And whipped the edge of her hand hard into the side of the first gunner’s neck.
The man’s head snapped sideways and he toppled to the floor without a sound. The second gunner had just enough time to gurgle something unintelligible before Mara sent him to join his friend.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” she snapped, feeling along the line where the door fitted into the car’s cylindrical wall. “Locked solid. Come on, Skywalker, get busy here.”
Luke ignited his lightsaber. “How much time have we got?” he asked as he carved a narrow exit through part of the door.
“Not much,” Mara said grimly. “Turbolift cars have sensors that keep track of the number of people inside. It’ll give us maybe another minute to do our ID checks before reporting us to the system computer. I need to get to a terminal before the flag transfers from there to the main computer and brings the stormtroopers down on top of us.”
Luke finished the cut and closed down the lightsaber as Mara and Karrde lifted the section down and out of the way. Beyond was the tunnel wall, not quite in line with the hole. “Good,” Mara said, easing through the gap. “We were starting to rotate when the system froze down. There’s room here to get into the tunnel.”
The others followed. The turbolift tunnel was roughly rectangular in cross-section, with gleaming guide rails along the walls, ceiling, and floor. Luke could feel the tingle of electric fields as he passed close beside the rails, and he made a mental note not to touch them. “Where are we going?” he whispered down the tunnel toward Mara.
“Right here,” she whispered back, stopping at a red-rimmed plate set in the wall between the guide rails. “Access tunnel—should lead back to a service droid storage room and a computer terminal.”
The lightsaber made quick work of the access panel’s safety interlock. Mara darted through the opening, blaster in hand, and disappeared down the dark tunnel beyond. Luke and Karrde followed past a double row of deactivated maintenance droids, each with a bewildering array of tools fanned out from their limbs as if for inspection. Beyond the droids the tunnel widened into a small room where, as predicted, a terminal sat nestled amid the tubes and cables. Mara was already hunched over it; but as Luke stepped into the room he caught the sudden shock in her sense. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“They’ve shut down the main computer,” she said, a stunned expression on her face. “Not just bypassed or put it on standby. Shut it down.”
“The Grand Admiral must have figured out you can get into it,” Karrde said, coming up behind Luke. “We’d better get moving. Do you have any idea where we are?”
“I think we’re somewhere above the aft hangar bays,” Mara said. “Those service techs got off just forward of the central crew section, and we hadn’t gone very far down yet.”
“Above the hangar bays,” Karrde repeated thoughtfully. “Near the vehicle deep storage area, in other words?”
Mara frowned at him. “Are you suggesting we grab a ship from up there?”
“Why not?” Karrde countered. “They’ll probably be expecting us to go directly to one of the hangar bays. They might not be watching for us to come in via vehicle lift from deep storage.”
“And if they are, it’ll leave us trapped like clipped mynocks when the stormtroopers come to get us,” Mara retorted. “Trying to shoot our way out of deep storage—”
“Hold it,” Luke cut her off, Jedi combat senses tingling a warning. “Someone’s coming.”
Mara muttered a curse and dropped down behind the computer terminal, blaster trained on the door. Karrde, still weaponless, faded back into the partial cover of the service tunnel and the maintenance droids lined up there. Luke flattened himself against the wall beside the door, lightsaber held ready but not ignited. He let the Force flow through him as he poised for action, listening to the dark, purposeful senses of the troopers coming up to the door and recognizing to his regret that no subtle mind touches would accomplish anything here. Gripping his lightsaber tightly, he waited …
Abruptly, with only a flicker of warning, the door slid open and two stormtroopers were in the room, blaster rifles at the ready. Luke raised his lightsaber, thumb on the activation switch—
And from the tunnel where Karrde had disappeared a floodlight suddenly winked on, accompanied by the sound of metal grinding against metal.
The stormtroopers took a long step into the room, angling to opposite sides of the door, their blaster rifles swinging reflexively toward the light and sound as two black-clad naval troopers crowded into the room behind them. The stormtroopers spotted Mara crouching beside the terminal, and the blaster rifles changed direction to track back toward her.
Mara was faster. Her blaster spat four times, two shots per stormtrooper, and both Imperials dropped to the floor, one with blaster still firing uselessly in death reflex. The naval troopers behind them dived for cover, firing wildly toward their attacker.
A single sweep of the lightsaber caught them both.
Luke closed down the weapon and ducked his head out the doorway for a quick look around. “All clear,” he told Mara, coming back in.
“For now, anyway,” she countered, holstering her blaster and picking up two of the blaster rifles. “Come on.”
Karrde was waiting for them at the access panel they’d come in by. “Doesn’t sound like the turbolifts have been reactivated yet,” he said. “It should be safe to move through the tunnels a while longer. Any trouble with the search party?”
“No,” Mara said, handing him one of the blaster rifles. “Effective diversion, by the way.”
“Thank you,” Karrde said. “Maintenance droids are such useful things to have around. Deep storage?”
“Deep storage,” Mara agreed heavily. “You just better be right about this.”
“My apologies in advance if I’m not. Let’s go.”
Slowly, by comlink and intercom, the reports began to come in. They weren’t encouraging.
“No sign of them anywhere in the detention level area,” a stormtrooper commander reported to Pellaeon with the distracted air of someone trying to hold one conversation while listening to another. “One of the waste chute gratings in detention has been found cut open—that must be how they got Karrde out.”
“Never mind how they got him out,” Pellaeon growled. “The recriminations can wait until later. The important thing right now is to find them.”
“The security teams are searching the area of that turbolift alert,” the other said, his tone implying that anything a stormtrooper commander said must by definition be important. “So far there’s been no contact.”
Thrawn turned from the two communications officers who had been relaying messages for him to and from the hangar bays. “How was the waste chute grating cut open?” he asked.
“I have no information on that,” the commander said.
“Get it,” Thrawn said, his tone icy. “Also inform your search parties that two maintenance techs have reported seeing a man in a TIE fighter flight suit in the vicinity of that waste collector. Warn your guards in the aft hangar bays, as well.”
“Yes, sir,” the commander said.
Pellaeon looked at Thrawn. “I don’t see how it matters right now how they got Karrde out, sir,” he said. “Wouldn’t our resources be better spent in finding them?”
“Are you suggesting that we send all our soldiers and stormtroopers converging on the hangar bays?” Thrawn asked mildly. “That we thereby assume our quarry won’t seek to cause damage elsewhere before attempting their escape?”
“No, sir,” Pellaeon said, feeling his face warming. “I realize we need to protect the entire ship. It just seems to me to be a low-priority line of inquiry.”
“Indulge me, Captain,” Thrawn said quietly. “It’s only a hunch, but—”
“Admiral,” the stormtrooper commander interrupted. “Report from search team 207, on deck 98 nexus 326-KK.” Pellaeon’s fingers automatically started for his keyboard; came up short as he remembered that there was no computer mapping available to pinpoint the location for him. “They’ve found team 102, all dead,” the commander continued. “Two were killed by blaster fire; the other two …” He hesitated. “There seems to be some confusion about the other two.”
“No confusion, Commander,” Thrawn put in, his voice suddenly deadly. “Instruct them to look for near-microscopic cuts across the bodies with partial cauterization.”
Pellaeon stared at him. There was a cold fire in the Grand Admiral’s eyes that hadn’t been there before. “Partial cauterization?” he repeated stupidly.
“And then inform them,” Thrawn continued, “that one of the intruders is the Jedi Luke Skywalker.”