Specter of the Past

by Timothy Zahn

But at the moment, of course, they couldn’t see. That was the whole point of this exercise. As far as the Bothans’ homeworld defense apparatus was concerned, there was nothing out here except the exhausts of a handful of small ships moving apparently aimlessly around.

  Small ships … and one not-quite-so-small comet.

  “We’re under way, Captain,” the helm announced. “ETA, five minutes.”

  Nalgol nodded. “Acknowledged.”

  Slowly, the minutes ticked by. Nalgol watched the blackness outside the viewport, occasionally glimpsing a drive flare as one or another of his scouts ducked back inside the shroud of the cloaking shield to check on the Tyrannic’s progress and then ducked back out again. The timer ran down to zero—he sensed the huge ship slowing—

  And then, abruptly, there it was, off to starboard: a slice of dirty rock and ice poking through the edge of the shield, sliding rapidly sternward. “There!” he snapped. “We’re passing it!”

  “We’re on it, sir,” the helm called back. Sure enough, even as Nalgol watched, the aft motion of the comet’s edge came to a stop and then slowly backed up until it was hanging off the starboard side just ahead of the command superstructure. “We’re stabilized now, Captain.”

  “Tether lines?”

  “The shuttles are on their way with them now, sir,” another officer reported. “They’ll be secured in ten minutes.”

  “Good.” The tether lines weren’t nearly strong enough to physically hold the Star Destroyer and comet together, of course. Their purpose was merely to give the helm the necessary feedback to make sure the orbiting bodies stayed in the same relative positions as the comet continued its leisurely drift inward toward Bothawui. “Any word from the other two Star Destroyers?”

  “The Ironhand has successfully tethered,” the comm officer reported. “The Obliterator’s in position; they should be tethered about the time we are.”

  Nalgol nodded, taking a deep breath and letting it out quietly. So they’d made it. They were here, presumably unobserved by the Bothans.

  And now there was nothing to do but wait. And hope that Grand Admiral Thrawn was really the genius everyone claimed he was.

  CHAPTER

  8

  “Yeah, all right,” the greasy-looking man on the comm display said, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Let’s try it again.”

  “I’ve already told you twice,” Luke said, putting some grouchy weariness into his voice and expression. “It’s not going to change just because you think it ought to.”

  “So tell me again. Your name is—?”

  “Mensio,” Luke said tiredly, glancing out the viewport at the hundreds of asteroids drifting past and wondering which one this particular sentry was hiding on. “I work for Wesselman, and I’ve got a shipment to deliver to you. Which part of that don’t you understand?”

  “Let’s start with the part about you and Wesselman,” the man growled. “He never mentioned anyone named Mensio before.”

  “I’ll have him send you a complete crew list when I get back,” Luke said sarcastically.

  “Watch your mouth,” the other snapped. For a long moment he stared hard at Luke’s face. Luke gazed back, trying to look as bored and unconcerned as possible. All things considered, the face of Luke Skywalker had to be one of the most recognizable in the galaxy. But with darkened hair and skin, an artificial beard, a Gorezh-style slant added to the outer corners of his eyes, and a pair of scars slicing across one cheek, he should be able to pass completely unrecognized.

  “Another thing is that Pinchers usually makes this run,” the sentry said at last. “How come he’s not here?”

  “He came down with something and can’t fly,” Luke said. Which was true, more or less. Pinchers should still be snoozing in peaceful oblivion back on Wistril under the influence of the Jedi healing trance Luke had put on him.

  His associates were not going to be happy with the smuggler for letting Luke get the drop on him that way. On the other hand, when he came out of the trance he ought to be healthier than he’d been in years.

  “Look, I haven’t got all week to sit out here dishing the dust with you,” Luke continued. “You going to let me in, or do I take it back to Wesselman and let him charge you a double delivery fee? I don’t care—I get paid either way.”

  The sentry growled something unintelligible. “All right, keep your blaster tucked. What have you got?”

  “A little of everything,” Luke told him. “Some Norsam DR-X55 lift mines, a few Praxon emergency survival pods, some GTU power armor suits. Plus one or two little surprises.”

