by Timothy Zahn
Luke shook his head. “No.”
“Apparently, not a lot of people have,” she said. “Made things so much more challenging. Anyway, with the beckon call we had a starting point, and Karrde asked me to try to track him down. And as I said, Lando—smelling profit, no doubt—insisted on tagging along.”
“Must have been a long search,” Luke murmured. “The stories of you and Lando …”
“It took some years,” Mara said. “Off and on work, of course.” She lifted her eyebrows. “For whatever it’s worth, the romance part of the cover story drove me crazy. But finding Car’das was important to Karrde, so I stuck with it. Like you said, loyalty.”
She hissed gently between her teeth with the memories. “Though it did prove exceptionally embarrassing at times. There was one particular week on M’haeli where Lando was trying to sugar-talk the Vicebaron Sukarian out of some information we needed. I had to become a giddy, vacant-brained bit of decorative fluff, because Sukarian automatically put that class of woman beneath his contempt and the role gave me the freedom of movement I needed. The worst part was that Solo caught me in the act with a comm relay when I thought it was Sukarian calling. I’ve never quite had the nerve to ask him what he thought of that.”
“I don’t think it would have ruined his opinion of you,” Luke said, his voice an odd mixture of support, gallantry, and lingering embarrassment. “Though I imagine Sukarian’s opinion is probably beyond repair at this point.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Mara assured him. “I usually wore one of Lando’s shirts during Sukarian’s late-night visits and comm calls, and I made sure to leave one of them hanging on the open door of his private office safe. After I’d gutted it.”
Luke smiled. A tentative, still somewhat shamefaced smile, but a genuine smile nevertheless. At this point, that was enough. “His reaction must have been interesting.”
Mara nodded. “I like to think so.”
“Yes.” Luke took a deep breath, and she could sense him forcing old memories and extraneous thoughts to the back of his mind. “But as you said, we’ve got a job to do,” he said briskly, “and it’s going to be a long climb. Let’s pack up the gear and get going.”
It was, as Luke had estimated from the numbers the Qom Jha had gathered for him, indeed a long climb. Nearly as long as it had been from the bottom of the hidden stairway to that first door, in fact. And with Mara’s muscles still recovering from five days of idleness, and Luke himself therefore handling Artoo and all the rest of their equipment, it should have been something of a strain.
But to his mild astonishment, it wasn’t. And it didn’t take any deep Jedi insight to understand why.
The barrier he had set up between him and Mara was gone.
The odd part was that he hadn’t even realized there had been a barrier there. The communication they had together—their ability to sense each other’s thoughts and emotions—had been so close that he’d simply assumed that was as strong as it got.
He’d been wrong. He’d been very wrong.
It was an exhilarating experience; and yet, at the same time, a somewhat intimidating one as well. He’d experienced close-mind contact with other people on occasion, but never to the same level as he was experiencing now. Mara’s thoughts and emotions seemed to flow over him, their level and intensity now seemingly limited only by her personal barriers, as his own thoughts and emotions flowed the other direction back to her. There was a new rapport between them, a deepening of their old relationship that he only now realized how sorely he’d missed.
Confession, apology, and forgiveness, Aunt Beru had been fond of reminding him, were the tools friends used to break walls down into bridges. Seldom if ever in his life had he had that truth so graphically demonstrated.
With concern for Mara’s physical condition and stamina foremost in his mind, he made sure the party took frequent rest breaks as they climbed, a policy that drove Mara just slightly less crazy than it did the Qom Jha. But he insisted, and as a result it took them nearly an hour to reach their target door. But when they did, at least, Mara was fully ready to go.
“All right, here’s the plan,” Luke told her, stretching out with the Force. As near as he could tell, the entire area outside the hidden door was clear. “We’ll leave Artoo and the Qom Jha in here and do a little reconnoiter on our own.”
