Taz and Varun moved faster than was prudent for a couple of wanted men in the heart of an enemy base, but need outweighed caution. The sky would be light soon and neither man was under any illusion that their escape would go unnoticed for very long.
Rho-277's data vault was in a low building fronted by a long duracrete pad that looked like it might have been a parade ground. They carefully navigated around the perimeter, avoiding the two sentries huddled around a thermogenerator to ward off the chill.
Reaching the side of the building, Taz whispered, "Think there's a back door we could use?"
"Hear those exhaust fans?" asked Numarkos. The fast whopp whopp whopp of ventilator blades carried on the night air from somewhere close by. "Those things usually need regular maintenance. There's probably a hatch somewhere."
Ten minutes of feeling around in the dark led them to a narrow access door. Broder's code cylinder opened the lock in short order and they slipped inside. A tight warren of conduits, cables and ductwork made progress a contentious thing, but after some time and not a few scratches and bruises, the two men found another narrow hatch that opened onto a long hallway.
Taz cracked the panel open and stole a look. Diffuse, meager light dribbled from the panels that lined the walls and ceiling. The passage ended at a heavy door pierced by a small porthole window.
"The vault should be behind that door," Varun indicated, pointing toward the end of the hall.
"You mean the one with the big surveillance camera right over it?"
Numarkos scowled in the half-light. He sucked in a breath, then hopped through the narrow door and sprinted down the corridor. He touched the stun baton's electrical contacts to the camera's power connector, shorting it with a brilliant flash and a sharp popping noise. Taz came right behind, code cylinder in hand. The door snapped up into the ceiling with a hiss, then knifed back down behind them as soon as they entered.
Varun looked grim. "Shorting that camera probably set off an alarm. It won't take them long to come after us."
Taz got his fingers around the edge of the door control and pried it from the wall. "I'll try to override the lock."
The interior of the space was sterile white, flooded with light that made them squint after the twilight they'd adjusted to. In the very center of the room stood a black instrument panel with a keyboard, displays, and controls for managing the bank of data tapes stacked on a huge rotating carousel behind them. Thick armored transparisteel separated the valuable tapes from the antechamber.
Varun stepped to the controls. "Cylinder," he called, and Taz flipped the little silvery code key to him. He inserted it into the interface port. "Now let's see how much data we can get."
Taz poked at the components behind the wall that controlled the door mechanism. He cross-wired what looked like a timer lock with the key socket. The circuitry arced and he yanked his hand back with a yelp, smarting from a potent electrical shock. He shook his hand and winced. "How's it going?" he said over his shoulder before making another try on the lock circuits.
"I have access to the tape retrieval mechanism, I just need to find the right ones." He tapped away at the keyboard for a minute, then swore. "I think I've found the files, but they're buried behind some security barriers."
"Can you bypass them?" Taz shorted out the power regulator on the door's linear actuators, careful not to get shocked this time.
"Working on it," Numarkos answered, sounding annoyed.
"Well work faster."
"You want to give it a shot?" Varun snapped. He let out a long breath. "Look, just let me work here."
"Yeah, okay," Taz said, taking the hint.
Varun worked like a possessed man, manipulating dials and switches, tapping staccato patterns on the keyboard. After a few seconds, without looking up he stated, "She still loves you, you know."
"What?"
"Tessa. She's still in love with you."
Taz kept his tone even. "What makes you think that?"
"The look on her face when she realized it was you calling to say you'd found Jerric and Amanda. The way she worried herself sick while we waited for you to get to Womrik. The way she looks at you when your back is turned." He glanced up at Taz, fierce jealousy in his eyes. "She's the one who made me come along, you know. She was afraid of what might happen if she was alone with you."
Taz tried the door controls to verify his sabotage had worked. It was hard to believe what Varun was telling him, but deep down he felt a little thrill at the thought. An instant later he thought about Lyra. There might have been a time, not too long ago, when that news would have made him fight to get Tess back. But over the past few weeks, he'd realized their time together had passed.
"I wouldn't take advantage of her like that."
