[Thrawn Trilogy] - 02(120)

He did so. A minute later, with the help of a magnetic winch, they had hauled the severed section of decking and hull into the storage room. A few centimeters beneath it, lit eerily by the green light from Luke’s lightsaber, was the hangar bay deck. Mara got the winch’s grapple attached to it; stretching out flat on his stomach, Luke extended the lightsaber down through the hole. There he paused, waiting until he could sense that the corridor beneath the hangar deck was clear.

“Don’t forget to bevel it,” Mara reminded him as the lightsaber bit smoothly into the hardened metal. “A gaping hole in the ceiling would be a little too obvious for even conscripts to miss.”

Luke nodded and finished the cut. Mara was ready, and even as he shut down the lightsaber she had the winch pulling the thick slab of metal up into the shuttle. She brought it perhaps a meter up and then shut down the motor. “That’s far enough,” she said. Blaster ready in her hand, she sat gingerly on the still-warm edge of the hole and dropped lightly down to the deck below. There was a second’s pause as she looked around-“All clear,” she hissed.

Luke sat down on the edge and looked over at the winch control. Reaching out with the Force, he triggered the switch and followed her down.

The deck below was farther than it had looked, but his Jedi-enhanced muscles handled the impact without trouble. Recovering his balance, he looked up just as the metal plug settled neatly back down into the hole. “Looks pretty good,” Mara murmured. “I don’t think anyone will notice.”

“Not unless they look straight up,” Luke agreed. “Which way to the detention center?”

“There,” Mara said, gesturing with her blaster to their left. “We’re not going to get there dressed like this, though. Come on.

She led the way to the end of the passage, then down a crossway to another, wider corridor. Luke kept his senses alert, but only occasionally did he detect anyone. “Awfully quiet down here.”

“It won’t last,” Mara said. “This is a service supply area, and most of the people who’d normally be working here are a level up helping unload the shuttles. But we need to get into some uniforms or flight suits or something before we go much farther.”

Luke thought back to the first time he’d tried masquerading as an imperial. “Okay, but let’s try to avoid stormtrooper armor, he said. “Those helmets are hard to see through.”

“I didn’t think Jedi needed to use their eyes,” Mara countered sourly. “Watch it-here we are. That’s a section of crew quarters over there.”

Luke had already sensed the sudden jump in population level. “I don’t think we can sneak through that many people,” he warned.

“I wasn’t planning to.” Mara pointed to another corridor leading off to their right. “There should be a group of TIE pilot ready rooms down that way. Let’s see if we can find an empty one that has a couple of spare flight suits lying around.”

But if the Empire was lax enough to leave its service supply areas unguarded, it wasn’t so careless with its pilot ready rooms. There were six of them grouped around the turbolift cluster at the end of the corridor; and from the sounds of conversation faintly audible through the doors, it was clear that all six were occupied by at least two people. “What now?” Luke whispered to Mara.

“What do you think?” she retorted, dropping her blaster back in its holster and flexing her fingers. “Just tell me which room has the fewest people in it and then get out of the way. I’ll do the rest.”

“Wait a minute,” Luke said, thinking hard. He didn’t want to kill the men behind those doors in cold blood; but neither did he want to put himself into the dangerous situation he’d faced during the Imperial raid on Lando’s Nkllon mining operation a few months earlier. There, he’d successfully used the Force to confuse the attacking TIE fighters, but at the cost of skating perilously close to the edge of the dark side. It wasn’t an experience he wanted to repeat.

But if he could just gently touch the Imperials’ minds, instead of grabbing and twisting them:

“We’ll try this one,” he told Mara, nodding to a room in which he could sense only three men. But we’re not going to charge in fighting. I think I can suppress their curiosity enough for me to walk in, take the flight suits, and leave.

“What if you can’t?” Mara demanded. “We’ll have lost whatever surprise we would have had.”

“It’ll work,” Luke assured her. “Get ready.”

“Skywalker-“