“Sounds good.” Mara pulled out her blaster and checked it, and Luke could sense her working to control her private misgivings about going back in there. Understandable, of course; she was the one who’d gotten shot. Luke had had something of the same trouble the first time he’d gone back to visit Cloud City. “How about leaving one of our comlinks here with them?”
“Good idea,” Luke agreed, pulling his comlink from his belt and putting it in Artoo’s light-duty grasping arm. “Don’t forget and turn it off,” he admonished the droid.
Artoo warbled indignantly, the translation scrolling across the datapad. “Yes, I know,” Luke assured him. “I was just kidding.”
“What?” Mara asked.
“He said turning off comlinks at critical moments was Threepio’s trick,” Luke told her. “Private joke. You ready?”
He could sense her reaching out to the Force for calm. “Ready,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
The secret door, gratifyingly enough, opened as quietly as the other one had. With Luke in the lead, they stepped out, closing the door behind them.
“Now this,” Mara said quietly in his ear, “is like the Hijarna fortress.”
Luke nodded acknowledgment, looking around. They were in a vast chamber, with short wall segments scattered around apparently at random linking the floor with the relatively low ceiling. The shiny wall coverings, elaborate flooring, and wall sconces they’d seen below were absent, leaving nothing but unadorned and unrelieved black stone. Despite that, though, the place seemed oddly airy. “Doesn’t look like our friends downstairs are using this area,” he said. “I wonder why.”
Mara took a few steps to the side and pointed around the end of one of the wall segments. “There’s your answer,” she said. “Come on—let’s go see.”
She disappeared around the wall. Luke followed, noticing for the first time a gentle flow of air coming from that direction.
And the reason for it was quickly clear. Beyond the wall, at the far side of the room, the black stone had been gashed open to the sky.
“Collateral damage from the battle that knocked down that tower, I’ll bet,” Mara said, already crossing to the gash.
“Be careful,” Luke warned her, hurrying to catch up.
“Yeah, yeah,” Mara said. She reached the gash and cautiously looked out “I was right,” she said, pointing. “There it is. Or what’s left of it.”
Luke reached her side and looked out. They were looking across a vast, circular rooftop that slanted downward from their position at a reasonably steep angle. The stub of Mara’s ruined tower was ahead of them and slightly to the left, eighty meters or so away. The distance and dim sunlight made it hard to tell for sure, but to Luke’s eye the jagged edge looked slightly melted. “And you say this stone absorbs turbolaser fire,” he said.
“Like a very dry sponge,” Mara agreed grimly. “Whoever the builders of this place were, they must have had some impressive enemies.”
“Let’s hope they were satisfied with wrecking that one tower and then went away,” Luke said, giving the rest of the rooftop a quick but careful examination. Symmetrically placed on the right side of the slanting rooftop was another tower, this one undamaged, stretching a good ninety meters into the sky and topped with a ring of ominous-looking protrusions. Weapons systems, undoubtedly. At the far end of the roof, almost two hundred meters from where he and Mara stood, he could see twin bumps that seemed to extend outward from the roof and then continue down the wall on that side. Twin guardhouses, possibly, flanking the main entrance. Beyond the roof, he could see a smooth surface stretching through the craggy mountaintop away from the fo
rtress that could only be an access road. In the center of the fortress was a thirty-meter-long structure whose flat-topped roof extended horizontally out from the main rooftop, making the whole thing look rather like a round-cornered wedge that had been stuck on as an afterthought
“There’s a landing pad on top,” Mara said, pointing to the structure. “You can just make out the markings.”
Luke nodded. The markings were dim, but visible enough when you knew to look for them. “They probably have lights they can turn on when something friendly is on its way in.”
“With turbolasers ready at the top of that tower in case they’re not so friendly.” Easing through the gap in the wall, Mara took a few steps out onto the rooftop, peering toward the landing pad. “Looks like the area under the pad is open in front,” she reported. “Probably their hangar. Might be a handy place to make for if we ever get caught too far away from our exit.” She turned back around—
And her breath caught, a surge of surprise shooting through her. “Whoa,” she said, her eyes tracking upward. “Come take a look at this.”
