The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  They emerged from the staircase into another corridor that was lit only by emergency glowstrips. Corran took three steps from the entry into the hall, then raised a hand, holding it against one wall almost at ceiling height. “It’s here,” he said. “A simple bolt and counterweight. Just give it a tug.”

  Luke reached out with the Force, felt past Corran’s hand, past the wall, to the machinery beyond. A weight suspended from a metal cable; a hole in the center of the weight; a crossbar that passed through the hole. Delicately, he drew the crossbar out of the hole and pulled down on the weight.

  A section of the wall rose smoothly into the ceiling. Light spilled out into the corridor. Beyond the wall section was a medium-sized chamber, tables laden with lit computer screens, wall lockers, four cots. They entered and Luke released his hold on the weight; the wall section slid smoothly into place behind them.

  “How do you do it?” Luke asked. One of Corran’s few weaknesses as a Jedi was his lack of ability with telekinetic disciplines; Corran couldn’t, under most circumstances, operate the crossbar and pull-weight machinery.

  “A backup system. Say Halcyon Endures. That’ll trigger the door. It uses battery power, though. I have a hand-crank device to keep the battery charged.” Corran shrugged. He sat at a chair in front of one of the computer tables and gestured at the items in front of the other chair—the housing and power supply for Luke’s lightsaber.

  “So,” Luke said again. He sat, brought his false glow rod from his bag, and got to work reassembling his weapon.

  “So you know my position. You accept the role and duties of a Jedi, you put the order, and the general good, ahead of planetary interests. Even family interests. Doesn’t mean you cut yourself off from your family or world … just that you recognize that putting personal interests above the greater good basically constitutes maintaining attachments.”

  Luke slid the main lightsaber machinery out of the glow rod housing and set the housing, and the feeble battery that belonged to it, aside. In moments, he had his lightsaber reassembled. He turned it on experimentally, felt the heat from its green blade, and turned it off again. “What about the younger Jedi here?”

  “The ones who aren’t Corellian are fine. Standing by. The Corellians, on the other hand, are … distressed. Distressed at having to remain in hiding, distressed at the fact that the government is trying to recruit them for anti-GA activities, distressed at being considered potential spies and saboteurs. But they’re holding to the Jedi bylaws.”

  “For now.”

  “For now. Let me ask you a favor. Transfer them out of Corellia. Get them out of this environment. Let them do their duty to the order without having to choose between the order and their homes, their families.”

  Luke nodded, not an answer but simply an acknowledgment that he’d heard Corran’s words and recognized their gravity. “And the children?”

  “I … don’t know.” Corran’s face was impassive, but his voice sounded pained. “Taking them offworld would put them even farther from their families. Leaving them here would keep them in a potential danger zone, keep them looking between teachers and family members who represent divided loyalties. What’s the right answer?”

  Luke held out his hands, palms up, a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine gesture. “I think I’ll arrange to get them offworld. Continue their education someplace more neutral. Minimizing the degree of influence their attachments have on them. I’ll make those arrangements today. How many young students do you have?”

  “Only five.”

  “That’s not too bad. And speaking of attachments, Mara’s going to be very unhappy if I don’t have all my facts straight and errands completed before her mission gets under way. If she has to leave in a hurry and I’m not ready to go …” Luke rose. “I’ll see myself out.”

  “May the Force be with you, Master.”

  “And also with you.”

  Mara decided that Thrackan Sal-Solo’s surroundings quite expressively reflected his mentality. He had a bunker mentality; he lived in a bunker. Perhaps he’d had more aesthetic sense and a prettier dwelling in the past, but if so, he had purged that weakness in his personality in recent years.

  Thrackan’s estate, as unlovely as any Mara had ever seen in the possession of a major political figure, was a flat sheet of land a kilometer west of Coronet’s government precincts. A blue clover-like plant grew on the grounds, and nothing else—no trees, no flower beds, no exotic carnivorous plants.

