Star Wars - 174 - Survivor's Quest - Timothy Zahn by Star Wars

Author:Star Wars
Format: mobi
Published: 2009-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

“This is the main school area,” Uliar said, pointing across the corridor toward a room with a small plaque beside the door identifying it as AA-7 FIRE CONTROL ROOM. A neatly printed sign had been fastened to the wall above the plaque that read PRELIMINARY TIERS. “All the lower tiers are in the complex of rooms back there,” he went on. “There’s also a university of sorts two decks above us, up where the main scientific and technical sections of the ship were.”

“Interesting,” Jinzler said, looking at the door and wondering if he dared ask to go in and take a look.

“What courses do you teach?”

“Everything we can, of course,” Uliar said, half turning to look at Evlyn and her mother, walking silently behind Formbi. “This is actually Instructor Tabory’s field of expertise. Instructor, would you care to elaborate?”

“Many of the records were lost in the Devastation, of course,” Rosemari said. “Either destroyed or buried in the wreckage of D-One where we couldn’t get to them.”

She waved at the schoolroom door. “But the Survivors had fair amounts of skills and knowledge among them, so as soon as they could they set up a school to teach the children what they would need to know. In the lower tiers we teach history, science, reading, galactic languages, political science, and a few others—the usual curriculum of a Republic school back home. At the university level—though of course it’s not a real university—we teach mechanics and electronics, higher mathematics, basic astrogation and starship operation, plus the sorts of things we’ll need when we finally get out of here and settle down on a real world again.”

“Ah,” Jinzler said. “And you were trained as an instructor?”

She shrugged. “That’s what I do now, but my actual training is in meteorology and music. I’m not very good at the latter, though.” She smiled down at the girl beside her. “Evlyn’s much better than I am. And of course, there are a lot of advanced maintenance classes.”

“That being particularly important to our survival,” Councilor Tarkosa added gruffly, glaring briefly at Rosemari. Apparently, her comment about leaving Outbound Flight wasn’t sitting well with him. “Even with many of the old droids still functional, this ship still chews up a huge number of worker-hours in repairs and maintenance. And the droids need constant maintenance of their own.”

Jinzler nodded. “What about basic life necessities?” he asked. “Food, water, and energy?”

“Fortunately, we have all of that in abundance,” Uliar said. “The central storage core suffered only minor damage in the Devastation, and we were able to bring the D-Five and D-Six fusion generators back online before the emergency power supplies were exhausted.”

“You speak as if you were there,” Formbi suggested.

Uliar favored him with a somewhat brittle smile. “Yes, I was,” he said. “I was twenty-two, in fact, when your people viciously attacked and destroyed us.”

It took every bit of Jinzler’s strength to keep his face from reacting. With all of Uliar’s politeness and hospitality, and the almost homey atmosphere of

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