Jaina leaned against the curved wall of the turbolift, looking up at the round disk of the ceiling, the rush of her breath and the pounding of her heart competing with the sense of elation she felt as the deck beneath her feet accelerated downwards towards the Star Destroyer's keel.
She took a moment to realise that her pocket comm was buzzing.
Anakin? she thought, frowning at the animated swish of bubbles on the screen, mimicking the wake of a disappearing underwater leviathan. Was this some kind of trick? No, the Imperials wouldn't know how to replicate her brother's comm code.
But the 'lift was already braking, so she quickly thumbed the comm to mute, and drew her blaster as the doors slid open. She was relieved to find herself facing an empty corridor - she couldn't sense any danger in the Force, but she glanced quickly out to either side, confirming there were no troopers with ysalamiri backpacks wating in an ambush before stepping fully through the doors.
She'd taken the 'lift car straight down to the engineering section. She knew her way around a Star Destroyer's drive shafts and generators from her time aboard the Errant Venture, better than she knew the upper decks, and although the Chimaera had to have a lot more personnel in an engineering shift than Booster's outsize pirate ship, she reckoned they'd all be deployed in control rooms and monitoring stations - the corridors would only be busy during change-of-watch rotations.
Her instinct was to treat this as a commando mission, moving in short, quick rushes from one angle of scant defensive cover to the next, but as soon as she heard the noise her boots made on the deck, she forced herself to shift her pace to imitate a steady Imperial marching step - the tone of her non-regulation heels wasn't quite right, but the familiar rhythm would help mask her passage, merging her obtrusive footsteps into the Empire's regular background noise as much as possible.
The only thing she really had to worry about was running into engineers ducking off-duty to use the 'fresher, and hopefully she could just knock them out with silenced stun-shots before they raised any alarms.
Then her comm danced in her pocket. Anakin intruding again, this time sending her a Jedi mental nudge to pick up the call.
"How are you even calling me on this thing?" she asked, flipping the handset open, and scowling. Sometimes, sharing her Force instincts with a kid brother who was as stubborn as a bantha and knew exactly how to push her buttons could be really...
"Relax," Anakin's voice grinned at her, doing his best impression of their father. "Fiver's giving us secure comms using Aunt Mara's override code. Watched your little interview on the bridge, too. You should hear this."
Thrawn's voice cut off any attempt she might have made to query the wisdom of her brother trying to hijack the Imperial command ship's computer system.
"... certainly not a real Emperor's Hand." The Grand Admiral sounded more controlled and commanding than she remembered him being five minutes earlier, more like the voice from old holo-footage. Was that just a trick of the audio pickup, or did he shift his tone like that when he wanted his subordinates to pay attention? "But not a Rebel infiltrator either. The lack of a rehearsed cover story was too amateurish, the mishandling of the recogition code is not a mistake a professional would make."
Mishandling?! She felt a momentary flash of outrage, but pushed it aside as the implications hit her. Did that mean Thrawn had been on to her from the start? Well, what did I expect? That's why Palpatine made him a Grand Admiral...
The challenge of sneaking through an Imperial command ship with upwards of thirty thousand crewers and a garrison of ten thousand Stormtroopers was starting to come home to her, as well.
She tuned out of the audio feed from the bridge as Thrawn shifted his attention to a report from one of the Chimaera's officers, and focused on her own plans.
"See. Important stuff." Anakin's mood almost made her smile. "How long are you going to be?"
"Should be about ten minutes." She paused, and decided to risk another turbolift trip to get up to the right deck. The Imperials didn't seem to have caught up with her escape yet. "Hold on," she added. "You're not aboard the Turtle any more, are you?"
"We stole a couple of Imperial uniforms," Anakin said - neither an apology or a justification, just one of his statement-of-fact shrugs. "Thought you might need rescuing."
"Meet me in the long access corridor just behind the hangar bay," she told him, shaking her head in disbelief. "Where Traders' Alley is aboard the Venture. I'm heading up through the engineering section."
