Scarlet stood up, her cheeks flushed with exertion, but looking none the worse for wear.
“Is he dead?” Han asked.
“Put your blaster away,” Scarlet replied. “If you fire it in here, every alarm goes off.”
“Right,” Han said, and slid it back into his holster. “Is he dead?”
“No. Does your identity card open these doors? We’ll need to get him out of the hallway.”
Han punched the button next to the nearest door, and it whooshed open. “Yep.”
The room turned out to be a meeting space with a small table and six chairs, currently unoccupied. Han dragged the unconscious captain inside and dumped him unceremoniously under the table. Scarlet was already moving down the corridor to their destination.
“Ready?” she asked. Han nodded.
She punched the entry code and the door opened. Inside was a small technical station. The walls were covered with control panels and displays. It looked exactly like the kind of room that would house a cabling junction.
But in the center of the room, where the conduit access should have been, was a large control station with an Imperial officer manning it.
“I told you this was a terrible plan.”
“Excuse me?” the officer said.
“Are we in the right room?” Scarlet asked no one in particular.
“Non-military personnel—” the officer started.
“Not allowed on this level,” Han finished for him. “We know. Say, there’s supposed to be a major trunk line here, with a conduit access point.”
The officer nodded. “Yes, but the last security audit noted it as a flaw, so the cable was rerouted. This communications security station was put in to utilize the space. Do you need access to the trunk line?”
“Not as such,” Scarlet replied. For the first time since he’d met her, Han thought she looked a little lost.
“So you work on the security detail?” Han asked.
“Yes.” The officer nodded again.
“Would your access card get you into the intelligence service center above us?” Han smiled gentle encouragement at the man.
“Sure, but there’s no way they’d let non-military—”Han drew his blaster and in one smooth motion clubbed the Imperial officer on top of the head. The man slid out of his chair, boneless, and wound up in a heap on the floor.
Scarlet blinked at Han, opened her mouth as if she had something to say, then closed it without speaking.
“We tried your plan,” Han said, holding up the access card. “The rest of this, we’re doing my way.”
Nine
“This is your better plan?” Scarlet said under her breath.
“It is,” Han whispered back.
The intelligence service was the whole planet Cioran—maybe the whole Imperial Core—writ small. There were no colors in the flooring, the walls, the doors. Only shades of gray and black. The air had a sharp, astringent smell that reminded Han of cleaning up blood. The stink of the well-maintained interrogation chamber.
“Steal a keycard and just walk in,” Scarlet said. “Why didn’t I think of that? You know we’re going to die.”
“No one’ll see us coming,” Han said. “And everyone dies sometime.”
“Not comforting.”
“The alternative is we go spend a bunch of time waiting for you to come up with some other plan that doesn’t work. This way, we get all the risk out of the way quickly and get off this sinkhole of a planet.”
The guard at main desk looked up at them, curious but not yet alarmed. “I think you’re on the wrong level.”
Han grinned and held up the keycard without breaking stride. “Special permission. Someone routed the ventilation power right through the secure facility. We’ve got to move it back before anyone compromises it.”
The guard stood up, frowning. “I wasn’t informed about that.”
“General Screal doesn’t like us announcing security flaws until after they’re addressed,” Scarlet said.
“Screal?” the guard said, his eyebrows reaching for his hairline.
“Just take us a minute,” Han said, as they reached a thick steel door. He slid the keycard through the reader, and the display shifted from red to green with a loud beep. The door slid open. “See?”
As they stepped into the data center, Scarlet pulled a storage disk and a diagnostic interface out of her pocket. Around them, a thousand pillars of black ceramic glowed under blue light. The hiss of coolant and the almost inaudible ticking of power relays were the only sounds. She stepped to the nearest pillar, slid her fingers across its surface to open the control panel, and attached the interface. It squealed once, and a bright red warning code blinked on its face.
“Do we have a problem?” Han asked.
“Several,” Scarlet said. “But this isn’t one of them.”
