The droid beeped questioningly, its dome swiveling around to look briefly at Skywalker. “I said let’s get going,” she repeated harshly.
The droid beeped again, a resigned sort of sound. The communicator’s pulse indicator flashed once as the droid requested a message dump from the distant X-wing’s computer; flashed again as the dump came back.
Abruptly the droid squealed in obvious excitement. “What?” Mara demanded, snatching out her blaster and giving the area a quick scan. Nothing seemed out of place. “What, there’s finally a message?”
The droid beeped affirmatively, its dome again turning toward Skywalker. “Well, let’s have it,” Mara growled. “Come on—if there’s anything in it he needs to hear, you can play it for him later.”
Assuming—she didn’t add—there wasn’t anything in the message that suggested she needed to come out of the forest alone. If there was …
The droid bent forward slightly, and a holographic image appeared on the matted leaves.
But not an image of Karrde, as she’d expected. It was, instead, an image of a golden-skinned protocol droid. “Good day, Master Luke,” the protocol droid said in a remarkably prissy voice. “I bring greetings to you from Captain Karrde—and, of course, to you as well, Mistress Mara,” it added, almost as an afterthought. “He and Captain Solo are most pleased to hear you are both alive and well after your accident.”
Captain Solo? Mara stared at the holograph, feeling totally stunned. What in the Empire did Karrde think he was doing?—he’d actually told Solo and Calrissian about Skywalker?
“I trust you’ll be able to decrypt this message, Artoo,” the protocol prissy continued. “Captain Karrde suggested that I be used to add a bit more confusion to the counterpart encrypt. According to him, there are Imperial stormtroopers waiting in Hyllyard City for you to make your appearance.”
Mara clenched her teeth, throwing a look at her sleeping prisoner. So Thrawn hadn’t been fooled. He knew Skywalker was here, and was waiting to take them both.
With a vicious effort, she stifled the fatigue-fed panic rising in her throat. No. Thrawn didn’t know—at least, not for sure. He only suspected. If he’d known for sure, there wouldn’t have been anyone left back at the camp to send her this message.
“The story Captain Karrde told the Imperials was that a former employee stole valuable merchandise and tried to escape, with a current employee named Jade in pursuit. He suggests that, since he never specified Jade as being a woman, that perhaps you and Mistress Mara could switch roles when you leave the forest.”
“Right,” Mara muttered under her breath. If Karrde thought she was going to cheerfully hand her blaster over for Skywalker to stick in her back, he’d better try thinking again.
“At any rate,” the protocol droid continued, “he says he and Captain Solo are working out a plan to try to intercept you before the stormtroopers do. If not, they will do their best to rescue you from them. I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can say at the moment—Captain Karrde has put a one-minute real-time limit on this message, to prevent anyone from locating the transmission point. He wishes you good luck. Take good care of Master Luke, Artoo … and yourself, too.”
The image vanished and the droid’s projector winked out. Mara shut down the communicator, setting the antenna spool to begin winding the balloon back down.
“It’s a good idea,” Skywalker murmured.
She looked sharply at him. His eyes were still closed. “I thought you were faking,” she spat, not really truthfully.
“Not faking,” he corrected her sleepily. “Drifting in and out. It’s still a good idea.”
She snorted. “Forget it. We’ll try going a couple of kilometers north instead, circling out and back to Hyllyard from the plains.” She glanced at her chrono, then up through the trees. Dark clouds had moved in over the past few minutes, covering the blue sky that had been there. Not rain clouds, she decided, but they would still cut rather strongly into what was left of the available daylight. “We might as well save that for tomorrow,” she said, favoring her ankle again as she got back to her feet. “You want to get—oh, never mind,” she interrupted herself. If his breathing was anything to go by, he’d drifted off again.
Which left the task of putting camp together up to her. Terrific. “Stay put,” she growled to the droid. She turned back to where she’d dropped the survival kit—
The droid’s electronic shriek brought her spinning back around again, hand clawing for her blaster, eyes flicking around for the danger—
And then a heavy weight slammed full onto her shoulders and back, sending hot needles of pain into her skin and throwing her face-first to the ground.
Her last thought, before the darkness took her, was to wish desperately that she’d killed Skywalker when she’d had the chance.
Artoo’s warbling alert jerked Luke out of his doze. His eyes snapped open, just as a blur of muscle and claw launched itself through space onto Mara’s back.
He bounded to his feet, sleepiness abruptly gone. The vornskr was standing over Mara, its front claws planted on her shoulders, its head turned to the side as it prepared to sink its teeth into her neck. Mara herself lay unmoving, the back of her head toward Luke—dead or merely stunned, it was impossible to tell. Artoo, clearly too far away to reach her in time, was nevertheless moving in that direction as fast as his wheels could manage, his small electric arc welder extended as if for battle.
Taking a deep breath, Luke screamed.
Not an ordinary scream; but a shivering, booming, inhuman howl that seemed to fill the entire clearing and reverberate from the distant hills. It was the blood-freezing call of a krayt dragon, the same call Ben Kenobi had used to scare the sand people away from him all those years ago on Tatooine.
The vornskr wasn’t scared away. But it was clearly startled, its prey temporarily forgotten. Shifting its weight partially off Mara’s back, it turned, crouching, to stare toward the sound.
For a long moment Luke locked gazes with the creature, afraid to move lest he break the spell. If he could distract it long enough for Artoo to get there with his welder …
And then, still pinned to the ground, Mara twitched. Luke cupped his hands around his mouth and howled again. Again, the vornskr shifted its weight in response.
And with a sound that was half grunt and half combat yell, Mara twisted around onto her back beneath the predator, her hands snaking past the front claws to grip its throat.
It was the only opening Luke was going to get; and with a vornskr against an injured human, it wasn’t going to last for long. Pushing off from the tree trunk behind him, Luke charged, aiming for the vornskr’s flank.
He never got there. Even as he braced himself for the impact, the vornskr’s whip tail whistled out of nowhere to catch him solidly along shoulder and face and send him sprawling sideways to the ground.
He was on his feet again in an instant, dimly aware of the line of fire burning across cheek and forehead. The vornskr hissed as he came toward it again, slashing razor-sharp claws at him to ward him back. Artoo reached the struggle and sent a spark into the predator’s left front paw; almost casually, the vornskr swung at the welder, snapping it off and sending the pieces flying. Simultaneously, the tail whipped around, the impact lifting Artoo up on one set of wheels. It swung again and again, each time coming closer to knocking the droid over.
Luke gritted his teeth, mind searching furiously for a plan. Shadowboxing at the creature’s head like this wasn’t anything more than a delaying tactic; but the minute the distraction ceased, Mara was as good as dead. The vornskr would either slash her arms with its claws or else simply overwhelm her grip by brute force. With the loss of his welder, Artoo had no fighting capability left; and if the vornskr kept at him with that whip tail …