Heir To The Empire (33 page)

Artoo beeped again. Luke twisted his attention back to the compound . . . and froze.

Mara had stepped out of the central building.

For what seemed like a long time she just stood there on the doorstep, looking distractedly up into the sky. Luke watched her, not daring even to look down to see how well concealed Artoo might be. If she turned in their direction-or if she went to the shed to see how he was doing . . .

Abruptly, she looked down again, a determined expression on her face. She turned toward the second barracks building and headed off at a brisk walk.

Luke let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. They were far from being out of danger-all Mara had to do was turn her head 90 degrees to her left and she’d be looking directly at them. But something about her posture seemed to indicate that her attention and thoughts were turned inward.

As if she’d suddenly made a hard decision . . .

She went into the barracks, and Luke made a quick decision of his own. “Come on, Artoo,” he murmured. “It’s getting too crowded out here. We’re going to cut farther into the forest, come up on the ships from behind.”

It was, fortunately, a short distance to the maintenance hangar and the group of ships parked alongside it. They arrived after only a few minutes-to discover their X-wing gone.

“No, I don’t know where they’ve moved it to,” Luke gritted, looking around as best he could while still staying under cover. “Can your sensors pick it up?”

Artoo beeped a negative, adding a chirping explanation Luke couldn’t even begin to follow. “Well, it doesn’t matter,” he reassured the droid. “We’d have had to put down somewhere else on the planet and find something with a working hyperdrive, anyway. We’ll just skip that step and take one of these.”

He glanced around, hoping to find a Z-95 or Y-wing or something else he was at least marginally familiar with. But the only ships he recognized were a Corellian Corvette and what looked like a downsized bulk freighter. “Got any suggestions?” he asked Artoo.

The droid beeped a prompt affirmative, his little sensor dish settling on a pair of long, lean ships about twice the length or Luke’s X-wing. Fighters, obviously, but not like anything the Alliance had ever used. “One of those?” he asked doubtfully.

Artoo beeped again, a distinct note of impatience to the sound. “Right; we’re a little pressed for time,” Luke agreed.

They made it across to one of the fighters without incident. Unlike the X-wing design, the entrance was a hinged hatchway door in the side-possibly one reason Artoo had chosen it, Luke decided as he manhandled the droid inside. The pilot’s cockpit wasn’t much roomier than an X-wing’s, but directly behind it was a three-seat tech/weapons area. The seats weren’t designed for astromech droids, of course, but with a little ingenuity on Luke’s part and some stretch on the restraints’, he managed to get Artoo wedged between two of the seats and firmly strapped in place. “Looks like everything’s already on standby,” he commented, glancing at the flickering lights on the control boards. “There’s an outlet right there-give everything a quick check while I strap in. With a little luck, maybe we can be out of here before anyone even knows we’re gone.”

She had delivered the open comlink message to Chin, and the quieter ones to Aves and the others at the Millennium Falcon; and as she stalked her way glowering across the compound toward the number three shed, Mara decided once more that she hated the universe.

She’d been the one who’d found Skywalker. She, by herself, alone. There was no question about that; no argument even possible. It should be she, not Karrde, who had the final say on his fate.

I should have left him out there, she told herself bitterly as she stomped across the beaten ground. Should have just let him die in the cold of space. She’d considered that, too, at the time. But if he’d died out there, all alone, she might never have known for sure that he was, in fact, dead.

And she certainly wouldn’t have had the satisfaction of killing him herself.

She looked down at the lightsaber clenched in her hand, watching the afternoon sunlight glint from the silvery metal as she hefted its weight. She could do it now, she knew. Could go in there to check on him and claim he had tried to jump her. Without the Force to call on, he would be an easy target, even for someone like her who hadn’t picked up a lightsaber more than a handful of times in her life. It would be easy, clean, and very fast.

And she didn’t owe Karrde anything, no matter how well his organization might have treated her. Not about something like this.

And yet . . .

She was coming up on four shed, still undecided, when she heard the faint whine of a repulsorlift.

She peered up into the sky, shading her eyes with her free hand as she tried to spot the incoming ship. But nothing was visible . . . and as the whine grew louder, she realized abruptly that it was the sound of one of their own vehicles. She spun around and looked over toward the maintenance hangar-

Just in time to see one of their two Skipray blastboats rise above the treetops.

For a pair of heartbeats she stared at the ship, wondering what in the Empire Karrde thought he was doing. Sending an escort or pilot ship for the Imperials, perhaps?

And then, abruptly, it clicked.

She twisted back and sprinted for the four shed, pulling her blaster from its forearm sheath as she ran. The lock on the room inexplicably refused to open; she tried it twice and then blasted it.

Skywalker was gone.

She swore, viciously, and ran out into the compound. The Skipray had shifted to forward motion now, disappearing behind the trees to the west. Jamming her blaster back into its sheath, she grabbed the comlink off her belt-

And swore again. The Imperials could be here at any minute, and any mention of Skywalker’s presence would land them all in very deep trouble indeed.

Which left her with exactly one option.

She reached the second Skipray at a dead run and had it in the air within two minutes. Skywalker would not-would not-get away now.

Kicking the drive to full power, she screamed off in pursuit.

**]

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 common-sense 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, 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 left-most 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 macrobinoculars 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.