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Chapter Text

“At least, not unless there’s a use for the things that we don’t know about. Coming all the way out here to collect ysalamiri is a bit of an overkill to use against a single Jedi.”

Mara’s eyes again drifted away. “Maybe it’s not Skywalker they’re after,” she murmured. “Maybe they’ve found some more Jedi.”

“Seems unlikely,” Karrde said, watching her closely. The emotion in her voice when she’d said Luke Skywalker’s name . . . “The Emperor supposedly made a clean sweep of them in the early days of the New Order. Unless,” he added as another thought occurred to him, “they’ve perhaps found Darth Vader.”

“Vader died on the Death Star,” Mara said. “Along with the Emperor.” “That’s the story, certainly—”

“He died there,” Mara cut him off, her voice suddenly sharp.

“Of course,” Karrde nodded. It had taken him five months of close observation, but he’d finally pinned down the handful of subjects guaranteed to trigger strong responses from the woman. The late Emperor was among them, as was the pre-Endor Empire.

And at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum was Luke Skywalker. “Still,” he continued thoughtfully, “if a Grand Admiral thinks he has a good reason to carry ysalamiri aboard his ships, we might do well to follow his lead.”

Abruptly, Mara’s eyes focused on him again. “What for?” she demanded. “A simple precaution,” Karrde said. “Why so vehement?”

He watched as she fought a brief internal battle. “It seems like a waste of time,” she said. “Thrawn’s probably just jumping at shadows. Anyway, how are you going to keep ysalamiri alive on a ship without transplanting some trees along with them?”

“I’m sure Thrawn has some ideas as to the mechanics of it,” Karrde assured her. “Dankin and Chin will know how to poke around for details.”

Her eyes seemed strangely hooded. “Yes,” she muttered, her voice conceding defeat. “I’m sure they will.”

“And in the meantime,” Karrde said, pretending not to notice, “we still have business to discuss. As I recall, you were going to list some improvements you would make in the organization.”

“Yes.” Mara took another deep breath, closing her eyes . . . and when she opened them again she was back to her usual cool self. “Yes. Well—”

Slowly at first, but with ever-increasing confidence, she launched into a contraband materials.”

“What makes you think they’ll come?” Mara demanded. “They’re not going to be in time to do anything.”

“No, but that’s not really the point of such a show,” Karrde said. “The point is to score domestic political gains by bustling around, presenting a comforting display of force, and otherwise convincing the locals that something like this can never happen again.”

“And promising to help clean up the wreckage,” Lachton put in.

“That goes without saying,” Karrde agreed dryly. “Regardless, it’s not a situation we really want to fly into. We’ll send a transmission from our next stop telling them we’ll try to make delivery again in a week.”

“I still don’t like it,” Mara insisted. “We promised them we’d do it. We promised.”

There was a short pause. “It’s standard procedure,” Karrde told her, a touch of curiosity almost hidden beneath the usual urbane smoothness of his voice. “I’m sure they’d prefer late delivery to losing the entire shipment.”

With an effort, Mara forced the black haze of memory away. Promises . .

. “I suppose so,” she conceded, blinking her attention back to the control board. While they’d been talking, the last Star Destroyer had apparently gone to lightspeed, leaving nothing behind but enraged and impotent defenders and mass destruction.

A mess for the New Republic’s politicians and military people to clean up. For a moment she gazed out at the distant planets. Wondering if Luke Skywalker might be among those the New Republic would send to help clean up that mess.

“Whenever you’re ready, Mara.”

With an effort, she shook away the thought. “Yes, sir,” she said, reaching for the board. Not yet, she told herself silently. Not yet. But soon. Very, very soon.

The remote swooped; hesitated; swooped again; hesitated again; swooped once more and fired. Leia, swinging her new lightsaber in an overlarge arc, was just a shade too slow. “Gah!” she grunted, taking a step backward.

“You’re not giving the Force enough control,” Luke told her. “You have to —Wait a minute.”

Reaching out with the Force, he put the remote on pause. He remembered vividly that first practice session on the Falcon, when he’d had to concentrate on Ben Kenobi’s instructions while at the same time keeping a wary eye on the remote. Doing both together hadn’t been easy choosing it,” Luke told him. “A small run-in with an Imperial Star Destroyer about half a light-year away.”

“Ah,” Karrde said, without any surprise that Luke could see or sense. “Yes, the Empire is still quite active in this part of the galaxy. Growing more so, too, particularly of late.” He cocked his head slightly to the side, his eyes never leaving Luke’s face. “Though I presume you’ve already noticed that. Incidentally, it looks like we’ll be able to take your ship in tow, after all. I’m having the cables rigged now.”

“Thank you,” Luke said, feeling the skin on the back of his neck start to tingle. Whether a pirate or a smuggler, Karrde should certainly have reacted more strongly to the news that there was a Star Destroyer in the area. Unless, of course, he already had an understanding with the Imperials . . . “Allow me to thank you for the rescue, as well,” he continued. “Artoo and I are lucky you happened along.”

“And Artoo is—? Oh, of course—your astromech droid.” The blue eyes flicked down briefly. “You must be a formidable warrior indeed, Skywalker— escaping from an Imperial Star Destroyer is no mean trick. Though I imagine a man like yourself is accustomed to giving the Imperials trouble.”

“I don’t see much front-line action anymore,” Luke told him. “You haven’t told me how you came to be out here, Captain. Or, for that matter, how you knew who I was.”

Another almost-smile. “With a lightsaber attached to your belt?” he asked wryly. “Come now. You were either Luke Skywalker, Jedi, or else someone with a taste for antiques and an insufferably high opinion of his swordsmanship.” Again, the blue eyes flicked up and down Luke. “You’re not really what I expected, somehow. Though I suppose that’s not all that surprising—the vast majority of Jedi lore has been so twisted by myth and ignorance that to get a clear picture is almost impossible.”

The warning bell in the back of Luke’s mind began to ring louder. “You almost sound as if you were expecting to find me here,” he said, easing his body into a combat stance and letting his senses reach out. All five of the crewers were still more or less where they’d been a few minutes earlier, farther up toward the forward part of the ship. None except Karrde himself was close enough to pose any kind of immediate threat.

“As a matter of fact, we were,” Karrde agreed calmly. “Though I can’t actually take any of the credit for that. It was one of my associates, Mara Jade, who led us here.” His head inclined slightly to his right. “She’s on the bridge at the moment.”

He paused, obviously waiting. It could be a setup, Luke knew; but the suggestion that someone might actually have been able to sense his presence.

He awoke slowly, in stages, aware of nothing but the twin facts that, one, he was lying flat on his back and, two, he felt terrible. Slowly, gradually, the haze began to coalesce into more localized sensations. The air around him was warm but damp, a light and shifting breeze carrying several unfamiliar odors along with it. The surface beneath him had the soft/firm feel of a bed; the general sense of his skin and mouth implied he’d been asleep for probably several days. It took another minute for the implications of that to percolate through the mental fog filling his brain. More than an hour or two was well beyond the safe capabilities of any stun weapon he’d ever heard of. Clearly, after being shot, he’d been drugged. Inwardly, he smiled. Karrde was probably expecting him to be incapacitated for a while longer; and Karrde was in for a surprise. Forcing his mind into focus, he ran through the Jedi technique for detoxifying poisons and then waited for the haze to clear. It took him some time to realize that nothing was, in fact, happening. Somewhere in there he fell asleep again; and when he next awoke, his mind had cleared completely. Blinking against the sunlight streaming across his face, he opened his eyes and lifted his head. He was lying on a bed, still in his flight suit, in a small but comfortably furnished room. Directly across from him was an open window, the source of the aroma-laden breezes he’d already noted. Through the window, too, he could see the edge of a forest fifty meters or so away, above which a yellowish-orange sun hovered—rising or setting, he didn’t know which. The furnishings of the room itself didn’t look much like those of a prison cell— “Finally awake, are you?” a woman’s voice said from the side. Startled, Luke twisted his head toward the voice. His first, instantaneous thought was that he had somehow missed sensing whoever was over there; his second, following on the heels of the first, was that that was clearly ridiculous and that the voice must be coming instead from an intercom or comlink. He finished his turn, to discover that the first thought had indeed been correct. She was sitting in a high-backed chair, her arms in a posture that seemed strangely familiar: a slender woman about Luke’s own age, with brilliant red-gold hair and equally brilliant green eyes. Her legs were casually crossed; a compact but wicked-looking blaster lay on her lap.

A genuine, living human being . . . and yet, impossibly, he couldn’t sense her.

The confusion must have shown in his face. “That’s right,” she said, favoring him with a smile. Not a friendly or even a polite smile, but one that seemed to be made up of equal parts bitterness and malicious amusement. “Welcome back to the world of mere mortals.”

—and with a surge of adrenaline, Luke realized that the strange mental veiling wasn’t limited to just her. He couldn’t sense anything. Not people, not droids, not even the forest beyond his window.

It was like suddenly going blind.

“Don’t like it, do you?” the woman mocked. “It’s not easy to suddenly lose everything that once made you special, is it?”

Slowly, carefully, Luke eased his legs over the side of the bed and sat up, giving his body plenty of time to get used to moving again. The woman watched him, her right hand dropping to her lap to rest on top of the blaster. “If the purpose of all this activity is to impress me with your remarkable powers of recuperation,” she offered, “you don’t need to bother.”

“Nothing so devious,” Luke advised, breathing hard and trying not to wheeze. “The purpose of all this activity is to get me back on my feet.” He looked her hard in the eye, wondering if she would flinch away from his gaze. She didn’t even twitch. “Don’t tell me; let me guess. You’re Mara Jade.”

“That doesn’t impress me, either,” she said coldly. “Karrde already told me he’d mentioned my name to you.”

Luke nodded. “He also told me that you were the one who found my X- wing. Thank you.”

Her eyes flashed. “Save your gratitude,” she bit out. “As far as I’m concerned, the only question left is whether we turn you over to the Imperials or kill you ourselves.”

Abruptly she stood up, the blaster ready in her hand. “On your feet. Karrde wants to see you.”

Carefully, Luke stood up, and as he did so, he noticed for the first time that Mara had attached his lightsaber to her own belt. Was she, then, a Jedi herself? Powerful enough, perhaps, to smother Luke’s abilities? “I can’t say that either of those options sounds appealing,” he commented.

“There’s one other one.” She took half a step forward, moving close enough that he could have reached out and touched her. Lifting the blaster, she pointed it directly at his face. “You try to escape . . . and I kill you right here and now.”

For a long moment they stood there, frozen. The bitter hatred was blazing again in those eyes . . . but even as Luke gazed back at her, he saw something else along with the anger. Something that looked like a deep and lingering pain.

He stood quietly, not moving; and almost reluctantly, she lowered the weapon. “Move. Karrde’s waiting.”

Luke’s room was at the end of a long hallway with identical doors spaced at regular intervals along its length. A barracks of sorts, he decided, as they left it and started across a grassy clearing toward a large, high-roofed building. Several other structures clustered around the latter, including another barracks building, a handful that looked like storehouses, and one that was clearly a servicing hangar. Grouped around the hangar on both sides were over a dozen starships, including at least two bulk cruisers like the Wild Karrde and several smaller craft, some of them hidden a ways back into the forest that pressed closely in on the compound from all sides. Tucked away behind one of the bulk cruisers, he could just see the nose of his X-wing. For a moment he considered asking Mara what had happened to Artoo, decided he’d do better to save the question for Karrde.

They reached the large central building and Mara reached past Luke to slap the sensor plate beside the door. “He’s in the greatroom,” Mara said as the panel slid open in response. “Straight ahead.”

They walked down a long hallway, passing a pair of what seemed to be medium-sized dining and recreation rooms. Ahead, a large door at the end of the hallway slid open at their approach. Mara ushered him inside—

And into a scene straight out of ancient legend.

For a moment Luke just stood in the doorway, staring. The room was large and spacious, its high ceiling translucent and crisscrossed by a webwork of carved rafters. The walls were composed of a dark brown wood, much of it elaborately open-mesh carved, with a deep blue light glowing through the interstices. Other luxuries were scattered sparingly about: a small sculpture here, an unrecognizable alien artifact there. Chairs, couches, and large cushions were arranged in well-separated conversation circles, giving a distinctly relaxed, almost informal air to the place.

But all that was secondary, taken in peripherally or at a later time entirely. For that first astonishing moment Luke’s full attention was fixed solidly on the tree growing through the center of the room.

the others go. “They’re usually better behaved than that with guests. Now; please sit down.”

Luke did so, accepting the cup Karrde offered him. Mara stepped past him and took up position next to her chief. Her blaster, Luke noted, was now in a wrist holster on her left forearm, nearly as accessible as it would have been in her hand.

“It’s just a mild stimulant,” Karrde said, nodding to the cup in Luke’s hand. “Something to help you wake up.” He took a drink from his own cup and set it back down on the low table.

Luke took a sip. It tasted all right; and anyway, if Karrde had wanted to drug him, there was hardly any need to stoop to such a childish subterfuge. “Would you mind telling me where my droid is?”

“Oh, he’s perfectly all right,” Karrde assured him. “I have him in one of my equipment sheds for safekeeping.”

“I’d like to see him, if I may.”

“I’m sure that can be arranged. But later.” Karrde leaned back in his seat, his forehead furrowing slightly. “Perhaps after we’ve figured out just exactly what we’re going to do with you.”

Luke glanced up at Mara. “Your associate mentioned the possibilities. I’d hoped I could add another to the list.”

“That we send you back home?” Karrde suggested.

“With due compensation, of course,” Luke assured him. “Say, double whatever the Empire would offer?”

“You’re very generous with other people’s money,” Karrde said dryly. “The problem, unfortunately, doesn’t arise from money, but from politics. Our operations, you see, extend rather deeply into both Imperial and Republic space. If the Empire discovered we’d released you back to the Republic, they would be highly displeased with us.”

“And vice versa if you turned me over to the Empire,” Luke pointed out. “True,” Karrde said. “Except that given the damage to your X-wing’s subspace radio, the Republic presumably has no idea what happened to you. The Empire, unfortunately, does.”

“And it’s not what they would offer,” Mara put in. “It’s what they have offered. Thirty thousand.”

Luke pursed his lips. “I had no idea I was so valuable,” he said.

“You could be the difference between solvency and failure for any number of marginal operators,” Karrde said bluntly. “There are probably dozens of ships out there right now, ignoring schedules and prior commitments to hunt for you.” He smiled tightly. “Operators who haven’t given even a moment of consideration to how they would hold onto a Jedi even if they caught one.”

“Your method seems to work pretty well,” Luke told him. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell me how you’ve managed it.”

Karrde smiled again. “Secrets of that magnitude are worth a great deal of money. Have you any secrets of equal value to trade?”

