Below it was stone, and the stone portion kept rising, one meter, two, three, while Luke slogged his way over toward the side of the tank.

Then the stone gave way to machinery, another three meters of metal construction, before the whole apparatus clanked to a stop.

Mara and the others were well back from the apparatus, covering it with blasters. "What did you do?"

Luke pulled the breathing mask off. "I turned a wheel. Something obviously still has power."

He saw Face glance in his direction and grin. Tahiri, in the light from the glowrods, looked at him, flushed red, and turned away, staring back at the plug. Danni joined her in this scrutiny.

Mara suppressed a laugh; it came out as a cough. "Luke, before you step out and join us, out of respect for those of us you're not married to, you might want to be sure that you're presentable."

Luke glanced down. His torso was bare. He reached down into the goo. The submerged portions of his garment were missing, too.

He reached the edge of the tank and stood close to it. "I guess I forgot to tell the stuff, 'My clothes aren't food, either.' "

"I guess you did."

"Could you pass me my pack?"

The plug was a turbolift housing. Once Luke was out of the tank and dressed in spare clothes-his black cling-suit, which was more likely to be visible in the joints and gaps of his false vonduun crab armor-he could see the doors that gave access to the turbolift within. They opened readily enough when Luke neared them, spilling bright artificial glow out onto the floor.

He peeked within. The control panel had only three settings: MAINTENANCE, HOUSING, and RESEARCH.

"Research," Danni said.

Luke snorted. "1 knew you'd say that."

"We all did," Bhindi said. "But I have no objection."

Face brought up his comlink. "Kell, Elassar?"

"We hear you." The voice was Kell's.

"We may be gone for a little while. Don't be surprised or alarmed."

"As long as Aunt Tahiri is going to be back in time for my bedtime story, I'll be all right."

Tahiri sighed. "He's starting to get on my nerves. Doesn't he know that's a bad idea?"

Baljos snorted. "He knows. But he's a demolitions expert. He likes playing with things that blow up in his face."

They entered the turbolift. Its doors shut them in. Luke hit the button reading RESEARCH.

The turbolift did not immediately move. An antiquated droid voice, coming from an overhead speaker, addressed them: "State your name and Bluenek authorization code. You have ten seconds to comply... before you die."

Vannix, Vankalay System "We can probably manage twenty or more public appearances in the next four days," Leia said. She was whispering, her words nearly drowned out by her other voice, the one emerging from R2-D2, who was replaying the recording of an argument they'd had a few days ago about Corellia's Senators. "I'm not sure what the anti-jedi sentiment is on Vannix; if there's any significant amount, we ought to downplay me and promote you.

Han Solo, the Hero." She sat at one end of the most comfortable of the chamber's couches.

Han lay stretched out on his back on the couch, his head in Leia's lap. He stared incuriously at the ornate floral pattern on the ceiling of their quarters. "Sounds like a lot of work."

"Politics is hard work, Han. Hasn't being married to me all these years taught you that?"

"Oh, yes. Which is one reason I'm still not a politician. And I have to point out, we could do all that work and she could still win."

"It's true."

"In which case the Yuuzhan Vong get another allied world, and we don't get our submersibles. And I've already sent off for the transport for them, so I'll look like an idiot."

"Also true. So?"

"So there are two reasons to play sabacc, Leia. For fun, or to make money. If your main goal is to have fun, losing a little money isn't too bad. If you're out to make money, and you do, not having fun isn't much of a hardship."

Leia looked into her husband's eyes, suspicious, "I worry whenever anything that sounds even vaguely like philosophy comes out of your mouth. What are you getting at?"

He flashed her a trust-me grin. "I'm getting at the fact that you're talking about playing a fair game. It's much better under these circumstances to cheat at cards. Better, faster, and surer."

Coruscant Luke ignited his lightsaber and held the blade over his head, the better to deflect any blaster damage raining down upon them. But he didn't know what sorts of booby-traps had been set up on this turbolift, didn't know if it would be blaster damage or poison gas, blades, or acid, attacks from above or below. "Mara, cut the door open," he said.

His wife looked confused, eyes flickering back and forth, not focusing on the door before them.

"You have five seconds remaining," said the droid voice.

"Tahiri," Luke said. "The door."

Tahiri lit her lightsaber with a snap-hiss and plunged its point into the metal at the seam. The door began to glow and soften, but it was obvious that it would take far more than five seconds to cut an exit-sized hole in it.

"Authorization Bluenek two seven ithor four nine na-boo," Mara said.

"Accepted," said the droid voice. "Welcome, Mara Jade."

