The passageway made a sudden turn, and they came to a partially demolished wall. Auben stepped over the stones and jumped into a chamber a little larger than the one they left."There's a whole system of passageways that were once hidden," she explained. "I guess the big monks used to spy on the rest."
That sounded like standard Sith procedure to Anakin. Trust was not part of Sith doctrine. It seemed to Anakin to be a bleak way to live.
Auben led them down a bigger hallway. They went steadily downward, deeper and deeper into the complex. The walls began to weep with moisture. Anakin guessed they were now in the part of the monastery buried in the mountain.
They went through so many twists and turns that Anakin wondered if they'd have to use tracking devices to get out again. Even with his Jedi memory skills, he was beginning to feel disoriented.
At last, Auben paused. "What I'm about to show you isn't visible from above." She pushed open a rotted door.
Anakin followed. An ancient ship stood in the middle of a large space. He had never seen anything like it. Crude and clunky, it must have been state-of-the-art at one time. The afterburner tanks were huge.
"This was probably from before the sublight engine was perfected," Anakin said, half to himself. Under normal circumstances, he would love to investigate the ancient technology of the ship.
Around it, various decaying parts of what looked like droids were littered, models so old he couldn't identify them. He saw sheets and shards of durasteel and other metals on the floor and realized they had once been servodrivers, valves, and pumps, the hoses long decayed.
"It's a service bay," he said. "We must be near a landing hangar."
"You got it," Auben said. "Look."
She led them through the open arch, into the darkness. Anakin stepped out and released a breath. The hangar was so vast, it ended in darkness. Service bay after service bay ran down each side of the hangar, waiting to repair the ships that no longer arrived. Hulking wrecks of ships still littered the floor, bits of metal that had once been droids, decayed tanks. Huge statues of terrifying creatures from many worlds marched on either side down the hangar. The statues had crumbled and cracked over the years. Some were headless, and the huge heads had fallen and crumbled into blocks of stone.