And then, from a side corridor in that direction, came a barely audible clink, as if someone had brushed the bulkhead with something hard. Holding her lightsaber ready, she slipped toward the archway leading into the corridor, keeping to the shadows as much as she could.
There was another faint clink as she reached the archway, this one much closer. She pressed her back to the wall and lifted her lightsaber high, thumb ready on the activator.
For a second she held the pose. Then, in a sudden smooth surge of motion, she swung around, igniting her lightsaber as she rotated, and planted herself in combat stance squarely in the center of the archway—
To find herself facing an Imperial stormtrooper as he simultaneously swung out from behind a coolant pump into the same stance, his BlasTech E-11 pointed squarely back at her.
Mara's first impulse, from somewhere deep in the dark corners of her mind, was to lower her weapon and order him to lower his. Her second impulse, from a more recent frame of reference, was to slash the blue lightsaber blade forward and cut him in half. Her final impulse, as her brain finally caught up with the conflicting reflexes, was to simply do nothing.
Fortunately, perhaps, the stormtrooper himself seemed to have no such confusion of loyalties or responses. Even as Mara fought back the urge to kill, he snapped the muzzle of his weapon upward away from her. "Jedi Skywalker," he said. "My apologies."
"No problem," Mara said, fighting the words out through a momentarily stiff throat as she closed down her lightsaber. That unexpected surge of past patterns had been incredibly disconcerting. "What are you doing here?"
"Commander Fel heard of the problem with the ship's engines and ordered me to secure the bow from potential danger," he said. "You?"
"Same thing," Mara said, peering down the darkened corridor over his shoulder. "You find anything?"
"The area around the glider appears secure," he said. "My intention was to continue forward and check the shield generators."
"Fine," Mara said. "We'll go together."
"Acknowledged," he said. Without asking, he stepped past her and moved into point position, ahead and slightly to Mara's left. In silence, they continued forward.
They had gone perhaps ten more meters when Mara caught a glimpse of something ahead. "Hold," she murmured, running through the Jedi sight-enhancement techniques as they stopped. It hadn't been a movement she'd seen, exactly, but something else.
The stormtrooper, with his helmet's own vision enhancements, got it first. "We're looking through the archway into the shield generator room," he murmured back. "That was a reflection from the generator shell."
"Right," Mara agreed, trying to overlay the view ahead onto her mental schematic of this part of the ship. A reflection off the semi-spherical cap of the shield generator meant someone was inside the room, moving port and possibly aft.
Unfortunately, there were three other exits from the compartment in that direction: one heading aft toward the shield monitor room behind it, one heading forward toward a small cluster of crew quarters, and the third all the way across the chamber to a mirror-image archway into the portside corridor. Three possible ways out, with only her and one stormtrooper available to cover them all.
Except that Luke should be on his way toward that far portside exit. Luke? She sent out the mental call.
Coming, the reply came, accompanied by a glimpse of the portside corridor. It was apparently as dark over there as it was on this side of the ship, but he seemed to be making good progress and she had the sense that he was nearby.
At any rate, they couldn't afford to wait any longer. "All right," she murmured to the stormtrooper. "You keep going straight ahead. Make sure he doesn't double back and get out through the starboard archway up there. If it looks like you can do it without risking him getting behind you, go ahead and sweep him portside. I'll head back to that last cross corridor and try to cut him off before he can get out through the monitor room."
"Acknowledged," the stormtrooper said. Lifting his BlasTech, he moved cautiously forward.
Mara didn't wait to see how he fared, but turned and moved as quickly and silently as possible back to the cross-corridor. Unlike the main passageway, this one had several jogs in it as it wended its way around and between rooms of various sizes and shapes. That meant more cover for her, of course; unfortunately, it also meant she wouldn't get a glimpse of the exit she was trying to block until she was practically on top of it. Setting her teeth, stretching out to the Force, she headed in.
She'd gone maybe five steps when the whole thing fell completely apart.
From somewhere ahead came a sharp shout and the sudden scuffle of running feet. Breathing a curse, Mara ducked ahead around the next jog in the corridor, coming into view of the generator room exit just in time to see the reflected blue flash of a Chiss charric heat weapon. Someplace in the distance, over the ruckus, she heard the distinctive snap-hiss of Luke's lightsaber. Sprinting to the doorway, she ducked through—
There was just the briefest flicker of warning, and she barely got her lightsaber ignited in time to block another charric blast that would have burned her upper right shoulder if it had gotten through. "Hold it!" she snapped, ducking back into the relative protection of the doorway as another pair of charric bolts shot past her face.
"Halt!" a harsh Chiss voice countered. "Identify!"
"Who do you think?" Mara shot back. "How many people have you got aboard with lightsabers?"
For a moment there was no reply. But at least the shooting had stopped. "Very well, Jedi Skywalker," the Chiss said in a somewhat more polite tone. "Come forward."
Warily, Mara stepped into the room. Over by the starboard shield generator to her right were two armed Chiss dressed in leisure clothing, apparently having come straight from the crew quarters a couple of corridors away. Behind them was the stormtrooper she'd sent in, his BlasTech held in ready position across his chest. Possibly the reason they'd stopped shooting at her, the cynical thought crossed her mind.
She turned her head to her left. At the far end of the generator room, Luke was coming toward the party from the portside archway, his lightsaber blade looking brighter than usual in the gloom.
And in the long gap between Luke and the Chiss, standing straight and tall and yet looking strangely vulnerable and forlorn, was Dean Jinzler.
CHAPTER 9
"There's really nothing to tell," Jinzler protested as Mara led him to one of the lounge's couches and gave him a not-entirely-gentle push down onto it. "I was sitting right here, watching the stars, when the lights went out."
"Were you alone?" Luke asked, stretching out with the Force. The man clearly knew he was in trouble, yet was amazingly calm for all that. It was the sort of calm Luke had seen before, sometimes in a person who no longer had anything to lose.
Unfortunately, he'd also seen it in people with hidden tricks up their sleeves, or in people who fully believed they could lie their way out of anything. So far, he still couldn't tell which category Jinzler fit into.
"By then I was," Jinzler said. "A little earlier I'd been talking with one of the Geroons—Estosh, the young one—but he left when the engines started acting up. He said he was worried there was going to be another fire. I stayed here until the lights went out, as I said, at which point I decided something serious must be happening and started back toward my quarters."
In the ceiling above them, the lights abruptly came back on. That part, at least, was apparently fixed. "Why did you go through the Chiss quarters?" Luke asked. "Why didn't you use one of the outer corridors? They're better lit."
"Yes, I know." Jinzler shrugged. "I didn't really think about it, I suppose. At any rate, I heard someone moving around in the darkness and went to investigate."