“Don’t forget to bevel it,” Mara reminded him as the lightsaber bit smoothly into the hardened metal. “A gaping hole in the ceiling would be a little too obvious for even conscripts to miss.”
Luke nodded and finished the cut. Mara was ready, and even as he shut down the lightsaber she had the winch pulling the thick slab of metal up into the shuttle. She brought it perhaps a meter up and then shut down the motor. “That’s far enough,” she said. Blaster ready in her hand, she sat gingerly on the still-warm edge of the hole and dropped lightly down to the deck below. There was a second’s pause as she looked around— “All clear,” she hissed.
Luke sat down on the edge and looked over at the winch control. Reaching out with the Force, he triggered the switch and followed her down.
The deck below was farther than it had looked, but his Jedi-enhanced muscles handled the impact without trouble. Recovering his balance, he looked up just as the metal plug settled neatly back down into the hole. “Looks pretty good,” Mara murmured. “I don’t think anyone will notice.”
“Not unless they look straight up,” Luke agreed. “Which way to the detention center?”
“There,” Mara said, gesturing with her blaster to their left. “We’re not going to get there dressed like this, though. Come on.”
She led the way to the end of the passage, then down a crossway to another, wider corridor. Luke kept his senses alert, but only occasionally did he detect anyone. “Awfully quiet down here.”
“It won’t last,” Mara said. “This is a service supply area, and most of the people who’d normally be working here are a level up helping unload the shuttles. But we need to get into some uniforms or flight suits or something before we go much farther.”
Luke thought back to the first time he’d tried masquerading as an Imperial. “Okay, but let’s try to avoid stormtrooper armor,” he said. “Those helmets are hard to see through.”
“I didn’t think Jedi needed to use their eyes,” Mara countered sourly. “Watch it—here we are. That’s a section of crew quarters over there.”
Luke had already sensed the sudden jump in population level. “I don’t think we can sneak through that many people,” he warned.
“I wasn’t planning to.” Mara pointed to another corridor leading off to their right. “There should be a group of TIE pilot ready rooms down that way. Let’s see if we can find an empty one that has a couple of spare flight suits lying around.”
But if the Empire was lax enough to leave its service supply areas unguarded, it wasn’t so careless with its pilot ready rooms. There were six of them grouped around the turbolift cluster at the end of the corridor; and from the sounds of conversation faintly audible through the doors, it was clear that all six were occupied by at least two people. “What now?” Luke whispered to Mara.
“What do you think?” she retorted, dropping her blaster back in its holster and flexing her fingers. “Just tell me which room has the fewest people in it and then get out of the way. I’ll do the rest.”
“Wait a minute,” Luke said, thinking hard. He didn’t want to kill the men behind those doors in cold blood; but neither did he want to put himself into the dangerous situation he’d faced during the Imperial raid on Lando’s Nkllon mining operation a few months earlier. There, he’d successfully used the Force to confuse the attacking TIE fighters, but at the cost of skating perilously close to the edge of the dark side. It wasn’t an experience he wanted to repeat.
But if he could just gently touch the Imperials’ minds, instead of grabbing and twisting them …
“We’ll try this one,” he told Mara, nodding to a room in which he could sense only three men. “But we’re not going to charge in fighting. I think I can suppress their curiosity enough for me to walk in, take the flight suits, and leave.”
“What if you can’t?” Mara demanded. “We’ll have lost whatever surprise we would have had.”
“It’ll work,” Luke assured her. “Get ready.”
“Skywalker—”
“Besides which, I doubt that even with surprise you can take out all three without any noise,” he added. “Can you?”
She glared laser bolts, but gestured him to the door. Setting his mind firmly in line with the Force, he moved toward it. The heavy metal panel slid open at his approach, and he stepped in.
There were indeed three men lounging around the monitor table in the center of the room: two in the Imperial brown of ordinary crewers, the other in the black uniform and flaring helmet of a Fleet trooper. All three looked up as the door opened, and Luke caught their idle interest in the newcomer. Reaching out through the Force, he gently touched their minds, shunting the curiosity away. The two crewers seemed to size him up and then ignore him; the trooper continued to watch, but only as a change from watching his companions. Trying to look as casual and unconcerned as he could, Luke went over to the rack of flight suits against the wall and selected three of them. The conversation around the monitor table continued as he draped them over his arm and walked back out of the room. The door slid shut behind him—
“Well?” Mara hissed.
Luke nodded, exhaling quietly. “Go ahead and get into it,” he told her. “I want to try and hold off their curiosity for another couple of minutes. Until they’ve forgotten I was ever in there.”
Mara nodded and started pulling the flight suit on over her jumpsuit. “Handy trick, I must say.”
“It worked this time, anyway,” Luke agreed. Carefully, he eased back his touch on the Imperials’ minds, waiting tensely for the surge of emotion that would show the whole scheme was unraveling. But there was nothing except the lazy flow of idle conversation.
The trick had worked. This time, anyway.
Mara had a turbolift car standing by as he turned away from the ready room. “Come on, come on,” she beckoned impatiently. She was already in her flight suit, with the other two slung over her shoulder. “You can change on the way.”
“I hope no one comes aboard while I’m doing it,” he muttered as he slipped into the car. “Be a little hard to explain.”
“No one’s coming aboard,” she said as the turbolift door closed behind him and the car started to move. “I’ve keyed it for nonstop.” She eyed him. “You still want to do it this way?”
“I don’t think we’ve got any real choice,” he said, getting into the flight suit. It felt uncomfortably tight over his regular outfit. “Han and I tried the frontal approach once, on the Death Star. It wasn’t exactly an unqualified success.”
“Yes, but you didn’t have access to the main computer then,” Mara pointed out. “If I can fiddle the records and transfer orders, we ought to be able to get him out before anyone realizes they’ve been had.”
“But you’d still be leaving witnesses behind who knew he’d left,” Luke reminded her. “If any of them decided to check on the order verbally, the whole thing would fall apart right there. And I don’t think that suppression trick I used in the ready room will work on detention center guards—they’re bound to be too alert.”
“All right,” Mara said, turning back to the turbolift control board. “It doesn’t sound like much fun to me. But if that’s what you want, I’m game.”
The detention center was in the far aft section of the ship, a few decks beneath the command and systems control sections and directly above Engineering and the huge sublight drive thrust nozzles. The turbolift car shifted direction several times along the way, alternating between horizontal and vertical movement. It seemed to Luke to be altogether too complicated a route, and he found himself wondering even now if Mara might be pulling some kind of double-cross. But her sense didn’t indicate any such treachery; and it occurred to him that she might have deliberately tangled their path to put the Chimaera’s internal security systems off the scent.
At last the car came to a halt, and the door slid open. They stepped out into a long corridor in which a handful of crewers in maintenance coveralls could be seen going about their business. “Your access door’s that way,” Mara murmured, nodding down the corridor. “I’ll give you three minutes to get set.”
Luke nodded and set off, striving to look like he belonged there. His footsteps echoed on the metal deck, bringing back memories of that near-disastrous visit to the first Death Star.
But he’d been a wide-eyed kid then, dazzled by visions of glory and heroism and too naive to understand the deadly dangers that went with such things. Now, he was older and more seasoned, and knew exactly what it was he was walking into.
And yet was walking into it anyway. Dimly, he wondered if that made him less reckless than he’d been the last time, or more so.
He reached the door and paused beside it, pretending to study a data pad that had been in one of the flight suit’s pockets until the corridor was deserted. Then, taking one last deep breath of clear air, he opened the door and stepped inside.