Maneuvering through the crack, Luke crossed to her side and turned around. Rising from atop the room they’d just been in was yet another tower.
And it had friends. Spaced around the curve of the fortress rooftop to the left were three more, all of the same design. Even with Luke’s skewed perspective, he could tell that these four rear towers were both thicker and a good twenty meters taller than the single one standing below them.
And as with the one below, each of these was also crowned by a ring of weapons emplacements.
“This must have been one impressive place in its heyday,” Mara commented. Her voice was steady, but Luke could tell that she was feeling the same vague uneasiness he was. “Like the one on Hijama. I wish to blazes I knew what they were built to protect.”
“Or to defend against,” Luke added, taking one last look around the rooftop. No lights; no movement; no signs of life at all. “Let’s get back inside and find the way down.”
The way down was on the far side of one of the other wall segments: a smaller version of the spiral slideway they’d used in the barracks section down below. Unlike that one, though, the slideway here wasn’t moving. “Either damaged or shut down for lack of use,” Mara said, easing a cautious eye over the edge. “Next level down doesn’t look inhabited, either.”
“This whole section is probably out of use,” Luke said as they started down. “The way the roof slopes toward the broken tower, each of the levels ought to have a little more floor space as we go down. They’ve probably set up shop on the larger levels.”
“Makes sense,” Mara agreed. “Let’s keep going until we reach a floor with a working slideway somewhere on it. That should be either their highest working level or close to it.”
The floors did indeed extend farther outward as they continued down, with the pattern of random wall segments changing with each level. It wasn’t until the fourth level that Luke finally caught the faint hum of working machinery. “I think we’re here,” he murmured, shifting his grip on his lightsaber and stretching out with the Force. There still didn’t seem to be anyone nearby.
“Looks like it,” Mara agreed, cupping a hand around one ear. “That sounds like one of the slideways. Shall we take a look?”
Luke nodded. “I’ll go first. You stay behind me.”
He headed out, moving as silently as he could across the empty space, trying to ignore Mara’s annoyance from behind him. She could call it overprotectiveness if she wanted—and she undoubtedly was calling it exactly that—but after watching her do five days in a healing trance he much preferred to err on the side of caution. He reached one of the rare—at least on this level—wall segments and eased an eye around it. Beyond it, set right up against the far wall, was the spiral slideway they had heard. “All right,” Luke murmured over his shoulder. “Real easy, now—”
He sensed Mara’s emotional call; but it wasn’t coming from directly behind him. He glanced around, feeling a flash of annoyance of his own as he spotted her standing at the corner of one of the other wall segments twenty meters off to his left. She beckoned to him, a quick, impatient gesture.
And there was a sudden sense of dread in her emotions …
He made it to her side in less than ten seconds. “What is it?” he hissed.
She nodded toward the wall, a silent churning in her eyes and mind. “Around there,” she said.
Lightsaber ready in his hand, Luke slid around the end of the wall segment.
Beyond it was a large open space that had been set up as a sort of command center, though it was currently as unoccupied as everywhere else they’d been today. Two circles of command consoles had been laid out, the boards and displays winking status lights toward the empty chairs in front of them. To one side, a larger and more elaborate chair ringed by its own status boards had been set up on a meter-high platform where it could overlook the entire operation.
And in the center of it all was a sight that sent a shiver of memory along Luke’s spine: a holographic map of the galaxy, with the sectors of the New Republic, the Empire, and the rest of the known regions marked out in a bewildering array of a dozen different colors. The whole variegated mosaic stretched across perhaps a quarter of the huge spiral, fading into neutral white where the edges of the Outer Rim Territories gave way to the vastness of the Unknown Regions beyond.
