by James Luceno
“Which is precisely what I offer you,” Thrawn said. “Millions of lives—billions, if you wish. All those lives to do with as you please.”
“It isn’t the same,” C’baoth said, a note of paternal patience in his voice. “I have no desire to hold distant power over faceless lives.”
“You could have just a single city to rule, then,” Thrawn persisted. “As large or as small as you wish.”
“I rule a city now.”
Thrawn’s eyes narrowed. “I need your assistance, Master C’baoth. Name your price.”
C’baoth smiled. “My price? The price for my service?” Abruptly, the smile vanished. “I’m a Jedi Master, Grand Admiral Thrawn,” he said, his voice simmering with menace. “Not a mercenary for hire like your Noghri.”
He threw a contemptuous look at Rukh, sitting silently off to one side. “Oh, yes, Noghri—I know what you and your people are. The Emperor’s private Death Commandos; killing and dying at the whim of ambitious men like Darth Vader and the Grand Admiral here.”
“Lord Vader served the Emperor and the Empire,” Rukh grated, his dark eyes staring unblinkingly at C’baoth. “As do we.”
“Perhaps.” C’baoth turned back to Thrawn. “I have all I want or need, Grand Admiral Thrawn. You will leave Wayland now.”
Thrawn didn’t move. “I need your assistance, Master C’baoth,” he repeated quietly. “And I will have it.”
“Or you’ll do what?” C’baoth sneered. “Have your Noghri try to kill me? It would almost be amusing to watch.” He looked at Pellaeon. “Or perhaps you’ll have your brave Star Destroyer captain try to level my city from orbit. Except that you can’t risk damaging the mountain, can you?”
“My gunners could destroy this city without even singeing the grass on Mount Tantiss,” Pellaeon retorted. “If you need a demonstration—”
“Peace, Captain,” Thrawn cut him off calmly. “So it’s the personal, face-to-face sort of power you prefer, Master C’baoth? Yes, I can certainly understand that. Not that there can be much challenge left in it—not anymore. Of course,” he added reflectively, glancing out the window, “that may be the whole idea. I expect that even Jedi Masters eventually get too old to be interested in anything except to sit out in the sun.”
C’baoth’s forehead darkened. “Have a care, Grand Admiral Thrawn,” he warned. “Or perhaps I’ll seek challenge in your destruction.”
“That would hardly be a challenge for a man of your skill and power,” Thrawn countered with a shrug. “But then, you probably already have other Jedi here under your command.”
C’baoth frowned, obviously thrown by the sudden change in subject. “Other Jedi?” he echoed.
“Of course. Surely it’s only fitting that a Jedi Master have lesser Jedi serving beneath him. Jedi whom he may teach and command and punish at will.”
Something like a shadow crossed C’baoth’s face. “There are no Jedi left,” he murmured. “The Emperor and Vader hunted them down and destroyed them.”
“Not all of them,” Thrawn told him softly. “Two new Jedi have arisen in the past five years: Luke Skywalker and his sister, Leia Organa Solo.”
“And what is that to me?”
“I can deliver them to you.”
For a long minute C’baoth stared at him, disbelief and desire struggling for supremacy on his face. The desire won. “Both of them?”
“Both of them.” Thrawn nodded. “Consider what a man of your skill could do with brand-new Jedi. Mold them, change them, re-create them in any image you choose.” He cocked an eyebrow. “And with them would come a very special bonus … because Leia Organa Solo is pregnant. With twins.”
C’baoth inhaled sharply. “Jedi twins?” he hissed.
“They have the potential, or so my sources tell me.” Thrawn smiled. “Of course, what they ultimately became would be entirely up to you.”
C’baoth’s eyes darted to Pellaeon; back to Thrawn. Slowly, deliberately, he stood up. “Very well, Grand Admiral Thrawn,” he said. “In return for the Jedi, I will assist your forces. Take me to your ship.”
“In time, Master C’baoth,” Thrawn said, getting to his feet himself. “First we must go into the Emperor’s mountain. This bargain is dependent on whether I find what I’m looking for there.”
