Artoo moaned softly. “I don’t like it, either,” Luke told him. “Let’s hope it doesn’t have anything to do with us. All clear?”
The droid beeped affirmation, and they started off again. Luke kept half an eye on the forest behind them, remembering Mara’s veiled hints about large predators. It could have been a lie, of course, designed to discourage him from trying to escape. For that matter, he’d never spotted any real evidence that the window of his previous room had had an alarm on it.
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.