by Timothy Zahn
“An interesting speculation, isn’t it?” Thrawn agreed. “Unlikely, I’ll admit. But likely enough to be worth following up on.”
“Yes, sir.” Pellaeon glanced at the chrono, did a quick calculation. “Though if we stay here more than another day or two, we may have to move back the Sluis Van attack.”
“We’re not moving Sluis Van,” Thrawn said emphatically. “Our entire victory campaign against the Rebellion begins there, and I’ll not have so complex and far-reaching a schedule altered. Not for Skywalker; not for anyone else.” He nodded at the flame statues surrounding them. “Sluissi art clearly indicates a biannual cyclic pattern, and I want to hit them at their most sluggish point. We’ll leave for our rendezvous with the Inexorable and the cloaking shield test as soon as the troops and vehicles have been dropped. Three squads of stormtroopers should be adequate to handle Skywalker, if he is indeed here.”
His eyes bored into Pellaeon’s face. “And to handle Karrde,” he added softly, “if he turns out to be a traitor.”
The last bits of dark blue had faded from the tiny gaps in the canopy overhead, leaving nothing but blackness above them. Turning the survival kit’s worklight to its lowest setting, Mara set it down and sank gratefully to the ground against a large tree bole. Her right ankle, twisted somehow in the Skipray crash, had started to ache again, and it felt good to get the weight off it.
Skywalker was already stretched out a couple of meters on the other side of the worklight, his head pillowed on his tunic, his loyal droid standing at his side. She wondered if he’d guessed about the ankle, dismissed the question as irrelevant. She’d had worse injuries without being slowed down by them.
“Reminds me of Endor,” Skywalker said quietly as Mara arranged her glow rod and blaster in her lap where they’d be accessible. “A forest always sounds so busy at night.”
“Oh, it’s busy, all right,” Mara grunted. “A lot of the animals here are nocturnal. Including the vornskrs.”
“Strange,” he murmured. “Karrde’s pet vornskrs seemed wide enough awake in late afternoon.”
She looked across at him, mildly surprised he’d noticed that. “Actually, even in the wild they take small naps around the clock,” she said. “I call them nocturnal because they do most of their hunting at night.”
Skywalker mulled that over for a moment. “Maybe we ought to travel at night, then,” he suggested. “They’ll be hunting us either way—at least then we’d be awake and alert while they were on the prowl.”
Mara shook her head. “It’d be more trouble than it’s worth. We need to be able to see the terrain as far ahead of us as possible if we’re going to avoid running into dead ends. Besides, this whole forest is dotted with small clearings.”
“Through which a glow rod beam would show very clearly to an orbiting ship,” he conceded. “Point. You seem to know a lot about this place.”
“It wouldn’t take more than an observant pilot flying over the forest to see that,” she growled. But he was right, she knew, as she eased back against the rough bark. Know your territory was the first rule that had been drilled into her . . . and the first thing she’d done after establishing herself in Karrde’s organization had been to do precisely that. She’d studied the aerial maps of the forest and surrounding territory; had taken long walks, in both daylight and at night, to familiarize herself with the sights and sounds; had sought out and killed several vornskrs and other predators to learn the fastest ways of taking them down; had even talked one of Karrde’s people into running bio tests on a crateload of native plants to find out which were edible and which weren’t. Outside the forest, she knew something about the settlers, understood the local politics, and had stashed a small but adequate part of her earnings out where she could get hold of it.
More than anyone else in Karrde’s organization, she was equipped to survive outside the confines of his encampment. So why was she trying so hard to get back there?
It wasn’t for Karrde’s sake—that much she was sure of. All that he’d done for her—her job, her position, her promotions—she’d more than repaid with hard work and good service. She didn’t owe him anything, any more than he owed her. Whatever the story was he’d concocted this afternoon to explain the Skipray chase to Thrawn, it would have been designed to protect his own neck, not hers; and if he saw that the Grand Admiral wasn’t buying it, he was at perfect liberty to pull his group off Myrkr tonight and disappear down one of the other ratholes he had scattered throughout the galaxy.