"Gotcha," he agreed, which reminded her that they'd always worked well together when they could agree on a basic plan of action.
And in fairness, Anakin's plan of simply blasting out of the capture bay aboard the Yavin Turtle was starting to seem more attractive than she'd have ever credited.
"So, who was she, sir?" another voice asked on the audio relay from the bridge - a voice she vaguely recognized. Jaina frowned, trying to place the speaker. A few weeks' military co-operation during the Ithor campaign had hardly given her an encyclopedic knowledge of the Imperial command ship's officers, but if the voice was one she recognized, she ought to be able to put a name to it.
The arrival of the turbolift distracted her, and by the time she'd keyed for the storage holds at the rear of the hangar deck, where a Star Destroyer kept rarely-needed things like AT-ATs, cargo tugs, and prefabricated Army bases, she was focused on Thrawn's answer.
"Simply a girl with a particular set of aptitudes, whose path has crossed with one of the Emperor's former agents in the years since Endor," the Grand Admiral was saying. "Certain aspects of her behaviour and body-language lead me to think I might even know the individual in question. This agent evidently passed on some of the Emperor's training to the girl at second-hand, and probably to her brother also, and gave them the recognition code to get them out of tricky situations if they encountered Imperial forces." Thrawn paused, almost sounding amused. "But their training seems somewhat incomplete, perhaps interrupted by events - and evidently, their mentor did not regard the detailed working of the Empire's command protocol as a worthwhile subject for instruction."
Jaina wondered if she should feel so flattered and impressed that Thrawn had figured her out completely in advance. There was the small matter of him apparently not knowing anything about the Jedi, which seemed a little crazy - would his information really be that out of date if he'd just popped out of the Unknown Regions or a cloning cylinder, or were junior personnel subject to insane levels of censorship which forced their commanders to talk in code? Whatever the reason for the bewildering oversights, that just made his analysis of her Jedi training and its limitations even more disturbingly accurate.
And he even knows who trained me, she realised. She wasn't sure how she felt about that. She could imagine how her former Jedi Master would react, though. Aunt Mara is not going to be impressed.
The arrival of her turbolift at the right deck gave her something else to think about. She'd chosen what she hoped was a quiet area, but with deck crew, TIE Pilots and Stormtroopers all deployed nearby, this deck was going to be a lot busier than engineering. She'd have to do a lot of sneaking, moving only when the corridor was empty and the Force didn't suggest she was about to walk into trouble.
"Admiral!" a voice called out, sharp and edgy on the speaker.
"They're on to you!" Anakin warned her.
"I noticed," she drawled, breaking into a run. These are so not the boots for this. She had no real option now except a flat sprint for the hangar, feeling incongruously grateful to Aunt Mara for passing on the running-in-heels part of her Emperor's Hand training, and checking that the setting on her blaster was switched to heavy stun - she was still hoping that all this was some sort of crazy misunderstanding, so she didn't want to start gunning down stormtroopers quite yet, but the main reason was that Aunt Mara had always said the wide effect-ring was the best setting for corridors full of enemy commandos.
When the diagonal blast-doors of the next hatch up ahead slid open and revealed a squad or two of white-armoured Imperial stormtroopers, she simply dived for the side passage on the left, bringing up her gun to pulse off two quick shots at them, landing on her shoulder then picking up in a roll and sprinting on again, blindly snapping off more stun bolts at anyone pursuing her.
She skidded round the corner into the next corridor - but there were more stormtroopers coming down from the hangar area, too many to stop with pistol stun-bolts, and when she quickly doubled back, hoping that she could slow the pursuit by merging the chase parties into an unweildy pack and get back across into her original corridor before them, she found her route blocked by a third group - at least three squads this time, led by an officer with a big red shoulder-pad strapped across one side of his white armour.
"There she is! Get her!"
Stun-bolts came at her from all sides, and she felt herself being thrown in all directions at once, spiralling off her feet and no longer sure which way was up. She felt the deck land on top of her, and tumbled sideways into darkness.
Kriff, she thought, with surprising clarity. But after that, she was simply silence.