She shivered in the cold, glancing at the cloud-shrouded sun, low over the jagged horizon of distant buildings. The Emperor had summoned her, presumably to make preparations for his daily visit to his Jedi.
She didn't envy Luke, to be trapped here with her master, only one possible outcome. How could he hold out against that certain knowledge? What was the point?
She cursed silently, realizing that she had broken one of her own basic rules; she had called him by name.
Mara waited outside the Information Suite as the guards opened the doors. Her master didn't bother to look up, but she bowed anyway before entering.
The Emperor was staring at a bank of several two- and three-D images projected into space before him, most containing written information which, viewing from back-to-front, she was unable to read.
Finally he looked up to her through the holo's. "Why are you here when Skywalker is awake?"
There was no preamble; he seldom bothered with pleasantries.
Mara frowned. "I was told you wanted to see me immediately, master."
"I told you never to leave him alone and awake. Always remain close to his quarters."
"The guards are on duty, and there's one in the room," Mara said, careful not to let too quarrelsome a tone enter her voice.
"He's a Jedi. Guards are useful to slow him down; they certainly won't stop him from doing anything he intends."
Palpatine paused; became very still, and she knew he was calling the Force to him. He smiled broadly, teeth yellow in the shadows of the room. "Ah; I believe my Jedi is about to do something rather rash..."
The last word was drowned out by the general alert claxon, which made Mara jump in shock. The comlink on her belt sounded its own insistent tone seconds later.
Chagrined, she glanced back to her master, who seemed more amused than anything else.
--This is your mistake, child. Go and correct it.--
He spoke through the Force, since the claxon effectively drowned out any chance to hear him audibly. Cursing inwardly, Mara turned on her heel and set off for Skywalker's quarters at full-tilt.
.
By the time she reached the rooms, there were perhaps forty or so armed guards out in the corridor, their guns focused on the heavy double doors to the private dining hall, which were open. Mara pushed through them into the room, her own gun drawn.
And walked into a scene of controlled chaos.
About two dozen guards were in the room, a mixture of Palace guards with weapons drawn and Red Guards carrying force-pikes or the small, powerful handguns concealed beneath their ceremonial cloaks, all with their backs to her, pointed to the far side of the massive room, close to the fireplace. Pushing through, Mara glanced to her right and slowed to a stop before the window, the room's priceless antique table reduced to splintered firewood beneath it.
The plasteel window was hugely distended outward, its surface crazed into pieces so fine that it was completely opaque, the shattered remnants barely held in place by the monofilament wires, the heavy inset frame buckled in places, its metal fracturing as it withstood the brunt of the force--but it had held against whatever had struck it. Just.
Whatever had struck it--because it certainly wasn't just the table; heavy as it was, it wouldn't even have scratched the surface. No, the table had pretty much been between whatever had landed the blow and the window-pane itself, because the transparisteel pane was designed to withstand a three-click explosive charge detonated against it.
Mara had thought it outrageously over-specified when the Emperor had begun building this prison. Even the large transparisteel screens of front-line military starship like Star Destroyers were designed only to withstand two clicks.
Her master always said that the Jedi Order's control of the Force was weak, fading as the Darkness gained ever more power, leaving them unable to redress the balance--but this display of raw power rivaled any she had seen by the Emperor.
A thought occurred for the first time, disturbing in its consequences;
Were Skywalker's powers equal to Palpatine's?
Was he a genuine threat?
Turning away, she pushed her way quickly to the front of the assembled guards to find Skywalker standing quietly facing the wall by the hearth, his hands behind his head.
"Hey, Mara." His voice was unruffled, almost light, as if amused at the outrageous over-reaction he'd instigated.
Mara snorted; apparently they were on first-name terms now. How had he found that out?
"You want to tell your trained nerfs to back off?" he continued.
She could almost hear the murmur of anger travel round the room.
Could almost see him smiling at it.
"Okay, calm down," Mara said, speaking equally to the guards and to Skywalker.
His head turned slightly to the left, his tone suddenly very different. "Don't even try it...I'm serious."
Mara turned to see a blue-clad Palace guard aiming a specialized dart gun, little more than a gas-powered tube with a button-trigger, at Skywalker's back. The guard hesitated momentarily, then re-aimed.
With a 'crack,' the dart shot from the gun, flying through the air faster than the eye could follow--
To pause, spinning on the spot mid-air a short distance from the Jedi's shoulder. Before Mara had a chance to react, the dart yanked about and shot like a bullet back to its firer, embedding in his unprotected neck and eliciting a yelp as he was thrown back.
The tranquillizer had been tailor-made by the Emperor's geneticists to work in seconds on Skywalker, but the guard was human of course, so he'd barely pulled it from his flesh before it dropped him to the ground, unconscious.
Everyone leaned forward slightly as the already tense atmosphere raised another notch.
"I think everyone needs to calm down," Mara said firmly, aware that one way or another she had to regain control, though the first inklings of nerves were beginning to worry at the edges of her own thoughts.
Suddenly, she was no longer dealing with another prisoner--now she was dealing with a Jedi. Somehow, somewhere along the way, she'd allowed herself to dismiss and ignore that, carefully encouraged by Skywalker's casual calm, his reluctance to visibly use the Force. It was the oldest trick in the deck, to remain amenable and so lull one's enemies into a false sense of security. She was both angry and embarrassed to admit it had worked.
"I'm calm." There was a seldom-heard edge to Skywalker's voice now which made Mara's adrenaline surge. "I told him not to do it."
Holstering her gun, Mara fumbled for the small medikit box at her belt and took out an ampoule, loading the I.V. syringe. Handing it to the guard next to her, she indicated with a nod of her head that he was to inject the Jedi as she took her own gun back out and re-aimed it.
"No," Skywalker said, turning slightly to her. "You do it."
Mara frowned, wary. "Why?"
"Because I trust you." It was the most bizarre thing to say given their circumstances, but it had an inexplicable ring of truth to it which made Mara distinctly uneasy.
Lifting her chin in defiance as if he had offered a challenge, she handed her gun to a guard, took the syringe and stepped forward, aware of the fact that if he wanted to kill her, no one would be fast enough to stop him. But then, judging from the window, if he had wanted to kill her, he could have done so a long time ago.
It wasn't until she was moving forward, committed, that she realized that this may well be a very different challenge.
Setting her jaw, she stepped in close, taking his left arm and pulling it unresisting behind his back as she leaned her weight against him to hold him to the wall, her foot pressed against the inside of his so that she could trip him if he tried to turn about. She twisted his wrist outward without any resistance, pulling up the fine black linen of his sleeve and holding the needle to his artery, aware that the adrenaline of the moment was making her hands tremble, the tip of the needle shaking. "Dammit!"