Outbound Flight's designers had clearly never considered the possibility that anyone would ever wish to travel through the connecting turbolift pylons without an actual turbolift car or at least a maintenance repulsorlift pack. As a result, they had kept the tube interior smooth, without any of the access ladders Luke had assumed would be there. There were also no other built-in handholds, and all the wiring was buried behind protective metal panels.
Fortunately, Jedi had their own resources.
"How's it going?" Luke grunted as he hauled himself another arm's length up the thick power cable.
"I'm doing fine," Mara countered from above him. "Question is, how are you holding up?"
"I'm fine, too," Luke assured her, taking a moment to look up at the woman sitting on his shoulders. It would have looked utterly ridiculous, he knew, had there been anyone around to see them: a man hauling himself hand over hand up a set of power cables while a grown woman sat high atop his shoulders like a small child watching a Victory Day parade.
But silly looking or not, it was working, and faster even than Luke had anticipated. With the metal access panels long since frozen shut by age and rust, there was no way to reach the cables beneath them except via a lightsaber wielded by a steady hand. Any other approach they could have used would have required each of them to cut away a section of paneling, haul him- or herself up to that level via the newly exposed cables, and then pause to cut away the next section. This way, Mara was able to concentrate on the task of precision cutting while Luke could give his full attention to the climb itself.
Or at least he could do so as long as his arms held out. Stretching out to the Force, letting its strength flow into his muscles, he kept going. It was just as well, he reflected, that they hadn't had to get out of the rigged turbolift car this way. Drask would never have made it.
"Watch it," Mara warned. "We're hitting the edge of another eddy."
"Right," Luke said, making sure to get an extra-firm grip with each pull upward. With the storage core and each of the Dreadnaughts running its own gravity direction, the tube had been designed to align incoming cars with the proper "up" before they arrived at their various destinations. The gravity eddy fields required for such an operation weren't too difficult to get past—he and Mara had already forded two of them—but getting caught unprepared could be trouble.
"I wish these things weren't tied into the ships' environmental system," he muttered as he felt the eddy current tugging at his body, trying to turn him around. Mara had abandoned her lightsaber work for the moment in favor of steadying herself with a grip on Luke's collar. "Without gravity in the pylon, we could have just floated up to D-Five."
"It would have taken us half a day just to find all the redundancies and shut them down," Mara pointed out, waving her free hand cautiously above her. "Okay, there's the upper edge of the eddy."
Luke eased them past the interface and they continued on their way. "So when are you going to tell me what this is all about?" he asked.
Even over the humming of her lightsaber he heard Mara's sigh. "It was that scene on the Chaf Envoy's observation deck," she said. "Just before we headed into the Redoubt, when Bearsh and the Geroons were saying good-bye to their ship."
"I remember," Luke said. "You said at the time something about that wasn't right."
"I just wish I'd caught it sooner," Mara said, an edge of self-recrimination in her voice. "I should have caught it earlier. Remember when the Geroon ship first arrived, and on the comm display behind Bearsh we saw some children playing Hilltop Emperor?"
"Yes," Luke said, replaying the scene in his mind. "It looked all right to me."
"Oh, it looked just fine," Mara bit out. "Problem is, a couple of days later, when the Geroons were saying their farewells, the same scene was going on in the background."
Luke frowned. "What do you mean, the same scene? More children playing on the structure?"
"I mean the same children playing on the structure," she said. "Doing the same things, in exactly the same way."
Luke tightened his grip on the cables. "The whole thing was a recording?"
"You got it," Mara said bitterly. "There are no children aboard that ship, Luke. Bearsh was lying through his teeth. Both sets of teeth."
"And I missed it completely," Luke said, feeling like a fool. "I wasn't even paying attention."
"Why should you have been?" Mara pointed out. "There wasn't any reason to suspect them of anything."
"I still should have been more alert," Luke said, refusing to be mollified. "Especially after everything that was going on aboard the Chaf Envoy. So what exactly does it mean?"
"It means the Geroons are frauds," Mara said. "It means that ship of theirs isn't a refugee ship at all. Aside from that, I have no idea."
"Bearsh said the ship was mostly composed of small rooms," Luke said, trying to think it through. "That kind of structure is something our sensors might be able to check out, so we can assume he was telling the truth about that. What sort of ship would be composed of mostly small rooms?"
"A prison ship, maybe?" Mara suggested. "Or maybe a cargo ship like Outbound Flight's storage core? That's basically a series of small rooms."
"I wish we knew what size rooms they are," Luke said. "You ever ask Drask if he took any sensor readings of their ship?"
"No, but you'd think he would have said something if it didn't check out," Mara said.
"Maybe he did, only not to us," Luke said, visualizing the Geroon ship in his mind. Big and spherical, with a regular pattern of dark spots covering the hull. Viewports, he'd tentatively identified them at the time. Or vents, or decoration—
He drew in a sharp breath. "Or ejection ports," he said aloud.
"What?"
"Ejection ports," he repeated. "Those dark spots on the hull are just like the ones we saw on that firepoint asteroid on our way into the Redoubt."
"Ejection ports for fighters," Mara bit out. "The thing's a carrier."
"And we left it sitting right next to the Brask Oto Command Station," Luke reminded her grimly.
"Terrific," Mara grunted. "So much for the Geroons being peace loving."
From behind Luke's head, barely audible over the sound of Mara's lightsaber, came a soft chirp. "Did you hear that?" he asked.
"Hear what?"
"Another of those comlink chirps," he told her. "The kind Drask said sounded like someone communicating over the jamming. It came from your comlink."
"I missed it," she said, the tone of her lightsaber changing slightly as she sliced away more of the metal. "The Geroons, you think?"
"I don't think anyone else has lied to us as consistently as they have," Luke said grimly.
"Not even Formbi?"
"Not even Jinzler," he said. "And I'm getting a very bad feeling about this. How much farther?"
Her weight shifted slightly on his shoulders as she peered upward. "Fifteen minutes at this rate," she said. "Maybe more."
Luke set his teeth, stretching out to the Force for strength. "Let's make it less."
"No." With a contemptuous flick of his wrist, Tarkosa sent Jinzler's datapad sliding back across the tabletop toward him. "Completely unacceptable, all of them."
"What's wrong with the Rendili Battle Horn-class?" Jinzler asked, struggling to remain calm. This whole thing was starting to get ridiculous. "It's got the size you want, it's got the speed—"
"It's a freighter," Tarkosa said flatly.
"It's a bulk cruiser, not a freighter," Jinzler corrected. "It's armed, it's armored, it's got the range, it's got the capacity—"
"It's unacceptable," Uliar cut in. "Show us something else."
Jinzler reached over and snagged the datapad, swallowing the retort he so very much wanted to say. Uliar and the two councilors had shot down every single suggestion he'd made, and he was becoming extremely irritated with the whole bunch of them. "Fine," he said, keying for Mon Cal ship designs. Maybe there would be something here that the crotchety old Survivors could live with.