by Timothy Zahn
The droid jabbered as he rolled through the opening. "I'm terribly sorry, sir," Threepio said. "He has full schematics for the air-duct system itself, but he says that further information on the facility was not available at this terminal."
"There'll be other terminals down the line," Lando said. "Are we leaving a rear guard?"
"One of the Noghri will stay," Ekhrikhor mewed at Han's elbow. "He will keep the exit clear."
"Fine," Han said. "Let's go."
They were fifty meters down the tunnel and approaching the first of the dim maintenance lights Han had spotted before Luke suddenly noticed that the silent Myneyrshi had followed them in. "Han?" he murmured, gesturing behind them.
"Yeah, I know," Han said. "What did you want me to do, tell them to go home?"
Luke looked back again. He was right, of course. But knives and crossbows against blasters . . . "Ekhrikhor?"
"What is your command, son of Vader?"
"I want you to assign two of your people to go with those Myneyrshi," he told the Noghri. "They're to guide them and help them with their attacks."
"But it is you we must protect, son of Vader," Ekhrikhor objected.
"You will be protecting me," Luke said. "Every Imperial the Myneyrshi can pin down will be one less for us to worry about. But they can't pin any troops down if they're killed in the first sortie."
The Noghri made an unhappy-sounding noise in the back of his throat. "I hear and obey," he said reluctantly. He gestured to two of the Noghri; and as Luke watched them drop back down the tunnel he caught a quick look at Mara's face as she passed one of the lights. The dread was still there, but along with it was a grim determination. Whatever was waiting ahead for them, she was ready to face it.
He could only hope that he was, too.
"There it is," Karrde announced, pointing ahead to the mountain rising out of the forest and the gathering shadows of twilight.
"You sure?" Leia asked, stretching out with the Force as hard as she could. Back at Bespin, during that mad escape from Lando's Cloud City, she'd been able to sense Luke's call from almost this far away. Here, now, there was nothing at all.
"That's where their nav feed seems to be leading us," Karrde told her. "Unless they've seen through Ghent's little deception and are sending us to some sort of decoy spot." He glanced over his shoulder at her. "Anything?"
"No." Leia looked out at the mountain, her stomach tightening painfully. After all their hopes and effort, they were too late. "They must already be inside."
"They're heading into trouble, then," Ghent spoke up from the comm station where he was still fiddling with the fine-tuning on his counterfeit Imperial ID code. "Flight control says they've got a riot going on at the entrance. They're diverting us to a secondary maintenance area about ten kilometers north."
Leia shook her head. "We're going to have to risk contacting them."
"Too dangerous," Dankin, the copilot, said. "If they catch us using a non-Imperial comlink channel, we're likely to get shot down."
"Perhaps there is another way," Mobvekhar said, moving to Leia's side. "Ekhrikhor clan Bakh'tor will have left a guard at their entrance point. There is a Noghri recognition signal that can be created with landing lights."
"Go ahead," Karrde said. "We can always claim a malfunction if the garrison notices. Chin, Corvis—watch your scopes."
Stepping over to Dankin's board, the Noghri keyed the landing lights on and off a half-dozen times. Leia stared out the viewport, trying to watch the whole mountain at once. If Han and the others had gone in above the dusk line—
"Got it," Corvis's voice came from his turbolaser turret. "Bearing zero-zero-three mark seventeen."
Leia looked over Karrde's shoulder as the coordinates came up on his nav display. There it was, faint but visible: a flickering light. "They are there," Mobvekhar confirmed.
"Good," Karrde said. "Ghent, acknowledge that we're proceeding to that secondary maintenance area as ordered. Better find a seat and strap down, Councilor; we're about to have an unexpected repulsorlift malfunction."
Between the trees and eroded rock outcroppings it looked to Leia like an impossible place for a ship the size of the Wild Karrde to land. But Karrde and his crew had clearly pulled this trick before, and with a last-second sputter of precision-aimed turbolaser fire they created just enough of a gap to put down into.
"Now what?" Dankin asked as Karrde cycled back the repulsorlifts.
Karrde looked at Leia, raised an eyebrow in question. "I'm going in," Leia told him, the vision of Luke and Mara in danger hovering before her eyes. "You don't have to come along."
"The Councilor and I will go look for her friends," Karrde answered Dankin, unstrapping and getting to his feet. "Ghent, you'll try to convince the garrison that we don't need any assistance."
"What about me?" Dankin asked.
Karrde smiled tightly. "You'll stay ready in case they don't believe him. Come on, Councilor."
The Noghri who'd returned their signal was nowhere in sight as they stepped out onto the Wild Karrde's ramp. "Where is he?" Karrde asked, looking around.
