Dark Force Rising (Star Wars) swtt-2

by Timothy Zahn

  "Solo only, I think," Thrawn corrected thoughtfully.

  "Organa Solo and the Wookiee are most likely still trying to find a place to hide from our Noghri. But Solo will be going to Palanhi, firmly convinced by Intelligence's electronic sleight-of-hand that the trail leads through that system. Which is why the Death's Head is on its way there right now."

  "I see," Pellaeon murmured. He'd noticed that order on the daily log and had wondered why Thrawn was pulling one of their best Imperial Star Destroyers off battle duty. "I hope it will be equal to the task. Solo and Skywalker have both proved hard to trap in the past."

  "I don't believe Skywalker is going to Palanhi," Thrawn told him, his face settling into a somewhat sour expression. "Our esteemed Jedi Master apparently called it correctly. Skywalker has decided to pay a visit to Jomark."

  Pellaeon stared at him. "Are you sure, Admiral? I haven't seen anything from Intelligence to that effect."

  "The information wasn't from, Intelligence," Thrawn said. "It came from Delta Source.

  "Ah," Pellaeon said, feeling his own expression go a little sour. The Chimaera's Intelligence section had been nagging him for months now to find out what exactly this Delta Source was that seemed to feed such clear and precise information to the Grand Admiral from the very heart of the Imperial Palace. So far all Thrawn would say was that Delta Source was firmly established and that the information gained through it should be treated as absolutely reliable.

  Intelligence hadn't even been able to figure out whether Delta Source was a person, a droid, or some exotic recording system that was somehow able to elude the Rebellion's hourly counter intelligence sweeps of the Palace. It irritated them no end; and Pellaeon had to admit he didn't much like being kept in the dark about it, either. But Thrawn had personally activated Delta Source, and long years of unwritten protocol in such matters gave him the right to keep the contact confidential if he chose. "I'm sure C'baoth will be pleased to hear it," he said. "I presume you'll want to give him the news yourself."

  He thought he'd hidden his irritation with C'baoth reasonably well. Apparently, he'd thought wrong. "You're still upset about Taanab," Thrawn said, turning to gaze out at the battle. It wasn't a question.

  "Yes, sir, I am," Pellaeon said stiffly. "I've been over the records again, and there's only one possible conclusion. C'baoth deliberately went beyond the battle plan Captain Aban had laid out-went beyond it to the point of disobeying a direct order. I don't care who C'baoth is or whether he felt justified or not. What he did constitutes mutiny."

  "It did indeed," Thrawn agreed calmly. "Shall I throw him out of the Imperial service altogether, or simply demote him in rank?

  Pellaeon glared at the other. "I'm serious, Admiral.

  "So am I, Captain," Thrawn countered, his voice abruptly cold. "You know full well what's at stake here. We need to utilize every weapon at our disposal if we're to defeat the Rebellion. C'baoth's ability to enhance coordination and battle efficiency between our forces is one of those weapons; and if he can't handle proper military discipline and protocol, then we bend the rules for him."

  "And what happens when we've bent the rules so far that they come around and stab us in the back?" Pellaeon demanded. "He ignored a direct order at Taanab-maybe next time it'll be two orders. Then three, then four, until finally he's doing what he damn well pleases and to blazes with the Empire. What's to stop him?"

  "Initially, the ysalamiri," Thrawn said, gesturing at the odd-looking tubular frameworks scattered around the bridge, each with an elongated furry creature wrapped around it. Each of them creating a bubble in the Force where none of C'baoth's Jedi tricks would work. "That's what they're here for, after all."

  "That's all well and good," Pellaeon said. "But in the long run-"

  "In the long run, I will stop him," Thrawn cut him off, touching his board. "Squadron C-3, watch your port-zenith flank. There's a blister on that Frigate that could be a cluster trap."

  The commander acknowledged, the TIE interceptors veering away in response. A second later, half a heartbeat too late, the blister abruptly exploded, sending a withering hail of concussion grenades outward in all directions. The rearmost of the TIE interceptors was caught by the edge of the fiery flower, shattering in a brilliant secondary èxplosion. The rest, out of range, escaped the booby trap unharmed.

