by Timothy Zahn
Swirlings in the Force—surprise—confusion—darkness—anxiety—
Only what was it? For all the strength of the awareness, the sensation was vague and unfocused. He couldn’t tell whether it was a person, a group of people, or something else. Possibly something completely unknown in Jedi or Sith history.
And then, as the Darshi darted out the door and Vader tried to focus on the thoughts and sensations, he heard the distant rumbling of an explosion.
The swirling of anxiety turning to fear—twisting in alien forms and patterns—breaking all ability to concentrate—flashing into unfocused turmoil—
The sudden shift snapped Vader’s attempts to isolate it. The distant explosion—had the aliens attacked the source of the disturbance?
The disturbance dissolving into terror—
A second explosion, as muffled and indistinct as the first, rippled across Black Spire, rattling the cantina.
“I believe our freighter has been attacked,” Thrawn said coolly. Stepping over one of the three Darshi lying unconscious on the floor in front of him, he hurried toward Vader and the door. “Our opponents are attempting to isolate us.”
The terror fading—the swirling collapsing onto itself and silence—
Vader still didn’t understand the disturbance. But as the hurricane faded, he made one last focused effort to locate it.
And for a single heartbeat, he was able to do so.
“No,” he told Thrawn, pointing in the opposite direction from the door. “Not the freighter. The three houses.”
Thrawn’s eyes narrowed. “Their communications network?”
“Yes,” Vader said. “And the Emperor’s disturbance.”
Vader had never seen Thrawn at a moment of complete surprise. Neither had The Jedi. But now, without warning, the Chiss’s face went suddenly rigid, his stride jerking just as Vader’s had a moment earlier. The moment passed, and he was once again the imperturbable Chiss grand admiral.
But the moment had been enough.
“We must hurry,” Thrawn said, picking up his pace and gesturing Vader to follow. “Come.”
And because Vader was still reaching out to the Force, he felt the flicker of warning.
He spun around toward the now empty cantina dining area, the now empty array of tables and chairs, and lifted his lightsaber—
As a cloud of large insects appeared out of nowhere and swarmed toward them.
He ignited his lightsaber, the blade’s brilliant glow adding a layer of red light to the relative gloom. Stinging or biting insects were of no threat to Vader himself, protected as he was by his armor. But Thrawn was completely vulnerable to such attacks. Behind Vader and to his side, the Chiss’s blaster opened fire, the bolts blazing into the mass of insects.
He might as well have been shooting at a sandstorm. The blasterfire caught a couple of bugs, but the targets were too small and moving too erratically for even Thrawn’s marksmanship to make any real difference. Vader stretched out with the Force, trying to shove the swarm into a more compact space, but again the insects’ size and numbers made the effort largely futile. As the swarm reached them, he slashed his lightsaber blade through it, with results that were little better than Thrawn’s. The lead group of insects slammed into Vader’s shoulder and right arm—
And disintegrated into bursts of gray liquid.
So: no stinging, no biting. Something artificial, bioengineered or possibly even tiny droids.
Acid? Vader peered down at his arm, looking for the telltale smoke as the woven metal, ceramic, and plastoid was eaten away.
But again, no. Instead, the bursts of gray liquid had instantly solidified across his arm and elbow into a sort of smooth gray stone.
His elbow?
He tried straightening out the joint as more of the insects slammed into his arm and chest. But it was too late. The elbow was frozen solid.
Thrawn had been right the first time. The attackers were hoping to take them alive.
But where were they? Somewhere among the scattering of tables and chairs, certainly—that was where the insects had come from. But there was no one crouching beneath or beside any of the furniture.
He snarled under his breath. At least, no one he could see.
Thrawn’s assassin, Rukh, had a personal cloaking device. Apparently, someone on Batuu did, too.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw another insect swarm suddenly appear and start buzzing toward them. An instant later a volley of blasterfire raked the area beneath the tables. Clearly, Thrawn had already come to the same conclusion as Vader and was hoping a patterned counterattack would take out their hidden enemy. There was a sudden, choked-off scream, and a Darshi body abruptly appeared, twitched violently, then toppled to the floor and lay still.