  Toward the center of the estate was its one building, a four-story monstrosity of blue-green painted duracrete. Had the arc of its exterior been more perfect, it would have been a proper dome, but it looked flattened, like a half-buried ball of immense size that had been sat on by a giant and partially compressed.

  There were several doors at ground level, all sideways-sliding slabs of blue-green durasteel, two of them large enough to accommodate speeders, but there were no visible windows. It was said that instead of windows Thrackan had had the exterior riddled with holocams, and each interior room had screens on the walls that would display windo-wlike views from those sensors.

  The estate was ringed by a high, gray duracrete wall—not too high for a Jedi Master to jump, but certainly high enough to silhouette a leaping intruder quite nicely.

  Mara knew, from Intelligence reports, that there were pressure and movement sensors installed at random intervals under the ground cover, that the exterior holocams fed into monitors in Thrackan’s security chamber as well as the decorative wall displays of the rooms, that the complex had its own generators should city power lines be cut, that its water and waste processors were set up so that nothing above the size of a Kowakian monkey-lizard could fit through the pipes and enter from underground.

  Mara had set up on the roof of a building across a broad but lightly traveled avenue from Thrackan’s estate. Ironically, the building, a flat two-story affair whose simple, unmemorable architecture was still far more pleasing than that of Thrackan’s home, was a local precinct house of Corellian Security. It had taken her very little time to scale the exterior and disable the sensors on the roof; now it made an ideal position from which to spy on the estate opposite.

  Team Tauntaun, the Jedi strike team that had invaded Thrackan’s home at the same time Team Purella was attempting to kidnap Prime Minister Saxan, had faced the same difficult task: get inside without being seen. Galactic Alliance Intelligence observers had provided information on the times and routes taken by Thrackan when traveling from the government buildings to his home. Setting up in a drainage culvert on a blind curve on one stretch of that route, the three Jedi—Tahiri Veila, Doran Tainer, and Tiu Zax—had leapt up against the undersides of the groundspeeders in Thrackan’s caravans, tucking themselves between the repulsorlift generators and hanging on by virtue of powerful magnets, and were conveyed into the bunker by Thrackan himself—or so they thought. It swiftly developed that, as with the assault on Prime Minister Saxan’s home, the speeders were loaded with combat droids, the security staffs of the building alerted to the high probability of a Jedi attack.

  Two of the Jedi had fled. The third, Tiu, now waited for nightfall in Thrackan’s home as Mara waited here.

  While the shadows thickened, Mara stretched out not too uncomfortably on the roof’s edge and listened to the conversations of CorSec agents as their words floated out from the windows below her.

  “… say we just take everything we have to Tralus and blow them right out of their beachhead …” “… acceptable losses …” “… not a very popular position, but we don’t really need a full-sized navy …” “… saw Tarania Lona’s new holosquirmer. She has the most …” “… continue to refuse to cooperate, we’re going to have to …” “… if they were true Corellians, they’d never have let themselves be taken alive …”

  Full darkness fell, and a tiny green dot appeared halfway up the squashed dome of Thrackan’s home. It remained there for half a minute and then disappeared.

  Ma
ra checked to make sure her lightsaber and other equipment were in place. Then she rolled over the lip of the roof and fell two stories to the sidewalk, landing as lightly as a leaf fluttering to the ground.

  She held herself in a crouch, her dark robes making her all but invisible, and waited until there was no speeder cross-traffic to be seen. She came up out of her crouch like a sprinter and was across the avenue and up against the base of the featureless duracrete wall a moment later. A quick flex of the legs and boost of the Force and she was atop that wall—

  Not quite. She did not allow herself to come down on the walltop. It, too, was said to have pressure sensors on its walkway and would reveal her presence if she did so. Instead, she caught herself with the Force, creating a bubble between her and the top of the wall, and drifted just over that surface until she was above the blue clover on the far side.

