by Timothy Zahn
Two minutes later, with both helmets removed and both shoulder pieces in place, LaRone and Marcross were ready to go. “Double-check the helmets,” Jade ordered as she handed them over. “Make sure I got it right.”
Marcross nodded and slid the helmet over his head. A few seconds of listening to the palace security chatter was all it took. “Yes, we’re in,” he confirmed, locking the helmet securely to his collar. “But it doesn’t sound like we’re on the same system as the gate guards.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem—you’ll be talking to them in person anyway,” Jade reminded him, giving each of their shoulder pieces a final check. “Put these two in that storeroom over there to sleep off the sonic—I’ve already sliced the lock for you. Then plug in your private frequency and make sure Brightwater and the others are in position in case we need a fast breakout. Which of you has it?”
“I do,” Marcross said, reaching behind him and tapping the cylindrical thermal detonator at the small of his back. It was slightly but noticeably longer than the standard stormtrooper version, which in LaRone’s opinion made it as much a potential threat to them as their robe-covered armor had been earlier.
As usual, Jade had waved away his fears, contending that the same familiarity that kept citizens from noting anything subtly different on familiar streets would likewise keep stormtroopers from noticing subtle differences on their even more familiar armor.
She’d been right about the robe. LaRone hoped she was right about the thermal detonator pack, too.
“Good,” Jade said, handing a small, flat disk to LaRone. “Here’s the sonic. If you need to use it, remember that you need to slip it up beneath the helmet rim, double-circle-side inward, and squeeze the edge.”
“Right,” LaRone said. She’d gone through this twice with them all the previous night, but it never hurt to double- and triple-check with unfamiliar weapons.
“When will we know when to move?” Marcross asked.
“Just keep listening,” Jade said, opening her brown robe the rest of the way to reveal a loose blue-and-silver ankle-length dress underneath. “Trust me, you’ll know. And don’t be late.”
She went over to the side of the alley, dropping the robe and picking up a small bag lying among the bits of garbage there. With the bag tucked under her arm, she strode briskly away.
“What do you think?” Marcross asked quietly.
LaRone grimaced behind his faceplate. “So far she’s been right about everything,” he said.
Marcross grunted. “Let’s just hope we’re in a position to collect the pieces if she starts not being right. Come on, let’s get these guys out of sight.”
Landspeeder theft was a serious business in the Empire, particularly out here on the edges where vehicles—especially decent ones—were scarcer than on the older and more populous worlds. One of the results was that theft protection systems, while less sophisticated than those on Imperial Center, were employed much more consistently.
Not that security systems of any sort made much of a difference to Mara Jade.
She had already walked through the neighborhood earlier that morning and found what she needed: an open-topped landspeeder like the one the teenager had been driving yesterday, conveniently parked along a quiet side street. Mara had it unlocked and started in thirty seconds, and drove off to her chosen insertion point a kilometer from the palace gate. Setting the landspeeder on idle, she pulled a wide-brimmed hat from her bag, unfolded it, and put it on, stuffing most of her red-gold hair inside. The bag’s other item, the controller to the toy airspeeder, went onto the passenger seat, with the empty bag laid casually over it.
The next phase of the plan, unfortunately, wasn’t under her direct control. She had to wait for another open-topped vehicle to come by, traveling in the proper direction, with a driver and no other passengers who might slant the witness reports.
But the Force was with her. Five minutes after settling down she spotted the perfect vehicle approaching from behind: a low-backed speeder truck with an open cab. She waited until it passed, then pulled smoothly into the traffic flow directly behind it.
Ahead, the spur leading to the palace gate was coming up fast. Stretching out in the Force, Mara got a grip on the speeder truck’s wheel. As the truck reached the spur, she wrenched the wheel hard over, sending the truck careening onto the short road heading for the gate. A second later, as she also reached the spur, she spun her own wheel and headed in after him.
