Reece was among the wounded; concussion and shrapnel injuries, and though he hadn't been able to help, the story of what had transpired came together very quickly. Mara hadn't yet bothered to go up to the security Ops room to check the surveillance images which would have been fed to the main bank right up until the moment the blast had severed the connection. She had, however, been the one who'd had to go to Comms and tell her master. Which hadn't gone well.
The Executor was en-route, due to arrive in four hours, the Fury and the Relentless having already been joined by the Intrepid and the Dauntless, everyone primed for another attack. So now all there was left to do was wait...
Skywalker still hadn't woken and was laid on his back in Intensive Care, the bed carefully angled to protect against ventilator-assisted pneumonia from the tracheotomy, sutures running a long line down his face and resuming over the deep laceration at his neck, his right eye swollen closed, another deep, sutured gash disappearing into his hairline.
A series of pins had been constructed to support his left arm, shoulder, both collar-bones and his left shoulder-blade, all shattered in the explosion, and amother long line of sutures marked the surgical scar which ran from collar-bone to stomach, where he'd been opened up to deal with internal bleeding.
Not yet stable enough for bacta, he was now on full life-support, one of his lungs collapsed, heartbeat arythmic, massive blood loss, blood pressure not yet stabilising. He was, apparently, of a rare blood group and despite Hallin's constant requests, Luke never bothered to give any of his own blood to be kept in storage for just such an emergency. It wasn't particularly that he thought he was untouchable, Mara knew; he just didn't really care.
"What are his chances?" Mara whispered, voice broken with guilt; he had been her responsibility- hers alone.
Hallin remained silent for long seconds- probably choosing his words with care, Mara reflected. "We will, of course, do all we can for him, but until we can stabilise him it's difficult to provide any prognosis."
Mara turned to him, "Which means?"
"Very serious. Critical, until we can stabilise him."
Mara tried a different tack - she was after all a trained agent, and knew how to keep pushing until she got the truth- "Will he wake up?"
"I don't know. His coma could be as a result of the hypovolemia - he lost around thirty percent of blood volume - or more likely traumatic brain injury. He had four seizures on the operating table, which would seem to indicate ongoing damage from brain contusions, though there's no serious skull fractures. We've re-established perfusion to the organs, but we weren't instantly able to put him on anticoagulants due to the internal bleeding into his abdominal cavity. Now he's out of surgery we can monitor that more closely, but all indications are that the coma will persist so I daren't put him into bacta. We'll know more within the next few hours I think."
The silence hung for a long time, punctuated by the steady wheeze of the respirator and the gentle pips of the life support, before Mara found her voice. "Vader will be here in four hours. We'll transfer him to the Executor then and jump for Coruscant, with a mid-jump stop to allow trauma specialists to board from the Dominant, which is en-route to us from Coruscant."
"Move him?" Hallin's voice expressed his opinion of that.
"Well we can't fly back in the Peerless, can we?"
The Peerless had sustained damage to her forward bays, leaving them partially open to space over several levels, only the outer environmental compression shields maintaining atmospheric pressure. The first bomb connected to the shields had been far smaller than originally thought, so with mobile blast shields set about it to minimise the damage and internal seals engaged, it had caused little damage outside of a close radius whenit detonated. But it had still done its job efficiently; they were effectively flying without navigation shields, so the Peerless certainly wasn't in any fit state to jump.
How anyone in the fore bays had survived that explosion was beyond Mara- that gravity had held and the whole bay hadn't decompressed was a miracle.
Or maybe not- initial reports indicated that the blast from the two-stage explosion in the bay had been channelled down, preventing the force of the discharge from ripping the external walls of the bay wide open to space and thus explosive decompression over many levels, which would have instantly killed everyone in the bays effected. Yet on early inspection the recovered fragments of the bomb casing indicated no such feature.
Had Skywalker found the time, Mara wondered, to limit the damage- to direct the blast?
Was that even possible?
There was, to Mara's memory, only a fraction of a second between his shouting 'Back!' and the sound of the explosion. Had he been able not only to form a Force-shield strong enough to withstand a four-click explosion, but also have enough power left to actually control the direction of blast itself?
She looked at the broken, bruised man before her, still as death, a cold weight settling in her stomach. He'd probably saved a couple of hundred lives...but had the cost been his own?
.
.
.
Leia sat quietly in the noisy, bustling main fighter bay of Home-One, waiting for Han's flight to come back; they were due about five minutes ago, so it could be any time now. In the meantime, she stared out into the velvet blackness, eyes drawn to the distant moon of the inhospitable Anzat, thoughts far away. Beside her, his fur warm against the chill of the cool docking bay, Chewie crooned lightly, dismayed by the news she'd just given him. enough so that he'd decided to come along to mediate in this coming confession, though it was hardly Leia's fault; she'd been as in the dark as everyone else here, and she knew exactly why; they hadn't trusted her not to tell Han...
They were probably right.
The first of the A-Wings came in hot and effected a sharp stop, repulsor engines cutting in as its sublights cut out, bobbing it precariously on the spot as several others came in to land close by, the rest waiting outside the bay for a clear slot. Leia sighed as Han's A-Wing came in to a fast landing, then she rose, dusting imaginary dirt from her pale blue trousers as she set forward.
Popping the canopy on his fighter Han grinned, seeing her set toward him, Chewie in tow, "Hey, what's this, a welcome committee?"
Leia didn't smile, and Han pulled off his helmet, sitting up on the side of the cockpit to swing his legs clear, "Woah, who died?" Even as he said it he bit his tongue; it was a real day-to-day occurrence here and he felt he'd jinxed someone by even saying it.
"Han, I heard some news and... I thought you should know- I wanted to tell you myself."
Kini, one of the 'techs, stepped in, oblivious to the grave conversation, running her expert hand over the still-freezing panels of the A-Wing as she did so, "Hey, Commander- hear the news? There's no Heir any more, courtesy of the Alliance!" She paused, unaware of his widening eyes, rolling her panel-gauge backwards over her fingers like a gunslinger, "Boom!! Just like that!"
Han spun round to Leia, who cursed beneath her breath; she'd wasted the last half-hour in the bay waiting for Solo to come back, wanting to be the one who broke it to him...
"Is that true?"
She shook her head, "I didn't know - nobody did. It was a covert operation; strictly need-to-know."
"Whose?" Han ground the word, making Leia worry that he may well march from the bay right now and find them.
"Madine had a unit at Kuat Shipyards... the Peerless was being outfitted there... " She didn't know what else to say.
In truth it shouldn't have been that much of a surprise; Mon Mothma had made no secret of her intent to bring The Heir down, though no specific plan had ever been mentioned. Somehow Leia still couldn't believe it and somehow... she'd know it was happening. She'd dreamed of the black wolf last night, though as often happened in the light of day, she couldn't quite bring the dream to mind anymore. All she knew was that it had been there again... hunting. Had Mon been there too? She narrowed her eyes, almost remembering...