by Timothy Zahn
Outside, there was a brilliant flash from the upper portside quadrant. Relatively brilliant, at least: the glowing drive from one of their probe ships, carefully made up to look like a battered old mining tug. Nalgol watched as it circled around to vanish beneath the arrowhead-shaped hull toward the hangar bay.
No, the unremitting blackness didn’t bother him. Still, he had to admit it had felt good to stretch his eyes there for a moment.
There was a step on the command walkway beside him. “Preliminary report from Probe Two, sir,” Intelligence Chief Oissan said in that tone of voice that always sounded to Nalgol like someone smacking his lips. “The warship count around Bothawui has gone up to fifty-six.”
“Fifty-six?” Nalgol echoed, taking the other’s datapad and skimming the numbers. If he remembered the list from yesterday’s probe run—“Four new Diamalan ships?”
“Three Diamalan, one Mon Calamari,” Oissan said. “Probably there to counter the six Opquis ships that arrived two days ago.”
Nalgol shook his head in wordless amazement. From the beginning he’d had quiet but serious doubts about this mission—the idea that the Bothan homeworld would become a focal point for any military activity, let alone a confrontation of this magnitude, had been ludicrous on the face of it. But Grand Admiral Thrawn himself had apparently come up with this scheme; and plagued if old red-eyes hadn’t been right.
“Very good,” he told Oissan. “I want Probe Two’s complete report filed within the next two hours.”
“Understood, Captain.” Oissan seemed to hesitate. “I don’t mean to pry into top-level affairs, sir, but at some point I’m going to need to know what’s going on out there if I’m to do my job properly.”
“I wish I could help you, Colonel,” Nalgol said candidly. “But I really don’t know a lot myself.”
“But you did receive a special briefing from Grand Admiral Thrawn at Moff Disra’s palace, didn’t you?” the other persisted.
“It hardly qualified as a briefing,” Nalgol said. “He basically just gave us our assignments and told us to trust him.” He nodded in the direction of the comet and the other two Star Destroyers riding cloaked alongside it. “Our part is simple: we wait until all those ships out there have battered themselves and the planet into as much rubble as they’re going to, then we come out of cloak and finish them off.”
“Finishing off Bothawui will be a good trick,” Oissan commented dryly. “I doubt the Bothans have scrimped on their planetary shield system. Thrawn give any idea how he’s going to handle that?”
“Not to me,” Nalgol said. “Under the circumstances, though, I’m inclined to assume he knows what he’s doing.”
“I suppose,” Oissan muttered. “I wonder how he got all those ships to face off like that?”
“Best guess is that rumor you picked up from your fringe contacts just before we cloaked,” Nalgol said. “That thing about a group of Bothans having been involved in the destruction of Caamas.”
“Hardly seems something worth getting worked up over,” Oissan sniffed. “Especially not after all this time.”
“Aliens get worked up over the strangest things,” Nalgol reminded him, feeling his lip twist with contempt. “And from the evidence out there, I’d say Thrawn found exactly the right hot spot to hit them with.”
“So it would seem,” Oissan conceded. “How are we supposed to know when to come out of cloak and attack?”
“I think a full-scale battle out there will be fairly obvious,” Nalgol said dryly. “Anyway, Thrawn’s last message before we went under the cloak said there would be an Imperial strike team on Bothawui soon, and that they’d be feeding us periodic data via spark transmission.”
“That’ll be useful,” Oissan said thoughtfully. “Of course, knowing Thrawn, he’ll probably have the battle timed for the comet’s closest approach to Bothawui, to give us the maximum benefit of surprise. That’s about a month away.”
“That makes sense,” Nalgol agreed. “Though how he’s going to get them to follow that tight a timetable I haven’t a clue.”
“Neither do I.” Oissan smiled tightly. “That’s probably why he’s a Grand Admiral and we’re not.”
Nalgol smiled back. “Indeed,” he said; and with that admission, one more layer of his private doubts seemed to melt away. Yes, Thrawn had proved himself in the past. Many, many times. However this magic of his worked, it was apparently still working.
