“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.”
“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 the 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.