Another of Jacen’s lessons was Plan and time your steps. The woman was stepping up to the doorway and preparing to insert her identicard into a security board slot. The man wasn’t moving. It was a staredown.
That gave Ben a moment to plan. He’d need to wait until the door was just opening. Then he’d take out the droid. His next priority would be getting into the chamber before the door closed again, and any security monitor might shut it as soon as it was open. So he’d rush through the door and deal with the human guards as he passed.
After that-Jacen would be disappointed in him if he didn’t figure out some way off this station, but Ben didn’t have time right now. The staredown between the guards ended. Irritably, the man stepped out of the way and the woman inserted her identicard in the slot.
Everything began to move in slow motion, as though the entire corridor were suddenly submerged in thick, invisible fluid. Ben saw the door begin to slide upward. Doors like this opened almost instantly, but his time perception was so dilated that he watched it as it rose a meter.
He held his hand above his pouch and tugged through the Force. His lightsaber leapt up into his hand, and he snapped it on, swinging it at the hovering droid even as the distorted snap-hiss noise announced that the blade was coming live.
Instead of slashing, he leapt upward and thrust down, aiming for one of the deflector shield nodules. The point of his lightsaber blade sheared through the bronze hull there, punching into the droid’s insides. Ben kept his hands on the lightsaber handle, letting his weight drag the weapon down through the droid.
The droid fell almost as fast as he did-with agonizing slowness-and Ben could see the male guard reacting to the attack, bringing his rifle barrel up.
Ben’s heels hit the ground and he continued downward, going into a sideways roll toward the now fully open doorway. The male guard tried to track the boy with his blaster rifle. The woman, her face distorted in surprise, was punching the CLOSE button on the security panel. Her identicard was still in the panel’s card slot.
Ben came up on his feet between the man and the woman, so close that the man’s blaster barrel now protruded safely past him, and lashed out at the control panel. His lightsaber blade slashed into the controls and into the identicard, burning and fusing it into place. The blade came so close to the back of the woman’s hand that he saw her skin blacken along a four-centimeter patch. Her knuckles still hit the CLOSE button, even as the near edges of that button melted from the lightsaber’s heat. Ben continued his forward roll, going head over heels into dimness-and, as the door came slamming down behind him, into darkness illuminated only by the glowing blue blade of his weapon.
He couldn’t make out much of the chamber’s interior. There was a large mass in front of him, as if someone had parked a small groundspeeder on its tail there-it didn’t correspond to anything Dr. Seyah had shown him in the simulations. There were little lights in various colors all over the walls.
First things first. He spun and lunged back at the door, thrusting with his lightsaber at the top, where the lifter mechanism should be. He shoved the lightsaber blade in well above his head, cutting upward and sideways, trying to sever the mechanism or, failing that, fuse it. This would give him time to accomplish his mission.
His mission. That thought almost made him dizzy. It was his mission now.
His cutting done, he slapped the light control on the door control panel. White overhead lights came on and he spun, lightsaber ready, in case enemies waited there in the dark.
No living enemies did. But the room was still not as it was supposed to be.
The banks of lights, computers, and secondary control tables, some original equipment and some installed by the Corellians, lined the walls as they had in Dr. Seyah’s simulations.
But where the main control table was supposed to be rested something else entirely.
It was a mound of machinery as big as half a dozen Hutts engaged in a no-rules wrestling match. Roughly human-shaped, it had a desk-sized head that looked like a sensor node whose surface was thickly crusted with antennae, light monitors, and holocam lenses. Its torso was made up of mismatched modules, each at least as big as the head, connected with durasteel cables and light-bearing transparisteel fibers. Dangling torso units surrounded-perhaps incorporated-the control board Ben needed to access. The machine’s arms appeared to be the heavy-duty cylindrical limbs from a wrecker droid, and ended in the same clumsy, destructive manipulator hands. Instead of legs it had a thick bottom plate whose skirted edges probably concealed repulsorlift machinery. All these components were of different colors, some black, some silver, some industrial green.