Desperate Measures/Part 11

Aldayr caught Narasi by the arm just in time to drag her back behind the pen. She fought against his grip, her face contorted in rage as the young Anx cried and his parents screamed. Aldayr had to risk channeling a bit of the Force into his hold; he always forgot how much stronger than a Human Narasi was. Eventually he got her against the metal of the pen, pressing his forearm against her neck. "Narasi, get a grip!"

Narasi levered her hands against his arm, and Aldayr knew she had the brute strength to push him off, but the mania cleared from her blue eyes, though she was no less angry. "We have to stop them."

"Yeah, but we're not doing that with just a shock whip." Aldayr shared her fury, but years of raiding Valin Aresh's concentration camps and depopulation centers had taught him that unfocused anger accomplished nothing. "Now, I say we split up to confuse Xargo. You stay here and spread the word; pick off more of the slavers if you can.  I'll go back to the prison, get this bolt off, and get the slaves there."

Narasi nodded, back in control of herself; she pressed Aldayr's arm gently and he let her go. It occurred to Aldayr that their faces were within centimeters of each other; he retreated. "Right," she said. "May the Force be with you."

"You too. And good luck," he smirked.

She smiled. "Go get 'em, Corellian."

Aldayr headed off the way they had come, looking for the brute Xargo; the Nikto carrying the Anx's severed arm passed out of the room. Aldayr had gotten only a pen away when he sensed a surge of the dark side and crouched behind an unoccupied pen to observe. A winged alien of a species Aldayr had never encountered flew straight into the room, pulled up, and settled on his feet. He had a fearsome face of spikes and bone spurs, with sharp spines over his body; Aldayr first thought he might be another Sithspawn until he saw the lightsaber.

"The Jedi have escaped!" he roared.

"What?!" Xargo bellowed back from only meters away. "Impossible. I can sense them nearby!"

"Then who killed the blood raptors?" the winged Acolyte demanded. "Over a dozen dead, and some of them mauled by lightsaber blades!"

"Lightsabers?" the Hiitian chimed in. "How? How could they possibly have retrieved them from—"

"Who else could have used them?"

"They didn't escape!" Xargo insisted. "What if we're under attack?"

The Acolyte rustled his wings in agitation, fangs bared. "Under attack from whom?"

"You're the one with wings," Xargo snarled. "Go find out."

The Hiitian stepped between them as the other Acolyte snarled. "Enough! Lygrot, how were the others killed?"

"Struck by blaster bolts," the winged Acolyte spat. His eyes narrowed as he processed what he had said, but the Hiitian beat him to it.

"Then it wasn't the Jedi," the Hiitian reasoned. "Where would they have gotten blasters?"

They were all silent for a moment before Lygrot looked at the Zygerrians. The other two followed his gaze, but the Hiitian shook his head. "They know the master's rules."

"So we are under attack," Xargo growled. "And the Jedi haven't escaped me yet."

The Hiitian raised his hands. "Xargo, if you can catch them, now's the time. Lygrot, you can survey the exterior better than the rest of us."

"And you?"

He gestured to the slaves. "Someone needs to oversee this."

The three looked at one another, then Lygrot growled at Xargo. "Find your Jedi."

He got a running start, bowling over a few slaves before flapping his wings, gaining some altitude, and flying out of the room. Xargo half-raised his bow after Lygrot, but then took a deep breath through the nostrils in his forehead and turned back to the room. The Hiitian barked at some of the Zygerrians, who had been listening with frowns; they exchanged looks, but returned to supervising the slaves.

Aldayr crept to the far edge of the pen, gauging his chances. His feet still ached, but with boots on at last he could run. Then again, his dead right arm continued to weigh him down. He could just make out Xargo moving on the far side of the pen and retreated, keeping the thick, latticed bars between them and moving slowly. Aldayr felt a surge of the dark side, and the Acolyte nocked an arrow and fired.

It was an impossible shot, but the Force made it real nonetheless. The arrow wove through the lattice on both sides, brushing only its fletching, and only a hair-trigger danger sense born of years of fighting across battlefields with Mali Darakhan brought Aldayr's left hand up in time to catch it, stopping the arrowhead just short of his nose.

"THERE!" Xargo bellowed, and he darted around the pen as Aldayr circled the other way, calling on the Force.

The Hiitian turned at his comrade's cry, but before he could react, there was a buzz-crack and Narasi stuck her head out past her pen, screaming something in a language Aldayr didn't know. The Zygerrian slavers all reacted, though, and several of them engaged their own shock whips; one of them lashed out at the Hiitian, who barely managed to lurch out of the way in time.

