Chapter 12
He'd done it, not because he'd wanted to, but because it was best for the both of them. Davic would have pushed the issue until there was no other way out. Mar seemed to understand, she only cried a little. Xan knew she wasn't mad, she couldn't be mad at him.
Now they were coming out of the simulator, a run that bore and almost exact profile to the one Xan, Rydell and Mar had run for the Rebels when the convoy was jumped by a Star Destroyer. Davic had thrown a fit over the comm frequencies, when Rydell had ordered the rest of the squadron to withdraw while his and Xan's Blastboat went after the Star Destroyer. All the crews withdrew as Rydell had ordered, showing who they would really listen to when their lives were on the line.
"Security! Security!" Davic howled. "I want both these crews thrown in the stockade!" He stalked over pointing a skinny finger at Rydell and Xan. "I want them brought up on charges. Mutiny, disobeying a direct order, undermining the authority of a superior officer. . ."
"Enough!" Aylard boomed, cutting Davic's tirade short. "You're over stepping your bounds Major!" The Colonel placed himself between Davic and Xan and Rydell. "There will be no charges, and no discipline. Captain Artell and Lieutenant Hodgins acted within their authority, and kept your group alive. Now, Major, they'll sit out, and you'll run the sim again with the computer taking the place of the two missing Blastboats."
"Yes, sir." Davic saluted, and returned to his simulator dome.
"You boys really get on his bad side." Aylard chuckled.
"Better on his bad side than dead, sir." Rydell said. They all watched and laughed as Davic's nice parade ground flying got his Blastboat, and all but one of the other turned into floating space junk.
"Supervisor Aylard, why is Davic in command?" Rydell asked.
The Supervisor shrugged, "I don't know, but I bet he doesn't make it through the first engagement. You boys probably want to be well clear of him tonight. You have my permission to leave base tonight."
"Thank you, sir." The eight saluted and left the simulator complex before Davic could get them.
•••
Xan was cold, the ground was hard, his blasters were almost out of power, and he'd spent the night being shot at by Stormtroopers. By every right he should have been miserable, but he wasn't, he felt great as shafts of Caridan sunlight found him at the base of Carida's tall buildings.
All because he was holding Haara.
Rydell must have had something to do with it. It couldn't have been coincidence that Haara had managed to find them late at night. They were all together Xan, Rydell, Makazu, Vors, Noo-gin and his pregnant girlfriend. When the Stormies found them just after midnight they immediately started calling for Xander Parck to surrender.
There was no time to play games. Xan was the first to shoot back, and then everybody else started, except for the two women. Two Stormtroopers went down with the first volley of laser bolts. The Stormtroopers returned fire, but only with stun bolts, all the time calling for Xander Parck to surrender.
Xan had urged Haara to go with Noo-gin and his girlfriend, but she refused to leave Xan while he and the others laid down cover fire so Noo-gin could escape with his girlfriend and unborn child. They'd done what they could, but none of them could make Noo-gin's girlfriend stay low, and she caught a stun bolt in the stomach.
Seeing her crumpled on the ground sent Noo-gin into an uncontrollable rage. He fired his blaster until there were no more Stormtroopers left, and even then he kept shooting. Pulsing laser bolts into unbreathing chests. It amazed Xan, that even after they shot at the Stormtroopers, not once did they shoot back with their blasters set on kill.
Everyone looked at Rydell; he was the ranking officer, someone who they all knew could be trusted. Had Rydell not been there all eyes would have been on Xan. Rydell ordered them to split up, Xan wanted to go it alone, knowing that he was the target. Rydell and Makazu would go with Noo-gin to protect his unconscious girlfriend. Haara refused to let Xan go alone though.
It was no more than a half standard hour later when another patrol found them picking their way through the shadows of an ally. With almost no power left for his blaster Xan was going to surrender when Haara grabbed his elbow and pulled him under a durasteel sheet.
Haara squeezed her eyes shut as Xan pulled her deeper into their hiding place, bodies pressed close together, hearts racing with heavy breath.
"We're not here. They can't see us. We're invisible." Haara chanted over and over again.
Boots scraped pavement, closer and closer until a Stormtrooper stood in front of them. We're done, Xan thought as Haara continued to chant. The twenty seconds the trooper stood there seemed to be an hour.
"They must have moved on." A voice crackled over a helmet comm. "Move out, we can't let them get to far ahead." The Stormtroopers moved on looking far Xan and Haara somewhere else.
"Whoo!" Xan sighed. "I thought we were dead."
"Me too." Haara said, reaching a hand around to touch the back of Xan's neck. As soon as she touched him a calming wave swept over his whole body radiating out from his neck, and Haara's hand.
"How did you do that?" Xan asked.
"What?"
"It's like you made the troopers go away, how, just by chanting a few words."
"I don't know. But it's like I could feel there minds. I don't know, it sounds stupid, but I think by me chanting like that it made them think we weren't here. I've always been able to do something like that."
"Huh. Wish I could do that." Surprisingly after all that had happened Xan fell to sleep in minutes, with Haara's hand still on his neck.
Now he was awake again, still holding Haara, her stomach moved against his hands as she breathed. Xan kissed the back of her neck softly.
"I was wondering when you were going to wake up." Haara said, turning over and planting a kiss on Xan's lips. "What a night."
"Yeah, now let's get out of here."
