by Timothy Zahn
“How would you get aboard?” Cracken asked. Of all of them, Han noticed, he was the only one who seemed to be taking the idea seriously.
“We use the pass Ferrouz gave Axlon,” Han said. “It came back with the body, didn’t it?”
“It should be there, yes,” Cracken said. “But it’s probably only good for getting into the palace.”
“That’s okay,” Han said. “I can make it good for the Golan, too.”
“How?” the major asked.
“By being the best loud, overbearing Imperial undercover officer the Poln system has ever seen,” Han told him. “Trust me, I’ve seen some of them. I know how to play it.”
“And once you’re aboard, you take over and shoot everyone who gets in your way?” the major persisted. “Just the two of you?”
“Pretty much,” Han said. “Unless you’ve got a few soldiers you think could use some exercise.”
“Get back to the armaments locker and draw whatever you need,” Cracken ordered. “We’ll make it a small team, I think—Toksi and Atticus should do. They’ll meet you at the Falcon.”
“Wait a minute,” Leia said, sounding stunned. “You’re actually going to let him do this?”
“It’s that or risk losing everything,” Cracken said. “You know how we have to play these things.”
Leia looked across at Han, her face tight, and he thought he saw her slump a little. “Understood,” she murmured.
Cracken looked back at Han and cocked an eyebrow. “You still here?”
“Nope,” Han said, standing up and beckoning to Chewie. “Come on. Let’s go see if they’ve got anything we can use.”
And as he strode down the narrow corridor toward the transport’s stern, he permitted himself a small smile.
Oh, yeah. She was crazy about him, all right.
Luke had been settling himself down for a long, uncomfortable ride when, suddenly, it was over.
He frowned in the darkness, wondering if they could really have arrived already. But the landspeeder had stopped and the repulsorlifts shut down, and he felt the double rocking dip as Stelikag and Mikks got out. For a few seconds he heard their footsteps, then they faded away.
This was apparently it.
Leaning over the body beside him, Luke fumbled for the lid release. He found it, pulled it, and the lid popped open a few centimeters. Leaning over a little more, he peered out.
He was in a long tunnel, dimly lit by what seemed to be randomly placed overhead glow panels. Here and there along the walls he could see clusters of crates, drums, cabinets, and workbenches. In the far distance, the tunnel’s end was a faint glow of what appeared to be diffuse daylight. Half a dozen other landspeeders were parked against the walls, along with two airspeeders. Now that the storage compartment lid was open, he could again hear the two men’s footsteps, and once again listened as they faded away into silence.
For another moment he waited, listening hard. But there was nothing. Drawing his lightsaber, he eased himself over Kofter, raised the lid just far enough to squeeze through, and rolled over the lip onto the permacrete floor. He glanced around the tunnel, confirming that he was alone, then eased himself to the rear corner of the landspeeder and looked carefully around its side.
There was more of the tunnel stretching out in front of the vehicle, but it was blocked by a heavy metal-and-permacrete barrier that had gaps only wide enough for pedestrians to get through. Twenty meters past the barrier, the tunnel abruptly opened up into a big cavern whose walls glowed with soft reddish light.
Checking one last time behind him, he pulled out his comlink and thumbed it on.
“I’m here,” he said softly when LaRone answered. “Looks like a tunnel leading into a cavern or cave with white walls. At least, I think they’re white—the place is being lit by red glow panels, so it’s a little hard to tell.”
“Any idea where exactly this tunnel is?”
“No, but the landspeeder ride was less than fifteen minutes,” Luke told him. “We must be still in the city. Maybe even somewhere near the palace.”
“Okay,” LaRone said. “Hold on.”
The comlink went dead. Luke started to close the storage compartment lid, then on impulse reached in and retrieved the blanket he’d been hiding beneath. He closed the lid, folded the blanket and tucked it under his arm, then straightened up and ran as quietly as he could over to the barrier and crouched down beside it. From his new vantage point he could see that there were buildings inside the cavern, low, rough-looking structures, clearly decades old. He couldn’t see anyone, but he could hear voices, one of them Stelikag’s, conversing angrily from somewhere inside the cavern.