Except that he wouldn’t. He would sit there, sending out search party after search party, and wait for Mara to come out of the forest. Even if she never did.
Even if by doing so he overstayed Thrawn’s patience.
Mara clenched her teeth, the unpleasant image of Karrde pinned against a cell wall by an interrogation droid dancing in front of her eyes. Because she knew Thrawn—knew the Grand Admiral’s tenacity and the limits of his patience both. He would wait and watch, or set someone to do it for him, and follow through on Karrde’s story.
And if neither she nor Skywalker ever reappeared from the forest, he would almost certainly jump to the wrong conclusion. At which point he would take Karrde in for a professional Imperial interrogation, and eventually would find out who the escaping prisoner had been.
And then he’d have Karrde put to death.
Across from her, the droid’s dome rotated a few degrees and it gave a quietly insistent gurgle. “I think Artoo’s picked up something,” Skywalker said, hiking himself up on his elbows.
“No kidding,” Mara said. She picked up her glow rod, pointed it at the shadow she’d already seen moving stealthily toward them, and flicked it on.
A vornskr stood framed in the circle of light, its front claws dug into the ground, its whip tail pointed stiffly back and waving slowly up and down. It paid no attention to the light, but continued moving slowly toward Skywalker.
Mara let it get another two paces, then shot it neatly through the head.
The beast collapsed to the ground, its tail giving one last spasmodic twitch before doing likewise. Mara gave the rest of the area a quick sweep with the glow rod, then flicked it off. “Awfully good thing we have your droid’s sensors along,” she said sarcastically into the relative darkness.
“Well, I wouldn’t have known there was any danger without him,” Skywalker came back wryly, “Thank you.”
“Forget it,” she grunted.
There was a short silence. “Are Karrde’s pet vornskrs a different species?” Skywalker asked. “Or did he have their tails removed?”
Mara peered across the gloom at him, impressed in spite of herself. Most men staring down a vornskr’s gullet wouldn’t have noticed a detail like that. “The latter,” she told him. “They use those tails as whips—pretty painful, and there’s a mild poison in them, too. At first it was just that Karrde didn’t want his people walking around with whip welts all over them; we found out later that removing the tails also kills a lot of their normal hunting aggression.”
“They seemed pretty domestic,” he agreed. “Even friendly.”
Only they hadn’t been friendly to Skywalker, she remembered. And here, the vornskr had ignored her and gone directly for him. Coincidence? “They are,” she said aloud. “He’s thought occasionally about offering them for sale as guard animals. Never gotten around to exploring the potential market.”
“Well, you can tell him I’d be glad to serve as a reference,” Skywalker said dryly. “Having looked a vornskr square in the teeth, I can tell you it’s not something the average intruder would like to do twice.”
Her lip twisted. “Get used to it,” she advised him. “It’s a long way to the edge of the forest.”
“I know.” Skywalker lay back down again. “Fortunately, you seem to be an excellent shot.”
He fell silent. Getting ready to sleep . . . and probably assuming she was going to do the same.
Wish away, she thought sardonically at him. Reaching
into her pocket, she pulled out the survival kit’s tube of stimpills. A steady stream of the things could ruin one’s health in short order, but going to sleep five meters away from an enemy would ruin it a lot faster.
She paused, tube in hand, and frowned at Skywalker. At his closed eyes and calm, apparently totally unworried face. Which seemed strange, because if anyone had ever had reason to be worried, it was he. Stripped of all his vaunted Jedi powers by a planetful of ysalamiri, trapped in a forest on a world whose name and location he didn’t even know, with her, the Imperials, and the vornskrs lining up for the privilege of killing him—he should by rights be wide-eyed with pumping adrenaline by now.
Maybe he was just faking it, hoping she would lower her guard. It was probably something she would try, under reversed circumstances.
But then, maybe there was more to him than met the eye. More than just a family name, a political position, and a bag of Jedi tricks.
