by Timothy Zahn
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 aboard 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 o
f 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."
Luke nodded and set off striving to look like he belonged there. His footsteps echoed on the metal deck, bringing back memories of that near-disastrous visit to the first Death Star.
But he'd been a wide-eyed kid then, dazzled by visions of glory and heroism and too naive to understand the deadly dangers that went with such things. Now, he was older and more seasoned, and knew exactly what it was he was walking into.
And yet was walking into it anyway. Dimly, he wondered if that made him less reckless than he'd been the last time, or more so. He reached the door and paused beside it, pretending to study a data pad that had been in one of the flight suit's pockets until the corridor was deserted. Then, taking one last deep breath of clear air, he opened the door and stepped inside.
Even holding his breath, the stench hit him like a slap in the face. Whatever advancements the Empire might have made in the past few years, their shipboard garbage pits still smelled as bad as ever.
He let the door slide shut behind him, and as it did so he heard the faint sound of an internal relay closing. He'd cut things a little too close; Mara must already have activated the compression cycle. Breathing through his mouth, he waited...and a moment later, with a muffled clang of heavy hydraulics, the walls began moving slowly toward each other. Luke swallowed, gripping his lightsaber tightly as he tried to keep on top of the tangle of garbage and discarded equipment that was now starting to buck and twist around his feet. Getting into the detention level this way had been his idea, and he'd had to talk long and hard before Mara had been convinced. But now that he was actually here, and the walls were closing in on him, it suddenly didn't seem like nearly such a good idea anymore. If Mara couldn't adequately control the walls' movement-or if she was interrupted at her task Or if she gave in for just a few seconds to her hatred for him ... The walls came ever closer, grinding together everything in their path. Luke struggled to keep his footing, all too aware that if Mara was planning a betrayal he wouldn't know until it was too late to save himself. The compressor walls were too thick for him to cut a gap with his lightsaber, and already the shifting mass beneath his feet had taken him too far away from the door to escape that way. Listening to the creak of tortured metal and plastic, Luke watched as the gap between the walls closed to two meters...then one and a half...then one...
And came to a shuddering halt just under a meter apart. Luke took a deep breath, almost not noticing the rancid smell. Mara hadn't betrayed him, and she'd handled her end of the scheme perfectly. Now it was his turn. Moving to the back end of the chamber, he gathered his feet beneath him and jumped.
The footing was unstable, and the garbage compactor walls impressively tall, and even with Jedi enhancement behind the jump he made it only about halfway to the top. But even as he reached the top of his arc he drew his knees up and swung his feet out; and with a wrenching jolt to his legs and lower back, he wedged himself solidly between the walls. Taking a moment to catch his breath and get his bearings, he started up. It wasn't as bad as he'd feared it would be. He'd done a fair amount of climbing as a boy on Tatooine and had tackled rock chimneys at least half a dozen times, though never with any real enthusiasm. The smooth walls here in the compactor offered less traction than stone would have, but the evenness of the spacing and the absence of sharp rocks to dig into his back more than made up for it. Within a couple of minutes he had reached the top of the compactor's walls and the maintenance chute that would lead-he hoped-to the detention level. If Mara's reading of the schedule had been right, he had about five minutes before the guard shift changed up there. Setting his teeth together, he forced his way through the magnetic screen at the bottom of the chute and, in clean air again, started up.
He made it in just over five minutes, to discover that Mara's reading had indeed been right. Through the grating that covered the chute opening he could hear the sounds of conversation and movement coming from the direction of the control room, punctuated by the regular hiss of opening turbolift doors. The guard was changing; and for the next couple of minutes both shifts would be in the control room. An ideal time, if he was quick, to slip a prisoner out from under their noses.
Hanging on to the grating by one hand, he got his lightsaber free and ignited it. Making sure not to let the tip of the blade show through into the corridor beyond, he sliced off a section of the grating and eased it into the shaft with him. He used a hook from his flight suit to hang the section to what was left of the grating, and climbed through the opening. The corridor was deserted. Luke glanced at the nearest cell number to orient himself and set off toward the one Mara had named. The conversation in the control room seemed to be winding down, and soon now the new shift of guards would be moving out to take up their positions in the block corridors. Senses alert, Luke slipped down the cross corridor to the indicated cell and, mentally crossing his fingers, punched the lock release.
