[Thrawn Trilogy] - 02(129)
Luke stared, a cold lump forming in his throat as the Millennium Falcon rose steadily up through the opening. Leia and Chewbacca had been aboard that ship : “Did he say anything about prisoners?”
“Not to me,” Mara said. “I got the impression he’d found the ship deserted.”
Which meant that wherever Leia and Chewbacca had gone, they were now stranded there. But there was no time to worry about that now. “We’re taking it back,” he told the others, stuffing his lightsaber into his flight suit tunic. “Cover me.”
“Skywalker-” Mara hissed; but Luke was already jogging toward the shaft. The lift plate itself came into view, revealing two men riding alongside the Falcon: a naval trooper and a tech with what looked like a combined data pad/control unit. They caught sight of Luke-
“Hey!” Luke called, waving as he hurried toward them. “Hold on!”
The tech did something with his data pad and the lift stopped, and Luke could sense the sudden suspicion in the trooper’s mind. “Got new orders on that one,” he said as he trotted up to them. “The Grand Admiral wants it moved back down. Something about using it as bait.”
The tech frowned down at his data pad. He was young, Luke saw, probably not out of his teens. “There’s nothing about new orders here,” he objected.
“I haven’t heard anything about it, either,” the trooper growled, drawing his blaster and pointing it vaguely in Luke’s direction as he threw a quick look around the storage room.
“It just came through a minute ago,” Luke said, nodding back toward the computer console. “Stuffs not transferring very fast today, for some reason.”
“Makes a good story, anyway,” the trooper retorted. His blaster was now very definitely pointed at Luke. “Let’s see some ID, huh?”
Luke shrugged; and, reaching out through the Force, he yanked the blaster out of the trooper’s hand.
The man didn’t even pause to gape at the unexpected loss of his weapon. He threw himself forward, hands stretching toward Luke’s neck -
The blaster, heading straight toward Luke, suddenly reversed direction. The trooper caught the butt end full in the stomach, coughed once in strangled agony, and fell unmoving to the deck.
“I’ll take that,” Luke told the tech, waving Karrde and Mara to join him. The tech, his face a rather motley gray, handed the data pad to him without a word.
“Good job,” Karrde said as he came up beside Luke. “Relax, we’re not going to hurt you,” he added to the tech, squatting down and relieving the gasping trooper of his comlink. “Not if you behave, anyway. Take your friend to that electrical closet over there and lock yourselves in.”
The tech glanced at him, looked again at Luke, and gave a quick nod. Hoisting the trooper under the armpits, he dragged him off. “Make sure they get settled all right, and then join me in the ship,” Karrde told Luke. “I’m going to get the preflight started. Are there any security codes I need to know about?”
“I don’t think so.” Luke glanced around the room, spotted Mara already busy with the computer console. “The Falcon’s hard enough to keep functional as it is.”
“All right. Remind Mara not to waste too much time fiddling with that computer.”
He ducked under the ship and disappeared up the ramp. Luke waited until the tech had locked himself and the trooper into the electrical closet as ordered, and then followed.
“It has a remarkably fast start-up sequence,” Karrde remarked as Luke joined him in the cockpit. “Two minutes, maybe three, and we’ll be ready to fly. You still have that controller?”
“Right here,” Luke said, handing it to him. “I’ll go get Mara.” He glanced out the cockpit window—
Just as a wide door across the room slid open, to reveal a full squad of stormtroopers.
“Uh-oh,” Karrde murmured as the eight white-armored Imperials marched purposefully toward the Falcon. “Do they know we’re here?”
Luke stretched out his senses, trying to gauge the stormtroopers’ mental state. “I don’t think so,” he murmured back. “They seem to be thinking more like guards than soldiers.”
“Probably too noisy in here for them to hear the engines in start-up mode,” Karrde said, ducking down in his seat out of their direct view. “Mara was right about the Grand Admiral; but we seem to be a step ahead of him.”
A sudden thought struck hike, and he threw a look through the side of the canopy. Mara was crouching beside the computer console, temporarily hidden from the stormtroopers view.