“Probably not,” Luke said evenly. “But, again, I’m sure the New Republic would be willing to pay market value.”

Karrde sipped from his drink, eyeing Luke thoughtfully over the rim of the cup. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said, putting the cup back on the table beside him. “You tell me why the Empire is suddenly so interested in you, and I’ll tell you why your Jedi powers aren’t working.”

“Why don’t you ask the Imperials directly?”

Karrde smiled. “Thank you, but no. I’d just as soon not have them start wondering at my sudden interest. Particularly after we pleaded prior commitments when the request came in for us to help hunt you down.”

Luke frowned at him. “You weren’t hunting for me?”

“No, we weren’t.” Karrde’s lip twisted. “One of those little ironies that make life so interesting. We were simply returning from a cargo pickup when Mara dropped us out of hyperspace on the spur of the moment to do a nav reading.”

Luke studied Mara’s stony expression. “How fortunate for you,” he said. “Perhaps,” Karrde said. “The net result, though, was to put us in the middle

of the exact situation that I’d hoped to avoid.”

Luke held his hands out, palms upward. “Then let me go and pretend none of this happened. I give you my word I’ll keep your part in it quiet.”

“The Empire would find out anyway,” Karrde shook his head. “Their new commander is extremely good at piecing bits of information together. No, I think your best hope right now is for us to find a compromise. Some way we can let you go while still giving the Imperials what they want.” He cocked his head slightly. “Which leads us back to my original question.”

“And from there back to my original answer,” Luke said. “I really don’t know what the Empire wants with me.” He hesitated, but Leia should be well beyond Imperial reach by now. “I can tell you, though, that it’s not just me. There have been two attempts on my sister Leia, too.”

“Killing attempts?”

Luke thought about it. “I don’t think so. The one I was present for felt more like a kidnapping.”

“Interesting,” Karrde murmured, his eyes defocusing slightly. “Leia Organa Solo. Who is in training to be a Jedi like her brother. That could explain . .

. certain recent Imperial actions.”

Luke waited, but after a moment it became clear that Karrde wasn’t going to elaborate. “You spoke of a compromise,” he reminded the other.

Karrde seemed to pull his thoughts back to the room. “Yes, I did,” he said. “It’s occurred to me that your privileged position in the New Republic might be what the Empire was interested in—that they wanted information on the inner workings of the Provisional Council. In such a case, we might have been able to work out a deal whereby you went free while your R2 droid went to the Imperials for debriefing.”

Luke felt his stomach tighten. “It wouldn’t do them any good,” he said as casually as he could manage. The thought of Artoo being sold into Imperial slavery . . . “Artoo has never been to any of the Council meetings.”

“But he does have a great deal of knowledge of you personally,” Karrde pointed out. “As well as of your sister, her husband, and various other highly placed members of the New Republic.” He shrugged. “It’s a moot question now, of course. The fact that the focus is exclusively on the New Republic’s Jedi and potential Jedi means they’re not simply after information. Where did these two attacks take place?”

“The first was on Bimmisaari, the second on Bpfassh.”

Karrde nodded. “We’ve got a contact on Bpfassh; perhaps we can get him to do some backtracking on the Imperials. Until then, I’m afraid you’ll have to remain here as our guest.”

It sounded like a dismissal. “Let me just point out one other thing before I go,” Luke said. “No matter what happens to me—or what happens to Leia, for that matter—the Empire is still doomed. There are more planets in the New Republic now than there are under Imperial rule, and that number increases daily. We’ll win eventually, if only by sheer weight of numbers.”

“I understand that was the Emperor’s own argument when discussing your Rebellion,” Karrde countered dryly. “Still, that is the crux of the dilemma, isn’t it? While the Empire will wreak swift retribution on me if I don’t give you over to them, the New Republic looks more likely to win out in the long run.”

“Only if he and his sister are there to hold Mon Mothma’s hand,” Mara put in contemptuously. “If they aren’t—”

“If they aren’t, the final time frame is somewhat less clear,” Karrde agreed. “At any rate, I thank you for your time, Skywalker. I hope we can come to a decision without too much of a delay.”

“Don’t hurry on my account,” Luke told him. “This seems a pleasant enough world to spend a few days on.”

“Don’t believe it for a moment,” Karrde warned. “My two pet vornskrs have a large number of relatives out in the forest. Relatives who haven’t had the benefits of modern domestication.”

“I understand,” Luke said. On the other hand, if he could get out of Karrde’s encampment and clear of whatever this strange interference was they were using on him . . .

“And don’t count on your Jedi skills to protect you, either,” Karrde added, almost lazily. “You’ll be just as helpless in the forest. Probably more so.” He looked up at the tree towering above him. “There are, after all, considerably more ysalamiri out there than there are here.”

“Ysalamiri?” Luke followed his gesture . . . and for the first time noticed the slender, gray-brown creature hanging onto the tree limb directly over Karrde’s head. “What is it?”

“The reason you’re staying where we put you,” Karrde said. “They seem to have the unusual ability to push back the Force—to create bubbles, so to speak, where the Force simply doesn’t exist.”

“I’ve never heard of them,” Luke said, wondering if there was any truth at all to the story. Certainly neither Yoda nor Ben had ever mentioned the possibility of such a thing.

“Not very many have,” Karrde agreed. “And in the past, most of those who did had a vested interest in keeping it that way. The Jedi of the Old Republic avoided the planet, for obvious reasons, which was why a fair number of smuggling groups back then had their bases here. After the Emperor destroyed the Jedi, most of the groups pulled up roots and left, preferring to be closer to their potential markets. Now that the Jedi are rising again—” he nodded gravely to Luke “—perhaps some of them will return. Though I dare say the general populace would probably not appreciate that.”

Luke glanced around the tree. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see several other ysalamiri wrapped around and across various of the limbs and branches. “What makes you think it’s the ysalamiri and not something else that’s responsible for this bubbling in the Force?”

“Partly local legend,” Karrde said. “Mainly, the fact that you’re standing here talking with me. How else could a man with a stun weapon and an extremely nervous mind have walked right up behind a Jedi without being noticed?”

Luke looked at him sharply, the last piece falling into place. “You had ysalamiri aboard the Wild Karrde.”

“Correct,” Karrde said. “Purely by chance, actually. Well—” He looked up at Mara. “Perhaps not entirely by chance.”

Luke glanced again at the ysalamiri above Karrde’s head. “How far does this bubbling extend?”

“Actually, I’m not sure anyone knows,” Karrde conceded. “Legend says that individual ysalamiri have bubbles from one to ten meters in radius, but

that groups of them together have considerably larger ones. Some sort of reinforcement, I gather. Perhaps you’ll do us the courtesy of participating in a few experiments regarding them before you leave.”

“Perhaps,” Luke said. “Though that probably depends on which direction I’m headed at the time.”

“It probably will,” Karrde agreed. “Well. I imagine you’d like to get cleaned up—you’ve been living in that flight suit for several days now. Did you bring any changes of clothing with you?”

“There’s a small case in the cargo compartment of my X-wing,” Luke told him. “Thank you for bringing it along, incidentally.”

“I try never to waste anything that may someday prove useful,” Karrde said. “I’ll have your things sent over as soon as my associates have determined that there are no hidden weapons or other equipment among them.” He smiled slightly. “I doubt that a Jedi would bother with such things, but I believe in being thorough. Good evening, Skywalker.”

Mara had her tiny blaster in hand again. “Let’s go,” she said, gesturing with the weapon.

Luke stood up. “Let me offer you one other option,” he said to Karrde. “If you decide you’d rather pretend none of this ever happened, you could just return Artoo and me to where you found us. I’d be willing to take my chances with the other searchers.”

“Including the Imperials?” Karrde asked. “Including the Imperials,” Luke nodded.

A small smile touched Karrde’s lips. “You might be surprised. But I’ll keep the option in mind.”

The sun had disappeared behind the trees and the sky was noticeably darker as Mara escorted him back across the compound. “Did I miss dinner?” he asked as they walked down the corridor toward his room.

“Something can be brought to you,” Mara said, her voice little more than a thinly veiled snarl.

“Thank you.” Luke took a careful breath. “I don’t know why you dislike me so much—”

“Shut up,” she cut him off. “Just shut up.”

Grimacing, Luke did so. They reached his room and she nudged him inside. “We don’t have any lock for the window,” she said, “but there’s an alarm on it. You try going out, and it’ll be a toss-up as to whether the vornskrs get to you before I do.” She smiled, mock-sweetly. “But don’t take my word for it. Try it and find out.”

Luke looked at the window, then back at Mara. “I’ll pass, thanks.”

Without another word she left the room, closing the door behind her. There was the click of an electronic lock being engaged, and then silence.

He went to the window, peered out. There were lights showing in some of the other barracks windows, though he hadn’t noticed any other lights in his own building. Which made sense, he supposed. Whether Karrde decided to turn him over to the Empire or release him back to the New Republic, there was no point in more of his associates knowing about it than absolutely necessary.

All the more so if Karrde decided to take Mara’s advice and just kill him.

He turned away from the window and went back to his bed, fighting back the fear trying to rise inside him. Never since facing the Emperor had he felt so helpless.

Or, for that matter, actually been so helpless.

He took a deep breath. For the Jedi, there is no emotion; there is peace.

Somehow, he knew, there had to be a way out of this prison. All he had to do was to stay alive long enough to find it.

Mara stepped up to the comm room door, wondering uneasily what this sudden summons was all about. Karrde hadn’t said, but there had been something in his voice that had set her old survival instincts tingling. Checking the tiny blaster hanging upside down in its sleeve sheath, she slapped at the door release.

She’d expected to find at least two people already in the room: Karrde plus the comm room duty man plus whoever else had been called in on this. To her mild surprise, Karrde was alone. “Come in, Mara,” he invited, looking up from his data pad. “Close the door behind you.”

She did so. “Trouble?” she asked.

“A minor problem only,” he assured her. “A bit of an awkward one, though. Fynn Torve just called to say he was on his way in . . . and he has guests. Former New Republic generals Lando Calrissian and Han Solo.”

Mara felt her stomach tighten. “What do they want?”

Karrde shrugged fractionally. “Apparently, just to talk to me.”

For a second, Mara’s thoughts flicked to Skywalker, still locked away in his barracks room across the compound. But, no—there was no way anyone in the New Republic could possibly know he was here. Most of Karrde’s own people didn’t know it, including the majority of those right here on Myrkr. “Did they bring their own ship?” she asked.

“Theirs is the only one coming in, actually,” Karrde nodded. “Torve’s riding with them.”

Mara’s eyes flicked to the comm equipment behind him. “A hostage?”

Karrde shook his head. “I don’t think so. He gave all the proper all-clear passwords. The Etherway’s still on Abregado—been impounded by the local authorities or some such. Apparently, Calrissian and Solo helped Torve avoid a similar fate.”

“Then thank them, have them put Torve down, and tell them to get off the planet,” she said. “You didn’t invite them here.”

“True,” Karrde agreed, watching her closely. “On the other hand, Torve seems to think he’s under a certain obligation to them.”

“Then let him pay it back on his own time.”

The skin around Karrde’s eyes seemed to harden. “Torve is one of my associates,” he said, his voice cold. “His debts are the organization’s. You should know that by now.”

Mara’s throat tightened as a sudden, horrible thought occurred to her. “You’re not going to give Skywalker to them, are you?” she demanded.

“Alive, you mean?” Karrde countered.

For a long moment Mara just stared at him; at that small smile and those slightly heavy eyelids and the rest of that carefully constructed expression of complete disinterest in the matter. But it was all an act, and she knew it. He wanted to know why she hated Skywalker, all right—wanted it with as close to genuine passion as the man ever got.

And as far as she was concerned, he could go right on wanting it. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you,” she bit out, “that Solo and Calrissian might have engineered this whole thing, including the Etherway’s impoundment, as a way of finding this base.”

“It’s occurred to me, yes,” Karrde said. “I dismissed it as somewhat farfetched.”

“Of course,” Mara said sardonically. “The great and noble Han Solo would never do something so devious, would he? You never answered my question.” “About Skywalker? I thought I’d made it clear, Mara, that he stays here until I know why Grand Admiral Thrawn is so interested in acquiring him. At the very least, we need to know what he’s worth, and to whom, before we can set a fair market price for him. I have some feelers out; with luck, we should know in a few more days.”

“And meanwhile, his allies will be here in a few more minutes.”

“Yes,” Karrde agreed, his lips puckering slightly. “Skywalker will have to be moved somewhere a bit more out of the way—we obviously can’t risk Solo and Calrissian stumbling over him. I want you to move him to the number four storage shed.”

“That’s where we’re keeping that droid of his,” Mara reminded him.

“The shed’s got two rooms; put him in the other one.” Karrde waved toward her waist. “And do remember to lose that before our guests arrive. I doubt they’d fail to recognize it.”

Mara glanced down at Skywalker’s lightsaber hanging from her belt. “Don’t worry. If it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon not have much to do with them.”

“I wasn’t planning for you to,” Karrde assured her. “I’d like you here when I greet them, and possibly to join us for dinner, as well. Other than that, you’re excused from all social activities.”

“So they’re staying the day?”

“And possibly the night, as well.” He eyed her. “Requirements of a proper

host aside, can you think of a better way for us to prove to the Republic, should the need arise, that Skywalker was never here?”

It made sense. But that didn’t mean she had to like it. “Are you warning the rest of the Wild Karrde’s crew to keep quiet?”

“I’m doing better than that,” Karrde said, nodding back toward the comm equipment. “I’ve sent everyone who knows about Skywalker off to get the Starry Ice prepped. Which reminds me—after you move Skywalker, I want you to run his X-wing farther back under the trees. No more than half a kilometer—I don’t want you to go through any more of the forest alone than you have to. Can you fly an X-wing?”

“I can fly anything.”

“Good,” he said, smiling slightly. “You’d better be off, then. The

Millennium Falcon will be landing in less than twenty minutes.”

Mara took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. Turning, she left the room. The compound was empty as she walked across it to the barracks building.

By Karrde’s design, undoubtedly; he must have shifted people around to inside duties to give her a clear path for taking Skywalker to the storage shed. Reaching his room, she keyed off the lock and slid open the door.

He was standing by the window, dressed in that same black tunic, pants, and high boots that he’d worn that day at Jabba’s palace.

That day she’d stood silently by and watched . . . and let him destroy her life.

“Get your case and let’s go,” she growled, gesturing with the blaster. “It’s moving day.”

His eyes stayed on her as he stepped over to the bed. Not on the blaster in her hand, but on her face. “Karrde’s made a decision?” he asked calmly as he picked up the case.

For a long moment she was tempted to tell him that, no, this was on her own initiative, just to see if the implications would crack that maddening Jedi serenity. But even a Jedi would probably fight if he thought he was going to his death, and they were on a tight enough schedule as it was. “You’re moving to one of the storage sheds,” she told him. “We’ve got company coming, and we don’t have any formal wear your size. Come on, move.”

