They were able to stabilise Sylvana eventually. Between Kristy's biology studies, Brad's life experience, and Cheriss and Mike's crash course from the Wraiths there was enough medical expertise in the room to get her on the bed and restrained. Ryll was painted on her more obvious wounds in the hope that it would help her heal. Josh Nolan had been easier. He'd just had to be wrapped in a bacta sheet which, with Lenka taking up the bacta tank, was the best they could do for his injuries.
Sci had returned, taken one look at the scene in front of him, and taken Nick off for a talk.
Mike leaned back against the wall of the medical bay, and watched as his team-mates tidied up. Noreh and Brad replaced supplies in the cabinet, Becki and Thayer rehoused the medical equipment, Arrek watched in concern over his sister, and Kristy excused herself to go and be extremely ill in the refresher. Raymond and Cheriss stood by, the outsiders' faces betraying worry, fear, even anger at what they saw in front of them.
Lenka bubbled, or at least the bacta tank did. Josh rustled, or at least the bacta wrap did. Sylvana beeped, or at least the monitor she was hooked up to did.
Mike looked around, and he did it all by himself, without any aid from medical assistance whatsoever.
"Where's Vickie?" he said. Brad looked up.
"I. . . don't know," he said, his brow furrowing. Arrek raised his hand.
"Um, I saw her heading off just before we got the call for help," the young man said. "She grabbed some water from the fridge, and headed off on a speeder bike," he added, looking as though he couldn't quite believe what he was saying. "Said she wanted to go walkabout."
"Bugger," Mike said. "Now we've lost another one."
This time it was Mike's brows knitting together, his fingers reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose.
"I'm going after her," he said.
"What?" Becki said, dropping the medical scanner she was holding. "What do you mean, you're going after her?"
"Just what I said. Vickie's gone, Josh has gone, we have no Jedi. While I'm the last person to hide behind a Force user for protection, I'd feel happier if we had one or the other here. I have no idea where Josh has gone, but I can track Vickie."
"How? She knows about the tracers in her equipment. She'll find a way to beat them."
"True, but she doesn't know about the ones in the speeders, and if all else fails, well, Vickie is the one person I can't hide from, but that works both ways. I can find her if she's feeling emotional enough. And if she's right, and there's a Dark Jedi about. . . I'm betting she's gone after him."
Thayer hissed.
"I may not know much about Jedi," he said. "However, I feel that if Vickie has gone after this Dark Jedi, she is best suited to handling the matter. You, Mike, will. . ."
". . .only serve to get in the way. Possibly, milord Atner. In fact it's very probable that I shall. But if Vickie has gone after the Jedi, I'll feel that it's partly my fault. If she gets hurt because she's trying to prove she's still part of the team. . ." he was making wild gestures with his hands. "Bloody hell," he said, calming a little.
He stalked out of the medical bay and toward the cockpit. Along the way, he began calling out to no-one, apparently, until a beeping sound from the cockpit greeted his arrival.
". . . and Clark-Theta-Nine-Delta-Seven to finish."
With that, a section of wall swung upwards and outwards from the side of the cockpit, revealing a small storage area from which Mike took. . .
"I was hoping I'd not see you again," he said quietly. He strapped the tatty gauntlets to his wrists and flexed his fingers, sending three foot-long steel spikes shooting from the backs of his arms. A shift in his grip pulled the spikes back in, and suddenly he was holding a sizzling metal rectangle that was coated in a fizzing chemical mixture which would explode on contact with any solid surface.
"Are you going to let us help?" Thayer asked from the doorway.
"Yes," Mike said. "Noreh is going to stay here and be ready to pilot the Home if we need an evac. Brad and Nick need to be ready to go on the speeders. . ." his voice tailed off momentarily. "Scratch that. Brad in an X-Wing, Cheriss too. . . Sith, I can't focus properly." He looked up at the young ruler. "Too much happening at once. It's only a couple of days since I got out of bacta, and all of a sudden I'm having to be responsible." He managed a ghost of a smile. "That's enough reason to get this mess sorted out."
