Chapter Text
“Spector One, I’m in.” Sabine continued forward as the duracrete tunnel of the sewer line opened into a cavernous hall. An old warehouse structure, closed up and forgotten a generation before. “It’s just like the intel said, this must have been buried when they built the new Imperial center on top of it.”
Which meant a few well-placed charges would bring the whole thing down.
Kanan’s voice came in low over her helmet comm. “All right, Specter Five. Do the thing and get out of there fast as you can.”
“You have a bad feeling about this, Specter One?” she asked, amused.
“Always,” he grumbled.
She didn’t know whether to take him seriously, if he was really having one of his gut feelings or if he’d woken up grumpy today.
So far, the mission had gone perfectly. She’d followed the sewer for a couple of kilometers, while her crew waited on the other end, which meant they couldn’t back her up if she got in trouble. She couldn’t let her guard down. Lowering her helmet’s scanner, she searched for traps, for surveillance, for any sign that this place wasn’t as abandoned as it looked.
And there it was, the thing that wasn’t right. “Specter One, I’m seeing pressure plates on the floor.” Just a couple of them, no more than a few centimeters across. Squares of metal sitting on top of the duracrete. Maybe old scrap metal? But her scan was showing active wiring underneath them, which meant they were intended to activate…something.
“Can you avoid them?” Kanan asked, and his calm reassured her.
“Yeah, easy. But it makes me wonder what I’m missing.”
“Is it time to abort?”
“No, no. I’ll have the charges planted in two minutes, then I’m out of here.”
With the intel they’d gotten she’d been able to map out the structure ahead of time and knew exactly where the weak points were, the three places she needed to plant bombs in order to destabilize the entire building on the surface. Shifting to the edge of the tunnel to avoid the pressure plates, she moved forward— And something caught her leg. She pulled it, but it was held fast.
A cord had snaked out of the wall and wound around her leg, below her shin guard, digging into her boot. The part of the wall it had emerged from was invisible, seamless. She’d been so distracted by the traps on the floor, she’d missed the wall entirely. And now she couldn’t continue forward.
“Uh, Specter One? We might have a problem.” She drew her blaster and fired at the wall, which popped with a spray of duracrete fragments and the cord broke loose.
“Specter Five?” Kanan demanded.
“Site’s booby trapped,” she said. “Do I continue with the mission or get out?”
“Get out,” Kanan said, no hesitation.
She turned back to the sewer tunnel and ran. But by this time a second cord snaked out to grab her other leg, and a third to grab at her arm. This one caught above her glove, into her skin. She ducked and twisted away from that one, but her leg was caught again. She blasted it free—her armor would protect her from the energy blast, she wasn’t worried about that. But she was seriously under attack now.
Two more cables snaked out of slots in the wall, whipping toward her. And a blast door slammed shut at the end of the tunnel, between her and the hall.
“Karabast!” she muttered. The cords were coming at her faster than she could blast them. She had to get back down the tunnel, fast.
She threw herself backward and ignited her jet pack. She rocketed along the floor, the metal of the pack scraping on duracrete with a teeth-leaching whine. That was going to ruin the finish, and she was probably going to need to repaint all her armor after this. At least she was too fast for the trap, now.
The tunnel walls whipped past, and she craned her head back to get a look at where she was going, to make sure the way was clear—
Another blast door slammed shut on this end of the tunnel.
She shut off the jet pack and twisted to get her legs up, aimed in her direction of motion to absorb the impact, if she couldn’t get stopped in time. But she could, rolling against the duracrete, her armor taking the brunt of the impact. She grabbed a hand torch off her belt and scanned the tunnel. The blast door was solid; she was well and truly locked in.
“Specter Five?”
“I’m going to have to blast my way out of this tunnel.” She jumped up, sticking one of her charges to the ceiling. This should open up to a wide street. If she could just get to daylight, she could run and she’d be fine. “It’ll be fine,” she said, hoping she conveyed confidence. She gave the charge some distance, put her back to it and bent over, letting her armor protect her, and detonated.
It should have just blown out a circle of duracrete. It should have just punched a hole into the street. This was one of the explosives she’d intended to use to surgically take out a support for the foundation of a building, not blast a swathe of destruction. It should have been perfect, she never made a mistake with this kind of thing.
And it was perfect. Exactly right. The explosion blasted out, dust rained down, and a perfect beam of sunlight streamed down through the tunnel’s ceiling. But then dust kept raining down—and there were three more blasts, the pop of detonators and the rumble of shattered duracrete.