She walked him past the central building to the number four shed, a two- room structure tucked conveniently back out of the compound’s major traffic patterns. The room on the left, normally used for sensitive or dangerous equipment, was also the only one of the storage areas with a lock, undoubtedly the reason Karrde had chosen it to serve the role of impromptu prison. Keeping one eye on Skywalker, she keyed open the lock, wondering as she did so whether Karrde had had time to disable the inside mechanism. A quick look as the door slid open showed that he hadn’t.

Well, that could easily be corrected. “In here,” she ordered, flicking on the inside light and gesturing for him to enter.

He complied. “Looks cozy,” he said, glancing around the windowless room and the piled shipping boxes that took up perhaps half the floor space to the right. “Probably quiet, too.”

“Ideal for Jedi meditation,” she countered, stepping over to an open box marked Blasting Disks and taking a look inside. No problem; it was being used for spare coveralls at the moment. She gave the rest of the box markings a quick check, confirmed that there was nothing here he could possibly use to escape. “We’ll get a cot or something in for you later,” she said, moving back to the door. “Food, too.”

“I’m all right for now.”

“Ask me if I care.” The inner lock mechanism was behind a thin metal plate. Two shots from her blaster unsealed one end of the plate and curled it back; a third vaporized a selected group of wires. “Enjoy the quiet,” she said, and left.

The door closed behind her, and locked . . . and Luke was once again alone. He looked around him. Piled boxes, no windows, a single locked door.

“I’ve been in worse places,” he muttered under his breath. “At least there’s no Rancor here.”

For a moment he frowned at the odd thought, wondering why the Rancor pit at Jabba’s palace should suddenly have flashed to mind. But he only gave it a moment. The lack of proper preparation and facilities in his new prison strongly suggested that moving him here had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, possibly precipitated by the imminent arrival of whoever the visitors were Mara had mentioned.

And if so, there was a good possibility that somewhere in the mad scramble they might finally have made a mistake.

He went over to the door, easing the still-warm metal plate a little farther back and kneeling down to peer inside at the lock mechanism. Han had spent a few idle hours once trying to teach him the finer points of hot-wiring locks, and if Mara’s shot hadn’t damaged it too badly, there was a chance he might be able to persuade it to disengage.

It didn’t look promising. Whether by design or accident, Mara’s shot had taken out the wires to the inside control’s power supply, vaporizing them all the way back into the wall conduit, where there was no chance at all of getting hold of them.

But if he could find another power supply . . .

He got to his feet again, brushed off his knees, and headed over to the neatly piled boxes. Mara had glanced at their labels, but she’d actually looked inside only one of them. Perhaps a more complete search would turn up something useful.

The search, unfortunately, took even less time than his examination of the ruined lock. Most of the boxes were sealed beyond his capability to open without tools, and the handful that weren’t held such innocuous items as clothing or replacement equipment modules.

All right, then, he told himself, sitting down on the edge of one of the boxes and looking around for inspiration. I can’t use the door. There aren’t any windows. But there was another room in this shed—he’d seen the other door while Mara was opening this one. Perhaps there was some kind of half-height doorway or crawl space between them, hidden out of sight behind the stacked boxes.

It wasn’t likely, of course, that Mara would have missed anything that obvious. But he had time, and nothing else to occupy it. Getting up from his seat, he began unstacking the boxes and moving them away from the wall.

He’d barely begun when he found it. Not a doorway, but something almost as good: a multisocket power outlet, set into the wall just above the baseboard.

Karrde and Mara had made their mistake.

The metal doorplate, already stressed by the blaster fire Mara had used to peel it back, was relatively easy to bend. Luke kept at it, bending it back and forth, until a roughly triangular piece broke off in his hand. It was too soft to be of any use against the sealed equipment boxes, but it would probably be adequate for unscrewing the cover of a common power outlet.

He returned to the outlet and lay down in the narrow gap between wall and boxes. He was just trying to wedge his makeshift screwdriver against the first screw when he heard a quiet beep.

He froze, listening. The beep came again, followed by a series of equally soft warbles. Warbles that sounded very familiar . . . “Artoo?” he called softly. “Is that you?”

For a pair of heartbeats there was silence from the other room. Then, abruptly, the wall erupted with a minor explosion of electronic jabbering. Artoo, without a doubt. “Steady, Artoo,” Luke called back. “I’m going to try and get this power outlet open. There’s probably one on your side, too—can you get it open?”

There was a distinctly disgusted-sounding gurgle. “No, huh? Well, just hang on, then.”

Artoo whistled. “Yeah,” Luke agreed. He tapped at the wire . . . touched it again . . . held his finger against it.

So Karrde and Mara hadn’t made a mistake, after all. They’d already cut the power to the outlet.

For a moment he knelt there, holding the wire, wondering what he was going to do now. He still had all this wire, but no power supply for it to connect with. Conversely, there were probably any number of small power sources in the room, attached to the stored replacement modules, but they were all packed away in boxes he couldn’t get into. Could he somehow use the wire to get into the boxes? Use it to slice through the outer sealant layer, perhaps?

He got a firm grip on the wire and pulled on it, trying to judge its tensile strength. His fingers slipped along the insulation; shifting his grip, he wrapped it firmly around his right hand—

And stopped, a sudden prickly feeling on the back of his neck. His right hand. His artificial right hand. His artificial, dual-power-supply right hand . .

“Artoo, you know anything about cybernetic limb replacements?” he called, levering the wrist access port open with his metal triangle.

There was a short pause, then a cautious and ambiguous-sounding warble. “It shouldn’t take too much,” he reassured the droid, peering at the maze of wiring and servos inside his hand. He’d forgotten how incredibly complex the whole thing was. “All I need to do is get one of the power supplies out. Think you can walk me through the procedure?”

The pause this time was shorter, and the reply more confident. “Good,” Luke said. “Let’s get to it.”

“Get on the comlink to Chin,” he told Mara. “Tell him we have Imperial guests coming, and he’s to begin preparations to receive them properly. Then go to pad eight and have Aves move the Millennium Falcon farther back under cover. Go there in person—the Chimaera and its shuttles might be able to tap into our comlink transmissions.”

“What about Solo and Calrissian?”

Karrde pursed his lips. “We’ll have to get them out, of course. Move them into the forest, perhaps at or near their ship. I’d better deal with that myself.”

“Why not turn them over to Thrawn?”

He looked up at her. At those burning eyes and that rigid, tightly controlled face . . . “With no offer of a bounty?” he asked. “Relying on the Grand Admiral’s generosity after the fact?”

“I don’t find that a compelling reason,” Mara said bluntly.

“Neither do I,” he countered coldly. “What I do find compelling is that they’re our guests. They’ve sat at our table and eaten our food . . . and like it or not, that means they’re under our protection.”

Mara’s lip twitched. “And do these rules of hospitality apply to Skywalker, too?” she asked sardonically.

“You know they don’t,” he said. “But now is not the time or the place to turn him over to the Empire, even if that’s the way the decision ultimately goes. Do you understand?”

“No,” she growled. “I dont.”

Karrde eyed her, strongly tempted to tell her that she didn’t need to understand, only to obey. “It’s a matter of relative strength,” he told her instead. “Here on the ground, with an Imperial Star Destroyer orbiting overhead, we have no bargaining position at all. I wouldn’t do business under such circumstances even if Thrawn was the most trustworthy client in the galaxy. Which he’s not. Now do you understand?”

She took a deep breath, let it out. “I don’t agree,” she gritted. “But I’ll accept your decision.”

“Thank you. Perhaps after the Imperials leave, you can ask General Calrissian about the perils of making bargains while stormtroopers are strolling around your territory.” Karrde looked back at the display. “So. Falcon moved; Solo and Calrissian moved. Skywalker and the droid should be all right where they are—the four shed has enough shielding to keep out anything but a fairly determined probe.”

“And if Thrawn is determined?”

“Then we may have trouble,” Karrde agreed calmly. “On the other hand, I doubt that Thrawn would be coming down himself if he thought there was the looked in their direction, but headed straight toward the edge of the forest.

Headed there at a fast, determined trot . . . and just before they disappeared into the trees, all three drew their blasters.

Artoo moaned softly. “I don’t like it, either,” Luke told him. “Let’s hope it doesn’t have anything to do with us. All clear?”

The droid beeped affirmation, and they started off again. Luke kept half an eye on the forest behind them, remembering Mara’s veiled hints about large predators. It could have been a lie, of course, designed to discourage him from trying to escape. For that matter, he’d never spotted any real evidence that the window of his previous room had had an alarm on it.

Artoo beeped again. Luke twisted his attention back to the compound . . . and froze.

Mara had stepped out of the central building.

For what seemed like a long time she just stood there on the doorstep, looking distractedly up into the sky. Luke watched her, not daring even to look down to see how well concealed Artoo might be. If she turned in their direction—or if she went to the shed to see how he was doing . . .

Abruptly, she looked down again, a determined expression on her face. She turned toward the second barracks building and headed off at a brisk walk.

Luke let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. They were far from being out of danger—all Mara had to do was turn her head 90 degrees to her left and she’d be looking directly at them. But something about her posture seemed to indicate that her attention and thoughts were turned inward.

As if she’d suddenly made a hard decision . . .

She went into the barracks, and Luke made a quick decision of his own. “Come on, Artoo,” he murmured. “It’s getting too crowded out here. We’re going to cut farther into the forest, come up on the ships from behind.”

It was, fortunately, a short distance to the maintenance hangar and the group of ships parked alongside it. They arrived after only a few minutes—to discover their X-wing gone.

“No, I don’t know where they’ve moved it to,” Luke gritted, looking around as best he could while still staying under cover. “Can your sensors pick it up?”

Artoo beeped a negative, adding a chirping explanation Luke couldn’t even begin to follow. “Well, it doesn’t matter,” he reassured the droid. “We’d have had to put down somewhere else on the planet and find something with a working hyperdrive, anyway. We’ll just skip that step and take one of these.”

He glanced around, hoping to find a Z-95 or Y-wing or something else he was at least marginally familiar with. But the only ships he recognized were a Corellian Corvette and what looked like a downsized bulk freighter. “Got any suggestions?” he asked Artoo.

The droid beeped a prompt affirmative, his little sensor dish settling on a pair of long, lean ships about twice the length of Luke’s X-wing. Fighters, obviously, but not like anything the Alliance had ever used. “One of those?” he asked doubtfully.

Artoo beeped again, a distinct note of impatience to the sound. “Right; we’re a little pressed for time,” Luke agreed.

They made it across to one of the fighters without incident. Unlike the X- wing design, the entrance was a hinged hatchway door in the side—possibly one reason Artoo had chosen it, Luke decided as he manhandled the droid inside. The pilot’s cockpit wasn’t much roomier than an X-wing’s, but directly behind it was a three-seat tech/weapons area. The seats weren’t designed for astromech droids, of course, but with a little ingenuity on Luke’s part and some stretch on the restraints’, he managed to get Artoo wedged between two of the seats and firmly strapped in place. “Looks like everything’s already on standby,” he commented, glancing at the flickering lights on the control boards. “There’s an outlet right there—give everything a quick check while I strap in. With a little luck, maybe we can be out of here before anyone even knows we’re gone.”

She had delivered the open comlink message to Chin, and the quieter ones to Aves and the others at the Millennium Falcon; and as she stalked her way glowering across the compound toward the number three shed, Mara decided once more that she hated the universe.

She’d been the one who’d found Skywalker. She, by herself, alone. There was no question about that; no argument even possible. It should be she, not Karrde, who had the final say on his fate.

I should have left him out there, she told herself bitterly as she stomped across the beaten ground. Should have just let him die in the cold of space. She’d considered that, too, at the time. But if he’d died out there, all alone, she might never have known for sure that he was, in fact, dead.

And she certainly wouldn’t have had the satisfaction of killing him herself.

She looked down at the lightsaber clenched in her hand, watching the afternoon sunlight glint from the silvery metal as she hefted its weight. She could do it now, she knew. Could go in there to check on him and claim he had tried to jump her. Without the Force to call on, he would be an easy target, even for someone like her who hadn’t picked up a lightsaber more than a handful of times in her life. It would be easy, clean, and very fast.

And she didn’t owe Karrde anything.

They showed up almost simultaneously on the scopes: the other of Karrde’s fighter ships pursuing him from behind, and the Imperial Star Destroyer in orbit far overhead. “I think,” Luke called back to Artoo, “that we’re in trouble.”

The droid’s reply was almost swallowed up in the roar as Luke gingerly eased the drive up as high as he dared. The strange fighter’s handling wasn’t even remotely like anything he’d ever flown before; slightly reminiscent of the snowspeeders the Alliance had used on Hoth, but with the kind of sluggish response time that implied a great deal of armor and engine mass. With time, he was pretty sure he’d be able to master it.

But time was something he was rapidly running out of.

He risked a glance at the aft-vision display. The other fighter was coming up fast, with no more than a minute or two now separating the two ships. Obviously, the pilot had far more experience with the craft than Luke had. That, or else such a fierce determination to recapture Luke that it completely overrode normal common-sense caution.

Either way, it meant Mara Jade.

The fighter dipped a little too deep, scraping its ventral tail fin against the tops of the trees and drawing a sharp squeal of protest from Artoo. “Sorry,” Luke called back, feeling a fresh surge of perspiration break out on his forehead as he again carefully eased the drive up a notch. Speaking of overriding common sense . . . But at the moment, sticking to the treetops was about the only option he had. The forest below, for some unknown reason, seemed to have a scattering or scrambling effect on sensor scans, both detection and navigational. Staying low forced his pursuer to stay low, too, lest she lose visual contact with him against the mottled forest backdrop, and also at least partially hid him from the orbiting Star Destroyer.

The Star Destroyer. Luke glanced at the image on his overhead scope, feeling his stomach tighten. At least he knew now who the company was Mara had mentioned. It looked like he’d gotten out just in the nick of time.

On the other hand, perhaps the move to that storage shed implied that Karrde had decided not to sell him to the Imperials after all. It might be worth asking Karrde about someday. Preferably from a great distance.

find out what kind of game Karrde’s playing, but then we’re gone. Even if we have to blow out of here with that camo net still hanging off the ship.”

The strangest thing about waking up this time, Luke decided dimly, was that he didn’t actually hurt anywhere.

And he should have. From what he remembered of those last few seconds —and from the view of splintered trees outside the fighter’s twisted canopy— he would have counted himself lucky even to be alive, let alone undamaged. Clearly, the restraints and crash balloons had been augmented by something more sophisticated—an emergency acceleration compensator, perhaps.

