by Timothy Zahn
Ten minutes after arriving at the turbolift lobby they were suited up and ready to go. One of the Chiss guided them up the broken turbolift tube to the sealant tent and field air lock that the Chaf Envoy’s crew had installed, then escorted them over the rough terrain of the planetoid’s surface to the docking bay where the Delta-12 was waiting.
Thirty minutes later, after a quick test of the control systems and a final diagnostic check, Luke eased the Skysprite out of the docking bay and turned its nose upward.
“You ever ride in anything like this?” he asked as they drove toward the brilliant starscape.
“No,” Mara said, unsealing one of the self-heating food packets Jinzler and the Outbound Flight techs had put aboard for them. “According to Jinzler, Kuat sold the Delta line around forty years ago to Sienar Systems. They got most of the starfighter contracts under Palpatine, and they either built the hyperdrive into the hull or left it out completely.”
“Like with the old TIE fighters,” Luke said, his stomach growling as he sniffed at the aromas rising from the packet. Karkan ribenes with tomo-spice; one of his favorite meals. Mara must have had a hand in the menu arrangements. “I never thought the TIE design made much sense.”
Mara shrugged as she laid out the tray of ribenes, set a golden plaitfruit beside it, and pulled out two bottles of flavored water. “They were cheap to make, and Palpatine didn’t mind spending pilots. Lunch is served. Dig in.”
Luke set at the meal with enthusiasm, tearing the ribenes off the slab and devouring them right down to the bone, alternating with bites of the plaitfruit. It had been a long time since he’d eaten, and healing trances were always hard on energy reserves. Mara took a couple of the smaller ribenes, but from the way she nibbled at them it was clear she must have already eaten aboard Outbound Flight and was simply being companionable.
Midway through the meal the control board pinged with the announcement that the Skysprite had reached the edge of the planetoid’s gravity well. Mara keyed in the hyperdrive, and with a flash of starlines they were off.
They chatted about inconsequential things as they ate, mostly just enjoying the chance to spend a few minutes of tranquility together. Luke finished off the ribenes and plaitfruit, and Mara produced a pair of choclime twists for dessert. “So,” she commented as Luke bit into his. “When are you going to tell me about that deep revelation back in the recovery room?”
“Nothing deep or surprising,” he told her, savoring the sweet tang. “It was just a random thought.”
“Such as?” she asked, taking a bite of her twist.
“Such as, why should we settle for just warning the Brask Oto station?” he said. “Dreadnaughts might not have been known for speed, but they were known for toughness, and I doubt Thrawn took out all the weapons in his attack. Even if the station is alerted, it’s going to have a hard time taking both a Dreadnaught and a Vagaari battle carrier.”
“Agreed,” Mara said. “So option two is?”
He smiled at her. “We intercept the Dreadnaught en route, get aboard, and take it back ourselves.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Just the two of us?”
Luke shrugged. “They won’t be expecting it, that’s for sure.”
“No, it sounds too crazy even for us,” Mara agreed dryly. “Any particular ideas on how we would get aboard without them noticing and massing fire against us?”
“Already taken care of,” Luke assured her. “Back when Evlyn and I were retreating down the pylon, I threw my lightsaber into one of the D-Four turbolift doors, opening it to space. Assuming the local blast doors are working, that should have isolated the whole lobby area from the rest of the ship. We maneuver this thing into what’s left of the pylon, go inside, reseal the hole I cut, repressurize, and we’re in.”
“Great,” Mara said. “Then all we have to do is cut our way through two hundred Vagaari soldiers and take over the ship.”
“Something like that,” Luke agreed. “You game?”
Mara shrugged. “Sure, why not? I didn’t have anything else planned for after lunch.”
“Good,” Luke said, wiping his fingers and mouth with his napkin and dropping it into the empty ribene container. “Then all we have to do is plot out our intercept point, maybe use some Jedi navigation technique to make up a little more time, and we’ll be in.”
