Treason - Timothy Zahn

by Star Wars

Now, face-to-face with him, he had to admit to a bit of disappointment.

  Thrawn was visually impressive, certainly. The blue skin and glowing red eyes made a nice counterpoint to the grand admiral’s white uniform and gold shoulder bars. There was an air of authority about him as well, a calmness and global awareness that contrasted greatly with so many officers, even senior ones, whom Savit had met and served with throughout his long career.

  Even more telling, the fact that Thrawn’s skin and eyes marked him as only near-human should have severely limited his rise through the ranks, if indeed he’d been permitted into the navy at all. The fact that he’d made it all the way to the very top was proof of his strategic and tactical abilities.

  But he had one huge, glaring, fatal flaw. Clearly, he had absolutely no competence in the realm of politics.

  The way he’d responded to Krennic and Tarkin proved that beyond any doubt. Brilliant tactician or not, favorite of the Emperor or not, he’d looked like a ratling caught in a floodlight sweep in there.

  In fact, Savit would bet large sums of money that Thrawn still didn’t know what all that had been about.

  Easy enough to check. “Interesting, wasn’t it?” he asked casually as he and Thrawn walked down the passageway toward the Firedrake’s hangar. “Their little dance.”

  “Excuse me?” Thrawn asked.

  Savit mentally shook his head. He’d called it, all right. “The dance between Krennic and Tarkin,” he said. “Krennic runs Stardust. Tarkin wants very badly to take it away from him. And so he brings you into play.”

  For a couple of steps, Thrawn seemed to digest that. “Does he think I will support him in his confrontation?”

  “He might,” Savit said. “But it’s probably more a matter of him trying to show he’s a better administrator than Krennic. Krennic has a problem; Tarkin is the one who’s smart enough to bring in the expert to solve it. That expert being you, of course.”

  Another two steps’ worth of silence. “So you’re saying that, rather than being a problem solver, I’m merely a weapon?”

  “Exactly,” Savit said, his estimation of the man beside him rising a notch.

  But only one. After all, Savit had had to lay it out for him. And even then, Thrawn had had to convert it to military terms before he was able to grasp the concept involved.

  “And don’t have any illusions,” he continued. “Now that Tarkin has brought you onto the field of battle, both sides are going to try to use you. Tarkin will try to bludgeon Krennic with you, and Krennic will try to use Tarkin’s association with you to diminish Tarkin’s own standing with the Emperor.”

  “Only if I fail.”

  “Trust me,” Savit said, snorting out a laugh. “If Governor Haveland couldn’t get rid of the cursed things in three years of trying, you aren’t going to do it in a week.”

  “We shall see,” Thrawn said. “Have you the gralloc data the Emperor asked you to deliver to me?”

  The man had confidence in himself. Savit had to give him that. “Right here,” he said, pulling a data card from his pocket and handing it over. “How exactly do—?”

  “Admiral?” a voice came from behind them.

  Savit turned. A middle-aged man was striding toward them, his white tunic with its prominent colonel’s rank plaque glittering in the Firedrake’s lights.

  And behind the tunic, a thigh-length white cape fluttering along behind him.

  Mentally, Savit shook his head. He knew of Krennic’s pompous affectation regarding that long cape of his. He hadn’t realized the director had foisted the same nonsense onto his senior staff.

  “I was hoping to catch you, Admiral Thrawn, before you returned to the Chimaera,” the stranger said. Despite his apparent haste, Savit noticed, the man didn’t seem to be making much of an effort to hurry. In his daily life, apparently, the flowing cape automatically commanded the kind of respect that allowed him to save his own time at the expense of others’.

  Maybe that was the case on Stardust. Not on a grand admiral’s flagship. “Then you’d best hurry,” Savit said. Turning his back on the other, he resumed walking.

  He got three steps before he realized that Thrawn hadn’t followed.

  He stopped and again turned around. Thrawn was still standing where Savit had left him, waiting patiently for the man in the cape to catch up.

