by Timothy Zahn
Mara also knew that even with a completely sealed interrogation section like this one, most governors instinctively tried to keep prying eyes and ears at a distance. This implied that the kitchen and droid stations on either side of her were probably closed down and abandoned, which furthermore suggested that a quick exit from the corridor was only a couple of lightsaber cuts away.
The problem, as Marcross had pointed out, was that there was no guarantee someone wouldn’t come looking for Major Pakrie and his men, either from the courtyard or from the underground interrogation room itself. A hole in the wall would be something not even the dimmest security recruit would miss.
But fewer people bothered to look up, especially when their eyes and hands were busy with something else—something such as lining up a passkey with a door’s security slot.
The hallway was a bit above average height, but the ceiling was still easily reachable without Mara having to jump. Standing directly in front of the door, she swung her lightsaber blade in a conical pattern, cutting a beveled circle through the slab of duracrete above her. Closing down the weapon, she stretched out with the Force and lifted the plug she’d just cut, moving it away from the opening and setting it down off to the side. She leapt upward, catching the edge of the hole, and pulled herself cautiously through.
She was in the relaxation room of a nicely appointed guest suite. From the drawn shades and the faintly musty smell, it was clear the room had been unoccupied for some time.
That probably also meant that the room’s computer wasn’t active. But there would be other rooms nearby where she could tap into the palace system.
She dropped back to the corridor below and, using the Force, lifted the unconscious security men one by one up through the opening. The last of the three was a bit wobbly—for some reason, lifting bodies always seemed to take more out of her than moving the equivalent amount of inert matter. But she made it without dropping him. Then, jumping back up to join them, she lowered the duracrete plug back into place.
It was far from perfect. But the beveling would keep the slab firmly in place, and her cut was neat enough that even if someone spotted it, they might wonder if it was something that had always been there that they simply had never noticed before. By the time uncertainty and hesitation ran its course, the job should be finished.
And someone in the palace would have received Imperial justice.
In the dim light seeping around the closed curtains she discarded her hat and stripped off the blue-and-silver dress, readjusting the long, dark green tunic and leggings she had on underneath. It was a neutral but professional outfit, a style currently in vogue all across the Empire, and one she’d seen a handful of the palace’s female employees wearing as they left for home the previous evening. She tore out the collapsed courier’s shoulder pouch that had been concealed in the blue dress’s inner lining, folded it back into its proper shape, and secured her lightsaber inside.
And with that, she was ready to roam the palace hallways.
The door had been double-locked, probably when it was first closed down, which normally prevented it from being opened from either side. But Major Pakrie’s passkey had been coded even for off-limits areas and popped the lock without trouble.
A moment later Mara was moving silently down the hallway toward the murmurings of life and activity. Time to find herself a computer.
It was a quarter after ten, and Luke had just settled himself by one of the shops across the street from the governor’s palace when he saw Axlon emerge from the crowd and head toward the small pedestrian door at the side of the main gate.
An unpleasant tingle ran through him. Axlon had his fancy pass from Governor Ferrouz, and so far neither the roaming stormtroopers nor the handful of men in bright blue-and-red uniforms had seemed inclined to do more than watch the older man’s approach. But that didn’t mean that the crowd milling around the area wasn’t going to have its curiosity aroused if they saw a plainly dressed stranger just walk into the most secure place on Poln Major.
More important, how would the Imperial agent react if she, too, was wandering around here in the crowd?
Luke frowned, a second tingle shivering across his skin. For that matter, why was there a crowd outside the palace at all?
Maybe it was just the two landspeeders that had apparently crashed into each other in front of the gate. Luke hadn’t been here when that happened, but it must have been fairly recent, given that gray-uniformed men were still working on the vehicles under the watchful gaze of a dozen stormtroopers.
But the crowd didn’t seem like the usual collection of gawking onlookers that gathered at any disaster or near disaster. There was a restlessness to this crowd, a sense of anticipation that Luke could feel even without drawing on the Force. And as he stood there trying to look casual, it seemed to him that more and more people were sending lingering looks in his direction.
Something was about to happen. Maybe it was something the locals didn’t want strangers to witness.
Luke grimaced. Common sense said to get out of there, to slip away and find someplace a little less conspicuous from which to watch. But Axlon was giving the orders, and Axlon had told him to be here.
To wait for an Imperial agent to show her face.
Luke swallowed hard. It made no sense. If the agent had even a modicum of lightsaber training, she would be able to cut Luke into pieces without breaking a sweat.
Unless Axlon knew something Luke didn’t. Maybe the agent carried a lightsaber purely as a bluff, and had no more ability to actually fight with it than Luke did. Alternatively, maybe Axlon was right about the very existence of Luke’s lightsaber slowing her down and buying Axlon the time he needed for whatever it was he and Governor Ferrouz needed time for.
Unfortunately, despite what Han seemed to think, Luke wasn’t always let in on all the subtleties of the orders he was given.
But he had been given an order. And so he would wait here, until he received orders to do otherwise.