The turbolift dropped. Tahiri, thrown off-balance, stumbled, her lightsaber blade swinging around toward Bhindi. Luke caught and deflected the accidental blow, and Tahiri snapped her lightsaber off almost instantly. "Sorry," she said.

"Don't be." Luke shut his own weapon off. He turned to Mara. "You knew about this?"

The turbolift stopped and the doors snapped open, revealing a hallway, its contents and walls made visible by light spilling in from doorways to either side. The hall was strewn with wreckage, pieces of chairs, chunks of ceiling, fragments of droids.

The air was cool, but strong with the smell of decay; it overpowered the perfume in Luke's nostrils. But there was, in Luke's ears, for the first time in days, the hum of air-processing units and other powered equipment: the hum of civilization.

There were, however, no voices. No distant noises suggesting broadcasts or recordings being listened to.

Tahiri looked at black scorching on the wall nearest her.

"Lightsaber hit," she said. Her voice was subdued, a whisper appropriate to this setting. "It looks like some of the droids got if that way, too."

Luke returned his attention to his wife. "Mara?"

Recovering, Mara shook her head. "No, I didn't know about this. But there was a chance-I used various access codes back when I was the Emperor's Hand. Some gave me access to credit accounts, to weapon caches, to military cooperation. I had a Bluenek Section code I never had occasion to use. It's been a long time. I almost didn't remember it."

Baljos rose from a pile of rubbish-a collapsed desk, a toppled cabinet, a spray pattern of body parts Luke thought were more droid components until he took a closer look at them. "Fatality here," Baljos said, his voice unusually subdued. "Human female, middle-aged, cut into about eight pieces. Lightsaber damage again, I think." He turned away from the grisly spectacle. "Danni?"

Danni held one of her sensors in her hand. "There's a lot of electromagnetical. From functioning equipment, I think. It's masking any major biological energy, if there is any."

Luke closed his eyes and extended his perceptions into the Force.

He didn't find any signs of large living organisms. He couldn't. As soon as he began to extend his awareness, he became aware of it, the darkness he'd detected from above. Here, it was much closer, a suffusion of anger and violent intent that threatened to make him sick to his stomach. He opened his eyes and shook his head at the other Jedi. "We search the hard way," he said.

It was an expansive scientific complex. This floor had indeed been a scientific research station... decades in the past. Computer systems dating from before Luke's birth lay under dust covers, and Danni identified one long-unused laboratory as being devoted to cellular analysis.

The most curious feature of the floor, however, was a chamber to one side of the laboratories. It held nothing more than a long apparatus that looked like a bed with a lid. "A hermetically sealed sleeping unit,"

Bhindi suggested.

"An Imperial-era suspended animation unit," Baljos corrected.

"Later modified to be different from production units, since whatever was in it was nearly three meters tall. Not human."

Privately, Luke disagreed. The characteristic of the chamber that many of the others couldn't detect was that it reeked of the dark side of the Force-it was the source, or at least a source, of the disquiet he had felt. And it somehow suggested humanity to him, humanity at its worst.

There was something familiar about this darkness, familiar and ghastly. "Can you tell what it was?" Luke asked.

Baljos looked at the unit. The trans part steel cover had been thrown aside with such strength and violence that it was warped, the hinges along one side and locking latch on the other broken. The machinery that would have surrounded the sleeper like insulation was torn free from its housing and lay in pieces around the chamber. So did four medical droids-Luke thought it was four, gauging from the number of droid heads within sight, but he had to admit that their state of dismemberment made actual calculations difficult. "Depends on whether any memory survived in this machinery," Baljos said. "More Bhindi's department than mine. But if it did, and even if the memory doesn't obligingly say 'Ithorian' or 'wampa' or something, I might be able to figure it out based on the settings and life-sign readings it recorded."

Mara stuck her head in through a darkened doorway at the corner of the chamber. "Luke, this should interest you." She tossed something toward Luke's feet.

From the manner with which it twisted and curled as it flew, Luke suspected that it was part of an amphistaff, but when it landed at his feet, he saw that he'd been wrong. This sinuous body was covered in fur and had legs ending in needlelike claws. It had been dead for some days.

"Ysalamiri," he said.

"Your friend and mine," Mara said. "There are pieces of a cage and some Myrkr tree limbs in here. And access halls to similar chambers at the other seven corners of the chajnber. Dead ysalamiri there, too."

"That actually makes sense." Ysalamiri were reptilian creatures of the planet Myrkr. Generally docile, content to live on their trees, they had a trait that made them of considerable interest to Jedi and other Force-wielders: They projected a sort of energy that repelled the Force, kept its energies at bay. An ysalamiri's projections canceled the effects of the Force out to a distance of ten meters. Those who knew their traits had used them to hide things from the Jedi, even to capture the Jedi and temporarily strip them of their powers. "If this has been here all these years, I should have felt it before now while we were living on Coruscant. But if this chamber was surrounded by ysalamiri, with their anti-Force bubbles overlapping, it would have masked the presence of whatever was here."

