by Star Wars
“Yes, sir,” Faro said, his earlier comment finally clicking. “So we give them something that’s not just exciting to see, but also worth sharing with their superiors.”
“Indeed,” Thrawn said. “Commander Hammerly, what data from the TIE fighters?”
“They’re just entering passive sensor range, sir,” Hammerly said. “Do you want me to signal them to bring active sensors online?”
“Not yet,” Thrawn said. “We’ll use ours. Commodore Faro: Bring the Chimaera to full battle status.”
“Secure from stealth mode,” Faro called. “Battle readiness.”
All around them, the bridge came to life as systems that had been off or on standby were run back up to active status. “Commander Hammerly, active sensors,” Thrawn called.
“Sensors active,” Hammerly confirmed. “Reading three weapons clusters on each of the conjoined ships, energy weapons and torpedoes both, and the nodes of an electrostatic barrier generator.”
“Sir, Major Quach asks if you want his TIEs to go active,” Pyrondi called.
“Negative, Lieutenant,” Thrawn said. “Leave them dark for the moment. Lieutenant Lomar: open a hailing channel. No encryption.”
“Channel open, sir.”
“Unidentified ships, this is Grand Admiral Thrawn of the Galactic Empire,” Thrawn called. “You are trespassing in Imperial space. I order you to power down all weapons and defenses and surrender for inspection.”
There was no response. Thrawn signaled, and Lomar muted the comm. “Are you genuinely expecting an answer?” Ar’alani asked, a bit drily.
“Of course,” Thrawn replied. “Though not an immediate one. We will hope they were surprised by our sudden appearance and are even now deciding exactly how to respond.”
“Such response possibly including an attack on the Chimaera from their cloaked warship?”
“Not yet,” Thrawn said. “Not at this distance. And so we offer added incentive. Commodore, move us toward the conjoined ships.”
“Helm: ahead, one-quarter speed,” Faro ordered. “Be aware of the TIEs and the outriding triad poles.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Agral acknowledged. “Quarter power.”
Thrawn signaled again. “Comm open,” Lomar said.
“This is Grand Admiral Thrawn,” Thrawn called. “If you do not answer in the next thirty seconds, we will launch a boarding party to take your ships by force of arms.”
He signaled again. “Major Carvia, are your stormtroopers ready?”
“They are, Admiral,” Carvia’s voice came over the bridge speaker.
“Launch shuttle,” Thrawn ordered.
“Shuttle launched,” the hangar master confirmed.
“Commander Hammerly, watch closely,” Thrawn said. “The chance to destroy a group of Imperial stormtroopers should add extra incentive to our bait.”
Faro gazed at the tactical, watching as the shuttle and, still lagging behind it, the Chimaera itself moved closer to the conjoined ships. An extra prize like that should indeed lure the Grysks into action.
She felt her stomach tighten. More human bait. And if the Grysks decided to take them out, all those lives would be lost.
Only the Grysks weren’t playing Thrawn’s game. Hammerly’s scanners still showed nothing: no diffuse ion path from low-level thrusters, no occultation from cold-gas maneuvering jets, no radar or laser emissions from comms or targeting systems.
Could the Grysks be asleep? Could they all have fled before the Chimaera even entered the system, leaving only the conjoined ships and a group of slaves and prisoners behind?
The stormtrooper shuttle had entered the tactical’s inner sphere, the distance Thrawn had estimated would be within the blast radius from the destruction of the conjoined ships. Were the Grysks merely waiting until the shuttle was closer and the stormtroopers’ destruction was assured?
Or was the bait just not quite good enough?
“Lomar: Signal to the shuttle,” she said, trying to remember the code they’d already proved that the Grysks had cracked. Right: G77. “Encryption G77,” she added. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Thrawn turn a frown on her—
“G77,” Lomar confirmed. “Ready.”
