“He doesn’t have to be an enemy, Mara,” Skywalker said with that irritating earnestness of his. “He’s ill. Maybe he can be cured.”
Mara felt her lip twist. “You didn’t hear the way he was talking before you showed up,” she said. “He’s insane, all right; but that’s not all he is anymore. He’s a lot stronger, and a whole lot more dangerous.” She hesitated. “He sounded just like the Emperor and Vader used to.”
A muscle in Skywalker’s cheek twitched. “Vader was deep in the dark side, too,” he told her. “He was able to break that hold and come back. Maybe C’baoth can do the same.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Mara said. But she holstered her blaster. They didn’t have time to debate the issue; and as long as she needed Skywalker’s help, he had effective veto on decisions like this. “Just remember, it’s your back that’ll get the knife if you’re wrong.”
“I know.” He looked down at C’baoth once more, then back up at her. “You said Karrde was in trouble.”
“Yes,” Mara nodded, glad to change the subject. Skywalker’s mention of the Emperor and Vader had reminded her all too clearly of that recurring dream. “The Grand Admiral’s taken him. I need your help to get him out.”
She braced herself for the inevitable argument and bargaining; but to her surprise, he simply nodded and stood up. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
With one last mournful electronic wail Artoo signed off; and with the usual flicker of pseudomotion, the X-wing was gone. “Well, he’s not happy about it,” Luke said, shutting down the Skipray’s transmitter. “But I think I’ve persuaded him to go straight home.”
“You’d better be more than just thinking you’ve persuaded him,” Mara warned from the pilot’s chair, her eyes on the nav computer display. “Sneaking into an Imperial supply depot is going to be hard enough without a New Republic X-wing in tow.”
“Right,” Luke said, throwing a sideways look at her and wondering if getting into the Skipray with her had been one of the smarter things he’d done lately. Mara had put the ysalamir away in the rear of the ship, and he could feel her hatred of him simmering beneath her consciousness like a half-burned fire. It evoked unpleasant memories of the Emperor, the man who’d been Mara’s teacher, and Luke briefly wondered if this could be some sort of overly elaborate trick to lure him to his death.
But her hatred seemed to be under control, and there was no deceit in her that he could detect.
But then, he hadn’t seen C’baoth’s deceit either, until it was almost too late.
Luke shifted in his chair, his face warming with embarrassment at how easily he’d been taken in by C’baoth’s act. But it hadn’t all been an act, he reminded himself. The Jedi Master’s emotional instabilities were genuine—that much he was convinced of. And even if those instabilities didn’t extend as far as the insanity that Mara had alluded to, they certainly extended far enough for C’baoth to qualify as ill.
And if what she’d said about C’baoth working with the Empire was also true …
Luke shivered. I will teach her such power as you can’t imagine, C’baoth had said about Leia. The words had been different from those Vader had spoken to Luke on Endor, but the dark sense behind them had been identical. Whatever C’baoth had once been, there was no doubt in Luke’s mind that he was now moving along the path of the dark side.
And yet, Luke had been able to help Vader win his way back from that same path. Was it conceit to think he could do the same for C’baoth?
He shook the thought away. However C’baoth’s destiny might yet be entwined with his, such encounters were too far in the future to begin planning for them. For now, he needed to concentrate on the immediate task at hand, and to leave the future to the guidance of the Force. “How did the Grand Admiral find Karrde?” he asked Mara.
Her lips compressed momentarily, and Luke caught a flash of self-reproach. “They put a homing beacon aboard my ship,” she said. “I led them right to his hideout.”
Luke nodded, thinking back to the rescue of Leia and that harrowing escape from the first Death Star aboard the Falcon. “They pulled that same trick on us, too,” he said. “That’s how they found the Yavin base.”
“Considering what it cost them, I don’t think you’ve got any complaints coming,” Mara said sarcastically.
“I don’t imagine the Emperor was pleased,” Luke murmured.