And under the spell of Thrawn’s genius, the Empire was about to get some of its own back. And that was really all Nalgol cared about.
“Thank you, Colonel,” he said, handing back the other’s datapad. “You may return to your duties. Before you do, though, I want you to check with Probe Control about whether we can increase our probe flights to twice a day without drawing unwanted attention.”
“Yes, sir,” Oissan said with another tight smile. “After all, we wouldn’t want to miss out on our grand entrance.”
Nalgol turned to gaze out at the blackness again. “We won’t miss it,” he promised softly. “Not a chance.”
CHAPTER
2
From somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind came an insistent warbling; and with a jolt, Luke Skywalker snapped out of his Jedi hibernation trance. “Okay, Artoo,” he told the droid as he rolled out of his bunk, and took a moment to reorient himself. Right; he was aboard Mara Jade’s ship, the Jade’s Fire, heading toward the Nirauan system. The system where Mara herself had disappeared nearly two weeks ago. “Okay, I’m awake,” he added, flexing his fingers and toes and working moisture back into his mouth. “We almost there?”
The droid twittered an affirmative as Luke snagged his boots, a twitter that was echoed from the direction of the cockpit. The echo was Mara’s Veeone pilot droid, who had been flying the Fire ever since Luke and Artoo had come aboard at the Duroon rendezvous point, and who up till now had refused to let either of them anywhere near the ship’s controls.
An overprotectiveness that was about to come to an end. “Artoo, go back to the docking port and make sure the X-wing’s ready to fly,” he instructed the little droid as he headed toward the cockpit. “I’m going to take us in.”
A minute later he was seated in the Fire’s pilot’s seat, reviewing the layout of the controls and displays one last time. The Veeone droid, perhaps recognizing Luke’s expression as one he’d seen often enough on Mara’s face, had decided not to argue the point “Get ready,” Luke told the droid, resting his hands on the controls. The counter ran to zero, and Luke pushed the hyperdrive lever forward. The star-lines flared and shrank back down into stars, and they were there.
The Veeone whistled softly. “That’s the place,” Luke confirmed, gazing out at the distant sun, its tiny red disk looking cold and aloof. The planet Nirauan itself was nowhere to be seen. “We’re looking for the second planet,” he told the droid. “Can you get me a reading on it?”
The Veeone twittered an affirmative, and the nav displays came to life. “I see it.” Luke nodded, checking the reading. It was a pretty fair distance away.
Which was by deliberate design, of course. The Fire had impressive shields and armament, but charging to the rescue with quad lasers blazing would be unlikely to do Mara any good, no matter what the situation she was in. Stealth and secrecy were the plan, and that meant leaving the Fire hidden out here while he and Artoo sneaked in in their X-wing.
He keyed the comm unit to the docking bay. “Artoo? Is everything ready?”
There was a confirming warble. “Good,” Luke said, looking back at the nav display. They were, he estimated, a good seven hours away from the planet by the X-wing’s sublight drive. A long time to sit in a cramped cockpit worrying about Mara, besides giving whoever was down there a straight vector back to the Fire.
Fortunately, there was another way. “Start calculating our two jumps,” he instructed Artoo, keying on the Fire’s automatic weapons systems. “No more than five minutes each way—we don’t want to take any mo
re time with this than we have to.”
Artoo twittered an acknowledgment, and got to work. “Now, you’re clear on what you’re supposed to do?” Luke asked the Veeone as he keyed the drive to low power and started the Fire moving. There was a convenient clump of small asteroids drifting through in the darkness just ahead that would make a perfect hiding place. “I’m going to put the ship in with those rocks; and then you’re going to sit there and pretend to be one of them. Okay?”
The droid gurgled reluctant agreement. “All right,” Luke said, easing the ship up into the asteroids. One of them, about shockball size, bounced lightly against the hull, and be winced in reaction. The Fire was Mara’s most prized possession, and she was more protective of it than even the Veeone was. If he dented the hull, or even just scratched the paint, he would never hear the end of it from her.
