by Timothy Zahn
“She’s ready,” Zistalmu’s wife said.
Ar’alani scowled. “Sky-walker Che’ri?” she asked pointedly.
“I’m ready, Admiral,” the girl’s voice came back. Her confirmation was quieter and maybe a little more tentative than Nana’s, but it confirmed to Ar’alani that Che’ri was, indeed, ready.
Ar’alani had had other caregivers insist on speaking for their young charges instead of letting them speak for themselves. She’d never liked it then, either. “Good,” she said. “As soon as we confirm Captain Thrawn’s aboard, we’ll go. Captain Wutroow?”
“Almost there,” Wutroow said. There was a small clunking sound as the shrapnel from a pair of disintegrated Lioaoin missiles bounced off the Vigilant’s hull near the viewport. One final, desperate, useless attack. “Aboard,” Wutroow confirmed. “Crash webbing’s deployed…confirmed capture…outer hatch closing…outer hatch sealed.”
“All right, Che’ri, we’ve got him,” Ar’alani said. A long road, with a blaze of fire and noise at the end of it. She could only hope Thrawn had found everything he’d come here for. “Take us home.”
“How much longer?” Senior Captain Ziara asked.
“Two minutes,” the tense reply came from the helm.
Ziara nodded, wincing to herself. Two minutes. Two hours since Thrawn’s emergency call, with no communication possible in hyperspace, and now two more minutes. Depending on how deep the excursion liner had been in the planetary gravity well when Thrawn and his newly assigned patrol boat reached it, Ziara and the Parala could arrive just in time to join Thrawn in watching helplessly as eight thousand people fell to their blazing deaths in the thick planetary atmosphere. “Tractor beams ready?” she asked.
“Ready and waiting, Captain.”
“Standing by for breakout,” the pilot announced. “Three, two, one.” The hyperspace swirl vanished—
And there, ten kilometers ahead, the drama stretched out in front of them.
Ship losses of this sort were rare these days, but no less horrific for all that. The excursion liner, a compact cylinder with a pair of wide D-shaped wings stretching out on opposite sides and housing the more expensive suites, was deep into the roiling upper atmosphere of the triple-ringed gas giant planet it had been cruising past. Already its wake was visible as it plowed through the tenuous gasses, the drag eroding its orbital velocity and threatening it with a death spiral into the crushing depths. A few hundred meters in front of it, trailing a smaller wake, was the Boco, straining for all it was worth to stabilize the liner.
Straining, and losing. Even without running the numbers, Ziara could see that the sheer difference in mass between the two ships would make it impossible for the Boco to pull the liner free. In fact, even adding the Parala’s tractors to the mix might not be enough.
“Senior Captain Ziara,” Thrawn’s voice came from the bridge speaker. “Thank you for your prompt response. Would you join me off the liner’s bow?”
“On our way,” Ziara said, gesturing the order to the helm. The sensor display lit up with the relevant numbers…
Just as she’d feared. “But it won’t do any good,” she added quietly. “Even together we can’t make this work. Are the passengers off yet?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Thrawn said. “By the time the thrusters failed, the liner was already too deep into the radiation and magnetic bands to launch escape pods.”
“They’re still aboard?”
“It’s all right,” Thrawn said. “The passengers and crew are all gathered in the central cylinder behind adequate shielding.”
Ziara hissed between her teeth. That wasn’t at all what she’d meant. “Did you get through to anyone else?” she asked, her eyes running down the numbers. Another hour, and even a full Nightdragon wouldn’t be able to tow the liner free.
“No one else is coming,” Thrawn said. “Please hurry. Time is short.”
“Short?” someone muttered. “More like nonexistent.”
“Just pull us parallel to him,” Ziara said, wondering what Thrawn had in mind.
“In position, Captain,” the pilot called.
“Tractors on,” the weapons officer added. “Status…no good. Liner’s still drag—”
An instant later she broke off with a startled gasp as the Parala jerked violently. “Boco’s dropped its tractors!”
“Increase thrust,” Ziara ordered, staring at the display. Not only had the Boco disengaged its tractors, but it had veered away from the Parala and was making a tight curve back toward the liner.
And as the Boco settled into position alongside the liner, its spectrum lasers flashed, blasting into the junction points where the portside luxury wing connected to the central cylinder. “Captain, he’s attacking them!” the sensor officer yelped.
“Stand fast,” Ziara said. “Ready emergency power to the thrusters.”
“But Captain—”
“I said stand fast,” Ziara snapped. “Don’t you see? He’s lightening the ship.”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the portside wing broke away, the sudden change in the liner’s mass again sending a jolt along the tractor beam line and into the Parala. The Boco was already moving to the liner’s other side, blasting away at the connectors of the starboard wing. Ziara watched, bracing herself…
The wing snapped away and disappeared into the atmosphere below. “Emergency power!” Ziara ordered. “Get us out of here.”
And as the Parala vibrated and creaked with the additional stress, the liner finally began to move away from the planet. A moment later there was another, smaller jolt as the Boca returned to Ziara’s side and added its own tractors and thrusters to the effort. Slowly but steadily, they eased the liner out of the atmosphere and the gravity well.
