[Thrawn Trilogy] - 01(127)

Abruptly, as if feeling his eyes on her, Mara looked up. “I said thanks already,” she growled. “What do you want, a medal?”

Luke shook his head. “I just want to know what happened to you.”

For a moment those green eyes flashed again with the old hatred. But only for a moment. The vornskr attack, coming on top of two days of laborious travel and no sleep, had taken a severe toll on her emotional strength. The anger faded from her eyes, leaving only a tired coldness behind. “You happened to me,” she told him, her voice more fatigued than embittered. “You came out of a grubby sixth-rate farm on a tenth-rate planet, and destroyed my life.”

“How?”

Contempt briefly filled her face. “You don’t have the faintest idea who I am, do you?”

Luke shook his head. “I’m sure I’d remember you if we’d met.”

“Oh, right,” she said sardonically. “The great, omniscient Jedi. See all, hear all, know all, understand all. No, we didn’t actually meet; but I was there, if you’d bothered to notice me. I was a dancer at Jabba the Hutt’s palace the day you came for Solo.”

So that was it. She’d worked for Jabba; and when he’d killed Jabba, he’d ruined her life …

Luke frowned at her. No. Her slim figure, her agility and grace-those certainly could belong to a professional dancer. But her piloting skills, her expert marksmanship, her inexplicable working knowledge of lightsabers-those most certainly did not.

Mara was still waiting, daring him with her expression to figure it out. “You weren’t just a dancer, though,” he told her. “That was only a cover.”

Her lip twisted. “Very good. That vaunted Jedi insight, no doubt. Keep going; you’re doing so well. What was I really doing there?”

Luke hesitated. There were all sorts of possibilities for this one: bounty hunter, smuggler, quiet bodyguard for Jabba, spy from some rival criminal organization …

No. Her knowledge of lightsabers … and suddenly, all the pieces fell together with a rush. “You were waiting for me,” he said. “Vader knew I’d go there to try and rescue Han, and he sent you to capture me.”

“Vader?” She all but spat the name. “Don’t make me laugh. Vader was a fool, and skating on the edge of treason along with it. My master sent me to Jabba’s to kill you, not recruit you.”

Luke stared at her, an icy shiver running up his back. It couldn’t be … but even as he gazed into that tortured face, he knew with sudden certainty that it was. “And your master,” he said quietly, “was the Emperor.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice a snake’s hiss. “And you destroyed him.”

Luke swallowed hard, the pounding of his own heart the only sound. He hadn’t killed the Emperor-Darth Vader had done that-but Mara didn’t seem inclined to worry over such subtleties. “You’re wrong, though,” he said. “He did try to recruit me.”

“Only because I failed,” she ground out, her throat muscles tight. “And only when Vader had you standing right there in front of him. What, you don’t think he knew Vader had offered to help you overthrow him?”

Unconsciously, Luke flexed the fingers of his numbed artificial hand. Yes, Vader had indeed suggested such an alliance during their Cloud City duel. “I don’t think it was a serious offer,” he murmured.

“The Emperor did,” Mara said flatly. “He knew. And what he knew, I knew.”

Her eyes filled with distant pain. “I was his hand, Skywalker,” she said, her voice remembering. “That’s how I was known to his inner court: as the Emperor’s Hand. I served him all over the galaxy, doing jobs the Imperial Fleet and stormtroopers couldn’t handle. That was my one great talent, you see-I could hear his call from anywhere in the Empire, and report back to him the same way. I exposed traitors for him, brought down his enemies, helped him keep the kind of control over the mindless bureaucracies that he needed. I had prestige, and power, and respect.”

Slowly, her eyes came back from the past. “And you took it all away from me. If only for that, you deserve to die.”

“What went wrong?” Luke forced himself to ask.

Her lip twisted. “Jabba wouldn’t let me go with the execution party. That was it-pure and simple. I tried begging, cajoling, bargaining-I couldn’t change his mind.”

“No,” Luke said soberly. “Jabba was highly resistant to the mind-controlling aspects of the Force.”

But if she had been on the Sail Barge …

Luke shivered, seeing in his mind’s eye that terrifying vision in the dark cave on Dagobah. The mysterious silhouetted woman standing there on the Sail Barge’s upper deck, laughing at him as she held his captured lightsaber high.