"But you won't tell them, will you?" Rosemari pleaded. "Please?"
"They don't like Jedi here, Mara," Fel said quietly. "I don't know exactly why, but they don't."
"We don't just not like them, Commander," Pressor said grimly. "If the council sticks the Jedi label on someone, they get immediately sent over to Three."
"You mean D-Three?" Jinzler asked. "The Number Three Dreadnaught?"
"That's the one," Pressor said. "The pylons between it and the rest of Outbound Flight were destroyed or collapsed during the attack and crash, leaving it isolated from everything else. So Uliar and the other Survivors set it up as a place where anyone with Jedi traits could be safely banished."
"I thought that was what the Quarantine on D-Six was for," Fel said.
Pressor shook his head. "Quarantine is for people they suspect of using the Force," he said. "Three is where they get sent once they're pretty sure."
"Pretty sure, you say?" Su-mil asked softly, his alien expression very still. In some ways, Mara reflected, he looked even more dangerous without his armor. "And how certain exactly is that?"
Pressor looked away from him. "They're completely sure," he said. "The Managing Council is. I can't speak for the rest of us."
He looked at Mara. "And it's not a death sentence, really," he added with an odd combination of earnestness and embarrassment. "The place has been set up with plenty of food and power. A person could live there for a lifetime in reasonable comfort."
"But in complete isolation," Su-mil said darkly. "You sentence these people to a life of loneliness."
Pressor sighed. "We've only done it twice," he said. "At least, up to now."
"They're not going to send her there, Jorad," Rosemari said. "They can't."
She looked suddenly at Mara. "You can take her with you, can't you?" she asked. "You can take her when you leave."
"The plan was to take all of you with us," Mara told her. "Unfortunately, unless we can get out of here and back to the Chaf Envoy, neither option has much of a future."
"I spoke to the techs a few minutes ago," Pressor said. "Most of the blast doors stopped working years ago, and most of the ones that did work have now been locked open by those cursed conduit worms. Unless we can get a few of them working again, we're not going to be able to get either the turbolift doors or any of the outer hatchways open without losing all our air."
He looked at Drask. "I take it there's still no word from your own ship?"
The general shook his head. "No," he said. "And I no longer believe they will be coming."
"You think they're all dead?" Pressor asked.
Drask closed his eyes. "Including crew members, there were thirty-seven warriors aboard the Chaf Envoy," he said. "The Vagaari may have had as many as three hundred." He opened his eyes into slender cracks of glowing red. "They would not have been prepared for such a devastating assault."
Mara felt her stomach tighten. The sudden multiple deaths she and Luke had sensed aboard D-l could have been all the Chiss, or a sizable fraction of them, or just the squad of warriors Drask had left in the D-4 docking bay. There hadn't been any way to tell at the time, and there still wasn't.
Though if there were surviving Chiss, it might not make any difference. Even if the Vagaari hadn't bothered to hunt down and kill everyone aboard, they would certainly have made a point of wrecking the ship on their way out. "So in other words, we should assume we're on our own," she concluded. "All right. Pressor, you said D-Three was isolated from the rest of Outbound Flight. That means you must have vac suits to get back and forth. Any of them still in working condition?"
"A couple dozen of them are," he said. "But as I told you, we can't get the hatches open."
"We don't have to," Mara told him. "All you need to do is build a small caisson around one of the turbolift doors with me in it. I can cut through the hull, climb up the pylon, and make my way cross-country to the Chaf Envoy."
"And how do you get back in?" Drask asked.
"I'll figure that out later," Mara told him. "What do you think?"
Above them, the lights flickered. "Terrific," Pressor muttered, glancing up. "They must be getting to the generator."
"What, we're running on generator power already?" Mara asked.
"We are in this part of the ship," Pressor said. "They've already gotten into the main power conduits."
"Wait a minute," Jinzler said, frowning. "You have portable generators? How many?"
"Probably ten that still work," Pressor said. The lights flickered again—"Better make that nine."
"I never even thought to ask," Jinzler said, sounding disgusted with himself. "Get them together as quickly as you can—all of them—and set them out along the corridors."
"Connected to what?" Pressor asked, sounding confused.
"Connected to anything you want," Jinzler said. "Lights, heaters—anything. Just crank them up to full power and then shut down the main reactors."
"It will not work," Drask declared. "Even if the generators succeed in drawing the line creepers out, there are too many of them. They will quickly overload and destroy the generators' wiring, then return to the larger sources of power."
"That's right," Jinzler said, smiling tightly. "If the worms actually get to them."
He turned back to Pressor. "But they won't, because around each generator you're going to create a moat of salt water. The worms will crawl in, short out their organic capacitors, and die."
"You're kidding," Pressor said. "I've never even heard of that."
Jinzler shrugged. "It's a trick we came up with when I was bumming around Hadar sector after the Clone Wars. It's fairly disgusting, but it works."
"I'll get the techs on it right away," Pressor said, pulling out his comlink. "You've certainly had a varied career, Ambassador."
Jinzler's answer, if he made one, was lost as a sudden surge of distant emotion yanked at Mara's attention. "Something's wrong," she said, pulling her lightsaber from her belt and heading for the door. Pressor got there ahead of her, slapping the release and ducking through.
It was then that they heard the shouting in the distance ahead.
"Come on," Pressor growled, drawing his blaster as he and Mara sprinted down the corridor.
They rounded a turn and nearly collided with a dozen techs and civilians running in the other direction. "They're back!" one of the techs gasped, jabbing a finger behind him as he dodged around Pressor. "In the turbolift. They're trying to break in."
Pressor swore under his breath, thumbing on his comlink. "All Peacekeepers to the forward starboard pylon," he ordered. "The Vagaari are back."
"This doesn't make sense," Mara objected, trying to stretch out to the Force as she ran. But the flavor of the alien minds was too faint to sort out against the clamor of civilian panic throbbing in the air around her. "Why would they have come back?"
"Maybe they decided they wanted to watch us die after all," Pressor said grimly. "If so, they're going to pay heavily for the privilege."
One of the other Peacekeepers was waiting in the darkness when they arrived at the turbolift lobby, the beam from his glow rod twitching back and forth as he fidgeted with apprehension. "They're coming through," he hissed, turning the beam on one of the doors. "I can hear them working on it. What do we do?"
Pressor never had a chance to answer. Almost before the words were out of the other's mouth, the door suddenly gave a violent creak and cracked a centimeter open. Three pry bars were in place before it could close again; and with another series of creaks the door was forced open. Pressor and the Peacekeeper leveled their blasters at the opening, and suddenly two combat-armored figures leapt out of the gloom, their own glow rods swinging back and forth. Behind the lights, Mara could see hand weapons tracking as they searched for targets—