by Troy Denning
As the guards drew nearer to Jaina and her prisoner, the stomach-dropping thuboom of a hull-hit reverberated through the ship. The lights flickered and blinked out, then blinked on again, out one more time, and finally returned to normal. The guards cast a nervous glance at the ceiling, then seemed to shiver off their anxiety and started down the corridor again. It would have been an exaggeration to say that the crew had become inured to the sound of turbolaser strikes impacting their Star Destroyer, but they were certainly growing accustomed to it. There had been a lull in the explosions for about half an hour after Jaina boarded, but then the Anakin Solo had followed the Megador forward and begun to take a steady trickle of hits. Whatever else he was, Caedus was certainly no coward.
When the distance had closed to within a couple of meters, the guards pulled their shoulders back and stopped. Jaina began to draw on the Force, using it to reinforce the impression in the two men’s minds that she was a familiar face—someone they ran into every now and again. It was a calculated trade-off. If her brother sensed her calling on the Force, it might give him a hint about her location. But if a suspicious guard reported a stranger wandering around the Prison Hold, it would bring him running—probably with an entire platoon of GAG troopers to back him up.
“Good day, Captain,” said the tallest guard, a sandy-haired man with a heavy, square jaw that reminded Jaina of Zekk’s strong features. “May we see the prisoner’s cell assignment chit?”
“If you must,” Jaina said, reinforcing her image as just another imperious GAG officer. She reached into a thigh pocket and produced the chit she had been given at the processing center a few minutes before. “Be fast about it. I don’t have much time.”
The guard glanced at the chit, then said, “In that case, you’re lucky you ran into us.” He pointed back down the corridor toward an intersection Jaina had just passed. “The women’s block is back there. We’ll escort you.”
“I don’t need an escort. I know where the women’s block is.” Jaina used a dismissing wave of her hand to draw the guard’s attention away from the suggestive tone of her voice. “I’m taking the prisoner to the infirmary first. She needs to be examined.”
The guard turned to his companion. “The prisoner needs to be examined first,” he said. “We’ll escort the captain to the infirmary.”
Jaina swallowed her frustration. “I don’t need an escort.” This time, she distracted the pair by pointing at the hall from which the two had emerged. “I can see where the infirmary is.”
The two guards frowned, then the shorter one—he had hair that was one shade lighter than black—said, “She can see where the infirmary is, Dex.”
Dex sighed, then passed back the chit. “Thank you, ma’am. Do be careful.” He pointed at a silver dome hanging from the ceiling. “The surveillance system is out.”
“Thanks for the warning.” An idea occurred to Jaina, and she added, “So was the prisoner index. Can you tell me what cell the Hapan prince is in?”
Both guards frowned, and Dex asked, “Why would you need to know that?”
“Because …” Jaina let her explanation trail off there, trying to make the best of her tight uniform by flashing a coy smile. Playing the flirt had worked pretty well for her mother on Coruscant, so Jaina saw no reason it shouldn’t work for her here. She raised her brows. “I hear he’s worth looking at.”
Dex shook his head in annoyance. “I don’t think I can help you with that, Captain.”
The two guards marched off without awaiting a proper dismissal, leaving Jaina to stand there wondering what her sixty-year-old mother had that she didn’t.
“That was smooth,” CeeCee observed. “You should probably just stick to the Force tricks.”
“I got rid of them, didn’t I?” Jaina started forward again, dragging her prisoner across the tunnel toward the infirmary checkpoint in case the guards looked back. “And how do you know that wasn’t a Force trick?”
“If it was, it needs work,” CeeCee answered.
“Careful,” Jaina warned. “It’s not too late to kill you.”
CeeCee laughed at the threat, then asked, “Is that really what this is about? Isolder?”
“Of course.” Jaina stopped at the entrance to the short corridor leading to the infirmary checkpoint and pretended to be checking CeeCee’s wrist restraints. “You think Jedi go around breaking into prisons for fun?”
“No, I thought you were here for the Mandalorian,” CeeCee said. “I heard she was working with a Jedi when Caedus captured her.”
