by Timothy Zahn
Pellaeon felt his stomach tighten. “That was the team that went after Leia Organa Solo on Kashyyyk.”
“And of which team only Khabarakh still survives,” Thrawn nodded. “I think it might be instructive to hear from him the details of that failed mission. And to find out why it’s taken him this long to return home.”
Thrawn’s eyes glittered. “And to find out,” he added quietly, “just why he’s trying so hard to avoid us.”
CHAPTER
10
It was full dark by the time Khabarakh brought the ship to ground in his village, a tight-grouped cluster of huts with brightly lit windows. “Do ships land here often?” Leia asked as Khabarakh pointed the ship toward a shadowy structure standing apart near the center of the village. In the glare of the landing lights the shadow became a large cylindrical building with a flat cone-shaped roof, the circular wall composed of massive vertical wooden pillars alternating with a lighter, shimmery wood. Just beneath the eaves she caught a glint of a metal band encircling the entire building.
“It is not common,” Khabarakh said, cutting the repulsorlifts and running the ship’s systems down to standby. “Neither is it unheard of.”
In other words, it was probably going to attract a fair amount of attention. Chewbacca, who had recovered enough for Leia to help into one of the cockpit passenger seats, was obviously thinking along the same lines. “The villagers are all close family of the clan Kihm’bar,” Khabarakh said in answer to the Wookiee’s slightly slurred question. “They will accept my promise of protection as their own. Come.”
Leia unstrapped and stood up, suppressing a grimace as she did so. But they were here now, and she could only hope that Khabarakh’s confidence was more than just the unfounded idealism of youth.
She helped Chewbacca unstrap and together they followed the Noghri back toward the main hatchway, collecting Threepio from her cabin on the way. “I must go first,” Khabarakh said as they reached the exit. “By custom, I must approach alone to the dukha of the clan Kihm’bar upon arrival. By law, I am required to announce out-clan visitors to the head of my family.”
“I understand,” Leia said, fighting back a fresh surge of uneasiness. She didn’t like this business of Khabarakh having conversations with his fellow Noghri that she wasn’t in on. Once again, there wasn’t a lot she could do about it. “We’ll wait here until you come and get us.”
“I will be quick,” Khabarakh promised. He palmed the door release twice, slipping outside as the panel slid open and then shut again.
Chewbacca growled something unintelligible under his breath. “He’ll be back soon,” Leia soothed him, making a guess as to what was bothering the Wookiee.
“I’m certain he is telling the truth,” Threepio added helpfully. “Customs and rituals of this sort are very common among the more socially primitive prespaceflight cultures.”
“Except that this culture isn’t prespaceflight,” Leia pointed out, her hand playing restlessly with the grip of her lightsaber as she stared at the closed hatchway in front of her. Khabarakh could at least have left the door open so that they would be able to see when he was coming back.
Unless, of course, he didn’t want them to see when he was coming back.
“That is evident, Your Highness,” Threepio agreed, his voice taking on a professorial tone. “I feel certain, however, that their status in that regard has been changed only recent— Well!” he broke off as Chewbacca abruptly pushed past him and lumbered back toward the center of the ship.
“Where are you going?” Leia called after the Wookiee. His only reply was some comment about the Imperials that she wasn’t quite able to catch. “Chewie, get back here,” she snapped. “Khabarakh will be back any minute.”
This time the Wookiee didn’t bother to answer. “Great,” Leia muttered, trying to decide what to do. If Khabarakh came back and found Chewbacca gone—but if he came and found both of them gone— “As I was saying,” Threepio went on, apparently deciding that the actions of rude Wookiees were better left ignored, “all the evidence I have gathered so far about this culture indicates that they were until recently a nonspacefaring people. Khabarakh’s reference to the dukha—obviously a clan center of some sort—the familial and clan structures themselves, plus this whole preoccupation with your perceived royal status—”
“The high court of Alderaan had a royal hierarchy, too,” Leia reminded him tartly, still looking back along the empty corridor. No, she decided, she and Threepio had better stay here and wait for Khabarakh. “Most other people in the galaxy didn’t consider us to be socially primitive.”