The comlink clicked back on. “You need to stay there,” LaRone said. “Find a safe place to hide, and watch and listen.”
“What about the governor’s family?” Luke asked. “If they’re in there, I may be able to get them out.”
“You’re more likely to get yourself killed,” LaRone said bluntly. “Don’t worry, help is on the way.”
“One of you?” Luke asked.
“Never mind who,” LaRone said evasively. “You just stay out of sight and let us know if anything changes.”
Luke grimaced. “Right,” he said. “Just tell whoever it is to hurry. Stelikag’s out for blood.”
“Understood,” LaRone said. “Watch yourself.”
For another moment Luke peered through the barrier. Han would go for it, he knew. Leia probably would, too.
But he, Luke Skywalker, Jedi-in-training and son of the best star pilot in the galaxy, had been ordered to sit this one out.
A meter past the barrier were a pair of deep, human-sized niches carved into the tunnel wall, one on each side. Guard or maintenance posts, probably, now no longer in use. Watching the cavern closely, Luke eased through the barrier and slipped into the right-hand niche.
He would wait. But he wouldn’t wait forever.
Mara was in the middle of searching the governor’s safe room office when she suddenly remembered the glowglitter in the soaking tub.
There was no reason for anything that powdery to have remained intact through the tub’s draining and filtering process. Unless, of course, the girl and her glitter had been in there without any water.
It took her two minutes to find the hidden door built into the rear section of the tub, designed to be partially covered and totally inaccessible when the tub was full. Turning out the bathroom’s glow panels to make sure the sudden appearance of light didn’t alert any watchers who might be on the other side, she popped the catch and swung the door out and up on its hinges.
Apparently the Moff who’d designed this whole place had been a big fan of tunnels. Beyond the door was yet another narrow passageway, this one leading down yet another flight of steps. In the distance, she could see a hint of a reddish glow. Returning her lightsaber to her belt, Mara drew her hold-out blaster and headed down.
She’d gone three steps when her comlink signaled.
Grimacing, she hurried back up the steps and closed the hidden door. If she couldn’t afford Stelikag’s men seeing stray lights, she certainly couldn’t afford them hearing unfamiliar voices. Pulling out the comlink, she clicked it on. “Report.”
“Skywalker’s found the nest,” LaRone said. “He says it’s a white-walled cavern with red glow panel lighting at the end of a long vehicle tunnel. From the description he gave of the tunnel and the structures inside the cavern, it didn’t sound like the place has been used for a while.”
Mara smiled tightly as it finally clicked. “Not for the past hundred years or so,” she agreed. “It would seem that the secret emergency exit from the governor’s secret emergency safe room leads into one of the old underground mines beneath the big crystal mounds. Probably the mound the palace itself was built into.”
“All the way down there?” LaRone said disbelievingly. “Sounds a little like overkill.”
“Not for the truly paranoid,” Mara said. “The more barrier
s and secret doors you put between yourself and your enemies, the longer it takes for those enemies to track you down. The more tunnels that connect those secret doors, the more the enemy has to come at you one at a time, which gives you better odds on defense. And by putting the end point in a big, spacious cavern with a built-in vehicle exit, you’ve got the option of getting out of town or even off the planet while your security team fills the tunnels with your enemies’ bodies.”
“Still sounds like overkill to me,” LaRone said. “What do you want Skywalker to do?”
“Find cover and stay put,” Mara said. “He can watch and listen, but nothing else. I’ll go in and see what needs to be done.”
“Acknowledged,” LaRone said. “Good luck.”
