#26 Escape…Almost
By bits and pieces, Goose slowly floated back to consciousness. The first thing she was aware of was the awful pain in her head. Every beat of her heart caused a brutal, incessant pounding where…where the force-user had thrown her at the wall. She felt her cheek pressed against cold stone; that meant she still had to be inside the monastery. Memory flooded back, and she willed herself to stay perfectly still, in case there were still Separatist droids around. Everything was quiet, but she didn't trust her ears.
With great effort, she managed to force her eyes open. Goose saw that she was still in the same place, half slumped against the wall, half laying on the ground, with her left arm twisted uncomfortably beneath her. She was facing the floor, but could see some of the room from the corner of her eye. The force-user was nowhere in sight, to her relief. However, at the very edge of her vision were four pairs of spindly, sand-brown durasteel legs.
Battle droids. Her breath hitched a little in alarm, and it caused a sharp pain to blossom in her side. She felt the cynical part of her mind spark back to life. As if having her skull cracked open wasn't enough, it also seemed her little encounter with the mad-eyed Sep lady had left her with a broken rib or two. Delightful.
She stifled the grunt of pain that threatened to escape, and tried to take shallower breaths. The battle droids did not seem to have noticed at all. Somewhat relieved, Goose glanced around the room more slowly. A path had been cleared down the center of the hall, likely done by the droids so they wouldn't be slowed by navigating the debris from the battle. The shadows cast by the light shining in from outside had also shifted, meaning it was later in the day. How long had she been out?
Her attention gradually wandered back to the four battle droids, none of which had moved at all since she'd come to. They probably thought she was dead. Sluggishly, she started to wonder what they were doing there. They couldn't have been watching the entrance, she realized, because their feet were pointing the wrong way. From her awkward position on the ground, she couldn't see higher than their legs, but it seemed all of them were facing the wall opposite her.
If they weren't watching the door, then that meant…they were guarding prisoners. Hope flared in her chest for the first time. Maybe some troopers had survived, after all. She hazily recalled Captain Rex, rising to his feet…maybe that had been real. Goose struggled in vain to see what the tinnies were guarding, but her head was at such an angle it would be impossible. The only way would to be for her to raise her head long enough to get a look.
Goose debated it for a while. The battle droids' commander had been enraged the last she remembered, and it was more than plausible they'd finish her off if they discovered she was alive. At the same time, if some troopers really had lived, maybe they still had a chance. Eventually, the desire to know if there were other survivors was so irresistible she decided to try it. She took a breath to steady her nerves, then carefully lifted her head a fraction of an inch.
Being thrown at a solid stone wall must have given her some whiplash, because the muscles in her neck protested the small movement painfully. Goose winced a little, but managed to get a good glimpse before she gingerly relaxed her aching neck. What she'd seen warmed her hear with a mixture of joy and almost overwhelming relief. Five troopers sat together, unarmed and as still as statues, but clearly alive. Rex had been supine against the wall a few feet away from them, but she hadn't been able to tell if he was breathing or not.
Although she felt a pang to see the stolid Captain in such a state, it seemed to Goose that a weight had lifted off her chest. She was sure that the clones were talking to each other inside their helmets, with the external audio off. The droids were just too stupid to take their helmets away from them. Mentally, she cursed herself for getting rid of her ear comlink; if she'd kept it, they would have been able tell her what they were planning. Since she had a wrist comlink now, any attempt to contact her would alert the battle droids immediately.
In the end, there was nothing for her to do but bide her time and wait for the troopers to make their move. When it came, she'd just have to follow along as best she could. After a few more minutes, Goose noticed that her left arm had gone completely numb from being trapped underneath her body so long. The rest of her was starting to hurt too, on top the splitting headache and cracked ribs. Even worse, she was starting to have a hard time staying awake.
Had the situation been different, she might have closed her eyes to complete the illusion of being dead. Now, though, she was certain her run-in with the wall had left her more than just a little concussed. Should she fall asleep now…it was possible she may not wake up again. Of course, that all depended on the extent of the damage inside her skull. If only she knew how long she'd been out, she might be able to guess how bad things were…
Time stretched interminably in the impenetrable silence. Nothing moved. Goose hardly dared to breathe. The battle droids just stood there. All in all, she was having trouble not falling asleep. Her mind would wander away, and increasingly more often she found herself forcing her eyes open after starting to doze off. It was one of these times that her mind began to drift again that a sudden bleeping sound startled her to alertness.