Talon Karrde looked up from the cot as the door slid open, that well-remembered sardonic half smile on his face. His eyes focused on the face above the flight suit, and abruptly the smile vanished. "I don't believe it," he murmured.
"Me, either," Luke told him, throwing a quick glance around the room.
"You fit to travel?"
"Fit and ready," Karrde said, already up and moving toward the door.
"Fortunately, they're still in the softening-up phase. Lack of food and sleep-you're familiar with the routine."
"I've heard of it." Luke looked both ways down the corridor. Still no one. "Exit's this way. Come on."
They made it to the grating without incident. "You must be joking, of course," Karrde said as Luke maneuvered his way into the hole and got his feet and back braced against the chute walls.
"The other way out has guards at the end of it," Luke reminded him.
"Point," Karrde conceded, reluctantly looking into the gap. "I suppose it'd be too much to hope for a rope."
"Sorry. The only place to tie it is this grate, and they'd spot that in no time." Luke frowned at him. "You're not afraid of heights, are you?"
"It's the falling from them that worries me," Kai'rde said dryly. But he was already climbing into the opening, though his hands were white-knuckled where he gripped the grating.
"We're going to rock-chimney it down to the garbage masher," Luke told him. "You ever done that before?"
"No, but I'm a quick study," Karrde said. Looking back over his shoulder at Luke, he eased into a similar position against the chute walls. "I presume you want this hole covered up," he added, pulling the grating section from its perch and filling it back into the opening. "Though it's not going to fool anyone who takes a close look at it."
"With luck, we'll be back at the hangar bay before that happens," Luke assured him. "Come on, now. Slow and easy; let's go." They made it back to the garbage compactor without serious mishap.
"The dark side of the Empire the tourists never see," Karrde commented dryly as Luke led him across the tangle of garbage. "How do we get out?"
"The door's right there," Luke said, pointing down below the level of the mass they were walking on. "Mara's supposed to open the walls again in a couple of minutes and let us down.
"Ah," Karrde said. "Mara's here, is she?"
"She told me on the trip here how you were captured," Luke said, trying to read Karrde's sense. If he was angry at Mara, he was hiding it well.
"She said she wasn't in on that trap."
"Oh, I'm sure she wasn't," Karrde said. "If for no other reason than that my interrogators worked so hard to drop hints to the contrary." He looked thoughtfully at Luke. "What did she promise for your help in this?" Luke shook his head. "Nothing. She just reminded me that I owed you one for not turning me over to the Imperials back on Myrkr." A wry smile twitched Karrde's lip. "Indeed. No mention, either, of why the Grand Admiral wanted me in the fi
rst place?" Luke frowned at him. The other was watching him closely ... and now that he was paying attention, Luke could tell that Karrde was holding some secret back from him. "I assumed it was in revenge for helping me escape. Is there more to it than that?"
Karrde's gaze drifted away from him. "Let's just say that if we make it away from here the New Republic stands to gain a great deal." His last word was cut off by a muffled clang; and with a ponderous jolt the compactor walls began slowly moving apart again. Luke helped Karrde maintain his balance as they waited for the door to be clear, stretching his senses outward into the corridor beyond. There were a fair number of crewers passing by, but he could sense no suspicion or special alertness in any of them. "Is Mara doing all this?" Karrde asked.
Luke nodded. "She has an access code for the ship's computer."
"Interesting," Karrde murmured. "I gathered from all this that she had some past connection with the Empire. Obviously, she was more highly placed than I realized."
Luke nodded, thinking back to Mara's revelation to him back in the Myrkr forest. Mara Jade, the Emperor's Hand ... "Yes," he told Karrde soberly.
"She was."
The walls reached their limit and shut down. A moment later there was a click of a relay. Luke waited until the corridor immediately outside was deserted, then opened it and stepped out. A couple of maintenance techs working at an open panel a dozen meters down the corridor threw a look of idle curiosity at the newcomers; throwing an equally unconcerned glance back their way, Luke pulled the data pad from his pocket and pretended to make an entry. Karrde played off the cue, standing beside him and spouting a stream of helpful jargon as Luke filled out his imaginary report. Letting the door slide closed, Luke stuffed the data pad back into his pocket and led the way down the corridor.
Mara was waiting at the turbolift cluster with the spare flight suit draped over her arm. "Car's on its way she murmured. For a second, as her eyes met Karrde's, her face seemed to tighten.