"Maybe not." Varun kept tapping; the Imperial access codes he knew weren't working and the code cylinder he'd taken from Broder wasn't keyed for the high-security data retrieval system. He wasn't a slicer by any definition of the word, but he'd had some counter-intrusion training. It wasn't much but he had little choice other than to keep digging.
"After Endor, well, you remember how chaotic it got. The Emperor was dead but there was still plenty of fight left in the Imperial war machine and they let us know it. Right after you were assigned to Alliance ground forces, Moff Prechion put a task force together and went after us, hard. We fought running skirmishes for five months, with never more than a day or two of rest between. I don't know how they kept finding us but his fleet chased us from one end of the galaxy to the other and back.
"All that materiel you appropriated at Borga? We burned through that. We could only field half our A-wings from lack of fuel and munitions. We had to cannibalize the other ships just to keep those running. Everyone was frazzled. Morale hit rock bottom; half the crew thought the other half were selling us out to the Empire."
Taz looked astonished. "I didn't know it was that bad. Tess didn't say anything about it. If she had maybe I could have come back, done something to help."
Numarkos shook his head. "I imagine getting reassigned from Jakku would've been next to impossible by then. And you'd probably have died if you'd come back aboard.
"When we hit the Hammer of Vengeance, Aunt Dee and General Rexler thought it would be a good way to turn the tide, take the fight right to Prechion and boost our spirits. I suppose it worked but we nearly destroyed the Olminar doing it. Medbay got hit; we lost the entire medical team including Doc Reetoo and your friend M'nik."
"M'nik-onshu?" Taz groaned, feeling the bottom fall out of his stomach. The Filvian had been his senior on the Olminar's medical staff. He'd turned a struggling, newly-minted medtech into a competent combat medic through patient mentoring and unshakable good humor.
It had been a long time since he'd spoken to M'nik. "I... lost contact with him. The fighting was insane on the ground—" He felt a moment of oppressing grief and terrible regret. Another priceless friend lost to that awful war.
"They used the staterooms, lounges, even the passageways for the injured because there were so many of us. It took a week to get to Letsago Drift on our backup hyperdrive, another week to evacuate the wounded to the medical facility at Arclight. The whole thing was... Let's just say going through it once was more than enough for anybody.
"Tessa was a mess. We were still being hunted so there were no outbound comms allowed. She wanted to write back to you, Oktos-grasha. I think she still has the drafts, but she couldn't send them. She was so depressed, laying in that hospital out of the fight, and knowing what was happening on Jakku... she didn't want to do her rehab, wouldn't eat, and couldn't sleep."
"She got better though," Taz said. Why didn't she tell me any of this?
"She withdrew, wouldn't talk to anyone. I—" he looked embarrassed, the first time Taz had ever seen Varun Numarkos looking anything other than confident and aloof. "It'll sound childish but the first time I saw her on the ship I fell in love. She was polite to me, but, you know..."
Taz didn't say anything but his expression was at least understanding, if not exactly sympathetic.
"The damage control party put us in the Old Ghost's crew lounge when they turned it into makeshift medbay. She was so scared when she came to and couldn't speak, I just took her hand and held on. It was all I could think to do. I know she wanted it to be you comforting her but I was glad it was me." He looked up to judge Taz's reaction. The medtech had an intense look on his face but he didn't seem angry.
The terminal beeped affirmatively; he'd made it past the first security layer. He got to work on the second. "When she refused to see anyone or go to rehab she at least let me sit with her. I think she felt sorry for me; I was burned over most of my left side. They fixed the scarring pretty well, but," he tapped his left eye with his fingernail, making a distinct clinking sound.
"Cybernetic eye?"
Numarkos nodded. "And a lung. The bacta immersions made me sick. She took pity on me, which, believe me, was the last thing I wanted her to do. But after a few days she started showing up to my treatments, helping me back to my bed, you know, little things like that. And she let me help with her speech therapy, getting her voice back. It was—" He looked up at Taz, his eyes limpid. "Saving each other. That's what we did.
"She loved you that whole time, though, Oktos. It tore her apart, growing closer to me. She told me so." He made a rough, rueful sound. "Truth is I've been in your shadow this whole time. Probably still am."
