LL3 38 Abandon Ship

"All hands abandon ship! All hands abandoned ship!" The cry over the Vengeance's loudspeakers was starting to panic when the caller apparently dropped the mike and just ran.

Kadaan dragged Kess' limp body across the tiny docking bay and commanded the first pilot he saw to fire up his transport. The pilot didn't mind and raced into the little ship, leaving his evacuation crew behind him. Kadaan followed the man's pattering feet into the cockpit and dropped Kess' body into a passenger seat. The pilot flipped controls and grabbed the throttle with amazing speed and accuracy.

Kadaan stood at her side, pulling the straps around her body and securing her limp figure into place. Kess winced a little and started to wake up again. A pilot punched at the navicomp for a hyperspace jump. As soon as she realized that she was on a transport and not the Vengeance, her panic started to boil.

Kess lost all hope of ever getting back home, but—

The plan worked. The Imperials were headed off at the rendezvous point. They would never make it to Yavin Base. All those lives are saved. Kess found solace in that.

Kess told her father what he needed to know, and her father begrudgingly accepted it, and so found her peace with that.

And even though she wasn't supposed to do it so soon, Kess took the chance anyway and told Luke she loved him. She breathed a smile, nodding at herself, at her grandfather, at the Force. She was at peace with all of it.

Her training was over.

The tri-wings folded down for flight and the transport rose off the docking bay floor. The bay doors opened with a manual jerking. Troopers and grunts and pilots and officers raced to the nearest escape pod, but most of them wouldn't make it.

The Victory twisted full ninety degrees by the time hull met hull. The outstretched hang-tail of the frigate fell sideways onto the Vengeance the same time its polygon nose beheaded the bridge tower. Both hulls collapsed in slow motion.

And Luke let out gut shuddering scream, "NO!"

Han's heart sank into his stomach at the sound of Luke's pain but frantically pulled the Falcon around the next big ship to keep from getting blown away from the blast. His shields wouldn't hold against that.

The Victory detonated first, the Vengeance a split second later.

And the entire battle came to a brief halt when the explosion rattled every single hull panel on the battlefield.

Fire bubbled out in large chunks of air, knocking out everything in its path for kilometres. Even the Star Destroyer that Han was trying to hide behind got knocked off-center. TIEs fried on contact. X-wings went into wild spins. The Falcon blew away like a dried leaf in an autumn breeze. Everyone not strapped down in his or her craft was beat forcibly against the nearest wall.

Kadaan gave the order to hit hyperspace to anywhere. The hyperdrive engines wound up just as the Victory crushed the Vengeance. Flying debris rained on the transport, ripping two of the three wings off its body. The flames engulfed the rear, frying the hyperdrive engines on contact. The transport tumbled with the spewing pieces of Star Destroyer, toasting the hull black as the lights blinked out.

Han swallowed his nausea and grabbed the controls to steady the Falcon. Before Chewie had the chance to check the scopes, TIEs swarmed over them like flies on a rotting carcass.

"Lando, you still up there?"

"Yeah," Lando coughed quietly back. In a few seconds, the rumbling of the upper turret resumed.

"Luke?" Han called back worried, but couldn't pull his attentions away from the business of battle long enough to get more than a glimpse of the bodies on the cockpit floor. "Kayla?"

Kayla sat up slowly, "I'm okay." She rubbed her bleeding shoulder and scooted closer to Luke. "Luke?" Her aching body rose to her knees to tend to the man lying next to her in nearly a fetal position. She shook his shoulder with one hand and began to reach to his neck to check his pulse with the other.

Luke moaned and slowly rolled onto his back. Kayla gasped at the amount of blood on his leg and had to look closer to find the horizontal gash across the front of his left thigh. She instantly pressed both hands on the cut to slow the bleeding and reported the situation to Han. "He's got a bad cut on his leg. I need to get him in the back and dress it."

