'We have to go!' Luna yelled over the wailing klaxon, struggling out of the hole in the turbolift that Hoshi had carved out. She doubted she needed to tell the others, but it made her feel better.
'We have to get Face,' Fenn said suddenly.
'We'll get him,' she reassured them. 'We'll find him as soon as we get out of here. Somehow,' she led them down the corridor - literally, as the ship listed, they were travelling downhill.
'Face is here,' Fenn said, and Luna stopped in her tracks.
'What do you mean, here?' she demanded. With their speech difficulties, sometimes their words didn't quite match their meaning, but she had a feeling that they meant exactly what they said.
They didn't speak, but rather pointed back where they had come. Back up the increasingly steep hill.
'You know where he is?'
Fenn nodded.
'Oh!' Ro'vena jumped, clasping her hands to her mouth. 'I get it now - before you arrived on the bridge, that man - Shayde? He talked about something in his office. I thought it was just some data, the way he was talking about it. But now,' her words trailed off.
Luna stared beyond them, back up the corridor. Some stormtroopers were at the other end, and she reflexively raised her blaster, but they clearly had no desire to fight, as they ran off in another direction. After the stun grenade went off, after they had broken out of the trap, she had tried looking for Shayde in the aftermath, but he had disappeared. She had simply taken it for cowardice, but now his actions took on a second meaning. She had no reason to believe it to be true, but the longer she thought about it, the more real, the more solid, the more right it felt. He had run away to secure his one last piece of leverage against them: Face.
'Lead the way,' she told Fenn, and started running back up that hill.
As they made their way through the maze of corridors, the ship continued to shudder with the impact of the cannons from the other star destroyers, but as the Terror started to list further and further, the attacks stopped, and she knew that the ship had been caught fully in the planet's gravity well. They didn't have long before the ship crashed. She was filled with relief when Fenn said, 'near here.'
But as they turned the corner into the next corridor, her relief died. At the other end was Shayde, accompanied by two squads of stormtroopers - and Face. He looked half dead already, beaten and bloodied and being dragged by the stormtroopers. Luna thought he was unconscious until his head moved, looking right at them. Even then he didn't seem to react, or register their presence.
'Face!' she yelled, which was a bad idea because Shayde and the stormtroopers turned to look at them. She saw Shayde point at her and convey an order to his guard. The words were lost to the sound of the Klaxon and the metallic shrieking of the ship protesting its death, but the meaning was clear as the stormtroopers began shooting at them. Luna ducked low to the ground as Hoshi stepped in front of her, shooting around her, back at the stormtroopers, her efforts quickly bolstered by the other Nexu. She saw one go down from a shot to the chest - she didn't need to hear Twitch's hiss of celebration to know that it was his doing - and saw Face lash out, trying to free himself of his captors. But his attempt had an unintended side effect, for as he flailed about, he blocked them from having a clear shot at the opposing stormtroopers, and so they could do nothing but follow as they dragged him away from them. Away, and into an escape pod. As the stormtroopers provided a covering fire, keeping the Nexu at bay, they watched as Shayde stepped into one, then watched as Face was forcibly hurled in, quickly followed by the guards. As the last stepped in, Luna and the others made a mad dash to the escape pod dock, but they could only stand there, impotent, as the pod flew away from them and down to the surface.
Luna felt her anger and frustration rise to the surface, and she slammed her fists against the blast door window, again and again. It was only when Hoshi placed a gentle hand on her shoulder that she looked away from the window, and then followed Hoshi's pointed finger that led down the corridor - to an unclaimed escape pod.
'Everybody get in!' she yelled, electrified. 'We need to follow them. We can't lose them. Not now.'