The truck driver managed to overcome his stunned surprise at his vehicle’s erratic behavior and brake before he hit the gate. He had barely enough time to heave a sigh of relief when Mara slammed full-tilt into his rear crash plate, the impact lurching the truck another three meters forward.
Yesterday’s landspeeder incident had been a perplexing but isolated event. Today’s, though, made it part of a pattern, and Mara knew how security forces were trained to react to patterns. She’d barely shut down her engine when she and the trucker were both swarmed by guards, both the livery-wearing group and a dozen stormtroopers who streamed briskly out through the personnel door by the main gate.
One of the liveried guards got to Mara first. “Hands in the air,” he ordered, his blaster steady on her chest as he jogged up to the side of her stolen speeder.
“I didn’t do this,” Mara protested as she raised her hands. “My wheel just turned. All by itself.”
“Sure it did,” the guard growled, gesturing with his free hand. “Come on—out.”
A minute later Mara was standing beside the landspeeder, her hands still raised, watching yet more stormtroopers emerge from the palace compound. The speeder truck driver was also standing beside his vehicle, a similar crowd of security personnel gathered around him as he stuttered the same story Mara had already given her group.
“I tell you, this wasn’t my fault,” Mara went on, watching the liveried guard’s face as his helmet comlink murmured into his ear. There was a slight hardening of his expression. “Look, I’m late for a very important meeting,” she added, starting to edge along the side of the vehicle. “You can keep my speeder and check it for yourself—I’ll come back for it later.”
“Stay where you are!” the guard snapped, taking a long step to cut off her escape. “You’re not the registered owner of this vehicle.”
“Yes, thank you, I know that,” Mara said in a tone of exaggerated patience. “It belongs to my friend Carolle. Go ahead and call her—she’ll tell you she let me borrow it.”
“There she is,” a flat stormtrooper vocoder voice came from the right.
Mara turned. LaRone and Marcross were marching toward her clump of guards, their gait and postures stiff and determined. “Hold that woman—we saw her shoplifting from an electronics store.”
“An electronics store?” the guard echoed, frowning as he shifted his gaze from Mara to the landspeeder itself.
“That’s ridiculous,” Mara insisted, mentally crossing her fingers as she watched the guard’s eyes move methodically around the passenger compartment. If necessary, LaRone or Marcross could perform the next step, but it would be better if an official palace security man figured it out on his own. “He’s lying. I’ve never stolen a thing in my life.”
“Quiet,” the guard ordered as his eyes fell on the crumpled bag lying casually on the front passenger seat. “Watch her,” he ordered the stormtroopers, and walked around the rear of the landspeeder to the passenger side. Carefully, he lifted the bag, revealing the controller for the toy airspeeder Mara had bought yesterday. “What’s this?” he asked.
“How should I know?” Mara countered. “I told you, I borrowed it from my friend.”
“Uh-huh.” The guard picked up the controller and turned it over in his hand, studying the controls and peering suspiciously at the extra electronic components Mara had attached randomly to the top and sides. He set his fingers on the controls, glancing quickly at Mara to see her reaction. Mara kept her face expressionless, stretching out with the Force.
Tentatively, the guard moved one of the controls.
And in perfect sync, Mara twitched the speeder truck’s control wheel.
The guard’s head jerked hard toward the truck. So did the truck driver’s and several of the troopers guarding him. “I didn’t do that,” the driver protested frantically.
“I did,” Mara’s guard called to them, holding up the controller and pointing to Mara. “Binders. Now.”
One of the stormtroopers stepped forward, pulling a set of binders from one of his utility pouches. “And hobble her,” the guard added. “This one’s something special.”
A moment later Mara’s hands were shackled in front of her and her ankles were fastened together by twenty centimeters of chain. “You two: take her to interrogation,” the guard said, pointing at two of the palace stormtroopers. “And take this to the lab,” he added, handing the controller to one of the other stormtroopers.
“We’ll take her,” LaRone offered, taking a step forward.
“They’ll do it,” the guard said. “You’re on patrol.”