He finished his maneuvering with exaggerated care, and managed to get it into position without any further collisions. “Okay, that’s it,” he said, unstrapping and keying control back to the Veeone. “You’ve got the code I gave you—we’ll transmit that on our way back so you’ll know it’s us. Anyone else … well, don’t let the ship shoot at them unless you’re fired on first. Not until we have some idea what’s going on down there.”
Two minutes later, keeping a wary eye out for the floating rock pile outside, he eased the X-wing out of the Fire’s docking bay and headed into deep space. Artoo had the course already plotted in, and with a burst of starlines they were off.
Luke had told him to keep it under five minutes, and the droid had taken him at his word. Two minutes after heading out, following Artoo’s instructions, he dropped the X-wing back out of hyperspace, turned it around, and headed back in. Two minutes after that, they were there.
Artoo whistled softly. “That’s the place, all right,” Luke confirmed, gazing out at the dark planet hanging in space in front of them. “Just like the pictures the Starry Ice brought back.”
And Mara was down there somewhere. Stranded, maybe injured, maybe a prisoner.
Or maybe dead.
Pushing that thought firmly away from his mind, Luke stretched out to the Force. Mara? Mara, can you hear me?
But there was nothing.
Artoo gave a questioning warble. “I can’t sense her,” Luke admitted. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. We’re still pretty far out, and she may not be strong enough to reach this far. She could be asleep, too—that would limit her range.”
The droid didn’t respond. But it wasn’t hard to guess that his thoughts were paralleling Luke’s.
And there was also the vision Luke had had three and a half weeks ago at the Tierfon medical facility. That image of Mara floating lifelessly in a pool of water …
“Anyway, there’s no point in worrying about it,” Luke said, pushing that vision into the back of his mind as best he could. “Do a quiet sensor scan—nothing that’ll set off their detectors. Or at least, nothing that’ll set them off if they work the way ours do.”
There was an acknowledgment, and another question scrolled across the X-wing’s computer display. “We’ll take the same route in that she did,” Luke answered. “Down the canyon to the cave where she disappeared. Once we get there, we’ll take the X-wing inside and see what happens.”
Artoo twittered an uneasy-sounding acknowledgment. Glancing at the course record Talon Karrde had given him, Luke eased the X-wing toward the planet, wishing for a moment that Leia were here with him. If those creatures that Mara had run into were intelligent, it might take not only Jedi skill but also diplomatic finesse to deal with them. Finesse that Leia had, and that he didn’t.
He grimaced. On the other hand, they probably weren’t very happy back home that he’d taken off this way without notice, let alone if he’d tried to bring Leia along with him. No, Leia’s diplomatic skills were needed most back in the New Republic.
What skills would be needed here he’d find out soon enough.
They were still well outside the planet’s atmosphere when the X-wing’s sensors picked up the two alien spacecraft rising from the surface toward them. “So much for stealth and secrecy,” Luke murmured, studying the sensor profiles. They definitely looked like the ship he and Artoo had spotted on their way out of the Cavrilhu Pirates’ nest in the Kauron asteroid field.
That ship, though, had cut and run before he could get a close look at it. Now, as this pair rose rapidly toward him, he could see that his first impression of the craft had indeed been correct. Roughly three times the X-wing’s size, they were an odd but strangely artistic combination of alien manufacture melded with that of the all-too-familiar TIE fighter design. At the bow of each ship was a slightly darkened canopy, through which he could just barely make out a pair of Imperial-style flight helmets.
Artoo whistled pensively. “Steady, Artoo,” Luke warned. “It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re allied with the Empire. They might have found a TIE fighter somewhere and borrowed from it.”
Artoo’s grunt showed his opinion of that one. “All right, fine, probably not,” Luke said, eyeing the incoming ships. A minute later they were on him, rising slightly above the X-wing and altering course as they curved into flanking positions on both sides. “You getting weapons readings?”
The droid whistled, and a rough schematic appeared on the computer display. The ships were quite heavily armed. “Great,” Luke muttered, stretching out with the Force to try to get a feel for the situation. But all he could detect were the basic emotional backgrounds of the three beings aboard each ship. Alien minds thinking alien thoughts, with no point of reference for him to latch on to.