The terminal beeped again. "Second security layer breached," he announced, relieved to have the interruption. He tapped at the keyboard, then grinned. "Looks like we're in luck; only two security layers. Guess they didn't plan for anyone breaking in here."
The sudden blare of klaxons made both men jump. At almost the same time, the comlink Taz had appropriated erupted with busy, frenzied traffic. Taz peered out the little porthole, then over his shoulder with alarm. "Movement in the hallway." A few seconds later he added, "It's Tafo and he's brought the boys in white!"
The director tromped toward the data vault's door surrounded by a quartet of stormtroopers. He inserted his code cylinder into the lock. The door creaked but didn't open. Snarling, he jammed it into the socket again, but the door refused to open. "Bypass it!" he snapped. "I won't allow these petty Rebel saboteurs to ruin years of research!"
One of the troopers got to work on the access panel. "The rest of you listen to me. I don't care what instructions Ruatha gave you; I'm the director of this facility and you'll obey my orders. The men in there are Rebel terrorists. You will shoot them on sight and you will shoot to kill. Is that understood?"
"Director, Agent Ruatha still wants to interrogate the prisoners."
"I don't care what she wants!" he snarled. "Ruatha reports to me and I report to the Emperor! Now follow my orders!"
Varun stood behind the vault's controls, working feverishly to copy as much data as he could onto the guard's cylinder.
"They're going to bypass my rewiring job before long," warned Taz. He picked up a stool in the corner of the room. "I'll keep them busy for as long as I can. Keep your head down and look for an opportunity to get out of here."
"What makes you think I'm going to—"
The door hissed open. Varun ducked behind the panel as the two lead troopers fired their blasters. Blue stun bolts impacted the back wall and the panel; neither trooper had listened to Tafo. The director cursed furiously and unsnapped his holster.
For the thousandth time in his life, Taz thanked whichever idiot genius had designed stormtrooper helmets with such a limited field of vision. He brought the stool down hard on the nearest trooper's blaster just as he fired. The gun clattered to the floor and Taz swept the stool up, catching the soldier under the chin with one of the legs. The man slumped to the floor in a heap of white plastoid armor.
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Taz kicked blindly at the blaster rifle, hoping it went in Varun's general direction. He uttered the fiercest yell he could conjure and jumped toward the other trooper. Tafo looked stunned and furious as Taz collided with the stormtrooper. He managed to get both hands on the man's weapon before the trooper head-butted him, making the room spin.
Taz staggered. The trooper whacked him on the side of his head and Taz stumbled to the ground. The remaining two troopers crowded into the room.
Spitting curses, Tafo drew his compact blaster and shot the trooper Taz had felled. The other one turned. "Sir, what are you—"
"Shoot to kill, I said!" Tafo snarled and fired. The second trooper grunted and dropped to the ground.
Taz shook his head, his vision clearing. Is Tafo not in command of his troops? His lightsaber was still tucked in the director's belt. There were a few precious seconds of confusion as the director raged at the recalcitrant troopers. He saw Varun lunge for the blaster from behind the data terminal.
Taz kicked at Tafo, his poorly aimed foot glancing off the man's ankle. Still, it was enough to distract him and the others. Taz had never called on the Force so quickly or with such fervor, but he snapped out his hand and felt the weight of Aurora Ascendant. He stretched out his senses until he enveloped the lightsaber, then he pulled as hard as he could. The weapon flew into his hand.
"TAFO!" Taz screamed and mashed the activation button. The ancient weapon hummed to life, its superheated amber blade ablaze. He slashed in front of him in a broad arc and Tafo jumped back as Taz scrambled to his feet, enraged. Varun got to one knee and started firing. The Imperials shot back. Taz rushed the nearest trooper and bisected him from shoulder to hip. There were screams and shouts all around, and utter chaos for a few, terrible seconds. Smoke filled the room with acrid odors and the smell of charred flesh.
The smoke cleared as the room's vent fans activated. All four of the stormtroopers lay dead. Varun groaned and didn't get up. He looked down at his torso where the stormtrooper had shot him. He coughed, spitting blood, his face twisted in agony.
Taz knelt beside him and swore. "Give me a few minutes, I can heal that," he blurted, breathing hard.