“Right,” Mara said, slipping the last half of her choclime twist back into its wrapper and resealing it. “Except that I’ll be doing all that. Your job right now is to finish healing.”
Luke grimaced. But she was right. “Fine,” he said with a theatrical sigh as he adjusted his chair to horizontal position. “You always get all the fun stuff.”
“I know,” Mara said sweetly. “And I appreciate you indulging me that way. Now, go to sleep.”
“Okay.” Luke took a deep breath and stretched out to the Force. “Just don’t forget to wake me when we get there.”
“You’ll be the first to know,” she promised. “Pleasant dreams.”
His last view before the darkness of the healing trance folded over him was of her red-gold hair shimmering in the light as she bent over the navigation console.
CHAPTER 24
“I love you.”
Luke jerked slightly as he came out of his healing trance. “Are we there?” he asked, working moisture into his mouth.
“We’re there,” she confirmed. “More importantly, so is our wayward Dreadnaught. It came into the system about fifteen minutes ago and is angling around the star to get into position for the next jump. It should be crossing our bow in about half an hour.”
Luke peered out the canopy at the asteroid Mara had settled the Skysprite beside. “Nice location,” he complimented her. “How’d you manage to sneak in without them spotting you?”
“Actually, we were a little ahead of them,” Mara told him. “They weren’t anywhere in sight, so I gambled that they hadn’t picked up an hour or two somewhere along the way and settled in to wait.”
“Good,” Luke said, stretching again and bringing his seat back to a sitting position. “Where exactly are we?”
“Well, that’s the bad news,” Mara admitted. “We’re only another hour or two outside the Brask Oto Command Station. If we let them get back into hyperspace, we’re going to be pushing it to take back the ship in time.”
“Okay, so it’ll be a challenge,” Luke said, offhandedly. “I think we can handle it.”
Mara frowned suspiciously at him. “You’re not going all super-Jedi on me, are you?”
Luke gave her an innocent look. “Me?”
“Skywalker—” she said warningly.
He grinned once, then sobered. “No, of course not,” he assured her. “I just don’t think they’re going to put up that much resistance, that’s all. We pretty well proved aboard Outbound Flight that we can take them.”
“We proved it to the ones who didn’t survive,” Mara pointed out. “I’m not convinced Bearsh and Estosh will have gotten the message. You’re not really expecting them to just surrender, are you?”
“No, not really,” Luke said regretfully. “But I don’t think their troops will just stand there and get themselves slaughtered, either. If we can push them back to the bridge, I’m going to offer Estosh a deal: we’ll let him and his people leave the Dreadnaught, get back into their carrier, and leave in peace.”
“Under Chiss escort, of course,” Mara said. “And if he doesn’t go for it?”
Luke grimaced. “Then we’ll just have to take them out.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Mara said. “Come on; you’ve got just enough time for a quick snack before we have to get ready.”
They were in their vac suits and back at their chosen control boards when the Dreadnaught appeared around the side of the asteroid. It was, Luke noted, nearly five minutes ahead of Mara’s estimate. Estosh was apparently pushing the ancient ship for all it was worth.
“Okay,” he muttered, watching the huge mass of metal lumber past
and trying to gauge the best moment to swing out of their partial concealment. The massive sublight engines blazed into view—
He threw power to the Skysprite’s drive, blasting them away from the asteroid on a vector paralleling the Dreadnaught’s course. Keeping them clear of the larger ship’s ion emissions, he swung them around the starboard side and underneath. The stumps of the four broken turbolift pylons looked like sections of a model maker’s mounting stand in the light from the distant star. “Anything?” he asked as he swung toward the aft-portside tube.
“No course twitching; nothing tracking us,” Mara reported. “Of course, the aft sensors are the ones the Colonists would probably have skipped if they hadn’t felt like fixing everything.”
“Or they may just have skipped the point-defense weaponry back here,” Luke reminded her, easing up to the shattered end of the pylon for a closer look. It didn’t look like there was going to be enough room for him to lift the Skysprite straight upward, canopy-first, as he would into a standard docking bay.