It was a duplicate of the galactic holo Emperor Palpatine had had in his throne room in Mount Tantiss.
Luke swallowed, tearing his eyes away from the holo to give the surrounding equipment a closer look. Yes, the consoles were indeed Imperial issue: status and computer-access boards from a Star Destroyer or other major capital ship. The chairs, likewise, were straight from a Star Destroyer’s bridge crew pits.
And the overseer chair and boards were those of an Imperial fleet admiral. Such as the one Grand Admiral Thrawn would have used.
He felt the whisper of air as Mara came up close beside him. “I think we’ve found our link to the Imperials,” he told her. “It looks like even Palpatine may have had a hand in this place.”
Her hair swished against his shoulder as she shook her head. “You’re missing the point, Luke,” she muttered. “Look at that holo. I mean really look at it.”
Luke frowned, focusing on the galactic spiral again. What in space was she referring to?
And then, abruptly, he caught his breath. No. No—he was seeing things. Surely he was seeing things.
But he wasn’t. At the edge of the known galaxy, where Palpatine’s holo had shown only the white stars of the Unknown Regions, an entirely new area had been colored in.
A huge new area.
“Funny, isn’t it,” Mara said, the dread still swirling through her. “He was exiled from the Imperial court, you know. Just summarily thrown out.”
“Who was?” Luke asked.
“Grand Admiral Thrawn,” she said. “Picked the wrong side in one of the political battles that were always going on there and lost. Everyone else in the cabal wound up demoted or imprisoned or else reassigned to a semiprivate torture chamber like garrison duty in the Outer Rim. But not Thrawn. Oh, no. Even the Outer Rim was too good for this ungrateful alien who’d been accepted into Imperial society and paid them back for their kindness with a slap in the face. No, they had to come up with something very special for him.”
“And that something was exile to the Unknown Regions?”
Mara nodded. “If the Outer Rim was a torture cell, the Unknown Regions was a fully populated rancor pit,” she said. “So with some prodding—and probably a lot of deal-making—they got Palpatine to put him aboard a Star Destroyer and send him on a one-way trip past the Outer Rim.”
She snorted out a derisive laugh. “And just to add insult to injury, they managed to make it a mapping expedition. Imagine—one of the best strategists the Empire had ever known being reduced to mapping duty. Ruining his life and his reputation with a singl
e stroke. I’ll bet they were chuckling together about it for years afterward.”
Luke shook his head. “I seem to be missing the joke.”
“So did they,” Mara said, her dark mood darkening even further. “The joke is that it apparently never occurred to any of them that Palpatine was always one step ahead of whatever was happening in his court. And if he was a step ahead, a strategist like Thrawn was at least two steps ahead.”
Luke’s mouth felt dry. “Are you saying that Thrawn and Palpatine had the whole thing planned out from the beginning?”
“Of course they did.” Mara gestured at the holo. “Just look at all the territory he opened up. He couldn’t possibly have done that by himself, with just a single Star Destroyer. Palpatine must have been feeding him men and ships all along the way.”
“But that can’t all be Imperial territory,” Luke said. “I mean … it can’t.”
“Why not?” Mara countered. “Oh, I agree there probably aren’t more than a few actual colonies out there. But you can bet there are Imperial garrisons scattered all over the place, plus intel centers and listening posts and probably a few fullblown shipyards. And if I know Thrawn, probably a whole network of alliances with the natives, too.”
“But if that’s Imperial territory, why hasn’t the Empire made any use of it?” Luke argued. “I’ve seen the data, Mara—they’re down to practically nothing over there.”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” she said quietly. “They’re not using it because they don’t know it’s there.”
For a long minute neither of them spoke. Luke gazed at the holo, listening to the distant hum of the spiral slideway, the terrible implications of those gently glowing lights tumbling over each other in his mind. There had to be the equivalent of two hundred fifty sectors there—nearly thirty times the Empire’s current size.
