Heir to the Empire

C H A P T E R 23

They showed up almost simultaneously on the scopes: the other of Karrde’s fighter ships pursuing him from behind, and the Imperial Star Destroyer in orbit far overhead. “I think,” Luke called back to Artoo, “that we’re in trouble.”

The droid’s reply was almost swallowed up in the roar as Luke gingerly eased the drive up as high as he dared. The strange fighter’s handling wasn’t even remotely like anything he’d ever flown before; slightly reminiscent of the snowspeeders the Alliance had used on Hoth, but with the kind of sluggish response time that implied a great deal of armor and engine mass. With time, he was pretty sure he’d be able to master it.

But time was something he was rapidly running out of.

He risked a glance at the aft-vision display. The other fighter was coming up fast, with no more than a minute or two now separating the two ships. Obviously, the pilot had far more experience with the craft than Luke had. That, or else such a fierce determination to recapture Luke that it completely overrode normal commonsense caution.

Either way, it meant Mara Jade.

The fighter dipped a little too deep, scraping its ventral tail fin against the tops of the trees and drawing a sharp squeal of protest from Artoo. “Sorry,” Luke called back, feeling a fresh surge of perspiration break out on his forehead as he again carefully eased the drive up a notch. Speaking of overriding common sense … But at the moment, sticking to the treetops was about the only option he had. The forest below, for some unknown reason, seemed to have a scattering or scrambling effect on sensor scans, both detection and navigational. Staying low forced his pursuer to stay low, too, lest she lose visual contact with him against the mottled forest backdrop, and also at least partially hid him from the orbiting Star Destroyer.

The Star Destroyer. Luke glanced at the image on his overhead scope, feeling his stomach tighten. At least he knew now who the company was Mara had mentioned. It looked like he’d gotten out just in the nick of time.

On the other hand, perhaps the move to that storage shed implied that Karrde had decided not to sell him to the Imperials after all. It might be worth asking Karrde about someday. Preferably from a great distance.

Behind him, Artoo suddenly trilled a warning. Luke jerked in his seat, eyes flickering across the scopes as he searched for the source of the trouble—

And jerked again. There, directly above his dorsal tail fin and less than a ship’s length away, was the other fighter.

“Hang on!” Luke shouted at Artoo, clenching his teeth tightly together. His one chance now was to pull a drop-kick Koiogran turn,¹ killing his forward momentum and loop-rolling into another direction. Twisting the control stick with one hand, he jammed the throttle forward with the other—

And abruptly, the cockpit canopy exploded into a slapping tangle of tree branches, and he was thrown hard against his restraints as the fighter spun and twisted and rolled out of control.

The last thing he heard before the darkness took him was Artoo’s shrill electronic scream.

The three shuttles came to a perfectly synchronized landing as, overhead, the TIE fighter escort shot by in equally perfect formation. “The Empire’s parade-ground expertise hasn’t eroded, anyway,” Aves murmured.

“Quiet,” Karrde murmured back, watching the shuttle ramps lower to the ground. The center one, almost certainly, would be Thrawn’s.

Marching with blaster rifles held ceremonially across their chests, a line of stormtroopers filed down each of the three ramps. Behind them, emerging not from the center but from the rightmost of the shuttles, came a handful of midranking officers. Following them came a short, wiry being of unknown race with dark gray skin, bulging eyes, a protruding jaw, and the look of a bodyguard. Following him came Grand Admiral Thrawn.

So much, Karrde thought, for him doing things the obvious way. It would be something to make a note of for future reference.

With his small reception committee beside him, he walked toward the approaching group of Imperials, trying to ignore the stares of the stormtroopers. “Grand Admiral Thrawn.” He nodded in greeting. “Welcome to our little corner of Myrkr. I’m Talon Karrde.”

“Pleased to meet you, Captain,” Thrawn said, inclining his head slightly. Those glowing eyes, Karrde decided, were even more impressive in person than they were on a comm display. And considerably more intimidating.

“I apologize for our somewhat less than formal greeting,” Karrde continued, waving a hand at his group. “We don’t often entertain people of your status here.”

Thrawn cocked a blue-black eyebrow. “Really. I’d have thought a man in your position would be used to dealing with the elite. Particularly high planetary officials whose cooperation, shall we say, you find you require?”

Karrde smiled easily. “We deal with the elite from time to time. But not here. This is—was, I should say,” he added, glancing significantly at the stormtroopers, “—our private operations base.”

“Of course,” Thrawn said. “Interesting drama a few minutes ago out there to the west. Tell me about it.”