A shaky sort of gurgle came from behind him. “You okay, Artoo?” he called, levering himself out of his seat and climbing awkwardly across the canted floor. “Hang on, I’m coming.”

The droid’s information retrieval jack had been snapped off in the crash, but apart from that and a couple of minor dents, he didn’t seem to have been damaged. “We’d better get moving,” Luke told him, untangling him from his restraints. “That other ship could be back with a ground party any time.”

With an effort, he got Artoo aft. The hatchway door popped open without serious complaint; hopping down, he looked around.

The second fighter would not be returning with any ground parties. It was right here. In worse shape, if possible, than Luke’s.

From the hatchway, Artoo whistled in squeamish-sounding awe. Luke glanced up at him, looked back at the ruined craft. Given the fighters’ safety equipment, it was unlikely that Mara was seriously injured. A backup flight was inevitable—she would probably be able to hold out until then.

But then again, she might not.

“Wait here, Artoo,” he told the droid. “I’m going to take a quick look.”

Even though the exterior of the fighter was in worse shape than Luke’s, the interior actually seemed to be a little better off. Crunching his way across the bits of debris in the weapons/tech area, he stepped into the cockpit doorway.

Only the top of the pilot’s head showed over the seat back, but that shimmering red-gold hair was all he needed to see to know that his earlier guess had been correct. It was indeed Mara Jade who’d been chasing him.

For a pair of heartbeats he stayed where he was, torn between the need for haste and the need to satisfy his internal sense of ethics. He and Artoo had to get out of here with all possible speed; that much was obvious. But if he turned his back on Mara now, without even pausing to check her condition . . . His mind flashed back to Coruscant, to the night Ben Kenobi had said his final farewells. In other words, he’d told Threepio later up on the roof, a Jedi can’t get so caught up in matters of galactic importance that it interferes with his concern for individual people. And it would, after all, only take a minute. Stepping into the room, he looked around the seat back.

Directly into a pair of wide-open, perfectly conscious green eyes. Green eyes that stared at him over the barrel of a tiny blaster.

“I figured you’d come,” she said, her voice grimly satisfied. “Back up. Now.”

He did as ordered. “Are you hurt at all?” he asked.

“None of your business,” she retorted. She climbed out of the seat, pulling a small flat case from under the chair with her free hand as she stood up. Another glitter caught his eye: she was again wearing his lightsaber on her belt. “There’s a case in that compartment just over the exit hatch,” she told him. “Get it.”

He found the release and got the compartment open. Inside was an unfamiliarly labeled metal case with the very familiar look of a survival kit to it. “I hope we’re not going to have to walk the whole way back,” he commented, pulling the bag out and dropping out the hatchway.

“I won’t,” she countered. She seemed to hesitate, just a little, before following him down to the ground. “Whether you make the trip back at all is another question.”

He locked gazes with her. “Finishing what you started with this?” he asked, nodding at his wrecked ship.

She snorted. “Listen, buddy boy, it was you who took us down, not me. My only mistake was being stupid enough to be sitting too close to your tail when you hit the trees. Put the bag down and get that droid out of there.”

Luke did as he was told. By the time Artoo was down beside him she had the survival kit’s lid open and was fiddling one-handed with something inside. “Just stay right there,” she told him. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”

She paused, cocking her head slightly to the side as if listening. A moment later, in the distance, Luke could hear the faint sound of an approaching ship. “Sounds like our ride back is already on the way,” Mara said. “I want you and the droid—”

She stopped in midsentence, her eyes going strangely unfocused, her throat tight with concentration. Luke frowned, eyes and ears searching for the problem . . .

Abruptly, she slammed the survival kit lid shut and scooped it up. “Move!” she snapped, gesturing away from the wrecked fighters. With her blaster hand she picked up the flat box she’d been carrying and wedged it under her left arm. “Into the trees—both of you. I said move!”

There was something in her voice—command, or urgency, or both—that stifled argument or even question. Within a handful of seconds Luke and Artoo were under cover of the nearest trees. “Farther in,” she ordered. “Come on, move it.”

Belatedly, it occurred to Luke that this might all be some macabre joke— that all Mara really wanted was to shoot him in the back and be able to claim afterward that he’d been running away. But she was right behind him, close enough that he could hear her breathing and occasionally feel the tip of her blaster as it brushed his back. They made it perhaps ten meters farther in— Luke leaned down to help Artoo across a particularly wide root—

“Far enough,” Mara hissed in his ear. “Hide the droid and then hit dirt.”

Luke got Artoo over the root and behind a tree . . . and as he dropped down beside Mara, he suddenly understood.

Hanging in midair over the wrecked fighters, rotating slowly like a hovering raptor searching for prey, was an Imperial shuttle.

A small motion caught the corner of his eye, and he turned his head to look directly into the muzzle of Mara’s blaster. “Not a move,” she whispered, her breath warm on his cheek. “Not a sound.”

He nodded understanding and turned back to watch the shuttle. Mara slid her arm over his shoulders, pressed her blaster into the hinge of his jaw, and did the same.

The shuttle finished its circle and settled gingerly to the torn-up ground between the ruined fighters. Even before it was completely down, the ramp dropped and began disgorging stormtroopers.

Luke watched as they split up and headed off to search the two ships, the strangeness of the whole situation adding an unreal tinge to the scene. There; less than twenty meters away, was Mara’s golden opportunity to turn him over to the Imperials . . . and yet, here they both lay, hiding behind a tree root and trying not to breathe too loudly. Had she suddenly changed her mind?

Or was it simply that she didn’t want any witnesses nearby when she killed him?

In which case, Luke realized abruptly, his best chance might actually be to find some way of surrendering to the stormtroopers. Once away from this planet, with the Force as his ally again, he would at least have a fighting chance. If he could just find a way to distract Mara long enough to get rid of her blaster . . .

Lying pressed against his side, her arm slung across his shoulders, she must have sensed the sudden tensing of muscles. “Whatever you’re thinking about trying, don’t,” she breathed in his ear, digging her blaster a little harder into his skin. “I can easily claim you were holding me prisoner out here and that I managed to snatch the blaster away from you.” Luke swallowed, and settled in to wait.

The wait wasn’t very long. Two groups of stormtroopers disappeared into the fighters, while the rest walked around the edge of the newly created clearing, probing with eyes and portable sensors into the forest. After a few minutes those inside the fighters emerged, and what seemed to be a short meeting was held between them at the base of the shuttle ramp. At an inaudible command the outer ring of searchers came back in to join them, and the whole crowd trooped into their ship. The ramp sealed, and the shuttle disappeared once more into the sky, leaving nothing but the hum of its repulsorlifts behind. A minute later, even that was gone.

Luke got his hands under him, started to get up. “Well—”

He broke off at another jab of the blaster. “Quiet,” Mara muttered. “They’ll have left a sensor behind, just in case someone comes back.”

Luke frowned. “How do you know?”

“Because that’s standard stormtrooper procedure in a case like this,” she growled. “Real quiet, now; we get up and grab some more distance. And keep the droid quiet, too.”

They were completely out of sight of the wrecked fighters, and probably another fifty meters past that, before she called a halt. “What now?” Luke asked.

“We sit down,” she told him.

Luke nodded and eased to the ground. “Thank you for not turning me in to the stormtroopers.”

“Save it,” she said shortly, sitting down carefully herself and laying her blaster on the ground beside her. “Don’t worry, there wasn’t anything altruistic about it. The incoming shuttles must have seen us and sent a group over to investigate. Karrde’s going to have to spin them some sort of sugar story about what happened, and I can’t just walk into their arms until I know what that story is.” She set the small flat box on her lap and opened it.

“You could call him,” Luke reminded her.

“I could also call the Imperials directly and save myself some time,” she retorted. “Unless you don’t think they’ve got the equipment to monitor anything I send. Now shut up; I’ve got work to do.”

For a few minutes she worked at the flat box in silence, fiddling with a tiny keyboard and frowning at something Luke couldn’t see from his angle. At irregular intervals she looked up, apparently to make sure he wasn’t trying anything. Luke waited; and abruptly she grunted in satisfaction. “Three days,” she said aloud, closing the box.

“Three days to what?” Luke asked.

“The edge of the forest,” she told him, gazing at him with unblinking eyes. “Civilization. Well, Hyllyard City, anyway, which is about as close as this part of the planet gets to it.”

“And how many of us will be going there?” Luke asked quietly.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” she agreed, her tone icy. “Can you give me any reason why I should bother taking you along?”

“Sure.” Luke inclined his head to the side. “Artoo.”

“Don’t be absurd.” Her eyes flicked to the droid, back at Luke. “Whatever happens, the droid stays here. In pieces.”

Luke stared at her. “In pieces?”

“What, you need it spelled out?” she retorted. “The droid knows too much.

We can’t leave it here for the stormtroopers to find.” “Knows too much about what?”

“You, of course. You, Karrde, me—this whole stupid mess.”

Artoo moaned softly. “He won’t tell them anything,” Luke insisted. “Not after it’s in pieces, no,” Mara agreed.

With an effort, Luke forced himself to calm down. Logic, not fervor, was the only way to change her mind. “We need him,” he told her. “You told me yourself the forest was dangerous. Artoo has sensors that can spot predators before they get close enough to strike.”

“Maybe; maybe not,” she countered. “The vegetation here limits sensor ranges down to practically zero.”

“It’ll still be better than you or I could do,” Luke said. “And he’ll also be able to watch while we’re sleeping.”

She raised her eyebrows slightly. “We?”

“We,” Luke said. “I don’t think he’ll be willing to protect you unless I’m along.”

Mara shook her head. “No good,” she said, picking up her blaster. “I can get along without him. And I certainly don’t need you.”

Luke felt his throat tighten. “Are you sure you’re not letting your emotions get in the way of your judgment?” he asked.

He hadn’t thought her eyes could get any harder than they already were. He was wrong. “Let me tell you something, Skywalker,” she said in a voice almost too soft for him to hear. “I’ve wanted to kill you for a long time. I dreamed about your death every night for most of that first year. Dreamed it, plotted it—I must have run through a thousand scenarios, trying to find exactly the right way to do it. You can call it a cloud on my judgment if you want to; I’m used to it by now. It’s the closest thing I’ve got to a permanent companion.”

Luke looked back into those eyes, shaken right down to the core of his soul. “What did I do to you?” he whispered.

“You destroyed my life,” she said bitterly. “It’s only fair that I destroy yours.”

“Will killing me bring your old life back?”

“You know better than that,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “But it’s still something I have to do. For myself, and for—” She broke off.

“What about Karrde?” Luke asked. “What about him?”

“I thought he still wanted me kept alive.”

She snorted. “We all want things we can’t have.”

But for just a second, there was something in her eyes. Something else that had flickered through the hatred . . 

But whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. “I almost wish I could drag it out a little more,” she said, glacially calm again as she lifted the blaster. “But I don’t have the time to spare.”

Luke stared at the muzzle of her blaster, his mind frantically searching for inspiration . . . “Wait a minute,” he said suddenly. “You said you needed to find out what Karrde had told the Imperials. What if I could get you a secure comm channel to him?”

The muzzle of the blaster wavered. “How?” she asked suspiciously.

Luke nodded toward her survival kit. “Does the communicator in there have enough range to reach back to the base? I mean, without satellite boosting or anything.”

She was still looking suspicious. “There’s a sonde balloon included that can take the antenna high enough to get past most of the forest damping. But it’s nondirectional, which means the Imperials and anyone else in this hemisphere will be able to listen in.”

“That’s okay,” Luke said. “I can encrypt it so that no one else will be able to get anything out of it. Or rather, Artoo can.”

Mara smiled thinly. “Wonderful. Except for one minor detail: if the encrypt is that good, how is Karrde supposed to decrypt it?”

“He won’t have to,” Luke told her. “The computer in my X-wing will do it for him.”

The thin smile vanished from Mara’s face. “You’re stalling,” she snarled. “You can’t do a counterpart encrypt between an astromech droid and a ship computer.”

“Why not? Artoo’s the only droid who’s worked with that computer in more than five years, with close to three thousand hours of flight time. He’s bound to have molded it to his own personality by now. In fact, I know he has—the ground maintenance people have to run diagnostics through him to make any sense out of them.”

“I thought standard procedure was to wipe and reload droid memories every six months to keep that from happening.”

“I like Artoo the way he is,” Luke said. “And he and the X-wing work better together this way.”

“How much better?”

Luke searched his memory. Maintenance had run that test just a few months ago. “I don’t remember the exact number. It was something like thirty percent faster than a baseline astromech/X-wing interface. Maybe thirty-five.” Mara was staring hard at Artoo. “That’s counterpart-level speed, all right,”she agreed reluctantly. “The Imperials could still crack it, though.” “Eventually. But it would take some specialized equipment to do it. And you said yourself we’d be out of here in three days.”

For a long minute she stared at him, her jaw tight with clenched teeth, her face a mirror of fiercely battling emotions. Bitterness, hatred, desire for survival . . . and something else. Something that Luke could almost believe might be a touch of loyalty. “Your ship’s sitting all alone out in the forest,” she growled at last. “How are you going to get the message back to Karrde?”

“Someone’s bound to check on the ship eventually,” he pointed out. “All we have to do is dump the message into storage and leave some kind of signal flashing that it’s there. You have people who know how to pull a dump, don’t you?”

“Any idiot knows how to pull a dump.” Mara glared at him. “Funny, isn’t it, how this scheme just happens to require that I keep both of you alive a while longer.”

Luke remained silent, meeting that bitter gaze without flinching . . . and then, abruptly, Mara’s internal battle seemed to end. “What about the droid?” she demanded. “It’ll take forever to get it across this terrain.”

“Artoo’s made it through forests before. However . . .” Luke looked around, spotted a tree with two low branches just the right size. “I should be able to rig up a dragging frame to carry him on—a travois, or something like that.” He started to get up. “If you’ll give me my lightsaber for a minute I can cut a couple of those branches off.”

“Sit down,” she ordered, standing up. “I’ll do it.”

Well, it had been worth a try. “Those two,” he told her, pointing. “Be careful—lightsabers are tricky to handle.”

“Your concern for my welfare is touching,” she said, her voice dripping sarcasm. She drew the lightsaber and stepped over to the indicated tree, keeping an eye on Luke the whole time. She raised the weapon, ignited it—

And in a handful of quick, sure swipes trimmed, shortened, and cut the closer. “The manufacturer’s logo is small, but readable. Recognize it?”

Han squinted at it. The script was alien, but it seemed vaguely familiar. “I’ve seen it before, but I don’t remember where.”

“You saw it during the war,” Lando told him, his gaze steady on Karrde. “It’s the logo of the Sibha Habadeet.”

Han stared at the tiny cylinder, a strange chill running through him. The Sibha Habadeet had been one of the Alliance’s major suppliers of micrel equipment. And their specialty had been—“That’s a bioelectronic power supply?”

