“And Artoo is-? Oh, of course-your astromech droid.” The blue eyes flicked down briefly. “You must be a formidable warrior indeed, Skywalker-escaping from an Imperial Star Destroyer is no mean trick. Though I imagine a man like yourself is accustomed to giving the Imperials trouble.”
“I don’t see much front-line action anymore,” Luke told him. “You haven’t told me how you came to be out here, Captain. Or, for that matter, how you knew who I was.”
Another almost-smile. “With a lightsaber attached to your belt?” he asked wryly. “Come now. You were either Luke Skywalker, Jedi, or else someone with a taste for antiques and an insufferably high opinion of his swordsmanship.” Again, the blue eyes flicked up and down Luke. “You’re not really what I expected, somehow. Though I suppose that’s not all that surprising-the vast majority of Jedi lore has been so twisted by myth and ignorance that to get a clear picture is almost impossible.”
The warning bell in the back of Luke’s mind began to ring louder. “You almost sound as if you were expecting to find me here,” he said, easing his body into a combat stance and letting his senses reach out. All five of the crewers were still more or less where they’d been a few minutes earlier, farther up toward the forward part of the ship. None except Karrde himself was close enough to pose any kind of immediate threat.
“As a matter of fact, we were,” Karrde agreed calmly. “Though I can’t actually take any of the credit for that. It was one of my associates, Mara Jade, who led us here.” His head inclined slightly to his right. “She’s on the bridge at the moment.”
He paused, obviously waiting. It could be a setup, Luke knew; but the suggestion that someone might actually have been able to sense his presence from light-years away was too intriguing to pass up. Keeping his overall awareness clear, Luke narrowed a portion of his mind to the Wild Karrde’s bridge. At the helm was the young woman he’d spoken to earlier from the X-wing. Beside her, an older man was busy running a calculation through the nav computer. And sitting behind them-The jolt of that mind shot through him like an electric current. “Yes, that’s her,” Karrde confirmed, almost offhandedly. “She hides it quite well, actually-though not, I suppose, from a Jedi. It took me several months of careful observation to establish that it was you, and you personally, for whom she had these feelings.”
It took Luke another second to find his voice. Never before, not even from the Emperor, had he ever felt such a black and bitter hatred. “I’ve never met her before,” he managed.
“No?” Karrde shrugged. “A pity. I was rather hoping you’d be able to tell me why she feels this way. Ah, well.” He got to his feet. “I suppose, then, there’s nothing more for us to talk about for the moment … and let me say in advance that I’m very sorry it has to be this way.”
Reflexively, Luke’s hand darted for his lightsaber. He’d barely begun the movement when the shock of a stun weapon coursed through him from behind.
There were Jedi methods for fighting off unconsciousness. But they all took at least a split second of preparation-a split second that Luke did not have. Dimly, he felt himself falling; heard Artoo’s frantic trilling in the distance; and wondered with his last conscious thought how in the worlds Karrde had done this to him.
Chapter 19
He awoke slowly, in stages, aware of nothing but the twin facts that, one, he was lying flat on his back and, two, he felt terrible.
Slowly, gradually, the haze began to coalesce into more localized sensations. The air around him was warm but damp, a light and shifting breeze carrying several unfamiliar odors along with it. The surface beneath him had the soft/firm feel of a bed; the general sense of his skin and mouth implied he’d been asleep for probably several days.
It took another minute for the implications of that to percolate through the mental fog filling his brain. More than an hour or two was well beyond the safe capabilities of any stun weapon he’d ever heard of. Clearly, after being shot, he’d been drugged.
Inwardly, he smiled. Karrde was probably expecting him to be incapacitated for a while longer; and Karrde was in for a surprise. Forcing his mind into focus, he ran through the Jedi technique for detoxifying poisons and then waited for the haze to clear.
It took him some time to realize that nothing was, in fact, happening.
Somewhere in there he fell asleep again; and when he next awoke, his mind had cleared completely. Blinking against the sunlight streaming across his face, he opened his eyes and lifted his head.