Toward the center of the estate was its one building, a four-story monstrosity of blue-green painted duracrete. Had the arc of its exterior been more perfect, it would have been a proper dome, but it looked flattened, like a half-buried ball of immense size that had been sat on by a giant and partially compressed.
There were several doors at ground level, all sideways-sliding slabs of blue-green durasteel, two of them large enough to accommodate speeders, but there were no visible windows. It was said that instead of windows Thrackan had had the exterior riddled with holocams, and each interior room had screens on the walls that would display window-like views from those sensors.
The estate was ringed by a high, gray duracrete wall-not too high for a Jedi Master to jump, but certainly high enough to silhouette a leaping intruder quite nicely.
Mara knew, from Intelligence reports, that there were pressure and movement sensors installed at random intervals under the ground cover, that the exterior holocams fed into monitors in Thrackan’s security chamber as well as the decorative wall displays of the rooms, that the complex had its own generators should city power lines be cut, that its water and waste processors were set up so that nothing above the size of a Kowakian monkey-lizard could fit through the pipes and enter from underground.
Mara had set up on the roof of a building across a broad but lightly traveled avenue from Thrackan’s estate. Ironically, the building, a flat two-story affair whose simple, unmemorable architecture was still far more pleasing than that of Thrackan’s home, was a local precinct house of Corellian Security. It had taken her very little time to scale the exterior and disable the sensors on the roof; now it made an ideal position from which to spy on the estate opposite.
Team Tauntaun, the Jedi strike team that had invaded Thrackan’s home at the same time Team Purella was attempting to kidnap Prime Minister Saxan, had faced the same difficult task: get inside without being seen. Galactic Alliance Intelligence observers had provided information on the times and routes taken by Thrackan when traveling from the government buildings to his home. Setting up in a drainage culvert on a blind curve on one stretch of that route, the three Jedi — Tahiri Veila, Doran Tainer, and Tiu Zax-had leapt up against the undersides of the groundspeeders in Thrackan’s caravans, tucking themselves between the repulsorlift generators and hanging on by virtue of powerful magnets, and were conveyed into the bunker by Thrackan himself-or so they thought. It swiftly developed that, as with the assault on Prime Minister Saxan’s home, the speeders were loaded with combat droids, the security staffs of the building alerted to the high probability of a Jedi attack.
Two of the Jedi had fled. The third, Tiu, now waited for nightfall in Thrackan’s home as Mara waited here.
While the shadows thickened, Mara stretched out not too uncomfortably on the roof’s edge and listened to the conversations of CorSec agents as their words floated out from the windows below her.
“… say we just take everything we have to Tralus and blow them right out of their beachhead …”
“… acceptable losses …”
“… not a very popular position, but we don’t really need a full-sized navy …”
“… saw Tarania Lona’s new holosquirmer. She has the most …”
“… continue to refuse to cooperate, we’re going to have to …”
“… if they were true Corellians, they’d never have let themselves be taken alive …”
Full darkness fell, and a tiny green dot appeared halfway up the squashed dome of Thrackan’s home. It remained there for half a minute and then disappeared.
Mara checked to make sure her lightsaber and other equipment were in place. Then she rolled over the lip of the roof and fell two stories to the sidewalk, landing as lightly as a leaf fluttering to the ground.
She held herself in a crouch, her dark robes making her all but invisible, and waited until there was no speeder cross-traffic to be seen. She came up out of her crouch like a sprinter and was across the avenue and up against the base of the featureless duracrete wall a moment later. A quick flex of the legs and boost of the Force and she was atop that wall
Not quite. She did not allow herself to come down on the walltop. It, too, was said to have pressure sensors on its walkway and would reveal her presence if she did so. Instead, she caught herself with the Force, creating a bubble between her and the top of the wall, and drifted just over that surface until she was above the blue clover on the far side.
It was time to be a Jedi instead of a spy. As a spy, she’d probably have fixed a line thrower to the top of the CorSec building, launched a driller projectile, trailing a nearly invisible cable, to affix itself to the top of Thrackan’s dome, and used a powered or hand-cranked winch to carry her the quarter kilometer from rooftop to rooftop … and even so, her chances of detection would have been very high. Instead, she carried almost no equipment, and her chances of detection would be determined by her own concentration.