Her mouth tightened, and she ran her fingers along the side of the lightsaber hanging from her belt. Yes, of course there was more there. Whatever had happened at the end—at that terrible, confused, life-destroying end—it hadn’t been his Jedi tricks that had saved him. It had been something else. Something she would make sure to find out from him before his own end came.
She thumbed a stimpill from the tube and swallowed it, a fresh determination surging through her as she did so. No, the vornskrs weren’t going to get Luke Skywalker. And neither were the Imperials. When the time came, she would kill him herself. It was her right, and her privilege, and her duty.
Shifting to a more comfortable position against her tree, she settled in to wait out the night.
The nighttime sounds of the forest came faintly from the distance, mixed in with the faint sounds of civilization from the building at his back. Karrde sipped at his cup, gazing into the darkness, feeling fatigue tugging at him as he’d seldom felt it before.
In a single day, his whole life had just been turned over.
Beside him, Drang raised his head and turned it to the right. “Company?” Karrde asked him, looking in that direction. A shadowy figure, hardly visible in the starlight, was moving toward him. “Karrde?” Aves’s voice called softly.
“Over here,” Karrde told him. “Go get a chair and join me.”
“This is okay,” Aves said, coming over beside him and sitting down cross-legged on the ground. “I’ve got to get back to Central pretty soon, anyway.”
“The mystery message?”
“Yeah. What in the worlds was Mara thinking of?”
“I don’t know,” Karrde admitted. “Something clever, though.”
“Probably,” Aves conceded. “I just hope were going to be clever enough to decrypt it.”
Karrde nodded. “Did Solo and Calrissian get bedded down all right?”
“They went back to their ship,” Aves said, his voice scowling. “I don’t think they trust us.”
“Under the circumstances, you can hardly blame them.” Karrde reached down to scratch Drang’s head. “Maybe pulling Skywalker’s computer logs tomorrow morning will help convince them we’re on their side.”
“Yeah. Are we?”
Karrde pursed his lips. “We don’t really have a choice anymore, Aves. They’re our guests.”
Aves umphed. “The Grand Admiral isn’t going to be happy.”
Karrde shrugged. “They’re our guests,” he repeated.
In the darkness, he sensed Aves shrug back. He understood, Aves did—understood the requirements and duties of a host. Unlike Mara, who’d wanted him to send the Millennium Falcon away.
He wished now that he’d listened to her. Wished it very much indeed.
“I’ll want you to organize a search party for tomorrow morning,” he told Aves. “Probably futile, all things considered, but it has to be tried.”
“Right. Do we defer to the Imperials in that regard?”
Karrde grimaced to himself. “I doubt if they’ll be doing any more searching. That ship that sneaked out from the Star Destroyer an hour ago looked suspiciously like a stripped-down assault shuttle. My guess is that they’ll set up in Hyllyard City and wait for Mara and Skywalker to come to them.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Aves said. “What if we don’t get to them first?”
“We’ll just have to take them away from the stormtroopers, I suppose. Think you can put a team together for the purpose?”
Aves snorted gently. “Easier done than said. I’ve sat in on a couple of conversations since you made the announcement, and I can tell you that feelings in camp are running pretty strong. Hero of the Rebellion and all that aside, a bunch of our people figure they owe Skywalker big for getting them out of permanent hock to Jabba the Hutt.”
“I know,” Karrde said grimly. “And all that warm enthusiasm could be a problem. Because if we can’t get Skywalker free from the Imperials . . . well, we can’t let them have him alive.”
There was a long silence from the shadow beside him. “I see,” Aves said at last, very quietly. “It probably won’t make any difference, you know, in what Thrawn suspects.”
“Suspicion is better than unequivocal proof,” Karrde reminded him. “And if we can’t intercept them while they’re still in the forest, it may be the best we’re going to get.”
Aves shook his head. “I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I. But we need to be prepared for every eventuality.”
