Technology? A small voice in the back of Lyla's head scoffed. This bulkhead barely deserves the name.
It was strange how she felt now. The thumps of distant explosions resonating through the surface of the planet made her feel almost safe. After all, they were deeper down than before and it was unlikely the clones had another ambush like this prepared; even if they wanted to lay one, they were slowly but surely approaching the depth where not every level was directly above or underneath another. From a certain depth downward, there were service levels in between, with generators, condensators, energy conduits, pipes for water, gases and sewage and small access tunnels for maintenance robots. The deeper you got, the more frequent those became; more and more of them would be abandoned, then some of the levels would be found in a state of disrepair, then some of them completely collapsed and, far, far below that, almost unreachable under level upon abandoned level: The actual surface of the planet, almost forgotten here at the heart of the planetary megalopolis.
But perhaps it was the lit lightsaber in her hand that had calmed her nerves - she had almost forgotten that she had one in the chaos of the ambush. Or maybe it was Enrik's hand that she was still firmly holding in her own.
Whatever it was, the darkness and depth she had been so very scared of seemed to have less power over her. Lyla felt focused enough to not only blank out all the terrible feelings that threatened to drown her once she would face them but also strong enough to consciously let the Force touch her again and reach out in it. But what happened wasn't conscious.
As they approached the thick reinforced door, she let go of her fellow initiate's hand and felt compelled to touch bulkhead, her plasteel appendages clicking softly on the metal surface.
"There are terminals on both sides", she murmured. She wasn't wondering out loud or asking somebody to confirm it - she simply knew that it was so, like touching it had revealed something self-evident.
With the sureness of a sleepwalker, she turned her head to the right and pointed directly at a piece of wall plating that looked exactly like all the ones around it and all the others in the corridor.
"There. It's behind that plate."
Nothing, not even a scratch or dent marked it as special in any way, and yet she wasn't convinced but knew for a fact that the terminal was hidden underneath. With slow, deliberate steps, she crossed the short distance and, with a light push and click as the mechanism unlocked, swung it open to reveal the cables and primitive terminal underneath.
It was only now that her conscious mind took over again and she typed in the simple commands necessary to open the obstacle in their way, which it did, the servos hidden in the walls protesting with rusty screams.
When it was open all the way and her companions had passed through, Lyla almost lovingly let her lightsaber graze the terminal and cables, melting them all into one, before hiding it all away behind the panel.
On the other side of the gateway, she walked up to an equally inconspicuous panel with the twin of the previous terminal, and with only a few movements of her half-mechanical hand, the gate closed with thundering finality, the only way to open it hidden again.
"It would take hours to get through it with brute force." She said it with a hint of pride in her voice. Being unable to help earlier had been weighing heavy on her heart but the feeling she had at that moment, the surprise she had sensed in some of the others as she revealed the hallway's secrets, seemed to make up for some of it.
And yet... There was something odd about this. Lyla had never been in this tunnel, had never seen this gate or these panels, and yet she had instinctively known or felt where she had to look. How was that possible? The Force didn't flow through lifeless objects, she was reminded of that every time she looked at her prosthetic fingers, but it couldn't have been instinct and knowledge on machines and technology alone, could it?