But if he rotated the ship ninety degrees, standing it on its drive nozzles and taking it in nose-first. . .
“I hope,” Mara said, “that you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
“I am,” Luke said. “Hang on.”
He gave the engines a burst of power, pushing the small craft ahead a dozen meters along the Dreadnaught’s underside. Then, shutting down the main drive, he shifted power to the forward-ventral maneuvering jets, pitching the Skysprite’s nose upward. The pylon stump slid past, and he fired one final burst from the main drive, running them straight upward into the tube.
To the accompaniment of a horrendous screech of torn metal.
Luke fought back a wince as he activated the forward landing claw, firing it past the turbolift cars to a more solid connection with the wall. “Was that the hyperdrive ring?” he asked as he took in the cable slack, winching the Skysprite another couple of meters into the pylon.
“Let’s just say we’d better not need a quick exit,” Mara said. “Aside from that, it was a classy maneuver.”
“Thanks,” Luke said, shutting the Skysprite’s systems back to standby and making sure his vac suit was sealed. “At least we don’t have to wonder whether or not they heard us coming. Grab the sealant kit and let’s go.”
The Skysprite’s canopy was, fortunately, reasonably flat, and they were able to get it open in the cramped space without having to cut their way out. Working his way up the landing claw cable, Luke maneuvered between the parked turbolift cars to that last-second gash he’d carved with his thrown lightsaber and squeezed through it.
The damage turned out to be even more impressive than he’d expected. The lightsaber handle had apparently bumped the top of the door a fraction of a second before the blade had closed down, swinging it up and nicking a small hole in the lobby ceiling.
“Nice,” Mara said, nodding to the latter as she handed Luke the sealant kit through the opening and then eased her own way through it. “You cut off not only the turbolift lobby, but a section of the next deck up, too. Anything up there they would have particularly missed?”
“Just the next turbolift lobby up,” Luke said, looking around. His lightsaber was lying over in a corner beside four dead Vagaari who had been in the wrong place when the Dreadnaught broke free and the lobby depressurized. The blast doors that had reacted to the emergency were about five meters away down each of the three corridors leading away from the lobby. “I think one of the aft electronics supply rooms is just down the corridor from it, though, and a droid maintenance facility is off in the other direction,” he added, starting across the lobby. “Depending on which blast doors reacted up there, either or both of those might have been locked away from them, too.”
Mara grunted. “It would have been a lot simpler if none of them had worked,” she pointed out, taking the sealant kit back from him and opening it. “Then the whole ship would have depressurized, and they’d all have died right then and there.”
“Which they obviously didn’t, since the ship is still under power,” Luke pointed out, retrieving his lightsaber and taking a quick look at the alien bodies.
“I didn’t say I believed it,” Mara said. “I just said it would have been simpler. Anyone we know?”
“Nope,” Luke said, experimentally igniting the lightsaber. The green-white blade flashed to existence with gratifying strength. “Good,” he said, closing it down again and hooking it onto his belt next to Lorana’s. “I was afraid the activator might have stuck on and drained all the power. You need any help?”
“No, I’ve got it,” Mara said, unfolding the patch to the proper size and starting to seal its edges around the gash. “You just stand there and be ready for trouble. They may try to pull something cute even before we get the lobby repressurized.”
“Right.” Moving to the blast door blocking the corridor leading forward, he stretched out to the Force. There were alien minds in that direction, he could tell, and a high degree of maliciousness. But that was all he could read. Holding his lightsaber ready, he waited.
No attack had come by the time Mara finished laying out the patch and checking its integrity. “Ready?” Luke asked as she packed the kit away.
“Ready,” Mara confirmed. “You sure you don’t want to use the emergency oxygen tanks to repressurize? It would let us get out of these suits before we have to do any serious fighting.”