“Of course.” C’baoth’s eyes flashed. “Let us both hope,” he said warningly, “that you do.”
It took seven hours of searching, through a mountain fortress much larger than Pellaeon had expected. But in the end, they did indeed find the treasures Thrawn had hoped for. The cloaking shield … and that other small, almost trivial, bit of technology.
The door to the Grand Admiral’s command room slid open; settling himself, Pellaeon stepped inside. “A word with you, Admiral?”
“Certainly, Captain,” Thrawn said from his seat in the center of the double display circle. “Come in. Has there been any update from the Imperial Palace?”
“No, sir, not since yesterday’s,” Pellaeon said as he walked to the edge of the outer circle, silently rehearsing one last time how he was going to say this. “I can request one, if you’d like.”
“Probably unnecessary.” Thrawn shook his head. “It looks like the details of the Bimmisaari trip have been more or less settled. All we have to do is alert one of the commando groups—Team Eight, I think—and we’ll have our Jedi.”
“Yes, sir,” Pellaeon braced himself. “Admiral … I have to tell you that I’m not convinced dealing with C’baoth is a good idea. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think he’s entirely sane.”
Thrawn cocked an eyebrow. “Of course he’s not sane. But then, he’s not Joruus C’baoth, either.”
Pellaeon felt his mouth fall open. “What?”
“Joruus C’baoth is dead,” Thrawn said. “He was one of the six Jedi Masters aboard the Old Republic’s Outbound Flight project.14 I don’t know if you were highly enough placed back then to have known about it.”
“I heard rumors,” Pellaeon frowned, thinking back. “Some sort of grand effort to extend the Old Republic’s authority outside the galaxy, as I recall, launched just before the Clone Wars broke out. I never heard anything more about it.”
“That’s because there wasn’t anything more to be heard,” Thrawn said evenly. “It was intercepted by a task force outside Old Republic space and destroyed.”
Pellaeon stared at him, a shiver running up his back. “How do you know?”
Thrawn raised his eyebrows. “Because I was the force’s commander. Even at that early date the Emperor recognized that the Jedi had to be exterminated. Six Jedi Masters aboard the same ship was too good an opportunity to pass up.”
Pellaeon licked his lips. “But then …?”
“Who is it we’ve brought aboard the Chimaera?” Thrawn finished the question for him. “I should have thought that obvious. Joruus C’baoth—note the telltale mispronunciation of the name Jorus—is a clone.”
Pellaeon stared at him. “A clone?”
“Certainly,” Thrawn said. “Created from a tissue sample, probably sometime just before the real C’baoth’s death.”
“Early in the war, in other words,” Pellaeon said, swallowing hard. The early clones—or at least those the fleet had faced15—had been highly unstable, both mentally and emotionally. Sometimes spectacularly so … “And you deliberately brought this thing aboard my ship?” he demanded.
“Would you rather we have brought back a full-fledged Dark Jedi?” Thrawn asked coldly. “A second Darth Vader, perhaps, with the sort of ambitions and power that might easily lead him to take over your ship? Count your blessings, Captain.”
“At least a Dark Jedi would have been predictable,” Pellaeon countered.
“C’baoth is predictable enough,” Thrawn assured him. “And for those times when he isn’t—” He waved a hand at the half dozen frameworks encircling his command center. “That’s what the ysalamiri are for.”
Pellaeon grimaced. “I still don’t like it, Admira
l. We can hardly protect the ship from him while at the same time having him coordinate the fleet’s attacks.”
“There’s a degree of risk involved,” Thrawn agreed. “But risk has always been an inescapable part of warfare. In this case, the potential benefits far outweigh the potential dangers.”
Reluctantly, Pellaeon nodded. He didn’t like it—was fairly certain he would never like it—but it was clear that Thrawn had made up his mind. “Yes, sir,” he muttered. “You mentioned a message to Team Eight. Will you be wanting me to transmit that?”
“No, I’ll handle it myself.” Thrawn smiled sardonically. “Their glorious leader, and all that—you know how Noghri are. If there’s nothing more …?”
