Dark Force Rising

by Timothy Zahn

  “Thank you.” If Thrawn was annoyed that he hadn’t caught Khabarakh red-handed in a lie, it didn’t show in his face. “Your team will take the ship back to Nystao for repairs.”

  “Yes, sir.” The tech saluted and left.

  Thrawn looked back at Khabarakh. “With your team destroyed, you will of course have to be reassigned,” he said. “When your ship has been repaired you will fly it to the Valrar base in Glythe sector and report there for duty.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Khabarakh said.

  Thrawn stood up. “You have much to be proud of here,” he said, inclining his head slightly to the maitrakh. “Your family’s service to the clan Kihm’bar and to the Empire will be long remembered by all of Honoghr.”

  “As will your leadership and protection of the Noghri people,” the maitrakh responded.

  Flanked by Rukh and Ir’khaim, Thrawn stepped down from the chair and headed back toward the double doors. Pellaeon took up the rear, and a minute later they were once again out in the chilly night air. The shuttle was standing ready, and without further comment or ritual Thrawn led the way inside. As they lifted, Pellaeon caught just a glimpse out the viewport of the Noghri filing out of the dukha to watch their departing leaders. “Well, that was pleasant,” he muttered under his breath.

  Thrawn looked at him. “A waste of time, you think, Captain?” he asked mildly.

  Pellaeon glanced at Ir’khaim, seated farther toward the front of the shuttle. The dynast didn’t seem to be listening to them, but it would probably still pay to be tactful. “Diplomatically, sir, I’m sure it was worthwhile to demonstrate that you care about all of Honoghr, including the outer villages,” he told Thrawn. “Given that the commando ship really had malfunctioned, I don’t think anything else was gained.”

  Thrawn turned to stare out the side viewport. “I’m not so sure of that, Captain,” he said. “There’s something not quite right back there. Rukh, what’s your reading of our young commando Khabarakh?”

  “He was unsettled,” the bodyguard told him quietly. “That much I saw in his hands and his face.”

  Ir’khaim swiveled around in his chair. “It is a naturally unsettling experience to face the lord of the Noghri,” he said.

  “Particularly when one’s hands are wet with failure?” Rukh countered.

  Ir’khaim half rose from his seat, and for a pair of heartbeats the air between the two Noghri was thick with tension. Pellaeon felt himself pressing back in his seat cushions, the long and bloody history of Noghri clan rivalry flooding fresh into his consciousness … “This mission has generated several failures,” Thrawn said calmly into the taut silence. “In that, the clan Kihm’bar hardly stands alone.”

  Slowly, Ir’khaim resumed his seat. “Khabarakh is still young,” he said.

  “He is indeed,” Thrawn agreed. “One reason, I presume, why he’s such a bad liar. Rukh, perhaps the Dynast Ir’khaim would enjoy the view from the forward section. Please escort him there.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Rukh stood up. “Dynast Ir’khaim?” he said, gesturing toward the forward blast door.

  For a moment the other Noghri didn’t move. Then, with obvious reluctance, he stood up. “My lord,” he said stiffly, and headed down the aisle.

  Thrawn waited until the door had closed on both aliens before turning back to Pellaeon. “Khabarakh is hiding something, Captain,” he said, a cold fire in his eyes. “I’m certain of it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pellaeon said, wondering how the Grand Admiral had come to that conclusion. Certainly the routine sensor scan they’d just run hadn’t picked up anything. “Shall I order a sensor focus on the village?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Thrawn shook his head. “He wouldn’t have brought anything incriminating back to Honoghr with him—you can’t hide anything for long in one of these close-knit villages. No, it’s something he’s not telling us about that missing month. The one where he claims he was off meditating by himself.”

  “We might be able to learn something from his ship,” Pellaeon suggested.

  “Agreed,” Thrawn nodded. “Have a scanning crew go over it before the techs get to work. Every cubic millimeter of it, interior and exterior both. And have Surveillance put someone on Khabarakh.”