“That’s right,” Lando said grimly. “Just like the kind that would have been put in, say, an artificial hand.”

Slowly, the muzzle of Han’s blaster came up again to point at Karrde’s stomach. “There was a droid in here,” he told Lando. “The skid marks on the floor look just about right for an R2 unit.” He raised his eyebrows. “Feel free to join the conversation anytime, Karrde.”

Karrde sighed, his face a mixture of annoyance and resignation. “What do you want me to say?—that Luke Skywalker was a prisoner here? All right— consider it said.”

Han felt his jaw tighten. And he and Lando had been right here. Blissfully unaware . . . “Where is he now?” he demanded.

“I thought Ghent would have told you,” Karrde said darkly. “He escaped in one of my Skipray blastboats.” His lips twisted. “Crashing it in the process.”

“He what?”

“He’s all right,” Karrde assured him. “Or at least he was a couple of hours ago. The stormtroopers who went to investigate said that both wrecks were deserted.” His eyes seemed to flatten, just for a minute. “I hope that means they’re working together to make their way out.”

“You don’t sound sure of that,” Han prompted.

The eyes flattened a little more. “Mara Jade was the one who went after him. She has a certain—well, why mince words. In point of fact, she wants very much to kill him.”

Han threw a startled glance at Lando. “Why?” Karrde shook his head. “I don’t know.”

For a moment the room was silent. “How did he get here?” Lando asked. “As I said, purely by accident,” Karrde said. “No—I take that back. It

wasn’t an accident for Mara—she led us directly to his crippled starfighter.” “How?”

“Again, I don’t know.” He fixed Han with a hard look. “And before you ask, we had nothing to do with the damage to his ship. He’d burned out both hyperdrive motivators tangling with one of the Empire’s Star Destroyers. If know about. They are smugglers, after all.”

“Agreed.” Thrawn’s eyes seemed to glitter. “But now consider the additional fact that Karrde refused our invitation to join in the search for Skywalker . . . and the fact that this afternoon he implied the search was over.” He raised an eyebrow. “What does that suggest to you, Captain?”

Pellaeon felt his jaw drop. “You mean . . . that was Skywalker in that Skipray?”

“An interesting speculation, isn’t it?” Thrawn agreed. “Unlikely, I’ll admit.

But likely enough to be worth following up on.”

“Yes, sir.” Pellaeon glanced at the chrono, did a quick calculation. “Though if we stay here more than another day or two, we may have to move back the Sluis Van attack.”

“We’re not moving Sluis Van,” Thrawn said emphatically. “Our entire victory campaign against the Rebellion begins there, and I’ll not have so complex and far-reaching a schedule altered. Not for Skywalker; not for anyone else.” He nodded at the flame statues surrounding them. “Sluissi art clearly indicates a biannual cyclic pattern, and I want to hit them at their most sluggish point. We’ll leave for our rendezvous with the Inexorable and the cloaking shield test as soon as the troops and vehicles have been dropped. Three squads of stormtroopers should be adequate to handle Skywalker, if he is indeed here.”

His eyes bored into Pellaeon’s face. “And to handle Karrde,” he added softly, “if he turns out to be a traitor.”

The last bits of dark blue had faded from the tiny gaps in the canopy overhead, leaving nothing but blackness above them. Turning the survival kit’s worklight to its lowest setting, Mara set it down and sank gratefully to the ground against a large tree bole. Her right ankle, twisted somehow in the Skipray crash, had started to ache again, and it felt good to get the weight off it.

Skywalker was already stretched out a couple of meters on the other side of the worklight, his head pillowed on his tunic, his loyal droid standing at his side. She wondered if he’d guessed about the ankle, dismissed the question as irrelevant. She’d had worse injuries without being slowed down by them.

“Reminds me of Endor,” Skywalker said quietly as Mara arranged her glow rod and blaster in her lap where they’d be accessible. “A forest always sounds so busy at night.”

“Oh, it’s busy, all right,” Mara grunted. “A lot of the animals here are nocturnal. Including the vornskrs.”

“Strange,” he murmured. “Karrde’s pet vornskrs seemed wide enough awake in late afternoon.”

She looked across at him, mildly surprised he’d noticed that. “Actually, even in the wild they take small naps around the clock,” she said. “I call them nocturnal because they do most of their hunting at night.”

Skywalker mulled that over for a moment. “Maybe we ought to travel at night, then,” he suggested. “They’ll be hunting us either way—at least then we’d be awake and alert while they were on the prowl.”

Mara shook her head. “It’d be more trouble than it’s worth. We need to be able to see the terrain as far ahead of us as possible if we’re going to avoid running into dead ends. Besides, this whole forest is dotted with small clearings.”

“Through which a glow rod beam would show very clearly to an orbiting ship,” he conceded. “Point. You seem to know a lot about this place.”

“It wouldn’t take more than an observant pilot flying over the forest to see that,” she growled. But he was right, she knew, as she eased back against the rough bark. Know your territory was the first rule that had been drilled into her . . . and the first thing she’d done after establishing herself in Karrde’s organization had been to do precisely that. She’d studied the aerial maps of the forest and surrounding territory; had taken long walks, in both daylight and at night, to familiarize herself with the sights and sounds; had sought out and killed several vornskrs and other predators to learn the fastest ways of taking them down; had even talked one of Karrde’s people into running bio tests on a crateload of native plants to find out which were edible and which weren’t. Outside the forest, she knew something about the settlers, understood the local politics, and had stashed a small but adequate part of her earnings out where she could get hold of it.

More than anyone else in Karrde’s organization, she was equipped to

survive outside the confines of his encampment. So why was she trying so hard to get back there?

It wasn’t for Karrde’s sake—that much she was sure of. All that he’d done for her—her job, her position, her promotions—she’d more than repaid with hard work and good service. She didn’t owe him anything, any more than he owed her. Whatever the story was he’d concocted this afternoon to explain the Skipray chase to Thrawn, it would have been designed to protect his own neck, not hers; and if he saw that the Grand Admiral wasn’t buying it, he was at perfect liberty to pull his group off Myrkr tonight and disappear down one of the other ratholes he had scattered throughout the galaxy.

Except that he wouldn’t. He would sit there, sending out search party after search party, and wait for Mara to come out of the forest. Even if she never did.

Even if by doing so he overstayed Thrawn’s patience.

Mara clenched her teeth, the unpleasant image of Karrde pinned against a cell wall by an interrogation droid dancing in front of her eyes. Because she knew Thrawn—knew the Grand Admiral’s tenacity and the limits of his patience both. He would wait and watch, or set someone to do it for him, and follow through on Karrde’s story.

And if neither she nor Skywalker ever reappeared from the forest, he would almost certainly jump to the wrong conclusion. At which point he would take Karrde in for a professional Imperial interrogation, and eventually would find out who the escaping prisoner had been.

And then he’d have Karrde put to death.

Across from her, the droid’s dome rotated a few degrees and it gave a quietly insistent gurgle. “I think Artoo’s picked up something,” Skywalker said, hiking himself up on his elbows.

“No kidding,” Mara said. She picked up her glow rod, pointed it at the shadow she’d already seen moving stealthily toward them, and flicked it on.

A vornskr stood framed in the circle of light, its front claws dug into the ground, its whip tail pointed stiffly back and waving slowly up and down. It paid no attention to the light, but continued moving slowly toward Skywalker.

Mara let it get another two paces, then shot it neatly through the head.

The beast collapsed to the ground, its tail giving one last spasmodic twitch before doing likewise. Mara gave the rest of the area a quick sweep with the glow rod, then flicked it off. “Awfully good thing we have your droid’s sensors along,” she said sarcastically into the relative darkness.

“Well, I wouldn’t have known there was any danger without him,” Skywalker came back wryly, “Thank you.”

“Forget it,” she grunted.

There was a short silence. “Are Karrde’s pet vornskrs a different species?” Skywalker asked. “Or did he have their tails removed?”

Mara peered across the gloom at him, impressed in spite of herself. Most men staring down a vornskr’s gullet wouldn’t have noticed a detail like that. “The latter,” she told him. “They use those tails as whips—pretty painful, and there’s a mild poison in them, too. At first it was just that Karrde didn’t want his people walking around with whip welts all over them; we found out later that removing the tails also kills a lot of their normal hunting aggression.”

“They seemed pretty domestic,” he agreed. “Even friendly.”

Only they hadn’t been friendly to Skywalker, she remembered. And here, the vornskr had ignored her and gone directly for him. Coincidence? “They are,” she said aloud. “He’s thought occasionally about offering them for sale

With the faint sounds of civilization from the building at his back. Karrde sipped at his cup, gazing into the darkness, feeling fatigue tugging at him as he’d seldom felt it before.

In a single day, his whole life had just been turned over.

Beside him, Drang raised his head and turned it to the right. “Company?” Karrde asked him, looking in that direction. A shadowy figure, hardly visible in the starlight, was moving toward him. “Karrde?” Aves’s voice called softly.

“Over here,” Karrde told him. “Go get a chair and join me.”

“This is okay,” Aves said, coming over beside him and sitting down cross- legged on the ground. “I’ve got to get back to Central pretty soon, anyway.”

“The mystery message?”

“Yeah. What in the worlds was Mara thinking of?”

“I don’t know,” Karrde admitted. “Something clever, though.”

“Probably,” Aves conceded. “I just hope were going to be clever enough to decrypt it.”

Karrde nodded. “Did Solo and Calrissian get bedded down all right?” “They went back to their ship,” Aves said, his voice scowling. “I don’t

think they trust us.”

“Under the circumstances, you can hardly blame them.” Karrde reached down to scratch Drang’s head. “Maybe pulling Skywalker’s computer logs tomorrow morning will help convince them we’re on their side.”

“Yeah. Are we?”

Karrde pursed his lips. “We don’t really have a choice anymore, Aves.

They’re our guests.”

Aves umphed. “The Grand Admiral isn’t going to be happy.” Karrde shrugged. “They’re our guests,” he repeated.

In the darkness, he sensed Aves shrug back. He understood, Aves did— understood the requirements and duties of a host. Unlike Mara, who’d wanted him to send the Millennium Falcon away.

He wished now that he’d listened to her. Wished it very much indeed.

“I’ll want you to organize a search party for tomorrow morning,” he told Aves. “Probably futile, all things considered, but it has to be tried.”

“Right. Do we defer to the Imperials in that regard?”

Karrde grimaced to himself. “I doubt if they’ll be doing any more searching. That ship that sneaked out from the Star Destroyer an hour ago looked suspiciously like a stripped-down assault shuttle. My guess is that they’ll set up in Hyllyard City and wait for Mara and Skywalker to come to them.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Aves said. “What if we don’t get to them first?” “We’ll just have to take them away from the stormtroopers, I suppose.

Think you can put a team together for the purpose?”

Aves snorted gently. “Easier done than said. I’ve sat in on a couple of conversations since you made the announcement, and I can tell you that feelings in camp are running pretty strong. Hero of the Rebellion and all that aside, a bunch of our people figure they owe Skywalker big for getting them out of permanent hock to Jabba the Hutt.”

“I know,” Karrde said grimly. “And all that warm enthusiasm could be a problem. Because if we can’t get Skywalker free from the Imperials . . . well, we can’t let them have him alive.”

There was a long silence from the shadow beside him. “I see,” Aves said at last, very quietly. “It probably won’t make any difference, you know, in what Thrawn suspects.”

“Suspicion is better than unequivocal proof,” Karrde reminded him. “And if we can’t intercept them while they’re still in the forest, it may be the best we’re going to get.”

Aves shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I. But we need to be prepared for every eventuality.” “Understood.” For another moment Aves sat there in silence. Then, with a

grunted sigh, he stood up. “I’d better get back, see if Ghent’s made any progress on Mara’s message.”

“And after that you’d better hit the sack,” Karrde told him. “Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day.”

“Right. Good night.”

Aves left, and once again the soft mixture of forest sounds filled the night air. Sounds that meant a great deal to the creatures who made them but nothing at all to him.

Meaningless sounds . . .

He shook his head tiredly. What had Mara been trying to do with that opaque message of hers? Was it something simple—something that he or someone else here ought to be able to decrypt with ease?

Or had the lady who always played the sabacc cards close to her chest finally outsmarted herself?

In the distance, a vornskr emitted its distinctive cackle/purr. Beside his chair, Drang lifted his head. “Friend of yours?” Karrde inquired mildly, listening as another vornskr echoed the first’s cry. Sturm and Drang had been wild like that once, before they’d been domesticated.

Just like Mara had been, when he’d first taken her in. He wondered if she would ever be similarly tamed.

Wondered if she would solve this whole problem by killing Skywalker first. The cackle/purr came again, closer this time. “Come on, Drang,” he told.

The mass of vines hung twisted around and between half a dozen trees, looking like the web of a giant spider gone berserk. Fingering Skywalker’s lightsaber, Mara studied the tangle, trying to figure out the fastest way to clear the path.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Skywalker fidgeting. “Just keep your shirt on,” she told him. “This’ll only take a minute.”

“You really don’t have to go for finesse, you know,” he offered. “It’s not like the lightsaber’s running low on power.”

“Yes, but we’re running low on forest,” she retorted. “You have any idea how far the hum of a lightsaber can carry in woods like this?”

“Not really.”

“Me, neither. I’d like to keep it that way.” She shifted her blaster to her left hand, ignited the lightsaber with her right, and made three quick cuts. The tangle of vines dropped to the ground as she closed the weapon down. “That wasn’t so hard, now, was it?” she said, turning to face Skywalker and hooking the lightsaber back onto her belt. She started to turn away—

The droid’s warning squeal came a fraction of a second before the sudden rustle of leaves. She whirled back, flipping her blaster into her right hand as the vornskr leaped toward Skywalker from a branch three trees away.

Even after two long days of travel, Skywalker’s reflexes were still adequate to the task. He let go the handles of the travois and dropped to the ground just ahead of the vornskr’s trajectory. Four sets of claws and a whip tail took a concerted swipe at him as the predator shot by overhead. Mara waited until it had landed, and as it spun back around toward its intended prey, she shot it.

Cautiously, Skywalker got back to his feet and looked warily around. “I wish you’d change your mind about giving me back my lightsaber,” he commented as he bent down to pick up the travois handles again. “You must be getting tired of shooting vornskrs off me.”

“What, you afraid I’m going to miss?” she retorted, stepping over to prod the vornskr with her foot. It was dead, all right.

“You’re an excellent shot,” he conceded, dragging the travois toward the tangle of vines she’d just cleared out. “But you’ve also gone two nights without any sleep. That’s going to catch up with you eventually.”

“You just worry about yourself,” she snapped. “Come on, get moving—we need to find someplace clear enough to send up the sonde balloon.”

