by Timothy Zahn
Which suggested that the base wasn’t intended for long-term use. Whatever they were up to, they were planning to do it and get out.
Another group of B1s was coming across the courtyard toward the Larkrer, presumably the Team Four the Serennian had mentioned. Anakin eyed the droids, running a quick calculation of their closest approach to him. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be good enough. Reaching over, he gently tapped R2-D2’s side.
The droid gave a muffled grunt of acknowledgment and slid open the hidden compartment in the top of his dome. Thrawn slipped around Anakin’s other side, striding past the two of them and moving to catch up with the Serennian—
“Halt,” one of the B2s ordered.
Obediently, Anakin and R2-D2 stopped. But Thrawn kept moving. “I must speak,” he called toward the Serennian. The super battle droids snapped their blasters up, hurrying to catch up with him, passing Anakin and R2-D2.
And with everyone’s attention elsewhere, Anakin stretched out with the Force and pulled his lightsaber from R2-D2’s dome. He dropped it to just above ground level and sent it floating back behind them across the courtyard. It flew out of his shadow, glinted briefly in the light streaming down from the wall, then angled up from the ground and tucked itself alongside the bent gun arm of one of the two rearmost droids. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Serennian jerk to a halt and spin around. “Stop!” he snapped.
“My apologies,” Thrawn said, finally coming to a halt. The B2 droids did likewise, their blasters still trained on him. “I merely wished to ask a question.”
“Questions can wait,” the Serennian growled, glaring at the Chiss. He looked at the B2s and gestured their blasters back down. “Come.”
“The question is important,” Thrawn insisted, not moving.
Again, the B2s’ blasters came up. “I said otherwise,” the Serennian said.
For a moment the human and the Chiss stood facing each other, locking eyes and wills. Anakin stayed where he was, watching the battle droid patrol continue its march, keeping his lightsaber half concealed beside the droid’s arm. This was going to take exquisite timing…
“This had better be good,” the Serennian said at last.
“You’ve suggested this droid may have come from the Republic,” Thrawn said. “The thieves tried to force the freighter to their own destination. In warfare, some believe that if one cannot gain a prize, neither shall anyone else.”
For a pair of heartbeats the Serennian just stared at him. Then, abruptly, his head jerked as he turned toward R2-D2. “Droids!” he shouted, backing rapidly away. “That astromech—quick-scan for explosives!”
Anakin looked past him to the row of switches by the wall, stretched out with the Force, and opened all of them, then turned his eyes back to the droid patrol. As the floodlights winked out he caught a glimpse of his lightsaber, falling out of concealment toward the ground, and reestablished his Force grip on it. R2-D2 gave a wailing scream—
And as a chorus of startled human and droid screeches erupted across the courtyard, Anakin ignited the lightsaber and sent it whirling and slashing through the droid patrol.
In the heat of a real battle, such a maneuver would have meant quick death. Not only did he have only limited control over the weapon at this distance, but with his lightsaber that far away he was completely open to enemy fire.
But for making it look like a Jedi had suddenly appeared from concealment, he couldn’t have asked for better.
It also wasn’t a trick he could play for long. He sent one final slash through the last droid, then closed down the lightsaber and threw it toward the top of the eastern building. He hated to part with it, even for a short time, but someone could turn the lights back on at any second and the last thing he wanted was for the Serennian to see a Jedi weapon sailing toward his outstretched hand.
It was just as well he hadn’t dawdled. An instant later the floodlights came back on, one of the beams catching the lightsaber hilt for a fraction of a second before the weapon arced out of its reach into the darkness.
And in the newly restored light, he saw that the courtyard had dissolved into chaos.
Droids were everywhere: the two remaining groups of B1s trotting across the open space, their long, cylindrical heads turning rapidly back and forth as they searched for a target; four more B2s appearing from somewhere and lurching along, their arms stretched out with wrist blasters pointed stolidly in front of them. The two Serennians over in the corner were racing toward the pile of scrap metal that Anakin had just created from the droid patrol, their cloaks flapping behind them, comms held urgently to their lips as they barked out orders. A door at the courtyard’s northeast corner opened and another group of B1s streamed out.
“What was that?” Anakin gasped.
“You fool,” Thrawn bit out. “The droid was no bomb. It was a distraction. He stowed away aboard our ship!”
“Oh, esehigi!” Anakin snarled, spitting out a local curse Thrawn had taught him. “Come on—we need to get out of here.”
He took off, slapping Thrawn on the shoulder for emphasis as he passed, sprinting past the still-backpedaling Serennian toward the door.
“Wait!” the Serennian shouted.
Anakin kept going, reaching to the Force for warning. If the other was suspicious, or if the B2s were programmed to act on their own—
But no double-vision warning came of blaster bolts blazing toward his back. The Serennian had seen the lightsaber; and if he hadn’t actually seen anyone wielding it, Anakin knew that human minds and memories were very good at adding in unseen but logically obvious details.
Anakin had covered half the distance to the door when he heard footsteps coming up behind him. He half turned, assuming it was Thrawn, just as a heavy hand came down on his shoulder. “I said wait,” the Serennian snapped, forcing Anakin to slow to a fast jog. “You can’t be in there alone.”
