HOSTAGE
- - Part 1
by ardavenport
"Ya gotta see this. This one's really gonna make us." Yagatz led Mooni down the narrow, winding corridor of crumbling gray stone to the cells where Bombi kept his occasional 'guests'. Mooni had no interest at all in whatever grotesque amusement Yagatz and the rest of Bombi's guards were into now but it seemed safer to oblige her than refuse outright.
"Just as long as it's quick. I have to get back to Bora City before dark."
"Ya just gotta have a quick look. You wouldn't believe what it took to take him down." They arrived at a dark metal cell door with one small narrow window in it. Mooni peered inside where Yagatz pointed with a thick gray-scaled finger. The back wall of the cell was one large dingy mirror making the whole space inside visible. A lone figure lay on one of the two bunks.
"What did you do?"
He looked Human, like herself, and a boy as far as she could tell from his back and head visible in the mirror. Dried blood stained the parts of his torn shirt she could see and his bare ankles were shackled. He didn't move or react to Yagatz calls.
"Open this door!" Mooni demanded.
Even though Mooni was a head shorter and slightly built, Yagatz recoiled from her, her flat hairless features shocked. "You got to be kidding. He's the one–"
"I don't care where you got him from or what you plan to do with him. The only reason why you get me here is because we don't ask questions if someone needs help. That means anybody. And you just showed me another injured person and I'm going to have him treated. Now open this door!"
Yagatz had never been very smart. She had always been the taking-orders kind of muscle that suited hill-warlords like Bombi. But she did not take orders from outsiders well, either. She called Bombi instead. Minutes later, the Sagast Hills warlord himself showed up and bodily tossed Mooni into the cell with the boy.
She sat stunned in a corner of the cell, and bruised from colliding with the wall and the bunk opposite the boy's. The door slammed shut.
"You want to be in there with him, Mooni, you can stay there!" She heard him bellow as he and Yagatz left.
Mooni painfully clamored to her feet. "Send down S4, you fathead!" No response. They were both gone.
Mooni stared at the now sealed door. What had gotten into Bombi? He would never get another technician to show up at his hideout if he kept her prisoner, or if she didn't return at all. Had he actually gone to the expense of getting his own medical droid? And the medical center and equipment that would have to go with it?
No, he hadn't, she thought. Otherwise, S4 would not have spent the last three hours fixing burns on Bombi's goons from their last fight. And S4 would not be much good to him all alone, not without links and supplies from the Bora City medical center.
"Great. This is just great." She shook her head and looked about. The boy on the bunk had half risen and was looking over his shoulder at her. His face was a mess of bruises. She went to him and he hastily sat up, his legs pulled up to his chest.
"What were they doing?" A wide, blue plastic strip covered his mouth. The boy looked wary but he obviously recognized the green medical technician's insignia on her shirt.
"Sorry," she apologized. "I'm not much good without the droid. And somehow I think that Bombi's not going send S4 down." Mooni unhooked one of her pouches. "I've got a few things that should help with the bruises."
He nodded and let her sit next to him on the bunk. He looked to Mooni like he was mid-adolescent, skinny and not fully grown, but old enough to be treated like an adult.
The first thing she looked at was the plastic covering his mouth\ but it had obviously been put on with a permanent adhesive. "I'm going to need S4 for that."
He nodded his understanding. He did not look like he was quite old enough to shave, much, but even without sprouting facial hair, the plastic strip was stuck to him tight.
"Can you show me what hurts worse?" He pointed to his ribs with his shackled hands. He wore a simple, pale wrap-around shirt with a longer, larger wrap-around shirt over that, both torn and bloodied in places. It was impossible to take either one off with his hands bound, so she just lifted them up to look. She dabbed at the injuries with a couple of cleaning pads from her pouches to separate cloth from skin where the blood had dried. But when she looked more carefully, she could see that the cuts were only superficial.
The bruises looked like boot marks and when Mooni asked, he confirmed that Bombi's thugs had kicked him for sport. Mooni wished she had S4 to check him for internal injuries. Medicine was droid work. Droid maintenance and repair were her work. She was only trained for first-aid because she accompanied the mobile unit when it was sent out for emergencies.