It was, clearly, a dismissal. “No, sir,” Pellaeon said. “I’ll be on the bridge if you require me.” He turned to go.
“It will bring us victory, Captain,” the Grand Admiral called softly after him. “Quiet your fears, and concentrate on that.”
If it doesn’t kill us all. “Yes, sir,” Pellaeon said aloud, and left the room.
C H A P T E R 5
Han finished his report, sat back, and waited for the criticism to start.
It was a very short wait. “So once again your smuggler friends refuse to commit themselves,” Admiral Ackbar said, sounding more than a little disgusted. His high-domed head bobbed twice in some indecipherable Calamarian gesture, his huge eyes blinking in time with the head movements. “You’ll recall that I disagreed with this idea all along,” he added, waving a webbed hand toward Han’s report case.
Han glanced across the table at Leia. “It’s not a matter of commitment, Admiral,” he told the other. “It’s a matter that most of them just don’t see any real gain in switching from their current activities to straight shipping.”
“Or else it’s a lack of trust,” a melodic alien voice put in. “Could that be it?”
Han grimaced before he could stop himself. “It’s possible,” he said, forcing himself to look at Borsk Fey’lya.
“Possible?” Fey’lya’s violet eyes widened, the fine cream-colored fur covering his body rippling slightly with the motion. It was a Bothan gesture of polite surprise, one which Fey’lya seemed to use a lot.1 “You said possible, Captain Solo?”
Han sighed quietly and gave up. Fey’lya would only maneuver him into saying it some other way if he didn’t. “Some of the groups I’ve talked to don’t trust us,” he conceded. “They think the offer might be some sort of trap to bring them out into the open.”
“Because of me, of course,” Ackbar growled, his normal salmon color turning a little darker. “Haven’t you tired of retaking this same territory, Councilor Fey’lya?”
Fey’lya’s eyes widened again, and for a moment he gazed silently at Ackbar as the tension around the table quickly rose to the level of thick paste. They had never liked each other, Han knew, not from the day Fey’lya had first brought his sizable faction of the Bothan race into the Alliance after the Battle of Yavin. Right from the start Fey’lya had been jockeying for position and power, cutting deals wherever and whenever he could and making it abundantly clear that he expected to be given a high position in the fledgling political system Mon Mothma was putting together. Ackbar had considered such ambitions to be a dangerous waste of time and effort, particularly given the bleak situation the Alliance was facing at the time, and with typical bluntness had made no effort to conceal that opinion.
Given Ackbar’s reputation and subsequent successes, Han had little doubt that Fey’lya would ultimately have been shunted off to some relatively unimportant government post in the New Republic … if it hadn’t happened that the spies who discovered the existence and location of the Emperor’s new Death Star had been a group of Fey’lya’s Bothans.
Preoccupied at the time with more urgent matters, Han had never learned the details of how Fey’lya had managed to parlay that serendipity into his current position on the Council. And to be perfectly honest, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
“I merely seek to clarify the situation in my own mind, Admiral,” Fey’lya said at last into the heavy silence. “It’s hardly worthwhile for us to continue sending a valuable man like Captain Solo out on these contact missions if each is predoomed to failure.”
“They’re not predoomed to failure,” Han cut in. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Leia give him a warning look. He ignored it. “The kind of smugglers we’re looking for are conservative businesspeople—they don’t just jump into something new without thinking it through first. They’ll come around.”
Fey’lya shrugged, his fur again rippling. “And meanwhile, we expend a great deal of time and effort with nothing to show for it.”
“Look, you can’t build up any—”
A gentle, almost diffident tap of a hammer from the head of the table cut off the argument. “What the smugglers are waiting for,” Mon Mothma said quietly, her stern gaze touching each of the others at the table in turn, “is the same thing the rest of the galaxy is waiting for: the formal reestablishment of the principles and law of the Old Republic. That is our first and primary task, Councilors. To become the New Republic in fact as well as in name.”