“Understood.” For another moment Aves sat there in silence. Then, with a grunted sigh, he stood up. “I’d better get back, see if Ghent’s made any progress on Mara’s message.”
“And after that you’d better hit the sack,” Karrde told him. “Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day.”
“Right. Good night.”
Aves left, and once again the soft mixture of forest sounds filled the night air. Sounds that meant a great deal to the creatures who made them but nothing at all to him.
Meaningless sounds . . .
He shook his head tiredly. What had Mara been trying to do with that opaque message of hers? Was it something simple—something that he or someone else here ought to be able to decrypt with ease?
Or had the lady who always played the sabacc cards close to her chest finally outsmarted herself?
In the distance, a vornskr emitted its distinctive cackle/purr. Beside his chair, Drang lifted his head. “Friend of yours?” Karrde inquired mildly, listening as another vornskr echoed the first’s cry. Sturm and Drang had been wild like that once, before they’d been domesticated.
Just like Mara had been, when he’d first taken her in. He wondered if she would ever be similarly tamed.
Wondered if she would solve this whole problem by killing Skywalker first.
The cackle/purr came again, closer this time. “Come on, Drang,” he told the vornskr, getting to his feet. “Time to go inside.”
He paused at the door to take one last look at the forest, a shiver of melancholy and something that felt disturbingly like fear running through him. No, the Grand Admiral wasn’t going to be happy about this. Wasn’t going to be happy at all.
And one way or the other, Karrde knew that his life here was at an end.
CHAPTER
25
The room was quiet and dark, the faint nighttime sounds of Rwookrrorro floating in through the mesh window with the cool night breeze. Staring at the curtains, Leia gripped her blaster with a sweaty hand, and wondered what had awakened her.
She lay there for several minutes, heart thudding in her chest. But there was nothing. No sounds, no movements, no threats that her limited Jedi senses could detect. Nothing but a creepy feeling in the back of her mind that she was no longer safe here.
She took a deep breath, let it out silently as she continued to listen. It wasn’t any fault of her hosts, or at least nothing she could blame them for. The city’s leaders had been on incredibly tight alert the first couple of days, providing her with over a dozen Wookiee bodyguards while other volu
nteers combed through the city like hairy Imperial Walkers, searching for the alien she’d spotted that first day here. The whole thing had been carried out with a speed, efficiency, and thoroughness that Leia had seldom seen even in the top ranks of the Rebel Alliance.
But as the days passed without anyone finding a trace of the alien, the alert had gradually softened. By the time the negative reports also began coming in from other Kashyyyk cities, the number of searchers had dwindled to a handful and the dozen bodyguards had been reduced to three.
And now even those three were gone, returning to their regular jobs and lives. Leaving her with just Chewbacca, Ralrra, and Salporin to watch over her.
It was a classic strategy. Lying alone in the dark, with the advantage of hindsight, she could see that. Sentient beings, human and Wookiee alike, simply could not maintain a continual state of vigilance when there was no visible enemy to be vigilant toward. It was a tendency they’d had to fight hard against in the Alliance.
As they’d also had to fight against the too-often lethal inertia that seduced a person into staying too long in one place.
She winced, memories of the near disaster on the ice world of Hoth coming back to haunt her. She and Chewbacca should have left Rwookrrorro days ago, she knew. Probably should have left Kashyyyk entirely, for that matter. The place had become too comfortable, too familiar—her mind no longer really saw everything that went on around her, but merely saw some of it and filled in the rest from memory. It was the kind of psychological weakness that a clever enemy could easily exploit, simply by finding a way to fit himself into her normal routine.
It was time for that routine to be broken.
She peered over at the bedside chrono, did a quick calculation. About an hour until dawn. There was a repulsorlift sled parked just outside; if she and Chewbacca got going now, they should be able to get the Lady Luck into space a little after sunrise. Sitting halfway up, she slid across the bed, set her blaster down on the nightstand, and picked up her comlink.
And in the darkness, a sinewy hand reached out to seize her wrist.
