Honor Among Thieves

Scarlet backed away down the hallway, watching them, then moved everyone into another branching passage, this one quite dark, so that the only light came from the glowing map. She fiddled with the controls, and the image dimmed until it was barely visible and cast no light on the walls.

“Looks like the alarm went out,” Scarlet whispered. “There will be a lot of troopers in the central corridor.” She pointed at a thick, yellow line on her map, filled with red dots. The dots were moving, and Han realized they must be marking the location of people that Scarlet’s bugs had spotted.

“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked.

She pointed at a large, glowing orange central room with a very small corridor coming off it and dead-ending. “This, at a guess. Lots of bodies in here, the most in the structure. And that’s the only dead end on the map. A door, I’m guessing. And this temple doesn’t seem to have any other ways out.”

Leia made a quiet noise of agreement, then whispered, “But that’s off the central corridor. Stormtroopers everywhere.”

“All respect, miss, I see at least two other ways to get there, including this here corridor we’re in,” Baasen said, pointing at the map. As soon as he did, it was obvious. Han saw the path leading from where they were through a variety of twists and turns and ending up right next to the short dead-end corridor at the center of the temple.

“No troopers in this corridor at all,” he pointed out.

“That worries me,” Scarlet said.

Han’s eyes had begun to adapt to the dark, and the faint glow of the mushrooms on the walls gave him a dim gray-scale view of the hallway around him.

“Any reason we should be waiting here?” Baasen asked. He was rocking on the balls of his feet, his grin so faint it might just have been Han’s imagination.

“Stay behind me,” Scarlet said, poking Baasen hard in the biceps.

“Aye, love.”

Scarlet turned off her map and headed down the corridor. The stone beneath their feet felt wet and slimy, though at the creeping pace Scarlet set it was easy to keep their footing. The air smelled of rot and decay, and a faint hint of something hot and metallic. After she’d gone a few dozen meters, Scarlet pulled a small light off her belt and turned it on, twisting the control until it gave off only the dimmest illumination.

A few meters later, they reached a partial blockage of the corridor. A stone cube a meter and a half on a side blocked the hallway from wall to wall, leaving only a one-meter gap above it.

“We can climb over,” Scarlet started, but Han touched her arm and pointed at the ceiling above. “Oh.” The block looked to have fallen out of a hole exactly its size.

“Temple falling apart, is it?” Baasen asked.

“No,” Leia said, pointing at the ground next to the block. A single foot poked out from under the stone, wearing a white stormtrooper’s boot. “It was a trap.”

Scarlet turned up her light. The hall brightened. The hole above the stone had a complex mechanism for releasing the block onto the corridor below. A printed foil notice had been pasted to the wall: WARNING: DO NOT USE THIS CORRIDOR, IT HAS NOT BEEN CLEARED.

“I’d say,” Baasen said, poking the doomed stormtrooper’s foot with his toe. “Though this fellow cleared the first trap for us, eh?”

Han put a hand on the stone block. It didn’t budge. It must have weighed thousands of kilograms. At least it would have been quick. But something itched at the back of his brain.

“Can we go?” Scarlet asked, trying to get around him to climb on top of the stone cube.

“This doesn’t make any sense to me,” Han said, thinking through the puzzle as he spoke. “We came here to find this super-high-tech thing that kills hyperspace, and it’s in a temple made out of rock? The traps are deadfalls? Unless this hyperspace blocker is made of granite and powered by a waterwheel, I don’t think these people built it.”

“Ever seen a Ternin tree sling?” Baasen asked. “Don’t look down on the damage a low-tech solution can achieve.”

“But hyperspace blocking?”

“The K’kybak died out millennia ago,” Scarlet said. “Another more primitive species may have followed them.”

“And built all of this,” Leia added, “to honor the gods that vanished from their world. It’s not uncommon to find this sort of layering of civilizations on older worlds.”

“I am not going to like it,” Han said, then paused to boost Scarlet up onto the stone block, “if I get killed by a bunch of primitives.”

Scarlet lay flat on the block and reached down to help pull Leia up. When Baasen moved forward, reaching for Leia’s hindquarters, Han thumped him in the chest. “Hands off.”

Baasen had the gall to look wounded. “Was just trying to give the lady a boost.”

Leia clambered up the stone with ease. “The lady is fine, thanks. Let’s move.”

Having now seen the first of the ancient builder’s deadly traps, Scarlet slowed her pace through the temple, keeping her light turned up. At several points, she had them avoid specific stones set into the floor.

“Pressure plates?” Han had asked at the first.

“Weird looking, and do we want to test?” she’d replied.

Han didn’t argue the point, just avoided anything Scarlet told him to avoid and tried not to touch the slime and mushrooms on the walls.

They reached a junction with two other corridors and Scarlet signaled for them to stop, then pulled out her map. “Almost there,” she said, pointing at the room nearby. It was still filled with red dots. “We’ll need a plan to get past those guards.”

“What’ve you got in mind?” Han asked.

“My first thought was to send you and Baasen into the room, guns blazing, and then have Leia and me sneak past while the troopers loot your corpses.”

“You see?” Han said. “That’s a terrible plan. This is why we don’t use plans. We’re really bad at them.”

“Well,” Scarlet said, putting her map away, “let’s keep moving, we can figure it out wh—”

Her foot came down on the large stone at the corridor’s junction point, and it fell away as if it had never been there. A yawning pit gaped below it, opening into darkness. Scarlet paused for one eternal heartbeat, arms pinwheeling as she tried to keep her balance, one leg still on the ledge while the other hung out over nothing, then she fell forward.