Ten twenty. Axlon reached the door and offered his pass to the guard. The guard plugged it into a datapad, then handed it back and said something on a comlink. The door opened, and Axlon went through.
There was still no sign of the mysterious Imperial agent who was supposedly here to stop him.
So where in blazes was she?
With a final jerk that jarred Han out of his fitful sleep, the speeder bus came to a halt.
He blinked as the repulsorlifts gave a final throaty growl and lowered the vehicle to the ground. They’d arrived just outside a large mined-out cavern, bigger even than the ones Dankcamp Village was built into.
Squatting in neat lines as far across the cavern as Han could see were ships. Decent-sized ones, too. They were about thirty-eight meters long, a bit bigger than the Falcon, with smooth curves and long, deep grooves running fore-to-aft along each of the sloping wings.
He nudged Leia. “Wake up, sweetheart,” he murmured. “We’re here.”
“I’m not asleep,” she murmured back, with a slightly slurred voice that told him that she had, in fact, been asleep until his nudge. “Where’s here?”
“I don’t know,” Han said grimly. “But whoever these guys are, they came loaded for Togorian. Those things out there are warships.”
Leia sat up a bit straighter. “How do you know?” she asked, peering out the window. “I’ve never seen anything like them before.”
“Add it up,” he told her. “Those grooves along the wings? That’s the passive, low-tech version of enhanced slipstream stabilizers. Those weapons struts at the wing interfaces are ribbed like original equipment, not add-ons. That tall fin poking up from the top probably holds a set of vertically racked laser cannons, and that bulb all the way at the top is a dedicated targeting sensor. You can’t see much of the sublights from this angle, but you can see enough of the nozzle flare to know they’re big and have wide separation.”
He pointed toward the nearest ship’s bow. “And the only re
ason for a crosshatch wraparound cockpit canopy is to give a pilot maximum protection while still giving him a two-seventy viewing angle. No, they’re warships, all right.”
At the front of the bus, Ranquiv got to his feet. “All persons out,” he called, his yellow insect’s eyes glittering strangely in the bus’s dim overhead light. “Your work now begins.”
There was a general shuffle as the passengers stood up and began filing down the aisle to the door. “I don’t know what’s going on,” Leia said quietly to Han. “But I can tell you we’re nowhere near a thousand kilometers away from Dankcamp Village. I’m guessing we’re no more than fifty or a hundred from Anyat-en.”
Han stared out at the ships, the back of his neck tingling unpleasantly. “How do you know?”
“I was tracking the turns for the first couple of hours,” she said. “We were doing a lot of weaving in and out, but we didn’t seem to be getting much real distance.” She nodded out the window. “I think they just don’t want us knowing where we are.”
“Yeah, well, if I had all these things stashed away down here, I wouldn’t want anyone knowing that, either,” Han agreed grimly.
“So what do we do?” Leia asked. “Try to get out of here and hope we can find our way back?”
Han leaned closer to her, trying to get a better look out the window. There were at least a dozen more of the black-haired, yellow-eyed aliens gathering in a loose circle near the front of their speeder bus, plus probably twenty other humans moving around among the warships.
Naturally, the whole bunch of them were armed.
“Han—” Leia began crossly, trying to lean away from him.
“We’re going to have to stay for a while,” Han said, pulling away from her and standing up. “Let’s try to figure out what’s going on, and look for an opening.”
“An opening to do what?”
Han grimaced. “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “I’ll figure something out.”
WITH A SIGH, MARA CLOSED DOWN THE LAST OF THE FILES AND SHUT down her borrowed computer. She’d hoped, she really had, that Ferrouz would prove innocent of the charges the Emperor had leveled against him. She’d wanted to believe that such a rising political figure had simply been duped, that the resources of the palace had been manipulated by someone else for their own advantage.
But the records were clear. Ferrouz had sent the first contact messages to the Rebel Alliance. He’d handled all the subsequent long-range negotiations as to sites and resources, discussing with Mon Mothma and General Carlist Rieekan all the quid pro quos of a full-stage political and economic agreement.
And to top it all off, the governor had personally gone to a local cantina only four days earlier to meet with the man the Alliance had sent in to finalize the plans.
She grimaced. First Choard, now Ferrouz. Was this a sign of things to come, a warning that the Emperor’s New Order was starting to crack at the seams? Or was it simply a coincidence that two ambitious governors had decided to make individual bids for power at roughly the same time?
Mara didn’t know. But one thing that was certain: treason could not be permitted to fester. It had to be dealt with, quickly and cleanly.
A governor’s office and inner sanctum were always guarded, usually by a handpicked cadre of the governor’s most competent and trusted people. But there were always ways to get through those final defenses. Some offices had drop ceilings, with enough space between the decorative and the real that a properly equipped agent could slip in that way. Nearly every governor also had a secret door and emergency exit, which could often be accessed for purposes of infiltration.
And sometimes, you could simply walk in the front door.
The computer had flagged the arrival of one Master Vestin Axlon at the gate just as Mara finished reading the last of the comm transcripts. Axlon’s pass, she’d noted, was a suspiciously vague one, offering universal access and carrying the governor’s personal authorization. Possibly he was Ferrouz’s Rebel contact. Certainly he was someone no one would question once he was inside the building.