"Waiting," Mobvekhar said, putting a hand to the side of his mouth and giving a complex whistle. An answering whistle came, shifted into a complex warble. "Our identity is confirmed," he said. "He bids us come quickly. The others are no more than a quarter hour ahead."
A quarter hour. Leia stared out at the starlit darkness of the mountain. Too late to warn them, but maybe not too late to help. "Come on—we're wasting time," she said.
"Just a minute," Karrde said, looking past her shoulder. "We have to wait for—ah."
Leia turned. Coming down the corridor toward them from the aft section of the ship was a middle-aged man with a pair of long-legged quadruped animals in tow. "Here you go, Capt'," the man said, holding out the leashes.
"Thank you, Chin," Karrde said, taking them as he squatted down to scratch both animals briefly behind the ears. "I don't believe you've met my pet vornskrs, Councilor. This one's named Drang; the somewhat more aloof one there is Sturm. On Myrkr they use the Force to hunt their prey. Here, they're going to use it to find Mara. Right?"
The vornskrs made a strange sound, rather like a cackling purr. "Good," Karrde said, straightening up again. "I believe we're ready now, Councilor. Shall we go?"
Chapter 25
The alarms were still hooting in the distance as Han carefully leaned one eye around the corner. According to the floor plans Artoo had pulled up, this should be the major outer defense monitor station in this sector of the garrison. There were likely to be guards, and those guards were likely to be alert.
He was right on both counts. Five meters away down the entry corridor, flanking a heavy blast door, stood a pair of stormtroopers. And they were alert enough to notice the skulking stranger looking at them and to snap their blaster rifles up into firing position.
The smart thing to do—the thing any reasonably nonsuicidal person would do—would be to duck back behind the corner before the shooting started. Instead, Han gripped the corner with his free hand, using the leverage to throw himself completely across the entry corridor. He made it to the other side millimeters ahead of the tracking blaster bolts, flattening himself against the wall as the rapid fire blew out chunks of paneling metal behind him.
They were still firing as Chewbacca leaned around the corner Han had just left and ended the discussion with two quick bowcaster shots.
"Good job, Chewie," Han grunted, throwing a quick look behind him and then slipping back around the corner. The stormtroopers were out of the fight, all right, leaving nothing in their way but a massive metal door.
Which, like the stormtroopers themselves, was no big deal. At least, not for them. "Ready?" he asked, dropping into a half-crouch at one side of the door and raising his blaster. There would be another pair of guards inside.
"Ready," Luke confirmed. There was the snap-hiss of the lad's lightsaber, and the brilliant green blade whipped past Han's head to s
lice horizontally through the heavy metal of the blast door. Somewhere along the way it caught the internal release mechanism, and as Luke finished the cut the top part of the door shot up along its track into the ceiling.
From the way the stormtroopers were facing the door, it was clear they'd heard the short fight outside. It was also clear that they hadn't expected anyone to be coming through this soon. Han shot one of them as he tried to bring his blaster rifle to bear; Luke lunged half over the bottom part of the door, lightsaber swinging, and took out the other.
The group of Imperials manning their sensor consoles weren't expecting company, either. They were fumbling for sidearms and scrambling for cover as Han and Chewbacca took them out. A dozen shots after that, the room had been reduced to a smoldering collection of junk.
"That ought to do it," Han decided. "Better get lost before the reinforcements get here."
But between the riot down at the main entrance and the wandering band of Myneyrshi, Imperial response time was down. The three intruders made it back along the corridor to the emergency stairway and three levels down to the pump room where they'd left the others.
Two of the Noghri were standing silent guard just inside the door as Han keyed it open. "Any trouble?" Lando called from somewhere in the tangle of pipes that seemed to fill two thirds of the room.
"Not really," Han said as Chewbacca closed and locked the door behind them. "Wouldn't want to try it again, though."
Lando grunted. "I don't think you'll have to. They should be adequately convinced that there's a major aerial attack on the way."
"Let's hope so," Han said, stepping around to where Lando was fiddling with an archaic-looking control board. Artoo was plugged into a computer socket on the side of the board, while Threepio hovered off to the side like a nervous mother bird. "Vintage stuff, huh?"
"You've got that," Lando agreed. "I think the Emperor must have just picked up the cloning complex and dropped it in here whole."
Artoo gibbered indignantly. "Right—including the programming," Lando said dryly. "I know a little about this stuff, Han, but not enough to do any permanent damage. I think we're going to have to use the explosives."
"Fine with me," Han said. He would have hated lugging them all the way across Wayland for nothing, anyway. "Where's Mara?"
