The Ruins of Dantooine (21 page)

“What’s that?” It looked like a flat object on a hill. As they crept closer they saw, rising out of the mist like some mythical creature rising from its own ashes, a modular structure.

“Well, I’ll be …” Finn exhaled.

“What is it?” Dusque asked again, more nervous now that she could see several other, similar structures beyond the first one.

“It’s the old Rebel base,” he told her. When he saw her unease, he added, “It’s been abandoned for almost two years. Come on.”

“I thought we needed to make up for lost time,” she reminded him.

“I just want to make a quick check that nothing was left behind,” he explained, starting to run up the hill toward the base.

“But Leia said that the Imperials were already here. Don’t you think they would’ve found anything if it had been left behind?” Dusque asked, jogging along beside him.

“They don’t always know where to look,” he told her.

“What happened here?” she asked as they arrived at the outer walls of what she was beginning to realize was quite a substantial base.

“I only heard the story secondhand, but I’ll tell you what I know.” He seemed about to go on when he stopped and turned to the right. Dusque looked past him to see a long canine-type creature pacing back and forth. Either it hadn’t smelled them yet, or it didn’t care.

“What is it?” Finn asked.

Dusque squinted to try to make out the creature. “I think it’s a huurton. Probably a huntress, if she’s on her own. Umm, maybe we should put a little distance between us,” she suggested. “She could be very deadly.”

“Right,” he replied, and he led the way to an opening in the wall.

Once inside the old base, Dusque saw that it was a huge facility. In the structures closest to them, some of the windows were smashed and doors were
ajar. Plants had started to grow over the buildings, and the whole area was desolate and somber. She wondered what it must have been like when it was alive with people.

“What happened?” she asked Finn again.

“As I understand it, this base was quite successful for many years,” he began as they walked slowly through the facility, “most likely because of its remote location. I don’t know how it happened or even how the Rebel soldier found it, but about a year and a half ago, someone slipped an Imperial tracking device into a cargo shipment.

“By some good fortune, it was discovered and the word went out to evacuate. These structures—” He stopped to tap on the wall of the one that they were passing on their left. “—are put together out of temporary, self-constructing modules. They were crafted to be movable at a moment’s notice.”

“Then if they left them behind, the Rebels must have had to flee really quickly,” Dusque mused.

“As I understand it,” Finn replied, “they all got out within a day.”

Dusque inhaled deeply, trying to picture the hundreds, if not thousands, of troops who must have streamed out of the buildings. “I guess they made it just in time,” she said.

“Supposedly, the Imperials didn’t find them until Leia told them about the base,” he added.

Dusque stared at him in shock. “
What?
Leia would never betray anyone!” She told herself she
couldn’t be that certain about someone she barely knew, but somehow she had absolutely no doubts about Princess Leia’s personal strength and commitment to the cause.

“She was a prisoner on the Emperor’s Death Star,” he told her gravely. “From what she told me, they tortured her and used mind probes, but she didn’t give them the location of the Rebel base. Then they tried a different ploy: they threatened to destroy her home planet. So she gave up the location here”—he waved an arm to indicate the ruined base around them—“on Dantooine.”

“I guess I can understand …,” Dusque said. “But the fact that she betrayed the others still seems … inhuman.”

“No, no, you’ve got it wrong! She already knew that the base had been evacuated. It was only a matter of time before the Imperials would have raided it.”

Now the story was beginning to make some sense. “She thought it would buy her more time.”

“Yes, but they destroyed Alderaan anyway.”

Dusque nodded in understanding. When she thought back on it, she remembered hearing that scientists from a different department had been working on a project of some magnitude a year or so before the destruction of Alderaan. Some of those same scientists had disappeared from their regular labs, and rumor had said that they’d been sequestered for some special project. She wondered …

“Would it have been so bad,” Finn asked her quietly, interrupting her musings, “if she had betrayed the Alliance for those she loved?”