Luke looked over at the red-rimmed emergency cabinet fastened to the side wall with its collection of oxygen tanks, sealant kits, and medpacs. “I’d rather leave that in reserve,” he told her. “Depending on how much of a fight the Vagaari put up, we may wind up needing extra oxygen somewhere else along the line.”
“Okay.” Igniting her own lightsaber, she took up a ready stance a couple of meters in front of the blast doors. “Remember, just nick it. Enough to let the air in but not enough to trigger anything they might have on the other side.”
“Right.” Standing as far off to the side as he could, feeling awkward in the confines of his vac suit, Luke jabbed the end of the green-white blade through one corner of the thick door.
There was a sudden hissing noise, and a stream of air began to blow in through the opening, its edges swirling white as water vapor condensed and froze in the vacuum. He glanced at the atmosphere tester on his vac suit, wondering if the Vagaari might have tried poisoning the air on this deck. But there was nothing. A minute later the whistling faded away as the pressures equalized.
“Anything?” Mara asked.
Luke checked the tester again. “Looks clear,” he said.
“Good.” Laying her lightsaber on the deck, Mara popped her helmet and started stripping off the vac suit. “I hate trying to move in these things. Watch for company, will you?”
A minute later she was finished. A minute after that, both vac suits were off and piled neatly back near the turbolift doors. “Here we go,” Luke commented as Mara took up a stance a couple of meters back from the blast door, her lightsaber humming in front of her. “Let’s see what the Vagaari have come up with.”
Reaching out with the Force, he keyed the control. Ponderously, the blast doors began to slide back into the walls.
And from a dozen standing and kneeling Vagaari five meters back came a withering hail of blasterfire.
Luke was ready, keying the doors instantly closed again as Mara scattered away the shots that had made it in. “Well, that answers that question,” she commented.
“Partially, anyway,” Luke corrected. “Did you happen to notice the little flat boxes lying along the sides of the walls?”
She shook her head. “Observation was your job,” she reminded him. “My job was staying alive.”
“Right,” Luke said. “Anyway, they were just like the little gray boxes they used to mine the turbolift, except that these were white.”
“White?” Mara frowned, then nodded. “Of course—repainted to blend in with the corridor walls. How many
were there?”
“I didn’t get an actual count,” Luke said, studying the image in his memory. “But they were spaced a meter or two apart and ran all the way down to where the corridor jogs to the right.”
“Cute,” Mara said. “So the next time we open the blast doors, we’ll probably see the Vagaari in full retreat. We’ll chase them, watching for blaster shots, and whoever’s handling the detonators will have his choice of when to blow us to bits.”
“Something like that,” Luke said, looking at the ceiling above them. “What do you think? We go up?”
“They’ll probably have something ready up there, too,” Mara said, her voice and sense suddenly thoughtful. “After all, they’ve seen what lightsabers can do.”
“You have an idea?” Luke prompted.
She favored him with an evil smile. “What they haven’t seen is this,” she said. Letting go of her lightsaber, she levitated it in front of her.
“Okay,” Luke said. “So?”
Mara’s reply was a twitch of her head back toward the turbolift lobby. Frowning, Luke followed. She stepped to the Vagaari bodies in the corner and, stretching out to the Force, levitated one of them upright. Focusing her control, she moved its arms and legs, keeping it a couple of centimeters above the floor, making it stride rather shakily across the lobby as if it was still alive.
Or, rather, as if he and Mara had put on their enemies’ armor as a disguise.
She lifted her eyebrows questioningly. “Doesn’t look all that realistic,” he pointed out doubtfully, levitating one of the other bodies for himself and sending it across the deck. His didn’t look any more alive than hers did. “But if we keep them moving, the Vagaari may not notice.”
“I think it’s worth a try, anyway,” Mara said.
“Definitely,” he agreed. “Let’s do it.”
Moving their puppets to the blast doors, they settled them into standing position. “Quickly, now,” Mara said, crouching down beside the wall where her presence wouldn’t be immediately obvious. “We don’t want anyone getting a clear look.”