“There!” Thrawn snapped.
“There are three more,” Vader snapped back. He still couldn’t see them, but he could sense them.
Thrawn’s response was more blasterfire, this time running a new pattern beneath all the tables.
Only there was no guarantee that was where the other Darshi were hiding. The cantina was dark enough that there were several places where they could be standing or crouching unseen. Especially if they remained still—Vader had noted that Rukh was slightly visible when he moved.
If the Darshi didn’t move, and if each of them had a canister of insects, he and Thrawn would be immobilized long before they could smoke out their attackers.
He looked down at his armor. His right shoulder and arm were rapidly being encased in gray stone, as were both legs around the knees and hips. Clearly, the Darshi had some way to aim the insects’ attack. But so far his left arm was clear.
With luck, that would be the last mistake the Darshi ever made.
“Visual cover!” he snapped to Thrawn, continuing to swing his lightsaber through the insect cloud as best he could with only his right wrist still free to move. A couple more insects fell, bursting into gray blobs that solidified before they even hit the floor.
An instant later Vader found himself in the middle of a shower of splinters and dust as Thrawn turned his aim upward and began blasting into the ceiling. For a brief moment both Vader and the attacking insect swarm were obscured.
And in that moment of privacy, Vader reached down with the Force and tore a strip of cloth from the bottom edge of his cloak. Bringing it up, he pressed it against his left arm, loosely wrapping the whole area from wrist to chest plate.
The cloth was barely in place when the shower of debris from the ceiling abruptly stopped. Vader looked over to see that the insects had targeted and wrapped Thrawn’s gun arm, freezing the elbow and shoulder joints and locking his aim upward. In response, the Chiss had bent over at the waist and was firing more or less blindly in his continuing attempt to take out the remaining attackers. A third insect swarm appeared from near the back of the room, followed immediately by a fourth from the far end of the bar.
Four Darshi. Four swarms. Hopefully, that was all of them. Vader continued to swing his lightsaber as far as he could, his range of movement steadily decreasing as the insects splattered against his wrist, adding layer after layer of stone. His legs were frozen, effectively pinning him to this one spot. His left arm was now under attack, with insects throwing themselves at those joints. Two insects headed for his helmet’s eyes; reaching to the Force, he shoved them to the sides. The Darshi might have immobilized him, but he was absolutely not going to let him blind him as well. At his side, Thrawn’s blasterfire settled to a single spot as the insects continued to bury him in the quick-setting stone.
And then, as the last of the insects expended itself against the two Imperials, there were three brief shimmers from various parts of the room, and three Darshi abruptly appeared. Each held a weapon the size of a blaster carbine, with large attached cylinders beneath the barrels where the inse
ct swarms had presumably been carried. Walking with what could only be their version of an arrogant swagger, they headed toward their immobilized victims.
Vader waited until they were nearly to him. Then, reaching out to the Force, he stripped away the section of stone-hardened cloak that he’d wrapped around his left arm and sent his lightsaber from his frozen right hand to his left.
The Darshi had barely enough time to jerk to horrified halts before Vader slashed the red blade through all four of them.
He waited until they were lying dead on the floor. “I presume, Admiral,” he said into the silence, “that you no longer require us to take prisoners?”
“I believe the situation has moved beyond that point,” Thrawn agreed darkly. “Well done, my lord. Can you summon aid from the Chimaera? My comlink is out of reach.”
Summon aid? Lining up the lightsaber blade with his right elbow, Vader carefully sliced through the gray stone wrapped around it. A quick snap of his arm, and the joint was free. Another slice at wrist and shoulder, and the entire arm was once again fully mobile. Shifting the lightsaber back to his right hand, he freed his legs, then turned to Thrawn.