Faro braced herself. “Shuttle commander, this is Commodore Faro,” she called. “Hold position off target; repeat, hold position off target. I’m coming to take personal command of the boarding force.”
“Shuttle command, acknowledged,” Carvia replied. “What’s your ETA?”
“I’m prepping my shuttle now,” Faro said. “I’ll be there in ten.”
She signaled Lomar, and the transmission cut off. Bracing herself, she turned to face Thrawn.
Ar’alani got in the first word. “That was insubordinate,” she said coldly.
“I agree, and I apologize,” Faro said. “But there was no time for a consultation. I needed to stop the shuttle before it moved any deeper into killing range.”
“Explain,” Thrawn said, the calm in his voice in sharp contrast to the antagonism in Ar’alani’s.
“You said they needed a good reason to call their base, sir,” she reminded him. “It was looking like even a ship full of stormtroopers might not be an image worth sending home.”
“So you offer them an Imperial flag officer.”
“Yes, sir.”
For a long moment, Thrawn eyed her thoughtfully. Then he inclined his head. “Your shuttle will be ready when you reach the hangar bay.”
“Thank you, sir,” Faro said. She stiffened to attention, then turned and headed toward the turbolift.
And as she walked, she noticed the bridge seemed have gone unusually quiet.
* * *
—
She’d expected to find an empty shuttle waiting for her. To her surprise, Major Carvia was already strapped into the pilot’s seat. “What are you doing here?” she asked, strapping in beside him.
“Admiral Thrawn told me what you were doing, Commodore,” he said, dropping the shuttle out of the bay without waiting for her to completely finish the strap-in process. “I figured if my stormtroopers and my commander were going to be in harm’s way, I might as well join them.”
“That wasn’t necessary.”
Carvia shrugged. “No offense, ma’am, but my pilot’s rating is higher than yours. Figured that if things went top-heavy, I might be able to scrape you out of something you couldn’t scrape out of by yourself.”
“I appreciate the thought,” Faro said. “On the other hand, it could just mean that we’ll both die.”
“Nah.” Carvia flashed her a tight smile. “Not with Grand Admiral Thrawn calling the shots from the bridge. He’ll get us through this.” He tapped the transmitter key. “Chimaera, this is Carvia. Commodore Faro is aboard; shuttle is away and headed in. ETA, four minutes.”
“Acknowledged, shuttle,” Lomar’s voice came from the speaker. “Standing by.”
Faro gazed out the shuttle’s viewport as the conjoined ships grew steadily larger. They were Grysks, all right, she could see now, with their distinctive breaking-wave design. The first stormtrooper shuttle was visible in front of them; a quick check of the tactical showed they’d already passed the still-dark groups of TIE fighters. She watched as they crossed the invisible line into the killing zone…caught up with the stormtrooper shuttle and continued on in convoy with it…watched as the conjoined ships began to completely fill the viewport…
What the hell were the Grysks waiting for?
Or were they waiting? In her mind’s eye she saw the Grysk commander gloating aloud as he twitched the maneuvering jet controls, sending brief bursts out into the vacuum of space, drifting toward the point where the triad would become active. Could the puffs of gas perhaps be too diffuse for Hammerly to pick up on?
Worse, could they all be on the warship’s far side, wher
e they wouldn’t even be visible from the Chimaera’s position?
“They’re speeding up,” Carvia said suddenly.
Faro snapped out of her speculations. “What are?”
“The conjoined ships,” he said, pointing to the shuttle’s sensor display. “They’re rotating faster.”
Faro frowned at the display. Their angular momentum had picked up, all right. Not much, only a few percent, but the ships were definitely moving faster.
But the sensors were picking up no indication of thruster or maneuvering jet usage. Even with the shuttle’s limited sensor package, she and Carvia were close enough to detect something like that.
But if the thrusters weren’t firing…
Damn. “They’re reeling in the triad poles,” she breathed.
“They’re what? Oh, hell.”
