[member="Darth Banshee"]
The station contained seventy-seven thousand people. Isolating one specific set of lifesigns among those seventy-seven thousand people would be, if not impossible, then very much time-consuming -- in a culture much more technologically advanced than this galaxy's. That level of resolution on internal starship sensors, if it was possible at all, would have required highly specialized equipment.
Four more elements complicated the search. One was Ember's ability to vanish utterly from sensors, sight, and Force tracking, which he did with the expertise of a thirty-year White Current practitioner.
The second element was his introduction of the lightsabre to every turbolift door he passed on the way down, right at the lock. Doubling back would have been a matter of a few quick Force jumps. He could have gone through any of those doors, invisible, using sensor-affecting illusion to mask the door opening and closing, even from central operators. The path he chose was through a cargo deck's subfloor, slipping between dense structural supports.
The third factor was the truly massive amount of corridor that needed to be searched and overlapped with ysalamiri bubbles, while manually shutting off interstitial energy shields. This station had three three-kilometre spokes, each a good two hundred metres high and wide at its narrowest point. At the absolute minimum, that made forty to sixty decks, just in the spokes; put another way, it would take roughly a hundred seventy mile-long sweeps from ten-metre-radius ysalamir bubbles to cover each of the six major protrusions, on the generous assumption that the corridors were all straight. Discounting the core of the station, and the six minor protrusions, that made one thousand five hundred and thirty kilometres of ysalamir sweep, on foot. For thirty-nine ysalamiri. Each ysalamir would have to be carried for about forty kilometres, or about two days' hike, with armed escort, taking care to check every nook and cranny for a man who knew how to hide even without the Force.
The fourth element would have been absolute child's play for a true Fallanassi Elder; after thirty years of practice, Ember couldn't exactly do it at the drop of a hat, but it wasn't terribly hard for him now that he'd been given a good bit of time to work with. False sensor contacts and glimpses of him began to appear throughout the station -- in the air vents, in the halls, mostly around the turbolift network but some beyond it. Energy shield operators would notice various shield anomalies, as if someone with a shield disruptor had walked through.
In other words, as far as the Force or sensors or search parties or common sense could determine, he could be, or be on his way to, anywhere in the station. The Dark Lord's Master was absolutely done playing around.
