SKELLY LEANED BACK against a pillar, wheezing. “Next time…we take the tram.”

“Yeah, that wouldn’t be suspicious,” Kanan said, pushing the cart up another seemingly endless hallway. They hadn’t encountered anyone but service droids like the one he’d accosted, but the distance was the real test. They’d gone from one node to another, working their way toward the hub.

He looked down at the hovercart in annoyance. I thought I gave this up when I quit Moonglow!

Walking alongside Kanan, Hera paused and looked back. She pulled on his arm, and Kanan turned to see Skelly sitting in the middle of the floor. “I’m fine,” the bomber said. “Just…come back…for my body.”

He looked at Hera. He couldn’t see her face, but he could imagine the expression of concern. This wasn’t going to work. They’d both realized on the trip from Cynda that Vidian had injured Skelly more than he was letting on; he’d gotten this far by doping himself from the medpacs, but he was starting to fade.

Kanan stopped and turned the empty cart. “Here,” he said, helping Skelly climb onto the flatbed. “You make one crack about me being your nursemaid, and I’m dumping you on the floor.”

“Check.” Skelly collapsed flat on his back.

Hera looked up at the fat disk on the ceiling up ahead. “What have you got, Zal?”

“These are Visitractic 830 factory surveillance cams,” Zaluna said. Walking in front of the group, she waved one of her devices like a dowser with a divining rod. “Quality stuff—only a few on Gorse. They’re not used for facial recognition. More to make sure the product keeps moving.”

“Can you kill them?”

“I’m freezing them before we come into view. As long as nobody’s walking into the scene around us, it won’t look odd.”

“You can do that?” Kanan asked. “I thought you said they were quality cams.”

“They are,” Zaluna said, unsnapping and removing her hood. “But nothing leaves a cam factory without a defeat code. Too many embezzling executives have been caught by their own technology. When I was younger, we used to use the codes to mess with other operators. You’d learn about them on Hetto’s data cube.”

Hera pulled off her head covering and smiled at Kanan. “And that is why I came to Gorse.”

Kanan yanked his own cowl off. He was dripping with sweat. “These masks sure aren’t for marathons. How far to the hub?”

Hera looked at her datapad. “Five hundred meters to another junction, then eight hundred more. There’s a reason they use the chutes and conveyer belts.”

“I never want to see another conveyor belt again,” Skelly mumbled.

“Wait,” Kanan said. “Zaluna, will your cam trick work if we go faster?”

“It’s an infrared signal. It works as soon as we get into range.”

“Fine. Both of you on the cart with Skelly,” he said, cracking his knuckles. He set the hovercart’s repulsors to maximum and grasped the pushbar. “I did this once with a ceiling falling on me. Get ready to hang on!”

—

Standing behind a wall of containers on the enormous warehouse floor of Calcoraan Depot’s hub, Kanan decided he was done with riding hovercarts for one lifetime. The ride across Cynda’s sublunar floor amid an avalanche had been harrowing enough, but by putting his formidable muscles into a running start before leaping aboard the cart’s back bumper, Kanan had turned the floating pallet into an unguided missile, caroming off the walls of the hallway. Hera, sitting up front, had nearly ground the heels off her boots bringing the thing to a stop at the end of the second, longer run.

Replacing their masks on entry, they’d found that Calcoraan Depot’s hub was every bit as busy and noisy as Kanan had expected. Robotic arms, vacuum hoses, and magnets were employed here, plucking materials from a forest of towering storage units and routing them to outer parts of the station. Zaluna had wryly pointed out a wire bin the size of Expedient that looked as if it held replacement latches for restroom doors.

“We take this place out,” Skelly said, “and we can make half the Imperial fleet prop the door shut.”

At least Skelly seemed to be feeling better. Kanan wasn’t. They’d found a quiet spot—quiet being a relative term—to park the hovercart near a far wall while Hera did some reconnaissance, looking for a route to Vidian’s executive chamber. Zaluna’s map showed that it was somewhere through the wall but at least one floor up—but there were no details about how to get there. Gantries and catwalks leading over the main floor hadn’t worked. Elevators were secured and guarded. The maintenance hatch in the wall behind him was their last chance.

Kanan stared down at Hera’s hazmat suit, rolled up in a bundle on the hovercart. She’d taken off the bulky suit so she’d have more freedom of movement for sneaking around. He wondered where she was, and thought about opening the door to follow her.

Before he could act on the impulse, Hera cracked the door open. She looked frustrated.

“This is no good,” she said, opening the hatch wide. The corridor behind was lost in shadows. She raised her portable light to reveal narrow apertures lining both sides of a passage that seemed to go on forever. “The entrance is at the far end, upstairs, but it’s a long hallway guarded by stormtroopers. And we have to go past a bunch of Vidian’s red-suits at their desks before you get to that.”

“I guess we could say we were delivering lunch,” Kanan said. He was about to give up when he saw something moving behind her, passing through one of the narrow openings on the right. “Look there!”

It was tall and mechanical, entering the corridor in the faraway darkness. Kanan stepped through the hatchway to get a better look. The droid had a gray tubular body and a flat head that rotated all the way around, casting a single red light about as it did.

“That’s not a guard droid,” Hera said, watching it disappear through a small opening to the left of the passageway. “That’s a Medtech. FX-something.”

“You get a lot of medical droids at an office complex?” Kanan asked. He waved to the others outside the hatch to follow him inside. “Be careful—it’s pretty dark in here.”

“No light, no problem,” Zaluna said, big Sullustan eyes widening as she entered.

“I’ll go anywhere that’s not here,” Skelly said, rubbing his ear. “This place is giving me a headache on top of everything else.”

The door sealed, Hera led the way, creeping toward the darkened exit the droid had taken. “I didn’t go this way before,” she whispered.

“Allow me.” Kanan drew his blaster and rounded the corner. Nothing leapt out at him. Hera’s light on uniformly placed girders cast long, deep shadows across a wide circular expanse. The place was empty but for what appeared to be furnishings in storage, including a bed, several operating tables of different types, a wardrobe, and a chair large enough to be a throne.

The medical droid ignored them as they entered the area. It simply glided next to what appeared to be a console and stopped.

Skelly squinted. “What are we—”

“Wait,” Kanan said. Light sliced into the area from a quadrilateral opening in the ceiling above the medical droid. With a mechanical whir, robot and console both started rising into the rafters, lifted by a hydraulic press. The rays from above illuminated the rest of the room in front of them before the door in the ceiling closed back. “We’re under Vidian’s health clinic!”

“Great,” Skelly said, staggering in a daze toward a cabinet. “I could use a medcenter.” Opening a drawer, he slumped against the side of the fixture. The others watched as he began pawing blindly at it with his gnarled right hand, completely missing the inside of the drawer.

Zaluna looked fretfully at Hera. “Is he going to be all right?”

“The faster we get in and out, the better for him.” Kanan could see the Twi’lek studying the other furnishings: All were on similar platforms. “But now we’ve got our way in.”

“You keep saying we,” Kanan said.

“This was your idea—and the last meter’s always the hardest. Besides, we’ve been lucky so far,” she said, grinning. “Maybe he’s asleep.”

“Or getting a personality transplant.” Kanan sighed as he pulled at the zipper of his suit. “But I doubt it. People never get what they need.”