Her fingers moved gracefully over the interface controls. The red gave way to a soft blue. She took a security chit from another pocket, slid it into the interface’s spare slot, and fed the disk into the dark pillar.
“Did we get it?”
“Soon,” she said. “So how did you wind up joining the Rebellion?”
“What? Why?”
“Just making conversation,” she said.
“An old guy and a kid were looking for a ride and I needed the money,” Han said. “After that, it was just bad luck.”
The pillar chimed and Scarlet took out the disk. The screen of the diagnostic interface flared and started running through a reboot sequence.
“We should get out of the room now,” she said.
At the front desk, the guard was scowling and tapping at his console. Han felt a tightness in his gut. His fingertip drifted toward his blaster.
“Right, then,” Han said. “We’ve got the power routing fixed, and—”
The alarm sounded, and the great steel door slammed shut behind them with a deep gonglike clang. The guard rose up, blaster in hand. Han pulled his own and shot him before the Imperial could find his aim. Together he and Scarlet raced for the doors. In the outer corridor, emergency lights flared red, while men and women in Imperial uniforms scuttled in a hundred levels of panic.
“We have to get down to the street level,” Scarlet said. “There’s a supply conveyor that runs from here to a holding facility close to the docks.” She stopped at the lifts. All of them showed the black-and-red symbol of secure lockdown. She took a small crowbar from her belt and popped the access panel free. “We’ll be going through the warehouses.”
“Actually, I’ve seen those,” Han said.
She deftly stripped three wires, crossed the connections, and reinserted them. When the unit sparked, she ignored it. The indicator on the lift stuttered back to life. The doors slid open. Ten stormtroopers, weapons drawn, looked out at them. For a moment, no one moved.
“Ah,” Han said. “Thank goodness we, um, got you guys. Did you know there’s been a security breach?”
“Halt in the name of the Empire!” one of the stormtroopers shouted, and Scarlet pulled the wires free. The lift doors closed on a barrage of blasterfire. Scarlet cursed under her breath and popped open a second access panel.
“We don’t have time,” Han said. “They’re going to get those doors open.”
“I can do this,” Scarlet Hark said between clenched teeth. The lift doors boomed as something struck them from within. Han shifted his weight from one foot to the other. At the edge of the bank of lifts, a door was marked with the sign for manual access. A stairway. Every muscle in his body was tensed with the need to run. Scarlet spat out an obscenity. The lift doors opened a centimeter, and a blaster barrel stuck out.
“All right. Enough being clever,” Han said, taking Scarlet by the shoulder. “Run now.”
The stairway dropped down a hundred or more floors below them and rose another twenty above, all lit by the angry red of the security alarms. Han and Scarlet hurried down them three steps at a time. The sound of confused and angry voice
s echoed behind them. Han’s breath was short, his legs burning from effort. The distance beneath them didn’t seem to be getting any smaller.
He stopped before he was quite sure why he’d done it. Scarlet went down another half flight, paused, and looked back over her shoulder at him. Her black eyes were confused for a moment, and then she heard it, too: the tramping of booted feet. Han leaned over the railing and looked down. Maybe ten floors below them, the alarm lights threw shadows across the handrails. Soldiers. Coming up.
“Come on,” Scarlet said, heading for the closest door, but Han stopped her, his hand on her arm.
“Up,” he said. “What about up?”
“Nothing’s up there. No flier stations. No walkways. Just transmission towers and air.”
The sound of boots grew louder. Han turned and started back up.
“Solo?”
“Come on,” he shouted. “I’ve got an idea.”
Running down the stairs had been bad. Running up was a thousand times worse. Every flight felt longer than the one before. They passed the door of the intelligence center, back where they’d come from, and then up past it. Below them, they heard doors being kicked open and the whine of scanning droids. Han forced himself on. His muscles were burning with the effort. Someone below them shouted, and a bright red blaster bolt burned the air in the shaft.
