Hey, guess what? Mara sees Luke for the first time this chapter. I plan on having them meet in the next one.
Chapter 5
"For the record, this is your fault," Andover accused, sitting defeated in his plane.
"I fail to see how," Luke retorted.
Andover scowled. "Really? You played the Duck Song instead of the jamming sequence. The Duck Song! And now guess what, we're going to be detained, tortured, and possibly executed!"
"It won't be that bad…" Luke said, unconvincingly.
"Uh huh," Andover replied skeptically. "You're Luke Skywalker! You destroyed the Death Star yourself! You killed Tarkin and millions of other Imperials who would have scared the entire galaxy into submission! You're a war hero! And you're in my plane! I'm gonna get killed just because you're here!"
The two had feared the worst ever since the TIEs attacked. Without the timely help of Wedge and the other fighters, the TIEs had herded the Nicomedia toward their own Star Destroyer. It had only been a minute when Luke realized they were caught in a tractor beam.
"Do you have a plan?" Luke asked hopefully.
"No!" Andover exclaimed defensively. "We weren't supposed to need one!"
They sat in near silence as the plane was pulled closer towards the hangar.
"Commence siesta mode," Andover said. It was not said in his usual excited voice, or his annoyed one. Instead, he spoke with a sense of defeat and despondency.
Luke watched as his console responded, slowly deactivating sections of the control board. The panels went dark, and the brightly-lit buttons did the same. All that remained lit was a small red bulb on the lower right side of the control board.
It was labeled "Emergency Transponder."
The spaceplane had just breached the aerated hangar, showing at least three hundred stormtroopers arranged in a rigid formation, when more Stormtroopers ran through a large set of doors. Instinctively, Luke fingered the lightsaber hooked to his belt.
"Leave it," Andover said.
"What?"
"Your lightsaber."
"You read my mind, again!" Luke stated. "How do you do that, if you are not force sensitive?"
Andover shrugged. "You're very predictable."
The plane was lowered onto the ground. A detachment of Stormtroopers ran up to it. Forcefully yanking off the canopy, Andover and Luke were roughly pulled from their seats and put into stun cuffs.
Mara walked purposely toward the hangar where Andover and Luke were being held. These Rebels should they in fact be Rebels, could possibly be important. As the Emperor's Hand, it was more than "personal business."
Vaguely, she could make out a strange force signature ahead of her. This person was obviously strong in the force. As there were fewer and fewer force-sensitives, their mere presence would send shock waves through the force.
And these were big shockwaves, too.
She pushed open a door and walked into a communications room. The wall joining the hangar was comprised entirely of transparisteel, so she could freely watch the detainment process. She observed as members of the Imperial Navy surrounding two young men, their sleek glistening white craft behind them. Mara smiled to herself, knowing these two would be no threat at all.
Well, maybe the one with the ugly flight helmet would, but she doubted it.
She watched, smiling, as the two were pushed toward their cells to await their interrogations.
Luke sat on his bunk, facing the wall, in his small iron-barred cell near the front of the Star Destroyer, vainly trying to meditate. Obi Wan, in the few lessons he had taught prior to his death, had emphasized meditation's importance as a way to unify one's self to the Living Force.
Prior to his death, Luke noted. He could feel the anger in him swelling.
"Relax yourself, Luke. Let go of your emotion." He turned towards the source of the voice. Obi Wan, in his blue ghost-like form, appeared, somehow leaning on the electrified cell bars. the cell.
"How am I supposed to relax?" Luke exclaimed, drawing looks from the Andover, the two guarding Stormtroopers, and the two prisoners across the hallway.
Looking for a means of escape, he rubbed his eyes and acted like he had just woken up. "Hmm? Just a dream?" he muttered, before apologizing. "Sorry."
Obi-Wan, still only perceivable to Luke, sat down on the floor of the cell. "You are to let go of your negative emotions and trust in the force."