Fifteen minutes later, the crisis was over.
“Thank you for your assistance, Senior Captain Ziara,” Thrawn’s voice came as the two ships finally cut back on their thrusters and disengaged their tractors. “Without you, the liner would indeed have been lost.”
“Thank you in turn for your quick thinking,” Ziara said, eyeing the liner. The ship’s beautiful external wings, gone, with their fancy suites and, no doubt, the inhabitants’ fancy possessions gone with them. “A word of warning, though. If I were you, I wouldn’t expect a lot of thanks from anyone else.”
* * *
—
“You’ve never been to Csilla, have you?” Ziara asked as the shuttle headed down toward the shimmery blue-white surface of the Chiss homeworld.
“No,” Thrawn said, gazing out the viewport. “All my training and briefings took place at the Expansionary Fleet complex on Naporar.”
Ziara peered at his profile. There was a tightness around his eyes and lips. “You seem worried.”
“Worried?”
“The state of seeing large nighthunters lurking in your future,” Ziara said. “You know you have nothing to be concerned about, right? The liner owners can squawk all they want, but the fact remains that you saved eight thousand people who otherwise would be compressed mush right now.”
“I imagine anything resembling mush would have long since dissipated into tendrils of shredded organic molecules within the atmospheric currents.”
“Oh, I like that one,” Ziara said. “Okay if I borrow it?”
“You’re welcome to it.” Thrawn nodded at the planet. “No, I was just thinking. I’ve been in trouble before, but I’ve never been called to such a high-level hearing.”
“Because all the other questionable things you did were essentially military,” Ziara reminded him. “This one is essentially civilian. More important, it’s civilian connected to one of the Nine Families. That puts you on everyone’s scanners.”
“Yet you suggest I don’t need to worry?”
“No, because the passenger list inc
luded Aristocra from at least five of the other Nine Families,” Ziara said. “When pique comes to poke, five-to-one odds make a pretty decent battle position.”
“I hope it won’t come to that.” Thrawn nodded toward the viewport. “Is that Csaplar?”
Ziara craned her neck. Barely visible in the otherwise featureless surface was what appeared to be a massive city frozen in the ice. “Yes,” she confirmed. “Capital of the Chiss Ascendancy, and once the flower-spray of culture and refinement. We’ll be landing at the spaceport on the southwest edge and taking a tunnel car westward to fleet headquarters. You won’t see that complex from up here, by the way—it’s mostly underground.”
“Yes, I know,” Thrawn said. “You say Csaplar was once a center of culture. Not anymore?”
“Sadly, no,” Ziara said. “But it really was marvelous once.”
“Odd,” Thrawn said, sounding a bit confused. “I would think that a city population of seven million would be more than enough to support both a government and the arts.”
“One would think so,” Ziara agreed, looking casually around the shuttle. Too many people. But there would be plenty of time later to tell him the truth. “But don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll find something down there to do.”
The hearing, as Ziara had predicted, was short and perfunctory. The Boadil family, which had owned the doomed liner, had sent a representative who loudly insisted that Thrawn be punished, demoted, or possibly thrown out of the Expansionary Defense Fleet altogether. Three of the five families whose members had been saved from death were also represented, countering that Thrawn deserved promotion, not censure. In the end, it all balanced out, and Thrawn ended up exactly where he’d started.
With one crucial exception. For whatever reason, for whatever obscure political favor someone owed someone else, Thrawn’s patrol ship—his very first command—was taken away from him.
“I’m so sorry,” Ziara commiserated as she and Thrawn rode their tunnel car back to the city. “I never expected the fleet to do that.”
“It’s all right,” Thrawn said. His voice was calm, but Ziara could hear the disappointment beneath it. “Considering how many millions I cost the Boadil, neither of us should be surprised by their vindictiveness.”
“You didn’t cost anyone anything,” Ziara ground out. “You didn’t take the liner too close to that planet. You didn’t ignore the engineers who warned the electronics were having trouble with the magnetic field twists. You didn’t push the engines and scramble the thrusters in the first place. If I were the Boadil, I’d be looking to nail the liner’s captain to the floor, not you.”
Except they wouldn’t, she knew, feeling the sharp edge of bitterness. The Boadil were political allies with both the Ufsa and her own Irizi family…and the liner’s captain had been Ufsa. Thrawn was the only scapegoat available for the mess, and so he’d received the full brunt of Boadil anger and embarrassment.
“Thank you,” Thrawn said. “But you don’t need to be angry on my behalf. Together we saved eight thousand lives. That’s what’s important.”
Ziara nodded. “Yes. Absolutely.”
“So,” Thrawn said, his tone businesslike again. “With my command gone, I no longer have convenient passage off Csilla. I presume the fleet will take note of that and find me transport to wherever post they next assign me.”
“Hopefully, they won’t need to go out of their way on that count,” Ziara said. “I’ve already put in a request for you to be reassigned to the Parala as one of my officers. If that’s approved, you’ll leave with me.”
“Thank you,” Thrawn said, inclining his head toward her. “I noticed a number of hotels clustered around the spaceport. I can find housing there while I await my new orders.”
