Alliances (Star Wars: Thrawn, #2)(68)

“Very,” LebJau said, giving her a suspicious look. “The Bins are in a block, all thick permacrete, inside another enclosure that has just one access door.”

“Locked?”

“Double-key system, yeah.”

“Are there any similar Bins in this wing?” If she could see what she was up against, maybe she could figure out an escape trick. If she could, it might make sense to let the droids take her.

“No, just in the east wing,” LebJau said. “They always promised to put some in here, but that never happened. I wish they had—people were always stealing other people’s stuff. Didn’t happen in the east wing, not after the Bins were set up. Why do you want to know all this?”

“I’m just concerned that you might get tossed into one,” Padmé said. “If that happens, I’ll want to know how to get you out.”

He snorted. “Yeah, good luck with that. Look, I better go.”

“Sure,” Padmé said. “Get some sleep, and I’ll see you whenever you can get back. And thank you again.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “Good night.”

A minute later he was gone. Two minutes after that, Padmé felt a faint, brief draft as he opened and then closed the service-level trapdoor again.

Her first task was to check out the windows. She started with the outer set, approaching at an angle and as low to the floor as she could manage. In theory, an unused and sealed wing shouldn’t be under close surveillance, but all it would take would be a chance glance by a droid or one of their overseers to ruin everything.

Unfortunately, the mesh barring the windows was as solid as it looked. Whoever had built this place had been serious about keeping out intruders.

Which just served to underline what LebJau had said about the secure storerooms. Maybe getting herself captured and stuck in there wouldn’t be a good move after all.

A check of the inward side windows yielded the same negative results. If she was going to get out of this part of the factory, it wouldn’t be through the windows. Not without some tools and a lot of time.

A search of the entire room came next. Again, her original cursory assessment proved accurate: no tools, no equipment, no scraps or bits of electronics, nothing.

But at least she was out of the boat and into the facility itself. Progress, however slight.

Tomorrow, she decided, she would set herself up by one of the inner windows where she hopefully wouldn’t be seen and give the other wings of the factory a few hours’ worth of surveillance. She would look for traffic patterns in the courtyard, see which windows had the most activity behind them, and try to get a count of droids and the people overseeing them.

Though she’d have to use her monocular without its enhancements, lest someone pick up the electronic signature and track it back to her. Still, straight optical magnification would be better than nothing—

And right in the middle of that thought the inner, factory-side windows exploded with a blaze of light.

She was flat on the floor in an instant, her heart pounding, her squinting eyes fighting to recover from the blast and adjust to the glare. Her backpack was on the floor a meter away; snagging it with her foot, she pulled it up to her side and slid out her S-5 Security blaster. The cubicle partitions wouldn’t be much use as defensive barriers, but they would at least let her play catch-the-mouse for a while before they ran her to ground. She eased her head and blaster around the edge of LebJau’s cubicle, lining up the weapon on the stairwell—

A shadow suddenly cut across the blaze of light. She jerked around again, to see a pair of vulture droids in escort formation hover briefly in the light and then rise again out of her view.

Her gun hand sagged to the floor as her whole body went limp with relief. So that was it. No intruder alert, no sudden recognition that a spy had penetrated their defenses. Just turning on the landing lights for an incoming ship and its escort.

She gave it a couple of minutes anyway, just to be on the safe side. Then, tucking her blaster into her belt, she crawled on elbows and knees toward the inner windows. If she was lucky, maybe it would be a passenger ship and she’d see someone she knew. If so, that might give her an idea of which Separatist faction was involved. She got to the wall, slid carefully up alongside one of the windows, and eased one eye around the edge.

The freighter wasn’t a style she was familiar with, though it had a Techno Union feel to it. Two passengers and an astromech droid had emerged and were standing midway across the courtyard, their backs to her, talking with a human who was himself flanked by a pair of B2 super battle droids. Off to one side of the conversation a group of six B1 droids stood with their blasters trained on the newcomers.

So: not anyone in authority, or at least not someone who’d been expected. Too bad. She shifted her focus to the other man, whose cloak was rippling with his movements as he spoke and gestured.

She caught her breath. That wasn’t just a cloak. The style, the throat clasps, the color and ribbing—all of it identified it as a royal Serennian cloak. The man was a fellow nobleman, possibly even an associate, of Count Dooku.

And if Dooku was even peripherally connected with this place, its significance suddenly jumped a whole lot higher.

She felt her eyes narrow. Had that been a flicker of reflection from somewhere near the conversation? But if it was, it was gone. The Serennian was heading toward the far side of the courtyard, aiming for a door in the south corner of the east wing. The newcomers were following, the B2s lumbering guard alongside them. The B1s had apparently been dismissed and were heading toward a ground vehicle parked in the courtyard’s northwest corner. Another group of battle droids was already there, along with a couple more human figures. The lights shut down, plunging the courtyard back into darkness.