  Thrawn turned his glowing eyes on Pellaeon. "I understand your concerns, Captain," he said quietly. "What you fail to grasp-what you've always failed to grasp-is that a man with C'baoth's mental and emotional instabilities can never be a threat to us. Yes, he has a great deal of power, and at any given moment he could certainly do considerable damage to our people and equipment. But by his very nature he's unable to use that power for any length of time. Concentration, focus, long-term thinking-those are the qualities that separate a warrior from a mere flailing fighter. And they're qualities C'baoth will never possess."

  Pellaeon nodded heavily. He still wasn't convinced, but there was clearly no use in arguing the point further. Not now, anyway. Yes, sir." He hesitated. "C'baoth will also want to know about Organa Solo." Thrawn's eyes glittered; but the annoyance, Pellaeon knew, wasn't directed at him. "You will tell Master C'baoth that I've decided to allow the Noghri one last chance to find and capture her. When we've finished here, I'll be taking that message to them. Personally."

  Pellaeon glanced back at the entrance to the bridge, where the Noghri bodyguard Rukh stood his usual silent vigil. "You're calling a convocate of the Noghri commandos?" he asked, suppressing a shiver. He'd been to one such mass meeting once, and facing a whole roomful of those quiet gray-skinned killers was not an experience he was anxious to repeat.

  "I think matters have gone beyond simply calling a convocate," Thrawn said coldly. "You'll instruct Navigation to prepare a course from the rendezvous point to the Honoghr system. The entire Noghri populace, I think, needs to be reminded of who it is they serve."

  He shifted his glare out the viewport at the battle and tapped his board. "TIE command: recall all fighters to the ship," he ordered.

  "Navigation: begin calculations for a return to the rendezvous point." Pellaeon frowned out the viewport. The modified Bulk Cruiser and backup Frigate were pretty much dead where they lay, but the convoy itself was largely undamaged. "We're letting them go?"

  "There's no need to destroy them," Thrawn said. "Stripping them of their defense is an adequate object lesson for the moment." He tapped a key, and a tactical holo of this section of the galaxy appeared between their two stations. Blue lines marked the Rebellion's main trade routes; those sheathed in red marked ones the Imperial forces had hit in the past month. "There's more to these attacks than simple harassment, Captain. Once this group has told their story, all future convoys from Sarka will demand upgraded protection. Enough such attacks, and the Rebellion will face the choice of either tying up large numbers of its ships with escort duty or effectively abandoning cargo shipment through these border sectors. Either way, it will put them at a serious disadvantage when we launch the Mount Tantiss campaign." He smiled grimly. "Economics and psychology, Captain. For now, the more civilian survivors there are to spread the tale of Imperial power, the better. There'll be time enough for destruction later." He glanced at his board, looked back out the viewport. "Speaking of Imperial power, any news on our ship hunt?"

  "We've had five more capital ships turned in to various Imperial bases in the past ten hours," Pellaeon told him. "Nothing larger than an old Star Galleon, but it's a start."

  "We're going to need more than just a start, Captain," Thrawn said, craning his neck slightly to watch the returning TIE interceptors. "Any word on Talon Karrde?"

  "Nothing since that tip from Rishi," Pellaeon told him, tapping the proper log for an update. "The bounty hunter who sent it was killed shortly afterward."

  "Keep up the pressure," Thrawn ordered. "Karrde knows a great deal about what happens in this galaxy. If there are any capital ships lying unused out there, he'll know where
they are."

  Personally, Pellaeon thought it pretty unlikely that a mere smuggler, even one with Karrde's connections, would have better information sources than the vast Imperial Intelligence network. But he'd also dismissed the possibility that Karrde might be hiding Luke Skywalker out at that base on Myrkr. Karrde was turning out to be full of surprises. "There are a lot of people out there hunting for him," he told the Grand Admiral. "Sooner or later, one of them will find him."

  "Good." Thrawn glanced around the bridge. "In the meantime, all units will continue their assigned harassment of the Rebellion." His glowing red eyes bored into Pellaeon's face. "And they will continue, too, to maintain a watch fur the Millennium Falcon and the Lady Luck. After the Noghri have been properly primed for their task, I want their prey to be ready for them." C'baoth awakened suddenly, his black-edged dreams giving way to the sudden realization that someone was approaching.

