Heir to the Empire

C H A P T E R 26

The mass of vines hung twisted around and between half a dozen trees, looking like the web of a giant spider gone berserk. Fingering Skywalker’s lightsaber, Mara studied the tangle, trying to figure out the fastest way to clear the path.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Skywalker fidgeting. “Just keep your shirt on,” she told him. “This’ll only take a minute.”

“You really don’t have to go for finesse, you know,” he offered. “It’s not like the lightsaber’s running low on power.”

“Yes, but we’re running low on forest,” she retorted. “You have any idea how far the hum of a lightsaber can carry in woods like this?”

“Not really.”

“Me, neither. I’d like to keep it that way.” She shifted her blaster to her left hand, ignited the lightsaber with her right, and made three quick cuts. The tangle of vines dropped to the ground as she closed the weapon down. “That wasn’t so hard, now, was it?” she said, turning to face Skywalker and hooking the lightsaber back onto her belt. She started to turn away—

The droid’s warning squeal came a fraction of a second before the sudden rustle of leaves. She whirled back, flipping her blaster into her right hand as the vornskr leaped toward Skywalker from a branch three trees away.

Even after two long days of travel, Skywalker’s reflexes were still adequate to the task. He let go of the handles of the travois and dropped to the ground just ahead of the vornskr’s trajectory. Four sets of claws and a whip tail took a concerted swipe at him as the predator shot by overhead. Mara waited until it had landed, and as it spun back around toward its intended prey, she shot it.

Cautiously, Skywalker got back to his feet and looked warily around. “I wish you’d change your mind about giving me back my lightsaber,” he commented as he bent down to pick up the travois handles again. “You must be getting tired of shooting vornskrs off me.”

“What, you afraid I’m going to miss?” she retorted, stepping over to prod the vornskr with her foot. It was dead, all right.

“You’re an excellent shot,” he conceded, dragging the travois toward the tangle of vines she’d just cleared out. “But you’ve also gone two nights without any sleep. That’s going to catch up with you eventually.”

“You just worry about yourself,” she snapped. “Come on, get moving—we need to find someplace clear enough to send up the sonde balloon.”

Skywalker headed off, the droid strapped to the travois behind him beeping softly to itself. Mara brought up the rear, watching to make sure the travois wasn’t leaving too clear a trail and scowling hard at the back of Skywalker’s head.

The really irritating part was that he was right. That pass from left to right hand a minute ago—a technique she’d done a thousand times before—she’d come within a hair of missing the catch completely. Her heart thudded constantly now, not quieting down even during rest. And there were long periods during their march where her mind simply drifted, instead of focusing on the task at hand.

Once, long ago, she’d gone six days without sleep. Now, after only two, she was already starting to fall apart.

She clenched her teeth and scowled a little harder. If he was hoping to see the collapse, he was going to be sorely disappointed. If for no other reason than professional pride, she was going to see this through.

Ahead, Skywalker stumbled slightly as he crossed a patch of rough ground. The right travois handle slipped out of his grip, nearly dumping the droid off the travois and eliciting a squeal of protest from the machine. “So who’s getting tired now?” Mara growled as he stooped to pick up the stick again. “That’s the third time in the past hour.”

“It’s just my hand,” he replied calmly. “It seems to be permanently numb this afternoon.”

“Sure,” she said. Ahead, a small patch of blue sky winked down through the tree branches. “There’s our hole,” she said, nodding to it. “Put the droid in the middle.”

Skywalker did as he was instructed, then went and sat down against one of the trees edging the tiny clearing. Mara got the small sonde balloon filled and sent it aloft on its antenna wire, running a line from the receiver into the socket where the droid’s retrieval jack had once been. “All set,” she said, glancing over at Skywalker.

Leaning back against his tree, he was sound asleep.

Mara snorted with contempt. Jedi! she threw the epithet at him as she turned back to the droid. “Come on, let’s get going,” she told it, sitting down carefully on the ground. Her twisted ankle seemed to be largely healed, but she knew better than to push it.

The droid beeped questioningly, its dome swiveling around to look briefly at Skywalker. “I said let’s get going,” she repeated harshly.

