by Timothy Zahn
“We can fix that,” Mara growled. Carefully picking her way across the steaming ruts the X-wing’s laser cannon had gouged in the ground, she headed over.
C’baoth was lying on his back, unconscious but breathing evenly, with Skywalker kneeling over him. “Not even singed,” she murmured. “Impressive.”
“Artoo wasn’t shooting to kill,” Skywalker said, his fingertips moving gently across the old man’s face. “It was probably the sonic shock that got him.”
“That, or getting knocked off his feet by the shock wave,” Mara agreed, lining her blaster up on the still figure. “Get out of the way. I’ll finish it.”
Skywalker looked up at her. “We’re not going to kill him,” he said. “Not like this.”
“Would you rather wait until he’s conscious again and can fight back?” she retorted.
“There’s no need to kill him at all,” Skywalker insisted. “We can be off Jomark long before he wakes up.”
“You don’t leave an enemy at your back,” she told him stiffly. “Not if you like living.”
“He doesn’t have to be an enemy, Mara,” Skywalker said with that irritating earnestness of his. “He’s ill. Maybe he can be cured.”
Mara felt her lip twist. “You didn’t hear the way he was talking before you showed up,” she said. “He’s insane, all right; but that’s not all he is anymore. He’s a lot stronger, and a whole lot more dangerous.” She hesitated. “He sounded just like the Emperor and Vader used to.”
A muscle in Skywalker’s cheek twitched. “Vader was deep in the dark side, too,” he told her. “He was able to break that hold and come back. Maybe C’baoth can do the same.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Mara said. But she holstered her blaster. They didn’t have time to debate the issue; and as long as she needed Skywalker’s help, he had effective veto on decisions like this. “Just remember, it’s your back that’ll get the knife if you’re wrong.”
“I know.” He looked down at C’baoth once more, then back up at her. “You said Karrde was in trouble.”
“Yes,” Mara nodded, glad to change the subject. Skywalker’s mention of the Emperor and Vader had reminded her all too clearly of that recurring dream. “The Grand Admiral’s taken him. I need your help to get him out.”
She braced herself for the inevitable argument and bargaining; but to her surprise, he simply nodded and stood up. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
With one last mournful electronic wail Artoo signed off; and with the usual flicker of pseudomotion, the X-wing was gone. “Well, he’s not happy about it,” Luke said, shutting down the Skipray’s transmitter. “But I think I’ve persuaded him to go straight home.”
“You’d better be more than just thinking you’ve persuaded him,” Mara warned from the pilot’s chair, her eyes on the nav computer display. “Sneaking into an Imperial supply depot is going to be hard enough without a New Republic X-wing in tow.”
“Right,” Luke said, throwing a sideways look at her and wondering if getting into the Skipray with her had been one of the smarter things he’d done lately. Mara had put the ysalamir away in the rear of the ship, and he could feel her hatred of him simmering beneath her consciousness like a half-burned fire. It evoked unpleasant memories of the Emperor, the man who’d been Mara’s teacher, and Luke briefly wondered if this could be some sort of overly elaborate trick to lure him to his death.
But her hatred seemed to be under control, and there was no deceit in her that he could detect.
But then, he hadn’t seen C’baoth’s deceit either, until it was almost too late.
Luke shifted in his chair, his face warming with embarrassment at how easily he’d been taken in by C’baoth’s act. But it hadn’t all been an act, he reminded himself. The Jedi Master’s emotional instabilities were genuine—that much he was convinced of. And even if those instabilities didn’t extend as far as the insanity that Mara had alluded to, they certainly extended far enough for C’baoth to qualify as ill.
And if what she’d said about C’baoth working with the Empire was also true …
Luke shivered. I will teach her such power as you can’t imagine, C’baoth had said about Leia. The words had been different from those Vader had spoken to Luke on Endor, but the dark sense behind them had been identical. Whatever C’baoth had once been, there was no doubt in Luke’s mind that he was now moving along the path of the dark side.