“Her?” Jaina asked. “Was this on Nickel One?” When CeeCee hesitated, Jaina added, “There are a lot of ways a Jedi can hurt you—most of them so bad that you can’t even scream.”
“Okay—you’re right. She came from Nickel One. She’s supposed to be related to Boba Fett.” CeeCee pointed her chin toward the checkpoint, where a suspicious-looking guard sat inside his control booth, studying them through a transparisteel viewing panel. “In there. I hear Caedus is handling her interrogations personally.”
Jaina was suddenly filled with so much guilt and anger that she felt as though she would burst. Mirta had survived. And Jaina had abandoned her—just as Fett had implied when he visited Jaina in the hospital. It didn’t matter that it had seemed inconceivable that Mirta was alive, or that Jaina had been so wounded and dazed herself she could not think straight, or that any retrieval attempt would almost certainly have cost Jaina her own life.
Jaina had left a wounded comrade behind. To a Mandalorian commando, that was all that would matter—and to Fett, all that would matter was that it had been Mirta.
“Kriffing Mandalorians!” Jaina slammed her palm against the tunnel wall, drawing a disapproving glower from the guard inside the checkpoint control booth. “I don’t have time for this!”
“Uh, sorry I brought it up, then,” CeeCee said, sounding genuinely frightened. “But if you’re going after Isolder, my thumbprint won’t help you. He’s in Block C—maximum security—so you’re going to have to fight your way in. Maybe you could dump me in my cell first.”
“Maybe I could,” Jaina said. She shoved CeeCee down the corridor toward the infirmary checkpoint. “If you’re not lying about the Mandalorian.”
The smart thing would have been to forget that CeeCee had ever mentioned a Mandalorian prisoner. That was what Fett would have done in her place, maybe even Mirta herself. But Jaina was a Jedi, not an assassin. She couldn’t just turn her back on an ally—even a quasially.
Kriffing Mandalorians. They were like Hutts—once they got their claws into you, they never let go.
At the checkpoint, Jaina spun her prisoner around backward and stepped over to the security pad, reaching for the thumb scanner with the same hand that held CeeCee’s arm. With the Force and a little sleight of hand, she prevented the guard from seeing whose thumb it was that actually touched the pad, and his suspicions seemed to subside as the scanning booth slid open.
Once they were inside, he activated an intercom and asked, “Authorization?”
“Don’t have one,” Jaina said. “I just need to get her checked for ejection injuries before we interrogate her.”
The guard nodded and initiated the scan—wincing only slightly as the boom of another, smaller hull-hit rang through the ship. None of the items in Jaina’s equipment belt seemed to trouble him, but he frowned and pointed at the thigh pocket where she had stowed her lightsaber.
“What’s that?”
“High-power glow rod.” Jaina pulled the lightsaber from its pocket and stuck the emitter nozzle against the transparisteel in front of his eyes. “Want me to show you?”
“No.” Not wanting to be blinded by the powerful light, the guard quickly looked away and reached for a button on his panel. “Please proceed, Captain. You know where the exam rooms are.”
The far door slid open, and Jaina led CeeCee into the prison’s infirmary wing. Like the other side of the Primary Access Tunnel, it was a cavernous durasteel vault wit
h five stories of catwalks ascending into the murky heights above. But each level seemed to have its own purpose.
The lowest level, about three meters below the balcony where Jaina and CeeCee had emerged, seemed to be a combination morgue and waste disposal area. A single black, four-armed droid with a skeletal frame and green-glowing photoreceptors was working in the pit, pulling medical waste off a conveyer belt and feeding it into a white-mouthed fusion incinerator. On the wall across from the incinerator was a line of a dozen meter-square body drawers, all closed and presumably full, as there were a pair of corpses resting on gurneys along the wall.
The main level was lined with examination rooms, while the next story up had too many attendants pushing hovergurneys along the catwalk to be anything but diagnostics or surgery. Jaina led her prisoner over to a lift tube and found two possibilities on the control panel: PATIENT CELLS on level four, and AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY on level five.