The Chiss was still hunched over, little but his face still visible. He was lucky, Vader thought as he began freeing him, that he hadn’t lost his balance and fallen over.
It was one thing to lose a battle, as Thrawn had at Atollon. It was worse to lose both a battle and one’s dignity at the same time.
“Thank you,” Thrawn said when he was finally able to straighten up again. He sent a quick look around the cantina, then looked down at the freshly dead Darshi. “Can you travel?”
“Can you?” Vader countered. Even with his own arms and legs free, he could feel the extra weight of all that stone. Thrawn, without Vader’s bioenhancements or the Force, would be hard-pressed to carry the extra load. Not to mention that he looked less like a living being than he did the midway point of some sculptor’s artwork.
Though to be fair, Vader didn’t look any better. Once back aboard ship, Thrawn could simply change clothing, while Vader would need his armor cleaned in more time-consuming detail. Fortunately, he had another full set in his quarters that he could wear while the Chimaera’s techs restored this one.
“Of course,” Thrawn said. With an effort, he squatted beside one of the bodies.
“What are you doing?” Vader demanded. “The Emperor’s disturbance is elsewhere.”
“A moment,” Thrawn said. He gazed at the Darshi’s knife, gently touched the spot where the scabbard rode the belt, and then drew the weapon. “Do you see?” he asked Vader, holding it up.
“I see that you are here while the Emperor’s disturbance is not,” Vader said, putting some anger into his voice.
“Yes,” Thrawn murmured. He slid the knife back into its scabbard and stood up. “Let us hope we are not too late,” he added as he made his slightly staggering way toward the door. “Nodlia? Do not let anyone remove these bodies.”
“I’ll try,” the bartender said, sounding doubtful. “But—”
“You will do as he says,” Vader ordered, glowering at Thrawn’s back as he followed. Had the Chiss been stalling with the whole knife thing, hoping to delay their travel?
No. Vader remembered the look on the Chiss’s face just before the final Darshi attack. Something about the mysterious houses, the explosion, and the Emperor’s disturbance had actually startled him.
And anything that could startle Grand Admiral Thrawn was something Vader very much wanted to see.
* * *
—
“I think they’ve spotted us,” Tephan reported from the Darkhawk’s helm, her pleasant alto voice glacially calm. “Reading fresh power transfer in their probable hyperdrive section.”
“Copy,” Kimmund said, cursing silently. The Darkhawk had an impressively low sensor cross section, but eventually even the most unobservant scan operator couldn’t help but notice it.
The target was already close enough for the Darkhawk’s laser cannons to blow it into atoms. But Lord Vader wanted it taken mostly intact, along with at least a handful of surviving prisoners. That meant Kimmund’s gunners had to get close enough for controlled, pinpoint fire.
The question was whether they could get there before the target escaped. Lord Vader wouldn’t be happy if that happened.
And everyone in the First Legion knew what happened when Lord Vader wasn’t happy.
With an effort, Kimmund unclenched his teeth. He was, in fact, the fourth commander this particular unit of the legion had had in the past two years. Two of the others had been demoted and sent back to the 501st. The third had been summarily executed.
But for cause, Kimmund reminded himself firmly. All three had been replaced for cause, either for incompetence or otherwise failing in their missions. None had been executed simply through bad luck or failure of subordinates.
At least, not in this unit. Other units of the First Legion had their own stories.
Some of those stories were painful to even listen to.
“Yeah, they’ve spotted us, all right,” Tephan said. “Breaking orbit and grabbing for deep vacuum.”
“Yes, thank you, I got it,” Kimmund growled, watching the displays, his mind sifting rapidly through the possibilities. The freighter was too deep in Batuu’s gravity well to make the jump to lightspeed, but that particular window was rapidly closing. He checked the displays, hoping Tephan might be able to squeeze a little more acceleration out of the engines. But the Darkhawk was already running full-out. Now all he could do was keep going as they were and hope his gunners could rise to the challenge—
“Incoming one eighty!” Tephan snapped.