With an effort, Karrde hid a grimace. He’d hoped the sensor-scrambling effect of Myrkr’s trees would have hidden the Skipray chase from Thrawn’s view. Obviously, it hadn’t. “Merely a small internal problem,” he assured the Grand Admiral. “A former and somewhat disgruntled employee broke into one of our storage sheds, stole some merchandise, and made off with one of our ships. Another of our people is in pursuit.”

“Was in pursuit, Captain,” Thrawn corrected lazily, those eyes seeming to burn into Karrde’s face. “Or didn’t you know they both went down?”

Karrde stared at him, a thin needle of ice running through him. “I didn’t know that, no,” he said. “Our sensors—the metallic content of the trees fouls them up badly.”

“We had a higher observation angle,” Thrawn said. “It looked as if the first ship hit the trees, with the pursuer getting caught in the slipstream.” He regarded Karrde thoughtfully. “I take it the pursuer was someone special?”

Karrde let his face harden a bit. “All my associates are special,” he said, pulling out his comlink. “Please excuse me a moment; I have to get a rescue team organized.”

Thrawn took a long step forward, reaching two pale blue fingers to cover the top of the comlink. “Permit me,” he said smoothly. “Troop commander?”

One of the stormtroopers stepped forward. “Sir?”

“Take a detail out to the crash site,” Thrawn ordered, his eyes still on Karrde. “Examine the wreckage, and bring back any survivors. And anything that looks like it wouldn’t normally belong in a Skipray blastboat.”

“Yes, sir.” The other gestured, and one of the columns of stormtroopers turned and retraced their steps up the ramp of the leftmost shuttle.

“I appreciate your assistance, Admiral,” Karrde said, his mouth suddenly a little dry. “But it really isn’t necessary.”

“On the contrary, Captain,” Thrawn said softly. “Your assistance with the ysalamiri has left us in your debt. How better for us to repay you?”

“How better, indeed?” Karrde murmured. The ramp lifted into place, and with the hum of repulsorlifts, the shuttle rose into the air. The cards were dealt, and there was nothing he could do now to alter them. He could only hope that Mara somehow had things under control.

With anyone else, he wouldn’t have bet on it. With Mara … there was a chance.

“And now,” Thrawn said, “I believe you were going to show me around?”

“Yes.” Karrde nodded. “If you’ll come this way, please?”

“Looks like the stormtroopers are leaving,” Han said quietly, pressing the macrobinoculars² a little harder against his forehead. “Some of them, anyway. Filing back into one of the shuttles.”

“Let me see,” Lando muttered from the other side of the tree.

Keeping his movements slow and careful, Han handed the macrobinoculars over. There was no telling what kind of equipment they had on those shuttles and TIE fighters, and he didn’t especially trust all this talk about how good the trees were at sensor shielding.

“Yes, it seems to be just the one shuttle that’s going,” Lando agreed.

Han half turned, the serrated, grasslike plants they were lying on top of digging into his shirt with the movement. “You get Imperial visitors here often?” he demanded.

“Not here,” Ghent shook his head nervously, his teeth almost chattering with tension. “They’ve been to the forest once or twice to pick up some ysalamiri, but they’ve never come to the base. At least, not while I was here.”

“Ysalamiri?” Lando frowned. “What are those?”

“Little furry snakes with legs,” Ghent said. “I don’t know what they’re good for. Look, couldn’t we get back to the ship now? Karrde told me I was supposed to keep you there, where you’d be safe.”

Han ignored him. “What do you think?” he asked Lando.

The other shrugged. “Got to have something to do with that Skipray that went burning out of here just as Karrde was herding us out.”

“There was some kind of prisoner,” Ghent offered. “Karrde and Jade had him stashed away—maybe he got out. Now, can we please get back to—”

“A prisoner?” Lando repeated, frowning back at the kid. “When did Karrde start dealing with prisoners?”

“Maybe when he started dealing with kidnappers,” Han growled before Ghent could answer.

“We don’t deal with kidnappers,” Ghent protested.

“Well, you’re dealing with one now,” Han told him, nodding toward the group of Imperials. “That little gray guy in there?—that’s one of the aliens who tried to kidnap Leia and me.”

“What?” Lando peered through the macrobinoculars again. “Are you sure?”

“It’s one of the species, anyway. We didn’t stop at the time to get names.” Han looked back at Ghent. “This prisoner—who was he?”

