Mara frowned, trying to pierce the gloom. The thing was tall and slender, with a pair of arms jutting out from the sides that gave it a not-quite-humanoid silhouette for all its obvious mechanical origins. The design looked vaguely familiar, but for those first few seconds she couldn't place it. The lift continued to rise, revealing hip-bone-like protrusions at the base of the object's long torso and a trio of curved legs extending outward beneath them.

And then, suddenly, it clicked.

The thing was a pre-Clone Wars droideka—one of the destroyer droids that had once been the pride of the Trade Federation army.

She looked back at Huxley, to find that his smile had widened into a grin. "That's right, Jade," he gloated. "My very own combat droideka, guaranteed to blast the stuffing out of even a Jedi. Bet you never expected to see one of those here."

"Not really, no," Mara conceded, running a practiced eye over the droideka as the lift reached the top and wheezed to a halt. It had arrived fully open in combat stance, she noted, instead of rolled into the more compact wheel form used to move into position. That could mean it wasn't able to maneuver anymore.

Did that mean its guns wouldn't track, either? Experimentally, she leaned back in her seat.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the droideka's left arm twitched, its twin blasters shifting angle to match her movement.

So the weapons could indeed track, though they appeared to be under someone's manual control instead of a central computer's or anything on board the droideka itself. In the dim lighting, she couldn't tell whether or not its built-in deflector shield was functioning, but it almost didn't matter. The thing was armed, armored, and pointed straight at her.

Huxley was right. Even the Jedi of that era had gone out of their way to avoid