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Jacen felt Ben’s motion as the boy swung to record the blaster-versus-lightsaber conflict.

“Is that enough?” Ben asked.

Jacen shook his head. “Get the whole chamber. And while you’re doing it, figure out what we’re supposed to do next.”

“I was kind of thinking we ought to get out of here.”

With the tip of his lightsaber blade, Jacen caught a blast that was crackling in toward his right shin. He popped the blast back toward its firer. It hit the woman’s blaster rifle, searing it into an unrecognizable lump, causing her green shoulder armor momentarily to catch fire. She retreated, one of her fellow soldiers patting out her flames. Now there were fewer than fifteen soldiers standing against the Jedi, and their temporary commander was obviously rethinking his make-a-stand orders.

“Good. How?”

“Well, the way we came in—no. They’d be waiting for us.”

“Correct.”

“And you never want to fight the enemy on ground he’s chosen if you can avoid it.”

Jacen grinned. Ben’s words, so adult, were a quote from Han Solo, a man whose wisdom was often questionable—except on matters of personal survival. “Also correct.”

“So…the ends of those assembly lines?”

“Good. So go.”

Jacen heard the scrape of a heel as Ben vaulted over the rail. Not waiting, Jacen leapt laterally, clearing the rail by half a meter, and spun as he fell. Ahead of and below him, Ben was just landing in a crouch on the nearest assembly line, which was loaded with opalescent shell casings. As Jacen landed, bent knees and a little upward push from the Force easing the impact, Ben raced forward, reflexively swatting aside the grasping hand of a too-bold line worker, and crouched as he lunged through the diminutive portal at the end of the line.

Jacen followed. He heard and felt the heat of blaster bolts hitting the assembly line behind him. He swung his lightsaber back over his shoulder, intercepting one bolt, taking the full force of the impact rather than deflecting the bolt into a neighboring line.

No line workers tried to grab him, and in seconds he was squeezing through the portal.

chapter two

In the next chamber, racing between and across assembly lines while workers ducked to get out of their way or, occasionally and more foolishly, lunged at them, Jacen and Ben spotted turbolift doors. It took a moment to get to them, and another moment to realize that the sensors indicated no movement of the turbolift beyond even when they’d pressed the SUMMON button multiple times. With a sigh of exasperation, Jacen cut his way into the turbolift shaft and he and his apprentice leapt through the hole, its edges still glowing, to grasp the diagonal support spars on the far side of the shaft. Clinging there, they could see the turbolift car roof about ten meters below…but this shaft was side by side with another, and the car in that shaft was only a few meters down and rising fast.

Jacen swung over the second shaft and readied himself for the shock of impact when the turbolift car reached him. He could feel Ben following his motion, could even feel it as Ben also began focusing on aspects of the Force that would allow for the absorption of kinetic energy…

Then the rising car hit them. They absorbed the shock with their knees and with control over the Force, and suddenly they were hurtling upward along the darkened shaft.

Jacen estimated that they’d risen three hundred meters or more before the car executed a rapid deceleration and locked into place a mere three meters before the top of the shaft. Jacen and Ben both grabbed at support spars at the shaft’s side. After a moment’s noise from beneath—hissing of opening doors, tramping of feet, conversation, closing doors—the car dropped away out of sight, leaving them alone in comparative silence at the top of the shaft.

“I think we’re aboveground,” Ben said.

“Well aboveground.” Jacen ignited his lightsaber and plunged it into what he assumed was the back wall of the shaft—the direction opposite that of the turbolift doors lining the shaft below