“You don’t get it,” Anakin insisted. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Thrawn trailing behind him, running along slightly behind the lumbering B2s, with R2-D2 gamely trying to keep up. “We threw him off the ship. Now he’s coming after us.”
“Don’t be stupid,” the Serennian said scornfully. “Didn’t you hear your friend? He let you throw him off so that he could stow away.”
“What?” Anakin asked, giving the Serennian a bewildered look that gained them another five steps toward the door. If he could keep up the charade long enough for him and Thrawn to get out of view of everyone out here, they should be able to ditch the Serennian and lose themselves in whatever maze of rooms and corridors they found inside.
They were ten steps from the door, and he was starting to think this whole thing would go off without a hitch, when the door swung violently open and two more B2s strode out, stopping just inside the courtyard and completely blocking the opening.
“But you’re right—we don’t want him getting to you,” the Serennian continued, again getting a grip on Anakin’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a nice, safe spot for you.”
* * *
—
“You’ve got to be joking,” Anakin protested as he stood in the doorway of his new home. The door, a swing-up panel that was stretched out like a canopy above him, was a slab of transparisteel attached to the upper cell wall by a pair of hinges the size of his forearm. Aside from two horizontal thirty-centimeter-long slits, the door was completely solid. The cell itself, four meters square and three meters high, was made of plain white permacrete slabs.
To Anakin’s right, Thrawn had already been ushered into his own cell, and out of the corner of his eye Anakin watched as one of the B1s the Serennian had picked up along the way swung the door down into place across the opening and slid a pair of tapered dowel pins through the fasteners at either side of the bottom edge. Across the corridor, R2-D2 was standing nervously beside the Serennian, with t
he two B2s flanking them. One of the B2s held the prisoners’ comms and weapons, including the small hold-out blaster in Thrawn’s boot that the Chiss had somehow forgotten to mention. “What if he comes after us?” Anakin asked again. “You’re only guessing he wanted us to throw him off.”
“I don’t guess, thief,” the Serennian said, finally putting away his comm. He’d been on it since they all fled from the courtyard, jabbering orders to someone to drag the techs out of bed and put them to work. What the techs were supposed to do, Anakin hadn’t been able to figure out from the one-sided conversation. “He wanted to get here, and this was the simplest way to do it.” The man lifted his blaster. “For that alone I should shoot you.”
“Your boss wouldn’t be too happy if you did that,” Anakin warned. “You still need us to get your freighter back.”
“The Larkrer?” The Serennian wrinkled his nose. “It would almost be worth it not to have to listen to your voice anymore.” He drew himself up to his full height. “And for your information, I am the boss. I am Duke Solha of the Free System of Serenno.”
Anakin snorted. “Am I supposed to be impressed?”
“You will be,” Solha promised darkly. “Trust me. Now: inside.”
Glowering, Anakin backed into the cell. The B1 reached up and took hold of one of the side hasps, pulling the door closed, then lowered the two dowel pins into their eyelets. Solha turned and strode away, pulling out his comm again. The two B2s lumbered along in front and behind, followed by a clearly reluctant R2-D2, with the two B1s at the rear.
And as R2-D2 passed, and only because Anakin was watching for it, he spotted the small drops of lubricating oil begin to slowly drip from the droid’s underside. A trail that would hopefully remain unnoticed by the Separatists and allow Anakin to track down the droid wherever Solha ultimately took him.
Assuming, of course, Anakin and Thrawn could get out of here.
The footsteps continued down the short passageway and through the outer door that led into the cell block. The door closed with a thud.
And he and Thrawn were alone.
“You okay?” Anakin called softly, looking around. Like the cell door, each of the walls also had a pair of slits. His first thought was that they were for observing or feeding prisoners, but he realized now that they were more likely ventilation openings.
“I’m unharmed,” Thrawn said. “As I assume you are as well. Let us review. We’re inside the base, as desired, though perhaps not in the most preferred situation.”
“That’s okay—this was always one of the possibilities,” Anakin assured him. “I know Separatists, and their first answer to any problem is to throw it behind a locked door.”
Though he’d hoped that the locked door would be that of an office, someplace with a dataport where he and R2-D2 could sift out the base’s secrets and figure out where Padmé was.
Still, the sudden revelation that there was a Jedi on Mokivj had gotten them inside the facility and into a spot where they weren’t being watched. Good enough.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Thrawn said, perhaps a bit too drily. “Do you know this Duke Solha?”
“Not really,” Anakin said. “Padmé mentioned him once, though. He’s from the same planet as Count Dooku. He’s got some family—a brother, I think, and maybe a sister.”
“The other two humans in the courtyard?”
“Could be,” Anakin said. “Padmé said the whole family’s as ambitious as they come.”
“Is the duke currently involved with Separatist politics or military?”
“Well, he’s here,” Anakin said. “Aside from that, like I said, I don’t know anything. Other than Padmé’s one comment, I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard his name mentioned.”
“My point precisely,” Thrawn said. “Count Dooku would need someone who wouldn’t be missed to run this facility.”