“No, of course not,” Threepio said, sounding a little embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to imply any such thing.”
“I know,” Leia assured him, a little embarrassed herself at jumping on Threepio like that. She’d known what he meant. “Where is he, anyway?”
The question had been rhetorical; but even as she voiced it the hatchway abruptly slid open again. “Come,” Khabarakh said. His dark eyes flicked over Leia and Threepio—“Where is the Wookiee?”
“He went back into the ship,” Leia told him. “I don’t know why. Do you want me to go and find him?”
Khabarakh made a sound halfway between a hiss and a purr. “There is no time,” he said. “The maitrakh is waiting. Come.”
Turning, he started back down the ramp. “Any idea how long it will take you to pick up the language?” Leia asked Threepio as they followed.
“I really cannot say, Your Highness,” the droid answered as Khabarakh led them across a dirt courtyard past the large wooden building they’d seen on landing—the clan dukha, Leia decided. One of the smaller structures beyond it seemed to be their goal. “Learning an entirely new language would be difficult indeed,” Threepio continued. “However, if it is similar to any of the six million forms of communication with which I am familiar—”
“I understand,” Leia cut him off. They were almost to the lighted building now; and as they approached, a pair of short Noghri standing in the shadows pulled open the double doors for them. Taking a deep breath, Leia followed Khabarakh inside.
From the amount of light coming through the windows she would have expected the building’s interior to be uncomfortably bright. To her surprise, the room they entered was actually darker than it had been immediately outside. A glance to the side showed why: the brightly lit “windows” were in fact standard self-powered lighting panels, with the operational sides facing outward. Except for a small amount of spillage from the panels, the interior of the building was lit only by a pair of floating-wick lamps. Threepio’s assessment of the society echoed through her mind; apparently, he’d known what he was talking about.
In the center of the room, standing silently in a row facing her, were five Noghri.
Leia swallowed hard, sensing somehow that the first words should be theirs. Khabarakh stepped to the Noghri in the center and dropped to his knees, ducking his head to the floor and splaying out his hands to his sides. The same gesture of respect, she remembered, that he’d extended to her back in the Kashyyyk holding cell. “Ilyr’ush mir lakh svoril’lae,” he said. “Mir’lae karah siv Mal’ary’ush vir’ae Vader’ush.”
“Can you understand it?” Leia murmured to Threepio.
“To a degree,” the droid replied. “It appears to be a dialect of the ancient trade language—”
“Sha’vah!” the Noghri in the center of the line spat.
Threepio recoiled. “She said, ‘Quiet,’ ” he translated unnecessarily.
“I understood the gist,” Leia said, drawing herself up and bringing the full weight of her Royal Alderaanian Court upbringing to bear on the aliens facing her. Deference to local custom and authority was all well and good; but she was the daughter of their Lord Darth Vader, and there were certain discourtesies that such a person should not put up with. “Is this how you speak to the Mal’ary’ush?” she demanded.
Six Noghri heads snapped over to look at her. Reach
ing out with the Force, Leia tried to read the sense behind those gazes; but as always, this particular alien mind seemed totally closed to her. She was going to have to play it by ear. “I asked a question,” she said into the silence.
The Noghri in the center took a step forward, and with the motion Leia noticed for the first time the two small hard bumps on the alien’s upper chest beneath the loose tunic. A female? “Maitrakh?” she murmured to Threepio, remembering the word Khabarakh had used earlier.
“A female who is leader of a local family or subclan structure,” the droid translated, his voice nervous and almost too low to hear. Threepio hated being yelled at.
“Thank you,” Leia said, eyeing the Noghri. “You are the maitrakh of this family?”
“I am she,” the Noghri said in heavily accented but understandable Basic. “What proof do you offer to your claim of Mal’ary’ush?”
Silently, Leia held out her hand. The maitrakh hesitated, then stepped up to her and gingerly sniffed it. “Is it not as I said?” Khabarakh asked.