  “Yeah? The captain hates surprises.”

  “He’ll love these,” Luke promised. “Surprise number one is a set of hyperdrive boosters. Surprise number two is an SB-20 security breach droid.” He shrugged. “Course, if he doesn’t want them, I’ll be happy to take them off your hands.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you would.” The sentry snorted. “Okay, fine, come on in. You know the in-route, or do I gotta draw you a map?”

  “I know it,” Luke said, mentally crossing his fingers. There were supposedly only two safe paths in through the maze of asteroids to this particular base of the Cavrilhu Pirates: one of which was safe for the inbound trip, the other for the outbound. He’d pulled visuals for the routes from Pinchers’s mind while setting up the healing trance, and would feel reasonably confident about tracing out the path in his X-wing.

  Doing the same in a lumbering Y60 Thalassian cargo hauler was another matter entirely. Especially when the Y60 no longer had any sublight drive units behind its central group of drive nozzles.

  “Sure,” the sentry sneered. “Try not to hit anything big.”

  The display went dead. Luke switched it off from his end, then keyed the makeshift intercom he’d rigged to the hollowed-out area where the central drive units had once been. “We’re on our way,” he announced. “You doing okay back there?”

  There was a twitter of acknowledgment from Artoo, along with a warble that sounded distinctly nervous. “Don’t worry, we’ll get through just fine,” Luke soothed him. “You just make sure the ship’s ready to fly.”

  The droid warbled again, and for a moment Luke thought back to the covert shroud gambit he and New Republic Intelligence had cooked up for his penetration into the Imperial-held world of Poderis during the Thrawn campaign. There, too, he’d had Artoo and his X-wing stashed aboard a larger ship for a quick exit.

  But this was a smuggler’s freighter they were flying now, not a carefully designed breakaway vehicle. It was going to be a different matter entirely to get the X-wing clear if they needed to get out of here in a hurry.

  Well, he’d cross that dune when he reached it. In the meantime, the preferred option would be to keep them from having to make that quick exit at all. And the first step in that was to convince the pirates’ sentries that he was indeed a legitimate member of their supply network.

  Resting his hands on the freighter’s controls, he ran through his Jedi calming exercises. “May the Force be with me,” he murmured, and headed in.

  It wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d expected. With typical smuggler’s finesse, Pinchers had modified the Y60’s engines and control surfaces to make the freighter faster and more maneuverable than its ungainly appearance would have implied, and even with the central drive section removed there was more than enough power left to do the job. The ship easily handled the sharp turns and backtracks necessary to keep it out of reach of the pirates’ defense setup, as well as the more mundane problem of not bumping into any of the asteroids rolling past.

  The whole trip rather reminded Luke of one of Leia’s war stories, the one about the Falcon’s dizzying escape through the asteroid field after the Rebels’ evacuation of Hoth. But of course, he wasn’t flying full-bore through the floating rock pile the way they had, with TIE fighters and Imperial Star Destroyers breathing down his neck.

  On his way out, of course, things might be different.

  He reac
hed the center of the maze to find himself approaching a large but otherwise undistinguished asteroid. According to New Republic Intelligence’s meager information and supplemented by the snippets he’d pulled from Pinchers’s mind, the pirates’ base consisted of a series of tunnels and chambers originally burned into the rock by some enterprising but unsuccessful pre-Clone Wars mining operation. The landing bays were camouflaged as valleys in the uneven surface, and as Luke approached the asteroid a ring of lights came on between two sharp-edged ridges to indicate his designated landing site. He eased the freighter into the opening—felt a brief jolt as he passed through an atmosphere barrier—and with a multiple bump of landing legs he was down.

  A lone man was waiting for him at the bottom of the landing ramp. “You Mensio?” he demanded gruffly, giving Luke’s disguised face a quick once-over. His hand, Luke noticed, was resting with total lack of subtlety on the butt of his holstered blaster.