Jaina was still pondering her choices when CeeCee said, “Patient cells. They don’t allow regular medical staff on the interrogation level, and your friend needs attention. She won’t be hard to find.”
Detecting no hint of deception in CeeCee’s Force aura, Jaina pressed PATIENT CELLS, and they ascended to level four. The catwalk was modestly busy, with a handful of nurses and medical droids bustling in and out of the cells, usually alone but sometimes in the company of an escort carrying a stun stick. At the far end of the catwalk, a pair of GAG guards stood in front of a closed door holding blaster rifles.
Guessing they would be guarding Mirta’s cell, Jaina started forward, pushing her prisoner ahead of her. They passed several open cells where nurses or droids were stooping over the lowered access panel of a blocky gray containment bed, tending to their patients. A couple of times, they passed guard-escorts leaning against doorways, swinging their stun sticks and looking bored.
No one gave Jaina a second look as she passed with her prisoner—in part because it had been nearly five minutes since a hull-hit had boomed through the ship. Either the battle was turning in Caedus’s favor, or the Anakin Solo had become so battered that it wasn’t even worth firing at anymore. Jaina wasn’t betting on the latter possibility.
By the time they were three-quarters of the way down the catwalk, she felt certain no one was paying any attention to them. She stretched her Force awareness out toward the cell and found an angry, disheartened presence lying inside.
Though Jaina could not actually sense the bed that Mirta was lying on, she knew it had to be there. She visualized a blocky gray containment bed similar to the one she had seen in other cells, then grasped it in the Force and jerked hard.
A muffled cry of surprise sounded through Mirta’s door, and the puzzled guards looked from the door to each other. Jaina grasped the bed in the Force again, this time lifting the bottom end off the floor and letting it drop. A sharp bang came through the door, followed by another cry of surprise.
The closer guard pressed his thumb to the security pad then stepped into the cell while the door was still sliding open. The other one frowned at Jaina and CeeCee, who were within a few meters of the cell door and still approaching.
He stepped forward, moving to block their approach. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but—”
Jaina Force-hurled him through the door and shoved CeeCee into the cell after him, then followed and slapped the interior door control. The startled guards were just picking themselves up, spinning around to bring up their blaster rifles. Jaina flicked her fingers, and the nearer guard’s weapon flew from his hands and smashed butt-first into the farther one’s temple. She followed up that attack with a snap-kick to the closest guard’s jaw, and both men collapsed in unconscious heaps.
CeeCee had slipped behind her and was moving toward the door. Jaina swung her arm back, pointing at the woman, and warned, “Don’t.”
She turned to find CeeCee standing a meter behind her, one arm half stretched toward a control panel on the wall. There were pads labeled INTERCOM, LIGHTS, PATIENT EMERGENCY, and ALARM.
Even before Jaina stepped toward her, CeeCee lowered her arm and said, “This is going to leave a bruise, isn’t it?”
“Probably.”
Jaina smashed a hammerfist into the hinge of CeeCee’s jaw, then caught her when her eyes rolled back and her knees buckled.
“The noble jetiise,” a muffled voice said behind her. “Gracious even in victory.”
Jaina laid CeeCee on the floor next to cell’s empty second bed, then turned to see Mirta Gev watching her through the transparisteel access panel on the first. She hardly looked like the same woman Jaina had met on Mandalore. Her eyes were sunken and rimmed in purple, her skin was ashen, and her curly brown hair lay straight, flat, and dirty on her head.
“Hello, Mirta,” Jaina said. As she spoke, she collected the weapons and comlinks from the two guards she had knocked unconscious. “It’s good to see you. I’m glad you’re alive.”
Mirta snorted and looked away. “If you want to call it that.”
Jaina scowled at the bitterness in Mirta’s voice. Still holding the weapons and comlinks she had taken off the guards, she stepped over to the bed and kneed the access control. As the panel slid down, she saw that Mirta lay beneath a thin blanket, her legs extended straight out and her right arm resting motionless at her side. Her left arm was slightly bent, and Jaina could see the outline of a heavy restraining cuff around her wrist.