“Be silent, thirdson,” the maitrakh said, raising her head to stare into Leia’s eyes. “I greet you, Lady Vader. But I do not welcome you.”
Leia held her gaze steadily. She could still not sense anything from any of the aliens, but with her thoughts extended she could tell that Chewbacca had left the ship and was approaching the house. Approaching rather rapidly, and with a definite agitation about him. She hoped he wouldn’t charge brashly in and ruin what little civility remained here. “May I ask why not?” she asked the maitrakh.
“Did you serve the Emperor?” the other countered. “Do you now serve our lord, the Grand Admiral?”
“No, to both questions,” Leia told her.
“Then you bring discord and poison among us,” the maitrakh concluded darkly. “Discord between what was and what now is.” She shook her head. “We do not need more discord on Honoghr, Lady Vader.”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the doors behind Leia swung open again and Chewbacca strode into the room.
The maitrakh started at the sight of the Wookiee, and one of the other Noghri uttered something startled-sounding. But any further reactions were cut off by Chewbacca’s snarled warning. “Are you sure they’re Imperials?” Leia asked, a cold fist clutching her heart. No, she pleaded silently. Not now. Not yet.
The Wookiee growled the obvious: that a pair of Lambda-class shuttles coming from orbit and from the direction of the city of Nystao could hardly be anything else.
Khabarakh moved up beside the maitrakh, said something urgently in his own language. “He says he has sworn protection to us,” Threepio translated. “He asks that the pledge be honored.”
For a long moment Leia thought the maitrakh was going to refuse. Then, with a sigh, she bowed her head slightly. “Come with me,” Khabarakh said to Leia, brushing past her and Chewbacca to the door. “The maitrakh has agreed to hide you from our lord the Grand Admiral, at least for now.”
“Where are we going?” Leia asked as they followed him out into the night.
“Your droid and your analysis equipment I will hide among the decon droids that are stored for the night in an outer shed,” the Noghri explained, pointing to a window-less building fifty meters away. “You and the Wookiee will be more of a problem. If the Imperials have sensor equipment with them, your life-sign profiles will register as different from Noghri.”
“I know,” Leia said, searching the sky for the shuttles’ running lights and trying to remember everything she could about life-form identification algorithms. Heart rate was one of the parameters, she knew, as were ambient atmosphere, respiratory byproducts, and molecule-chain EM polarization effects. But the chief long-range parameter was—“We need a heat source,” she told Khabarakh. “As big a one as possible.”
“The bake house,” the Noghri said, pointing to a windowless building three down from where they stood. At its back was a squat chimney from which wisps of smoke could be seen curling upward in the backwash of light from the surrounding structures.
“Sounds like our best chance,” Leia agreed. “Khabarakh, you hide Threepio; Chewie, come with me.”
The Noghri were waiting for them as they stepped from the shuttle: three females standing side by side, with two children acting as honor wardens by the doors of the clan dukha building. Thrawn glanced at the group, threw an evaluating sweep around the area, and then turned to Pellaeon. “Wait here until the tech team arrives, Captain,” he ordered Pellaeon quietly. “Get them started on a check of the communications and countermeasures equipment in the ship over there. Then join me inside.”
“Yes, sir.”
Thrawn turned to Ir’khaim. “Dynast,” he invited, gesturing at the waiting Noghri. The dynast bowed and strode toward them. Thrawn threw a glance at Rukh, who’d taken Ir’khaim’s former position at the Grand Admiral’s side, and together they followed. There was the usual welcoming ritual, and then the females led the way into the dukha.
The shuttle from the Chimaera was only a couple of minutes behind them. Pellaeon briefed the tech team and got them busy, then crossed to the dukha and went in.
He’d expected that the maitrakh would have managed to round up perhaps a handful of her people for this impromptu late-evening visit by their glorious lord and master. To his surprise, he found that the old girl had in fact turned out half the village. There was a double row of them, children as well as adults, lining the dukha walls from the huge genealogy wall chart back to the double doors and around again to the meditation booth opposite the chart. Thrawn was seated in the clan High Seat two-thirds of the way to the back of the room with Ir’khaim standing again at his side. The three females who’d met the shuttle stood facing them with a second tier of elders another pace back. Standing with the females, his steel-gray skin a marked contrast to their older, darker gray, was a young Noghri male.