The droid beeped again, a resigned sort of sound. The communicator’s pulse indicator flashed once as the droid requested a message dump from the distant X-wing’s computer; flashed again as the dump came back.

Abruptly the droid squealed in obvious excitement. “What?” Mara demanded, snatching out her blaster and giving the area a quick scan. Nothing seemed out of place. “What, there’s finally a message?”

The droid beeped affirmatively, its dome again turning toward Skywalker. “Well, let’s have it,” Mara growled. “Come on—if there’s anything in it he needs to hear, you can play it for him later.”

Assuming—she didn’t add—there wasn’t anything in the message that suggested she needed to come out of the forest alone. If there was …

The droid bent forward slightly, and a holographic image appeared on the matted leaves.

But not an image of Karrde, as she’d expected. It was, instead, an image of a golden-skinned protocol droid. “Good day, Master Luke,” the protocol droid said in a remarkably prissy voice. “I bring greetings to you from Captain Karrde—and, of course, to you as well, Mistress Mara,” it added, almost as an afterthought. “He and Captain Solo are most pleased to hear you are both alive and well after your accident.”

Captain Solo? Mara stared at the holograph, feeling totally stunned. What in the Empire did Karrde think he was doing?—he’d actually told Solo and Calrissian about Skywalker?

“I trust you’ll be able to decrypt this message, Artoo,” the protocol prissy continued. “Captain Karrde suggested that I be used to add a bit more confusion to the counterpart encrypt. According to him, there are Imperial stormtroopers waiting in Hyllyard City for you to make your appearance.”

Mara clenched her teeth, throwing a look at her sleeping prisoner. So Thrawn hadn’t been fooled. He knew Skywalker was here, and was waiting to take them both.

With a vicious effort, she stifled the fatigue-fed panic rising in her throat. No. Thrawn didn’t know—at least, not for sure. He only suspected. If he’d known for sure, there wouldn’t have been anyone left back at the camp to send her this message.

“The story Captain Karrde told the Imperials was that a former employee stole valuable merchandise and tried to escape, with a current employee named Jade in pursuit. He suggests that, since he never specified Jade as being a woman, that perhaps you and Mistress Mara could switch roles when you leave the forest.”

“Right,” Mara muttered under her breath. If Karrde thought she was going to cheerfully hand her blaster over for Skywalker to stick in her back, he’d better try thinking again.

“At any rate,” the protocol droid continued, “he says he and Captain Solo are working out a plan to try to intercept you before the stormtroopers do. If not, they will do their best to rescue you from them. I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can say at the moment—Captain Karrde has put a one-minute real-time limit on this message, to prevent anyone from locating the transmission point. He wishes you good luck. Take good care of Master Luke, Artoo … and yourself, too.”

The image vanished and the droid’s projector winked out. Mara shut down the communicator, setting the antenna spool to begin winding the balloon back down.

“It’s a good idea,” Skywalker murmured.

She looked sharply at him. His eyes were still closed. “I thought you were faking,” she spat, not really truthfully.

“Not faking,” he corrected her sleepily. “Drifting in and out. It’s still a good idea.”

She snorted. “Forget it. We’ll try going a couple of kilometers north instead, circling out and back to Hyllyard from the plains.” She glanced at her chrono, then up through the trees. Dark clouds had moved in over the past few minutes, covering the blue sky that had been there. Not rain clouds, she decided, but they would still cut rather strongly into what was left of the available daylight. “We might as well save that for tomorrow,” she said, favoring her ankle again as she got back to her feet. “You want to get—oh, never mind,” she interrupted herself. If his breathing was anything to go by, he’d drifted off again.

Which left the task of putting camp together up to her. Terrific. “Stay put,” she growled to the droid. She turned back to where she’d dropped the survival kit—

The droid’s electronic shriek brought her spinning back around again, hand clawing for her blaster, eyes flicking around for the danger—

And then a heavy weight slammed full onto her shoulders and back, sending hot needles of pain into her skin and throwing her face-first to the ground.

Her last thought, before the darkness took her, was to wish desperately that she’d killed Skywalker when she’d had the chance.

Artoo’s warbling alert jerked Luke out of his doze. His eyes snapped open, just as a blur of muscle and claw launched itself through space onto Mara’s back.