The pair crawled out from under their ersatz shelter and headed for Haara's home, hand in hand. The whole time Xan thought about how it was wrong to jeopardize Haara, but the only thing that mattered was that it felt right. There was no other way to explain it, and he'd already given himself up to her.
"Haara," Xan said as they stood outside the door to her home, "You know I care about you. I care enough about you to be alone, because if we're together you'd spend many more nights like last night, and I don't want to see you get hurt. I just want you to know. . ."
"That you love me." She interrupted smiling. "And I want you to know that I love you enough to face Darth Vader himself to be with you." She threw her arms around him in a hug.
"As long as you understand." If she only knew hoe right she might be.
•••
There was a crowd waiting outside Noo-gin's room when Xan got back to the IPEC compound. Something had to be wrong.
"Nice of you to finally show up." Vors remarked dryly. "Noo-gin's locked himself in there and he won't come out."
"Why?" Xan asked, even though he probably didn't want to know.
"The stun bolt his girlfriend got hit with caused a miscarriage. She died a little while ago as a result." Olsaa responded before Xan even noticed she was there.
"Now he won't come out." Vors added. "We thought you might be able to talk to him."
Great! Xan thought, now he had somebody's blood, two somebody's blood on his conscience. Xan pounded on the door. "Noo-gin open up, it's Xan."
"No!" Came the muffled reply.
"Let me in now, or do I have to get Davic, and you can explain the whole thing to him." There was no reply, but the door opened and Noo-gin's head poked out. His face was sunken, with sullen gray eyes looking back at Xan.
"Only you." He said without looking around at the others. Xan looked back and shrugged before entering. Inside the room was just like any other in the IPEC compound, except for the hole in the wall by Noo-gin's bed. Apparently he had spliced into a computer conduit and was now running to his datapad.
"What's that?" Xan asked
"It's a computer conduit to the mainframe. I've been slicing into it since I got here."
"Don't get caught. I've invested too much time into making you a useful gunner to loose you now."
"I won't get caught. I never, erh, get caught."
"And I'm sorry, Darick, it's my fault you girlfriend died. The Stormies were after me."
"Why were they after you? Does it have something to do with this Thrawn?" Noo-gin offered.
"Who?" Xan wanted to say more, but the words caught in his throat.
"Thrawn, erh, he's commanding a force in the Unknown Regions. They're, erh, sending us there before we go anywhere else.
Xan froze; Thrawn and his father had been monitoring them. And allowing Xan to think they would get away. He had to think.
"When are we being sent to the Unknown Regions?"
"Erh, I don't know. As soon as we complete our training."
"Do you have our field training locations on that thing?"
"What do you think I've been doing, staring at Garrick Loran?"
"Show me." Xan ordered.
Noo-gin handed the datapad to Xan when the files were up. Xan copied them onto a datacard without looking.
"Thanks Noo-gin, we'll be out of here in few months." Xan stalked out of the room with the datacard in his pocket.
Xan motioned for Rydell to follow him into his room, and popped the card into his datapad.
"Where have you been?" Mar demanded.
"Not now Mar. We're in trouble." Xan snapped, as he pulled up the listing of instructors. He started with his instructor because he was most likely to have connections to Thrawn and his father. There was nothing of interest until Xan came to the list of high level kills. Number 10 was Artell, Senator from the Corbata system. Rydell had been right.
"What's going on Xan?" Rydell asked.
"First of all, you were right about your father, and my instructor was the one who did the job. My father and Thrawn have been monitoring us. You guys can just guess where we're headed." Xan looked at Rydell, rage was boiling just beneath the surface, now he knew who killed his father, and he could do something about it. "I know what you're thinking Rydell. Don't do it, not now. We have to find a way to get off this planet before you do anything. I have here the list of our field training locations. Let's get to work."
The three huddled around Xan's datapad, sifting through the field training locations and schedule. The desert was thrown out right away, as it was too long to wait, and the defenses around the equator were too tight. After exhausting all other possibilities, Xan and Rydell settled on Arctic Training. The planets defenses were thinner up near the North Pole, without any civilian population that could pin the group, and ships. Without the direct sightings they would be able to slip past or destroy any sentry ship. Because there was only a small garrison on the tundra maintained only for training purposes it would lower the risk of pursuit. Rydell had his own plan for taking care of anything that might be able to come after them. The only downside was that it was almost six months away. They were left hoping that Thrawn didn't request their services or find out before then.
"This is funny, isn't it?" Mar piped up. "The Empires spending all these credits to train us, and we're just going to turn it against them in a few months and because of the equipment they've handed us they won't be able to find us." Xan and Rydell chuckled.
"They'll never forget what I have planned for them." Rydell added.
"Remember, no one can know but us, that is until we do it."
"Who is going with us? Makazu."
"Of course." Xan paused, "I don't know, maybe Vors, Noo-gin, and Olsaa, she doesn't seem to like it here."
"Fine but Maijongh Dee's useless." Rydell said.
"And they can't find out until the day we're going. The more people know, the greater our chances of getting caught are."
"We know Xan; we've all been to the same classes." Mar admonished.
"Right, not another word until we're on the tundra." Xan said.
"Right." His companions responded. Just like before, no one could stop the three of them, and now they were just getting more dangerous by adding in the others. The Empire would never be able to stop them.