  It was time to be a Jedi instead of a spy. As a spy, she’d probably have fixed a line thrower to the top of the CorSec building, launched a driller projectile, trailing a nearly invisible cable, to affix itself to the top of Thrackan’s dome, and used a powered or hand-cranked winch to carry her the quarter kilometer from rooftop to rooftop … and even so, her chances of detection would have been very high. Instead, she carried almost no equipment, and her chances of detection would be determined by her own concentration.

  She allowed herself to float down to stand just above the blue clover. The bubble of Force energy that kept her aloft was easier to maintain when she was mere centimeters above the surface—merely having the mental image, the paradigm, of it as a sort of air-filled balloon improved her ability to perceive it, to maintain it. She’d need to employ all the concentration tricks she knew, because what she was about to do was very tricky.

  At the base of the wall, she stood a moment, eyes closed, and focused on the other things she’d have to do to cross two hundred meters of sensor-filled open space.

  Air. She could not keep air from moving, of course. As she moved, she would displace it. But she added motion to the air she displaced, so that it moved out in a single stream, losing neither speed nor coherence for dozens of meters ahead of her. To a sensor, it would read not as the movement of a person across the lawn, but as a breeze.

  Heat. That would be the trickiest part. If she radiated heat, infrared sensors would inevitably pick it up. She surrounded herself with another bubble, this one of containment … and immediately felt her temperature begin to rise as the heat she expended stayed within centimeters of her skin. She could even control herself to the point that she did not sweat, and would need to do so here—but that, too, would increase her internal temperature.

  She couldn’t sustain the effect of heat entrapment for long; she would end up collapsing. But she should be able to sustain it long enough to cross the open space between wall and bunker … and in that time, infrared detectors would not see her.

  Probably.

  She stepped forward, concentrating on the act of walking, reminding herself that the movement of her legs was only a comforting paradigm—levitating in some other pose would require more of her attention. Each step felt a bit wobbly, as though she were moving across a flexible playground surface, but she fell into a regular pace and let her muscle memory do the work for her.

  Yes, any Jedi Knight might know one of these three techniques—most commonly, the technique of levitation. But only a Jedi Master was likely to know all three or be able to sustain them simultaneously across such a broad distance.

  Mara bumped her nose into something hard and stopped. Immediately ahead of her was uniform grayness.

  She looked up along the curved surface of the bunker wall. And only a Jedi Master is likely to become so focused that she walks into a wall, she told herself.

  She swayed where she stood, suddenly dizzy from the heat. Come on, Tiu, she thought. You should have detected me by now—

  A cord, millimeters thick, transparent and almost invisible in the darkness, fell across her face. Hurriedly, she grasped at it, wrapped it around her waist three times, and gave it a tug.

  It hauled at her and she walked up the wall, her arms trembling and legs increasingly faltering as the heat threatened to overwhelm her. An eternity later, she was ten meters up the wall and a wedge-shaped slit in the duracrete surface beckoned her. She stepped into darkness, dropped a meter to a hard floor, and landed badly, collapsing to the floor as her legs failed.

  She released the heat entrapment and felt the built-up energy flow away from her. With her last bit of strength, she held her control over the surrounding air long enough to send much of that heat streaming out through the slit in the wall, even as the slit slid closed. And then she burst into a sweat, a sudden head-to-toe sheen that felt like heavy motor oil against her skin.

  In the darkness, a female voice said, “Goodness. You smell like a rancor after a footrace.”

  Mara smiled weakly. “That’s no way to greet a Master. And you’ve never smelled a rancor after a footrace.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  There was a click, and brilliant light from overhead blinded Mara; she raised an arm over her eyes.

  As her vision settled, she could see she was in a tight chamber, narrower against the bunker exterior wall but long. It was dominated by a neutral-blue flying craft, a tubular vehicle like a starfighter but with abbreviated fins instead of maneuvering wings; its canopy, which opened at the rear instead of forward, was up.

