21

Corran Horn shuffled along in line with the other prisoners. He affected the dull-eyed, hopeless stare most of them displayed for their guards. He moved when told to move and stopped when told to stop. In no way should any of the guards in stormtrooper armor conducting them to the mines have noticed anything out of the ordinary about him. To them he should have appeared to be just like all the other prisoners being herded to the mines.

He hoped against hope the facade he put forward fooled them, because as dull and soporific as he might seem on the outside, he was seething and anxious on the inside. After only a week in the general population he had decided to make his first stab at escape. He had briefly discussed his plan with Jan and found the man’s insights useful, but he had ignored Jan’s entreaties to put off his attempt.

The prospect of being killed in his first try did daunt Corran, but not as much as he thought it should have. He had a hunch that he wouldn’t be killed if he was captured. He knew that was foolish, and that he had no factual basis for making that judgment, but it felt right. During his career with CorSec, and as a pilot with Rogue Squadron, he’d gone with gut feelings before, and won more times than he’d lost.

Although he did not have any facts to support his feelings about escape, he did have some circumstantial evidence that made him optimistic. First and foremost was the fact that he wasn’t dead yet. He couldn’t imagine Ysanne Isard keeping him or anyone else around unless they were useful. As long as he did not prove to be more of a bother than he was worth to Iceheart and her plans, he’d be kept alive.

Second, and it was a rather bizarre fact, was the method of return for the unsuccessful escapees. Most of them came back as fire-blackened skeletons, or parts thereof. The only way to match them up with the people who had escaped would be through genetic testing. Since that was unavailable to the prisoners, they had to assume the bodies were, in fact, those of the escapees. However, since confirmation was impossible, Isard could have simply picked a prisoner out of the less secure prison levels, and had him burned beyond recognition and dumped in the high security area. As long as she could identify who had escaped, returning a close match would be pretty easy, and the high-security prisoners would be left imagining escape was impossible.

Third and finally, Corran saw that Jan really did care for the men under his control. His fear for Corran’s safety was genuine, and not based in any fear of retribution against himself. As the leader of the Rebel contingent, Jan felt responsible for the other Alliance prisoners. He’d seen enough people die in the fight against the Empire that he wanted to prevent people from throwing their lives away needlessly. He clearly believed that some day, that day being sooner rather than later, the Alliance would find them and free them, and he wanted as many of his people alive on that day as possible.

As wonderful as Jan’s care and concern was, it also tortured the older man. Corran could clearly see Ysanne Isard’s fine hand in that. By letting Jan take responsibility for all the Rebel prisoners, she created dozens and dozens of avenues to attack him. With each one of them who went away or died, a little piece of Jan died. How he had endured that much pain for so long Corran could not imagine, but he hoped, by taking responsibility for himself, he could ease the burden on Jan’s shoulders.

Seventy paces from the cave mouth they passed the opening to the latrine. The fixtures in it were rudimentary, but did include a water spigot so a minimum of hygiene could be observed. Thirty paces beyond it, about halfway to the mine complex, the line of prisoners passed through a barred gateway that was locked closed at night. Corran thought its presence was unnecessary, since the Imps had placed infrared detection units at both ends of the corridors. Then again, those units aren’t really that hard to defeat, especially if the people monitoring them are as alert as the guards marching through the dust with us.

A full 203 paces from the mouth of the cavern complex, Corran passed through what had once been a ship’s hatchway and into the prisoners’ workstation. Rumor among the prisoners had it that Lusankya dated from before the Clone Wars and incorporated parts from various ships that had been blasted to pieces in a naval action beyond the atmosphere. The scavenged hatch and the condition of the old, worn tools did suggest a certain amount of antiquity to the facility, but that conclusion came so easily that Corran was disinclined to trust it. If that’s what Isard wants us to think about her Lusankya, then I don’t want to think it.

