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Luke nodded and waited for me to come around on Mirax’s other side. “Ready?”

“Let’s do it.” I gave him a nod, then leaned down and kissed my wife on the lips.

FORTY-EIGHT

Mirax’s brown eyes blinked open and she began to smile. She reached up with her right hand, grabbed a fistful of my tunic and pulled me back down, covering her mouth with mine. We kissed with the urgency of lost love found, heart’s pain eased. I stroked her hair and she kept me close, then we both had to come up for air.

Pulling back so I could see all of her face, I smiled. “Hi.”

“Hi, yourself. You’re pretty cute.” She smiled back up at me, sending a jolt through me from head to toe and back again. “Of course, if my husband finds out you kissed me like that, you’ll be in big trouble.”

Luke burst out laughing. “Her, I like.”

I kissed her on the tip of her nose. “You remember Luke Skywalker, right?”

“I do indeed. Good to see you again, though I could have hoped for better circumstances.” Mirax sat up, swung her legs over the edge of the bier and stretched. “I don’t even want to know where this rock is, I just want to know you have a plan for getting us off it.”

The distant whine of blasters accompanied Elegos’ entry into the detention cell. “Ooryl has them cut off at the stair landing. We better move before they bring up reinforcements.”

Mirax cocked her head at the Caamasi. “A Caamasi?”

“Elegos A’kla, Trustant of the Caamasi community at Kerilt.” I looked at her. “He’s been taking good care of me.”

She laughed and threw Elegos a salute. “You have my thanks and sympathies. Taking care of him can be quite a chore.”

Elegos shrugged. “Not really, you have him well trained.”

“Still leaves dirty clothes lying about, though, right?”

I cleared my throat. “We can have this discussion later. Any chance we can make it back to the spaceport from here?”

Elegos shook his head. “Not likely.”

Mirax hefted the blaster carbine I’d left on the bier. “Then we go to the top of the big tower. They have a landing pad there—that’s how they brought me in after they separated me from the Skate. We steal some speeder bikes or a shuttle and make a dash for your ship.”

Luke nodded. “It’s a plan.”

Mirax pointed at the door. “Let’s move, then.”

The Jedi Master looked at me. “Notice any resemblance between her and Mara?”

I shivered. “Now that you mention it … let’s make sure they never get together, okay?”

“Right.”

From the far end of the corridor, Ooryl was filling the stairwell with a hail of laser bolts, stippling the wall behind the first landing with little fires. Two stormtroopers lay tangled on the stairs, and others kept peeking around the edge. They snapped their heads back when Ooryl fired at them. Stretching out my senses, I could feel a knot of them waiting on the stairs and toward that end of the corridor above us.

I smiled. “I’ve got a piece of a plan. Mirax, the blaster, please.” I pointed at the ceiling. “Elegos, if you can boost me up there.”

Luke held a hand out. “Permit me.” With a simple gesture I rose toward the ceiling as steadily as if standing on a stone platform.

I ignited my lightsaber and cored a circle in the ceiling above me, then shoved it out of the way as Luke pushed me all the way up through it. Taking a step forward, I brought the blaster carbine up and lashed the stream of blue energy darts back and forth over the crowd of armor-shelled warriors clogging the corridor’s end. Their armor deflected some shots and ablated to lessen the power of others—reducing them from stunning to something that just dazed the soldiers, but I had such clean shots at them that they were at my mercy.

Elegos came up through the hole next and blazed away with his blaster. His blue bolts struck befuddled targets, enveloping them in a collapsing sphere of blue that dropped them easily. Trapped as they were, they were not really a fighting force, just targets waiting to be shot. I scythed my fire over them and together we finished them off.

Ooryl came up the