He grasped the bolt in his fist. He couldn’t break out of here with a bolt. Clive knew that. But when they came for him, when they took him to the execution room, then maybe he could use it.
You put a small object in a piece of equipment in the right way, you can disable it. Disable something, you’ve got a distraction. Sometimes that’s all you need.
All in all, he’d rather have a lightsaber.
Already he heard them coming. They didn’t let you sit for long.
He still had the Force. It was here, even on this stinking, dismal planet, even in this dark cage of a room. It was inside him and around him and he could access it whenever he chose.
He stood.
Today he would either die or escape.
It would be his choice. Not theirs.
The door slid open. There were six stormtroopers. One was an officer, consulting a datapad attached to his wrist.
“Ferus Olin, criminal from the planet Bellassa. Retinal scan.” He held up a scanner to Ferus’s eye. “Identification confirmed.”
They pushed him into another room, a larger one, with several chairs with restraints that were bolted to the ceiling and trailed down like lethal vines. There was a med droid in the corner. So it would be lethal injection.
They pushed him past the droid. He palmed the restraining bolt as he passed. He hoped the guards would keep shoving him, and they did, poking him with their blaster rifles. He pretended to stumble and reached out with an arm to steady himself. He grabbed on to the med droid.
“Off!” The stormtrooper slammed the butt of the rifle into his shoulder.
The pain radiated down Ferus’s arm. It didn’t matter. He’d been able to slip the bolt into the droid’s socket.
They brought him toward the chair, then slammed him down into it.
“Prepare injection,” the officer said.
The droid didn’t move.
“Prepare injection!” the officer snapped.
“Restrained,” the droid answered succinctly.
“What?”
The officer turned. It was the moment Ferus had been waiting for. With one kick he sent one stormtrooper into another; an elbow sent a third spinning. The Force hummed around him as he leaped over the pile, snatching up two blasters on the way. He twisted in midair, held himself motionless for one instant to blast the droid to smithereens, then landed. He dived away from blaster fire and used the momentum to roll himself like a ball, taking down the rest of the stormtroopers. On his way up he grabbed a security card out of a stormtrooper’s utility belt.
The officer faced him, his blaster held steady.
Ferus held his blasters. Neither of them moved.
The officer fired. Ferus had already taken advantage of the instant before the blast and leaped. He fired above at the ceiling. The bolts holding the restraints in place fell. The restraining cables dropped to the floor. He wrapped the officer in them and fled.
Since he’d been in the restraint box, he wasn’t sure where he was in the prison complex. He would have to find the factory. He wasn’t sure if Clive had been able to disable the loader but he had to assume that the plan was on schedule. Clive would expect him to show up. If he didn’t, he had no doubt that Clive would leave without him … if he could.
Ferus ran through the halls. There had to be another entrance to the factory, one for the guards to use.
He found it. The blast doors opened with a swipe of the card. The racket of the factory assaulted his ears.
Glad to kiss this place good-bye.
He ducked behind a machine. The line of prisoners kept their faces toward their work. A guard patrolled - up and down, up and down. Ferus could see no disruption in routine. In the distance, the transport freighter sat, while a conveyor ramp rolled crate after crate inside.
Then he heard the crackle of a transmitter and saw an officer walking quickly down the aisle, toward the freighter. Another officer was hurrying from the opposite direction.
Ferus was covered by the noise of the machines and the regular routine of the patrolling guard. While the guard’s back was to him, he rushed forward and took down the first officer. The officer cracked his head on machinery and was out cold.
Keeping his head down, Ferus ran past the clamor of the turbines stamping durasteel into sheets and forming them into gears and pins. He grabbed a handful of gears as he ran.
By now the prisoners had noted him but they said nothing. If one of them was going to break out, he would make it or not make it. They would neither help him nor hinder him. But he could feel their avid interest in his progress and their conviction that he would fail.
The bay doors were open now, and the second officer was striding up the ramp, ready to do the manual count. No doubt he expected his fellow officer at any moment. They had a window of time to do this. Once he was unable to raise the officer on his comlink, the officer would become suspicious.