And yet, Luke had been able to help Vader win his way back from that same path. Was it conceit to think he could do the same for C’baoth?
He shook the thought away. However C’baoth’s destiny might yet be entwined with his, such encounters were too far in the future to begin planning for them. For now, he needed to concentrate on the immediate task at hand, and to leave the future to the guidance of the Force. “How did the Grand Admiral find Karrde?” he asked Mara.
Her lips compressed momentarily, and Luke caught a flash of self-reproach. “They put a homing beacon aboard my ship,” she said. “I led them right to his hideout.”
Luke nodded, thinking back to the rescue of Leia and that harrowing escape from the first Death Star aboard the Falcon. “They pulled that same trick on us, too,” he said. “That’s how they found the Yavin base.”
“Considering what it cost them, I don’t think you’ve got any complaints coming,” Mara said sarcastically.
“I don’t imagine the Emperor was pleased,” Luke murmured.
“No, he wasn’t,” Mara said, her voice dark with memories of her own. “Vader nearly died for that blunder.” Deliberately, she looked over at Luke’s hands. “That was when he lost his right hand, in fact.”
Luke flexed the fingers of his artificial right hand, feeling a ghostly echo of the searing pain that had lanced through it as Vader’s lightsaber had sliced through skin and muscle and bone. A fragment of an old Tatooine aphorism flickered through his mind: something about the passing of evil from one generation to the next … “What’s the plan?” he asked.
Mara took a deep breath, and Luke could sense the emotional effort as she put the past aside. “Karrde’s being held aboard the Grand Admiral’s flagship, the Chimaera,” she told him. “According to their flight schedule, they’re going to be taking on supplies in the Wistril system four days from now. If we push it, we should be able to get there a few hours ahead of them. We’ll ditch the Skipray, take charge of one of the supply shuttles, and just go on up with the rest of the flight pattern.”
Luke thought it over. It sounded tricky, but not ridiculously so. “What happens after we’re aboard?”
“Standard Imperial procedure is to keep all the shuttle crews locked aboard their ships while the Chimaera’s crewers handle the unloading,” Mara said. “Or at least that was standard procedure five years ago. Means we’ll need some kind of diversion to get out of the shuttle.”
“Sounds risky,” Luke shook his head. “We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”
“You got any better ideas?”
Luke shrugged. “Not yet,” he said. “But we’ve got four days to think about it. We’ll come up with something.”
CHAPTER
22
Mara eased the repulsorlifts off; and with a faint metallic clank the cargo shuttle touched down on the main deck of the Chimaera’s aft hangar bay. “Shuttle 37 down,” Luke announced into the comm. “Awaiting further orders.”
“Shuttle 37, acknowledged,” the voice of the controller came over the speaker. “Shut down all systems and prepare for unloading.”
“Got it.”
Luke reached over to shut off the comm, but Mara stopped him. “Control, this is my first cargo run,” she said, her voice carrying just the right touch of idle curiosity. “About how long until we’ll be able to leave?”
“I suggest you make yourselves comfortable,” Control said dryly. “We unload all the shuttles before any of you leave. Figure a couple of hours, at the least.”
“Oh,” Mara said, sou
nding taken aback. “Well … thanks. Maybe I’ll take a nap.”
She signed off. “Good,” she said, unstrapping and standing up. “That ought to give us enough time to get to the detention center and back.”
“Let’s just hope they haven’t transferred Karrde off the ship,” Luke said, following her to the rear of the command deck and the spiral stairway leading down to the storage area below.
“They haven’t,” Mara said, heading down the stairs. “The only danger is that they might have started the full treatment already.”
Luke frowned down at her. “The full treatment?”
“Their interrogation.” Mara reached the center of the storage room and looked appraisingly around. “All right. Just about … there should do it.” She pointed to a section of the deck in front of her. “Out of the way of prying eyes, and you shouldn’t hit anything vital.”