"So, I shall let Sci know he can give the team their orders?" Thayer grinned.
"Yeah, I guess you'd better," Mike said.
Sci caught up with Mike as the latter was throwing a few rations into a knapsack. The Major was holding a datapad.
"Vickie left this for me," he said. "I think you'd better read it."
Major,
Wow, so formal, huh? Well, I figured being formal would be appropriate. My conscious has been bothering me since I watched the Dark Lord escape. Something very wrong is going on. I've decided to take it upon myself to find him. I don't want anyone else to get hurt like Lady Leannan. If I do not return, there is another letter for my husband on here. Please get it to him as soon as you return to Mendellia. Also, if I don't make it back, I suggest that you get everyone out of here as soon as you can. Let Master Skywalker know we have a very powerful Dark Jedi here. He is probably one of the only Jedi who can take care of him.
I only ask one more thing, Major. Please don't come after me. I'm afraid of what may happen if you do. And when Josh comes back, be careful. I've been sensing a change in him.
Good luck, Capt. Vickie Boyd, Jedi
PS. If I do fail to return, tell Kelly when she arrives (and she will, you know that) that I'm sorry. My only wish for her is that she name their firstborn daughter Shaana.
Mike looked up from the datapad, deep lines lashing the corners of his eyes as he stared wordlessly into the future. He dropped the datapad to the floor and hoisted the knapsack onto his back. Sci and he shared a loaded look.
"I'm going to-"
"You have permission to-"
"-go after her," they finished together.
"See you," Mike said, seating the heavy rucksack as comfortably as he could on his back. He gunned the throttle on the speeder bike, accelerating smoothly away from the Red Home. From far enough away he looked like any maniac riding a Harley across the untamed Israeli landscape, and with his coat billowing out behind him, he was the very image of a wild biker with few cares and fewer morals.
"Which," he mused grimly, "is about right if Vickie gets hurt."
After an hour, Vickie paused and stretched, the engine idling beneath her. She stretched out with the Force to try and fix on the feeling she'd had since the firefight in the Old City. A Dark Jedi? She had to face him. She was the only person on the planet who stood a chance. And she couldn't risk the lives of her team-mates. No, best for her to tackle this problem herself and even if she fell. . .
"No negative thinking," she scolded herself. "This Darth Vader wannabe is just so-"
She paused. A familiar presence had entered her Force consciousness. She spun in the saddle of her bike, looking back in the direction she had come, but she couldn't see that which she knew was there.
"Mike. . ." she hissed. She focused on the presence, growing brighter by the second.
*GO AWAY*
The speeder bike stalled as Mike slammed forward into the handlebars. The steering vanes dipped dangerously close to the stoney earth, and a vision of Face Loran slurred drunkenly through Mike's mind. He hung, panting, on the handlebars, his mind throbbing from the force of the psychic blast he'd just been hit with.
"Bugger," he said again.
Straightening up, he restarted the bike, and sped onwards, trying to focus long enough to put up what meagre blocks he could manage against any further psychic assaults.
Vickie turned in her saddle and gunned her own engine, speeding forward toward the biggest challenge of her infant Jedi life. She even felt a little relaxed, safe in the knowledge that her friend wouldn't dare risk another, stronger mental attack.
Mike's smile was tight and almost feral. Not only did he have a technological fix on where Vickie was, now he knew that she hadn't fooled his tracking device. The echoes of her psychic attack rang strongest when he looked due east, exactly where Vickie's homing device was heading. He opened the throttle even further, his coat billowing behind him as he slowly ate up the distance between himself and his apparently unbalanced friend.
If Vickie was going to face trouble, Mike vowed, he'd be there by her side all the way in and back out again.
Hours passed, hours in which the trace on Vickie's bike grew steadily weaker. They had entered an area of rocky ground, and Mike was falling behind, unable to traverse the treacherous terrain as well as his more adept friend. Silently, he cursed his friend for her piloting skills, and for taking the best bike and the hardest route. He wondered if she would hear him.