The boy was amazingly tolerant and only winced when she checked some of his worst bruises. He likely had some cracked ribs, but nothing was broken. He even stood for her and let her check his lower torso and legs, but none of the bruises there were as bad as those on the upper part of his body. He had a lump on the side of his head, too, but his eyes were clear and steady. When she heard a muffled groan, she looked more carefully at his face again.
"Did they gag you, too?"
He nodded.
"What did you say to them?"
He shrugged.
Aside from the tools she needed for working on S4, the only things Mooni had were the first-aid supplies she usually carried. But fortunately she had a full kit. None of the injuries on Bombi's guards had been anything that simple bacta patches and sterilizing pads would help with. They had all been long burned gashes and missing limbs. They were unusual injuries but no amount of violence from Bombi's ilk surprised her.
Mooni applied patches to the worst places on his ribs and covered a huge bruise on his cheek and forehead. She also rubbed salve over the raw places on his wrists and ankles under the shackles. Simple as her ministrations were, his blue eyes affirmed his gratitude to her. She inquired about his health in general and commented about the crude manners of Bombi and his kind, but he could only shrug and gesture a little in return, so their 'conversation' did not go very far.
She invited him to lie back down on the bunk again when she finished. His eyes spoke his gratitude again for her help but instead of laying down he sat up straight, his hands in his lap, his legs hanging down, feet almost touching the floor, his eyes closed. It looked odd to Mooni, but it obviously meant that he was feeling better. He remained remarkably calm. Even as badly treated as he was, Mooni saw no trace of tears or dread or nervousness. He looked about as unhappy about being in Bombi's cell as she was, but he was not panicked about it.
He certainly was not an average rich kid, Mooni thought, for it was all but certain that Bombi was ransoming another offworlder. His hair was very ordinary for a human, medium brown, short and thick, except for one long braid tied with colored bands that hung behind his right ear and a small short tail that stuck out like a brush in back. Her youngest son fancied himself as a fashion maven, especially when it came to hair, but Mooni did not remember seeing him wear anything like it. This boy was not local.
What surprised Mooni was that the warlord had abused him so badly. According to rumor, Bombi's first kidnaping had gone as smoothly as that sort of thing could go, with no injury to the victim and a profit large enough for Bombi's toughs to make a nuisance of themselves in the Sagast Hills villages after they got their cut. A modest ransom to a wealthy core-worlder was a fabulous fortune on this settlement world.
Bombi's new venture had certainly caused a lot of local gossip, but in the end that was all that happened. People had talked and talked about doing something about the lawlessness in the hills for as long as Mooni could remember but nothing had been ever done about it. The law enforcement effort would be huge and expensive some factions argued. Others cynically complained that if they could not run the miscreants off to the hills they would just cause trouble in the cities. But Mooni thought that the real problem was that there were too many fools hanging on to the romantic idea of forsaking everything for the life of a bandit in the hills, like running away from home to become a space pirate, but without the danger of decompression in vacuum.
Mooni looked at her gray haired and dusty reflection in the back mirror wall of the cell. She sat forward, resting her elbows on her knees and briefly wondered what had made the worn stains on the stone floor. The cell smelled of old sweat and decay. How long would it take before she was reported missing? She was supposed to meet her daughter for dinner; when would she call the medical center to ask where she was? Or would her supervisor notice she had not checked in when she was supposed to and try signaling? She pondered the permutations for quite a while.
After a long time thinking, Mooni thought about lying down on the other bunk, but looking at it, she wondered if it might be more comfortable on the floor instead. She saw some bunched up material that matched the boy's tunic that he had apparently been using as a pillow on the bunk behind him. He wasn't using it at the moment, but she did not feel like taking it. She got up and crouched, looking under both bunks. There were no obvious concentrations of bad smells or signs of live vermin, but there were plenty of withered remains of some old pests and the corners were crammed with dark crumbly dust. No, the floor would not be more comfortable.
