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He activated his comlink and requested the Special Operations office of the Chief of State.

“You have to let us in,” Octa said.

The uniformed and helmeted security woman standing in front of the closed east entrance doors shrugged. “Actually, I don't.”

“No, really, you do.” Octa made a subtle gesture with one hand and poured soothing feelings of peace and compliance into the security agent. “It's Jedi business, very important.”

The woman gave the Jedi Master a smile. Perhaps it would have been a scowl of irritation had Octa not been smothering her with dreamy goodness through the Force. “First, the doors just sealed. It's called a lockdown. Happens all the time, nothing to worry about, nothing to see here. I'm sure the office will tell us in a minute why. Second, no, not only can I not let you in until the lockdown ends, really I don't have to.”

Exasperated, Octa turned away and returned to the side of her apprentice a few paces back. “We need another entrance. One with an appropriately weak-willed guard.”

Seha's eyes were unfocused as she stared at a blank wall of the building. “He's moving. Looking for something. Ascending, I think.”

“A vehicle. He has to be looking for an escape vehicle.” Octa turned back toward the guard and raised her voice. “You, where are the hangar exits from this building?”

“That's classified.”

“Some of them are public!”

“Everything's classified during a lockdown.”

Octa made a strangled noise and turned back to Seha. “I hate good guards. They're the most inconvenient things in the universe.”

“Happiness. He's elated.”

“Can't he feel you?”

“Maybe. Maybe he doesn't care. He's about to get away.”

“Meld with me. Give me a sense of him so I can pick him out.”

Seha extended herself through the Force, a tentative expression of power—she was years behind other Jedi students her age, many of whom were already Jedi Knights. But she performed the technique correctly, and Octa could feel her emotions, feel the distinctive characteristics of the living being Seha was trying to track.

It was easier for the Master. “Up about ten meters, this way.” She set off at a trot northward, along the wall that would gradually curve around toward the north entrance. Seha followed.

Octa could feel decisions being made—“He's considering two vehicles. No, he's taking two vehicles. How can he take two vehicles?”

“One inside the other?”

They found out seconds later. A hundred meters farther, they heard a tremendous shriek of metal from ahead and above. A shuttle with Kuati markings emerged from the building—through a closed portal, the impact hurling slabs of artificial stone and durasteel supports scores of meters. Passing through the non-exit, which was too small for the shuttle's generous girth, caused the vehicle's upraised wings to rip clean off; they fell to either side. The shuttle, angling downward, headed toward the permacrete of the plaza. Octa could neither see nor detect a pilot in the shuttle's cockpit.

The shuttle's repulsors were not the only ones to be heard. Before the building alarms cut in, their howl drowning out all other noises, Octa heard another, more familiar set of repulsors increasing in volume from within the hangar.

She put on a Force-aided burst of speed, then leapt, trying to achieve as much altitude and distance as she could. As she leapt, she shouted, “Push!”

Her apprentice, though underconfident and undertrained, was smart, and telekinesis was something she was good at. Octa felt Seha's effort not as a blow to her back but almost as a short blast of wind, a stream of power that lofted her, propelled her.

As the gray X-wing emerged from the hangar through the ruined door, Octa slammed into the starboard side of the fuselage, her right arm scrabbling at the nose just in front of the canopy. The impact hammered her ribs.

Valin Horn, in the pilot's seat, inappropriately dressed in businessman's garments, looked surprised. He stared at Octa, mouth open.

Unseen, behind Octa in the distance, the ruined shuttle came down on the plaza with a noise like tons of metal and