  “You expecting someone else?” Luke countered, resting his hand on his own blaster in response and looking around the landing bay. The room beneath the atmosphere-shield ceiling was more or less circular, roughly carved from the rock of the asteroid, with a half-dozen pressure doors spaced more or less evenly around the perimeter. Austere in the extreme. “Yeah, I’m Mensio. Nice place you got here.”

  “We like it,” the man said. “We just talked to Wesselman.”

  “No kidding,” Luke said, still looking around. The New Republic Intelligence agent on Amorris was supposed to have locked Wesselman away incommunicado for the next few days. If he’d failed—or if the supplier had somehow escaped—“I hope you said hi for me.”

  “Yeah, we did,” the pirate said darkly. “He says he’s never heard of you.”

  “Really,” Luke said casually, reaching out to the other with the Force. There was a level of suspicion in the pirate’s mind, but no hint of the certainty that would mean such a conversation had actually taken place. This had to be a bluff.

  Or rather, a test. “That’s funny, you talking to him and all,” Luke went on, finishing his inspection and focusing his gaze on the pirate. “Wesselman told me he was going to be out of touch for the next few days.” He probed the other’s mind a little deeper—“Heading out to Morshdine sector, as I recall. Something about picking up a load of unregistered Tibanna gas for you.”

  The pirate gave him a smile that was half sneer, and as he did so his suspicion faded away. “Yeah, that’s where he’s going, all right,” he conceded. “Hasn’t gotten there yet, though. We’re still trying to contact him.”

  Luke shrugged, wishing he knew what Wesselman’s exact itinerary was supposed to have been. If the supplier got too far behind schedule, the pirates’ suspicions would probably start rising again. Too late to do anything about that now, though. “Well, when you do, say hi for me,” he said. “So. Did I pass?”

  The pirate sneered again and lifted his left hand. Four of the six pressure doors slid open and four tough-looking thugs stepped through into the landing bay. Holstering their drawn blasters, they headed toward Luke’s freighter. “Yeah, you passed,” he said. “You got any fancy locks or booby traps on your cargo hold we should know about?”

  “Nope, everything’s clear,” Luke said. “Help yourselves. You got any food around here? That shipboard stuff gets worse every day.”

  “Sure,” the pirate said, pointing to one of the two doors that hadn’t had a guard waiting behind it. “Snack area’s through there. Don’t drink it dry—we’ll have you unloaded in a couple of hours, and I don’t want you tackling the out-route half-drunk. It’d make a mess, and I’d be the one who’d have to clean it up.”

  The indicated door led into a room about ten meters long and four wide, with a pair of tables equipped with bench seats arranged down the center. Along the right-hand wall stood various music and vid stations; along the opposite side was a waist-high counter with a gleaming SE-5 service droid waiting behind it.

  “Good day, fine sir,” the droid said brightly as Luke stepped into the room. “May I be of assistance?”

  “You got any tomo-spiced karkan ribenes?” Luke asked, glancing around. There were no exits that he could see that might lead from this room into the rest of the complex. Not surprising, really, considering the sort of visitors the snack area catered to.

  “Yes, fine sir, I most certainly do,” the droid assured him, shuffling over a few steps and producing a package from beneath the counter. “It will take only a few moments to prepare them.”

  Luke grunted. “Fine.”

  It took just under four minutes, in fact, for the droid to heat the slab of ribenes and arrange them artistically on a plate. Luke spent the time wandering around the room, ostensibly looking at the vid stations, actually hunting for hidden spy cams.

  He’d spotted three of them by the time his meal was ready. Even in a completely isolated room, the Cavrilhu Pirates weren’t taking any chances.

  “May I provide you something to drink?” the droid asked as he presented Luke with the plate.

  “Don’t bother,” Luke said. “I’ve got better stuff on my ship.”

  “Ah,” the droid said. “Will you need a set of utensils?”

  Luke gave him a scornful look. “With spiced ribenes? You must be kidding.”

  “Oh,” the droid murmured, looking a little nonplussed. “Well … do enjoy, fine sir.”