Beyond the hatch they proceeded down a steep grade to a long rectangular cavern that had five tunnels shooting off it like fingers off the palm of a hand. All the fingers ended in doors that were cobbled together from ship bulkhead panels and held closed by chains and locks. The tunnels were big enough to allow a small mining droid to pass through them, but the doors were always shut when the prisoners came into the room, so Corran never saw the droids digging out the ore they processed.

At the far end of the chamber from the entryway sat several piles of huge boulders. Men would work on them with heavy sledgehammers, bit by bit breaking them down into smaller rocks. Other prisoners would carry those smaller rocks to the middle of the chamber, where more prisoners would smash them with smaller sledges. Yet more prisoners with shovels and screens would sift the debris, pitching back the larger stones. The resulting gravel would then be hauled in buckets to a conveyor belt that carried the gravel up and away. At the top of the conveyor belt the gravel disappeared through a heavy steel grate.

No one knew much about what lay beyond the grate. They knew air was blowing out of it because they could see a fair amount of dust blown back into the air around the conveyor belt. Most of the prisoners assumed the belt led to a blast furnace where the gravel was melted down, or a mixing container where it was being made into ferrocrete. Corran argued that it was just as likely that the gravel was being dumped into hovertrucks and taken out to pave walkways in some Moff’s garden, and if that was true, the grate was all that stood between them and freedom.

All of the prisoners knew what they were doing was simply make-work, but the Imps had taken the precautions necessary to prevent work stoppages. The conveyor belt’s workings had been sunk into the ground so the prisoners couldn’t get access to the motor and sabotage it. Steel fibers had been woven into the length of the belt to keep it strong and had been tightened so virtually no slack appeared in the belt on its return trip to the depths of the mine’s floor. A railing had even been set up to prevent prisoners from accidentally falling onto the belt or getting caught in the mechanism.

Corran dumped his bucket of gravel into the maw of the container bolted on the conveyor belt. Humming away loudly, the belt started the gravel on its twenty-meter journey to the grate. Corran watched it go for a second, then allowed the next man in line to bump him out of the way.

Heading back to where Urlor was shoveling gravel into buckets, Corran took a quick inventory of the guards watching over them. A full squad of men in stormtrooper armor guarded them, providing one trooper for every ten of the eighty prisoners in the work detail. Six of the troopers carried blaster carbines. The other two crewed an E-Web set up just inside the hatchway, making any attempt to rush out of the mine suicidal. The sharp slope up which the prisoners would have to charge would slow them enough that the two-man heavy blaster would cut them all down. Though none of the guards were as big as stormtroopers, nor seemed as well disciplined as the Empire’s shock troops, even they would have been enough to quell a prisoner revolt.

Urlor tossed a shovelful of gravel toward Corran’s bucket but missed with half of it. “Don’t do this, Corran.” He kept his voice low enough that the rattling chuff of gravel pouring through a screen hid it from outsiders. “Wait. Learn more.”

“This is learning.” He winked at the bigger man. “Guards have their blasters selected for stun.”

Jan looked over from the end of the screen he was holding. “You’ll risk your life on the flick of a thumb?”

Corran tapped himself on the chest. “Rogue Squadron, remember.”

“Corellian, more like.” Jan shook his head. “None of you have any respect for odds.”

“Why respect what you have to beat?” Corran gave each of them a nod. “Trust me, I have to make this run.”

Urlor dumped a final shovel’s-worth in the bucket. “May the Force be with you.”

“Thanks.” Corran, letting the bucket dangle down between his legs, started the awkward, hunched-over Rybet-walk back toward the conveyor belt. His plan was simple: he’d dump his bucket, then hop over the railing and ride the belt up to the grate. Up there, at least as viewed from the work floor, there appeared to be enough shadowed space to conceal him. If he could then get down through the grate, or find a hidden passageway out, he’d be free.

“You there.”

Corran looked over at the guard pointing at him. “Me?”

“Come here.”

Why me? Corran shuffled over toward the man. “Sir?”

“Don’t question me, prisoner.” The guard, clad in the lighter weight scout version of the armor, loomed over him. “As for the reason I picked you, you’re new and need a lesson.”