  Savit shook his head, this time not even bothering to hide his annoyance. He’d just explained to Thrawn that he was Tarkin’s weapon—and now he couldn’t even stand up against the smallest move from Krennic’s side?

  Hopeless. The only question was whether Krennic or Tarkin would make the best use of him before tossing him aside.

  The newcomer made his leisurely way to the others. He was perhaps younger than middle-aged, Savit saw now, at least in overall appearance.

  But that was his skin and posture. His eyes, Savit noted, still looked old.

  “I’m Assistant Director Brierly Ronan,” he said, as if either of the grand admirals might not have already figured that out. “Director Krennic has instructed me to observe your operation, Admiral Thrawn.”

  “You are welcome aboard the Chimaera,” Thrawn said. He turned to Savit. “You were saying, Admiral Savit?”

  It took Savit a second to remember what Thrawn was talking about. “I was going to ask how exactly you were planning to proceed.”

  “From the beginning, of course,” Thrawn said, inclining his head. “Thank you for your time and advice, Admiral. I believe Assistant Director Ronan and I can find the rest of our way alone.”

  “Yes,” Savit said. “Good luck, Admiral.”

  “Thank you.” Thrawn turned to Ronan and again inclined his head. “If you’ll follow me, Assistant Director Ronan, I’m anxious to get started.”

  * * *

  —

  “I trust,” Commodore Faro said as she unlocked the door to Ronan’s new quarters and gestured him inside, “that this will be satisfactory.”

  Ronan stepped past her and looked around. As one of Director Krennic’s senior associates, he’d seen the insides of any number of Star Destroyers. The suite Faro had assigned him wasn’t the lowest someone of his rank could expect, but it wasn’t the most luxurious the Chimaera had to offer, either. It certainly didn’t match the suite Savit had given the director and his staff. Clearly, Faro and her commanding officer were hedging their bets, giving Ronan something that would keep him placid while at the same time making sure they had something better to offer someone of higher position, should that become necessary. Tarkin, perhaps, or even Director Krennic himself.

  Typical. Politics, maneuvering, covering their backfills, trying to make everyone happy while looking for advantage wherever they could. Everyone did it, from that old fool of an Emperor down to the lowliest bureaucrat.

  Ronan was just glad he didn’t have to put up with that nonsense. Director Krennic’s sheer brilliance, competence, and ability meant he didn’t have to play those stupid games.

  “Quite satisfactory,” he told Faro, resisting the urge to point out that the Chimaera had better quarters available. Whenever possible, he preferred to rise above politics, too. “I trust in turn that he’ll run the decryption on the data card as quickly as possible so that we can get under way?”

  “Quite quickly,” Faro assured him. “Though I confess to some perplexity as to why a hand-delivered data card needed to be encrypted in the first place.”

  “Director Krennic’s orders,” Ronan said. “Even aboard an Imperial vessel there might be spies, and even a trusted courier can be waylaid and information stolen. This way, even so brazen a thief would still come up empty.”

  “I see,” Faro said. The words were polite, but Ronan could sense the word paranoid lurking beneath them.

  Not that the opinions of others bothered him, of course. Precautions such as this were logica
l and creative, and were precisely why Stardust had remained hidden from prying eyes and sticky fingers all these years.

  “Fortunately, decryption won’t add that much time to our journey,” Faro continued. “Admiral Thrawn had already determined our goal would be no more than three hours away, and most likely only two.”

  Ronan felt his eyes narrow. The location of the current transfer station was indeed only an hour and a half from here at Star Destroyer speeds. But that information was supposed to be a dark secret. “May I ask how he learned that?” he asked, putting some demand into his tone.

  “The admiral assumed Director Krennic would have made one final attempt at solving the problem before confronting Governor Tarkin,” Faro said, the barest slightest hint of amusement dancing in her eyes at Ronan’s obvious discomfiture. “Admiral Savit’s command area defines a specific section of this region, and Governor Tarkin’s presence at the recent trade conference on Charra defines his own probable travel vector. For Admiral Thrawn, it was a simple calculation.”