“Right.” Luke ignited his lightsaber, and began carefully cutting a hole in the floor. He was most of the way through when there was a brilliant spark from the hole and the lights in the storage room abruptly went out. “It’s okay,” Luke told Mara as she muttered something vicious under her breath. “The lightsaber gives off enough light to see by.”
“I’m more worried that the cable might have arced to the hangar deck,” she countered. “They couldn’t help but notice that.”
Luke paused, stretching out with Jedi senses. “Nobody nearby seems to have seen anything,” he told Mara.
“We’ll hope.” She gestured to the half-finished cut. “Get on with it.”
He did so. A minute later, with the help of a magnetic winch, they had hauled the severed section of decking and hull into the storage room. A few centimeters beneath it, lit eerily by the green light from Luke’s lightsaber, was the hangar bay deck. Mara got the winch’s grapple attached to it; stretching out flat on his stomach, Luke extended the lightsaber down through the hole. There he paused, waiting until he could sense that the corridor beneath the hangar deck was clear.
“Don’t forget to bevel it,” Mara reminded him as the lightsaber bit smoothly into the hardened metal. “A gaping hole in the ceiling would be a little too obvious for even conscripts to miss.”
Luke nodded and finished the cut. Mara was ready, and even as he shut down the lightsaber she had the winch pulling the thick slab of metal up into the shuttle. She brought it perhaps a meter up and then shut down the motor. “That’s far enough,” she said. Blaster ready in her hand, she sat gingerly on the still-warm edge of the hole and dropped lightly down to the deck below. There was a second’s pause as she looked around— “All clear,” she hissed.
Luke sat down on the edge and looked over at the winch control. Reaching out with the Force, he triggered the switch and followed her down.
The deck below was farther than it had looked, but his Jedi-enhanced muscles handled the impact without trouble. Recovering his balance, he looked up just as the metal plug settled neatly back down into the hole. “Looks pretty good,” Mara murmured. “I don’t think anyone will notice.”
“Not unless they look straight up,” Luke agreed. “Which way to the detention center?”
“There,” Mara said, gesturing with her blaster to their left. “We’re not going to get there dressed like this, though. Come on.”
She led the way to the end of the passage, then down a crossway to another, wider corridor. Luke kept his senses alert, but only occasionally did he detect anyone. “Awfully quiet down here.”
“It won’t last,” Mara said. “This is a service supply area, and most of the people who’d normally be working here are a level up helping unload the shuttles. But we need to get into some uniforms or flight suits or something before we go much farther.”
Luke thought back to the first time he’d tried masquerading as an Imperial. “Okay, but let’s try to avoid stormtrooper armor,” he said. “Those helmets are hard to see through.”
“I didn’t think Jedi needed to use their eyes,” Mara countered sourly. “Watch it—here we are. That’s a section of crew quarters over there.”
Luke had already sensed the sudden jump in population level. “I don’t think we can sneak through that many people,” he warned.
“I wasn’t planning to.” Mara pointed to another corridor leading off to their right. “There should be a group of TIE pilot ready rooms down that way. Let’s see if we can find an empty one that has a couple of spare flight suits lying around.”
But if the Empire was lax enough to leave its service supply areas unguarded, it wasn’t so careless with its pilot ready rooms. There were six of them grouped around the turbolift cluster at the end of the corridor; and from the sounds of conversation faintly audible through the doors, it was clear that all six were occupied by at least two people. “What now?” Luke whispered to Mara.
“What do you think?” she retorted, dropping her blaster back in its holster and flexing her fingers. “Just tell me which room has the fewest people in it and then get out of the way. I’ll do the rest.”
“Wait a minute,” Luke said, thinking hard. He didn’t want to kill the men behind those doors in cold blood; but neither did he want to put himself into the dangerous situation he’d faced during the Imperial raid on Lando’s Nkllon mining operation a few months earlier. There, he’d successfully used the Force to confuse the attacking TIE fighters, but at the cost of skating perilously close to the edge of the dark side. It wasn’t an experience he wanted to repeat.