“I don’t know,” Ghent shook his head. “They brought him back on the Wild Karrde a few days ago and put him in the short-term barracks. I think they’d just moved him over to one of the storage sheds when we got the word that the Imperials were coming down for a visit.” “What did he look like?”

“I don’t know!” Ghent hissed, what little was left of his composure going fast. Skulking around forests and spying on armed stormtroopers was clearly not the sort of thing an expert slicer was supposed to have to put up with. “None of us was supposed to go near him or ask any questions about him.”

Lando caught Han’s eye. “Could be someone they don’t want the Imperials to get hold of. A defector, maybe, trying to get to the New Republic?”

Han felt his lip twist. “I’m more worried right now about them having moved him out of the barracks. That could mean the stormtroopers are planning to move in for a while.”

“Karrde didn’t say anything about that,” Ghent objected.

“Karrde may not know it yet,” Lando said dryly. “Trust me—I was on the short end of a stormtrooper bargain once.” He handed the macrobinoculars back to Han. “Looks like they’re going inside.”

They were, indeed. Han watched as the procession set off: Karrde and the blue-skinned Imperial officer in front, their respective entourages following, the twin columns of stormtroopers flanking the whole parade. “Any idea who that guy with the red eyes is?” he asked Ghent.

“I think he’s a Grand Admiral or something,” the other said. “Took over Imperial operations a while back. I don’t know his name.”

Han looked at Lando, found the other sending the same look right back at him. “A Grand Admiral?” Lando repeated carefully.

“Yeah. Look, they’re going—there’s nothing else to see. Can we please—?”

“Let’s get back to the Falcon,” Han muttered, stowing the macrobinoculars in their belt pouch and starting a backward elbows-and-knees crawl from their covering tree. A Grand Admiral. No wonder the New Republic had been getting the sky cut out from under them lately.

“I don’t suppose you have any records on Imperial Grand Admirals back on the Falcon,” Lando murmured, backing up alongside him.

“No,” Han told him. “But they’ve got ’em on Coruscant.”

“Great,” Lando said, the words almost lost in the hissing of the sharp-bladed grass as they elbowed their way through it. “Let’s hope we live long enough to get this tidbit back there.”

“We will,” Han assured him grimly. “We’ll stick around long enough to find out what kind of game Karrde’s playing, but then we’re gone. Even if we have to blow out of here with that camo net still hanging off the ship.”

The strangest thing about waking up this time, Luke decided dimly, was that he didn’t actually hurt anywhere.

And he should have. From what he remembered of those last few seconds—and from the view of splintered trees outside the fighter’s twisted canopy—he would have counted himself lucky even to be alive, let alone undamaged. Clearly, the restraints and crash balloons had been augmented by something more sophisticated—an emergency acceleration compensator, perhaps.

A shaky sort of gurgle came from behind him. “You okay, Artoo?” he called, levering himself out of his seat and climbing awkwardly across the canted floor. “Hang on, I’m coming.”

The droid’s information retrieval jack had been snapped off in the crash, but apart from that and a couple of minor dents, he didn’t seem to have been damaged. “We’d better get moving,” Luke told him, untangling him from his restraints. “That other ship could be back with a ground party anytime.”

With an effort, he got Artoo aft. The hatchway door popped open without serious complaint; hopping down, he looked around.

The second fighter would not be returning with any ground parties. It was right here. In worse shape, if possible, than Luke’s.

From the hatchway, Artoo whistled in squeamish-sounding awe.³ Luke glanced up at him, looked back at the ruined craft. Given the fighters’ safety equipment, it was unlikely that Mara was seriously injured. A backup flight was inevitable—she would probably be able to hold out until then.

But then again, she might not.

“Wait here, Artoo,” he told the droid. “I’m going to take a quick look.”

Even though the exterior of the fighter was in worse shape than Luke’s, the interior actually seemed to be a little better off. Crunching his way across the bits of debris in the weapons/tech area, he stepped into the cockpit doorway.

Only the top of the pilot’s head showed over the seat back, but that shimmering red-gold hair was all he needed to see to know that his earlier guess had been correct. It was indeed Mara Jade who’d been chasing him.

For a pair of heartbeats he stayed where he was, torn between the need for haste and the need to satisfy his internal sense of ethics. He and Artoo had to get out of here with all possible speed; that much was obvious. But if he turned his back on Mara now, without even pausing to check her condition …

His mind flashed back to Coruscant, to the night Ben Kenobi had said his final farewells. In other words, he’d told Threepio later up on the roof, a Jedi can’t get so caught up in matters of galactic importance that it interferes with his concern for individual people. And it would, after all, only take a minute. Stepping into the room, he looked around the seat back.

