“The shuttle that brought them will take you to Kuat,” the woman said. “You’d better board.”
Tawaler turned and slapped the control board for the air lock. He entered and peered in some confusion through the transparisteel viewport in the door on the opposite side. It showed nothing but stars. “It’s gone,” he said. “The shuttle.”
He heard the air lock door hiss closed behind him. The woman’s voice came across the air lock speaker. “No, it’s still there. Look harder.”
Tawaler felt light-headed. He wanted nothing so much as to sit down and rest for a minute. But he did as told, leaning closer to the viewport.
Oh, yes, he’d been wrong. Through the viewport he could see the docking tube in place, the door into the belly of the shuttle invitingly open.
“You’d better hurry.”
Tawaler pressed the control for the air lock door to open. But its speaker made a disagreeable noise and its text screen flashed red. He had to concentrate to read the words appearing on the screen. IT HASN’T RUN ITS DEPRESSURIZATION CYCLE. That was wrong. It didn’t need to depressurize. A boarding tube was coupled to the other side. Atmospheric pressure should be approximately equal.
Now his companion sounded exasperated. “Go ahead and depressurize. After all, you have your pressure suit on.”
Tawaler glanced down at himself. Yes, he was in his pressure suit. He couldn’t remember putting it on, but he was clad head-to-foot in the industrial gray of one of the station’s vac suits. He entered the code to pump the air out of the air lock and open the outer door.
In a moment, his ears popped and he felt even more light-headed.
“Don’t worry, Tawaler.” Her voice grew increasingly faint. “The feeling will pass soon.”
The unit of twenty dying killers moved briskly down the corridor from the air lock to a turbolift. They entered, keyed in a command to take them two floors down, and moments later emerged on the same level as Kallebarth Way.
This passageway, which ran at right angles to and intersected with the passageway that was their destination, was dark, faintly illuminated only by emergency glows along the floor. But there was a glow in one direction. The men and women turned that way and began marching. On the space station floor diagram on their helmet visors, a red dot moved to show their location.
Eventually the glow ahead resolved itself into a lighted area situated at the intersection of this passageway and Kallebarth Way. The armored soldiers could make out walls of transparisteel set up as a security station. At the station, a portion of the passageway was given over to a battery of sensors and a small enclosure, just large enough for a desk and two security officers. The rest of the passageway at that point was a lock, a stretch of walkway with a secure door at each end. The barriers separating the sensor area from the lock, and separating both sensor area and lock from original passageway, were made of transparisteel, as were the secure doors themselves, giving the whole station an oddly delicate, crystalline appearance.
Just as the killers came close enough to take in these details, the guidance map on their visors disappeared and the word WAIT appeared. They stopped in place and waited.
In the station sat two officers, human men in the gray-and-white uniform of Toryaz Station Security. At this late hour, with all the members of the delegation parties retired for the evening, they were relaxed, chatting over cups of caf.
Then a datapad sitting on the desk before them erupted in a cloud of white smoke. The smoke completely filled the tiny chamber, looking like a patch of thick fog cut into a square by some supernatural force.
It began to fade. Through it, the twenty intruders could see the two security men slumped over their desks.
Colored lights danced over the control pads of the security station doors, then those doors swung open.
The instruction showing on the helmet visors switched from WAIT to PROCEED, then as abruptly was replaced by the maps to the intruders’ destinations.
They marched forward.
Jacen awoke from fitful sleep. The compartment he and Ben had been assigned, one of several chambers arranged around a central living area that offered access to the main passageway, had two beds and its own refresher, quite comfortable by the standards of traveling Jedi. It was dark, the only illumination coming from a dim glow panel above the door to the living room.
Something was-not wrong, but different. He glanced around, saw only the inert shape of Ben in his bed, and the rectangular openings into the refresher and the closet.
Jacen sat up into a doss-legged posture and closed his eyes, sinking effortlessly into a contemplative state.
He looked for treachery, hatred, anger. He could feel little twinges of them, but no more than would be expected at any political gathering. Satisfied, he lay down again.