Fool's Bargain: Star Wars Legends (Novella) (Star Wars - Legends) by Timothy Zahn

Author:Timothy Zahn [Zahn, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Published: 2004-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

Su-mil detailed three of his soldiers to take their dead and wounded back into the relative safety of the tunnel. Then, with Su-mil and Twister in the lead, the twelve remaining Eickaries and four stormtroopers set off for the dungeons.

They met no further resistance. Apparently, the squad that had burst in on them from this direction had been the last Lakra who hadn’t already been summoned to either the tunnel defenses or to the surface. Alternating his attention between the distant battle reports, his helmet sensors, and the hallways themselves, Twister wondered if he dared hope that even the dungeon guards might have been called away to active service.

No such luck. At Su-mil’s murmured warning, he and Shadow swung out around the last corner to find two armored Lakra standing at attention beside a massive metal door, blaster carbines slung over their shoulders.

A direct assault on the dungeons was apparently the last thing anyone in the Warlord’s command structure was expecting. The two stormtroopers got off a solid volley before the guards had time to do more than scramble madly for their weapons. As the blaster bolts shredded the mercenaries’ armor, Su-mil stepped out of concealment and finished the job with a pair of shots from his projectile weapon. “We must hurry,” the Eickarie said as the two Lakra thudded to the floor.

“Wait a second,” Cloud said as Watchman headed for the door. “We agreed to get you to the dungeons—”

“You agreed to assist in freeing the prisoners,” Su-mil cut him off. “Come. Now.”

“Twister?” Cloud asked, his mind clearly on their comrades fighting in the tunnels a quarter of the fortress away.

“You heard him,” Twister said, suppressing his own impatience. “Come on.”

The outer door opened onto a wide landing from which a dozen steps led down to a large, circular cavern with more locked doors spaced around its circumference. “How fast can you open them?” Su-mil asked, looking around.

“Very,” Watchman assured him, stepping to a desk at one side of the landing and picking up a knife-blade-shaped data card. “All it takes is the key.”

“Go,” Twister told him, turning the muzzle of his BlasTech toward the door they’d entered through. “We’ll watch for trouble here.”

With the key in hand, the release did indeed go quickly. But as the imprisoned Eickaries began to emerge, blinking, into the brighter light of the cavern, Twister could sense that something was wrong. Many of them, not surprisingly, cringed back at the sight of Watchman’s armor as he opened their doors, staring with the same fascinated suspicion at the other three stormtroopers grouped together on the landing. More baffling was the fact that they seemed to be avoiding not only their fellow prisoners but Su-mil and his soldiers as well.

It was Shadow who caught on first. “They’re all from different tribes,” he murmured.

“And they were captured before the United Tribes Agreements were put together,” Twister said, a sour taste in his mouth as he understood. “Which means they’re still fighting their petty little tribal disputes.”

He thought he’d been speaking quietly.

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