  At the far end of the chamber, beside a circular hatch a meter in diameter, stood Tiu Zax, with her hand on a control panel mounted on the wall. Short of stature—she stood a centimeter shorter than Leia, and was lean like most of her kind—she had pale blue skin, hair so pale that it seemed translucent, and delicate features dominated by eyes that seemed oversized. She wore the black pants and tunic of her Jedi outfit; her boots, belt, and cloak were not in evidence.

  Mara struggled to a sitting position. Though tired and still flushed with heat, she felt much better already. “What is this place?”

  “A secret escape chamber.” Tiu came forward and reached up into the vehicle’s cockpit, pressing dashboard controls without looking. A side panel on the craft popped open; inside, Mara could see bundled clothing, packaged field rations, items she couldn’t make out. Tiu reached for one of them and came forward to hand it to Mara; it was a transparisteel canteen. “I think there are four of them in this building, but I haven’t gotten at all of them. The entry is concealed on the other side. This and the other one I found both had two-person escape vehicles in them.”

  “That’s very Thrackan-ish.” Mara took the canteen, unscrewed the cap, and took a long drink of its contents—water, tasting slightly of its storage in a metal container. “So, first: Master Skywalker says ‘Good work’ on your staying here like this.”

  Tiu beamed.

  “Second—your report?”

  Tiu sat down, cross-legged. “The short form? I’ve been here several days, have figured out how to patch a datapad into their internal holocam system and beep my comlink whenever the area I’m in is about to fall under active observation. I’ve dived under more tables recently than you can possibly imagine.”

  Mara grinned and took another drink.

  “Sal-Solo isn’t spending much time here,” Tiu continued. “Which has given me several opportunities to enter his personal quarters. I’ve found equipment there I think is a master control set for this building’s security and communications computers, but they’re too well defended for me. They apparently require Sal-Solo’s biometric identification, which I didn’t think to bring.”

  “I did.” Mara patted one of the pouches beneath her robes. “What else?”

  Tiu shrugged. “I’ve mapped out as much of this building as I’ve been able to visit, but I’ve concentrated more on not being discovered. Which is tricky, as Sal-Solo seems to be very paranoid, and has security agents with mentalities to match his. I don’t think I’ve been that effective.”

  “You’ve been
very effective. But I think we’ve asked all we can of you here. You’ll be leaving with me.”

  Tiu smiled again and mimed a sigh of relief.

  “All right,” Mara said. “I’m going to rest for a while—until whatever time you think is best for a visit to Thrackan’s quarters. That’s when we go to work.”

  chapter twenty-three

  Two YVH combat droids led Han and Leia along the curved hallway. Only a third of the glow rods in the ceiling were activated, and the shadows in the hallway were deep. Most of the doors from the hall were on the right wall; an occasional door or side passage led away to the left.

  Marching in lockstep unison, the droids came to a halt before one of the right-hand doors. One of them gestured at it, doubtless transmitting a security code, and it slid up.

  The droids waited. Leia and Han exchanged a look. Han shrugged, and they entered.

  The chamber beyond was spacious and airy. The far wall was mostly transparisteel, looking down on a larger chamber; from the doorway, Han and Leia could see the far wall but not the floor of that chamber. That chamber seemed to be circular and ringed by viewing chambers like this one; it was dimly lit like the hallway.

  The chamber they stood in was completely unlit; its only illumination came in through the transparisteel wall and the door, and the latter source of light vanished as the door slid closed behind them.

  There were chairs and couches scattered throughout the chamber, including a line of high-backed swivel chairs set against the transparisteel wall, and one of them now rotated so that its occupant faced Han and Leia. It was a male human. The dimness made it difficult to make out the man’s features, but he seemed to be dark-haired, with handsome but rather bland features; he wore garments that were similar to Han’s in cut and style, but all in red and brown hues and topped by a long-sleeved military-style tunic, unfastened along the front seam for its wearer’s comfort.

  He rose. “Captain Solo. Princess Organa. I’m glad to meet you at last.”