Luke's eyes slammed shut and his mouth was tense with rage. His face glowed a burning red. He didn't reach for his leg. He didn't care if it had been sliced completely off. He hid his eyes with his fingers and ignored Kayla's gentle requests for him to get up.

"C'mon, Luke. I've got to patch this up. You're losing a lot of blood."

"They'll give me another leg," he said tartly.

Kayla watched his lips twitch with a barely contained scream. His nerves were shattered and his purpose in life was, for the moment, gone. But Kayla knew that it was only for the moment. She let go of his leg and grabbed his collar with both hands, bringing his face up to hers.

Luke snarled, ready to bite her head off for yanking him with such vigor when he certainly had a right to be enraged.

Kayla's eyes stared into his with the serious calm he should have already been practicing. "Cry later," she ordered.

Luke blinked at her. The duties rolled back above feeling sorry for himself on the top of his current priorities. He closed his eyes and sighed, found what peace he had left, and grabbed onto Kayla's shoulder to help him stand.

Admiral Ackbar cried into the mike. "Stay out of the way of the chempods! Shoot them down with torpedoes!"

But even as he said it, he watched the Tamalak yank itself slowly sideways only to be hit in the side instead. The TIEs peeled off their attack on the ship, immediately moving to other live vessels, and the Corellian cruiser starting falling down out of the battle line.

"Our one man fighters can evade those missiles." Ackbar called out to his fleet, "All groups: concentrate your raid on the Destroyers. Disable them before they can get a shot."

Wedge ripped over the hull of a blockade-runner with Teak at his wing. As soon as the Star Destroyer came into view, they fired at it together. A TIE bomber splintered in front of Wedge and he yanked away from the collision. Teak continued his attack on the Destroyer with several A-wings and X-wings helping the effort from all directions.

The Destroyer started to list and a small explosion burst through the lower part of its hull but, without fail, a chempod shot out of the bridge silo as its last ditch effort against the Alliance.

The blockade-runner pushed its nose down and punched the thrusters. The chempod sprayed afterburner in its wake and followed the runner's exact path. It hit. It burrowed. And the runner continued to sink downward, barely missing the exploding hull of the destroyer in its death.

Teak swore into the channel.

Wedge pulled around to meet him just in time to see Teak's X-wing spiraling out of control into the dead Star Destroyer's hull.

"She could've gotten out on an escape pod." Kayla told him, not sounding hopeful, and ripped the fastenings closed on his bandage.

Luke winced at the pain, both physical and emotional. He couldn't sense her anymore. He couldn't feel her anywhere. She just wasn't out there.

"Right now, we have bigger problems on our hands." Kayla stepped backwards and looked him in the eye. Kayla was having a hard enough time already. If Luke Skywalker fell apart, they were in really big trouble.

Luke pulled himself off the bunk and limped passed her to the ladder well. "No," he hissed, "the Imperials have a problem." Without a care to the pain in his leg, he hobbled rapidly down the ladder well and, in moments, the lower gun turret was rumbling through the ship again.

Han watched three X-wings get sequentially fried and muttered under his breath. "We are getting creamed."

Chewie ruffed at him, concentrating hard on killing the TIEs in front of them, and hooted again.

Han yanked the stick, "I'm going! I'm going!" The battle line came into lopsided view and Han went straight for the nearest Star Destroyer. All three guns on the Falcon fired in that same direction, but nothing they could do would stop the chempod that shot out of its bridge.

The nearest Mon Calamari cruiser launched three torpedoes at the thing. The chempod met with them at half distance, and the torpedoes exploded. The chempod wobbled its course momentarily but continued for the cruiser.

"Dammit!" Lando yelled out in frustration.

Over the top rear of the shaken battle line, two disc-shaped ships came out of hyperspace, and when they did, each shot out a dozen small, one-man ships.

Luke didn't recognize them at first, but Han called into the mike. "I guess the Frakkans really do want a treaty."