  “Indeed,” Ronan said, studying Faro’s face. He’d assumed Thrawn was another political appointee, like most of the other eleven grand admirals, though in Thrawn’s case it would be the Emperor playing the politics and not Thrawn himself. Clearly, this grand admiral had more than a modicum of native intelligence.

  Which was not necessarily a good thing. Getting the gralloc problem solved after the deadline was the key to making sure none of Stardust’s funds were drained off into Thrawn’s shortsighted TIE Defender project. In Ronan’s book, half a victory was still half a defeat.

  Still, if Governor Haveland and Grand Admiral Savit hadn’t been able to obliterate the grallocs after years of effort, there was no way a newcomer could accomplish that task in a week, no matter how clever he was. All Ronan needed to do was make sure that after Thrawn failed, he left behind enough pieces for Director Krennic to solve the problem.

  “It will be interesting to see if the grand admiral’s deduction is correct,” he told Faro. Even now, he had no intention of giving her any more information—or private amusement—than necessary. “Please have someone alert me when we arrive.”

  The transfer system was a breathtaking beehive of activity, with hundreds of ships of various sizes floating in clumps and queues, or jumping in and out of hyperspace near the edges. The focal points for most of the activity seemed to be a dozen large bulk freighters, spread out through the area, each running an innocuous civilian ID mark. Groups of smaller ships clustered around each of the freighters, waiting their turn to dock and transfer their cargoes. A handful of midsized warships patrolled the perimeter while sentry patterns of TIE fighters swept around and past them.

  Faro had seen a similar scene once when she visited a system where a newly commissioned Star Destroyer was being provisioned and crewed. But never had she witnessed anything this elaborate.

  The system, she also noted with a small sense of gloating, was also exactly an hour and thirty-two minutes from the Firedrake meeting point, putting it well within Thrawn’s estimate of two hours or less. She wondered if Ronan would be impressed by the grand admiral’s accuracy.

  From the stony look on his face as he arrived on the Chimaera’s bridge, apparently not.

  “Assistant Director Ronan,” Thrawn said in greeting as he approached along the command walkway. “Or do you prefer to be addressed as Colonel?”

  “Either is acceptable,” Ronan said.

  “But which do you prefer?” Thrawn asked again. “I assume the military rank is largely honorary.”

  A muscle in Ronan’s cheek twitched. “Honorary, perhaps, but quite necessary to my work. You’d be surprised how many in the Imperial military refuse to take civilians and civilian orders seriously.”

  “I doubt I would be surprised at all,” Thrawn said. He gestured toward the forward viewport. “Explain this to me.”

  Ronan’s lip twitched disdainfully. “It’s really not that difficult,” he said, and Faro could hear a hint of condescension creeping into the arrogance. “Shipments of supplies come in from all over the local sectors. They’re transferred to larger freighters, which will fly them to Stardust’s location. That way, only carefully selected and screened pilots need to know the final destination.”

  “That much is of course obvious,” Thrawn said mildly. “I was asking that you supply the details.”

  “What details?”

  “I wish to know which ships are arriving from which systems in which sectors,” Thrawn said. “I wish a list of the captains and crews, the individual cargo manifests, and which companies supplied those cargoes.”

  “What does any of that have to do with anything?” Ronan asked, frowning. “You’re here to get rid of the grallocs.”

  “We are here to solve the problem,” Thrawn corrected. “To that end, I need to know everything related to it.”

  “It’s a question of security,” Ronan said. “If it were relevant to your task, maybe. But it’s not.”

  “I disagree,” Thrawn said. “Shall we ask Director Krennic for his opinion? Or perhaps we should request a ruling from the Emperor.”

  Ronan’s lips compressed, and he turned his head to glare out the viewport. He held that pose a moment, then gave a small sniff. “There’ll be a harbormaster aboard one of the ships,” he said reluctantly. “I can probably get him to release the listings to me.”

  “Senior Lieutenant Lomar is our chief communications officer,” Thrawn said, gesturing to the crew pit comm station. “He can assist you in sending your message.” He shifted the pointing finger toward the viewport. “In the meantime, is that one of the grallocs?”