“You could,” Ziara said, pursing her lips thoughtfully. The thought that had just occurred to her…
The family wouldn’t be happy about it, she knew. But right now she didn’t really care. Thrawn had been unfairly dumped on, and if she couldn’t fix it she could at least show him that he hadn’t been abandoned by the entire Ascendancy.
“But I’ve got a better idea,” she said. “We’ve got at least a few days, more likely a week. Why don’t you come to the Irizi homestead with me?”
“To your homestead?” Thrawn echoed. “Are strangers even allowed?” A muscle in his cheek twitched. “Especially strangers from rival families?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Ziara said. “I’m blood, and I’m an honored member of the fleet who just helped save eight thousand lives. I don’t know how far all that will take me, but I’d rather like to find out. You game to find out with me?”
“I don’t know,” Thrawn said hesitantly. “I don’t want you to get in trouble on my behalf.”
“I’m not worried about it,” Ziara said. “Did I mention that my grandfather was an amazingly passionate art collector?”
Thrawn smiled. “If I haven’t mentioned it recently, Ziara, you have a knack for seeking out and exploiting your opponents’ weaknesses. Very well. Shall we once again charge headlong into danger?”
“We shall,” Ziara said. “Besides, we’ve just survived an encounter with a malicious gas giant planet. Really, how bad could my family be?”
* * *
—
The area around the Csaplar spaceport was loud and busy, crowded with people, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment of all sorts. The Irizi homestead was about three hundred kilometers to the northeast, on the far side of the city. Ziara got them a two-person express overground tube car and they headed off.
Across the city. Not, as was usually done, around it.
She wasn’t supposed to do that, she knew. Thrawn wasn’t supposed to know the truth about the Ascendancy’s capital city—no one except senior syndics, flag officers, and the Patriarchs of the Nine Families knew the full truth—and there were plenty of tunnel car routes that would avoid the aboveground sections entirely.
But once again, she didn’t care. The fleet and Aristocra had treated Thrawn shamefully, and her lingering anger over that had awakened a peculiar but surprisingly delicious sense of defiance.
Besides, she reminded herself as they left the spaceport and headed through the buildings and parks and the maze of other overground tubes, it would be an interesting tactical exercise to see how long it took Thrawn to figure it out.
Not long at all, as it turned out. They’d crossed a little more than a third of the sprawling metropolis, and she was watching his expression closely as he stared out the viewport, when his eyes suddenly narrowed. “Something’s wrong,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Ziara asked.
“There don’t seem to be any people here,” Thrawn said. “Not since we left the spaceport area.”
“Of course there are,” Ziara said, pointing across the way at another tube car paralleling theirs in the distance. “You can see two people right there.”
“They’re the exceptions,” Thrawn said. “The other cars we’ve seen have been empty.”
“Maybe they’re just too far away for you to see inside,” Ziara said, feeling both guilty and surprised at how much fun this game was. “You can see that the car exteriors tend to be reflective.”
“No,” Thrawn said. “The empty cars ride higher on their rails than the full ones. We’ve also passed through three connecting loci, and there were no cars or passengers waiting at any of them.”
He turned, fixing her with such an intense look that she reflexively drew back a little. “What’s happened to our capital, Ziara?”
“The same thing that happened to the whole planet,” Ziara said quietly. “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have done that to you. But you’re not supposed to know.”
“To know what? That the people of Csilla are gone?”
“Oh, they’re not gone,” she said. “Well, yes, most of them a
re, but the big exodus happened over a thousand years ago. What they taught you in school about how changes in the sun’s output and the slow freezing of the surface forced the population of Csilla underground is mostly true. What the histories leave out is that the numbers that were moved below were a far cry from the four billion who’d been living here at the time.”
“Where did they go?”
“Other planets,” Ziara said. “Mostly Rentor, Avidich, and Sarvchi. The Syndicure and fleet headquarters were kept here, along with a lot of the cargo and merchant facilities. Some of the families moved their homesteads to worlds where they already had strong presences, but most didn’t want to leave Csilla entirely.”
“They also moved underground?”
“Right,” Ziara said. “My family’s new homestead—well, new as of a thousand years ago—is in a huge cavern about two kilometers below the surface. Still on our same land, of course. The Irizi are a bit obsessive about territory and history.”
“So how many people actually live on Csilla?”
“Sixty or seventy million,” Ziara said. “Though all the official records put the number at eight billion.” She waved at the city around them. “All the rest of this is just for show.”
“For whom?”
“Our visitors,” she said. “Our alien trading partners.” She felt her throat tighten. “Our enemies.”
“So a few continue to live aboveground to create the illusion,” Thrawn murmured. “Light and heat are also maintained. Tube cars continue to travel across the remaining cities, pretending to be the traffic of a thriving population.” He looked at Ziara. “I presume that on the far side our tube will descend into one of the tunnels?”
She nodded. “There are a few hundred people in Csaplar at any given time. They’re rotated out frequently so they don’t have to put up with the conditions up here for very long. The rest of the city—the real city—is spread out in caverns, mostly concentrated around the Syndicure complex. More illusion for our diplomatic visitors.”