Luke shot out the turret at every moving Imperial thing, "They're a little late!"

The tiny Frakkan discs zipped into battle with alarming speed, maneuvering like fireflies on acid through the colorful bolts. Several of them went straight for the chempod missile. As the chempod closed in on the pickle-shaped hull, a Frakkan disc sped in front of it, and took the hit for them.

"Kamikazes?" Han's eyebrows shot up, yanking the stick to pull around and attack the Star Destroyer again.

"No one was in there," Luke reported. "Those things are unmanned."

Han cocked a half smile, aimed right for the Star Destroyer, and all three men lay on the guns at the deflector shield. Everybody ignored the TIEs altogether now. The sphere blew. A-wings came up over the bridge tower and fired down at the hull. The Star Destroyer listed slightly, then blew into a thousand pieces.

The Frakkan addition to the battle brought a second wind to the troops. Each time a chempod fired, the tiny unmanned discs raced to intercept. When a chempod's nose met hull, the timer ticked for five full seconds and let out its flesh rotting poisons. The discs were so small that they didn't make it through the suicidal effort, but there was no one in them anyway; they were all being controlled by operators on mother ships, safely far behind the battle line.

As long as the Alliance didn't have to worry about those chempods, no one cared if the Frakkans themselves didn't step up for the fight. The Alliance was fine to rip the Star Destroyers to shreds by themselves. The Rebels ganged up on the Imperials, outmaneuvering them, out firing them, and eventually, outnumbering them. They fought with a fury beyond that of the Battle of Yavin. They fought with more desperation than the Battle of Endor. They fought like they had totally lost their temper until the last Star Destroyer exploded in space.

Most of the TIEs didn't have hyperspace capability, so the death of the last Star Destroyer meant the death for them too. Usually, the Alliance would round them up and start taking prisoners at that point, but many rebels individually kept shooting holes in hulls until last of the TIE fighter splintered in the night.

Angry battle cries of victory filled the airways. Frustration and pain colored the voices with the sick satisfaction of revenge. Without skipping a beat, the rescue efforts began. Every ship that still had the capability to do so began scanning the rubble for life signs.

The battlefield garbage stretched several gigametres in length. Y-wings cruised the rubble in pairs searching for lost comrades. Mon Calamari cruisers sucked in escape pods with a gentle tractor beam. From time to time, whole chunks of Star Destroyer tumbled into pieces of X-wing and exploded all over again. Homing beacons were followed to ejected pilots and the names of survivors were slowly reported back to home base one by one.

That first blockade-runner hit by a chempod was floating away. The Falcon clamped itself onto the top of the runner's hull to steady it so an A-wing could land itself aside the ship and see to see if there were any survivors, if they were just disabled, or if the whole crew was really dead.

They were really dead.

Really dead.

The rescuing pilot returned to her craft with vomit in her enviro-suit. She reported that the blockade runner, and anything else that was hit by a chempod, should be sent into the atmosphere, giving the crew a proper space burial. She refused to go into detail, but reported there was no way to identify the bodies enough to try to send them home in boxes.

Han conveyed this information back to Admiral Ackbar and the Admiral sent out the word to the rest of the rescue teams. The Tamalak, the Conquest, and the Mon Wrika were sent drifting towards Yavin's star, totaling over two-thousand people in those three ships alone. There wasn't anything left of the Victory to send drifting.

There wasn't anything left of the Vengeance either.

Luke stared out the Falcon's cockpit over the tongue-shaped battlefield. He found his peace, calmed his worries, and pacified his burgeoning hate for the Empire. He sensed everything within his range. He scanned every possible piece of ship he could see. He even called out to the Force from time to time and listened for a response.

He could feel it. Deep down in his soul, he recognized this sinking feeling, this emptiness. He had been here before, and he guessed that he'd probably be here again, no matter how hard, or how long, he tried to rectify it.

Luke was the last of the Jedi.

Again.