Faro nodded, a sudden tightness in her gut. Don’t raise the bridge, lower the river: The old engineering-class joking maxim came back to her.
The Grysk warship was indeed sitting on the line Thrawn had specified…only it wasn’t the full 8.7 kilometers above the conjoined ships that Faro had assumed. It was, instead, much closer to them. All the commander needed to do was bring in the other two poles to the proper distance, and the triad would become active without the warship ever needing to move.
Faro’s finger twitched toward the comm’s transmitter key. She had to tell Thrawn. Had to warn him that the plan he’d set up wasn’t going to work.
The finger froze a centimeter away from the key. Of course Thrawn would see the ships’ rotation and come to the right conclusion. Surely he would.
Only maybe he hadn’t. The murmur of bridge conversation still coming from the shuttle’s speaker showed no signs of sudden revelation, or heightened activity, or anything else. Could Thrawn have missed it?
But if he had, what should Faro do? What could she do? Calling back to the Chimaera now might simply alert the Grysks that their subterfuge had been spotted. In that case, the enemy might opt for destroying the shuttle and conjoined ships even without being able to send a live view of the triumph to their base.
“Ship rotation stabilizing,” Carvia said. “Settling into its new angular speed.”
Faro no longer had a choice. Even if it precipitated a premature attack, she had to let Thrawn know what was happening. She reached for the transmit key—
“Chimaera’s rolling!” Carvia snapped. “Ninety degrees, up on its side—”
And from the shuttle speaker came a clear female voice—Vah’nya’s voice—speaking a single accented but completely understandable Basic word.
“Fire!”
And from behind the shuttle, blazing past its canopy, came a firestorm of turbolaser bolts as the Chimaera opened up with a full double broadside: a starboard salvo converging on a point six kilometers above the conjoined ships, a portside salvo blasting with equal fury at the same spot beneath the ships. The portside bolts continued on their way unhindered, fading into the darkness of interplanetary space. The starboard salvo vanished for an instant above the ships.
And then the entire area erupted in fire and shattered metal as the cloaked Grysk warship abruptly became visible, its hull crackling and blackening under the Chimaera’s withering assault.
The turbolaser fire was still pounding at the enemy when the shuttle’s comm erupted into pure static.
“What the—?” Carvia barked.
“It’s all right,” Faro said quickly. This part, at least, she’d figured out right away. “The Chimaera is jamming all frequencies and all signals so that the warship can’t trigger whatever doomsday explosives are on the conjoined ships.”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the dark TIE fighters they’d left behind them came to full power and screamed past, laser cannons adding their own rain of destruction to the Star Destroyer’s bombardment.
The Grysk warship was beginning to return fire now. But starting from the low power levels that had been necessary for maintaining a proper cloaking field, they were at a huge disadvantage. The Chimaera continued to hammer away, raking the Grysk with general fire while the TIEs slipped in and out, blasting at more specific targets. Midway through the assault, the warship seemed to break apart, and only as the broken section angled off at high speed did she realize she was seeing the supply ship that Thrawn had chased away from the Grysk observation post.
The freighter made it nearly ten kilometers before a pair of TIEs dropped into pursuit and blew it to dust.
“Come on,” Faro said, motioning to the shuttle controls. “I think the admiral’s got this part in hand.”
“Where are we going?”
“Where we’re supposed to,” Faro said. “Let’s find these prisoners we came here to rescue.”
We do not struggle against flesh and blood—the old Clone Wars–era saying whispered through Faro’s mind—but against ideas and fears, against hopelessness and manipulation.
They certainly weren’t fighting against flesh and blood on the conjoined ships. Here, the enemy was all in the form of booby traps.
It started with the docking hatches themselves, rigged to explode if an unidentified ship came too close. Fortunately, by the time Faro’s transport arrived, the commander of the first shuttle had sent a pair of spacetroopers to investigate and had discovered the trap. With the Chimaera having lifted its jamming, Carvia had a short conversation with the TIE commander, and a couple of directed salvos later the hatches had been harmlessly detonated. The spacetroopers rigged a pair of boarding tubes, and they were in.
