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“…say we just take everything we have to Tralus and blow them right out of their beachhead…” “…acceptable losses…” “…not a very popular position, but we don’t really need a full-sized navy…” “…saw Tarania Lona’s new holosquirmer. She has the most…” “…continue to refuse to cooperate, we’re going to have to…” “…if they were true Corellians, they’d never have let themselves be taken alive…”

Full darkness fell, and a tiny green dot appeared halfway up the squashed dome of Thrackan’s home. It remained there for half a minute and then disappeared.

Mara checked to make sure her lightsaber and other equipment were in place. Then she rolled over the lip of the roof and fell two stories to the sidewalk, landing as lightly as a leaf fluttering to the ground.

She held herself in a crouch, her dark robes making her all but invisible, and waited until there was no speeder cross-traffic to be seen. She came up out of her crouch like a sprinter and was across the avenue and up against the base of the featureless duracrete wall a moment later. A quick flex of the legs and boost of the Force and she was atop that wall—

Not quite. She did not allow herself to come down on the walltop. It, too, was said to have pressure sensors on its walkway and would reveal her presence if she did so. Instead, she caught herself with the Force, creating a bubble between her and the top of the wall, and drifted just over that surface until she was above the blue clover on the far side.

It was time to be a Jedi instead of a spy. As a spy, she’d probably have fixed a line thrower to the top of the CorSec building, launched a driller projectile, trailing a nearly invisible cable, to affix itself to the top of Thrackan’s dome, and used a powered or hand-cranked winch to carry her the quarter kilometer from rooftop to rooftop…and even so, her chances of detection would have been very high. Instead, she carried almost no equipment, and her chances of detection would be determined by her own concentration.

She allowed herself to float down to stand just above the blue clover. The bubble of Force energy that kept her aloft was easier to maintain when she was mere centimeters above the surface—merely having the mental image, the paradigm, of it as a sort of air-filled balloon improved her ability to perceive it, to maintain it. She’d need to employ all the concentration tricks she knew, because what she was about to do was very tricky.

At the base of the wall, she stood a moment, eyes closed, and focused on the other things she’d have to do to cross two hundred meters of sensor-filled open space.

Air. She could not keep air from moving, of course. As she moved, she would displace it. But she added motion to the air she displaced, so that it moved out in a single stream, losing neither speed nor coherence for dozens of meters ahead of her. To a sensor, it would read not as the movement of a person across the lawn, but as a breeze.

Heat. That would be the trickiest part. If she radiated heat, infrared sensors would inevitably pick it up. She surrounded herself with another bubble, this one of containment…and immediately felt her temperature begin to rise as the heat she expended stayed within centimeters of her skin. She could even control herself to the point that she did not sweat, and would need to do so here—but that, too, would increase her internal temperature.

She couldn’t sustain the effect of heat entrapment for long; she would end up collapsing. But she should be able to sustain it long enough to cross the open space between wall and bunker…and in that time, infrared detectors would not see her.

Probably.

She stepped forward, concentrating on the act of walking, reminding herself that the movement of her legs was only a comforting paradigm—levitating in some other pose would require more of her attention. Each step felt a bit wobbly, as though she were moving across a flexible playground surface, but she fell into a regular pace and let her muscle memory