Vision of the future

'And then, what, given up after the first three years?'

Karrde shook his head. 'It doesn't make sense to me, either,' he conceded. 'But I knew Car'das; and he wasn't the sort of person who could just sit around doing nothing. He was a ruthless man, hard and calculating, who never forgave a wrong against him and never let anyone or anything stand in the way of what he wanted. And he lived for challenges—the bigger, the better.

'And he knows I'm here, and that I'm looking for him. That little man—Entoo Nee—is all the proof we need of that.'

An involuntary shiver ran through Shada. The Wild Karrde, which had felt so safe and secure up till now, suddenly felt small and very vulnerable. 'And so here we are. Walking straight into his hands.'

'You, at least, should have nothing to fear from him,' Karrde assured her. 'You're not connected in any way with me or my organization.' He hesitated. 'As a matter of fact, that's why I agreed to let you come along.'

Shada stared at him as understanding suddenly slapped her like an ice-soaked rag. 'You're expecting him to kill you, aren't you?' she breathed. 'And you think...?'

'You're not associated with me, Shada,' Karrde said quietly. 'Everyone else aboard the ship is. I would have come alone, but I knew I couldn't survive the trip to Exocron in anything smaller or less well armed than the Wild Karrde. Car'das is a vengeful man; but like Bombaasa, he likes to consider himself cultured. I hope to talk him out of killing me, of course; I hope even more that he won't harm my crew. But if he's adamant on settling old scores... I hope at least I can persuade him to let you go back to the New Republic with a copy of the Caamas Document.'

Shada shook her head. 'Karrde, this is insane—'

'At any rate, that's the whole story,' he cut her off easily, standing up and swinging his chair back to where it had been. 'Oh, except for the fact that the huge data library Car'das had built up over the years vanished along with him, which is why we think he may have a copy of the Caamas Document. And now, you do need to get to that bacta tank. I'll see you later.' With a nod, he left. 'Karrde, this is insane,' Shada repeated again, quietly, to the empty room. It was only later, floating in the bacta tank, that the other part of it occurred to her. Karrde was hoping, he had said, that Car'das would allow her to leave.

But he wasn't guaranteeing it.

CHAPTER

15

Splitter Of Stones said something in that irritating Qom Jha almost-voice and fluttered to his usual upside-down perch on a stunted stalactite. 'Great,' Luke announced. 'We seem to be here.' Mara raised her glow rod beam from the ground in front of her and scanned the walls of the passageway, hardly daring to believe the grueling four-day trip was finally over. Cities or starships or even a quiet encampment under the open sky—those were her milieus of choice. This business of grubbing around dark, dusty tunnels with grime and dripping water and dank air all around was emphatically not her cup of elba.

But she'd survived it, and she hadn't wanted to kill any of the Qom Jha more than twice a day, and the astromech droid hadn't caused too many problems, and Skywalker had been unexpectedly congenial company. And now, they were finally here.

Of course, from now on they would be facing the High Tower, with all its unknown dangers. But that was all right. Danger was also one of her milieus of choice.

One of Luke's, too, come to think of it.

'There it is,' Luke said, his own searching glow rod beam settling on a patch of rock along the wall a few meters ahead down the passageway. 'Just this side of that archway.'

'Archway?' Mara repeated, frowning as she turned her glow rod that direction. Surely someone hadn't actually built an archway down here in the middle of nowhere, had they?

No. It looked rather like an archway, certainly, with its more or less vertical side pillars creating a two-meter-wide bottleneck in the cavern passageway and its mostly circular upper arch butting up against the ceiling three meters above. But anything more than a cursory glance showed instantly that it was a natural formation, created by some trick of erosion or rock intrusion or long-gone water flow.

'It was a figure of speech,' Luke said, shifting his light to the formation, too. 'Sort of brings to mind that archway in Hyllyard City on Myrkr, doesn't it?'

'You mean the big mushroom-shaped thing you did your best to drop on us?' she countered.

'The one we had to grind our way through three days' worth of forest to get to? The one where half the stormtroopers in the Empire were sitting around waiting for us to show up?'

'That's the place,' he said, and she could sense his amusement at her recitation. 'You left out where you wanted