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Still, he’d have to take her out, and her partner, and the big floating ball in order to get into the room.

Prioritize your steps, Jacen always told him.

Priority One was the floating droid. It had to be some sort of combat model, so it was going to be tough, and maybe alert to attack, even from as unlikely a source as a redheaded urchin. Ben let his pouch gape open so he could look down at his lightsaber. If he reached for it, the droid might correctly interpret the motion as the herald of an attack. But he didn’t have to reach. After the droid, he’d take out whichever of the human agents was more alert to him, then the one less alert, but he’d wait for the moment to decide which was which.

Another of Jacen’s lessons was Plan and time your steps. The woman was stepping up to the doorway and preparing to insert her identicard into a security board slot. The man wasn’t moving. It was a staredown.

That gave Ben a moment to plan. He’d need to wait until the door was just opening. Then he’d take out the droid. His next priority would be getting into the chamber before the door closed again, and any security monitor might shut it as soon as it was open. So he’d rush through the door and deal with the human guards as he passed.

After that—Jacen would be disappointed in him if he didn’t figure out some way off this station, but Ben didn’t have time right now. The staredown between the guards ended. Irritably, the man stepped out of the way and the woman inserted her identicard in the slot.

Everything began to move in slow motion, as though the entire corridor were suddenly submerged in thick, invisible fluid. Ben saw the door begin to slide upward. Doors like this opened almost instantly, but his time perception was so dilated that he watched it as it rose a meter.

He held his hand above his pouch and tugged through the Force. His lightsaber leapt up into his hand, and he snapped it on, swinging it at the hovering droid even as the distorted snap-hiss noise announced that the blade was coming live.

Instead of slashing, he leapt upward and thrust down, aiming for one of the deflector shield nodules. The point of his lightsaber blade sheared through the bronze hull there, punching into the droid’s insides. Ben kept his hands on the lightsaber handle, letting his weight drag the weapon down through the droid.

The droid fell almost as fast as he did—with agonizing slowness—and Ben could see the male guard reacting to the attack, bringing his rifle barrel up.

Ben’s heels hit the ground and he continued downward, going into a sideways roll toward the now fully open doorway. The male guard tried to track the boy with his blaster rifle. The woman, her face distorted in surprise, was punching the CLOSE button on the security panel. Her identicard was still in the panel’s card slot.

Ben came up on his feet between the man and the woman, so close that the man’s blaster barrel now protruded safely past him, and lashed out at the control panel. His lightsaber blade slashed into the controls and into the identicard, burning and fusing it into place. The blade came so close to the back of the woman’s hand that he saw her skin blacken along a four-centimeter patch. Her knuckles still hit the CLOSE button, even as the near edges of that button melted from the lightsaber’s heat. Ben continued his forward roll, going head over heels into dimness—and, as the door came slamming down behind him, into darkness illuminated only by the glowing blue blade of his weapon.

He couldn’t make out much of the chamber’s interior. There was a large mass in front of him, as if someone had parked a small groundspeeder on its tail there—it didn’t correspond to anything Dr. Seyah had shown him in the simulations. There were little lights in various colors all over the walls.

First things first. He spun and lunged back at the door, thrusting with his lightsaber at the top, where the lifter mechanism should be. He shoved the lightsaber blade in well above his head,