"HEY!" he roared, ripping out his lightsaber, and suddenly the slave floor was a riot of lightning and plasma. Ugnaughts squealed and ran in all directions as the Zygerrians slashed at them and the Hiitian, who fought back, flattening two slavers against a wall before cutting down a third. Xargo nocked and fired a second arrow, but this time he was aiming toward the melee and caught a Zygerrian in the neck. Aldayr ran while the Acolyte's back was turned.

An arrow whistled past him. Aldayr bowled over the Ugnaughts crowded in the archway leading to the prison; there were enough of them that they might have stopped him had they tried, but they were so overwhelmed they didn't even see him coming until it was too late. A long, hard night on the razor's edge had left him tired and drained, but there was no longer any point to suppressing his abilities, so he leaned on the Force for speed and stamina; his stolen Zygerrian helmet fell off, but he could have raced another arrow down the corridor to the prison and beaten it cleanly.

The control platform had risen; the Ugnaught guards were delivering gruel to prisoners two levels down. Aldayr took his cybernetic forearm in his other hand, summoned the Force, and leapt; the Force cushioning his impact so it merely rattled him, but it was still more than sufficient to send the Ugnaught he hit with his metal hand to the floor with a crunch. The other two Ugnaught jailers jabbered in alarm; Aldayr thrust out his good hand and they both bounced off the walls, one falling, unconscious, and the other screaming as the Abyssin inside grabbed him and started strangling him. Searching the downed ones, Aldayr found a set of key cards and swiped them until one of them opened the cell.

"Here," he said, thrusting the card to the Abyssin. "Get everybody else out."

"'Kay," the Abyssin said, though he continued to strangle the already-dead Ugnaught with his other hand. On the run to the control platform, Aldayr thought briefly that perhaps he should have looked elsewhere for a deputy, but he didn't have time to fret about it long; he could feel Xargo on the hunt, bloodshed above, and the platform descending like a stone when he dropped the control lever.

It bottomed out in a workshop of gears and pistons—the machinery that drove the control platform and a workshop besides. Ugnaughts in welding gear had apparently gotten the report of the fight that their comrades above had missed—they were clustered around an Ugnaught who was pointing down a tunnel and jabbering agitatedly. They all turned at the sound of the platform and Aldayr sensed the ripple of alarm. Some Ugnaughts ran for it down the tunnel while others charged with welding torches. Aldayr used a powerful Force push to knock them into a tangle of limbs and sparks on the ground, then cast about.

"C'mon, c'mon…" he hissed as his eyes jumped from one mechanical apparatus to another, all the equipment needed to make the castle run. He was about to take his chances with a fusion cutter when he noticed a wall rack of shackles of every kind and size. Overleaping a chugging engine, he pulled open boxes and drawers until he found one full of restraining bolts and, hanging from the drawer inside, a bolt pick. He ripped the pick out, tore open his right sleeve, fitted the pick into the notch, and popped the bolt off. His cybernetic arm hummed as it warmed back up, but within three seconds feeling flowed back into his fingers and the joints responded at last.

"YES!" He squeezed his right hand into a triumphant fist, then raced back to the control platform; an Ugnaught was frantically trying to raise it, but Aldayr caught him by his collar and pitched him off, raising the platform toward the clamor of voices he heard above.

In the minute Aldayr had spent in the machine shop the prison had become a riot scene. Aldayr suspected a being with a bit more strategic thinking than the Abyssin had taken over management, because prisoners were free on multiple levels. The Abyssin himself, meanwhile, had gotten down to the fourth level, where he was fending off Ugnaught reinforcements by bashing their heads together or simply pitching them over the railing, screaming until they impacted some lower level; one fell past Aldayr as he rose. He stopped at the first level, where all the doors remained sealed, and bellowed, "KEYCARD!"

One fluttered through the air, tossed from a higher level, and the Force caught it for Aldayr and brought it to his grip. Swiping open the cell of a fit-looking Zabrak, he pressed the keycard into the alien's grip and said, "Get everyone out and onto the platform, then bring it up to level two."

"Eniki." The Zabrak nodded in understanding and jogged off while Aldayr leapt to the next level, where he found cell doors open and prisoners anxious for a plan. Instructing them to wait for the platform, he kept working his way up, doing what he could to expedite the release process. On the fourth level he found the Abyssin holding the old man in one arm and swinging a dead Ugnaught at others with the other. The Glymphid stood just out of range and stared at Aldayr.

"You did it," he said with undisguised astonishment.

"We're not out yet," Aldayr cautioned. Below, the control platform was rising, prisoners flowing across the access bridge into the center on each level. Most of the prisoners were released from their cells and crowding toward the bridge docks now, keycards passing from hand-to-hand as needed, stronger prisoners supporting or outright carrying weaker ones.