Directly into a pair of wide-open, perfectly conscious green eyes. Green eyes that stared at him over the barrel of a tiny blaster.

“I figured you’d come,” she said, her voice grimly satisfied. “Back up. Now.”

He did as ordered. “Are you hurt at all?” he asked.

“None of your business,” she retorted. She climbed out of the seat, pulling a small flat case from under the chair with her free hand as she stood up. Another glitter caught his eye: she was again wearing his lightsaber on her belt. “There’s a case in that compartment just over the exit hatch,” she told him. “Get it.”

He found the release and got the compartment open. Inside was an unfamiliarly labeled metal case with the very familiar look of a survival kit to it. “I hope we’re not going to have to walk the whole way back,” he commented, pulling the bag out and dropping out the hatchway.

“I won’t,” she countered. She seemed to hesitate, just a little, before following him down to the ground. “Whether you make the trip back at all is another question.”

He locked gazes with her. “Finishing what you started with this?” he asked, nodding at his wrecked ship.

She snorted. “Listen, buddy boy, it was you who took us down, not me. My only mistake was being stupid enough to be sitting too close to your tail when you hit the trees. Put the bag down and get that droid out of there.”

Luke did as he was told. By the time Artoo was down beside him she had the survival kit’s lid open and was fiddling one-handed with something inside. “Just stay right there,” she told him. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”

She paused, cocking her head slightly to the side as if listening. A moment later, in the distance, Luke could hear the faint sound of an approaching ship. “Sounds like our ride back is already on the way,” Mara said. “I want you and the droid—”

She stopped in midsentence, her eyes going strangely unfocused, her throat tight with concentration. Luke frowned, eyes and ears searching for the problem …

Abruptly, she slammed the survival kit lid shut and scooped it up. “Move!” she snapped, gesturing away from the wrecked fighters. With her blaster hand she picked up the flat box she’d been carrying and wedged it under her left arm. “Into the trees—both of you. I said move!”

There was something in her voice—command, or urgency, or both—that stifled argument or even question. Within a handful of seconds Luke and Artoo were under cover of the nearest trees. “Farther in,” she ordered. “Come on, move it.”

Belatedly, it occurred to Luke that this might all be some macabre joke—that all Mara really wanted was to shoot him in the back and be able to claim afterward that he’d been running away. But she was right behind him, close enough that he could hear her breathing and occasionally feel the tip of her blaster as it brushed his back. They made it perhaps ten meters farther in—Luke leaned down to help Artoo across a particularly wide root—

“Far enough,” Mara hissed in his ear. “Hide the droid and then hit dirt.”

Luke got Artoo over the root and behind a tree … and as he dropped down beside Mara, he suddenly understood.

Hanging in midair over the wrecked fighters, rotating slowly like a hovering raptor searching for prey, was an Imperial shuttle.

A small motion caught the corner of his eye, and he turned his head to look directly into the muzzle of Mara’s blaster. “Not a move,” she whispered, her breath warm on his cheek. “Not a sound.”

He nodded understanding and turned back to watch the shuttle. Mara slid her arm over his shoulders, pressed her blaster into the hinge of his jaw, and did the same.

The shuttle finished its circle and settled gingerly to the torn-up ground between the ruined fighters. Even before it was completely down, the ramp dropped and began disgorging stormtroopers.

Luke watched as they split up and headed off to search the two ships, the strangeness of the whole situation adding an unreal tinge to the scene. There, less than twenty meters away, was Mara’s golden opportunity to turn him over to the Imperials … and yet, here they both lay, hiding behind a tree root and trying not to breathe too loudly. Had she suddenly changed her mind?

Or was it simply that she didn’t want any witnesses nearby when she killed him?

In which case, Luke realized abruptly, his best chance might actually be to find some way of surrendering to the stormtroopers. Once away from this planet, with the Force as his ally again, he would at least have a fighting chance. If he could just find a way to distract Mara long enough to get rid of her blaster …

Lying pressed against his side, her arm slung across his shoulders, she must have sensed the sudden tensing of muscles. “Whatever you’re thinking about trying, don’t,” she breathed in his ear, digging her blaster a little harder into his skin. “I can easily claim you were holding me prisoner out here and that I managed to snatch the blaster away from you.”

Luke swallowed, and settled in to wait.