The shock of such an unexpected noise made Goose jerk involuntarily, but the battle droids didn't notice. The bleeping was coming from the comlink built into Rex's vambrace, and the droids were drawn to it like Alessian terror moths to an illumi bulb. They converged on the captain's still form, but only stood there like they couldn't tell where it was coming from. If the troopers were going to make a move, this would be the time.
"Come in, Rex," Skywalker's voice crackled faintly over the comm. "Rex, are you receiving?"
Goose tensed, waiting to see how this would play out, her brain not even processing that Skywalker was alive too. One of the battle droids had tilted its head down for its photoreceptors to inspect his arm, but all four still looked baffled. Rex hadn't moved a muscle yet, and she was beginning to wonder if the force-user had actually killed him. Then again, none of the five other prisoners had so much as twitched, either.
"Rex, do you copy?" The jedi kept trying, "If you can't respond – tap the receiver or something!"
Seeming to have finally figured out where the sound was coming from, a droid leaned to get a better look at the comlink. Rex began to slowly raise his arm, and Goose felt a small thrill of relief even as adrenaline started flowing through her veins again.
"Want to see how it works, clanker?" Rex practically growled.
His fist came out of nowhere, connecting with the battle droid's narrow faceplate, tearing the head right off its fragile neck. Scratch one tinny. Without any verbal command, the rest of the troopers sprang to their feet and started in on the droids with anything they could get their hands on – chunks of masonry, even a dismembered super battle droid's leg. They'd soon overpowered the four droids, and after grabbing their rifles were sprinting out into the courtyard. Taking this as her cue, Goose scrambled to her feet and ran after them.
That is, she tried to run after them. Standing up too quickly had given her a massive head rush, and the back of her skull exploded in pain, causing her to stumble blindly into the wall. Her vision blurred badly, and she tottered on her feet, all sense of balance deserting her. All she could make out were a few white smears moving against a darkish brown background, so Goose pointed herself in the direction they were going and lurched forward.
Goose was sure she was staggering worse than a drunken Wookiee, but her shambling gait carried her out of the monastery door quickly enough. After a few more seconds, blood began to flow normally again and the black spots cleared out of her eyesight. The white blurs resolved into running clone troopers, and she realized they were headed toward the hulking wreckage of the crippled AT-TE. She also noticed red bolts of plasma streaking past her, peppering the flagstones around her feet.
She cast a panicked glance over her shoulder, and was greeted by the unwelcome sight of a dozen battle droids streaming out of the monastery door. While she was distracted, Goose blundered over the smoldering remains of a spider droid and nearly tripped, but windmilled her arms out and managed to catch her balance before she fell. Another wave of adrenaline crashed over her, and she pumped her legs harder to catch up to the troopers.
The first few clones had already made it to cover behind the AT-TE, and the others were close behind. Goose felt her energy draining rapidly, and her broken rib was screaming in protest as she tried to take in big gulps of air. Enemy fire focused on her once the last trooper made it to safety behind the walker, and for the last five yards of her frantic sprint she felt the air around her heated by the flurry of blaster bolts that whizzed past.
Once she reached the AT-TE, her limbs were shaking so badly she couldn't quite muster the strength to climb over the top. Just when she was sure the droids were going to fry her to a crisp, a trooper's had darted out from behind the walker, grabbed the back of her uniform, and yanked her into cover. Goose collapsed into a heap on the other side, heart racing impossibly fast in her chest. Around her, the clones began to fire back desperately with weapons they'd found scattered on the ground.
Barely able to sit up straight, Goose gasped for air and scooted somewhere she wouldn't be in their way. Each breath sent a stab of agony shooting through her chest, and her numbed left arm burned painfully with a pins-and-needles sensation as blood flowed back into it. Her head pounded horribly, and every heartbeat made her skull feel as if it was being hit with a Gamorrean battle-hammer. She felt a sudden wave of nausea, and gagged to keep it down.
The shootout lasted another few minutes, then stopped abruptly. One trooper kept a lookout on the droids, but the rest climbed down off the walker and sank tiredly to the ground. Rex dropped down next to Goose, slamming reloads into the small arsenal of blasters he'd amassed.
"Glad to see you're still with us, Doctor Gosling," he said with a nod, panting lightly. "We weren't so sure for a while there."