“We should hurry,” Scarlet said.
“Am hurrying.”
“You should do it faster.”
At the foot of the next flight of stairs, she paused, fixing something to the handrail. Han leaned against the wall.
“I didn’t get any rest last night,” he said.
“All right.”
“Just saying, I can usually run better than this.”
Scarlet pulled a hair-thin strand of monofilament across the steps, just below waist-high. In the red light, it was practically invisible. The drum of footsteps grew louder.
“What’s—” Han said, then swallowed. “What’s that?”
“That’s a few more seconds,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Han turned back up, pushing himself. They’d made it up another two full flights, both of them running with their shoulders touching the wall, when an electrical discharge crackled through the air. A man’s voice rose in panic, and another one shouted it down.
“That was us, right?” Han said. “We did that?”
“Makes them take it a little slower,” Scarlet said. “Hope whatever you’ve got in mind is a really good idea.”
“Me, too.”
It felt like an hour or a day or a few seconds before they reached the access panel at the top of the stairway. A polished steel grate covered it, but just beyond Han could see the brightness of daylight. Scarlet pulled an electronic lock pick from her belt at the same time Han shot the lock. Smoking and shattered, the grate swung open.
“That works, too,” Scarlet said, putting the lock pick back.
The rooftop spread out around them, a landscape of ducts and conduits, grating walkways and massive transmission towers. The largest tower rose a hundred meters over the rooftop, reaching toward the clouds. Scaffolds and ladders rose up its center. Han pointed to it.
“There,” he said. “Go!”
They sprinted over the rough ground, reaching the tower’s ladder at the same time the first stormtrooper spilled onto the roof and took aim. Han boosted Scarlet up, then followed her, climbing with one hand and tapping his comlink with the other. Blaster bolts hissed through the air and blackened the steel.
“Was there anything more to this plan?” Scarlet asked as they climbed.
“I’m working on it,” he said, and the call went through. “Chewie! It’s me. Tell me the Falcon is warmed up and ready to go.”
The comlink groaned with the Wookiee’s voice.
“Almost is not a good word,” Han said. “I need you up here now. I’m on a transmission tower on top of the Imperial Intelligence Service Center, and there are a lot people shooting at me.”
Chewbacca’s howl maxed out the comlink’s speaker. Twenty more stormtroopers had come onto the roof. The sharpness of their commander’s gestures made him look as if he were very awkwardly waving. Scarlet reached the gantry at the ladder’s top and paused, rummaging through her tool belt.
“I’ve got a better idea,” Han said. “Why don’t you get in the air and come get me first, and then I’ll explain how it happened when no one’s shooting at me?”
Scarlet held a black cylinder between her finger and thumb with a pleased smile. Han nodded at it in query, and she shook her head. She mouthed Keep going and hunched at the top of the ladder they’d just come up. Chewbacca grumbled. On the rooftop, the stormtroopers were beginning a systematic advance on the tower.
“No, it’s all right,” Han shouted. “She’s here with me. We’re both on the tower. But we need you to get us out of here.”
He reached the bottom of another ladder and looked back. Scarlet was hunched over and moving toward him quickly. Behind her, a bright orange flare marked the first ladder’s top. Chewbacca grumbled again.
“Well, you may have to go without clearance. You can take the fine out of my cut.”
A volley of blasterfire cut through the gantryway, striking sparks. Han fired half a dozen times, not bothering to aim. Chewbacca howled from the comlink, but Han couldn’t hear what he’d said. The connection dropped as Scarlet reached him.
“What did you do?” he asked, nodding back behind her.
“The decking tape I had for getting into the shaft? It’s melting down that ladder. We didn’t need it, did we?”
“Nope,” he said, and they started up again.