He bounded to his feet, sleepiness abruptly gone. The vornskr was standing over Mara, its front claws planted on her shoulders, its head turned to the side as it prepared to sink its teeth into her neck. Mara herself lay unmoving, the back of her head toward Luke—dead or merely stunned, it was impossible to tell. Artoo, clearly too far away to reach her in time, was nevertheless moving in that direction as fast as his wheels could manage, his small electric arc welder extended as if for battle.

Taking a deep breath, Luke screamed.

Not an ordinary scream; but a shivering, booming, inhuman howl that seemed to fill the entire clearing and reverberate from the distant hills. It was the blood-freezing call of a krayt dragon, the same call Ben Kenobi had used to scare the sand people away from him all those years ago on Tatooine.

The vornskr wasn’t scared away. But it was clearly startled, its prey temporarily forgotten. Shifting its weight partially off Mara’s back, it turned, crouching, to stare toward the sound.

For a long moment Luke locked gazes with the creature, afraid to move lest he break the spell. If he could distract it long enough for Artoo to get there with his welder …

And then, still pinned to the ground, Mara twitched. Luke cupped his hands around his mouth and howled again. Again, the vornskr shifted its weight in response.

And with a sound that was half grunt and half combat yell, Mara twisted around onto her back beneath the predator, her hands snaking past the front claws to grip its throat.

It was the only opening Luke was going to get; and with a vornskr against an injured human, it wasn’t going to last for long. Pushing off from the tree trunk behind him, Luke charged, aiming for the vornskr’s flank.

He never got there. Even as he braced himself for the impact, the vornskr’s whip tail whistled out of nowhere to catch him solidly along shoulder and face and send him sprawling sideways to the ground.

He was on his feet again in an instant, dimly aware of the line of fire burning across cheek and forehead. The vornskr hissed as he came toward it again, slashing razor-sharp claws at him to ward him back. Artoo reached the struggle and sent a spark into the predator’s left front paw; almost casually, the vornskr swung at the welder, snapping it off and sending the pieces flying. Simultaneously, the tail whipped around, the impact lifting Artoo up on one set of wheels. It swung again and again, each time coming closer to knocking the droid over.

Luke gritted his teeth, mind searching furiously for a plan. Shadowboxing at the creature’s head like this wasn’t anything more than a delaying tactic; but the minute the distraction ceased, Mara was as good as dead. The vornskr would either slash her arms with its claws or else simply overwhelm her grip by brute force. With the loss of his welder, Artoo had no fighting capability left; and if the vornskr kept at him with that whip tail …

The tail. “Artoo!” Luke snapped. “Next time that tail hits you, try to grab it.”

Artoo beeped a shaky acknowledgment and extended his heavy grasping arm. Luke watched out of the corner of his eye, still trying to keep the vornskr’s head and front paws busy. The tail whipped around again, and with a warble of triumph, Artoo caught it.

A warble that turned quickly into a screech. Again with almost casual strength, the vornskr ripped its tail free, taking most of the grasping arm with it.

But it had been pinned out of action for a pair of heartbeats, and that was all the time Luke needed. Diving around Artoo’s bulk and under the trapped whip tail, he darted his hand to Mara’s side and snatched back his lightsaber.

The whip tail slashed toward him as he rolled back to his feet, but by the time it got there Luke was out of range around Artoo’s side again. Igniting the lightsaber, he reached the blazing blade past the flailing claws and brushed the vornskr’s nose.

The predator screamed, in anger or pain, shying back from this bizarre creature that had bit it. Luke tapped it again and again, trying to drive it away from Mara where he could safely deliver a killing blow.

Abruptly, in a single smooth motion, the vornskr leaped backward onto solid ground, then sprang straight at Luke. Also in a single smooth motion, Luke cut it in half.

“About time,” a hoarse voice croaked from beneath his feet. He looked down to see Mara push half the dead vornskr off her chest and raise herself up on one elbow. “What in blazes was that stupid game you were playing?”

“I didn’t think you’d like your hands cut off if I missed,” Luke told her, breathing hard. He took a step back as she sat up and offered her a helping hand.