Skywalker headed off, the droid strapped to the travois behind him beeping softly to itself. Mara brought up the rear, watching to make sure the travois wasn’t leaving too clear a trail and scowling hard at the back of Skywalker’s head.

The really irritating part was that he was right. That pass from left to right hand a minute ago—a technique she’d done a thousand times before—she’d come within a hair of missing the catch completely. Her heart thudded constantly now, not quieting down even during rest. And there were long periods during their march where her mind simply drifted, instead of focusing on the task at hand.

Once, long ago, she’d gone six days without sleep. Now, after only two, she was already starting to fall apart.

She clenched her teeth and scowled a little harder. If he was hoping to see the collapse, he was going to be sorely disappointed. If for no other reason than professional pride, she was going to see this through.

Ahead, Skywalker stumbled slightly as he crossed a patch of rough ground. The right travois handle slipped out of his grip, nearly dumping the droid off the travois and eliciting a squeal of protest from the machine. “So who’s getting tired now?” Mara growled as he stooped to pick up the stick again. “That’s the third time in the past hour.”

“It’s just my hand,” he replied calmly. “It seems to be permanently numb this afternoon.”

“Sure,” she said. Ahead, a small patch of blue sky winked down through the tree branches. “There’s our hole,” she said, nodding to it. “Put the droid in the middle.”

Skywalker did as he was instructed, then went and sat down against one of the trees edging the tiny clearing. Mara got the small sonde balloon filled and sent it aloft on its antenna wire, running a line from the receiver into the socket where the droid’s retrieval jack had once been. “All set,” she said, glancing over at Skywalker.

Leaning back against his tree, he was sound asleep.

Mara snorted with contempt. Jedi! she threw the epithet at him as she turned back to the droid. “Come on, let’s get going,” she told it, sitting down carefully on the ground. Her twisted ankle seemed to be largely healed, but she knew better than to push it.

The droid beeped questioningly, its dome swiveling around to look briefly at Skywalker. “I said let’s get going,” she repeated harshly.

The droid beeped again, a resigned sort of sound. The communicator’s

pulse indicator flashed once as the droid requested a message dump from the distant X-wing’s computer; flashed again as the dump came back.

Abruptly the droid squealed in obvious excitement. “What?” Mara demanded, snatching out her blaster and giving the area a quick scan. Nothing seemed out of place. “What, there’s finally a message?”

The droid beeped affirmatively, its dome again turning toward Skywalker. “Well, let’s have it,” Mara growled. “Come on—if there’s anything in it he needs to hear, you can play it for him later.”

Assuming—she didn’t add—there wasn’t anything in the message that suggested she needed to come out of the forest alone. If there was . . .

The droid bent forward slightly, and a holographic image appeared on the matted leaves.

But not an image of Karrde, as she’d expected. It was, instead, an image of a golden-skinned protocol droid. “Good day, Master Luke,” the protocol droid said in a remarkably prissy voice. “I bring greetings to you from Captain Karrde—and, of course, to you as well, Mistress Mara,” it added, almost as an afterthought. “He and Captain Solo are most pleased to hear you are both alive and well after your accident.”

Captain Solo? Mara stared at the holograph, feeling totally stunned. What in the Empire did Karrde think he was doing?—he’d actually told Solo and Calrissian about Skywalker?

“I trust you’ll be able to decrypt this message, Artoo,” the protocol prissy continued. “Captain Karrde suggested that I be used to add a bit more confusion to the counterpart encrypt. According to him, there are Imperial stormtroopers waiting in Hyllyard City for you to make your appearance.”

Mara clenched her teeth, throwing a look at her sleeping prisoner. So Thrawn hadn’t been fooled. He knew Skywalker was here, and was waiting to take them both.

With a vicious effort, she stifled the fatigue-fed panic rising in her throat. No. Thrawn didn’t know—at least, not for sure. He only suspected. If he’d known for sure, there wouldn’t have been anyone left back at the camp to send her this message.

“The story Captain Karrde told the Imperials was that a former employee stole valuable merchandise and tried to escape, with a current employee named Jade in pursuit. He suggests that, since he never specified Jade as being a woman, that perhaps you and Mistress Mara could switch roles when you leave the forest.”

“Right,” Mara muttered under her breath. If Karrde thought she was going to cheerfully hand her blaster over for Skywalker to stick in her back, he’d better try thinking again.

“At any rate,” the protocol droid continued, “he says he and Captain Solo are working out a plan to try to intercept you before the stormtroopers do. If not, they will do their best to rescue you from them. I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can say at the moment—Captain Karrde has put a one-minute real- time limit on this message, to prevent anyone from locating the transmission point. He wishes you good luck. Take good care of Master Luke, Artoo . . . and yourself, too.”

The image vanished and the droid’s projector winked out. Mara shut down the communicator, setting the antenna spool to begin winding the balloon back down.

“It’s a good idea,” Skywalker murmured.

She looked sharply at him. His eyes were still closed. “I thought you were faking,” she spat, not really truthfully.

“Not faking,” he corrected her sleepily. “Drifting in and out. It’s still a good idea.”

She snorted. “Forget it. We’ll try going a couple of kilometers north instead, circling out and back to Hyllyard from the plains.” She glanced at her chrono, then up through the trees. Dark clouds had moved in over the past few minutes, covering the blue sky that had been there. Not rain clouds, she decided, but they would still cut rather strongly into what was left of the available daylight. “We might as well save that for tomorrow,” she said, favoring her ankle again as she got back to her feet. “You want to get—oh, never mind,” she interrupted herself. If his breathing was anything to go by, he’d drifted off again.

Which left the task of putting camp together up to her. Terrific. “Stay put,” she growled to the droid. She turned back to where she’d dropped the survival kit—

The droid’s electronic shriek brought her spinning back around again, hand clawing for her blaster, eyes flicking around for the danger—and then a heavy weight slammed full onto her shoulders and back, sending hot needles of pain into her skin and throwing her face-first to the ground.

Her last thought, before the darkness took her, was to wish desperately that she’d killed Skywalker when she’d had the chance.

Artoo’s warbling alert jerked Luke out of his doze. His eyes snapped open, just as a blur of muscle and claw launched itself through space onto Mara’s back.

He bounded to his feet, sleepiness abruptly gone. The vornskr was standing

over Mara, its front claws planted on her shoulders, its head turned to the side as it prepared to sink its teeth into her neck. Mara herself lay unmoving, the back of her head toward Luke—dead or merely stunned, it was impossible to tell. Artoo, clearly too far away to reach her in time, was nevertheless moving in that direction as fast as his wheels could manage, his small electric arc welder extended as if for battle.

Taking a deep breath, Luke screamed.

Not an ordinary scream; but a shivering, booming, inhuman howl that seemed to fill the entire clearing and reverberate back from the distant hills. It was the blood-freezing call of a krayt dragon, the same call Ben Kenobi had used to scare the sand people away from him all those years ago on Tatooine.

The vornskr wasn’t scared away. But it was clearly startled, its prey temporarily forgotten. Shifting its weight partially off Mara’s back, it turned, crouching, to stare toward the sound.

For a long moment Luke locked gazes with the creature, afraid to move lest he break the spell. If he could distract it long enough for Artoo to get there with his welder . . .

And then, still pinned to the ground, Mara twitched. Luke cupped his hands around his mouth and howled again. Again, the vornskr shifted its weight in response.

And with a sound that was half grunt and half combat yell, Mara twisted around onto her back beneath the predator, her hands snaking past the front claws to grip its throat.

It was the only opening Luke was going to get; and with a vornskr against an injured human, it wasn’t going to last for long. Pushing off from the tree trunk behind him, Luke charged, aiming for the vornskr’s flank.

He never got there. Even as he braced himself for the impact, the vornskr’s whip tail whistled out of nowhere to catch him solidly along shoulder and face and send him sprawling sideways to the ground.

He was on his feet again in an instant, dimly aware of the line of fire burning across cheek and forehead. The vornskr hissed as he came toward it again, slashing razor-sharp claws at him to ward him back. Artoo reached the struggle and sent a spark into the predator’s left front paw; almost casually, the vornskr swung at the welder, snapping it off and sending the pieces flying. Simultaneously, the tail whipped around, the impact lifting Artoo up on one set of wheels. It swung again and again, each time coming closer to knocking the droid over.

Luke gritted his teeth, mind searching furiously for a plan. Shadowboxing at the creature’s head like this wasn’t anything more than a delaying tactic; but the minute the distraction ceased, Mara was as good as dead. The vornskr would either slash her arms with its claws or else simply overwhelm her grip by brute force. With the loss of his welder, Artoo had no fighting capability left; and if the vornskr kept at him with that whip tail . . .

The tail. “Artoo!” Luke snapped. “Next time that tail hits you, try to grab it.”

Artoo beeped a shaky acknowledgment and extended his heavy grasping arm. Luke watched out of the corner of his eye, still trying to keep the vornskr’s head and front paws busy. The tail whipped around again, and with a warble of triumph, Artoo caught it.

A warble that turned quickly into a screech. Again with almost casual strength, the vornskr ripped its tail free, taking most of the grasping arm with it.

But it had been pinned out of action for a pair of heartbeats, and that was all the time Luke needed. Diving around Artoo’s bulk and under the trapped whip tail, he darted his hand to Mara’s side and snatched back his lightsaber.

The whip tail slashed toward him as he rolled back to his feet, but by the time it got there Luke was out of range around Artoo’s side again. Igniting the lightsaber, he reached the blazing blade past the flailing claws and brushed the vornskrs nose.

The predator screamed, in anger or pain, shying back from this bizarre creature that had bit it. Luke tapped it again and again, trying to drive it away from Mara where he could safely deliver a killing blow.

Abruptly, in a single smooth motion, the vornskr leaped backwards onto solid ground, then sprang straight at Luke. Also in a single smooth motion, Luke cut it in half.

“About time,” a hoarse voice croaked from beneath his feet. He looked down to see Mara push half the dead vornskr off her chest and raise herself up on one elbow. “What in blazes was that stupid game you were playing?”

“I didn’t think you’d like your hands cut off if I missed,” Luke told her, breathing hard. He took a step back as she sat up and offered her a helping hand.

She waved the hand away. Rolling slowly onto hands and knees, she pushed herself tiredly to her feet and turned back to face him.

With her blaster back in her hand.

“Just drop the lightsaber and move back,” she panted, gesturing with the weapon for emphasis.

Luke sighed, shaking his head. “I don’t believe you,” he said, shutting down the lightsaber and dropping it onto the ground. The adrenaline was receding from his system now, leaving both face and shoulder aching like fury. “Or didn’t you notice that Artoo and I just saved your life?”

“I noticed. Thanks.” Keeping her blaster trained on him, Mara stooped to retrieve the lightsaber. “I figure that’s my reward for not shooting you two days ago. Get over there and sit down.”

Luke looked over at Artoo, who was moaning softly to himself. “Do you mind if I look at Artoo first?”

Mara looked down at the droid, her lips compressed into a thin line. “Sure, go ahead.” Moving clear of both of them, she picked up the survival pack and trudged off to one of the trees at the edge of the clearing.

Artoo wasn’t in as bad a shape as Luke had feared. Both the welder and the grasping arm had broken off cleanly, leaving no trailing wires or partial components that might get caught on something else. Speaking quiet encouragement to the droid, Luke got the two compartments sealed.

“Well?” Mara asked, sitting with her back to a tree and gingerly applying salve to the oozing claw marks on her arms.

“He’s okay for now,” Luke told her as he went back over to his own tree and sat down. “He’s been damaged worse than this before.”

“I’m so glad to hear it,” she said sourly. She glanced at Luke, took a longer look. “He got you good, didn’t he?”

Carefully, Luke touched the welt running across his cheek and forehead. “I’ll be all right.”

She snorted. “Sure you will,” she said, her voice laced with sarcasm as she went back to treating her gashes. “I forgot—you’re a hero, too.”

For a long minute Luke watched her, trying once more to understand the complexities and contradictions of this strange woman. Even from three meters away he could see that her hand was shaking as she applied the salve: with reaction, perhaps, or muscle fatigue. Almost certainly with fear—she’d escaped a bloody death by a bare handful of centimeters, and she would have to be a fool not to recognize that.

And yet, whatever she was feeling inside, she was clearly determined not to let any of it out past that rock-hard surface she’d so carefully built up around herself. As if she was afraid to let weakness of any sort show through . . .

Abruptly, as if feeling his eyes on her, Mara looked up. “I said thanks already,” she growled. “What do you want, a medal?”

Luke shook his head. “I just want to know what happened to you.”

For a moment those green eyes flashed again with the old hatred. But only for a moment. The vornskr attack, coming on top of two days of laborious travel and no sleep, had taken a severe toll on her emotional strength. The anger faded from her eyes, leaving only a tired coldness behind. “You happened to me,” she told him, her voice more fatigued than embittered. “You came out of a grubby sixth-rate farm on a tenth-rate planet, and destroyed my life.”

“How?”

Contempt briefly filled her face. “You don’t have the faintest idea who I am, do you?”

Luke shook his head. “I’m sure I’d remember you if we’d met.”

“Oh, right,” she said sardonically. “The great, omniscient Jedi. See all, hear all, know all, understand all. No, we didn’t actually meet; but I was there, if you’d bothered to notice me. I was a dancer at Jabba the Hutt’s palace the day you came for Solo.”

So that was it. She’d worked for Jabba; and when he’d killed Jabba, he’d ruined her life . . .

Luke frowned at her. No. Her slim figure, her agility and grace—those certainly could belong to a professional dancer. But her piloting skills, her expert marksmanship, her inexplicable working knowledge of lightsabers— those most certainly did not.

Mara was still waiting, daring him with her expression to figure it out. “You weren’t just a dancer, though,” he told her. “That was only a cover.”

Her lip twisted. “Very good. That vaunted Jedi insight, no doubt. Keep going; you’re doing so well. What was I really doing there?”

Luke hesitated. There were all sorts of possibilities for this one: bounty hunter, smuggler, quiet bodyguard for Jabba, spy from some rival criminal organization . . .

No. Her knowledge of lightsabers . . . and suddenly, all the pieces fell together with a rush. “You were waiting for me,” he said. “Vader knew I’d go there to try and rescue Han, and he sent you to capture me.”

“Vader?” She all but spat the name. “Don’t make me laugh. Vader was a fool, and skating on the edge of treason along with it. My master sent me to Jabba’s to kill you, not recruit you.”

Luke stared at her, an icy shiver running up his back. It couldn’t be . . . but even as he gazed into that tortured face, he knew with sudden certainty that it was. “And your master,” he said quietly, “was the Emperor.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice a snake’s hiss. “And you destroyed him.”

Luke swallowed hard, the pounding of his own heart the only sound. He hadn’t killed the Emperor—Darth Vader had done that—but Mara didn’t seem inclined to worry over such subtleties. “You’re wrong, though,” he said. “He did try to recruit me.”

