by Star Wars
Faro hadn’t observed an actual dissection since that one semester at the Academy when they’d been taught how to use physiological cues to assess a nonhuman opponent’s weaknesses. At the time, she’d found the whole procedure rather revolting, though she’d been intrigued by the tactical implications.
Here, as she, Thrawn, and Ronan watched from behind the safety partition the two medical droids take the gralloc apart, she found it just as distasteful. But she also found it much more interesting than she’d expected.
The secret of the creatures’ speed and maneuverability was the first surprise. She’d expected it was something to do with the solar wind, using a sailcraft’s tacking technique amplified or vectored by selective magnetic tissue, as was the case with their smaller mynock cousins.
But the grallocs had added a twist. The creatures had a set of tiny electrically charged intakes through which they drew in the thin interplanetary medium, ran it up to thruster speeds through organic superconducting conduits inside their bodies, and expelled it out other orifices as small but efficient jets. With the intakes and outflows clustered in spots all around the gralloc’s body surface and wing supports, the creature wasn’t restricted to simple forward movement, but could angle and dodge and even reverse direction at an instant’s notice.
And the second surprise…
“You do realize this is a waste of time, don’t you?” Ronan muttered from Thrawn’s other side. “Governor Haveland’s people have dissected dozens of these things. The data card I gave you has everything you need.”
“Does it?” Thrawn asked.
Faro smiled tightly to herself. She’d already spotted the discrepancy between Haveland’s data and their own, as she knew Thrawn had. Ronan, clearly, hadn’t.
“Of course,” Ronan said. “I can see you’re interested in the organic propulsion system, but there’s really nothing new there. The ionized solar wind gets drawn in—”
“Along with the Clouzon-36?”
“—and then—” Ronan broke off. “The what?”
“The Clouzon-36,” Thrawn repeated, offering Ronan his datapad. “There, in both the intakes and the outflow.”
Ronan took the datapad, and for a few seconds he gazed at it in silence. Then, with a small shrug, he handed it back. “Probably nicked a gas conduit while it was feeding on some power line,” he said. “Means nothing.”
“On the contrary,” Thrawn said. “You’ll recall that I suggested this creature’s relative sluggishness implied it had recently fed. Clouzon-36 conduits are generally well armored precisely to prevent leakage. Have you obtained the ship and manifest listing I asked for?”
There was half a second’s delay as Ronan shifted mental gears. “Yes, the full record came in about half an hour ago,” he said. He looked like he wanted to say something else—probably, Faro speculated, something along the line of how much effort getting the list had cost him—but seemed to think better of it. “It’s in my personal file on the main computer.”
“Very good,” Thrawn said. “You’ll release it to Commodore Faro. Commodore, you and the tactical analysis group will correlate the gralloc’s movements and identify the vessels it may have been feeding on just prior to the point at which it joined the pursuit of Lieutenant Fentaugh’s Defender.”
“Just a minute,” Ronan said tartly. “This information is highly confidential, Admiral. It cannot and will not be handed off to random people.”
“The Chimaera’s analysis group is completely trustworthy.”
“I don’t care,” Ronan said. “You can have it.” He shot a look at Faro, and his lip twitched. “Commodore Faro can have it,” he added grudgingly. “No one else.”
Thrawn considered, then inclined his head. “Very well. Commodore, you will take Assistant Director Ronan to your office, transfer the data to your file, and begin your analysis.”
Faro suppressed a grimace. All by herself. Terrific. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Assistant Director?”
A minute later she and Ronan were striding together down the corridor. “You disagree with my security measures,” Ronan commented as they stepped into a turbolift car.
“Yes, I do,” Faro said. “As I understand it, Stardust’s big secret is where the ships go from here, not where they came from or what they’re carrying. I don’t see how including a select group of Imperial officers in this work would compromise your security.”
“I don’t suppose you do,” Ronan said. “You take everything Grand Admiral Thrawn says as words carved in stone, don’t you?”
“Hardly,” Faro said. “I’ve disagreed with him on more than one occasion.”
“And yet I imagine you always let him get his way?”
“He’s my superior officer,” Faro said stiffly. “There’s not a his way and a my way, and I don’t let him do anything. He gives the orders. I follow them.”
“And he’s always right?”
“No, of course not,” Faro said. “No one is. But when he’s wrong, it’s usually because he has insufficient or faulty information, and he’s always quick to correct any false steps.”
“I see,” Ronan said. “So if I told you Thrawn was the one standing in the way of your new assignment, you’d still say he was always right?”
Faro frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about your imminent appointment as commander of Task Force 231,” Ronan said, a new touch of malicious amusement in his voice. “According to standard procedure, you should have been pulled off the Chimaera by now. Or had that little detail slipped your mind?”
Faro forced her face to remain neutral. Yes, that little detail had damn well not slipped her mind. She should have been called back to Coruscant the minute the Chimaera returned from Batuu and the Grysk mission and put into pre-command orientation.
On the other hand, that summons was only a few weeks late. Any number of things might have come up to delay it.
Still, High Command was normally very rigid about timing and protocol. This kind of delay was usually accompanied by a message resetting the orientation or the assignment.