“I don’t know,” Dusque answered honestly. “I can’t say with any certainty what I would do, in a similar situation. But I think we follow this cause because it’s the right thing to do. And I think that has to come before any of our personal loves. While dreamers may die, the dream lives on.”

Finn fell silent. She wondered if he had been asking more about her than about Leia’s choices. Perhaps, she thought, he wondered if she would betray the Rebel Alliance for him. Once more, she felt as if she were being tested, and was afraid she had failed.

“Let’s take a quick pass through the command center,” Finn suggested, “and then keep going.”

“All right,” Dusque agreed, “but we should be really careful. If there was one huurton here, there are probably others.”

“Right,” he agreed. Then he looked at her. “I see that you were an even better choice to work with than I originally thought,” he said. “It never even occurred to me to consider your expertise with animals.”

“That’s why they call me a bioengineer,” she said lightly, trying not to smile too widely at his compliment. But she had a feeling he could tell she was pleased, because he flashed her a grin before turning to move on.

They passed a series of smaller structures all in a row before climbing a set of stairs that led them to the command center. A glance inside each open door
showed that the smaller buildings were barracks—and that they had been pretty well ransacked by the Imperial soldiers who had searched the place. The state of the barracks did not bode well for what they might find in the command center, but it was still worth a look, Finn explained.

At the next level, they encountered a huurton mother and her pups. Seeing her, Finn paused and looked at Dusque.

“As long as we steer clear of her,” she assured him, “we should be fine. She’ll probably herd her brood away from us.”

“Got it,” Finn acknowledged.

Carefully sketching a large circle around the huurtons, they entered what had been the heart of the former base. Dusque was overwhelmed by the damage that had been done to it. Curious, she approached a series of control panels that seemed to have been looted, but not destroyed.

“Finn,” she called, “take a look at this.”

He trotted over to her and studied what was left of the equipment.

“Would the Imperials have done this?” she asked.

“No,” Finn answered slowly. “They wouldn’t have had any interest in looting. Not to this degree, at any rate.”

“Then who?”

Finn thought for a moment and then said, “Remember, that officer said they had been having problems with smugglers.”

“You’re right,” she said then. “I think he called them the Gray Talon. You think it was them?”

“Either them or someone else in the same profession. I saw more evidence of that over here.” He indicated a smaller chamber. Dusque poked her head in and saw that it was a room that had probably been occupied by a higher-ranking officer. There was a long table that had been knocked over and shattered, the pieces scattered across the remains of a woven floor covering. The walls were bare, with the exception of one picture that was hanging askew. Dusque shivered, although the air in the base was not cold.

“What’s the matter?” Finn asked as he stood next to her. “Cold?”

“No, I just want to get out of here,” she told him. She felt as though a grave site had been desecrated, although as far as she knew, no one had died.

Finn nodded in silent understanding. “Just let me make one quick pass and then we’ll leave, okay?”

“All right,” she agreed, “but I’m going to wait outside. Call me on the comlink if you need me.” As she left, she made sure to turn on the small, handheld communication device attached to her belt.

Outside, she made her way onto the observation platform. From there, she could see that several groups of huurtons had made their homes in and around the abandoned base. In a way, she found the sight oddly comforting. It was almost as though the fearsome predators were guarding the remains of the place so that no one else would defile it.

The rain had stopped completely, but darkness was growing as night approached. She worried that Finn had been right, that taking the longer route had been a mistake. Now they would reach the Jedi ruins in the dead of night, at the earliest. Not only would that make their search that much more challenging, but it would mean the night predators would be awake and on the prowl.

Finn came out of the command center and walked over to her. “Nothing,” he said, in response to her quizzical look. “We might as well keep moving.”

“Mm-hmm,” she agreed. “But take a look: there’s a good view from up here.” She pointed to the lower levels. “See? There are huurtons over in the eastern and northern quadrants of the base. We’ll need to avoid those areas when we leave. It’s getting dark, too,” she added, voicing the obvious.

“Yes, it is.” He glanced up. “At least the rain’s stopped.”