Luke nodded in agreement, and Kenobi slowly faded out of sight.
There was not much else Luke could do, locked in his two-meter long, high, and wide chamber. As a farm boy on Tatooine, Luke would celebrate the idea of getting 8 of anything. Everything except eight cubic meters of living space. For that, he would gladly go back to his home planet.
The room that he was held in had four of these cells in it, two on each side of a central walkway with doors where the side walls would be. Luke had been escorted though dozens of these rooms during his trip to his current location. This pattern would likely continue for many rooms onward in all directions.
Slowly settling back into his meditative position, he let the force sweep through him. But his force senses soon began to overwhelm his attemp at relaxing. Surprise was litterally radiating off Andover as he started to scratch the back wall of his cell.
The surprise was still there, but soon a sense of urgency also permeated the force. Andover, however, gave no hints on his excitement. He gradually replaced his half-smile with his sabacc face. Whatever it was, it had spurred him to action but was not helpful enough to make him jump up and down with happiness.
Try as he might, Luke could not ignore the distraction of Andover repeatedly scratching the back wall of his cell over and over again. Why the wall? There was nothing remarkable about it. Thick duracrete blocks, probably durasteel-enforced, were covered in a rust-red/brown paint. It looked like it had been freshly applied, since the ship was so new and it had not yet dulled.
So why was he scratching it over and over again, as if trying to wear the paint off?
After a while, Andover had enough dust accumulating at the tip of his fingernail that it looked like he had just gone for a manicure. Luke laughed quietly at the thought.
"What?" Andover asked curtly, realizing that Luke had been observing his actions and trying to discern why.
Luke blinked and looked away quickly.
Sighing, Andover went back to his work, and Luke tried to continue meditating.
After a few hours, another stormtrooper entered the rooms, and relieved the two guards of their duties. The he flipped a switch, dimming the lights, and told everyone to stay quiet and go to sleep.
"Don't worry," Andover responded sarcastically. "Sleep comes so naturally to me, I could do it with my eyes closed."
Luke could sense that the stormtrooper was really not amused. He simply turned around and walked through the door to his right.
Andover continued scratching at the wall.
Luke sat up, in a small white room. He knew it had to be a dream.
Andover was there standing next to him, carrying two large boxes of… what, exactly?
Luke stood up, looking into the boxes and running his cupped hand through one of the boxes' contents. His hand brought up nothing more than a fine-grained dull red powder. The box then disintegrated, scattering its powder all over the ground.
Andover pulled set down the other box on top of the pile. It brushed against a white metal pin on his shirt. The red powder caught fire, and the box was engulfed with flames. They watched as the box burned, its contents igniting and throwing themselves everywhere.
Suddenly, a powerful shockwave ran through the area, and the entire burning mass shot up in a huge fireball. The fire engulfed Luke as he watched the white walls of his dream slowly collapse, revealing the detained situation he was in.
"Finally, you're awake!" Andover greeted.
"What?" Luke questioned, rousing himself from his languid state.
"You kept talking all night long. Something about boxes and you catching on fire."
Luke rubbed his eye. "Yeah," he acknowledged simply. He didn't want to say too much. He knew Jedi dreams could act as premonitions, and thus withheld the details.
The rear wall of Andover's cell now contained an inch-thick white line scratched through it. Working through the night, Andover must have worn off the paint. The scratched material lay in a small pile of red dust at the base of the wall. Just like in my dream, Luke thought.
"At least now," Andover began, "I can get some sleep." He put his hands behind his head and lay down on his bunk.
Luke relaxed, and sat back down into his meditation position. But as always, Andover intruded on his peace. He stood up, looking at Luke ponderously. A grin cracked his now-regular sabacc face, and the urgency in his aura had dissipated. Luke felt something comparable to glee in its place.
But what he said still shocked the aspiring Jedi.
"Hey, did you know that they painted these walls with thermite?"
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Thanks for reading!
-ClaptonJr.