“Besides which, I doubt that even with surprise you can take out all three without any noise,” he added. “Can you?”
She glared laser bolts, but gestured him to the door. Setting his mind firmly in line with the Force, he moved toward it. The heavy metal panel slid open at his approach, and he stepped in.
There were indeed three men lounging around the monitor table in the center of the room: two in the Imperial brown of ordinary crewers, the other in the black uniform and flaring helmet of a Fleet trooper. All three looked up as the door opened, and Luke caught their idle interest in the newcomer. Reaching out through the Force, he gently touched their minds, shunting the curiosity away. The two crewers seemed to size him up and then ignore him; the trooper continued to watch, but only as a change from watching his companions. Trying to look as casual and unconcerned as he could, Luke went over to the rack of flight suits against the wall and selected three of them. The conversation around the monitor table continued as he draped them over his arm and walked back out of the room. The door slid shut behind him-
“Well?” Mara hissed.
Luke nodded, exhaling quietly. “Go ahead and get into it,” he told her. “I want to try and hold off their curiosity for another couple of minutes. Until they’ve forgotten I was ever in there.”
Mara nodded and started pulling the flight suit on over her jumpsuit. “Handy trick, I must say.”
“It worked this time, anyway,” Luke agreed. Carefully, he eased back his touch on the Imperials’ minds, waiting tensely for the surge of emotion that would show the whole scheme was unraveling. But there was nothing except the lazy flow of idle conversation.
The trick had worked. This time, anyway.
Mara had a turbolift car standing by as he turned away from the ready room. “Come on, come on,” she beckoned impatiently. She was already in her flight suit, with the other two slung over her shoulder. “You can change on the way.”
“I hope no one comes aboard while I’m doing it,” he muttered as he slipped into the car. “Be a little hard to explain.”
“No one’s coming aboard,” she said as the turbolift door closed behind him and the car started to move. “I’ve keyed it for nonstop. She eyed him. “You still want to do it this way?”
“I don’t think we’ve got any real choice,” he said, getting into the flight suit. It felt uncomfortably tight over his regular outfit. “Han and I tried the frontal approach once, on the Death Star. It wasn’t exactly an unqualified success.
“Yes, but you didn’t have access to the main computer then,” Mara pointed out. “If I can fiddle the records and transfer orders, we ought to be able to get him out before anyone realizes they’ve been had.”
“But you’d still be leaving witnesses behind who knew he’d left,” Luke reminded her. “If any of them decided to check on the order verbally, the whole thing would fall apart right there. And I don’t think that suppression trick I used in the ready room will work on detention center guards-they’re bound to be too alert.”
“All right,” Mara said, turning back to the turbolift control board. “It doesn’t sound like much fun to me. But if that’s what you want, I’m game.”
The detention center was in the far aft section of the ship, a few decks beneath the command and systems control sections and directly above Engineering and the huge sublight drive thrust nozzles. The turbolift car shifted direction several times along the way, alternating between horizontal and vertical movement, It seemed to Luke to be altogether too complicated a route, and he found himself wondering even now if Mara might be pulling some kind of double cross. But her sense didn’t indicate any such treachery; and it occurred to him that she might have deliberately tangled their path to put the Chimaera’s internal security systems off the scent.
At last the car came to a halt, and the door slid open. They stepped out into a long corridor in which a handful of crewers in maintenance coveralls could be seen going about their business. “Your access door’s that way,” Mara murmured, nodding down the corridor. “I’ll give you three minutes to get set.”
Luke nodded and set off striving to look like he belonged there. His footsteps echoed on the metal deck, bringing back memories of that near-disastrous visit to the first Death Star.
But he’d been a wide-eyed kid then, dazzled by visions of glory and heroism and too naive to understand the deadly dangers that went with such things. Now, he was older and more seasoned, and knew exactly what it was he was walking into.