  “Ah—yes, sir,” Pellaeon said. “One of our people, or another Noghri?”

  Thrawn cocked an eyebrow at him. “The ridiculously obvious or the heavily political, in other words?” he asked dryly. “Yes, you’re right, of course. Let’s try a third option: does the Chimaera carry any espionage droids?”

  “I don’t believe so, sir,” Pellaeon said, punching up the question on the shuttle’s computer link. “No. We have some Arakyd Viper probe droids, but nothing of the more compact espionage class.”

  “Then we’ll have to improvise,” Thrawn said. “Have Engineering put a Viper motivator into a decon droid and rig it with full-range optical and auditory sensors and a recorder. We’ll have it put in with the group working out of Khabarakh’s village.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pellaeon said, keying in the order. “Do you want a transmitter installed, too?”

  Thrawn shook his head. “No, a recorder should be sufficient. The antenna would be difficult to conceal from view. The last thing we want is for some curious Noghri to see it and wonder why this one was different.”

  Pellaeon nodded his understanding. Especially since that might lead the aliens to start pulling decon droids apart for a look inside. “Yes, sir. I’ll have the order placed right away.”

  Thrawn’s glowing eyes shifted to look out the viewport. “There’s no particular rush here,” he said thoughtfully. “Not now. This is the calm before the storm, Captain; and until the storm is ready to unleash, we might as well spend our time and energy making sure our illustrious Jedi Master will be willing to assist us when we want him.”

  “Which means bringing Leia Organa Solo to him.”

  “Exactly.” Thrawn looked at the forward blast door. “And if my presence is what the Noghri need to inspire them, then my presence is what they’ll have.”

  “For how long?” Pellaeon asked.

  Thrawn smiled tightly. “For as long as it takes.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  “Han?” Lando’s voice came from the cabin intercom beside the bunk. “Wake up.”

  “Yeah, I’m awake,” Han grunted, swiping at his eyes with one hand and swiveling the repeater displays toward him with the other. If there was one thing his years on the wrong side of the law had hammered into him, it was the knack of going from deep sleep to full alertness in the space between heartbeats. “What’s up?”

  “We’re here,” Lando announced. “Wherever here is.”

  “I’ll be right up.”

  They were in sight of their target planet by the time he’d dressed and made his way to the Lady Luck’s cockpit. “Where’s Irenez?” he asked, peering out at the mottled blue-green crescent shape they were rapidly approaching. It looked pretty much like any of a thousand other planets he’d seen.

  “She’s gone back to the aft control station,” Lando told her. “I got the impression she wanted to be able to send down some recognition codes without us looking over her shoulder.”

  “Any idea where we are?”

  “Not really,” Lando said. “Transit time was forty-seven hours, but that doesn’t tell us a whole lot.”

  Han nodded, searching his memory. “A Dreadnaught can pull, what, about Point Four?”

  “About that,” Lando agreed. “When it’s really in a hurry, anyway.”

  “Means we aren’t any more than a hundred fifty light-years from New Cov, then.”

  “I’d guess we’re closer than that, myself,” Lando said. “It wouldn’t make much sense to use New Cov as a contact point if they were that far away.”

  “Unless New Cov was Breil’lya’s idea and not theirs,” Han pointed out.

  “Possible,” Lando said. “I still think we’re closer than a hundred fifty light-yea
rs, though. They could have taken their time getting here just to mislead us.”

  Han looked up at the Dreadnaught that had been hauling them through hyperspace for the past two days. “Or to have time to organize a reception committee.”

  “There’s that,” Lando nodded. “I don’t know if I mentioned it, but after they apologized for getting the magnetic coupling off-center over our hatch I went back and took a look.”

  “You didn’t mention it, but I did the same thing,” Han said sourly. “Looked land of deliberate, didn’t it?”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Lando said. “Like maybe they wanted an excuse to keep us cooped up down here and not wandering around their ship.”

  “Could be lots of good and innocent reasons for that,” Han reminded him.