"No time, Oktos," Varun returned through gritted teeth, "Tafo will be back with more of them." He took a breath, grimacing with pain. "The plans are here... a superlaser that they can... put on small capital ships," he managed between wheezing breaths. "It'll be the end... of the New Republic." His breathing was shallow, his skin pale. "Their research, the plans... We have to destroy it."
Taz swore again, violently. He leaned the injured man against the wall.
Varun still gripped the blaster. "I'll watch the door," he said weakly. "These vaults have... independent power cores. You should be able to... overload it."
Taz nodded, snatched up a blaster, and scrambled to the panel. He found the power controls quickly enough. Varun's clumsy slicing work had bypassed the failsafe circuits; Flipping switches and dials, Taz reconfigured the power settings. He threw a big metal switch and an electronic noise started, first a buzz, then a whine that pitched higher with the passing seconds. Outside in the distance came the sound of explosions.
Taz jammed the data cylinder in his pocket, then started to lift Varun. Numarkos shook his head. "Somebody has to stay here," he panted, "make sure they don't come back... and disable the overload. Tell Tessa... tell her I love her." It might have been the pain, but there were tears in his eyes.
"No heroes on my watch, Numarkos-grasha." Taz hauled Varun to his feet, grunting with the effort. His head pounded from the blows he'd received. "You can tell her yourself. That power core will blow any minute now, and neither of us is going to be here when it does." He aimed the E-11 rifle and fired into the panel. It sparked and crackled, bursting into flames. "That should keep them from undoing our handiwork."
The alarm klaxons deafened the men as they shuffled up the corridor. When they got to the double entry doors, Taz chanced a peek outside. The entire camp was lit with floodlights on posts that extended from beneath the turf. Everywhere was pandemonium. The explosions they'd heard earlier must have been Lyra's and Tess's work. Searchlights near the hangar cut bright beams through a monstrous column of thick gray smoke near where they'd seen the power plant and the big deflector shield generator.
If they took the shield down at least some of them might escape.
The landing area was half a klick away. That was likely where Tess, Lyra, and the others would be. Taz had carried wounded men plenty of times in battle, but never that far. Still, he hadn't had the Force to work with, either. If he could get a ship, even a speeder, they might still have a chance. He shrugged under Varun's arm, getting a better hold around the man's waist. He looked around for a speeder, ground car, anything. But since arriving at Rho-277 he'd seen almost no ground vehicles of any kind. It seemed that everyone walked when they wanted to get someplace within the facility.
Varun was fading fast. He was barely conscious, his breath ragged and slow. Pink froth foamed at his nostrils and Taz knew he wouldn't last much longer. Growing more desperate by the second, he took a step toward the landing platform. Just then his heart sank as a score of white-clad bucketheads trotted across the parade ground toward them. Agent Ruatha marched stridently behind, barking orders and gesturing with her pistol.
He cast around, looking for cover. Even if he could find a place to hide and somehow weather the firefight with two full stormtrooper squads, Varun wouldn't live through it. He retreated back inside the vault, put his hand on the blast wound Varun had suffered, and pushed, willing the Force to work. Coercing the Force felt like lava flowing through him. He bit back a scream; he didn't need to heal Varun, and probably couldn't under their current circumstances, but if he could just give him a little patch job, keep him alive until...
Until what? The power core would overload any second now and if that didn't kill them the advancing troopers would. He fired a string of shots at the stormtroopers, then sat back beside Varun and sighed. "Looks like we're both done for."
TIEs streaked through the air; it looked like they were chasing something. Allegra, maybe? That meant that Lyra and the others had gotten away. He leaned around the door jamb and resumed firing. One buckethead fell, then another. The stormtroopers, only ten meters away, returned fire while pairs of them broke off into a classic flanking maneuver.
A flat-winged Striker zoomed overhead, its engines howling. It banked in a tight arc, settling low and heading right for the data vault. Its powerful wingtip lasers began firing. Taz ducked back, covering Varun and pressing against the wall as blaster fire and the heavier laser blasts from the TIE erupted all around him.