“Only because I failed,” she ground out, her throat muscles tight. “And only when Vader had you standing right there in front of him. What, you don’t think he knew Vader had offered to help you overthrow him?”

Unconsciously, Luke flexed the fingers of his numbed artificial hand. Yes,

Vader had indeed suggested such an alliance during their Cloud City duel. “I don’t think it was a serious offer,” he murmured.

“The Emperor did,” Mara said flatly. “He knew. And what he knew, I knew.”

Her eyes filled with distant pain. “I was his hand, Skywalker,” she said, her voice remembering. “That’s how I was known to his inner court: as the Emperor’s Hand. I served him all over the galaxy, doing jobs the Imperial Fleet and stormtroopers couldn’t handle. That was my one great talent, you see—I could hear his call from anywhere in the Empire, and report back to him the same way. I exposed traitors for him, brought down his enemies, helped him keep the kind of control over the mindless bureaucracies that he needed. I had prestige, and power, and respect.”

Slowly, her eyes came back from the past. “And you took it all away from me. If only for that, you deserve to die.”

“What went wrong?” Luke forced himself to ask.

Her lip twisted. “Jabba wouldn’t let me go with the execution party. That was it—pure and simple. I tried begging, cajoling, bargaining—I couldn’t change his mind.”

“No,” Luke said soberly. “Jabba was highly resistant to the mind- controlling aspects of the Force.”

But if she had been on the Sail Barge . . .

Luke shivered, seeing in his mind’s eye that terrifying vision in the dark cave on Dagobah. The mysterious silhouetted woman standing there on the Sail Barge’s upper deck, laughing at him as she held his captured lightsaber high.

The first time, years ago, the cave had spun him an image of a possible future. This time, he knew now, it had shown him a possible past. “You would have succeeded,” he said quietly.

Mara looked sharply at him. “I’m not asking for understanding or sympathy,” she bit out. “You wanted to know. Fine; now you know.”

He let her tend her wounds in silence for a moment. “So why are you here?” he asked. “Why not with the Empire?”

“What Empire?” she countered. “It’s dying—you know that as well as I do.”

“But while it’s still there—”

She cut him off with a withering glare. “Who would I go to?” she demanded. “They didn’t know me—none of them did. Not as the Emperor’s Hand, anyway. I was a shadow, working outside the normal lines of command and protocol. There were no records kept of my activities.

It was just before noon when they began to notice the faint sounds wafting occasionally to them through the forest. It was another hour after that before they were close enough for Luke to finally identify them.

Speeder bikes.

“You’re sure that’s a military model?” Mara muttered as the whine/drone rose and fell twice more before fading again into the distance.

“I’m sure,” Luke told her grimly. “I nearly ran one of them into a tree on Endor.”

She didn’t reply, and for a moment Luke wondered if the mention of Endor might not have been a good idea. But a glance at Mara’s face relieved that fear. She was not brooding, but listening. “Sounds like they’re off to the south, too,” she said after a minute. “North . . . I don’t hear anything from that direction.”

Luke listened. “Neither do I,” he said. “I wonder . . . Artoo, can you make up an audio map for us?”

There was an acknowledging beep. A moment later the droid’s holo projector came on and a two-color map appeared, hovering a few centimeters over the matted leaves underfoot.

“I was right,” Mara said, pointing. “A few units directly ahead of us, the rest off to the south. Nothing at all north.”

“Which means we must have veered to the north,” Luke said. Mara frowned at him. “How do you figure that?”

“Well, they must know we’ll make for Hyllyard City,” he said. “They’re bound to center their search on the direct approach.”

Mara smiled thinly. “Such wonderful Jedi naïveté,” she said. “I don’t suppose you considered the fact that just because we can’t hear them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”

Luke frowned down at the holographic map. “Well, of course they could

have a force lying in wait there,” he agreed. “But what would it gain them?” “Oh, come on, Skywalker—it’s the oldest tactical trick in the book. If the

perimeter looks impossible to crack, the quarry goes to ground and waits for a better opportunity. You don’t want him to do that, so you give him what looks like a possible way through.” She squatted down, ran a finger through the

“quiet” section on the map. “In this case, they get a bonus: if we swing north to avoid the obvious speeder bikes, it’s instant proof that we’ve got something to hide from them.”

Luke grimaced. “Not that they really need any proof.”

Mara shrugged and straightened up again. “Some officers are more legal- minded than others. The question is, what do we do now?”

Luke looked back down at the map. By Mara’s reckoning, they were no more than four or five kilometers from the edge of the forest—two hours, more or less. If the Imperials had this much organization already set up in front of them . . . “They’re probably going to try to ring us,” he said slowly. “Move units around to the north and south, and eventually behind us.”

“If they haven’t done so already,” Mara said. “No reason we would have heard them—they don’t know exactly how fast we’re moving, so they’ll have made it a big circle. Probably using a wide ring of Chariot assault vehicles or hoverscouts with a group of speeder bikes working around each focal point. It’s the standard stormtrooper format for a web.”

Luke pursed his lips. But what the Imperials didn’t know was that one of the quarry knew exactly what they were up to. “So how do we break out?” he asked.

Mara hissed between her teeth. “We don’t,” she said flatly. “Not without a lot more equipment and resources than we’ve got.”

The faint whine/drone came again from somewhere ahead of them, rising and then fading as it passed by in the distance. “In that case,” Luke said, “we might as well go straight up the middle. Call to them before they see us, maybe.”

Mara snorted. “Like we were casual tourists out here with nothing to hide?” “You have a better idea?”

She glared at him. But it was a reflexive glare, without any real argument behind it. “Not really,” she conceded at last. “I suppose you’re also going to want to do that role-switch thing Karrde suggested.”

Luke shrugged. “We’re not going to be able to blast our way through them,” he reminded her. “And if you’re right about that pincer movement, we’re not going to sneak through them, either. All that’s left is a bluff, and the better a bluff it is, the better chance we’ve got.”

Mara’s lip twisted. “I suppose so.” With only a slight hesitation, she dropped the power pack from her blaster and handed it and the forearm holster to him.

Luke took them, hefted the blaster in his hand. “They may check to see if it’s loaded,” he pointed out mildly. “I would.”

“Look, Skywalker, if you think I’m going to give you a loaded weapon—”

“And if another vornskr finds us before the Imperials do,” Luke cut her off quietly, “you’ll never get it reloaded fast enough.”

“Maybe I don’t care,” she shot back. Luke nodded. “Maybe you don’t.”

She glared at him again, but again, the glare lacked conviction. Teeth visibly grinding together, she slapped the power pack into his hand. “Thank you,” Luke said, reloading the blaster and fastening it to his left forearm. “Now. Artoo?”

The droid understood. One of the trapezoidal sections at the top of his upper dome, indistinguishable from all the other segments, slid open to reveal a long, deep storage compartment beneath it. Turning back to Mara, Luke held out his hand.

She looked at the open hand, then at the storage compartment. “So that’s how you did it,” she commented sourly, unhooking his lightsaber and handing it over. “I always wondered how you smuggled that thing into Jabba’s.”

Luke dropped the lightsaber in, and Artoo slid the door shut behind it. “I’ll call for it if I need it,” he told the droid.

“Don’t count on being very good with it,” Mara warned. “The ysalamiri effect is supposed to extend several kilometers past the edge of the forest— none of those little attack-anticipation tricks will work anywhere near Hyllyard City.”

“I understand,” Luke nodded. “I guess we’re ready to go, then.” “Not quite,” Mara said, eyeing him. “There’s still that face of yours.”

Luke cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t think Artoo’s got anywhere to hide that.” “Funny. I had something else in mind.” Mara glanced around, then headed off toward a stand of odd-looking bushes a few meters away. Reaching it, she pulled the end of her tunic sleeve down to cover her hand and carefully picked a few of the leaves. “Pull up your sleeve and hold out your arm,” she

ordered as she returned with them.

He did so, and she brushed his forearm lightly with the tip of one of the leaves. “Now. Let’s see if this works.”

“What exactly is it supposed to—aah!” The last of Luke’s air came out in an explosive burst as a searing pain lanced through his forearm.

“Perfect,” Mara said with grim satisfaction. “You’re allergic as anything to them. Oh, relax—the pain will be gone in a few seconds.”

“Oh, thanks,” Luke gritted back. The pain was indeed receding. “Right.

Now, what about this—mmm!—this blasted itch?”

“That’ll hang on a little longer,” she said, gesturing at his arm. “But never mind that. What do you think?”

Luke gritted his teeth. The itching was not-so-subtle torture . . . but she was

right. Where she’d brushed the leaf the skin had turned dark and puffy, sprinkled with tiny pustules. “Looks disgusting,” he said.

“Sure does,” she agreed. “You want to do it yourself, or you want me to do it for you?”

Luke gritted his teeth. This was not going to be pleasant. “I can do it.”

It was indeed unpleasant; but by the time he finished brushing his chin with the leaves the pain had already begun to recede from his forehead. “I hope I didn’t get it too close to my eyes,” he commented between clenched teeth, throwing the leaves away into the forest and fighting hard against the urge to dig into his face with both sets of fingernails. “It’d be handy to be able to see the rest of the afternoon.”

“I think you’ll be all right,” Mara assured him, studying the result. “The rest of your face is pretty horrendous, though. You won’t look anything like whatever pictures they have, that’s for sure.”

“Glad to hear it.” Luke took a deep breath and ran through the Jedi pain suppression exercises. Without the Force they weren’t all that effective, but they seemed to help a little. “How long will I look like this?”

“The puffiness should start going down in a few hours. It won’t be completely gone until tomorrow.”

“Good enough. We ready, then?”

“As ready as we’ll ever be.” Turning her back to Artoo, she took the travois handles and started walking. “Come on.”

They made good time, despite the lingering tenderness of Mara’s ankle and the distractions inherent in a faceful of itch. To Luke’s relief, the itching began to fade after about half an hour, leaving only puffy numbness behind it. Mara’s ankle was another story, however, and as he walked behind her and Artoo he could see clearly how she was having to favor it. The added burden of Artoo’s travois wasn’t helping, and twice he almost suggested that they give up on the role switching. But he resisted the urge. It was their best chance of getting out of this, and they both knew it.

Besides which, she had far too much pride to agree.

They’d gone perhaps another kilometer, with the whine/drone of the speeder bikes rising and falling in the distance, when suddenly they were there.

There were two of them: biker scouts in glistening white armor, swooping up to them and braking to a halt almost before Luke’s ears had registered the sound of their approach. Which meant a very short ride, with target position already known.

It took another hour to reach the edge of the forest. The two speeder bikes stayed with them the whole time; but as they traveled, the party began to grow. More speeder bikes swept in from both sides, falling into close formation on either side of Luke and Mara or else joining up with the guards to both front and rear. As they neared the forest’s edge, fully armored stormtroopers began to appear, too, moving in with blaster rifles held ready across their chests to take up positions around the two prisoners. As they did so, the scouts began drifting away, ranging farther out to form a kind of moving screen.

By the time they finally stepped out from under the forest canopy, their escort numbered no fewer than ten biker scouts and twenty stormtroopers. It was an impressive display of military power . . . and more even than the fact of the search itself, it drove home to Luke the seriousness with which the mysterious man in charge of the Empire was treating this incident. Even at the height of their power, the Imperials hadn’t spent stormtroopers lightly.

Three more people were waiting for them in the fifty-meter strip of open land between the forest and the nearest structures of Hyllyard City: two more stormtroopers and a hard-faced man wearing a major’s insignia on his dusty brown Imperial uniform. “About time,” the latter muttered under his breath as Mara and Luke were nudged in his direction. “Who are they?”

“The male says his name is Jade,” one of the stormtroopers in front reported in that slightly filtered voice they all seemed to have. “Bounty hunter; works for Karrde. He claims the female is his prisoner.”

“Was his prisoner,” the major corrected, looking at Mara. “What’s your name, thief?”

“Senni Kiffu,” Mara said, her voice surly. “And I’m not a thief. Talon Karrde owes me—he owes me big. I didn’t take any more than I had coming.”

The major looked at Luke, and Luke shrugged. “Karrde’s other dealings aren’t any of my business. He said bring her back. I brought her back.”

“And her theft, too, I see.” He looked at Artoo, still tied to his travois and dragging behind the speeder bike. “Get that droid off your bike,” he ordered the scout. “The ground’s flat enough here, and I want you on perimeter. Put it with the prisoners. Cuff them, too—they’re hardly likely to fall over tree roots out here.”

“Wait a minute,” Luke objected as one of the stormtroopers stepped toward him. “Me, too?”

The major raised his eyebrows slightly. “You got a problem with that, bounty hunter?” he asked, his voice challenging.

“Yeah, I got a problem with it,” Luke shot back. “She’s the prisoner here, not me.”

“For the moment you’re both prisoners,” the other countered. “So shut up.” He frowned at Luke’s face. “What in the Empire happened to you, anyway?”

So they weren’t going to be able to pass the puffiness off as Luke’s natural features. “Ran into some kind of bush while I was chasing her,” he growled as the stormtrooper roughly cuffed his hands in front of him. “It itched like blazes for a while.”

The major smiled thinly. “How very inconvenient for you,” he said dryly. “How fortunate that we have a fully qualified medic back at HQ. He should be able to bring that swelling down in no time.” He held Luke’s gaze a moment longer, then shifted his attention to the stormtrooper leader. “You disarmed him, of course.”

The stormtrooper gestured, and the first of the biker scouts swooped close to hand Mara’s blaster to the major. “Interesting weapon,” the major murmured, turning it over in his hands before sliding it into his belt. From overhead came a soft hum, and Luke looked up to see a repulsorlift craft settle into place overhead. A Chariot assault vehicle, just as Mara had predicted. “Ah,” the major said, glancing up at it. “All right, Commander. Let’s go.”

In many ways, Hyllyard City reminded Luke of Mos Eisley: small houses and commercial buildings crammed fairly tightly together, with relatively narrow streets running between them. The troop headed around the perimeter, clearly aiming for one of the wider avenues that seemed to radiate, spokelike, from the center of town. Looking into the city as they passed by the outer buildings, Luke was able to catch occasional glimpses of what seemed to be an open area a few blocks away. The town square, possibly, or else a spacecraft landing area.

The vanguard had just reached the target street when, in perfect synchronization, the stormtroopers abruptly changed formation. Those in the inner circle pulled in closer to Luke and Mara while those in the outer circle moved farther away, the whole crowd coming to a halt and gesturing to their prisoners to do the same. A moment later, the reason for the sudden maneuver came around the corner: four scruffy-looking men walking briskly toward them with a fifth man in the center of their square, his hands chained behind him.

