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After following the inactive conveyor system for a while, Rune exited through a maintenance hatch, then lost himself in a maze of deserted corridors and turbolifts where there was nothing to hear but the vain blaring of alarms. Knowing that his comlink could be tracked, he had discarded it while leaving the Harbor. He felt strongly disinclined to inform anyone in the facility that he was still alive. He’d certainly had enough of battle for a day—and perhaps a lifetime—especially since surviving the fall had sapped most of his Force strength.
Rune’s precognition was the first power to show itself diminished when he stumbled across a quartet of Rebel marines who were being held up by a locked door. He didn’t sense the men until he had turned a corner and almost walked into them. Startled into a frenzy, Rune drew his lightsaber and cut them down before any could get a shot off. In the wrong place at the wrong time, he thought as he sliced a hole through the door.
The room beyond turned out to be an abandoned security station. After making sure he was alone, Rune powered up a console and patched into Imperial comlink frequencies. His ears were assaulted by a battery of tactical reports: stormtroopers methodically falling back toward the main hangars, junction by junction, though at several points the Jedi were cutting through them before they could retreat. From the sound of things, Cairn Base’s evacuation was down to the last round of shuttles, and they were due to leave in thirty standard minutes.
There was no mention of Vrekis or the other Reborn. Rune doubted any had escaped the Harbor alive. Without them, the hangar's defenses would stand little chance of withstanding a Jedi assault.
With feverish speed, Rune typed at the console again and switched over to subspace radio signals. Again the speaker erupted with dire reports, this time from the TIE pilots who still swarmed about between the compromised base and their mothership. As the briefing had warned, the Rebels had brought overwhelming force; sustained turbolaser fire from two Rebel Star Cruisers was pushing the Resolute II’s shields to their breaking point.
Rune cut the audio feed and ground his fists against the console screen. What he was expected to do, of course, was head to the main hangars and help defend them. If he survived that battle, and if the shuttle he ended up boarding was not disabled or vaporized by Rebel starfighters, and if the Star Destroyer remained operational long enough to clear the asteroid field and make the jump to hyperspace…
So many ifs—he was being buried beneath an avalanche of impossibilities. Even if he did make it out of the system aboard the Resolute II, what then? He would live on, writhing forever in the brittle, lifeless grip of the Empire.
Never, Rune told himself yet again. I have been reborn again. I have a destiny.
He gritted his teeth, feeling himself infused with a final reserve of fresh strength. It was the strange new strength of defiance. He would not follow their plan—however, he still needed a plan, and he needed it now. He needed a way off this station, away from this system, now.
There has to be a way…
Refocusing on the screen, Rune began to cycle through Cairn Base’s security cam feeds, not knowing what he was looking for. Split-second vignettes played out before his eyes: firefights, men marching or running or falling and dying. Dead bodies crumpled in blaster-scorched halls. Empty junctions, workstations, hangar bays...
Rune froze on one particular feed, showing a hangar separate from those being used for the evacuation. Halfway inside Cairn Assembly, it was far too small for unloading heavy equipment. Rune guessed that it was a maintenance bay for space tugs, but at that moment it was hosting a lone starfighter. It was a peculiar variant of the Rebel T-65 X-wing, with three additional engines and an expanded cockpit, allowing for a living co-pilot in place of the usual astromech socket.
At once Rune understood. While most of the Jedi were with the marines as they wrought havoc in the Harbor and the central module, two of their number had snuck onto the station through a back door, as it were.
And they had left their ship unattended.