Numarkos murmured something unintelligible. Taz scowled. At least I won't die alone, though the company could be better.
The Striker shot by themq to judge by the descending scream of the engines. At the very instant Taz noticed the firing had stopped, a titanic concussion rocked the ground. He squeezed his eyes shut, expecting the data vault's exploding power core to rip him apart.
I never told Lyra how I feel.
A strange quiet settled all around. After a second he opened his eyes, amazed to still be breathing. The permacrete was fractured and jumbled; a huge crater sat a dozen meters off. Mangled stormtrooper corpses lay scattered about the field. Taz couldn't see Ruatha anywhere.
The Striker swooped by again and circled, hovering on its repulsors. It dropped to the ground almost before its solar collectors had angled down into their landing configuration. Taz heard shouts in the distance. More troops were on their way.
The Striker's hatch opened and Lyra poked her head out. "Taz! Varun!" she called.
He'd never been happier to see anyone. "Here, Lyra!" he shouted and levered Varun over his shoulder. He trundled as fast as he could bearing another man's weight.
Lyra looked stricken. "Is he—?"
"Shot badly, but still alive, I think," he panted through heaving breaths. "Give me a second, I have to get him up there."
"How are you going to do that?"
Taz had never jumped with someone else before. He wasn't sure it would work at all, but by the time he hauled Varun up the sloping solar collector, the onrushing troops would overtake them, to say nothing of the two TIEs still circling, though oddly not attacking. He filed that thought away for later, flexed his knees, and drew on the Force yet again. He wasn't trying to compel it this time, and it came easier to him. He felt a terrific strength in his legs when he jumped.
Varun was over his right shoulder. His leap carried them in a long arc, but the weight imbalance made him drift. He came down hard behind Lyra's hatch, smashing his chin and almost dropping Varun. He scrambled with his free hand, got a tenuous purchase on a ridge in the plating, and held on for dear life. Just like the last time he'd used the Force to jump onto a ship, he had the breath knocked out of him.
Lyra yelped in alarm and grabbed his arm with both hands. Straining with effort, she held him while Taz dragged himself and Varun atop the Striker. He took a couple of precious seconds to catch his breath.
Just then the data vault's power core overloaded. The building exploded with a deafening roar and a blast wave that shook every structure in the complex, scattering chunks of duracrete and shards of window glazing in every direction. Lyra ducked, but managed to hold onto him. The remains of the vault burned, throwing caustic black smoke high in the dark air.
Blaster fire erupted again from the Imperials while a team began to set up a big E-WEB repeating cannon on a tripod. It would chew up the unarmored TIE once they got its fusion generator connected.
Taz gave a mighty pull and swung Varun around, dropping him through the gunner's hatch without taking the time to be gentle about it. "Get us in the air," he rasped, dropping through after Varun. He buttoned up the hatch, wiped his bloody chin with his sleeve, and steadied himself the best he could in the cramped rear compartment.
Lyra put full power into the Striker's repulsors and the fighter leaped up, angling above the stormtroopers' heavy weapon and out of its firing arc. The twin ion engines blasted them skyward. "Where to?" she said as she jinked the Striker hard sideways and triggered its flare dispensers to counteract a PLX missile one of the stormtroopers fired after them.
"I've got to get him stable or he'll die," Taz panted. "Can you take us to the Dai Bendu temple?"
"Got it," Lyra acknowledged, still making evasive turns. He heard her calling Allegra with the rendezvous site and breathed silent thanks to whatever gods or good fortune had aided them in their escape.
Varun had stopped breathing and Taz couldn't feel a pulse. He figured the temple's close connection to the Force would boost his healing power but in his current condition, Varun would expire long before they arrived.
Grunting with pain, Taz bent over the intel officer, dug deep for every gram of strength, and called on the Force again. Letting go of his conscious, battered self, he stretched out and found the faint brightness of Varun's waning life.
Tess needs you, he thought, and I need you to take care of her. He fed his life force into Varun, carefully so as to not overwhelm the tenuous hold he still had on existence. Long minutes went by, but finally, Varun's spark brightened, its bare flicker glowing, dim but steady. Satisfied that he wouldn't die immediately, Taz turned to his wounds.