There’d been no such communication. In fact, Faro had already taken the initiative, sending a quiet inquiry a week ago. So far, there’d been no reply. “Admiral Thrawn has assured me the assignment is solid,” she told Ronan.
“And not only is he never wrong, but he never lies?” Ronan countered. “If you forgive my impertinence, Commodore, you’re far too old to be this naïve. As it happens, I did some digging on my own. The details are a bit murky, but there’s no doubt that Thrawn is the one who has blocked your reassignment.”
“If you’ll forgive my impertinence, Assistant Director, you’re either wrong or lying,” Faro said. “That’s not how Admiral Thrawn does things.”
“Believe what you will,” Ronan said with a shrug that was entirely too casual. “Just remember that I have no reason to lie to you. I just thought you should know where you stand. Where you really stand.”
Ten minutes later, with a copy of Ronan’s shipping data safely locked in her computer, Faro settled down to work.
Or at least tried to settle down.
Thrawn wouldn’t lie to her. Surely not to his flagship’s commander. Certainly not without a good reason.
But if he had a good reason?
Ridiculous. Thrawn was totally committed to making the Imperial fleet as strong as it could possibly be. He’d shared her excitement—or at least had come as close to excitement as he ever did—when she’d first received word of her promotion and reassignment. At the time, he’d told her she would make an excellent flotilla commander, and congratulated her on her success.
But that was then. This was now. And if Ronan wasn’t blowing smoke, Thrawn had apparently changed his mind.
But why? Had she done something at Batuu or Mokivj to undermine his confide
nce in her? Had she irritated Lord Vader, or someone else with connections to the highest ranks of Coruscant power, and the right amount of quiet pressure had been applied?
Surely it couldn’t be simply that Thrawn didn’t want to lose the Chimaera’s commander. Could it?
No. Thrawn didn’t behave that way to his officers. He also didn’t have the political finesse even to notice subtle pressures, let alone bow to them.
And despite Ronan’s statement to the contrary, the assistant director had every reason in the Empire to lie to her. He clearly didn’t think much of Thrawn—though to be fair, Faro had the feeling he didn’t think much of anyone—and anyone who’d worked his way that high up in Krennic’s staff was bound to be adept at political games. Thrawn had a single week to solve the gralloc problem and secure funding for his TIE Defenders, and anything Ronan could do to isolate the admiral from his officers would be make the challenge that much more difficult.
So Faro would assume Ronan was lying, and that there was some perfectly reasonable explanation as to what was going on with her assignment. She had a job to do, and she was damn well going to do it.
Besides, the faster she dug out the information Thrawn wanted, the better the chance that whatever she might have done would be forgiven.
* * *
—
She’d been digging at the shipping list for an hour when her intercom pinged. “Report on your analysis, Commodore,” Thrawn said.
“I’ve hardly just begun, sir,” Faro admitted. “There’s a lot of material here.”
“Understood,” Thrawn said. “Secure your work and report to the bridge.”
“Yes, sir,” Faro said. “Shall I bring my preliminary findings?”
“That can wait,” he said. “Right now we’re going to take a small trip.”
Thrawn and Ronan were waiting on the command walkway when she arrived. “Commodore,” Thrawn said in greeting.
“Admiral,” Faro said in turn, running a quick eye over Ronan. The assistant director was looking even more annoyed than usual. “May I ask where we’re going?”
“On a ghost hunt,” Ronan muttered.
“We’ve analyzed the vector the Allanar N3 was on when it jumped to lightspeed,” Thrawn said, ignoring Ronan’s comment. “There are two likely star systems along that path. I wish to see if the freighter might possibly have come out in one of them.”
“I see,” Faro said carefully, looking over at the nav display. The two systems Thrawn had designated were eight and twenty-two light-years away, respectively. If the Allanar hadn’t made it to one of them, there was an awful lot of empty space between here and there for it to have lost itself in.
“I realize it’s perhaps something of a long shot,” Thrawn continued, again casually reading her thoughts and doubts. “But we must start somewhere.”
“What we must do is clear out the logjam here,” Ronan growled.
“We shall,” Thrawn assured him. “The dissection and analysis of the gralloc continues. Until those results suggest a useful approach, we can do little except wait. I believe that our time would be better spent searching for the Allanar and its lost crew.” He raised his voice. “Lieutenant Hammerly? Has your group made any progress on the question I posed?”
“Yes, sir, some,” Hammerly said. “I’m afraid there’s no way for our sensors to directly identify a Clouzon-36 spill, not at this distance.”
Faro felt her eyebrow twitch. So the Clouzon-36 thing Thrawn had latched onto wasn’t just some passing thought. Clearly, he thought there was something there worth pursuing.
“And the occultation approach?” Thrawn asked.
“Still working on that part, sir, but there are definitely some possibilities,” Hammerly said. “We’re running some tests and tracking through the physics.”
“Excellent,” Thrawn said. “Keep me informed.”
He turned back to the viewport, his hands clasped behind his back, his posture one that Faro recognized as thoughtful meditation. With another glance at Ronan’s sour expression, she walked to the edge of the walkway closest to the sensor station and crouched down. “What’s the occultation approach?” she asked quietly.