“No, he wasn’t,” Mara said, her voice dark with memories of her own. “Vader nearly died for that blunder.” Deliberately, she looked over at Luke’s hands. “That was when he lost his right hand, in fact.”
Luke flexed the fingers of his artificial right hand, feeling a ghostly echo of the searing pain that had lanced through it as Vader’s lightsaber had sliced through skin and muscle and bone. A fragment of an old Tatooine aphorism flickered through his mind: something about the passing of evil from one generation to the next … “What’s the plan?” he asked.
Mara took a deep breath, and Luke could sense the emotional effort as she put the past aside. “Karrde’s being held aboard the Grand Admiral’s flagship, the Chimaera,” she told him. “According to their flight schedule, they’re going to be taking on supplies in the Wistril system four days from now. If we push it, we should be able to get there a few hours ahead of them. We’ll ditch the Skipray, take charge of one of the supply shuttles, and just go on up with the rest of the flight pattern.”
Luke thought it over. It sounded tricky, but not ridiculously so. “What happens after we’re aboard?”
“Standard Imperial procedure is to keep all the shuttle crews locked aboard their ships while the Chimaera’s crewers handle the unloading,” Mara said. “Or at least that was standard procedure five years ago. Means we’ll need some kind of diversion to get out of the shuttle.”
“Sounds risky,” Luke shook his head. “We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”
“You got any better ideas?”
Luke shrugged. “Not yet,” he said. “But we’ve got four days to think about it. We’ll come up with something.”
CHAPTER
22
Mara eased the repulsorlifts off; and with a faint metallic clank the cargo shuttle touched down on the main deck of the Chimaera’s aft hangar bay. “Shuttle 37 down,” Luke announced into the comm. “Awaiting further orders.”
“Shuttle 37, acknowledged,” the voice of the controller came over the speaker. “Shut down all systems and prepare for unloading.”
“Got it.”
Luke reached over to shut off the comm, but Mara stopped him. “Control, this is my first cargo run,” she said, her voice carrying just the right touch of idle curiosity. “About how long until we’ll be able to leave?”
“I suggest you make yourselves comfortable,” Control said dryly. “We unload all the shuttles before any of you leave. Figure a couple of hours, at the least.”
“Oh,” Mara said, sounding taken aback. “Well … thanks. Maybe I’ll take a nap.”
She signed off. “Good,” she said, unstrapping and standing up. “That ought to give us enough time to get to the detention center and back.”
“Let’s just hope they haven’t transferred Karrde off the ship,” Luke said, following her to the rear of the command deck and the spiral stairway leading down to the storage area below.
“They haven’t,” Mara said, heading down the stairs. “The only danger is that they might have started the full treatment already.”
Luke frowned down at her. “The full treatment?”
“Their interrogation.” Mara reached the center of the storage room and looked appraisingly around. “All right. Just about … there should do it.” She pointed to a section of the deck in front of her. “Out of the way of prying eyes, and you shouldn’t hit anything vital.”
“Right.” Luke ignited his lightsaber, and began carefully cutting a hole in the floor. He was most of the way through when there was a brilliant spark from the hole and the lights in the storage room abruptly went out. “It’s okay,” Luke told Mara as she muttered something vicious under her breath. “The lightsaber gives off enough light to see by.”
“I’m more worried that the cable might have arced to the hangar deck,” she countered. “They couldn’t help but notice that.”
Luke paused, stretching out with Jedi senses. “Nobody nearby seems to have seen anything,” he told Mara.
“We’ll hope.” She gestured to the half-finished cut. “Get on with it.”
He did so. A minute later, with the help of a magnetic winch, they had hauled the severed section of decking and hull into the storage room. A few centimeters beneath it, lit eerily by the green light from Luke’s lightsaber, was the hangar bay deck. Mara got the winch’s grapple attached to it; stretching out flat on his stomach, Luke extended the lightsaber down through the hole. There he paused, waiting until he could sense that the corridor beneath the hangar deck was clear.