Incoming one eighty? From behind them? Kimmund shifted his eyes to the aft display—
Just as a flight of four TIEs roared past the Darkhawk, blazing toward the target freighter.
“Whoa!” Kimmund said. “Yeah, that’s incoming and a half.”
“I guess the admiral decided to give us some backup after all,” Tephan said. “They came up through our shadow—never saw them.”
Which meant the freighter wouldn’t have seen them, either, Kimmund knew. At least Thrawn’s people had some rudimentary tactical ability.
“Commander Kimmund,” a formal voice came over the bridge speaker. “This is Captain Vult Skerris of Defender Squadron One. Hope we’re not too late to join in. Anything in particular we can do for you?”
Kimmund mouthed a curse. Not standard TIE fighters, but a quartet of those TIE Defenders he’d heard Thrawn was always going to Coruscant to lobby the High Command for.
Which was a complete waste of everyone’s time. With the extra weight of shields and hyperdrives—which standard TIEs didn’t have and competent pilots didn’t need—not to mention the structural changes necessary to switch the design from two wings to three, the Defenders were bigger, clumsier, slower, and more expensive than any other starfighters in the fleet. Even the navy didn’t have infinite funds, and with the High Command’s passion for bigger and more powerful ships there was no way even a grand admiral with Thrawn’s friends on Coruscant was going to get his way.
Kimmund frowned. On the other hand, given how fast the Defenders were leaving the Darkhawk behind, the reports of the craft being waddling ducks might have been a bit exaggerated.
Maybe this was his chance to see if the rest of the rumors were wrong, too.
“Looks like they’re heading out of orbit and running up their hyperdrive,” he called toward the comm. “Lord Vader wants it more or less intact. You think you can pin it to the sky?”
“Exactly what Commodore Faro suggested,” Skerris said. “One pinned freighter, coming up.”
“Idiot,” one of the stormtroopers behind Kimmund muttered.
“That’s fighter pilots for you,” someone else reminded him scornfully. “Twice
the mouth because half the brain.”
A withering salvo of fire erupted from the freighter, coming from a cluster of laser cannons that the Darkhawk hadn’t spotted. The blasts slammed into the TIE Defenders—
The four fighters broke outward in a perfect open-rose maneuver, taking themselves out of the vulnerable close-in group formation as they poured return fire into the cluster. There was a second salvo as the freighter reacquired its targets, with the same complete lack of effect.
It didn’t get a third salvo before the Defenders blew the whole laser cluster into twisted shards.
Someone whistled softly. “Damn things can actually fight.”
“Looks like it,” Kimmund agreed. So much for the snide rumors.
And now, with the laser cluster silenced, the four Defenders proceeded to dig into the part of the freighter’s dorsal area that Kimmund had tagged as being the likely hyperdrive location. A couple of quick salvos into the hull, another pair of slower passes with more accurate fire poured into the gaps created by the first volley—
“That should do you,” Skerris’s voice came as the Defenders delivered one final series of blasts and then veered away. “Aft quarter looks clear. You want us to open up another hole or two so you can get in?”
Kimmund snorted. Now he was just being insulting. “Thanks, we’ve got it,” he said. “If you want to be useful, see if you can chase down those four smaller ships.”
Which were already scattering, he saw, in response to the attack on their friend. At their current distance, there wasn’t a chance in the galaxy that the Defenders could get to them in time.
Skerris presumably knew all that, too. But the man was nothing if not ambitious. “Whatever you say,” he said. “The commodore said we were to render whatever assistance you thought necessary. Have fun. Call us if you need us.” The four Defenders made a hard portside turn and shot off on individual trajectories toward the escaping ships.
“Don’t worry, we will,” Kimmund muttered under his breath. “Boarding status?” he added, raising his voice.
