Before the translating droid could sound an alarm, as Jaina gently maneuvered the Rock Dragon through the narrow passageway toward open space, the silhouette of the enemy ship appeared at the mouth of the cave. Its laser cannons already glowed brightly.
“He’s found us!” Jacen cried just as the other ship opened fire.
Wrenching the controls, Jaina hoped to reverse their engines and evade the blast, but this time their enemy did not target the Rock Dragon itself. Instead, its powerful lasers pulverized the unstable roof of the crater cave.
The ceiling collapsed. Boulders split off from precarious positions, and the entire avalanche tumbled in slow motion, pounding down on the ship like sledgehammers … burying them within the empty cave.
17
Falling boulders sounded like thunder outside the Rock Dragon. All the ship’s systems went dark, plunging them into blackness.
Buried alive.
Jaina braced herself at the controls, but knew she could do nothing—not yet.
Gradually, backup systems kicked in. Em Teedee, working frantically to tap into their emergency power, restored a low glow to illuminate the cabin of the Hapan passenger cruiser.
Jaina’s head ached, but she drove away thoughts of pain as she got to her feet to make sure her friends were all right. As soon as the lights flickered back on, she swept her gaze over the others. Lowbacca, Jacen, and Tenel Ka all appeared to be stunned but uninjured.
Jaina scrambled back into her seat, suppressing a groan. “Em Teedee, is our hull integrity still intact?” She rubbed her left temple. “Any leakage?”
“Oh, Mistress Jaina! The diagnostic systems have simply gone mad,” the little droid wailed. “This is terribly distressing. Why, I—”
“Em Teedee,” she snapped, “are we leaking air or not?”
“No, Mistress Jaina—we seem to be intact.”
Jacen, who lay on the floor of the cockpit, snorted and ran his fingers through his tousled hair. “I’ll bet we wouldn’t win any prizes for best-maintained ship in the galaxy,” he said. He moaned. “Guess I should’ve buckled my crash webbing before we started to move, huh?”
“Prizes for ship maintenance are not our concern at the moment,” Tenel Ka answered, offering her hand to help him to his feet.
“Looks like we’ll have to make some of the same repairs again,” Jaina said, scanning the other cockpit systems. “And a few new ones, too. I wonder if that other ship has given us up for dead.”
“I hope so,” Jacen said. “Then he’d just leave, wouldn’t he?”
Tenel Ka shook her head. “No, I believe his strategy was to trap us, not to kill. He wants something from us … though he refuses to communicate directly.”
Rigged up at the control panels, Em Teedee let out a bleep of surprise. “Oh, alarm! Alarm! Emergency! Dear me, this is dreadful!”
“What is it, Em Teedee?” Jaina said, swivelling in the pilot’s chair to look at him. “A hull breach?”
“No, I can’t bear it! We are being violated—scanned! Someone is copying everything in our memory banks.”
“Scanned? How can anyone scan us? That would take a …”
“Indeed, it is a remote slicer, Mistress Jaina—a highly illegal piece of equipment, if my memory circuits are functioning properly. I should think he’d be ashamed!”
“I guess he hasn’t given us up for dead, then,” Jacen said.
Lights flashed on the control panels as the enemy ship linked up to their computers, skimming through their files. “If he reads our navigation history and our ship’s log entries,” Tenel Ka said, “he will know who we are.”
Scrambling with the controls, Jaina and Lowie were unable to block their enemy’s computer access probe. “Not a thing we can do about it, either,” Jaina said. Lowie growled.
“Well, we would have introduced ourselves by now, if he’d just given us the chance,” Jacen said.
Jaina pounded on the control panel in frustration. She seemed to be entirely out of options. “I don’t believe this! Remote slicers are completely illegal—not to mention expensive. Never even seen one myself. Only the most powerful high rollers can afford them.”
“Of course,” Tenel Ka said, raising her eyebrows and tossing her head to fling her reddish-gold braids behind her, “a certain powerful high roller helped to outfit this ship—and my grandmother always plans for many … contingencies.”
Jacen, Jaina, and Lowie all looked at her, comprehension dawning on their faces.
“Em Teedee,” Jaina said breathlessly, “see if the Rock Dragon has one of those remote slicers.”
“But Mistress Jaina, there is such an unusual combination of systems on board that I—”
“Just check, Em Teedee!”
“Yes, very well,” the little droid said. “Amazing! Why, I do believe I have found one. I’m quite astonished, since upstanding citizens could hardly be expected to deal in such illegal and unorthodox equipment.”
“That means we can use our own remote transmitter to pull data from our friend’s memory banks, see who he is and what he’s after,” Jaina said, feeling her heart pound with new optimism. “Turnabout. Give this guy a taste of his own medicine.”
“Shall I begin now, Mistress Jaina?” Em Teedee said hopefully. “I’m certain I can perform the appropriate slicing functions. I feel so … useful here in my position. Almost like the captain of a ship.”
“Don’t get delusions of grandeur, Em Teedee,” Jacen said, and Lowie chuffed with laughter.
“Using the Rock Dragon’s remote slicer would not be a wise idea at the moment,” Tenel Ka said. “If we did, our enemy would know we were alive—and that we had background information—just as we can see he’s probing us now.”
“Good point,” Jaina said. “Wait a while, Em Teedee. Meantime, we should go out and check over our situation, move a few rocks, see how bad it is this time.”
“Yeah,” Jacen said, “before our friend figures out what to do with the information he’s stolen from us.”
Carrying portable high-powered glow-rods, the young Jedi Knights put on their breathing masks and ventured out into the collapsed cavern to look over the battered exterior of the ship. Rock shards had pounded the Rock Dragon’s hull, smashing the already-damaged engines, the stabilizers, and some of the external communications systems.
“We’re banged up—but it could have been a lot worse,” Jacen said optimistically.
“The Force was with us,” Tenel Ka said.
Lowie groaned and gestured toward what had been the opening of the crater cave. A collapsed wall of rock completely blocked the exit. Boulders piled in a jumbled wall sealed them inside like a tomb. The Wookiee’s shoulders slumped.
Jaina patted his ginger-furred arm. “With our lightsabers and the Force, I’m sure we can clear that away … given time.”
“But how much time do you think we have?” Jacen said. Nobody hazarded a guess.
Jaina cleared the rubble from the top of the ship and climbed up onto it. Kneeling, she inspected the hull plates, brushing away dust with her fingertips. “Like Em Teedee said, no evident ruptures. The worst news, though, is that our communications array is smashed. We can’t send out a distress signal.”
“Not that we’d want to,” Jacen said.
“My friend Jacen is correct,” Tenel Ka said. “A distress signal would only lure others into the ambush. We do not know how many more pirates may be hiding in this asteroid field.”
“There’s already one too many,” Jacen said. Bending over, he hefted one of the boulders that had wedged itself between a flight fin and a starboard stabilizer, and tossed it aside. The young man grinned as he saw the rock fly farther than he had anticipated in the asteroid’s low gravity. “Hey, it’s easier than it looks!”