Blasters inflicted thermal and radiation damage, but the former was much worse. Humans were sixty-five percent water and the awful impact of a blaster bolt vaporized that water, causing explosive trauma to the body's tissues. Varun's abdominal organs were a mess. His spleen, liver, and intestines were ruptured. One kidney had been obliterated, his heart was bruised, and his organic lung was full of fluid. If not for his cybernetic lung he'd have died long ago. As it was, he was bleeding out at a prodigious rate.
Starting with Varun's liver, Taz worked organ by organ, repairing enough damage to keep him functioning for a little while. If they could get to Allegra's Heart he could finish healing in the bacta tank.
Taz opened his eyes. He'd been at it for nearly an hour; through the TIE's segmented front viewport Taz could see the crumbled Dai Bendu ziggurat. He made a joyful noise when he saw their little freighter nearby.
Sera and Reiko approached, blasters in hand. The former Ballista commando had her combat armor on. The freighter's dorsal turret traversed slowly, the auto-targeting system scanning for any Imperials that might be headed their way.
Taz poked his head out of the hatch and yelled to Sera. She bounded up the solar collector and took Varun's limp body. Flipping him over her shoulder she went down, Taz right behind her. Together they carried him up the ramp. Tess appeared at the top. Seeing Varun limp and unresponsive, her face went white.
"He's alive," Taz wheezed. "He needs bacta."
Tess followed behind Taz and Sera as they maneuvered the unconscious Varun through Allegra's narrow corridor and into the medbay. Taz affixed the rubber breathing mask and inserted an IV to start transfusing his meager onboard supply of artificial blood, then sealed the capsule. Tess sobbed beside him, shaking. He worked the controls, inclining the pod to forty-five degrees as bluish bacta started filling the volume.
"Let's get Lyra and get out of here," he groaned.
"No can do, Doc, she's already taken off."
"What?!"
"She's covering our escape." Sera turned to Tess, who looked haunted and scared. "Captain, you need to get back to the cockpit."
"I can't!" she cried. "He'll need me. Varun hates bacta. He gets sick."
Taz took her gently by the shoulders. "I know he does but he'll be unconscious for a while yet." He locked eyes with her. "Listen to me, Tess. You've got to fly us out of here. If they have more ships, we're sleeping dunesnakes on the ground."
"Doc's right. You're the only pilot we've got right now."
Tess looked back and forth between the two of them, desperate and scared.
"He'll survive, I swear on my life," Taz assured her, squeezing her hands, "but none of us will unless you get us in the air."
She nodded, rubbing her tears away. She turned the corner into the cockpit, Sera right behind. Taz snatched an injector from the instrument drawer and gave himself a stimulant shot before following Sera. Reiko was in one of the gunnery seats looking distracted and miserable. Sera sat next to her. "Copilot seat, Doc."
"Right," he acknowledged and strapped in next to Tess. The repulsors shrieked as they vaulted Allegra into the sky. Taz clipped on the headset and keyed the mic. "Lyra, it's Taz."
"Oktos, you're not flying are you? I thought you were trying to save everyone, not kill them." Despite her attempt at levity she couldn't quite hide the strain in her voice.
"Tess is flying. Lyra, you've got to get out of that thing. It's not rated for vacuum."
"It has pressure seals. I can last an hour at least with the air in the cabin."
"You don't have a vac-suit and it's got no shields, no armor. If you're hit—"
"Stop worrying about me and do your job," she interrupted. "Tess, I've got two TIEs on an intercept vector for you. By now they'll have figured out Yuzu's sabotage. I'll keep them off you but you have to do something for me."
"Anything. What do you need?"
"Keep my crew safe and my ship in one piece, okay?"
"You've got it, partner," Tess answered, sniffling. Varun barely clung to life. She didn't know if her parents lived. The shaking in her hands wouldn't stop.
Taz put a hand on her arm. "It'll be okay," he soothed, disregarding for the moment his building concern for Lyra. "Your parents and Varun, they're all strong. Believe in them."
"Yeah," she said in a shuddering voice, "Okay, Taz."
The sky turned black as they rocketed away from Beta Fonidian II.