  “And lots of not-so-innocent ones,” Lando countered. “You sure you don’t have any idea who this Commander of theirs might be?”

  “Not even a guess. Probably be finding out real soon, though.”

  The comm crackled on. “Lady Luck, this is Sena,” a familiar voice said. “We’ve arrived.”

  “Yes, we noticed,” Lando told her. “I expect you’ll want us to follow you down.”

  “Right,” she said. “The Peregrine will drop the magnetic coupling whenever you’re ready to fly.”

  Han stared at the speaker, barely hearing Lando’s response. A ship called the Peregrine …?

  “You still with me?”

  Han focused on Lando, noticing with mild surprise that the other’s conversation with Sena had ended. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. It’s just—that name, Peregrine, rang an old bell.”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Not the ship, no,” Han shook his head. “The Peregrine was an old Corellian scare legend they used to tell when I was a kid. He was some old ghostly guy who’d been cursed to wander around the world forever and never find his home again. Used to make me feel real creepy.”

  From above came a clang; and with a jolt they were free of the Dreadnaught. Lando eased them away from the huge warship, looking up as it passed by overhead. “Well, try to remember it was just a legend,” he reminded Han.

  Han looked at the Dreadnaught. “Sure,” he said, a little too quickly. “I know that.”

  They followed Sena’s freighter down and were soon skimming over what appeared to be a large grassy plain dotted with patches of stubby coniferous trees. A wall of craggy cliffs loomed directly ahead—an ideal spot, Han’s old smuggler instincts told him, to hide a spaceship support and servicing base. A few minutes later his hunch was borne out as, sweeping over a low ridge, they came to the encampment.

  An encampment that was far too large to be merely a servicing base. Rows upon rows of camouflaged structures filled the plain just beneath the cliffs: everything from small living quarters to larger admin and supply sheds to still larger maintenance and tool buildings, up to a huge camo-roofed refurbishing hangar. The perimeter was dotted with the squat, turret-topped cylinders of Golan Arms anti-infantry batteries and a few of the longer Speizoc anti-vehicle weapons, along with some KAAC Freerunner assault vehicles parked in defensive posture.

  Lando whistled softly under his breath. “Would you look at that?” he said. “What is this, someone’s private army?”

  “Looks that way,” Han agreed, feeling the skin on the back of his neck starting to crawl. He’d run into private armies before, and they’d never been anything but trouble.

  “I think I’m starting not to like this,” Lando decided, easing the Lady Luck gingerly over the outer sentry line. Ahead, Sena’s freighter was approaching a landing pad barely visible against the rest of the ground. “You sure you want to go through with this?”

  “What, with three Dreadnaughts standing on our heads out there?” Han snorted. “I don’t think we’ve got a whole lot of choice. Not in this crate, anyway.”

  “Probably right,” Lando conceded, apparently too preoccupied to notice the insult to his ship. “So what do we do?”

  Sena’s freighter had dropped its landing skids and was settling onto the pad. “I guess we go down and behave like invited guests,” Han said.

  Lando nodded at Han’s blaster. “You don’t think they’ll object to their invited guests coming in armed?”

  “Let ’em object first,” Han said grimly. “Then we’ll discuss it.”

  Lando put the Lady Luck down beside the freighter, and together he and Han made their way to the aft hatchway. Irenez, her transmission chores finished, was waiting there for them, her own blaster strapped prominently to her hip. A transport skiff was parked outside, and as the three of them headed down the ramp, Sena and a handful of her entourage came around the Lady Luck’s bow. Most of the others were dressed in a casual tan uniform of an unfamiliar but vaguely Corellian cut; Sena, by contrast, was still in the nondescript civilian garb she’d been wearing on New Cov.

  “Welcome to our base of operations,” Sena said, waving a hand to encompass the encampment around them. “If you’ll come with us, the Commander is waiting to meet you.”

  “Busy looking place you’ve got here,” Han commented as they all boarded the skiff. “You getting ready to start a war or something?”