He would do nicely.
Axlon and the two palace security men escorting him had reached the turbolift leading to Ferrouz’s fourth-floor office complex when Mara arrived. “I’ll take it from here,” she said briskly as she came up to them.
“Excuse me?” the senior guard, a lieutenant, asked.
“I said I’ll take it from here,” Mara repeated. “I’m to escort Master Axlon the rest of the way to Governor Ferrouz. Major Pakrie’s orders.”
The lieutenant made a little sniffing sound. Apparently, Pakrie’s name didn’t carry much weight among his troops. “We’ll need to see your authorization.”
“It was verbal,” Mara said, pulling out her comlink. In front of them the turbolift door slid open, and she strode toward it. “The governor’s waiting—we’ll sort it out on the way.” As she passed Axlon, she caught his arm and pulled him away from the guards and into the car with her.
It was instantly clear that neither guard was expecting anything so casually audacious, and for half a second both of them simply stood there gaping. Then they abruptly broke their paralysis and hurriedly clambered in with Mara and Axlon. “Hold on there,” the lieutenant said sternly as he grabbed Axlon’s other arm, clearly prepared to use force if necessary to get the man away from her.
For the second time in as many seconds a flash of bewilderment crossed his face as Mara simply let go of Axlon without struggle or argument. She keyed her comlink, lifting her hand for silence. “Give me a minute,” she said. “The major will straighten this out.”
The lieutenant squared his shoulders. “I have to insist—” He trailed off as Mara flashed him a hard-eyed look.
Major Pakrie, not surprisingly, hadn’t answered the call by the time the turbolift car stopped. “Where is he?” Mara ground out to the universe at large as she jammed the comlink back into her belt and increased the level of simmering fury she was working hard to radiate. The key to keeping people from asking questions, she’d long ago learned, was to make any such questioning look more dangerous than it was likely to be worth. As long as she then kept her actions below the suspicion-trigger level, the same people who’d already decided not to ask would usually decide not to get in her way, either. “Fine,” she growled as the car door opened, revealing another door ten meters away flanked by two guards and a clerk at an appointment desk. “We’ll deliver him together.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the lieutenant said, relief in his voice at having found a compromise that would permit him to carry out his orders without simultaneously annoying an unknown but clearly connected person. Beckoning to Axlon, he and his partner stepped out of the car and headed toward the guarded door. Axlon strode out after them, with Mara taking her place behind him.
But then her whole stance, expression, and demeanor suddenly changed. Instead of the arrogant Imperial official she’d played for the first set of guards, she was now the lowly personal assistant, trailing after her employer with the quiet efficiency and quieter resignation of someone who knows she will never be anything more than a servant and helper to others.
And as she stretched out to the Force, she could see that the guards flanking Ferrouz’s door had completely bought her act. Axlon, whom they would have been alerted to expect, had apparently brought an assistant whom no one had thought worth mentioning to them.
“Master Axlon to see Governor Ferrouz,” the lieutenant said briskly as they approached.
“Yes,” the receptionist said, her voice carefully neutral as she reached beneath her desk and triggered the door release. From the tension in her tone, Mara guessed that she either knew or strongly suspected who the visitor was, and didn’t much care for the company her employer was keeping. “He’s expecting you.”
The lieutenant nodded and gestured to his partner. They stopped, stepping to either side out of the way as Axlon walked between them and the door guards and through the open door. Mara, still half a step back
, went right in after him.
The lieutenant’s expression, Mara reflected, would have been interesting to see. But she didn’t give him the chance to show it to her. Glancing to the side as she cleared the door, she stretched out to the Force and hit the inside control, sliding the door shut again behind her. Another telekinetic twitch, and the door was locked.
The room she and Axlon had come into turned out to be a small waiting room equipped with couches, low tables, and a large transparisteel cylinder in the center inhabited by brilliantly colored butterflies. Five meters past the column, the door to Ferrouz’s office itself was already open. “Come in, Master Axlon,” a voice called.
Axlon continued forward. Mara stayed at his heels, still wearing her assistant’s persona.
A moment later, she got her first look at the man she’d been sent here to kill.
Holos and vids, in Mara’s experience, seldom captured the full essence of a person. Such was again the case here. On the surface, Governor Ferrouz certainly looked like his holos, with his lined but still-boyish face and thick brown hair that always seemed slightly mussed. But now, in person, Mara could see an overlay of tension to his face, a deep sadness the holos hadn’t shown. His eyes were on Axlon as he and Mara came through his door, shifting almost unwillingly to Mara. “Good to see you again,” he continued, rising slowly to his feet. “Who’s your associate?”
Axlon turned, his jaw dropping as he saw that Mara had come in with him. “What are you—this is a private meeting.”
“Go back into the waiting room, Master Axlon,” Mara ordered. “I have business with the governor.”
Axlon shot a hooded look at Ferrouz, then turned back to Mara, clamping his mouth firmly shut again. “What’s this about?”