With no gravity or friction to slow them down, they did not stop until they slammed into a wall two seconds later. Mara hit back-first, driving the air from her lungs but not breaking anything she could feel. A sharp crack over the comm suggested that Luke had impacted on his helmet. She started to ask if he was okay, then sensed him wondering the same thing about her and knew he was.
“Check air and suit,” Luke said, righting himself.
The reminder was unnecessary. The heads-up status display inside Mara’s faceplate was already glowing, though she did not
remember activating it.
“I’m good,” she said. “You?”
“Have a hisser,” he reported, indicating a small air leak. “But we’d better look for it later.”
He pointed back toward the maintenance hangar. Thirty meters away, the orange glow of rocket exhaust was flickering against a section of curved tunnel, dimming and brightening as dartships landed and shut down their engines and more poured into the hangar behind them.
“I don’t recall seeing any EV suits in the Taat hangars,” Mara said hopefully.
“No-but a carapace is a good start on a pressure suit.”
“Killjoy.” Mara turned her wrist over and entered a four-digit code on her forearm command pad. The StealthX’s self-destruct alarm began to gong inside her helmet, and the heads-up display on her faceplate began a twenty-second countdown. “Come on, Skywalker. Let’s stay on the move until we hear from the Falcon.”
Mara turned away from the hangar and started into the frozen darkness ahead.
THIRTY-SIX
The walls and floor were coated in a frozen black wax that absorbed the light from Luke’s helmet lamp and made the passage seem even darker and murkier than it was. Every few meters, a fissure caused by the tunnel’s sudden decompression ran all the way to the moon ice, sometimes exposing a short length of spitcrete piping or power conduit. There were none of the shine-balls that illuminated other Killik nests, nor any sense of order to its convoluted plan. The passages seemed to meander at random, twining around each other like vines, branching off at arbitrary intervals and rejoining the main passage without crossing any obvious destination between.
At the speed he and Mara were sailing through the darkness, using the Force to pull themselves along through the zero-g, Luke was growing badly disoriented. He no longer had any sense of whether they were traveling deeper into the moon or back toward the surface; whether ten meters of ethmane ice separated them from the hangar or a thousand. Were it not for the frozen beads of vapor that his leaky vac suit was leaving behind, he wasn’t even sure he could have found his way back down the same passage.
Mara suddenly grabbed a crack in the wall and brought herself to a stop. Luke did the same and found himself looking at one of the bulging hatch membranes that Killiks used instead of air locks. A pull chain hung to one side of the hatch, attached to a set of valves positioned to spray sealing gel over the membrane before anyone tried to push through.
Mara didn’t reach for the pull chain, and neither did Luke. Both their spines were prickling with danger sense, and they were all too aware of how difficult it was to sense Gorog in the Force.
“Ambush,” Mara concluded. “They’re starting to come after us.”
“Starting”“
Luke looked around, and his helmet lamp illuminated a torrent of dartship pilots pouring around the bend, at most thirty meters away. Wearing their dartship canopies like carapaces, they were scurrying along every available tunnel surface, with their legs and arms sheathed in a shimmering fabric that bunched and gathered at the joints. They had no weapons other than their six limbs-but that would be enough if the swarm ever caught up.
There was no question of using the Force to hide. Whenever the Gorog lost sight of their quarry, they simply spread out, scrambling over every surface in every direction, literally hunting their quarry down by feel.
Luke began to pour blasterfire into the front ranks. Most bolts ricocheted off the canopies, while those that hit a limb simply activated a safety seal at the nearest joint. The insects just kept coming.
“Trouble,” Luke said over the suit comm. Lightsabers would be more effective, but he really didn’t want to go hand-to-hand with who-knew-how-many bugs. “Big trouble, in fact.”
“Maybe not that big,” Mara said.
“No?”
“They can’t all be dartship pilots,” Mara said. He felt rather than saw her nod at the bulging hatch membrane. “So they won’t all be wearing pressure suits.”
“You’re right,” Luke said. The first pilots were less than ten meters away now, but he holstered his blaster and grabbed his lightsaber. “Not that big.”