  “We’re not in the business of starting wars,” Sena said coolly.

  “Ah,” Han nodded, looking around as the driver swung the skiff around and headed off through the camp. There was something about the layout that seemed vaguely familiar.

  Lando got it first. “You know, this place looks a lot like one of the old Alliance bases we used to work out of,” he commented to Sena. “Only built on the surface instead of dug in underground.”

  “It does look that way, doesn’t it?” Sena agreed, her voice not giving anything away.

  “You’ve had dealings with the Alliance, then?” Lando probed gently.

  Sena didn’t answer. Lando looked at Han, eyebrows raised. Han shrugged slightly in return. Whatever was going on here, it was clear the hired hands weren’t in the habit of talking about it.

  The skiff came to a halt beside an admin-type building indistinguishable from the others nearby except for the two uniformed guards flanking the doorway. They saluted as Sena approached, one of them reaching over to pull the door open. “The Commander asked to see you for a moment alone, Captain Solo,” Sena said, stopping by the open door. “We’ll wait out here with General Calrissian.”

  “Right,” Han said. Taking a deep breath, he stepped inside.

  From its outside appearance he’d expected it to be a standard administrative center, with an outer reception area and a honeycomb of comfy executive offices stacked behind it. To his mild surprise, he found himself instead in a fully equipped war room. Lining the walls were comm and tracking consoles, including at least one crystal grav-field trap receptor and what looked like the ranging control for a KDY v-150 Planet Defender ion cannon like the one the Alliance had had to abandon on Hoth. In the center of the room a large holo display showed a sector’s worth of stars, with a hundred multicolored markers and vector lines scattered among the glittering white dots.

  And standing beside the holo was a man.

  His face was distorted somewhat by the strangely colored lights playing on it from the display; and it was, at any rate, a face Han had never seen except in pictures. But even so, recognition came with the sudden jolt of an overhead thunderclap. “Senator Bel Iblis,” he breathed.

  “Welcome to Peregrine’s Nest, Captain Solo,” the other said gravely, coming away from the holo toward him. “I’m flattered you still remember me.”

  “It’d be hard for any Corellian to forget you, sir,” Han said, his numbed brain noting vaguely in passing that there were very few people in the galaxy who rated an automatic sir from him. “But you …”

  “Were dead?” Bel Iblis suggested, a half smile creasing his lined face.

  “Well—yes,” Han floundered. “I mean, everyone thought you died on Anchoron.”

  “In a very real sense, I did,�
�� the other said quietly, the smile fading from his face. Closer now, Han was struck with just how lined with age and stress the Senator’s face was. “The Emperor wasn’t quite able to kill me at Anchoron, but he might just as well have done so. He took everything I had except my life: my family, my profession, even all future contacts with mainstream Corellian society. He forced me outside the law I’d worked so hard to create and maintain.” The smile returned, like a hint of sunshine around the edge of a dark cloud. “Forced me to become a rebel. I imagine you understand the feeling.”

  “Pretty well, yeah,” Han said, grinning lopsidedly in return. He’d read in school about the legendary presence of the equally legendary Senator Garm Bel Iblis; now, he was getting to see that charm up close. It made him feel like a schoolkid again. “I still can’t believe this. I wish we’d known sooner—we could really have used this army of yours during the war.”

  For just a second a shadow seemed to cross Bel Iblis’s face. “We probably couldn’t have done much to help,” he said. “It’s taken us a good deal of time to build up to what you see here.” His smile returned. “But there’ll be time to talk about that later. Right now, I see you standing there trying to figure out exactly when it was we met.”

  Actually, Han had forgotten about Sena’s references to a previous meeting. “Tell you the truth, I haven’t got a clue,” he confessed. “Unless it was after Anchoron and you were in disguise or something.”

  Bel Iblis shook his head. “No disguise; but it wasn’t something I’d really expect you to remember. I’ll give you a hint: you were all of eleven at the time.”