There was a buzz-crack from the top level, followed by screams. Aldayr leapt each level one-by-one, though it was getting more tiring; he was leaning hard on the Force to keep himself in fighting trim, and the wounds on his chest from Olik's claws were bleeding again, soaking through his stolen tunic. By the time he got to the second level he saw a Zygerrian backed up against the railing, lashing his whip defensively and radiating panic; Aldayr rather thought he had fled the fight in the main room and found the prison was more than he bargained for. Taking the final leap, he landed behind the Zygerrian, who was hemmed in on both sides and trying to keep the angry prisoners at bay; reaching over his shoulder, Aldayr grabbed the Zygerrian's chin with his cybernetic arm and wrenched back so hard the slaver's head turned almost to face his back. While the prisoners cheered, Aldayr took the dead man's shock whip; he had no more training on whips than Narasi, but any weapon was preferable to none.

The waiting was the worst part—watching the control platform rise one level at a time, old or sick or injured prisoners limping slowly aboard and crowding into the little space the platform afforded. All the while Aldayr was convinced the Sith Acolytes were about to storm the prison in force, or else gang up on Narasi while he was here. He got a lead down the tunnel once he was confident the lower levels were not about to drown in Sithspawn, but he did not hear the clamorous echoes of battle he had expected. Eventually the control platform reached the top—the prisoners packed in like Xi Charrians, the strongest actually hanging off the rails to make space for the feebler to stand. As they unloaded, Aldayr led the charge out.

The slave room floor was strewn with dead Ugnaughts, dead slaves, and dead Zygerrians, blood running thick along the depressed floor. The Hiitian lay there as well, his corpse scorched with enough shock whip burns to kill a bantha. Aldayr looked for his lightsaber, but didn't see it until he heard a buzz-crack and turned to find Narasi lashing a shock whip. The two four-legged Sithspawn had broken free in the melee, but Narasi had somehow managed to chivvy them back into a corner. She had put on Zygerrian garb too, though her boots were too big and she had only hastily added a shirt and pants rather than the full attire; Aldayr suspected the sleeves had been draping down onto her hands, because she had ripped them off. She wore the Hiitian's lightsaber on her belt. Most of the surviving slaves were huddled together behind her.

"Get to the hangar!" Aldayr called as he joined her, snapping his own whip at the Sithspawn; one growled and faced him instead. The prisoners added to the tumult behind them so Aldayr could not even hear himself think. He was about to yell to Narasi to charge with the lightsaber while he himself kept the other Sithspawn pinned when the Abyssin charge by and tackled one of the Sithspawn. It sank its fangs into his shoulder and he howled, but pummeled the Sithspawn with his other hand.

The second Sithspawn turned to aid its partner and Aldayr and Narasi struck in unison. Narasi missed, but Aldayr, who had powered his shock whip down, wrapped the monster's ankle. It tugged and nearly pulled him off his feet; Narasi grabbed him and tried to steady him as Aldayr fumbled for the power button. Before he could find it, a Herglic who had been among the newly-imported prisoners walked calmly up, lifted the struggling Sithspawn off the ground, and broke its spine over her knee.

"Gotta borrow this!" Aldayr said, opening his mechanical hand to drop the shock whip and pulling the lightsaber off Narasi's belt with the Force. He ran to the Abyssin, whose Sithspawn released the cyclops's shoulder to snarl at Aldayr; Aldayr fed a meter of red plasma into the creature's throat, and the Abyssin punched it once more for good measure before pitching the corpse off. He stood, bleeding heavily from his shoulder.

"Good job," Aldayr said, and the Abyssin grinned.

"Let's go!" Narasi called. Most of the prisoners Aldayr had freed hesitated at the sight of a Zygerrian leading them to freedom, and more than a few of the new arrivals looked uneasy as well, but before Aldayr could intervene Narasi leapt up onto one of the pens.

"I'm Narasi Rican!" she called. "I'm a Zygerrian, but I'm a Jedi! We'll get you out of her, but we have to go right now."

She hopped down, and for a moment the masses wavered. Then a few surged toward her, then others, until it was a sea of sentience with Narasi on the crest of a wave. Aldayr shouldered his way through the pack to her side.

"Where's Xargo?" he yelled over the sounds of hundreds of rushing feet and frightened voices.

"Don't know!" she called back. "Lost track of him!"

They ran for the exit past a row of empty slave pens, and Aldayr was struck with a sudden feeling of danger that passed before he could get a real hold on it. He could feel conflict, but he was not in its crosshairs, so he didn't slow. Side-by-side he and Narasi led the charge to the slave room gate, and at last he could see a hangar bay beyond.