She shook it off.

Rising from her bed, she nodded to 2-1B, who Commander Fera had finally delivered back to the Rebel Alliance. She passed the room where her wounded neighbor, Luke Skywalker, was still being fitted for a new cybernetic hand. Princess Leia was there with him. Fera did not disturb them, but she watched as they stood together by a window, and watched the Millennium Falcon take off. Lando Calrissian and Chewbacca were on that ship. Calrissian had told Fera the plan, that he was now committed to finding Han Solo and using his business contacts to help the Alliance. There was no sign of Lobot. No one had heard from him. Calrissian had also intimated he would like to return to Cloud City and see if his companion was still there.

Maybe the Force be with you, she thought, watching the Falcon fly away.

Others had been sacrificed, too. Namyr had heard numerous Cloud City citizens had been taken up in tractor beams aboard the Executor. Their Rebel listening post on the planet was likely to be shut down, as well.

She watched the princess and Commander Skywalker stand there, flanked by their two droids, C-3PO and R2-D2. And she wondered about such camaraderie. She wondered if there would be any friendships to be had after the War was over. Or would the Empire crush them all into dust, grind the free-thinking citizens of the galaxy beneath its bootheel, and stamp out all freedom-loving peoples?

Namyr did not like that image of the future. But she also could not shake the idea that it was a very real possibility. We did not defend democracy, she thought, remembering some of Ageless’s words from days before. So now we must win it back. But what if we can’t?

She walked farther down the hall, and the next transparisteel door opened into a recuperation area for the wounded. Numerous pilots were there, people beaten and battered and half-alive from the Battle of Hoth, as well as a few other small skirmishes around the galaxy. Kevv sat at a dejarik table, playing against a female Bith. Losing, by the look on his face.

When he saw Namyr approaching, Kevv conceded and stood up. “Get some rest?” he asked.

“Not really. You?”

“Not really.”

They smiled together at that. Namyr and Kevv had arrived at the Rebel rendezvous still hidden beneath the floor panels of the Millennium Falcon. Smuggled in, for security’s sake. Calrissian had not told anyone they were down there, not until Leia, Skywalker, Chewbacca and the droids had all disembarked from the ship. Once alone on the Falcon, Calrissian had returned to them and helped them out, and Namyr then found the highest-ranking AIN official and got a direct line to Commander Fera, who told her to put Zumter in holding and sit tight. And so they had done. And neither Princess Leia nor her friends knew that Namyr, Kevv, and Zumter had been stowaways aboard their ship.

Everything had to be kept hush-hush. The fewer people that knew of Zumter’s capture, the better.

“Wanna go for a walk?” Namyr said.

“Sure.” Kevv thanked the Bith for a good game and they started walking through the corridors of the Nebulon-B. “What do you think will happen now?”

“I’ll be reassigned,” she said.

“Where to?”

“Who knows where? Wherever the next battle needs to be fought. Wherever the intel we get from Zumter leads. Or maybe just to some remote world where I need to sit and wait to hear what the next target will be.”

“The next target,” Kevv mused aloud. “You know, when us pilots talk about of targets, we think of the little tracking dots on our targeting screens that we try to line up in our sights. It’s all very clear who the enemy is. They’re the ones flashing red and painting you with a targeting laser. But this stuff you do…” He waved, indicating the clandestine world Namyr occupied. “An enemy can quickly become a friend. Or at least an ally. And then you have to think about what to do with him.”

She nodded. “Yes. Sometimes you do.”

“Do you think they’ll…?”

Namyr looked at him. “What? Send me to kill our Zabrak friend?” She dared not say his name, not in a busy ship’s corridor.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

“He helped us,” Kevv said. “He saved us. And we saved him.”

“The one thing I’ve learned, Kevv,” Namyr said, stepping through a doorway and into a room with an observation window, “is that that doesn’t matter.” She paused in front of the window and looked out at space. Together they watched the Millennium Falcon activate her hyperdrive and vanish in an instant into hyperspace.

“Think they’ll find their friend? Solo?” asked Kevv.

“He’s an asset, just like all of us. They’ll dedicate a lot of resources to retrieving him. If for no other reason than to protect the Rebellion. The Hutts may torture him for information about the Rebellion. Mon Mothma and the other higher-ups can’t have that.”

“Maybe they’ll send you to help.”

Namyr shrugged. “Maybe. We are at their service. We do as the High Command says.” She turned to him. “But what about you? Any news from your unit?”

Kevv sighed. “None yet. Maybe they’re still out there. Maybe they got scooped up by Imps. Who knows? I’ve been thinking about them a lot.”

Namyr looked him up and down. “You anxious to get back out there?”

“What, into the thick of things?”

“Yeah.”

“You bet your hind end I am. This fight’s not over. Far from it. When I joined the Rebellion, I set out to do my part, and I won’t stop until it’s finished. Or I am.” Kevv looked back out into space, to the point where the Millennium Falcon had vanished. “I hope they find him,” he said. “We could use all the Rebels we can get.”

“Yes,” Namyr said, thinking of Ageless Void. “We could.”