“Our arrest,” LaRone said firmly. “We’ll take her in.”
The guard glared at him. But he’d probably had enough experience with stormtroopers to know that they were just as ambitious as any other military professionals. Denying them the chance to add a glowing entry to their service record would make him a couple of enemies, and no one wanted that. “Fine—you can go along,” he growled. “But I won’t be answerable to your commander if you get in trouble for being off your patrol.”
They set off toward the gate, the palace stormtroopers walking in front of Mara, LaRone and Marcross walking behind her. It was a slightly awkward processional, given the hobble’s limitation on Mara’s usually longer stride. But by the time they reached the gate and shifted to single file to get through the door, she’d accustomed herself to the new rhythm.
She hadn’t been able to see into the grounds yesterday, but she’d assumed at the time that Ferrouz would have doubled or tripled the standard palace guard. Now, as she and her escort headed down the walkway, she discovered that, if anything, she’d underestimated the governor’s level of caution. There were at least thirty stormtroopers patrolling the area, including several pairs of the speeder scouts that she’d also seen guarding the approaches to the white-stone mound towering over the palace.
It was just as well, Mara reflected, that she hadn’t tried to get in by simply breaching the wall.
The main palace doors were large and elaborate, with the same decorative pattern that she’d seen on the entry gate. But suspected spies and saboteurs apparently weren’t given such elegant treatment. Her stormtrooper escort instead angled off toward a smaller side door, half hidden among a stand of sculpted bushes. As they approached, the door opened and three men stepped outside to meet them, all three wearing the gray uniforms Mara had seen yesterday. The oldest of the three, who Mara could now see was wearing a major’s insignia, was the middle-aged man who’d come out of the courtyard during yesterday’s incident to interrogate the teenager.
“As you were,” the major said as Mara and her escort came up to him. “We’ll take it from here.”
“We have to make a report,” LaRone said firmly.
“Then go make it,” the major said, his eyes narrowing as he studied Mara. “I remember you. You were at the tapcaf across the street yesterday when that other landspeeder tried to crash the gate.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Mara said stiffly.
“Of course not,” the major said, looking back at the stormtroopers. “I said you were dismissed. Return to your assigned duties.”
“Sir—” LaRone began.
“Take her,” the major ordered, gesturing to his two men as he turned his back on the stormtroopers.
Mara half turned toward LaRone, inclined her head microscopically toward the bushes clustered around them. Then, as the two gray-suited guards took her upper arms, she let them guide her to the open door. The major stepped aside to let them pass and then followed, sealing the door behind them with a data-card–sized passkey.
The palace floor plans that the Emperor had sent Mara hadn’t included any listing of interrogation rooms or holding cells—hardly surprising, given that such facilities weren’t supposed to exist in high-level governmental residences. It was usually up to each individual local ruler to make whatever quiet and strictly unofficial arrangements he chose in that area.
Mara had seen many such facilities over the years, ranging from deep, terrifying dungeons to light, airy containment rooms designed to lull prisoners into a relaxed sense of false hope. But such minor details apart, the one thing all interrogation specialists had in common was the desire to keep their activities as secret and unobserved as possible.
This one was no exception. The hallway Mara found herself in was short, unoccupied, and without any doors at all lining the sides. Besides the door they’d entered by, there was only a single turbolift door twenty meters away at the hallway’s far end. It was the perfect place for a prisoner to disappear, possibly never to be heard from again.
It was also the perfect place for that same prisoner to make her escape.
Mara let them walk her halfway down the hall, giving the palace stormtroopers outside plenty of time to start back to their posts and hopefully be out of earshot of anything that happened in here. Then, looking down at the binders on her wrists, she used the Force to pop them free. As they clattered to the floor, she reached over to the blaster of the guard to her left and fired the weapon, still in its holster, along his right leg.
And as he bellowed in surprise and pain, she yanked the blaster from its holster and swung it hard against the throat of the man to her right. She continued her turn as he collapsed to the floor, bringing the weapon to bear on the major only now beginning to react behind her. “Don’t,” she warned.