Han caught Leia’s eye, and this time he was the one who sent out the warning look. She grimaced, but nodded slightly and kept quiet.
Mon Mothma let the silence linger a moment longer, again sending her gaze around the table. Han found himself studying her, noting the deepening lines in her face, the streaks of gray in her dark hair, the thinness rather than slenderness of her neck. She’d aged a lot since he’d first met her, back when the Alliance was trying to find a way out from under the shadow of the Empire’s second Death Star.2 Ever since then, Mon Mothma had been right in the middle of this horrendous task of setting up a viable government, and the strain had clearly told on her.
But despite what the years were doing to her face, her eyes still held the same quiet fire they’d possessed then—the same fire, or so the stories went, that had been there since her historic break with the Emperor’s New Order and her founding of the Rebel Alliance. She was tough, and smart, and fully in control. And everyone present knew it.
Her eyes finished their sweep and came to rest on Han. “Captain Solo, we thank you for your report; and, too, for your efforts. And with the Captain’s report, this meeting is adjourned.”
She tapped the hammer again and stood up. Han closed his report case and worked his way through the general confusion around to the other side of the table. “So,” he said quietly, coming up behind Leia as she collected her own things. “Are we out of here?”
“The sooner the better,” she muttered back. “I just have to give these things to Winter.”
Han glanced around and lowered his voice a notch. “I take it things were going a little rough before they called me in?”
“No more than usual,” she told him. “Fey’lya and Ackbar had one of their polite little dogfights, this one over the fiasco at Obroa-skai—that lost Elomin force—with some more of Fey’lya’s veiled suggestions that the job of Commander in Chief is too much for Ackbar to handle. And then, of course, Mon Mothma—”
“A word with you, Leia?” Mon Mothma’s voice came from over Han’s shoulder.
Han turned to face her, sensing Leia tense a little beside him as she did likewise. “Yes?”
“I forgot to ask you earlier if you’d talked to Luke about going with you to Bimmisaari,” Mon Mothma said. “Did he agree?”
“Yes.” Leia nodded, throwing an apologetic look at Han. “I’m sorry, Han; I didn’t get a chance to tell you. The Bimms sent a message yesterday asking that Luke be there with me for the talks.”
“They did, huh?” A year ago, Han reflected, he would probably have been furious at having a painstakingly crafted schedule flipped at the last minute like this. Leia’s diplomatic patience must be starting to rub off on him.
Either that, or he was just getting soft. “They give any reasons?”
“The Bimms are
rather hero-oriented,” Mon Mothma said before Leia could answer, her eyes searching Han’s face. Probably trying to figure out just how mad he was about the change in plans. “And Luke’s part in the Battle of Endor is rather well known.”
“Yeah, I’d heard that,” Han said, trying not to be too sarcastic. He had no particular quarrel with Luke’s position in the New Republic’s pantheon of heroes—the kid had certainly earned it. But if having Jedi around to brag about was so important to Mon Mothma, then she ought to be letting Leia get on with her own studies instead of foisting all this extra diplomatic work on her. As it was, he would bet on an ambitious snail to make full Jedi before she did.3
Leia found his hand, squeezed it. He squeezed back, to show that he wasn’t mad. Though she probably already knew that. “We’d better get going,” she told Mon Mothma, using her grip on Han’s hand to start steering him away from the table. “We still have to collect our droids before we leave.”
“Have a good trip,” Mon Mothma said gravely. “And good luck.”
“The droids are already on the Falcon,” Han told Leia as they wove their way around the various conversations that had sprung up between the Councilors and staff members. “Chewie got them aboard while I came here.”
“I know,” Leia murmured.
“Right,” Han said, and left it at that.
She squeezed his hand again. “It’ll be all right, Han. You, me, and Luke together again—it’ll be just like old times.”
“Sure,” Han said. Sitting around with a group of half-furred, half-size aliens, listening to Threepio’s precise voice all day as he translated back and forth, trying to penetrate yet another alien psychology to figure out what exactly it would take to get them to join the New Republic—“Sure,” he repeated with a sigh. “Just exactly like old times.”4