She laughed weakly, but winced at the pain in her side. "Yeah, I wasn't so sure about you, either. You ought to get a gold star for playing dead."
"Those tinnies aren't too hard to fool," Rex replied with a trace of humor, then his tone took on a more serious note. "I'll get Coric to come check up on you, Doctor. You look awful."
Goose cast him what she hoped was a baleful look, but decided he was probably right. She gingerly touched the back of her head, and felt that her hair was matted down with blood. She hadn't realized it while she'd lain on the floor in the monastery, but blood had also flowed down the left side of her face, leaving her cheek encrusted and stiff. Grimacing a bit, she let her arm fall back down to her side, her fingers sticky with her own half-dried blood.
Coric crouched down next to her and gave a slow whistle when he looked at the back of her head. "Stang! That Seppie really did a number on you, didn't she?"
"Let's see how great you look after a crazy force-user tries to play smashball with your head," she grumbled without heat, glad to see he was alive.
He chuckled, then started checking her pupils for dilation. "Left pupil completely blown, right is partly dilated."
That wasn't very good news. Goose would've had to be rather deep in denial not to think she'd gotten a concussion, but she'd at least hoped it wasn't too bad. But her pupils were nonresponsive, she felt nauseous, had almost no sense of balance, her vision was blurry, and she still felt like she was about to fall asleep. While she mused to herself, Coric had started probing the back of her head, and just then prodded a sensitive spot that sent a fresh jolt of pain through her skull.
"Ow! That hurt," Goose hissed at him through clenched teeth, slapping his hand away. "What are you doing poking around back there, anyway?"
Coric said defensively, "I was just trying to see how bad it is."
"Unless you managed to fit an entire neuroscanner into one of your ammo pouches, I suggest you stop," she said irritably, then her tone sobered. "I'm pretty sure I've got a brain bleed, and a possible skull fracture on top of it."
The skull fracture was just a guess, but judging by her symptoms, a subdural hematoma was very likely. They occur when the head suffers severe trauma, which causes bleeding that builds up in the tissues between the skull and brain, almost like a bruise. Except, unlike a bruise, if too much blood accumulates there, it puts pressure on the brain that can cause irreparable damage. On the bright side, if there was such a thing in this situation, it could take hours or even days for the bleeding to prove fatal, so Goose still had time.
"You sure?" he asked apprehensively.
Goose sighed lightly. "Call it an educated guess."
He nodded slowly, then took a roll of gauze out of his medpack and started to wrap it around her head. "You're still bleeding a bit, so at least this will help."
When he finished, he pulled out a single-use painkiller sharp and injected it in her arm. Her entire body ached at this point, but the drugs were able to blunt the worst of it to a dull throbbing.
"Thanks," she mumbled with relief.
"No problem," Coric replied. "Anything else?"
Anything else? There was plenty else. Goose could feel all the little scrapes and bruises she'd accumulated since Christophsis, and the combined effect was the feeling that she'd been dragged through a bramble of brassvines. Backwards. But that wasn't painful enough to be worth mentioning, so she didn't.
She groaned a little for dramatic effect. "Got a broken rib or two."
There really wasn't anything to be done about those ribs except for her to tough it out, but it felt good to complain. Anything to get her mind off the blood that was pooling in the back of her head.
"Ah." He said with mock severity. "Has to be from when the Sep lady kicked you."
That must have happened after she'd blacked out, then. It made sense. The force-user had looked downright murderous, last she could recall.
"Don't remember it," Goose muttered.
"Well, you did manage to really piss her off," Coric said with a note of admiration. "She may not have done it if you'd kept your mouth shut."
Goose smiled wryly, although that memory was not fond. "I never told you I was smart, did I?"
"No," he chuckled. "But that was Asajj Ventress."
The name rang no bells in her mind, but it clearly meant something to Coric. An important figure among the Separatists, apparently.
She only stared at him blankly. "Who?"
"Oh, you know," Coric answered flippantly. "Dark side adept with an attitude. Dooku's good pal, and favorite assassin. You're lucky she didn't take your head off."
Abruptly, before Goose even had a chance to laugh, their reprieve came to an end.
"Second wave!" the clone on lookout duty shouted.
A/N: I'm sorry about these endless cliffhangers, but I just can't seem to help myself. Anyway, please review!