  Ronan gave a little snort. “Yes.”

  Faro leaned a little farther forward. Barely visible against the lights of all those drifting ships, something dark was gliding or fluttering or flapping—it was hard to tell which—past one of the nearest of the maneuvering ships. Its batlike wings, slender body, and large, tendriled suckermouth branded it instantly as a mynock relative.

  A big relative. Whereas mynocks seldom grew larger than a couple of meters, the creature moving around out there was at least five meters long and had a wingspan to match. That alone was probably enough to raise it from nuisance to serious threat. “Pretty fast,” she commented. “I didn’t think mynocks could maneuver that well, either.”

  “As Director Krennic said, they’re a serious problem,” Ronan said. “Did it land? I’ve lost it.”

  “I believe it attached itself to that VCX-200 freighter,” Thrawn said, pointing at the ship the gralloc had been sweeping toward. “Lieutenant Pyrondi?”

  “Sir?” the chief weapons officer replied.

  “Opinion, Lieutenant,” Thrawn said. “If we wish to take that creature, how do you recommend we do it?”

  “Turbolasers would be quickest,” Pyrondi said. “But with all these ships around, a miss could cause serious collateral damage.”

  “As well as a direct hit leaving little for us to study,” Thrawn said.

  “Yes, sir, that’s the other problem with it,” Pyrondi agreed. “If we instead used one of the laser cannons—”

  “What do you need to study it for?” Ronan interrupted. “I thought Savit already gave you all of Governor Haveland’s information.”

  “He did,” Thrawn confirmed. “I find it useful to collect my own data.”

  Ronan started to say something else, seemed to think better of it, and waved a hand as if in apology. “Of course. Carry on.”

  “Thank you,” Thrawn said. “You were saying, Lieutenant?”

  “Laser cannons would be safer for bystanders,” Pyrondi said. “But we’d have to get in closer to use them. Tractor beams are another possibility, and they’ve got more range than the laser cannons. But I’m not sure we can focus them tightly enough to grab something that small, especially something flitting around a
s much as these things are.”

  “What about the ion cannons?” Faro asked.

  “I doubt they’d be effective, Commodore,” Pyrondi said. “Given the grallocs’ environment, they likely have a high resistance to ionic bursts of every sort.”

  “They seem also able to tack against solar wind,” Thrawn said. “Your overall assessment seems valid, Lieutenant. But the first step in assessing any theory is to compare it with reality. We will begin with the ion cannons, and see what happens.”

  * * *

  —

  What happened was basically nothing.

  The first problem was getting the Chimaera into position to shoot at one of the grallocs in the first place. On the one hand, Faro saw as they moved in closer, there were plenty of targets to choose from: hundreds of the dark-gray creatures, swooping in and out in search of power cables or improperly shielded sensor clusters, or already attached and feeding. But on the other hand, as Pyrondi had surmised, they moved so erratically that targeting them was next to impossible. After nearly an hour of trying to get into firing range, Thrawn ordered Pyrondi to find one that was already attached to a freighter and shoot it.

  It was a waste of effort. As Pyrondi had also predicted, the gralloc flapped its way out of the ion burst without any apparent damage. The freighter itself wasn’t so lucky, and once its captain got his comm system back up he threatened to call everyone from Krennic to Tarkin to the Emperor himself and have the stupid Star Destroyer commander disciplined for his action.

  Thrawn didn’t seem fazed by the complaints. Ronan did, though, and Faro found it fascinating to watch the play of expressions across his face. At one point, she thought he was going to march over to the bridge comm station and call Krennic himself.

  Luckily for him, he decided to stay out of it.

  Which he probably regretted when Thrawn then proceeded to order attacks on three more sitting grallocs and their associated freighters.

  “Interesting,” the grand admiral commented calmly when the last of the verbal firestorms from those freighters finally faded away. “Commodore, did you note the grallocs’ vectors as they escaped our ion bursts?”