Extra charges. Not hers. The whole tunnel was coming down on top of her. And she had no place to go.
She spoke into her helmet comm, “Uh, Kanan, I’ve got a prob—“
**
The comm cut out, mid-sentence. The rest of the Ghost’s crew sat in the cockpit, listening, as if Sabine’s voice would return. It didn’t.
“What just happened?” Ezra asked, breaking the silence. “Guys—what just happened?”
“Specter Five?” Kanan tried again. Nothing.
Hera ordered, “Chopper, get that frequency back. Specter Five, you copy?” Still nothing, and the tension ratcheted up yet again. This was supposed to be a simple job.
“Whose idea was it to park on the other side of the city from the hit?” Zeb said.
“Sabine’s,” Kanan said. “She was supposed to be halfway down the sewer line by now.”
Chopper hollered an interruption, and Hera tapped at the holoplate. “Here we go,” she murmured. “Chop’s patched into a security feed on the street outside. Look at that, the whole street’s collapsed. The tunnel must have caved in.”
“Tell me what’s happening,” Kanan said calmly. Sometimes the Force was clear, sometimes he could sense the world around him to a degree that was almost like seeing. But sometimes, nothing at all. Blindness, both in his vision and the Force.
Hera said, “There’s a troop transport parked there. A whole squadron of stormtroopers.”
“They got there awfully fast,” Ezra said.
“They were waiting,” Kanan said somberly.
“A trap,” Zeb observed, a growl burring his voice.
It was starting to look that way.
“There…there she is,” Ezra said. “They’re pulling her out of the rubble. Is that…is that blood? Kanan, she’s hurt.”
“How bad is it?” Kanan asked. More difficult, keeping his voice calm.
“Banged up, unconscious it looks like,” Hera said. He only recognized the tightness in her voice because he’d known her so long. A stranger would have thought she was detached. “Wait a minute…”
Kanan felt them all flinch, drawing back from the holoplate. That was when he knew it was bad. Really bad.
“Grand Admiral Thrawn,” Hera murmured. “He’s there. He’s taking custody of her himself.”
The insight blazed, and Kanan could see what was happening. Maybe not the visible scene as it unfolded, but the signs and what they meant. The meaning underneath it all. All the clues came together. A trap, specifically designed to incapacitate—not kill, incapacitate—someone in Mandalorian armor, with Thrawn behind it.
“They were waiting for her,” Kanan said, furious with himself for not seeing it from the first.
“Why her?” Ezra said, anxiety filling his voice. Kanan resisted an urge to tell him to calm down. That would do the opposite. And the boy had a reason to be anxious.
“Kanan, what is it?” Hera asked. She must have seen the realization in his features, the tension in his shoulders. He was having trouble staying calm himself.
He said, “Thrawn isn’t just collecting art now. He’s collecting artists.”
“We’re going after her, right?” Ezra asked. Demanded, fiercely. “Right?”
“There’s a shuttle there, isn’t there?” Kanan said. “They’re taking her straight to orbit.”
The Ghost was already warmed up. Hera swung the pilot’s seat around, taking hold of the controls. “We’ll track it.”
There was nothing they could do. He didn’t want to say it out loud but he knew it was true. It was already too late.
Ezra wouldn’t stop talking long enough to think about it. “So we blast the shuttle out of the sky, force it to land—“
“And kill her?” Zeb said, outraged.
“Okay, then we follow it into hyperspace—“
“Ezra,” Kanan said. “Calm down.”
“Calm down! How can you—“
Kanan threw him a look—the admonishing look he would have given him if he still had working eyes, at least. Amazingly, Ezra fell quiet.
The Ghost was rocketing straight up, out of atmosphere and into the traffic lanes over the planet. “Well, would you look at that,” Hera breathed.
“The Chimaera,” Ezra said. Thrawn’s Star Destroyer. Kanan could feel them all leaning toward the viewport, staring. “When did it get here?”
“When Thrawn sprang the trap for Sabine,” Kanan said. “The whole thing was a setup.”
“Karabast,” Zeb cursed.
“So we go in,” Ezra said. “We go in and get her back. We’ve done it before.”
“That’s what worries me,” Kanan said. “There’s no way Thrawn isn’t waiting for us.”
Hera said, “We’ll check it out. We’ll get as close as we can and just see. There—there’s Thrawn’s shuttle. We’ll follow it in as close as we can. Agreed?”
She was asking him. Asking Kanan what they should do, and all he could think was, It’s already too late. But he said, “Agreed.”
They would just see what they could do.