Pellaeon had, apparently, missed nothing more important than a smattering of the nonsense ritual the Noghri never seemed to get enough of. As he moved past the silent lines of aliens to stand at Thrawn’s other side, the young male stepped forward and knelt before the High Seat. “I greet you, my lord,” he mewed gravely, spreading his arms out to his sides. “You honor my family and the clan Kihm’bar with your presence here.”
“You may rise,” Thrawn told him. “You are Khabarakh, clan Kihm’bar?”
“I am, my lord.”
“You were once a member of the Imperial Noghri commando team twenty-two,” Thrawn said. “A team that ceased to exist on the planet Kashyyyk. Tell me what happened.”
Khabarakh might have twitched. Pellaeon couldn’t tell for sure. “I filed a report, my lord, immediately upon leaving that world.”
“Yes, I read the report,” Thrawn told him coolly. “Read it very carefully, and noted the questions it left unanswered. Such as how and why you survived when all others in your team were killed. And how it was you were able to escape when the entire planet had been alerted to your presence. And why you did not return immediately to either Honoghr or one of our other bases after your failure.”
This time there was definitely a twitch. Possibly a reaction to the word failure. “I was left unconscious by the Wookiees during the first attack,” Khabarakh said. “I awakened alone and made my way back to the ship. Once there, I deduced what had happened to the rest of the team from official information sources. I suspect they simply were unprepared for the speed and stealth of my ship when I made my escape. As to my whereabouts afterward, my lord—” He hesitated. “I transmitted my report, and then left for a time to be alone.”
“Why?”
“To think, my lord, and to meditate.”
“Wouldn’t Honoghr have been a more suitable place for such meditation?” Thrawn asked, waving a hand around the dukha.
“I had much to think about. My lord.”
For a moment Thrawn eyed him thoughtfully. “You were slow to respond when the request for a recognition signal came from the surf
ace,” he said. “You then refused to land at the Nystao port facilities.”
“I did not refuse, my lord. I was never ordered to land there.”
“The distinction is noted,” Thrawn said dryly. “Tell me why you chose to come here instead.”
“I wished to speak with my maitrakh. To discuss my meditations with her, and to ask forgiveness for my … failure.”
“And have you done so?” Thrawn asked, turning to face the maitrakh.
“We have begun,” she said in atrociously mangled Basic. “We have not finished.”
At the back of the room, the dukha doors swung open and one of the tech team stepped inside. “You have a report, Ensign?” Thrawn called to him.
“Yes, Admiral,” the other said, crossing the room and stepping somewhat gingerly around the assembled group of Noghri elders. “We’ve finished our preliminary set of comm and countermeasures tests, sir, as per orders.”
Thrawn shifted his gaze to Khabarakh. “And?”
“We think we’ve located the malfunction, sir. The main transmitter coil seems to have overloaded and back-fed into a dump capacitor, damaging several nearby circuits. The compensator computer rebuilt the pathway, but the bypass was close enough to one of the static-damping command lines for the resulting inductance surge to trigger it.”
“An interesting set of coincidences,” Thrawn said, his glowing eyes still on Khabarakh. “A natural malfunction, do you think, or an artificial one?”
The maitrakh stirred, as if about to say something. Thrawn looked at her, and she subsided. “Impossible to say, sir,” the tech said, choosing his words carefully. Obviously, he hadn’t missed the fact that this was skating him close to the edge of insult in the middle of a group of Noghri who might decide to take offense at it. “Someone who knew what he was doing could probably have pulled it off. I have to say, though, sir, that compensator computers in general have a pretty low reputation among mechanics. They’re okay on the really serious stuff that can get unskilled pilots into big trouble, but on noncritical reroutes like this they’ve always had a tendency to foul up something else along the way.”