The TIEs had spotted several large caches of explosives on the hulls, presumably prepped for a signal from the warship. With the warship now reduced to debris and glowing plasma, those were no longer a threat.
But the corridors and hatchways were riddled with smaller traps, some designed for a single unwary intruder, others apparently intended to clear entire passageways. Fortunately, the Grysks hadn’t had a lot of time to prepare their gauntlet, and most of the traps were fairly obvious and relatively easy to detonate from a safe distance.
At Carvia’s insistence, Faro stayed near the back of the boarding party as the stormtroopers painstakingly cleared the way. They’d made it nearly to the center of the ship, and were approaching a large, open hatchway, when the lead stormtrooper abruptly held up a hand.
“Life-forms ahead,” Carvia murmured. “Let’s just hang back a little, Commodore, if you don’t mind.” The lead stormtrooper eased an eye around the hatchway—
“Found them,” he said. Pulling away from the edge, he took a long step into the center of the opening, his E-11 blaster rifle held up in covering position. Two stormtroopers slipped past his left into the compartment, two more disappeared inside past his right, and two more passed him and took up guard positions aiming farther down the corridor, just in case the compartment was a diversion.
“Report,” Thrawn said over Faro’s headset.
“Eight humans and a beat-up Dashade grouped together in a corner of the room, sir,” one of the stormtroopers said. “Actually, none of them looks in very good shape. Six nonhumans, unknown species, grouped together in the center. Three of them have blasters, two of them pointed at the prisoners. The third—well, sort of aimed in our direction, but mostly pointed at the deck. No immediate threat.”
From the room, and echoed faintly through Faro’s headset, came a series of sounds like an animal’s claws scratching against metal sheets. “I think they’re trying to talk, sir,” the stormtrooper added.
“Let me try Sy Bisti on him,” Faro suggested. “Can you hook me to your external speaker?”
“Yes, Commodore…okay, you’re on.”
“Do you speak Sy Bisti?” Faro called in that language.
More of the scratching. “Admiral, if they’re from the Unknown Regions, they might understand the Chiss language,” she sug
gested.
“Doubtful,” Thrawn said. “But I’ll try Meese Caulf.” He spoke a few words.
Abruptly, the scratching broke off. A moment of silence, and a different voice spoke up, the words still scratchy but now sounding like actual words.
“One of the others seems to understand, sir,” the stormtrooper confirmed.
“Yes,” Thrawn said. He spoke again, and there was another answer, this one much longer. Another exchange—“Commodore, he claims to fear for his life and the lives of his companions,” Thrawn translated. “I’ve given him my word, but he claims to need a face-to-face guarantee or he will kill the human prisoners.”
“If he’s been working under the Grysks, I’m not surprised he’s a little paranoid,” Faro said, starting forward. “Let me see if I can defuse the situation.”
“A moment,” Thrawn said. “Your visual monitor appears to be off.”
Faro felt her face warm as she peered down at her chestplate. She’d switched off the tiny cam on the flight into the combat zone, not wanting to have even so small a transmission running lest the Grysks pick it up, and she’d forgotten to turn it back on when they reached the ship. “Sorry, sir,” she apologized as she switched it on.
“No apology necessary, Commodore. We have the signal now. Proceed, but with caution. I will continue to translate for you.”
Faro nodded. Walking past the stormtroopers, she slipped through the hatchway.
The compartment was laid out exactly as it had been described. The humans and a lone Dashade sat on the deck in one corner, the Dashade’s olive-skinned reptilian bulk towering over his fellow prisoners. The six unidentified nonhumans huddled together in a standing clump in the center. Faro eyed the Dashade with interest—they’d turned up on the list of species that particularly liked the blosphi extract Thrawn had noted in the stolen supply ships.