She waved the hand away. Rolling slowly onto hands and knees, she pushed herself tiredly to her feet and turned back to face him.

With her blaster back in her hand.

“Just drop the lightsaber and move back,” she panted, gesturing with the weapon for emphasis.

Luke sighed, shaking his head. “I don’t believe you,” he said, shutting down the lightsaber and dropping it onto the ground. The adrenaline was receding from his system now, leaving both face and shoulder aching like fury. “Or didn’t you notice that Artoo and I just saved your life?”

“I noticed. Thanks.” Keeping her blaster trained on him, Mara stooped to retrieve the lightsaber. “I figure that’s my reward for not shooting you two days ago. Get over there and sit down.”

Luke looked over at Artoo, who was moaning softly to himself. “Do you mind if I look at Artoo first?”

Mara looked down at the droid, her lips compressed into a thin line. “Sure, go ahead.” Moving clear of both of them, she picked up the survival pack and trudged off to one of the trees at the edge of the clearing.

Artoo wasn’t in as bad a shape as Luke had feared. Both the welder and the grasping arm had broken off cleanly, leaving no trailing wires or partial components that might get caught on something else. Speaking quiet encouragement to the droid, Luke got the two compartments sealed.¹

“Well?” Mara asked, sitting with her back to a tree and gingerly applying salve to the oozing claw marks on her arms.

“He’s okay for now,” Luke told her as he went back over to his own tree and sat down. “He’s been damaged worse than this before.”

“I’m so glad to hear it,” she said sourly. She glanced at Luke, took a longer look. “He got you good, didn’t he?”

Carefully, Luke touched the welt running across his cheek and forehead. “I’ll be all right.”

She snorted. “Sure you will,” she said, her voice laced with sarcasm as she went back to treating her gashes. “I forgot—you’re a hero, too.”

For a long minute Luke watched her, trying once more to understand the complexities and contradictions of this strange woman. Even from three meters away he could see that her hand was shaking as she applied the salve: with reaction, perhaps, or muscle fatigue. Almost certainly with fear—she’d escaped a bloody death by a bare handful of centimeters, and she would have to be a fool not to recognize that.

And yet, whatever she was feeling inside, she was clearly determined not to let any of it out past that rock-hard surface she’d so carefully built up around herself. As if she was afraid to let weakness of any sort show through …

Abruptly, as if feeling his eyes on her, Mara looked up. “I said thanks already,” she growled. “What do you want, a medal?”

Luke shook his head. “I just want to know what happened to you.”

For a moment those green eyes flashed again with the old hatred. But only for a moment. The vornskr attack, coming on top of two days of laborious travel and no sleep, had taken a severe toll on her emotional strength. The anger faded from her eyes, leaving only a tired coldness behind. “You happened to me,” she told him, her voice more fatigued than embittered. “You came out of a grubby sixth-rate farm on a tenth-rate planet, and destroyed my life.”

“How?”

Contempt briefly filled her face. “You don’t have the faintest idea who I am, do you?”

Luke shook his head. “I’m sure I’d remember you if we’d met.”

“Oh, right,” she said sardonically. “The great, omniscient Jedi. See all, hear all, know all, understand all. No, we didn’t actually meet; but I was there, if you’d bothered to notice me. I was a dancer at Jabba the Hutt’s palace the day you came for Solo.”

So that was it. She’d worked for Jabba; and when he’d killed Jabba, he’d ruined her life.…

Luke frowned at her. No. Her slim figure, her agility and grace—those certainly could belong to a professional dancer. But her piloting skills, her expert marksmanship, her inexplicable working knowledge of lightsabers—those most certainly did not.

Mara was still waiting, daring him with her expression to figure it out. “You weren’t just a dancer, though,” he told her. “That was only a cover.”

Her lip twisted. “Very good. That vaunted Jedi insight, no doubt. Keep going; you’re doing so well. What was I really doing there?”

Luke hesitated. There were all sorts of possibilities for this one: bounty hunter, smuggler, quiet bodyguard for Jabba, spy from some rival criminal organization …

No. Her knowledge of lightsabers … and suddenly, all the pieces fell together with a rush. “You were waiting for me,” he said. “Vader knew I’d go there to try and rescue Han, and he sent you to capture me.”

