"I doubt it would have been any faster," Luke said, stepping forward and carefully sniffing the air drifting in through the slightly open door. It smelled dank and stale, but otherwise livable. The door markings were upside down, he noted, which meant that the turbolift car hadn't made the usual rotation as it arrived, and D-1's gravity wasn't functioning. If the gravity was off, the rest of the environmental system probably was, too, with the air he was smelling just the leakage from the rest of the Outbound Flight complex. They would have to make sure they didn't get oxygen-starved. "Don't forget all the debris we had to wade through when we first came in up on D-Four," he reminded her as he stepped back and gestured in invitation toward the doors. "Thrawn probably made even more of a mess of the turbolaser and shield sections on this one."
"I suppose." With deft flicks of her lightsaber, Mara carved an opening through the door. "Shall we?"
It wasn't as bad as Luke had expected, at least as far as basic travel difficulties were concerned. It was strange to walk along the ceiling with the deck above them, and of course the planetoid's own gravity was far weaker than what they were used to, but that in itself didn't present any particular problems. The bulkheads and floors were horrendously crumpled and twisted, but there was relatively little actual debris lying around to contend with. Occasionally they had to use their lightsabers to clear away a support strut that was blocking a doorway, and twice they had to use the Force to move a wayward console that had broken away from its connections and was lying, dust-covered, across their path. But most of the obstacles were easily dealt with, and a handful of the permlights had survived to supplement the illumination from their glow rods.
The debris itself wasn't the tough part. The tough part was the bodies.
Not really bodies, of course, at least not the sort Luke had seen in the aftermath of the many battles he'd been through in his lifetime. After five decades, there was little left but piles of bones and scraps of clothing to show where someone had fallen. Sometimes he could see evidence of how death had come: severely broken skulls from flying equipment, or pulverized bone showing where a hit from a laser or missile blast had turned part of the inner hull into deadly shrapnel.
Most of the time, though, the remains showed no indication of what had happened. Those crewers, most likely, had either died of suffocation or from the impact when the Dreadnaught had slammed into the gravel pile where Outbound Flight now lay.
"You can see where the hull's been repaired," Mara commented as they picked their way forward toward the command deck. "See the weld marks?"
Luke looked where she was pointing her glow rod. The marks were very professional, precisely following the jagged hull cracks. "Repair droids?"
"Definitely," Mara agreed. "The attack must have smashed the hull in enough places to bypass the blast doors and emergency compartmentalization system, which then suffocated any of the crew and passengers still alive. But it didn't put all the droids out of commission, and they automatically began emergency repairs. By the time anyone else got here, enough of the ship was airtight again for them to fly it."
The damage seemed to increase as they moved forward. So did the number of bones. "The crew must have been trying to escape up here as Thrawn took out the turbolaser and shield blisters," Mara said as Luke sliced open yet another frozen blast door. "There normally wouldn't have been this many people this far forward."
"Especially since most of the ones on duty would have been farther forward on the command deck," Luke agreed, eyeing her closely. "How are you doing?"
"I'm all right," she said. "Why? Shouldn't I be?"
"I just wondered," he said. "I mean, down here with more..."
"With more evidence of what Thrawn and Palpatine did to these people?"
Luke winced. "Something like that."
"Oddly enough, I'm all right," Mara said, her eyes drifting around the room. "I guess I must have already worked through all that up above." She gestured toward an upside-down arch ahead of them, a doorway partially blocked by a half-closed blast door. "Looks like we're getting near the end of the line."
"I think you're right." Slipping through the opening, Luke looked around. It was a large room, with a lot of scattered chairs and broken consoles that had once apparently been lined up in neat rows, all of it covered with the same thick layer of dust that existed everywhere down here. "Definitely the monitor anteroom," he identified it as Mara joined him. "That would put the bridge just ahead, through that other archway in the middle of the far wall."
"What's left of it, anyway," Mara said, looking around. "It may be my imagination, but it looks like there's less actual battle damage here."
"It does, doesn't it," Luke agreed, frowning. She was right: aside from a few of the droid-repaired fissures, most of the destruction seemed to be impact damage. "Either it happened when Outbound Flight plowed into this rock pile, or else Thrawn did some ship ramming during the battle."
"Thrawn, or someone else," Mara said. "Don't forget that according to Bearsh, the Vagaari were also at that battle."
"True." Luke surveyed the wreckage, a strange feeling of emptiness flowing into him. "I'd hoped we'd be able to find some intact records down here. Something about the Jedi of that time, maybe some details about how they'd been organized. But I can't see how anything like that could have survived."
"Doesn't look promising, does it?" Mara said. "Still, as long as we're here, we might as well go the whole way. You said that was the door to the bridge?"
"Should be," Luke said, ducking under a section of collapsed deck and stepping over to the archway and the warped metal door blocking it. Igniting his lightsaber, he sliced it open.
It was indeed the bridge, very much as he remembered from his brief time aboard the Katana some thirteen years before. Except, of course, that this particular bridge was littered with bones and broken consoles and ankle-deep in powdery dust.
And it was only about half as long as the other one had been.
"Now, that's impressive," Mara said. "I don't think I've ever even heard of a ship being crushed this badly, let alone seen it. They must have been really scorching space when they hit."
"Yes," Luke murmured. "Question is, whose idea was it to hit this hard?"
"You still thinking about those prisoners in the storage core?"
"Off and on," Luke said, frowning toward the crushed bow. There was something glinting dully over there amid the shards of the shattered observation bubble, something that didn't seem to fit with the rest of the wreckage they'd seen. "We know they escaped somehow," he continued, stepping carefully through the debris, wincing as something snapped beneath his boot. "We also know that there were eighteen Jedi aboard Outbound Flight, and yet Thrawn was still able to beat them. I keep wondering if there's some connection."
"It could be that Thrawn had a bigger fleet than anyone wants to admit," Mara suggested, leaning over one of the consoles for a closer look.
"Formbi said it was just his picket force," Luke reminded her.
"Formbi is also lugging around about two bantha-weights of corporate Chiss guilt over the whole incident," Mara countered, moving on to the next console. "Maybe there was more official Chiss involvement than he's letting on."
"Could be," Luke said, squatting down among the transparisteel shards. There it was. Gingerly, he reached into the debris and got a grip on it.
He froze. Not it; them. There were two objects buried in the rubble, both archaic in design and yet instantly recognizable as they lay among two distinct sets of broken bones.