The major froze, his hand on his still holstered blaster, his face tight. “You can’t escape,” he warned, his voice under rigid control.
“Maybe I don’t want to,” Mara said. The guard whose leg she’d shot started to stagger toward her, and she shifted her aim away from the major just long enough to slam the side of her blaster across the guard’s throat, sending him sprawling to the floor the way she had the other one. “Maybe I like living here,” she added, bringing the weapon back to the major. “How about you?”
The major snarled something under his breath. But he was smart enough to know when further resistance would be a waste of his life. Still glaring, he lifted his hands and put them on his head.
“Thank you,” Mara said. Dropping her aim, she blasted through the hobble chain linking her ankles. “Blaster and comlink on the floor.”
Gingerly, the major drew his blaster with two fingers and lowered it to the floor beside him, following it up with his comlink. “Now your passkey,” Mara continued.
“It won’t do you any good,” the major growled as he dropped the passkey beside the other items. “Governor Ferrouz doesn’t rely on locks and droid sentinels. You’ll never get to him—never. And you certainly won’t get out of the palace alive.”
“I appreciate the warning,” Mara said. “Two steps back and lie down on your stomach, face to the wall.”
Glowering, he obeyed. Mara picked up the passkey and retraced her steps to the door they’d entered through. Slipping the passkey into the slot, she keyed the release.
The door slid open. “LaRone?” she called softly, her eyes still on the major.
There was a breath of air, and the two stormtroopers slipped through the doorway into the corridor. “You all right?” LaRone asked. “We heard a shot.”
“I’m fine,” Mara assured him. “Give me the sonic—this blaster doesn’t have a stun setting.”
LaRone handed it over, and Mara headed back to the major. A minute later all three gray-suited men were asleep.
“Well, this looks nicely ominous,” Marcross commented as Mara returned to them. “One exit
, no doors, no monitors.”
“Typical interrogation center entrance,” Mara said, gesturing for him to turn around. “Consider yourself lucky you haven’t seen one before.”
“What happens now?” LaRone asked. “I hope you’re not thinking of trying that turbolift.”
“Hardly,” Mara said, unfastening the endcap of Marcross’s oversized thermal detonator casing and pulling out the lightsaber she’d concealed inside the empty shell. “Interrogation turbolifts typically only have two stops, and we’re already at the less unpleasant of them. Is there anywhere out there you can hang around for a while without being challenged?”
“There’s a guard station just north of the main gate,” LaRone said. “Or we could just pretend we’re one of the patrol teams. I doubt anyone will challenge us.”
“At least not right away,” Marcross added. “Eventually, someone’s bound to notice that their stormtrooper count is off.”
“If and when that happens, tell them Major Pakrie said he wanted you on courtyard patrol,” Mara said, squinting at the name on her borrowed passkey. “No one will be able to prove you wrong for the next couple of hours.”
“Assuming no one else wanders in here and finds him,” Marcross said.
“Don’t worry,” Mara said, resealing Marcross’s detonator casing. “I’ll signal you if and when I need you.”
“Any idea what that signal will be?” LaRone asked.
“Not yet,” Mara said. “You’ll know it when it happens.”
“Along with half the city?”
“I’ll try to keep it a little less visible than that,” Mara said with a touch of dry humor. “Go on, get going.”
A minute later they were outside, and the door was once again sealed. Mara took a quick look around, then ignited her lightsaber.
As she’d already noted, her plans hadn’t included the palace’s unofficial interrogation section. But they had shown what had been here before Ferrouz or his predecessors had retrofitted the area. This part of the palace had originally been a hospitality wing, with guest suites, private contemplation and entertainment rooms, and even a separate kitchen with human and droid chefs on call to attend to off-hour appetites. This particular corridor had once led from the kitchen and servant droid stations to a three-car turbolift cluster, continuing on into the rest of the palace.