The boy started. Mooni looked up at him. His eyes had opened and he slid off the bunk. Balancing on his shackled feet, he quickly shuffled toward the cell door.
"Hey!" Mooni refrained from grabbing him but she followed close in case he fell over. He was just tall enough to peer out the window. Mooni looked over his head into the gloomy corridor. Bombi had not set a guard, so there was nothing to see, no one to call out to.
"I don't see anything," she finally said. But he kept his bandaged face pressed up close to the bottom of the window, looking as far as he could, first one way, then the other down the corridor.
Rumble.
It sounded like thunder. Mooni heard another reverberating boom and the faint distant ping of rapid blaster fire. It was not thunder.
"Uh, oh." This time she did put her hands on his shoulders. "Let's not stand too close to the door."
After first resisting, he let her guide him back to the bunk. The battle sounds slowly got closer, louder. They sat together on the end of the bunk closest to the door so that they would be less visible to anyone passing by. The boy remained tense and alert next to the wall; Mooni could not get him to sit back, further away from the door.
Mooni decided that this was not just a drunken fight or petty vengeance when the explosions started rattling their cell. The light fixtures in the ceiling flickered briefly. It sounded like an invasion. Fights between warlords were not unheard of but they were rare. There was enough crime and exploitation to satisfy them and warfare was too much work. It was even more unlikely that the authorities had come after Bombi. Even if they wanted to rescue either of them, they would buy Bombi off before attacking him. At least, Mooni would have preferred that they choose the safer means of rescue.
Then the noise stopped. The blaster fire and explosions went ominously silent. Mooni could hear footsteps running down the corridor and a low humming sound. Mooni kept the boy from getting off the bunk again. She was not so optimistic that this battle survivor would be friendly. The lights flickered again and went out.
"Obi-Wan?"
The male voice was right outside.
Bright light exploded from the cell door. They cringed back together from the sparks and squealing metal. A bright green beam shot out through the door and descended. Mooni watched it cut around the locking mechanism and then vanish. A heavy chunk of metal fell with a bang to the floor. The door slid noisily aside.
A tall bearded male Human entered. The glowing beam lit everything in the cell green.
A Jedi? Mooni thought with shock. They sent a Jedi to rescue this kid? How important is he?
"Obi-Wan," the Jedi rushed forward and even though he held the lightsaber up and away from them, Mooni still pressed back away from it. She could not imagine why anyone would use an open-ended energy weapon like that. The boy, Obi-Wan, made a muffled sound as the Jedi's fingers passed over the patches that Mooni had applied and then probed the edge of the strip covering his mouth.
"Don't! You're not going to get that off without solvent; they used a bonding agent."
"Do you have any?" the Jedi demanded, looking directly at her, the lightsaber casting his face in deep shadow, his hand resting on Obi-Wan's shoulder. His gaze flicked down to her technician's insignia.
"Well, yes, with my droid, but I don't know—"
"I've seen it. It's upstairs." He stepped back. Before Mooni could even jump back, the tip of the Jedi's lightsaber flicked forward and back twice. The shackles fell away from Obi-Wan's hands and feet. The tall man looked back toward the ruined door and then paused to frown down at Obi-Wan's bare feet. "There's too much debris. I'm going to have to carry you."
He turned around and crouched. Without any prompting, Obi-Wan wrapped his arms around his neck, his legs around his waist so they rested over the Jedi's side pouches making his wide belt sag downward.
They warily left the cell, the Jedi leading with his lightsaber through the turns of the narrow, ill-kept corridors. Mooni's boots crunched on shards of plastic and metal; once she almost tripped over something. When they turned into an intersection with a still-functioning overhead light, the Jedi extinguished the green lightsaber and clipped it to his belt. They stepped over the remains of Bombi's sentry droids as they passed through now ruined doorways. One huge gray door lay on its side, a few droid appendages sticking out from under it. The Jedi was very careful not to bump Obi-Wan, still clinging to his back, as he ducked under a low entryway into the stairwell. They went up, their boots crunching on more debris. The railings were cut in places.
End - - Part 1