"Out there," Lando said, nodding toward another door half hidden by the pipes. "In the main room."
"Let's check it out, Luke," Han said. He didn't like the idea of Mara wandering around alone in this place. "Chewie, stay here with Lando. See if there's anything worth blowing up."
Crossing to the door, he keyed it open. Beyond was a wide circular walkway running around the inside of what seemed to be a huge natural cavern. Directly ahead, framed against a massive equipment column that extended downward from the ceiling through the center of the cavern, Mara was standing at the walkway's railing. "This the place?" he asked her, glancing around as he started toward her. About twenty other doors opened up onto the walkway at more or less regular intervals, and there were four retractable bridges extending out to a work platform encircling the central equipment column. Aside from a couple of their Noghri skulking around doing guard duty there was no one else in sight.
But there were sounds. A muted hum of machinery and voices was coming from somewhere, punctuated by the faint clicks of relays and a strange rhythmic pulsing or whooshing sound. Like the whole cavern was breathing . . .
"It's the place," Mara confirmed, her voice sounding strange. Maybe she thought it sounded like breathing, too. "Come and see."
Han threw a glance at Luke, and together they stepped to Mara's side and looked down over the railing.
And it was, indeed, the place.
The cavern was huge, extending downward at least ten stories below their walkway. It was laid out like a sport arena, with each level being a kind of circular balcony running around the inside of the cavern. Each balcony was a little wider than the one above it, extending further into the center of the cavern and making for a smaller hole around the big equipment column. There were pipes everywhere: huge ones coming off the ducts of the central column, smaller ones running around the edges of each of the balconies, and little ones feeding off them into the neatly arranged metal circles that filled the balconies and main floor.
Thousands of little circles. Each one the top cover plate of a Spaarti cloning cylinder.
Beside Han, Luke made a strange sound in the back of his throat. "It's hard to believe," he said, sounding about halfway between awestruck and dumbfounded.
"Believe it," Han advised him grimly, pulling out his macrobinoculars and focusing them on the main floor below. The ductwork blocked a lot of the view, but he could catch glimpses of men in medtech and guard uniforms scurrying around. They were on some of the balconies, too. "They're stirred up like a rats' nest down there," he said. "Stormtroopers on the main floor and everything."
He threw a sideways look at Mara. Her expression was tight as she stared down at the cloning tanks, with the haunted look of someone gazing back into the past. "Bring back memories?" he asked.
"Yes," she said mechanically. She stood there a moment longer, then slowly straightened up. "But we can't allow it to stand."
"Glad you agree," Han said, studying her face. She looked and sounded okay now, but there was a lot of stuff going on under the surface. Hold it together, kid, he told her silently. Just a little longer, okay? "That column in the middle looks like our best shot. You know anything about it?"
She looked across the cavern. "Not really." She hesitated. "But there might be another way. The Emperor wasn't one for leaving things behind for other people to use. Not if he could help it."
Han threw a glance at Luke. "You mean this whole place might have a self-destruct?"
"It's possible," she said, that haunted look back in her eyes again. "If so, the control will be up in the throne room. I could go and take a look."
"I don't know," Han said, looking down into the cloning cavern. It was an awfully big place for them to take on with a single sack of explosives—he'd give her that much. A destruct switch would simplify things a lot. But the idea of Mara and her memories up there in the Emperor's throne room didn't sound so good, either. "Thanks, but I don't think any of us ought to go wandering around this place alone."
"I'll go with her," Luke volunteered. "She's right—it's worth checking out."
"It'll be safe enough," Mara added. "There's a servicedroid turbolift along the walkway that'll get us most of the way there. Most of the Imperials' attention should be focused on the riot at the entrance, anyway."
Han grimaced. "All right, get going," he growled. "Don't forget to let us know before you pull the switch, okay?"
"We wont," Luke assured him with a tight grin. "Come on, Mara."
They headed down the walkway. "Where are they going?" Lando asked from behind Han.
"Emperor's throne room," Han said. "She thinks he might have put a self-destruct switch up there. You find anything?"
"Artoo's finally got a connection into the main computer," Lando told him. "He's looking for schematics of that thing." He gestured toward the central column.
"We can't wait," Han decided, turning back as Chewbacca emerged from the pump room with their bag of explosives over one shoulder. "Chewie, you and Lando take one of those bridges across and get busy."
"Right," Lando said, taking a cautious look over the railing. "What about you?"
"I'm going to go lock us in," Han told him, pointing to the other doors opening out onto the walkway. "You— Noghri—come here."
The two Noghri who'd been standing guard moved silently to him as Lando and Chewbacca headed toward the nearest bridge. "Your command, Han clan Solo?" one of them asked.