Level after level, they climbed, the legs of the transmission tower narrowing around them. The stormtroopers surrounded the tower’s base, firing up at them, but the steel girders and webwork of ladders and conduits took the damage. Scarlet kept sabotaging the path behind them. The only direction was up, until they reached the tiny platform where all four legs of the tower met. They were seventy meters above the rooftop. The last thirty meters to the top were reachable only by steel handholds welded into the tower’s side. That high up, even steel swayed in the wind. Han’s legs felt as if they were made of string, and his back ached. Scarlet’s hair was plastered to her forehead and neck, and she was shivering. The decking tape had run out, and she had a blaster in either hand. Below them, the stormtroopers looked like white dolls. The tower shifted, the metal groaning.
“Hmm,” Scarlet Hark said.
“What?”
“Down there.”
Han leaned to the side, peeking down. Four stormtroopers were struggling with a small plasma cannon, their commanding officer screaming at them, his voice made inaudible by distance.
“They can’t do that. They’ll take down the tower.”
Scarlet grinned. For a moment she seemed less like a rational, calculating master of espionage than a force of nature taking joy in the chaos. Not a soldier, but a criminal. “We may have made them feel a little inadequate. I wonder why they aren’t bringing in fliers.”
“Fliers?”
“That’s what I’d do. Get a few two-person fliers. Maybe a combat droid. Shoot us out of this thing without bothering with the ground game.”
Han nodded, then rested his head against the metal. Thirty meters was a hell of a long climb, and he wasn’t sure his body was up for it. He closed his eyes, listening for the faint but familiar scream of engines. Yes. There it was. “Maybe something’s keeping those guys busy.”
“Something like?”
“Come on,” he said. “We need to hurry.”
The city spread out around them in all directions, gray and hazy and bright with the sun. Flocks of birds swirled below them, passing between the massive buildings. The clouds glowed with sunlight. Han felt the first impact of the plasma cannon in his feet and fingers before he heard the explosion. He kept pushing himself up. Scarlet was just below him, grabbing the handholds as he lifted h
is feet from them. The wind was cold, the air thin. A second explosion made the transmission tower shudder. The glowing yellow navigation light at the tower’s top grew brighter with every moment.
“We’re almost out of up, Solo,” Scarlet Hark said. Her voice was thin and ragged.
“You’re never out of up,” he said. “Look.”
On the horizon, just above the level of the highest buildings, something like an electrical storm was going on. Dark shapes churned and shifted, flashes of brightness too straight to be lightning. And at the front, flying before the storm of fliers and droids, Imperial police and port authority enforcers, the beautiful gray smudge of the Millennium Falcon. The tower shuddered again and began to list. Han fired his blaster into the air three times. Four. The Falcon shifted, correcting course toward them.
“Get ready,” he said. “We don’t get to try this twice.”
The Falcon dipped a fraction when the ramp extended, then corrected. She was coming in fast, but Chewie wouldn’t be able to slow down much with half of Cioran getting scorched by their exhaust plume. Han pulled himself up to the top of the tower, ignoring the abyss before him. Scarlet clambered up at his side. Her eyes were bright. She was grinning.
“Not a good plan,” she said. “But it’s got style.”
Bolts of energy rained down from the belly of the Falcon, scattering the tiny stormtroopers far below them. The entry ramp was extended, the speed ripping contrails from the moisture in the air. Han breathed deeply, watched his ship grow larger, closer.
“Now!” he shouted, and jumped.
For a terrible moment, he thought his timing was off. A night without sleep. A hundred-meter climb while being shot at the whole way. And the day before hadn’t been much better. Being off by a few hundredths of a second could only be expected. He seemed to hang in the void, his death visible between his feet. Scarlet was a blur to his right, her arms thrown high as if in victory.
The ramp hit him in the side, bouncing him up its length. The world went small and quiet for a few seconds, and when he came fully back to consciousness, the only sounds were the shriek of the engines, the hum of the actuators pulling the ramp closed, and Scarlet laughing. He rolled onto his back and looked at her. Her hair was a wild tumble, her mouth a manic grin, and her teeth were bloody where the impact had split her lip. She shook her head as if trying to clear it.