On the other hand, their flanking positions were more suited to escort than attack. More importantly, Luke’s Jedi senses weren’t indicating any immediate danger. For the moment, at least, they were probably relatively safe.
And it was time to start acting friendly. “Let’s see if we can talk to them,” he suggested, reaching for the comm switch.
The aliens beat him to it. “Ka sha’ma’ti orf k’ralan,” a surprisingly melodious voice said in Luke’s ear. “Kra’miral sumt tara’kliso mor Mitth’raw’nuruodo sur pra’cin’zisk mor’kor’lae.”
Luke felt his stomach tighten. “Artoo?” he asked.
The droid warbled a worried-sounding confirmation: it was indeed the same transmission Karrde and Mara had picked up from the alien ship that had buzzed Booster Terrik’s Errant Venture. The transmission, according to Mara, that had included Thrawn’s little-known complete name.
Grimacing, Luke keyed his comm. “This is New Republic X-wing AA-589,” he said. If the aliens didn’t speak Basic, of course, this wasn’t going to do any good. Still, it wouldn’t do to just sit here and ignore them. “I’m looking for a friend who may have crashed on your world.”
There was a short pause. Watching out the canopy, Luke had the distinct impression that the two alien ships had pulled in just a hair closer to him. “New Republic X-wing,” the voice came again, this time in quite passable Basic. “You will follow us to the surface. You will not deviate from our guidance. If you do, you will be destroyed.”
“I understand,” Luke said. There was a click from the comm; and suddenly the two alien ships dropped toward the surface. Luke was ready, following and sliding quickly back into his place in the formation. “Show-offs,” he muttered under his breath.
He had spoken too soon. A second later the two ships again twisted away, this time curving slightly up and then hard to starboard. Artoo screeched as the portside ship shot uncomfortably close over his head, the tone of his displeasure rising sharply as Luke cut the X-wing hard over to again match the maneuver. He had barely settled back into his place in the center when they did it again, veering to portside this time.
Artoo grunted. “I don’t know,” Luke told him as he caught up with his escort again. “Maybe there’s some kind of defense system they’ve got set up that requires a specific approach if you don’t want to get blasted. Like the p
irates had at their asteroid base, remember?”
The obvious point scrolled down the computer display: according to the Starry Ice’s record, Mara hadn’t followed any such complicated approach. “Maybe they set it up in response to her sneaking in,” Luke suggested. “Or we could be coming in over a different part of the planet than she did—we haven’t been able to pick up a geographic match yet.”
Artoo grunted. “Or they could be trying to create an excuse to open fire,” Luke agreed grimly. “Though why they’d think they’d need one I don’t know.”
The alien ships performed three more sets of maneuvers on the way down, none of which Luke had any particular trouble matching. But as they reached the upper atmosphere they seemed to tire of the game, settling into a hard, straight drive toward the western horizon. Luke stayed in formation, splitting his attention between the ships and the ground far below, and stretching out to the Force for any signs of trouble.
They were twenty minutes into their drive, and Artoo had finally made a match between the topography below and the Starry Ice’s records, when the familiar tingling began. “We’ve got trouble, Artoo,” Luke told the droid. “I’m not sure what kind yet, but it’s definitely trouble. Give me a quick status rundown.”
He ran an eye over the display as the status report appeared. There were no other air- or spacecraft registering on the X-wing’s sensors, nothing in their escort’s power usage or weapons systems that indicated attack preparation, and the X-wing’s own systems were reading fully operative. “How far to the fortress Mara found?” he asked.
Artoo beeped: less than fifteen minutes at their current speed. “Sometime in the next ten minutes, I’d guess,” Luke told him. “Be ready.” Taking a deep breath, settling his hands on the controls, he consciously relaxed his muscles and immersed himself in the Force.
They were registering six minutes to the fortress, and the canyon Mara had flown down had just appeared paralleling them on the distant horizon, when it finally happened. In perfect unison the two escort ships threw a quick spurt of power to their forward thrusters, dropping from flanking into following positions behind the X-wing as their velocities blipped down.
