From the next room came a complicated series of electronic jabbers. Probably, Luke decided, the droid reminding him that he didn’t have any fingers to cross.
Fingers. For a moment Luke looked down at his right hand, flexing his fingers and feeling the unpleasant pins-and-needles tingling/numbness there. It had been five years since he’d really thought of the hand as being a machine attached to his arm. Now, suddenly, it was impossible to think of it as anything but that.
Artoo beeped impatiently. “Right,” Luke agreed, forcing his attention away from his hand as best he could and moving the end of the wire toward what he hoped was the proper contact point. It could have been worse, he realized: the hand could have been designed with only a single power supply, in which case he wouldn’t have even this much use of it. “Here goes,” he said, and touched the wire.
And with no fuss or dramatics whatsoever, the door slid quietly open.
“Got it,” Luke hissed. Carefully, trying not to lose the contact point, he leaned over and peered outside.
The sun was starting to sink behind the trees, throwing long shadows across the compound. From his position Luke could see only a little of the grounds, but what he could see seemed to be deserted. Setting his feet, he let go of the wire and dived for the doorway.
With the contact broken, the door slid shut again, nearly catching his left ankle as he hit the ground and rolled awkwardly into a crouch. He froze, waiting to see if the noise would spark any reaction. But the silence continued; and after a few seconds, he got to his feet and ran to the shed’s other door.
Artoo had been right: there was indeed no lock on this half of the shed. Luke hit the release, threw one last glance around, and slipped inside.
The droid beeped an enthusiastic greeting, bobbing back and forth awkwardly in the restraint collar, a torus-shaped device that fit snugly around his legs and wheels.8 “Quiet, Artoo,” Luke warned the other, kneeling down to examine the collar. “And hold still.”
He’d been worried that the collar would be locked or intertwined into Artoo’s wheel system in some way, requiring special tools to disengage. But the device was much simpler than that—it merely held enough of the droid’s weight off the floor so that he couldn’t get any real traction. Luke released a pair of clasps and pushed the hinged halves apart, and Artoo was free. “Come on,” he told the droid, and headed back to the door.
As far as he could see, the compound was still deserted. “The ship’s around that way,” he whispered, pointing toward the central building. “Looks like the best approach would be to circle to the left, keeping inside the trees as much as we can. Can you handle the terrain?”
Artoo raised his scanner, beeped a cautious affirmative. “Okay. Keep an eye out for anyone coming out of the buildings.”
They’d made it into the woods, and were perhaps a quarter of the way around the circle, when Artoo gave a warning chirp. “Freeze,” Luke whispered, stopping dead beside a large tree trunk and hoping they were enough in the shadows. His own black outfit should blend adequately into the darkening forest background, but Artoo’s white and blue were another matter entirely.
Fortunately, the three men who came out of the central building never looked in their direction, but headed straight toward the edge of the forest.
Headed there at a fast, determined trot … and just before they disappeared into the trees, all three drew their blasters.
Artoo moaned softly. “I don’t like it, either,” Luke told him. “Let’s hope it doesn’t have anything to do with us. All clear?”
The droid beeped affirmation, and they started off again. Luke kept half an eye on the forest behind them, remembering Mara’s veiled hints about large predators. It could have been a lie, of course, designed to discourage him from trying to escape. For that matter, he’d never spotted any real evidence that the window of his previous room had had an alarm on it.
Artoo beeped again. Luke twisted his attention back to the compound … and froze.
Mara had stepped out of the central building.
For what seemed like a long time she just stood there on the doorstep, looking distractedly up into the sky. Luke watched her, not daring even to look down to see how well concealed Artoo might be. If she turned in their direction—or if she went to the shed to see how he was doing …
Abruptly, she looked down again, a determined expression on her face. She turned toward the second barracks building and headed off at a brisk walk.
Luke let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. They were far from being out of danger—all Mara had to do was turn her head 90 degrees to her left and she’d be looking directly at them. But something about her posture seemed to indicate that her attention and thoughts were turned inward.
As if she’d suddenly made a hard decision …
She went into the barracks, and Luke made a quick decision of his own. “Come on, Artoo,” he murmured. “It’s getting too crowded out here. We’re going to cut farther into the forest, come up on the ships from behind.”
It was, fortunately, a short distance to the maintenance hangar and the group of ships parked alongside it. They arrived after only a few minutes—to discover their X-wing gone.
“No, I don’t know where they’ve moved it to,” Luke gritted, looking around as best he could while still staying undercover. “Can your sensors pick it up?”
Artoo beeped a negative, adding a chirping explanation Luke couldn’t even begin to follow. “Well, it doesn’t matter,” he reassured the droid. “We’d have had to put down somewhere else on the planet and find something with a working hyperdrive, anyway. We’ll just skip that step and take one of these.”
He glanced around, hoping to find a Z-95 or Y-wing or something else he was at least marginally familiar with. But the only ships he recognized were a Corellian Corvette9 and what looked like a downsized bulk freighter. “Got any suggestions?” he asked Artoo.
The droid beeped a prompt affirmative, his little sensor dish settling on a pair of long, lean ships about twice the length of Luke’s X-wing. Fighters, obviously, but not like anything the Alliance had ever used. “One of those?” he asked doubtfully.
Artoo beeped again, a distinct note of impatience to the sound. “Right; we’re a little pressed for time,” Luke agreed.
They made it across to one of the fighters without incident. Unlike the X-wing design, the entrance was a hinged hatchway door in the side—possibly one reason Artoo had chosen it, Luke decided as he manhandled the droid inside. The pilot’s cockpit wasn’t much roomier than an X-wing’s, but directly behind it was a three-seat tech/weapons area. The seats weren’t designed for astromech droids, of course, but with a little ingenuity on Luke’s part and some stretch on the restraints’, he managed to get Artoo wedged between two of the seats and firmly strapped in place. “Looks like everything’s already on standby,” he commented, glancing at the flickering lights on the control boards. “There’s an outlet right there—give everything a quick check while I strap in. With a little luck, maybe we can be out of here before anyone even knows we’re gone.”
She had delivered the open comlink message to Chin, and the quieter ones to Aves and the others at the Millennium Falcon; and as she stalked her way glowering across the compound toward the number three shed, Mara decided once more that she hated the universe.
She’d been the one who’d found Skywalker. She, by herself, alone. There was no question about that; no argument even possible. It should be she, not Karrde, who had the final say on his fate.
I should have left him out there, she told herself bitterly as she stomped across the beaten ground. Should have just let him die in the cold of space. She’d considered that, too, at the time. But if he’d died out there, all alone, she might never have known for sure that he was, in fact, dead.