  For a moment he lay there in the darkness, his long white beard scratching gently against his chest as he breathed, his mind reaching out through the Force to track along the road from the High Castle to the cluster of villages at the base of the rim mountains. It was hard to concentrate-so very hard-but with a perverse grimness he ignored the fatigue-driven pain and kept at it. There ... no ... there. A lone man riding a Cracian Thumper, laboring over one of the steeper sections of the roadway. Most likely a messenger, come to bring him some news from the villagers below. Something trifling, no doubt, but something that they felt their new Master should know. Master. The word echoed through C'baoth's mind, sparking a windblown tangle of thoughts and feelings. The Imperials who pleaded for him to help them fight their battles-they called him Master, too. So had the people of Wayland, whose lives he had been content to rule before Grand Admiral Thrawn and his promise of Jedi followers had lured him away.

  The people of Wayland had meant it. The people here on Jomark weren't quite sure yet whether they did or not. The Imperials didn't mean it at all. C'baoth felt his lip twist in disgust. No, they most certainly did not. They made him fight their battles for them-drove him by their disbelief to do things he hadn't attempted for years and years. And then, when he'd succeeded in doing the impossible, they still held tightly to their private contempt for him, hiding it behind those ysalamiri creatures and the strange empty spaces they somehow created in the Force.

  But he knew. He'd seen the sideways looks among the officers, and the brief but muttered discussions between them. He'd felt the edginess of the crew, submitting by Imperial order to his influence on their combat skills but clearly disliking the very thought of it. And he'd watched Captain Aban sit there in his command chair on the Bellicose, shouting and blaspheming at him even while calling him Master, spitting anger and impotent rage as C'baoth calmly inflicted his punishment on the Rebel ship that had dared to strike at his ship.

  The messenger below was approaching the High Castle gate now. Reaching out with the Force to call his robe to him, C'baoth got out of bed, feeling a brief rush of vertigo as he stood erect. Yes, it had been difficult, that business of taking command of the Bellicose's turbolaser crews for the few seconds it had required to annihilate that Rebel ship. It had gone beyond any previous stretch of concentration and control, and the mental aches he was feeling now were the payment for that stretch.

  He tightened the robe sash around him thinking back. Yes, it had been hard. And yet, at the same time, it had also been strangely exhilarating. On Wayland, he had personally commanded a whole city-state, one with a larger population than that which nestled beneath the High Castle. But there, he'd long since gone beyond the need to impose his will by force. The humans and Psadans had submitted to his authority early on; even the Myneyrshi, with their lingering resentment of his rule, had learned to obey his orders without question.

  The Imperials, as well as the people of Jomark, were going to have to learn that same lesson.

  Back when Grand Admiral Thrawn had first goaded C'baoth into this alliance, he'd implied that C'baoth had been too long without a real challenge. Perhaps the Grand Admiral had also secretly thought that this challenge of running the Empire's war would prove too much for a single Jedi Master to handle.

  C'baoth smiled tightly in the darkness. If that was what the glowing-eyed Grand Admiral thought, he was going to be in for a surprise. Because when Luke Skywalker finally got here, C'baoth would face perhaps the most subtle challenge of his life: to bend and twist another Jedi to his will without the other even being aware of what was happening to him. And when he'd succeeded, there would be two of and who could tell what might be possible them then?

  The messenger had dismounted from his Thumper and was standing beside the gate now, his sense that of a man prepared to await the convenience of his Master, no matter how long that wait might be. That was good: exactly the proper attitude. Giving his robe sash one final tug, C'baoth headed through the maze of darkened rooms toward the door, to hear what his new subjects wished to tell him.

  CHAPTER

  7

  With a delicacy that always seemed so incongruous in a being his size, Chewbacca maneuvered the Falcon into his precisely selected orbital slot above the lush green moon of Endor. Rumbling under his breath, he switched over the power linkages and cut the engines back to standby. Seated in the copilot seat, Leia took a deep breath, wincing as one of the twins kicked her from inside. "Doesn't look like Khabarakh's here yet," she commented, realizing even as she said it how superfluous the comment was. She'd been watching the sensors from the moment they dropped out of lightspeed; and given there were no other ships anywhere in the system, there wasn't much chance that they could have missed him. But with the familiar engine roar now cut back down to a whisper, the silence felt strange and even a little eerie to her.