The stairway was shorter than Mara had expected, only fifteen steps. The tunnel beyond was also short, running about twenty meters before opening up into the red-lit cavern Skywalker had described for LaRone. It was just as well, she thought as she eased her way down the passageway, that she’d been extra careful with the lights and voices. She reached the end of the tunnel and lowered herself into a crouch.
If the tunnel had been shorter than Mara expected, the cavern was surprising in the opposite direction. It was huge, a good 150 meters across, 60 or 70 wide, and 20 to 25 deep. She had come out near the center of the cavern’s narrower end, about three meters below the ceiling. Three-quarters of the way from her end of the cavern, a vehicle-sized tunnel headed off to the left, probably the tunnel where Skywalker was hiding. Right beside Mara, also to her left, a wide metal catwalk led from the tunnel mouth to a metal-mesh switchback stairway leading down to the cavern floor. Lowering herself to her belly, Mara crawled forward onto the catwalk for a better view.
It didn’t look promising. There were fifteen structures of various sorts down there, ranging from small supply and toolsheds all the way up to long but flat half-broken bunkhouse-style buildings. Any but the very smallest of the structures was large enough to hold Ferrouz’s family, particularly if the kidnappers weren’t concerned about the hostages’ comfort. There were various other bits and remnants of the old mining operation, including a few rusted or broken ore cars, occasional tools, and a lifter truck canting heavily to one side on a broken tread. A small group of barrels, also rusted, were stacked against the wall near the vehicle tunnel, their prominent FLAMMABLE warning emblems visible even at Mara’s distance. Probably fuel, now well aged, for the broken lifter truck. Walking a random-walk guard pattern through the cavern were at least thirty armed guards, some of them human, others more of the yellow-eyed aliens she’d dealt with upstairs in the guard foyer.
And as she watched, it seemed to her that several of them were casting casual but lingering looks upward toward her tunnel.
Which led to an interesting and ominous question. By now Pakrie had surely alerted his allies that Mara had disposed of their latest attack squad. They had to assume that sooner or later she would find the door in the tub and come down to join them.
So why were they still casually roaming the floor down there instead of lining up here with their blasters pointed down the tunnel?
Over the years, the catwalk Mara was lying on had pulled a couple of centimeters away from the long bolts that anchored it to the cavern wall. Easing herself backward, she lined up her eyes with the gap and gave the switchback stairway a good, hard look.
There was no line of blaster-wielding aliens up here because Pakrie had also told them about her skill at defending against such attacks. But no lightsaber artistry would protect her from a stairway mined with high explosives. Through the mesh she could see that sections of each flight of stairs had been mined with grenades, with the entire top two flights also rigged with motion triggers. The minute Mara stepped from the catwalk onto those stairs the booby trap would go off.
And if the twenty-meter fall didn’t kill her, the cloud of metal shrapnel from the disintegrating stairway would.
She raised her eyes again. There were ways to bypass even well-rigged explosives traps, but such techniques tended to be noisy. Noise would bring the guards running, and taking on thirty armed guards wasn’t something even the Emperor’s Hand went into lightly. Especially since there could easily be more guards out of sight inside the buildings.
But there might be a more subtle approach. Immediately to her right was a crane rail that stretched the entire length of the cavern, starting from an old decaying overseer’s control cabin at the right end of the catwalk and ending in another such cabin at the far end. The crane itself was missing, but the rail looked solid enough, and most of the two-meter-long, V-shaped struts connecting it to the ceiling were still intact. The cabin at the far end had another switchback stairway, similar to the one at Mara’s end, leading down to the main floor. The crane rail was about half a meter wide, easily crawlable, and with nearly two meters between it and the ceiling there was plenty of room for her to move along it without getting hung up on anything. If she could get up there, she could probably crawl across the cavern and get down the stairway that no one was paying any attention to.
The catch was getting up there in the first place. There was a three-meter section of catwalk with no cover that she would first have to get across, and with all the discreet attention the kidnappers were aiming in her direction she knew she would never make it without being spotted. What she needed was some kind of distraction.