Not for the first time, he pondered the nature of the link he shared with Vickie and Kelly both. A residue of Project Boussh, it seemed to serve little practical purpose, and yet Mike had often sought comfort in it. He had learned to accept, even enjoy, the faint buzzing sensation he experienced in his hindbrain when one of the twins was using the Force a great deal, or when either was feeling particularly emotional. Both of which Vickie was doing now. Mike couldn't feel Kelly across the galaxies, and he wondered momentarily if the twins could still touch each other's minds.
Up ahead, the trace signal from Vickie's speeder grew a little brighter, and a little brighter still. She had stopped. Mike leaned forward over the handlebars of his bike and opened the throttle, hoping the bike's repulsors would compensate for any rocks he hit.
Vickie hopped off the bike as it slowed to a halt beside the rock outcropping. She looked up at the sky. It was nearing noon and the sun was beating down fiercely. She pushed the bike into a patch of shade and sat down, dropping easily into a meditation pose as she fished one of the bottles of water from her bag.
Relaxing against the rock, she reached out with her senses, trying to find once more the presence she'd felt during the firefight mere hours before.
Instead, she found an oncoming problem that she had thought she had rid herself of. Growling, she jumped to her feet.
Why now? Why, just when she needed to focus, was he coming to distract her?
The homing beacon keened constantly on Mike's sensor as he pulled up alongside Vickie's bike. Looking around, he shut off the device, and dismounted. He scanned the area, or at least as much of it as he could see from within the outcropping. Sourly, he realised he was in a dead end, that in front of him the rocks joined together, and that behind him, something had moved to block out the sun.
"Why did you come after me?" Vickie asked.
Mike rummaged in his bag, before holding a packet of peppermints out.
"Sweets," he said. "If you're going on a long journey, you need sweets to keep your inner child happy."
He turned around to face her, his eyes resting for a fraction of a second on the blaster pistol held loosely in her hand. It was pointed at the ground and, Mike realised, wasn't even armed. The safety catch was locked on, and Mike couldn't help but calculate the chances of a lunge forward ending with him disarming his friend.
He discarded the plan, simply because he knew that Vickie could use telekinesis to pin him to the rock wall before he moved more than a few inches. Instead, he threw the sweets at Vickie's feet.
"Well, you've got your sweets, you've got your water," he said, prodding the bag on the back of her bike. "I guess that's it, unless you had anything you need?"
"No, nothing," she said. "Other than for you to go away. Please. I have to do this, and I can't risk you getting hurt. No-one else is going to get hurt because of something I did, or failed to do, or. . ."
"Okay, first, that's my line," Mike said. "Second, I can look after myself. Third, since when does there get to be a fight without me involved? Fourth, there is no fourth. Fifth, you asked for help against a bunch of thugs but think you can take on a Dark Jedi by yourself? Sixth, if nothing else, we always fight together, V. It's what we do. We work well together. I go high, you go low. I go right, you go left. I'm vanilla, you're mint choc chip. Seventh, how exactly do you plan on going on without a phi-inverted lateral stabiliser on your bike?"
Mike swung, his lightsabre igniting for the barest fraction of a second, before a cauterised lump of metal dropped from the side of Vickie's bike.
Vickie looked at her friend unhappily.
"Oh, Mikie, I didn't want it to come to this," she half-whispered. She waved her hand in front of her, and Mike folded up, dropping slowly to the ground where he immediately began to snore. Vickie checked on him briefly before climbing on to his bike, pausing only to use his sensor device to find and deactivate the homing beacon fixed to the bottom of the luggage rack. She threw a bottle of water at her friend's feet, before gunning the bike to life.
"Sweet dreams," she murmured as she opened up the throttle and rejoined her quest.
The sun was sinking toward the horizon before Mike awoke, much refreshed but also much annoyed. Biting back on the myriad curses that sprang readily to his lips, he stared moodily at the bisected phi-inverted lateral stabiliser nestled in the centre of the bikes engine unit. He dug into his backpack and pulled out a spare he'd drawn from the Red Home's stores. Opening a cloth roll of tools, he began the tedious task of replacing the device, the whole time devising the impassioned tirade he would subject Vickie to the next time he saw her.