The wait wasn’t very long. Two groups of stormtroopers disappeared into the fighters, while the rest walked around the edge of the newly created clearing, probing with eyes and portable sensors into the forest. After a few minutes those inside the fighters emerged, and what seemed to be a short meeting was held between them at the base of the shuttle ramp. At an inaudible command the outer ring of searchers came back in to join them, and the whole crowd trooped into their ship. The ramp sealed, and the shuttle disappeared once more into the sky, leaving nothing but the hum of its repulsorlifts behind. A minute later, even that was gone.

Luke got his hands under him, started to get up. “Well—”

He broke off at another jab of the blaster. “Quiet,” Mara muttered. “They’ll have left a sensor behind, just in case someone comes back.”

Luke frowned. “How do you know?”

“Because that’s standard stormtrooper procedure in a case like this,” she growled. “Real quiet, now; we get up and grab some more distance. And keep the droid quiet, too.”

They were completely out of sight of the wrecked fighters, and probably another fifty meters past that, before she called a halt. “What now?” Luke asked.

“We sit down,” she told him.

Luke nodded and eased to the ground. “Thank you for not turning me in to the stormtroopers.”

“Save it,” she said shortly, sitting down carefully herself and laying her blaster on the ground beside her. “Don’t worry, there wasn’t anything altruistic about it. The incoming shuttles must have seen us and sent a group over to investigate. Karrde’s going to have to spin them some sort of sugar story about what happened, and I can’t just walk into their arms until I know what that story is.” She set the small flat box on her lap and opened it.

“You could call him,” Luke reminded her.

“I could also call the Imperials directly and save myself some time,” she retorted. “Unless you don’t think they’ve got the equipment to monitor anything I send. Now shut up; I’ve got work to do.”

For a few minutes she worked at the flat box in silence, fiddling with a tiny keyboard and frowning at something Luke couldn’t see from his angle. At irregular intervals she looked up, apparently to make sure he wasn’t trying anything. Luke waited; and abruptly she grunted in satisfaction. “Three days,” she said aloud, closing the box.

“Three days to what?” Luke asked.

“The edge of the forest,” she told him, gazing at him with unblinking eyes. “Civilization. Well, Hyllyard City,⁴ anyway, which is about as close as this part of the planet gets to it.”

“And how many of us will be going there?” Luke asked quietly.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” she agreed, her tone icy. “Can you give me any reason why I should bother taking you along?”

“Sure.” Luke inclined his head to the side. “Artoo.”

“Don’t be absurd.” Her eyes flicked to the droid, back at Luke. “Whatever happens, the droid stays here. In pieces.”

Luke stared at her. “In pieces?”

“What, you need it spelled out?” she retorted. “The droid knows too much. We can’t leave it here for the stormtroopers to find.”

“Knows too much about what?”

“You, of course. You, Karrde, me—this whole stupid mess.”

Artoo moaned softly. “He won’t tell them anything,” Luke insisted.

“Not after it’s in pieces, no,” Mara agreed.

With an effort, Luke forced himself to calm down. Logic, not fervor, was the only way to change her mind. “We need him,” he told her. “You told me yourself the forest was dangerous. Artoo has sensors that can spot predators before they get close enough to strike.”

“Maybe; maybe not,” she countered. “The vegetation here limits sensor ranges down to practically zero.”

“It’ll still be better than you or I could do,” Luke said. “And he’ll also be able to watch while we’re sleeping.”

She raised her eyebrows slightly. “We?”

“We,” Luke said. “I don’t think he’ll be willing to protect you unless I’m along.”

Mara shook her head. “No good,” she said, picking up her blaster. “I can get along without him. And I certainly don’t need you.”

Luke felt his throat tighten. “Are you sure you’re not letting your emotions get in the way of your judgment?” he asked.

He hadn’t thought her eyes could get any harder than they already were. He was wrong. “Let me tell you something, Skywalker,” she said in a voice almost too soft for him to hear. “I’ve wanted to kill you for a long time. I dreamed about your death every night for most of that first year. Dreamed it, plotted it—I must have run through a thousand scenarios, trying to find exactly the right way to do it. You can call it a cloud on my judgment if you want to; I’m used to it by now. It’s the closest thing I’ve got to a permanent companion.”

Luke looked back into those eyes, shaken right down to the core of his soul. “What did I do to you?” he whispered.

“You destroyed my life,” she said bitterly. “It’s only fair that I destroy yours.”

“Will killing me bring your old life back?”

“You know better than that,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “But it’s still something I have to do. For myself, and for—” She broke off.

“What about Karrde?” Luke asked.