“One of the admiral’s clever little ideas,” Hammerly said, just as softly. “He thinks that if we can get the source of a leak between us and the system sun, or even a bright star, the light scattering and diffraction pattern through the gas can identify whether the leakage is Clouzon-36. If he’s right, it could give us a way to spot the stuff at much greater distances than standard scanning methods.”
“Nice,” Faro said. And not just the fuel from a leaky freighter, but also gas deposits in asteroid belts and other sources. That would be immensely useful for miners hunting down the rare fuel.
“Agreed,” Hammerly said.
There was a breath of moving air, and Faro turned to see Thrawn walk up behind her. “A question, Commodore,” he said quietly. “Have you looked at the cargo list from the Allanar N3 yet?”
“Yes, sir, first thing,” Faro said.
“Anything unusual about it?”
“Well…not on the surface,” she hedged. “It was mostly replacement parts, with a few packages of foodstuffs thrown in. Nothing I saw that shouldn’t be there.”
“Anything unusual about the foodstuffs? Something species-specific, perhaps?”
“There was a package of blosphi extract,” Faro said. How in hell did Thrawn always get ahead of her this way? “It’s mostly sold as low-cost rations for Wookiees.”
“It’s also considered a delicacy by a few other species,” Thrawn said. “What about the replacement parts? Did you cross-check the types of equipment they’re used for?”
“No, sir, not yet,” Faro said, wincing a little. Sometimes she was able to anticipate what the admiral wanted. This time, she’d apparently missed completely. “I thought I should first organize the entire combined inventory.”
“Quite right,” Thrawn assured her. “Can you separate out the Allanar’s inventory and send it to me?”
“Certainly, sir,” Faro said, pulling out her datapad. She found the file and keyed it over to him.
“Thank you.” With a final nod, Thrawn walked casually back across the command walkway.
“What was that all about?” Hammerly asked.
“No idea,” Faro admitted. “He might just be poking around, or he might have a specific idea he’s chasing down.”
Hammerly gave a little grunt. “Either way, I’m guessing there’ll be trouble at the end of it.”
Faro nodded, thinking about what Thrawn had told her about this insane agreement Krennic and Tarkin had dropped in his lap. To link a vital starfighter program to what was essentially a bet was just ridiculous. “Agreed,” she told Hammerly. “Let’s just hope it’s not Thrawn who gets the short stick.”
“Or us,” Hammerly said.
Faro felt her throat tighten. The short stick. Such as being denied a promised appointment to command a navy flotilla. “Or us,” she agreed.
“Commodore?”
Faro turned. Thrawn had rejoined Ronan and had turned again to face her. “Is my ship ready?”
Faro ran her eye over the status boards, her momentary brooding over lost opportunities vanishing into the shiver that was suddenly running up her back. Officially, that was merely the fleet’s standard pre-jump question from a ship’s commander to his bridge crew.
But Thrawn seldom used it except when the Chimaera was heading into battle.
What exactly was he expecting to find out there?
“It is, sir,” she said, glancing at the tactical. He’d put the ship at mid-level readiness, she saw, one step down from battle stations. “Do you wish full combat readiness?”
“Combat readiness?” Ronan demanded, his voice somewhere between stunned and outraged. “Thrawn—”
Ronan glared at her. Faro held his glare and sent back one of her own. “Admiral Thrawn,” he said grudgingly, turning away from her. “Putting your ship and crew at battle stations is a complete waste of time and effort.”
“Hardly, Assistant Director,” Thrawn said calmly. “Additional readiness drills are never a waste of effort. As to the TIE pilots you no doubt noticed are standing ready in their fighters, it may be we’ll arrive to find ourselves in a search-and-rescue mission. Mid-level readiness will suffice for now, Commodore. You may make the jump to hyperspace when ready.”
“Yes, sir. Helm: Activate hyperdrive.”
Out the viewport, the stars stretched into starlines and then faded into the mottled sky of hyperspace. “Arrival in three point seven minutes, Admiral,” Faro said.
“Thank you, Commodore.”
The seconds ticked by. Faro split her time double-checking the status boards, looking over the officers and crew at their stations, and studying what she could see of Thrawn’s face. Ronan she ignored completely.
The hyperspace sky switched back to starlines, then to stars, and they were there. “Full scan,” Faro ordered. “Energy concentrations, power usage, sensor emissions.”
“Scanning,” Hammerly confirmed.
More minutes ticked by. Ronan, Faro saw uneasily, was getting more and more agitated, though trying hard not to show it. Thrawn, in contrast, stood silent and motionless and glacially calm.
“Contact,” Hammerly said suddenly. “Artificial object—refined metal—no power or sensor emissions. Too far away for life-form readings. Bearing three-five-three by twenty-two. About six hundred thousand kilometers, right at the edge of sensor range.”
“Can we make a microjump?” Thrawn asked.
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Agral confirmed from the helm. “It’s a bit short, but we can do it.”
“How close can you bring us in?”
“As close as you want, sir.”
“Excellent,” Thrawn said. “Bring us in two kilometers from the object.”