Without warning the guard brought the blaster carbine up and around in a one-handed backhand stroke that caught Corran over the right ear. Stars exploded before his eyes and the clank of metal on skull started a fierce ringing in his ears. A flange on the barrel cut his ear and split his scalp, while the force of the blow spun Corran around to the left.

Pain overrode panic. As Corran whirled he held on tight to the bucket, brought it up, and let it fly when his tormentor came into view again. The gravel-filled container smashed into the guard’s faceplate. The man’s head snapped back as the blow knocked him from his feet. He stumbled backward as the bucket flew on comet-like, spraying out a gravel tail.

Corran’s vision cleared and seconds seemed to take hours to pass. The guard’s carbine, the muzzle glistening with his blood, hung in the air. Corran knew he could snatch it before it hit the ground and burn down the two closest guards in a heartbeat. Half the guards in the detail would have been accounted for. Getting the rest would be difficult, but the other prisoners could swarm them. They’d take the guards’ weapons and …

And die trying to clear the E-Web. Or die trying to fight our way out of the belly of this prison. All of them will die, and their deaths will be on my head, if I grab that gun.

He heard the whine of a blaster and saw something blue shoot past him. All the prisoners dove for the floor. They shrank into a huddled carpet of dirty arms and legs, ducking their heads to avoid recognition, yet peeking out to see what would happen.

All of them went down save for one.

Jan.

Eyes filled with horror and pride, he nodded to Corran.

Corran, understanding, nodded back.

The stun-bolt caught Corran square in the middle of his chest. It did to his nervous system what an ion-bolt did to a machine. In one instant every nerve in Corran’s body fired, instantly wracking him with pain, burning him up, shaking, crushing, and freezing him. All of his muscles contracted, bowing his back, grinding his teeth, and kicking him up into the air with a little hop. His limp body’s impact on the ground probably hurt, but his nervous system couldn’t route reports to his brain properly, so he really didn’t know how he felt.

Except it’s not good.

He saw Jan crouching over him. “I’ll see they get you help.”

Corran wanted to nod, wanted to blink, wanted to do something to let Jan know he heard him, but he couldn’t. About half the time he’d been hit with a stun-bolt before—in training exercises and a couple of times with CorSec in the field—he’d lost consciousness. The times he hadn’t, he’d wished he had, because the feeling of helplessness created by being trapped inside a body that didn’t work was worse than any pain.

The medical team called for by the guards arrived rather quickly, bringing with them a repulsorlift stretcher. After they loaded their unconscious comrade on it, they reluctantly draped Corran over the man’s legs, leaving Corran’s head dangling and his hands and feet scraping along the ground as they hauled the two individuals out of the mine.

Staring down at the floor, he couldn’t see much on the trip out. The medtechs wrestled the stretcher into a lift, and the one to the right of the door, at the foot of the stretcher, punched a button and started the box ascending. Corran heard three tones, which he took to mean they had ascended three floors, then the lift stopped and the medtechs again struggled to get the stretcher out of the lift.

They floated Corran on through corridors that appeared much more modern and maintained, if floor tile was any indication, than the rest of the facility. Finally they brought the stretcher to a stop in a place where he caught the familiar scent of bacta, and unceremoniously dumped him to the floor. He rolled onto his left side, his cheek pressed against the cold flooring.

He caught snatches of the conversation between the medtechs and the Emdee droid that would be caring for the guard, but the ringing in his right ear made it difficult for him to catch everything. Moreover, he wasn’t certain he could trust any sensory inputs, because what he was hearing through his left ear was simply impossible.

Starting from above his head and continuing on down toward his feet, he heard the dopplered sound of stormtroopers—real, well-disciplined stormtroopers—marching along. That was not remarkable in and of itself except in that if they had been there, they’d have been marching over him, and as messed up as he was, he was fairly certain he’d have noticed that. The only other alternative was that they were in a room below him, marching on the ceiling, and what that meant was, at that time, well and truly beyond his ability to comprehend.