But if he could just gently touch the Imperials’ minds, instead of grabbing and twisting them …
“We’ll try this one,” he told Mara, nodding to a room in which he could sense only three men. “But we’re not going to charge in fighting. I think I can suppress their curiosity enough for me to walk in, take the flight suits, and leave.”
“What if you can’t?” Mara demanded. “We’ll have lost whatever surprise we would have had.”
“It’ll work,” Luke assured her. “Get ready.”
“Skywalker—”
“Besides which, I doubt that even with surprise you can take out all three without any noise,” he added. “Can you?”
She glared laser bolts, but gestured him to the door. Setting his mind firmly in line with the Force, he moved toward it. The heavy metal panel slid open at his approach, and he stepped in.
There were indeed three men lounging around the monitor table in the center of the room: two in the Imperial brown of ordinary crewers, the other in the black uniform and flaring helmet of a Fleet trooper. All three looked up as the door opened, and Luke caught their idle interest in the newcomer. Reaching out through the Force, he gently touched their minds, shunting the curiosity away. The two crewers seemed to size him up and then ignore him; the trooper continued to watch, but only as a change from watching his companions. Trying to look as casual and unconcerned as he could, Luke went over to the rack of flight suits against the wall and selected three of them. The conversation around the monitor table continued as he draped them over his arm and walked back out of the room. The door slid shut behind him—
“Well?” Mara hissed.
Luke nodded, exhaling quietly. “Go ahead and get into it,” he told her. “I want to try and hold off their curiosity for another couple of minutes. Until they’ve forgotten I was ever in there.”
Mara nodded and started pulling the flight suit on over her jumpsuit. “Handy trick, I must say.”
“It worked this time, anyway,” Luke agreed. Carefully, he eased back his touch on the Imperials’ minds, waiting tensely for the surge of emotion that would show the whole scheme was unraveling. But there was nothing except the lazy flow of idle conversation.
The trick had worked. This time, anyway.
Mara had a turbolift car standing by as he turned away from the ready room. “Come on, come on,” she beckoned impatiently. She was already in her flight suit, with the other two slung over her shoulder. “You can change on the way.”
“I hope no one comes a
board while I’m doing it,” he muttered as he slipped into the car. “Be a little hard to explain.”
“No one’s coming aboard,” she said as the turbolift door closed behind him and the car started to move. “I’ve keyed it for nonstop.” She eyed him. “You still want to do it this way?”
“I don’t think we’ve got any real choice,” he said, getting into the flight suit. It felt uncomfortably tight over his regular outfit. “Han and I tried the frontal approach once, on the Death Star. It wasn’t exactly an unqualified success.”
“Yes, but you didn’t have access to the main computer then,” Mara pointed out. “If I can fiddle the records and transfer orders, we ought to be able to get him out before anyone realizes they’ve been had.”
“But you’d still be leaving witnesses behind who knew he’d left,” Luke reminded her. “If any of them decided to check on the order verbally, the whole thing would fall apart right there. And I don’t think that suppression trick I used in the ready room will work on detention center guards—they’re bound to be too alert.”
“All right,” Mara said, turning back to the turbolift control board. “It doesn’t sound like much fun to me. But if that’s what you want, I’m game.”
The detention center was in the far aft section of the ship, a few decks beneath the command and systems control sections and directly above Engineering and the huge sublight drive thrust nozzles. The turbolift car shifted direction several times along the way, alternating between horizontal and vertical movement. It seemed to Luke to be altogether too complicated a route, and he found himself wondering even now if Mara might be pulling some kind of double-cross. But her sense didn’t indicate any such treachery; and it occurred to him that she might have deliberately tangled their path to put the Chimaera’s internal security systems off the scent.
At last the car came to a halt, and the door slid open. They stepped out into a long corridor in which a handful of crewers in maintenance coveralls could be seen going about their business. “Your access door’s that way,” Mara murmured, nodding down the corridor. “I’ll give you three minutes to get set.”