They had barely emerged from the street when they were intercepted by a group of four stormtroopers. A short and inaudible conversation ensued, which concluded with the strangers handing their blasters over to the stormtroopers with obvious reluctance. Escorted now by the Imperials, they continued on toward the main group . . . and as they walked, Luke finally got a clear look at the prisoner.

Few steps away from it, when four of the stormtroopers abruptly blew up.

Quite spectacularly, too. The simultaneous flashes of yellow-white fire lit up the landscape to almost painful intensity; the thunderclap of the multiple detonations nearly knocked Luke over.

The sound was still ringing in his ears when the blasters opened up behind them.

The stormtroopers were good, all right. There was no panic that Luke could detect; no sudden freezing in astonishment or indecision. They were moving into combat position almost before the blaster fire had begun: those already at the archway hugging close to the stone pillars to return covering fire, the rest moving quickly to join them. Above the sound of the blasters, he could hear the increased whine of the speeder bikes kicking into high speed; overhead, he caught just a glimpse of the Chariot assault vehicle swiveling around to face the unseen attackers.

And then an armored hand caught him under each armpit, and suddenly he was being hauled toward the archway. A few seconds later he was dumped unceremoniously in the narrow gap between the two pillars supporting the north side of the arch. Mara was already crouched there; a second later, two more stormtroopers tossed Han in to join them. Four of the Imperials moved into position over them, using the pillars for cover as they began returning fire. Struggling to his knees, Luke leaned out for a look.

Out in the fire zone, looking small and helpless amid the deadly horizontal hail of blaster fire, Artoo was rolling toward them as fast as his little wheels would carry him.

“I think we’re in trouble,” Han muttered in his ear. “Not to mention Lando and the others.”

“It’s not over yet,” Luke told him tightly. “Just stick close. How are you at causing distractions?”

“Terrific,” Han said; and to Luke’s surprise, he brought his hands out from behind his back, the chain and manacles he’d been wearing hanging loosely from his left wrist. “Trick cuffs,” he grunted, pulling a concealed strip of metal from the inside of the open cuff and probing at Luke’s restraints. “I hope this thing—ah.” The pressure on Luke’s wrists was suddenly gone; the cuffs opened and dropped to the ground. “You ready for your distraction?” Han asked, taking the loose end of his chain in his free hand.

“Hang on a minute,” Luke told him, looking up. Most of the speeder bikes had taken refuge under the arch, looking like some strange species of giant birds hiding from a storm as they hovered close to the stone, their laser cannon spitting toward the surrounding houses. In front of them and just below their line of fire, the Chariot had swiveled parallel to the arch and was coming down. Once it was on the ground . . .

A hand gripped Luke’s arm, fingernails digging hard into the skin. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it!” Mara hissed viciously. “If the Chariot gets down, you’ll never get them out from cover.”

“I know,” Luke nodded. “I’m counting on it.”

The Chariot settled smoothly to the ground directly in front of the arch, blocking the last of the attackers’ firing vectors. Crouched at the window, Aves swore violently. “Well, there’s your Jedi for you,” he bit out. “You got any other great ideas, Calrissian?”

Lando swallowed hard. “We’ve just got to give him—”

He never finished the sentence. From the arch a blaster bolt glanced off the window frame, and suddenly Lando’s upper arm flashed with pain. The shock sent him stumbling backward, just as a second shot blew apart that whole section of the frame, driving wooden splinters and chunks of masonry like shrapnel across his chest and arm.

He hit the floor, landing hard enough to see stars. Blinking, gritting his teeth against the pain, he looked up— To find Aves leaning over him.

Lando looked up into the other’s fece. I won’t forget this, Aves had said, no more than three minutes ago. And from the look on his face, he wasn’t anticipating any need to hold that memory for much longer. “He’ll come through,” Lando whispered through the pain. “He will.”

But he could tell that Aves wasn’t listening . . . and, down deep, Lando couldn’t blame him. Lando Calrissian, the professional gambler, had gambled one last time. And he’d lost.

And the debt from that gamble—the last in a long line of such debts—had come due.

The Chariot settled smoothly to the ground directly in front of the arch, and Luke got his feet under him. This was it. “All right, Han,” he muttered. “Go.” Han nodded and surged to his feet, coming up right in the middle of the four stormtroopers standing over them. With a bellow, he swung his former shackles full across the faceplate of the nearest guard, then threw the looped chain around the neck of the next and pulled backwards, away from the pillars. The other two reacted instantly, leaping after him and taking the whole group down in a tangle.

And for the next few seconds, Luke was free.

He stood up and leaned out to look around the pillar. Artoo was still in the middle of no-man’s-land, hurrying to reach cover before he could be hit by a stray shot. He warbled plaintively as he saw Luke—

“Artoo!—now!” Luke shouted, holding out his hand and glancing across toward the southern end of the archway. Between the stone pillars and the grounded Chariot, the stormtroopers were indeed solidly entrenched. If this didn’t work, Han was right: Lando and everyone else out there were dead. Gritting his teeth, hoping fervently that his counterattack wasn’t already too late, he turned back to Artoo—

Just as, with a flicker of silver metal and perfect accuracy, his lightsaber dropped neatly into his outstretched hand.

Beside him, the guards had subdued Han’s crazy attack and were getting back to their feet, leaving Han on his knees between them. Luke took them all in a single sweep, the blazing green lightsaber blade slicing through the glistening stormtrooper armor with hardly a tug to mark its passing. “Get behind me,” he snapped to Han and Mara, stepping back to the gap between the two northern pillars and focusing on the mass of Imperials standing and crouching between him and the southern pillars. They were suddenly aware that they had an unexpected threat on their flank, and a few were already starting to bring their blasters to bear on him.

With the Force to guide his hand, he could have held out against them indefinitely, blocking their blaster shots with the lightsaber. Mara had been right, though: the ysalamiri effect did indeed extend this far outside the forest, and the Force was still silent.

But then, he’d never had any intention of fighting the stormtroopers anyway. Turning his back on the blasters tracking toward him, he slashed the lightsaber across and upward—

Neatly slicing one of the stone pillars in half.

There was a loud crack as suddenly released tension sent a shiver through the structure. Another stroke cut through the second pillar—and the noise of the battle was abruptly drowned out by the awful grinding of stone on stone as the two fractured pillars began sliding apart.

Luke swung back around, peripherally aware of Han and Mara scrambling out from under the arch to safety behind him. The stormtroopers’ expressions were hidden behind their masks, but the look of sudden horror on the major’s face said it for all of them. Overhead, the mass of the arch creaked warningly; setting his teeth, Luke locked the lightsaber on and hurled it across the gap toward the pillars there. It cut through one of them and nicked the other—and with a roar, the whole thing came crashing down.

Luke, standing at the edge, barely got out from under it in time. The stormtroopers, crouched in the center, didn’t.

Karrde walked around the mass of stone to where the crumpled nose of the Chariot assault vehicle poked out, a sense of slightly stunned disbelief coloring his vision. “One man,” he murmured.

“Well, we helped some,” Aves reminded him. But the sarcasm of the words faded beneath the grudging respect clearly there behind it.

“And without the Force, too,” Karrde said.

He sensed Aves shrug uncomfortably. “That’s what Mara said. Though of course Skywalker might have lied to her about it.”

“Unlikely.” A motion at the edge of the square caught his eye, and Karrde looked over to see Solo and Skywalker helping a distinctly shaky-looking Lando Calrissian to one of the airspeeders parked around the perimeter. “Took a shot, did he?”

Aves grunted. “Came close to taking one of mine, too,” he said. “I thought he’d betrayed us—figured I’d make sure he didn’t walk away from it.”

“In restrospect, it’s just as well you didn’t.” Karrde looked up, searching the skies. Wondering how long it would take the Imperials to respond to what had happened here today.

Aves looked up, too. “We might still be able to hunt down the other two Chariots before they get a chance to report,” he suggested. “I don’t think the headquarters people got any messages away before we took them out.”

Karrde shook his head, feeling a deep surge of sadness rising through the sense of urgency within him. Not until now had he truly realized just how much he’d come to love this place—his base, the forest, the planet Myrkr itself. Now, when there was no choice but to abandon it. “No,” he told Aves. “There’s no way to cover up our part in what happened here. Not from a man like Thrawn.”

“You’re probably right,” Aves said, his voice taking on a sense of urgency of its own. He understood the implications of that, all right. “You want me to head back and start the evacuation?”

“Yes. And take Mara with you. Make sure she keeps busy—somewhere away from the Millennium Falcon and Skywalker’s X-wing.”

He felt Aves’s eyes on him. But if the other wondered, he kept his wonderings to himself. “Right. See you later.”

Couple of Chariots and a few speeder bikes unaccounted for. One of them might have figured that a last-ditch suicide run was better than having to go back to the Grand Admiral and report.”

Luke stared at him. “Grand Admiral?” he asked carefully.

Han’s lip twisted. “Yeah. That’s who seems to be running the show now for the Empire.”

A cold chill ran up Luke’s back. “I thought we’d accounted for all the Grand Admirals.”

“Me, too. We must have missed one.”

And abruptly, right in the middle of Han’s last word, Luke felt a surge of awareness and strength fill him. As if he were waking up from a deep sleep, or stepping from a dark room into the light, or suddenly understanding the universe again.

The Force was again with him.

He took a deep breath, eyes flicking across the control board for the altimeter. Just over twelve kilometers. Karrde had been right—those ysalamiri did, indeed, reinforce one another. “I don’t suppose you got a name,” he murmured.

“Karrde wouldn’t give it to me,” Han said, throwing a curious frown in Luke’s direction. “Maybe we can bargain the use of that Star Cruiser he wants for it. You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Luke assured him. “I just—it’s like being able to see again after having been blind.”

Han snorted under his breath. “Yeah, I know how that is,” he said wryly.

“I guess you would.” Luke looked at him. “I didn’t get a chance to say this earlier . . . but thanks for coming after me.”

Han waved it away. “No charge. And I didn’t get a chance to say it earlier—” he glanced at Luke again “—but you look like something the proom dragged in.”

“My wonderful disguise,” Luke told him, touching his face gingerly. “Mara assures me it’ll wear off in a few more hours.”

“Yeah—Mara,” Han said. “You and she seemed to be hitting it off pretty well there.”

Luke grimaced. “Don’t count on it,” he said. “A matter of having a common enemy, that’s all. First the forest, then the Imperials.”

He could sense Han casting around for a way to ask the next question, decided to save him the trouble. “She wants to kill me,” he told the other.

“Any idea why?”

Luke opened his mouth . . . and, to his own surprise, closed it again. There wasn’t any particular reason not to tell Han what he knew about Mara’s past

“Unless a Star Destroyer’s sensors are better than you think,” Mara retorted.

“We know all about their sensors,” Aves soothed. “Ease up, Mara, Karrde knows what he’s doing. The Wild Karrde has probably the tightest sensor stealth mode this side of—”

He broke off as the bridge door opened behind them; and Mara turned just as Karrde’s two pet vornskrs bounded into the room.

Dragging, very literally, their handler behind them. “What are you doing here, Chin?” Karrde asked.

“Sorry, Capt’,” Chin puffed, digging his heels into the deck and leaning back against the taut leashes. The effort was only partially successful; the predators were still pulling him slowly forward. “I couldn’t stop them. I thought maybe they wanted to see you, hee?”

“What’s the matter with you two, anyway?” Karrde chided the animals, squatting down in front of them. “Don’t you know we’re busy?”

The vornskrs didn’t look at him. Didn’t even seem to notice his presence, for that matter. They continued staring straight ahead as if he wasn’t even there.

Staring directly at Mara.

“Hey,” Karrde said, reaching over to slap one of the animals lightly across the muzzle. “I’m talking to you, Sturm. What’s gotten into you, anyway?” He glanced along their unblinking line of sight—

Paused for a second and longer look. “Are you doing something, Mara?”

Mara shook her head, a cold shiver tingling up her back. She’d seen that look before, on many of the wild vornskrs she’d run into during that long three-day trek through the Myrkr forest with Luke Skywalker.

Except that those vornskr stares hadn’t been directed at her. They’d been reserved instead for Skywalker. Usually just before they attacked him.

“That’s Mara, Sturm,” Karrde told the animal, speaking to it as he might a child. “Mara. Come on, now—you saw her all the time back home.”

Slowly, almost reluctantly, Sturm stopped his forward pull and turned his attention to his master. “Mara,” Karrde repeated, looking the vornskr firmly in the eye. “A friend. You hear that, Drang?” he added, reaching over to grip the other vornskr’s muzzle. “She’s a friend. Understand?”

Drang seemed to consider that. Then, as reluctantly as Sturm had, he lowered his head and stopped pulling. “That’s better,” Karrde said, scratching both vornskrs briefly behind their ears and standing up again. “Better take them back down, Chin. Maybe walk them around the main hold—give them some exercise.”

The Wild Karrde shuddered slightly, and for a second it seemed that the Interdictor had won their deadly race. Then, abruptly, the stars outside burst into starlines.

They’d made it.

Aves heaved a sigh of relief as the starlines faded into the mottled sky of hyperspace. “Talk about slicing the mynock close to the hull. How do you suppose they tumbled that we were out there, anyway?”

“No idea,” Karrde said, his voice cool. “Mara?”

“I don’t know, either.” Mara kept her eyes on her displays, not daring to look at either of them. “Thrawn may have just been playing a hunch. He does that sometimes.”

“Lucky for us he’s not the only one who gets hunches,” Aves offered, his voice sounding a little strange. “Nice going, Mara. Sorry I jumped on you.”

“Yes,” Karrde seconded. “A very good job indeed.”

“Thanks,” Mara muttered, keeping her eyes on her control board and blinking back the tears that had suddenly come to her eyes. So it was back. She’d hoped fervently that her locating of Skywalker’s X-wing out in deep space had been an isolated event. A fluke, more his doing than hers.

But no. It was all coming back, as it had so many times before in the past five years. The hunches and sensory flickers, the urges and the compulsions.

Which meant that, very soon now, the dreams would probably be starting again, too.

Angrily, she swiped at her eyes, and with an effort unclenched her jaw. It was a familiar enough pattern . . . but this time things were going to be different. Always before there’d been nothing she could do about the voices and urges except to suffer through the cycle. To suffer, and to be ready to break out of whatever niche she’d managed to carve for herself when she finally betrayed herself to those around her.

But she wasn’t a serving girl in a Phorliss cantina this time, or a come-up flector for a swoop gang on Caprioril, or even a hyperdrive mechanic stuck in the backwater of the Ison Corridor. She was second in command to the most powerful smuggler in the galaxy, with the kind of resources and mobility she hadn’t had since the death of the Emperor.

The kind of resources that would let her find Luke Skywalker again. And kill him.

Maybe then the voices would stop.

The End of L/M moments in Heir to the Empire.