Setting her teeth together, splitting her attention between the approach scope, the airspeed indicator, and the throttle, she brought the ship in.
She nearly didn’t make it. The Skipray was still ten meters short of the ledge when its drive trail hit the cliff face below it with enough heat to ignite the rock, and an instant later the ship was sheathed in brilliantly colored fire. Mara held her course, trying to ignore the warbling of the hull warning sirens as she strained to see through the flames between her and her target. There was no time to waste with second thoughts—if she hesitated even a few seconds, the drive could easily burn away too much of the ledge for her to safely put down. Five meters away now, and the temperature inside the cabin was beginning to rise. Then three, then one—
There was a horrible screech of metal on rock as the Skipray’s ventral fin scraped against the edge of the ledge. Mara cut the drive and braced herself, and with a stomach-churning drop, the ship dropped a meter to land tail-first on the ledge. For a second it almost seemed it would remain balanced there. Then, with ponderous grace, it toppled slowly forward and slammed down hard onto its landing skids.
Wiping the sweat out of her eyes, Mara keyed for a status readout. The airstilting maneuver had been taught to her as an absolute last-ditch alternative to crashing. Now, she knew why.
But she’d been lucky. The landing skids and ventral fin were a mess, but the engines, hyperdrive, life-support, and hull integrity were still all right. Shutting the systems back to standby, she hoisted the ysalamir frame up onto her shoulders and headed aft.
The main portside hatchway was unusable, opening as it did out over empty space. There was, however, a secondary hatch set behind the dorsal laser cannon turret. Getting up the access ladder and through it with the ysalamir on her back was something of a trick, but after a couple of false starts she made it. The metal of the upper hull was uncomfortably hot to her touch as she climbed out onto it, but the cold winds coming off the lake below were a welcome relief after the superheated air inside. She propped the hatchway open to help cool the ship and looked upward.
And to her chagrin discovered that she’d miscalculated. Instead of being ten to fifteen meters beneath the top of the crater, as she’d estimated, she was in fact nearly fifty meters down. The vast scale of the crater, combined with the mad rush of the landing itself, had skewed her perception.
“Nothing like a little exercise after a long trip,” she muttered to herself, pulling the glow rod from her beltpack and playing it across her line of ascent. The climb wasn’t going to be fun, especially with the top-heavy weight of the ysalamir frame, but it looked possible. Attaching the glow rod to the shoulder of her jumpsuit, she picked out her first set of handholds and started up.
She’d made maybe two meters when, without warning, the rock in front of her suddenly blazed with light.
The shock of it sent her sliding back down the cliff face to a bumpy landing atop the Skipray; but she landed in a crouch with her blaster ready in her hand. Squinting against the twin lights glaring down on her, she snapped off a quick shot that took out the leftmost of them. The other promptly shut off; and then, even as she tried to blink away the purple blobs obscuring her vision, she heard a faint but unmistakable sound.
The warbling of an R2 droid.
“Hey!” she called softly. “You—droid. Are you Skywalker’s astromech unit? If you are, you know who I am. We met on Myrkr—remember?”
The droid remembered, all right. But from the indignant tone of the reply, it wasn’t a memory the R2 was especially fond of. “Yes, well, skip all that,” she told it tartly. “Your master’s in trouble. I came to warn him.”
Another electronic warble, this one fairly dripping with sarcasm. “It’s true,” Mara insisted. Her dazzled vision was starting to recover now, and she could make out the dark shape of the X-wing hovering on its repulsorlifts about five meters away, its two starboard laser cannons pointed directly at her face. “I need to talk to him right away,” Mara went on. “Before that Jedi Master up there figures out I’m still alive and tries to rectify the situation.”
She’d expected more sarcasm, or even out-and-out approval for such a goal. But the droid didn’t say anything. Perhaps it had witnessed the brief battle between the Skipray and C’baoth’s flying boulders. “Yes, that was him trying to kill me,” she confirmed. “Nice and quiet, so that your master wouldn’t notice anything and ask awkward questions.”
The droid beeped what sounded like a question of its own. “I came here because I need Skywalker’s help,” Mara said, taking a guess as to the content. “Karrde’s been captured by the Imperials, and I can’t get him out by myself. Karrde, in case you’ve forgotten, was the one who helped your friends set up an ambush against those stormtroopers that got both of you off Myrkr. You owe him.”
The droid snorted. “All right, then,” Mara snapped. “Don’t do it for Karrde, and don’t do it for me. Take me up there because otherwise your precious master won’t know until it’s too late that his new teacher, C’baoth, is working for the Empire.”
The droid thought it over. Then, slowly, the X-wing rotated to point its lasers away from her and sidled over to the damaged Skipray. Mara holstered her blaster and got ready, wondering how she was going to squeeze into the cockpit with the ysalamir framework strapped to her shoulders.
She needn’t have worried. Instead of maneuvering to give her access to the cockpit, the droid instead presented her with one of the landing skids.
“You must be joking,” Mara protested, eyeing the skid hovering at waist height in front of her and thinking about the long drop to the lake below. But it was clear that the droid was serious; and after a moment, she reluctantly climbed aboard. “Okay,” she said when she was as secure as she could arrange. “Let’s go. And watch out for flying rocks.”
The X-wing eased away and began moving upward. Mara braced herself, waiting for C’baoth to pick up the attack where he’d left off. But they reached the top without incident; and as the droid settled the X-wing safely to the ground, Mara saw the shadowy figure of a cloaked man standing silently beside the fence surrounding the house.
“You must be C’baoth,” Mara said to him as she slid off the landing skid and got a grip on her blaster. “You always greet your visitors this way?”
For a moment the figure didn’t speak. Mara took a step toward him, feeling an eerie sense of déjà vu as she tried to peer into the hood at the face not quite visible there. The Emperor had looked much the same way that night when he’d first chosen her from her home … “I have no visitors except lackeys from Grand Admiral Thrawn,” the figure said at last. “All others are, by definition, intruders.”
“What makes you think I’m not with the Empire?” Mara countered. “In case it escaped your notice, I was following the Imperial beacon on that island down there when you knocked me out of the sky.”
In the dim starlight she had the impression that C’baoth was smiling inside the hood. “And what precisely does that prove?” he asked. “Merely that others can play with the Grand Admiral’s little toys.”
“And can others get hold of the Grand Admiral’s ysalamiri, too?” she demanded, gesturing toward the frame on her back. “Enough of this. The Grand Admiral—”
“The Grand Admiral is your enemy,” C’baoth snapped suddenly. “Don’t insult me with childish denials, Mara Jade. I saw it all in your mind as you approached. Did you really believe you could take my Jedi away from me?”
Mara swallowed, shivering from the cold night wind and the colder feeling within her. Thrawn had said that C’baoth was insane, and she could indeed hear the unstable edge of madness in his voice. But there was far more to the man than just that. There was a hard steel behind the voice, ruthless and calculating, with a sense of both supreme power and supreme confidence underlying it all.
It was like hearing the Emperor speak again.
“I need Skywalker’s help,” she said, forcing her own voice to remain calm. “All I need to do is borrow him for a little while.”
“And then you’ll return him?” C’baoth said sardonically.
Mara clenched her teeth. “I’ll have his help, C’baoth. Whether you like it or not.”
There was no doubt this time that the Jedi Master had smiled. A thin, ghostly smile. “Oh, no, Mara Jade,” he murmured. “You are mistaken. Do you truly believe that simply because you stand in the middle of an empty space in the Force that I am powerless against you?”
“There’s also this,” Mara said, pulling her blaster from its holster and aiming it at his chest.