“And who was ambitious enough to work for promises of future glory,” Anakin said sourly. “I wonder what Dooku offered him.”
“With the highly ambitious, there are many options,” Thrawn said. “What do you propose as our next move?”
“We run a test,” Anakin said. “Hold on a second.” Settling himself cross-legged on the thin mattress of the cell’s bunk, he closed his eyes and stretched out to the Force.
And caught his breath. There she was.
Padmé was here.
Not here in the cells, but definitely somewhere close at hand. On this part of the planet at least, maybe even near the factory.
“She’s here,” he told Thrawn, stretching out to try to pick up every nuance of her mood and emotions. She didn’t seem to be a prisoner, but there was a dark grimness to her sense. “Somewhere nearby. Possibly in some trouble—I can’t tell whether she’s worried or just in the middle of something.”
“Can you communicate with her?”
He shook his head and opened his eyes. “Sorry. It doesn’t work that way.”
“A pity. I wonder what she’s planning.”
“Whatever it is, it’ll be good,” Anakin assured him. “She’s a lot more clever than most people give her credit for.”
“A remarkable person,” Thrawn said. “An equally remarkable association you have with her.”
Anakin felt his eyes narrow. He’d taken great pains to conceal his true relationship to Padmé. “What do you mean?”
“It’s clear from the way you speak that she’s not merely an ambassador of your Republic. There’s a personal bond between you.”
“Of course there is,” Anakin said. “I’ve known Padmé since I was nine years old. We’ve been through battles and prisons—” He felt a flicker of pain as the death of Qui-Gon suddenly flashed to mind. “—and seen a lot of friends and colleagues die. Too many. Not to mention we’ve lived through a long war. Yes, we’re close companions. But that’s all.”
For a long moment, Thrawn was silent. Anakin stretched out to the Force, trying to read the other’s sense, wishing they’d been put together in the same cell so that he could at least see his expression. “I understand,” the Chiss said at last. “The first step in locating her is to escape ourselves. Have you a plan for that?”
“Yes,” Anakin said. “We start by waiting.”
There was another pause. “For what?”
“To see if Padmé heard about the ruckus we just pulled off,” Anakin said. “If she’s free and on her own, she’ll know I’m here and figure out how to get to us.”
“She’ll recognize your weapon?”
“She’ll recognize my style,” Anakin said. “And this is the first place she’ll come looking for me.”
“Is falling into enemy hands part of your style?”
“No,” Anakin growled. Thrawn had a real talent for digging under people’s skin when he wanted to. “It’s just that she’ll start with the most urgent scenario. If I’ve been captured, I’d need help right away. If I’m still free, the situation is a lot less critical.”
“And if she doesn’t come?”
“We’ll give her two hours,” Anakin told him. “If she hasn’t broken in by then, or at least set up a ruckus of her own as a diversion, it’ll mean she isn’t in a position to act. In that case we’ll get out by ourselves and figure out some other way to find her.”
“I see,” Thrawn said. “You clearly know each other very well. As I said, a remarkable relationship.”
Anakin took a deep breath, preparing to again fend off the Chiss’s inferences—
“The local ground vehicle in the courtyard,” Thrawn said. “Did you recognize it?”
“Not really,” Anakin said. “Should I?”
“It appeared to be an ore carrier of some sort,” Thrawn said. “Its surface was marked by dirt and stone damage.”
“So the place is definitely a factory or manufacturing facility and no
t a staging ground,” Anakin said with a flicker of relief. He hadn’t been looking forward to tackling a whole droid army by himself. The guard complement for a factory, on the other hand, should be much more manageable.
“The layout we’ve seen would support that,” Thrawn said. “But the ore carrier’s cargo didn’t appear to be native rock.”
“Could have been already refined.”
“Perhaps,” Thrawn said. “Yet it looked more like fibrous material, such as raw grain or plants. Could this factory be for the refinement of foodstuffs?”
“Not likely,” Anakin said. “Not with most of the Separatist army being droids. Though if there’s some exotic food they can sell for quick money, that might be worth all this trouble. The war’s bleeding the Separatists as dry as it is the Republic.”
“Perhaps,” Thrawn said, sounding doubtful. “Regardless, I believe that cargo is the key.”
“Right,” Anakin said. “Any other insights you’d like to share?”
“I believe this eastern section of the factory is the main center of interest,” Thrawn said. “There’s also activity in the northern section, though to a lesser degree. The southern section holds human workers, most likely locals, possibly slaves, while the western section appears to be unused.”
Belatedly, Anakin realized he was staring at the dividing wall between them. “Okay, you’re going to have to explain that one,” he said.
“My eyes see slightly more into the infrared than yours,” the Chiss said. “The major heat sources are in the eastern and southern sections, with some lesser amounts in the northern.”
“So machinery and personnel in those areas,” Anakin said, nodding.
“Correct,” Thrawn said. “The droids all came from the doors in the northern and southern ends of the eastern section, which again supports this area as the most prominent. I also note that the windows in the northern and eastern sections have been permanently sealed with thick slabs of ceramic, indicating the areas they most wish to defend from attack or surveillance. The windows on the western and southern sections are still open.”