She allowed herself to float down to stand just above the blue clover. The bubble of Force energy that kept her aloft was easier to maintain when she was mere centimeters above the surface-merely having the mental image, the paradigm, of it as a sort of air-filled balloon improved her ability to perceive it, to maintain it. She’d need to employ all the concentration tricks she knew, because what she was about to do was very tricky.
At the base of the wall, she stood a moment, eyes closed, and focused on the other things she’d have to do to cross two hundred meters of sensor-filled open space.
Air. She could not keep air from moving, of course. As she moved, she would displace it. But she added motion to the air she displaced, so that it moved out in a single stream, losing neither speed nor coherence for dozens of meters ahead of her. To a sensor, it would read not as the movement of a person across the lawn, but as a breeze.
Heat. That would be the trickiest part. If she radiated heat, infrared sensors would inevitably pick it up. She surrounded herself with another bubble, this one of containment … and immediately felt her temperature begin to rise as the heat she expended stayed within centimeters of her skin. She could even control herself to the point that she did not sweat, and would need to do so here-but that, too, would increase her internal temperature.
She couldn’t sustain the effect of heat entrapment for long; she would end up collapsing. But she should be able to sustain it long enough to cross the open space between wall and bunker … and in that time, infrared detectors would not see her.
Probably.
She stepped forward, concentrating on the act of walking, reminding herself that the movement of her legs was only a comforting paradigm-levitating in some other pose would require more of her attention. Each step felt a bit wobbly, as though she were moving across a flexible playground surface, but she fell into a regular pace and let her muscle memory do the work for her.
Yes, any Jedi Knight might know one of these three techniques-most commonly, the technique of levitation. But only a Jedi Master was likely to know all three or be able to sustain them simultaneously across such a broad distance.
Mara bumped her nose into something hard and stopped. Immediately ahead of her was uniform grayness.
She looked up along the curved surface of the bunker wall. And only a Jedi Master is likely to become so focused that she walks into a wall, she told herself.
She swayed where she stood, suddenly dizzy from the heat. Come on, Tiu, she thought. You should have detected me by now
A cord, millimeters thick, transparent and almost invisible in the darkness, fell across her face. Hurriedly, she grasped at it, wrapped it around her waist three times, and gave it a tug.
It hauled at her and she walked up the wall, her arms trembling and legs increasingly faltering as the heat threatened to overwhelm her. An eternity later, she was ten meters up the wall and a wedge-shaped slit in the duracrete surface beckoned her. She stepped into darkness, dropped a meter to a hard floor, and landed badly, collapsing to the floor as her legs failed.
She released the heat entrapment and felt the built-up energy flow away from her. With her last bit of strength, she held her control over the surrounding air long enough to send much of that heat streaming out through the slit in the wall, even as the slit slid closed. And then she burst into a sweat, a sudden head-to-toe sheen that felt like heavy motor oil against her skin.
In the darkness, a female voice said, “Goodness. You smell like a rancor after a footrace.”
Mara smiled weakly. “That’s no way to greet a Master. And you’ve never smelled a rancor after a footrace.”
“Yes, I have.”
There was a click, and brilliant light from overhead blinded Mara; she raised an arm over her eyes.
As her vision settled, she could see she was in a tight chamber, narrower against the bunker exterior wall but long. It was dominated by a neutral-blue flying craft, a tubular vehicle like a starfighter but with abbreviated fins instead of maneuvering wings; its canopy, which opened at the rear instead of forward, was up.
At the far end of the chamber, beside a circular hatch a meter in diameter, stood Tiu Zax, with her hand on a control panel mounted on the wall. Short of stature-she stood a centimeter shorter than Leia, and was lean like most of her kind-she had pale blue skin, hair so pale that it seemed translucent, and delicate features dominated by eyes that seemed oversized. She wore the black pants and tunic of her Jedi outfit; her boots, belt, and cloak were not in evidence.
Mara struggled to a sitting position. Though tired and still flushed with heat, she felt much better already. “What is this place?”
“A secret escape chamber.” Tiu came forward and reached up into the vehicle’s cockpit, pressing dashboard controls without looking. A side panel on the craft popped open; inside, Mara could see bundled clothing, packaged field rations, items she couldn’t make out. Tiu reached for one of them and came forward to hand it to Mara; it was a transparisteel canteen. “I think there are four of them in this building, but I haven’t gotten at all of them. The entry is concealed on the other side. This and the other one I found both had two-person escape vehicles in them.”