  Luke turned away, suppressing the out-of-character reflex to thank the droid. Tearing one of the ribenes off the end of the slab, he munched on it as he headed back out into the landing bay.

  The pirates hadn’t been idle in his absence. They’d gotten the Y60’s wide cargo ramp lowered and were beginning to bring the big transport boxes out on repulsorlift floater carts. “I hope you’re watching the corners with those things,” Luke warned one of them, jabbing toward the floater cart with his ribene. “I don’t want my restraint rings getting all chewed up.”

  “Tuck your teeth in,” the other growled, flipping his head to toss a short braid back over one shoulder. “Nothing’s gonna get chewed up. ’Cept maybe your skin if you give us any static.”

  “Yeah—you and who else?” Luke fired back, heading past him up the ramp. “You don’t mind if I check for myself.”

  “Just don’t get in the way.”

  There were two other pirates in the cargo hold, one just settling his box into place on his floater cart, the other already starting for the ramp with his load. Luke crossed to the side bulkhead, stretching out with the Force as he pretended to examine the restraint rings for damage. In the near distance, somewhere down one of the asteroid’s corridors, he could sense two more of the pirates returning for their next load. He estimated the timing … yes. He should just be able to make it.

  The last of the two pirates was almost to the ramp now. Grunting with apparent satisfaction as to the safety of his equipment, Luke changed direction, crossing the hold toward the access door leading into the freighter’s living section. The pirate maneuvered his cart down the ramp and turned around the side of the ship.

  And for perhaps the next ten seconds, Luke was alone.

  There was no time to waste, but he and Artoo had had plenty of time to practice on the flight here and had gotten the drill down to a science. Whistling softly, Luke stepped to the box the two of them had prepared, at the same time getting a Force grip on his ribene plate and sending it flying smoothly across the hold. Artoo had heard the whistled signal, opening the access door as the meal neared it. Luke took another moment to ease the plate as far into the living section as he could see, then set it down on the deck and pulled open the side panel on the box beside him.

  Inside, well packaged against random bumps, was Wesselman’s fancy SB-20 security breach droid. It wasn’t going to do the pirates any good now, not with most of its insides cut away, but the shell that was left would make an ideal hiding place for a quiet infiltration of their base. Curling himself up, Luke squeezed into the narrow space and pulled the box’s side p
anel closed again.

  Just in time. Beneath him, the deck vibrated slightly as the returning pirates climbed up the ramp. Luke stretched out with the Force, sensing as he did so their sudden suspicion. He ran through his sensory enhancement techniques—

  “Control, this is Grinner,” a murmured voice came to Luke’s ears, as clear as if the pirate had been standing right beside him. “You see our smuggler anywhere?”

  “Last I saw, he was headed into the hold,” the faint voice of the pirate Luke had talked to earlier came in response. “Said he was worried about his restraint rings.”

  “Yeah, he was there when we left,” another voice agreed.

  “Fine,” Grinner said. “So where is he now?”

  “Probably inside,” the second voice said. “He was headed that direction when Fulkes and I were leaving, chomping down on a plate of ribenes.”

  “Probably looking for something to wash down the tomo-spice with,” a new voice added. “He told the service droid he had some good drinking stuff aboard.”

  “Maybe,” Grinner grunted, the word almost covered over by the soft hiss of metal on steelhide as he drew his blaster. “Or maybe he’s trying something cute, like hiding in one of these boxes. You want to get a scanner crew down here, Control?”

  “Steady, Grinner,” the unfamiliar voice advised him. “Let me run a check first.”

  For a long moment the hold was silent. Keeping his Force hold on the side of the box, Luke unsealed the flap of his tunic and got a grip on his lightsaber. If they didn’t buy this, he would have to take them out …

  “You can all decompress,” Control’s voice said. “He’s gone inside, all right. The plate he took out of the snack room is about five meters inside that door in front of you. There’s no way he could have stashed it in there and gotten back out to the hold in the—let’s see—in the nine seconds he was out of sight.”

  There was a faint snort and the sound of Grinner’s blaster being holstered again. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “There’s just something about this guy I don’t like.”