“Vader?” She all but spat the name. “Don’t make me laugh. Vader was a fool, and skating on the edge of treason along with it. My master sent me to Jabba’s to kill you, not recruit you.”

Luke stared at her, an icy shiver running up his back. It couldn’t be … but even as he gazed into that tortured face, he knew with sudden certainty that it was. “And your master,” he said quietly, “was the Emperor.”²

“Yes,” she said, her voice a snake’s hiss. “And you destroyed him.”

Luke swallowed hard, the pounding of his own heart the only sound. He hadn’t killed the Emperor—Darth Vader had done that—but Mara didn’t seem inclined to worry over such subtleties. “You’re wrong, though,” he said. “He did try to recruit me.”

“Only because I failed,” she ground out, her throat muscles tight. “And only when Vader had you standing right there in front of him. What, you don’t think he knew Vader had offered to help you overthrow him?”

Unconsciously, Luke flexed the fingers of his numbed artificial hand. Yes, Vader had indeed suggested such an alliance during their Cloud City duel. “I don’t think it was a serious offer,” he murmured.

“The Emperor did,” Mara said flatly. “He knew. And what he knew, I knew.”

Her eyes filled with distant pain. “I was his hand, Skywalker,” she said, her voice remembering. “That’s how I was known to his inner court: as the Emperor’s Hand. I served him all over the galaxy, doing jobs the Imperial Fleet and stormtroopers couldn’t handle. That was my one great talent, you see—I could hear his call from anywhere in the Empire, and report back to him the same way. I exposed traitors for him, brought down his enemies, helped him keep the kind of control over the mindless bureaucracies that he needed. I had prestige, and power, and respect.”

Slowly, her eyes came back from the past. “And you took it all away from me. If only for that, you deserve to die.”

“What went wrong?” Luke forced himself to ask.

Her lip twisted. “Jabba wouldn’t let me go with the execution party. That was it—pure and simple. I tried begging, cajoling, bargaining—I couldn’t change his mind.”

“No,” Luke said soberly. “Jabba was highly resistant to the mind-controlling aspects of the Force.”

But if she had been on the Sail Barge …

Luke shivered, seeing in his mind’s eye that terrifying vision in the dark cave on Dagobah. The mysterious silhouetted woman standing there on the Sail Barge’s upper deck, laughing at him as she held his captured lightsaber high.

The first time, years ago, the cave had spun him an image of a possible future. This time, he knew now, it had shown him a possible past. “You would have succeeded,” he said quietly.

Mara looked sharply at him. “I’m not asking for understanding or sympathy,” she bit out. “You wanted to know. Fine; now you know.”

He let her tend her wounds in silence for a moment. “So why are you here?” he asked. “Why not with the Empire?”

“What Empire?” she countered. “It’s dying—you know that as well as I do.”

“But while it’s still there—”

She cut him off with a withering glare. “Who would I go to?” she demanded. “They didn’t know me—none of them did. Not as the Emperor’s Hand, anyway. I was a shadow, working outside the normal lines of command and protocol. There were no records kept of my activities. Those few I was formally introduced to thought of me as court-hanging froth, a minor bit of mobile decoration kept around the palace to amuse the Emperor.”

Her eyes went distant again with memory. “There was nowhere for me to go after Endor,” she said bitterly. “No contacts, no resources—I didn’t even have a real identity anymore. I was on my own.”

“And so you linked up with Karrde.”

“Eventually. First I spent four and a half years sloshing around the rotten underfringes of the galaxy, doing whatever I could.” Her eyes were steady on him, with a trace of hatred fire back in them. “I worked hard to get where I am, Skywalker. You’re not going to ruin it for me. Not this time.”

“I don’t want to ruin anything for you,” Luke told her evenly. “All I want is to get back to the New Republic.”

“And I want the old Empire back,” she retorted. “We don’t always get what we want, do we?”

Luke shook his head. “No. We don’t.”

For a moment she glared at him. Then, abruptly, she scooped up a tube of salve and tossed it at him. “Here—get that welt fixed up. And get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day.”