“What about him?”

“I thought he still wanted me kept alive.”

She snorted. “We all want things we can’t have.”

But for just a second, there was something in her eyes. Something else that had flickered through the hatred …

But whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. “I almost wish I could drag it out a little more,” she said, glacially calm again as she lifted the blaster. “But I don’t have the time to spare.”

Luke stared at the muzzle of her blaster, his mind frantically searching for inspiration … “Wait a minute,” he said suddenly. “You said you needed to find out what Karrde had told the Imperials. What if I could get you a secure comm channel to him?”

The muzzle of the blaster wavered. “How?” she asked suspiciously.

Luke nodded toward her survival kit. “Does the communicator in there have enough range to reach back to the base? I mean, without satellite boosting or anything.”

She was still looking suspicious. “There’s a sonde balloon included that can take the antenna high enough to get past most of the forest damping. But it’s nondirectional, which means the Imperials and anyone else in this hemisphere will be able to listen in.”

“That’s okay,” Luke said. “I can encrypt it so that no one else will be able to get anything out of it. Or rather, Artoo can.”

Mara smiled thinly. “Wonderful. Except for one minor detail: if the encrypt is that good, how is Karrde supposed to decrypt it?”

“He won’t have to,” Luke told her. “The computer in my X-wing will do it for him.”

The thin smile vanished from Mara’s face. “You’re stalling,” she snarled. “You can’t do a counterpart encrypt between an astromech droid and a ship computer.”

“Why not? Artoo’s the only droid who’s worked with that computer in more than five years, with close to three thousand hours of flight time. He’s bound to have molded it to his own personality by now. In fact, I know he has—the ground maintenance people have to run diagnostics through him to make any sense out of them.”

“I thought standard procedure was to wipe and reload droid memories every six months to keep that from happening.”

“I like Artoo the way he is,” Luke said. “And he and the X-wing work better together this way.”

“How much better?”

Luke searched his memory. Maintenance had run that test just a few months ago. “I don’t remember the exact number. It was something like thirty percent faster than a baseline astromech/X-wing interface. Maybe thirty-five.”

Mara was staring hard at Artoo. “That’s counterpart-level speed, all right,” she agreed reluctantly. “The Imperials could still crack it, though.”

“Eventually. But it would take some specialized equipment to do it. And you said yourself we’d be out of here in three days.”

For a long minute she stared at him, her jaw tight with clenched teeth, her face a mirror of fiercely battling emotions. Bitterness, hatred, desire for survival … and something else. Something that Luke could almost believe might be a touch of loyalty. “Your ship’s sitting all alone out in the forest,” she growled at last. “How are you going to get the message back to Karrde?”

“Someone’s bound to check on the ship eventually,” he pointed out. “All we have to do is dump the message into storage and leave some kind of signal flashing that it’s there. You have people who know how to pull a dump, don’t you?”

“Any idiot knows how to pull a dump.” Mara glared at him. “Funny, isn’t it, how this scheme just happens to require that I keep both of you alive a while longer.”⁵

Luke remained silent, meeting that bitter gaze without flinching … and then, abruptly, Mara’s internal battle seemed to end. “What about the droid?” she demanded. “It’ll take forever to get it across this terrain.”

“Artoo’s made it through forests before. However …” Luke looked around, spotted a tree with two low branches just the right size. “I should be able to rig up a dragging frame to carry him on—a travois, or something like that.” He started to get up. “If you’ll give me my lightsaber for a minute I can cut a couple of those branches off.”

“Sit down,” she ordered, standing up. “I’ll do it.”

Well, it had been worth a try. “Those two,” he told her, pointing. “Be careful—lightsabers are tricky to handle.”

“Your concern for my welfare is touching,” she said, her voice dripping sarcasm. She drew the lightsaber and stepped over to the indicated tree, keeping an eye on Luke the whole time. She raised the weapon, ignited it—

And in a handful of quick, sure swipes trimmed, shortened, and cut the branches from the tree.

She closed down the weapon and returned it to her belt in a single smooth motion. “Help yourself,” she said, moving away.

“Right,” Luke said mechanically, his mind tingling with astonishment as he stumbled over to collect the branches. The way she’d done that … “You’ve used a lightsaber before.”

She gazed at him coldly. “Just so you know I can handle it. In case you should feel tempted to try and make a grab for my blaster.” She glanced upward at the darkening sky. “Come on—get busy with that travois. We’ll need to find some kind of clearing to put the sonde balloon up, and I want to get that done before nightfall.”