Jaina laid the weapons and comlinks on the foot of Mirta’s bed, at the same time saying, “Look, I’m sorry about what happened on Nickel One.” She pulled the blanket back and unbuckled the restraining cuff. “But I thought you were dead.”
“It might have been nice if you’d checked,” Mirta said. “You could’ve put a bolt through my head and spared me this.”
Mirta raised her hand and gestured at her motionless body, and then Jaina understood why only one hand had been restrained. Her heart sank.
“Ah … Mirta. I’m so sorry.” Jaina shook her head. She was so sad she could barely bring herself to meet Mirta’s gaze, and so frustrated she wanted to blast someone. “I can’t get you out of here.”
Mirta nodded. “I know who you came for,” she said. “The only thing I can’t figure out is what you’re doing in here.”
“I might have gotten played.” Jaina hooked a thumb at CeeCee, wondering whether the GAG captain had known all along that Mirta could not be rescued and had just been trying to eat up time Jaina did not have. She pulled the rest of the restraints from the storage bin under Mirta’s bed and began to buckle the unconscious guards to the empty bed. “If I make it, I’ll try to come back for you.”
“If you make it, I’ll be so happy I won’t care,” Mirta said, her head turned so she could watch Jaina work. “But there is something you should know. It may help you with Caedus.”
“Thanks,” Jaina said. She pulled CeeCee over next to the guards and used the restraints from the empty bed to secure her in place with them. “I’ll take all the help I can.”
Mirta did not continue, and Jaina looked to find the Mandalorian studying her.
“You have to do some things for me,” Mirta said. “If you survive, I mean. You have to promise.”
“Maybe,” Jaina said cautiously. She knew better than to make a blind agreement with a Mandalorian. “What do you have in mind?”
“You have to warn Ba’buir,” Mirta said, using the Mando’a word for her grandfather. “The Moffs took some of my blood—they’ve designed a nanokiller for him.”
Jaina nodded. “I can do that.”
Mirta’s eyes grew as dead and cold as Fett’s. “And you have to …” Her voice grew strained and cracked, and Jaina could tell that she was fighting some sort of internal battle. “You have to tell him he deserves it. That he did this … to me.”
Jaina frowned. “Okay, I can do that, too, Mirta,” she said. “But you’re not sounding like yourself. Are you sure you want me to do that?”
Mirta shook her head. “N
o—but I can’t help … I just have this anger … because your brother is right about one thing, at least. He did this to me!”
“Caedus did this to you?” Jaina asked. She did not understand what her brother had done to Mirta, but she could tell that it was ugly. “Or Fett?”
“Ba’buir.” Mirta looked away, and it grew obvious there was no use reasoning with her. “It … He sent us on a death mission. Promise!”
“Okay, if I make it,” Jaina said. Fett would want to know the truth, anyway, and she could always soften it by telling him of her suspicions. “I promise.”
“Good.” When Mirta looked back toward Jaina, a certain sad peace had returned to her face, but she did not look grateful. Far from it. She raised the one arm she could move, pointing it at one of the blaster rifles Jaina had laid on the foot of her bed. “And the last thing. It’s easy.”
Jaina looked at the blaster rifle and knew she could not make the deal. “No, Mirta, I’m not going to do that,” she said. “Even if I don’t make it, I don’t think your grandfather really believes—”
“Jaina, it’s not for that.” Mirta pointed at the three prisoners Jaina had tied to the bed. “When they wake up, I’m going to need a way to keep them quiet for you.”
Jaina breathed a sigh of relief, then placed the blaster rifles and comlinks on the bed where Mirta could reach them. “Good point. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Mirta said. “Now, the thing you need to know about your brother … he underestimates you.”
“That’s not really news, Mirta,” Jaina said. “Maybe not even true. He’s magnitudes stronger than me in the Force. All I’ve got on him is five weeks of Mandalorian commando training.”
“And that’s enough to get the job done.” Mirta’s tone was reprimanding, like a parent scolding a child for wanting a third bowl of frezgel. “But I mean, his weakness is more delusional. He’s convinced you couldn’t have taken his arm—at least not alone. He thinks Luke was with us.”