Or maybe what she needed was a surprise attack from the vehicle tunnel over there.
Taking one last look around the cavern, she crawled backward into her tunnel and headed back up the stairs to the safe room.
“Here’s the good news,” she said when LaRone answered. “I’ve found Skywalker’s cavern, and I think Ferrouz’s family is here. If not, they’re wasting an awful lot of guards and blasters on a crystal mine that was probably worked out decades ago.”
“And the bad news?”
“There are too many for me to take on alone,” she said. “You think you can organize a diversionary attack?”
“Just a moment.”
The comlink went dead. Mara pulled out her syntherope dispenser, checking the gauge. There was fifty meters’ worth of the quick-drying liquid left, more than enough for her to rappel down from either the catwalk or the crane rail if that became necessary. But if LaRone could get his force here and launch a sufficiently loud attack—
Abruptly, the comlink came on again, the speaker bursting with a flurry of distant but heated-sounding voices. “LaRone?” Mara snapped.
“We’ve got trouble,” LaRone came on, his voice tight. “Governor Ferrouz has just called Pakrie and told him where we are.”
“What?” Mara demanded.
“He says he wanted to draw some of them away from his family for you,” LaRone growled, sounding even angrier and more frustrated than Mara felt. “He pretended he didn’t know Pakrie was a traitor, and made it sound like he was calling him like he would any other security officer if he was in trouble.”
Mara ground her teeth. Of all the stupid stunts—
She took a deep breath, stretching to the Force for calm. What was done was done.
Besides, there was something to be said for a man who would deliberately put himself into deadly danger to help those he loved. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you can get out of there,” she said.
“We’d have to leave Grave behind,” LaRone said. “We can’t disengage him from the bacta tank that quickly. Quiller’s not exactly mobile, either.” There was another faint voice in the background. “Quiller is offering to stay here and guard Grave while we find a safe place to hide the governor.”
Mara grimaced. No way would LaRone and the others actually consider walking away and leaving two of their own behind to die. They and Ferrouz really did deserve each other. “It’s probably already too late,” she said. “Stelikag wouldn’t have pulled all his people off search duty. At this point all you can do is call General Ularno—”
She jerked back as a burst
of static erupted from the comlink. Reflexively, she shifted frequencies, hit the squelch, then tried the reset. But nothing worked.
Not only had Stelikag’s men reached the tapcaf, but they’d set up a comlink jammer nearby.
She smiled tightly. Fine. If LaRone couldn’t call Ularno for backup, Mara would do it.
She paused with her finger poised over the call button, the smile fading. Unfortunately, she couldn’t do that. Not yet. Pakrie was surely still monitoring palace security activities and communications. The minute Ularno ordered a security force to the tapcaf Stelikag would immediately pull his men back, including however many he’d been planning to send from the cavern detail.
Even worse, if Stelikag decided they’d lost all chance of getting to Ferrouz, there would be no reason for him to keep the hostages alive.
With a grimace, Mara put the comlink away. Stupidly reckless though it had been, Ferrouz had given her the best shot she would have to rescue his family.
It was up to her to make sure she didn’t waste that chance. Or to waste the lives it was going to cost.
ONCE AGAIN, THE STARLINES FLASHED AND BECAME STARS. ONCE again, the Chimaera had arrived safely at its destination.
For Pellaeon it was cause for a quiet sigh of relief. Just because they’d passed safely through this same tiny but potentially lethal segment of the Unknown Regions once before didn’t mean the return trip would be equally uneventful.
And as he gazed out the bridge viewport at the Poln system’s twin planets, he felt an unexpected flicker of respect and even admiration for Senior Captain Thrawn and the men in his task force. They took this same gamble every single time they jumped to lightspeed in those uncharted wastes.
Thrawn might not have the raw political skill that a fleet officer needed to keep himself moving smoothly up the ladder of success. But he did have courage.