  Chewbacca growled a question. "We wait, I guess, Leia shrugged.

  "Actually, we're almost a day early-we got here faster than I'd expected." Chewbacca turned back to his board, growling his own interpretation of the Noghri's absence. "Oh, come on," Leia chided him. "If he'd decided to make this meeting into a trap, don't you think they'd have had a couple of Star Destroyers and an Interdictor Cruiser waiting to meet us?"

  "Your Highness?" Threepio's voice called from down the tunnel. "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I believe I've located the fault in the Carbanti countermeasures package. Could you ask Chewbacca to step back for a moment?" Leia raised her eyebrows in mild surprise as she looked at Chewbacca. As was depressingly normal with the Falcon, several bits of equipment had gone out early in the flight from Coruscant. Up to his elbows with more important repairs, Chewbacca had assigned the relatively low-priority work on the Carbanti to Threepio. Leia had had no objections, though given the results the last time Threepio had tried to work on the Falcon, she hadn't expected very much to come of it. "We'll make a repair droid out of him yet," she said to Chewbacca. "Your influence, no doubt."

  The Wookiee snorted his opinion of that as he got out of the pilot's seat and headed back to see what Threepio had found. The cockpit door slid open, closed again behind him.

  Leaving the cockpit that much quieter.

  "You see that planet down there, my dears?" Leia murmured, rubbing her belly gently. "That's Endor. Where the Rebel alliance finally triumphed over the Empire, and the New Republic began."

  Or at least, she amended silently to herself that was what the histories some day would say. That the death of the Empire occurred at Endor, with all the rest of it merely a mopping-up action.

  A mopping-up action which had lasted five years, so far. And could wind up lasting another twenty, the way things were going. She let her eyes drift across the brilliant mottled green world turning slowly beneath them, wondering yet again why she'd chosen this place for her rendezvous with Khabarakh. True, it was a system that practically every being in both the Republic and Imperial sections of the galaxy had heard of and knew how to find. And with the major planes of contention long gone from this sector, it was a quiet enough place for two ships to
meet. But there were memories here, too, some of which Leia would just as soon not bring to mind. Before they'd triumphed, they'd very nearly lost everything.

  From down the tunnel, Chewbacca roared a question. "Hang on, I'll check," Leia called back. Leaning over the board, she keyed a switch. "It reads 'standby/modulo,"" she reported. "Wait a minute-now it reads `system ready." Do you want me-?"

  And abruptly, without any warning, a black curtain seemed to drop across her vision...

  Slowly, she became aware that there was a metallic voice calling to her. "Your Highness," it said over and over again. "Your Highness. Can you hear me? Please, Your Highness, can you hear me?"

  She opened her eyes, vaguely surprised to discover they were closed, to find Chewbacca leaning over her with an open medpack gripped in one huge hand, an agitated Threepio hovering like a nervous mother bird behind him.

  "I'm all right," she managed. "What happened?"

  "You shouted for help," Threepio put in before Chewbacca could answer. "At least, we thought it was for help," he amended helpfully. "You were brief and rather incoherent."

  "I don't doubt it," Leia told him. It was starting to come back now, like moonlight through the edge of a cloud. The menace, the rage; the hatred, the despair. "You didn't feel it, did you?" she asked Chewbacca. He growled a negative, watching her closely. "I felt nothing either," Threepio put in.

  Leia shook her head. "I don't know what it could have been. One minute I was sitting there, and then the next-"

  She broke off a sudden horrible thought striking her. "Chewie-where does this orbit take us? Does it ever pass through the position where the Death Star blew up?"

  Chewbacca stared at her a moment, rumbling something deep in his throat. Then, shifting the medpack to his other hand, he reached past her to key the computer. The answer came almost immediately.

  "Five minutes ago," Leia murmured, feeling cold. "That would be just about right, wouldn't it?