"Whatever it is," Face said. "The way I read it, this thing woke up, busted out, destroyed all the droids around it. With just its strength, you'll notice, because there are no burn marks on the droids in here or on the suspended animation unit. When it gets into other parts of the complex, it gets its hands on a lightsaber and finishes the job. Then it destroys the other droids and the ysalamiri."

Luke nodded. "That could be it. But how did it get out of this complex? With the ysalamiri dead, we'd feel it if it were still here."

Minutes later, they had their answer.

Two levels above, on the floor that had been marked MAINTENANCE, Tahiri pointed upward into what had been a machinery-access niche. The metal panel that had been the niche's ceiling was gone; the edges of the hole were burned. "This leads to a water and atmosphere supply shaft,"

she said. "It has pipes in it, but also plenty of open space. I climbed up a pretty good distance; it leads up to a hole in a wall a couple of levels up from the chamber with the red goo."

"Is the hole easy to access?" Bhindi asked.

Tahiri shook her head. "Not for normal people. It's about five meters up on a ten-meter wall. But anybody with a ladder could get up to it,"

"Especially obvious?"

"No, it's on one side of a storage house. Full of carpeting and wall decorations. Really useful stuff. No sign of people there. Why?"

"Because," Bhindi said, "in addition to this mystery of a three-meter-tall whatever-it-is, we have here a complex that still has power, a complex that's hidden from sight.

It's big enough to be the headquarters of the first resistance cell I organize."

"Not a good idea," Luke said, "That three-meter being knows where it is. He or she may come back."

"So we close up its exit hole, hide it, maybe secure that approach against intrusion." Bhindi fixed Luke with a grave look. "Besides, I suspect that you're not going to let that thing keep walking around out there. Are you?"

"I hope not." Luke looked up the hole; only a few meters of the water and atmosphere pipes were visible in the dim light from their glow rods. "It's very strong, very evil. And I have no idea whether we have enough resources here to stop it."

Vannix, Vankalay System The tall man wrapped in a gray hooded cloak entered the shop. His face was shadowed by the hood; under the cloak his garments were plain, dark trousers and tunic of the sort that any laborer might wear. Behind him rolled a blue and white R2-class astromech.

The shop owner, an aged human man with a fringe of white hair and rheumy blue eyes, sighed. He moved his hand inconspicuously under the counter to grip the hilt of the blaser pistol bolstered there. He hated clients who preferred to remain anonymous. So often they were on business that invited government scrutiny, and those were the best cases-the worst were when they were here to rob rather than employ. But this one, at least, had brought a droid, which suggested his business was actually in the shop owner's line.

"You repair droids?" the cloaked man asked. His accent was foreign.

Corellian, perhaps.

"We do," the shop owner said. "We have cleverly concealed that information on the sign outside, the blinking apparatus that reads NINGAL'S DROID REPAIR."

Apparently oblivious to irony, the visitor nodded. "I want this one fixed."

"Certainly. What's the nature of his malfunction?"

The cloaked man sighed. "He has a partner, a protocol droid, and they argue. The protocol droid apparently hacked into his speech translators and now all he does is insult. We want that programming removed. We also want his recording memory wiped. Not his other programming-just the recording memory."

"Easily done."

"You can wipe it in such a way that what's on it can't ever be retrieved? Not by anyone, no matter how good?"

"Also easily done. I just have to overwrite every portion of his recording memory with something else - several times, to make sure the most sensitive retrieval equipment can't dig underneath the new material."

The cloaked man breathed a sigh of relief. "Good."

The shop owner tapped the counter. "Plug in here, please."

The astromech obligingly rolled forward. He extended his datajack arm. and plugged in; a moment later, a text screen lit up on the shop owner's countertop, "What's your name, little fellow?" the shop owner asked.

The words THAT'S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS appeared on the screen. IN ANY CASE, YOUR FACIAL FEATURE SET SUGGESTS THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE THE.

INTELLIGENCE TO RETAIN MY NAME FOR MORE THAN A NANOSECOND. IT IS EVIDENT.

THAT YOU HAVE BEEN TAUGHT TO REPEAT SOUNDS YOU HAVE HEARD AND THAT YOU.

UNDERSTAND NEITHER THE WORDS YOU HEAR NOR THE ONES THAT EMERGE FROM YOUR.

MOUTH.