She smiled. “What I meant was, I’m sorry my delay cost us the daylight hours.”

Finn was silent for a moment. “Don’t be,” he finally told her. “Besides, it was my choice to take the time to explore this base,” he added. “So we share the responsibility for the delay, and cancel each other out, right?” His grin made her feel a lot better.

Feeling lighter, she followed Finn through the deserted complex to another gap in the surrounding wall. As they trotted down the hillside, avoiding the various pockets of huurtons, Dusque paused to take a last look at the Rebel base. Shrouded in the
mists, it seemed like a lonely guard, waiting for a time when such places would no longer be needed.

They headed off in an easterly direction, following the coordinates that Leia had given them before they had departed Corellia. The terrain became more hilly, bordering on mountainous, and the number of biba trees started to diminish, replaced by more conifers and evergreens. Small ferns dotted the hillsides, and the lavender grass started to thin out.

They stopped only once, to drink from a small stream that they passed. While they rested, Dusque foraged around a bit, using her halo lamp. She found some berries and even a melon. She shared them with Finn and ate quietly, wondering what would happen when they reached their destination. She was still musing while they got ready to move on, so she wasn’t prepared when a large voritor lizard broke through from the underbrush and charged her.

Before she had a chance to draw her weapon, Finn’s blaster shots lit the area like lightning. The lizard growled in anger but was delayed only long enough for Dusque to draw her own blaster and start firing. Even though it was attacked on two fronts, the two-meter-long lizard was not deterred. It used its clawed feet to dig into the soil and pull itself inexorably toward Dusque. She dropped to one knee to get a better angle. With its two prominent dorsal fins, she found it difficult to get a good aim on a vulnerable region.

Dusque felt her hand tremble, and for a moment she thought that she was holding on to the grip so
tightly that her hand was cramping. But then she realized that what she was feeling was the vibration of the weapon, alerting her to the fact that its power supply was nearly depleted. Grateful for Finn’s lessons, she gave the creature one last blast and followed that by tumbling to her right. Swiftly, she popped out the used pack and replaced it with a new one.

The creature spun around, trying to keep Dusque in sight. Lashing out with its impressive tail, it caught Finn unaware, knocking his feet out from under him. He fell backward. The lizard started to turn on him, and Dusque realized that their blasters alone weren’t going to stop it. While firing with one hand, she fished around in her pack with the other. When her hand closed around the object she was searching for, she shouted to Finn.

“Move!”

Without any hesitation, he scrambled to his feet and started to run. As she had expected, bolting immediately made him the primary prey in the eyes of the lizard. Dusque used that opportunity to activate the device in her hand and run after them both.

“Keep running,” she yelled. “Don’t stop for anything.”

She took careful aim and fired at the voritor. Angry, it swung its head toward her threateningly, snapping its vicious jaws. Dusque knew she had one shot. When the lizard lunged at her, she threw the thermal detonator into its mouth and dived away from the creature, covering her head with her
arm. If she had missed, she knew the next thing she would feel would be the reptile’s teeth tearing into her. What she felt instead was the sudden heat from the explosion of the tiny bomb.

She felt bits of the voritor’s body rain down on her. And behind the incessant ringing in her ears, she could hear Finn calling her name. As she rolled around and brushed bits of the very deceased reptile off, she saw Finn limping toward her. She rose to her feet and shook her head, trying to clear the ringing from her ears. Finn appeared eager to aid her, because he grabbed her by the shoulders and started shaking her, too.

“You idiot,” she barely heard him say. “You could have gotten us killed.”

“What?” she asked. “I thought the lizard was about to do that for sure.”

“That was a class-A thermal detonator. They’re supposed to have a blast radius of twenty meters. The baradium core must have been compromised somehow.”

“What?” she asked again, partially because she could still only hear about half of what he was saying, and partially because she couldn’t believe he was angry that they were alive.

Finn relented a bit as he calmed down. “That was quite a chance you took,” he said more loudly.