Star Wars - Thrawn Trilogy - Heir to the Empire 01

by Timothy Zahn

  Thrawn nodded, his glowing eyes sweeping the field of running lights around them. "Excellent," he murmured. "What word from Myrkr?"

  The question threw Pellaeon off stride-he hadn't thought about Myrkr for days. "I don't know, Admiral," he confessed, looking over Thrawn's shoulder at the communications officer. "Lieutenant-the last report from the Myrkr landing force?"

  The other was already calling up the record. "It was a routine report, sir," he said. "Time log . . . fourteen hours ten minutes ago."

  Thrawn turned to face him. "Fourteen hours?" he repeated, his voice suddenly very quiet and very deadly. "I left orders for them to report every twelve."

  "Yes, Admiral," the comm man said, starting to look a little nervous. "I have that order logged, right here on their file. They must have . . ." He trailed off, looking helplessly at Pellaeon.

  They must have forgotten to report in, was Pellaeon's first, hopeful reaction. But it died stillborn. Stormtroopers didn't forget such things. Ever. "Perhaps they're having trouble with their transmitter," he suggested hesitantly.

  For a handful of heartbeats Thrawn just stood there, silent. "No," he said at last. "They've been taken. Skywalker was indeed there."

  Pellaeon hesitated, shook his head. "I can't believe that, sir," he said. "Skywalker couldn't have taken all of them. Not with all those ysalamiri blocking his Jedi power."

  Thrawn turned those glittering eyes back on Pellaeon. "I agree," he said coldly. "Obviously, he had help."

  Pellaeon forced himself to meet that gaze. "Karrde?"

  "Who else was there?" Thrawn countered. "So much for his protestations of neutrality."

  Pellaeon glanced at the status board. "Perhaps we should send someone to investigate. We could probably spare a Strike Cruiser; maybe even the Stormhawk."

  Thrawn took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "No," he said, his voice steady and controlled again. "The Sluis Van operation is our primary concern at the moment-and battles have been lost before on the presence or absence of a single ship. Karrde and his betrayal will keep for later."

  He turned back to the communications officer. "Signal the freighter," he ordered. "Have them activate the cloaking shield."

  "Yes, sir."

  Pellaeon turned back to the viewport. The freighter, bathed in the Chimera's lights, just sat there looking innocent. "Cloaking shield on, Admiral," the comm man reported.

  Thrawn nodded. "Order them to proceed."

  "Yes, sir." Moving rather sluggishly, the freighter maneuvered past the Chimaera, oriented itself toward the distant sun of the Sluis Van system, and with a flicker of pseudovelocity jumped to lightspeed.

  "Time mark," Thrawn ordered.

  "Time marked," one of the deck officers acknowledged.

  Thrawn looked at Pellaeon. "Is my flagship ready, Captain?" he asked the formal question.

  "The Chimaera is fully at your command, Admiral," Pellaeon gave the formal answer.

  "Good. We follow the freighter in exactly six hours twenty minutes. I want a final check from all ships . . . and I want you to remind them one last time that our task is only to engage and pin down the system's defenses. There are to be no special heroics or risks taken. Make that clearly understood, Captain. We're here to gain ships, not lose them."

  "Yes, sir." Pellaeon started toward his command station-

  "And Captain . . . ?"

  "Yes, Admiral?"

  There was a tight smile on Thrawn's face. "Remind them, too," he added softly, "that our final victory over the Rebellion begins here."

  Chapter 31

  Captain Afyon of the Escort Frigate Larkhess shook his head with thinly disguised contempt, glaring at Wedge from the depths of his pilot's seat. "You X-wing hotshots," he growled. "You've really got it made-you know that?"

  Wedge shrugged, trying hard not to take offense. It wasn't easy; but then, he'd had lots of practice in the past few days. Afyon had started out from Coruscant with a planetary-mass chip on his shoulder, and he'd been nursing it the whole way.

  And looking out the viewport at the confused mass of ships crowding the Sluis Van orbit-dock area, it wasn't hard to figure out why. "Yeah, well, we're stuck out here, too," he reminded the captain.

  The other snorted. "Yeah. Big sacrifice. You lounge around my ship like overpriced trampers for a couple of days, then flit around for two hours while I try to dodge bulk freighters and get this thing into a docking station designed for scavenger pickers. And then you pull your snubbies back inside and go back to lounging again. Doesn't exactly qualify as earning your pay, in my book."

  Wedge clamped his teeth firmly around his tongue and stirred his tea a little harder. It was considered bad form to mouth back at senior officers, after all-even senior officers who'd long since passed their prime. For probably the first time since he had been given command of Rogue Squadron, he regretted having passed up all the rest of the promotions he'd been offered. A higher rank would at least have entitled him to snarl back a little.

  Lifting his cup for a cautious sip, he gazed out the viewport at the scene around them. No, he amended-he wasn't sorry at all that he'd stayed with his X-wing. If he hadn't, he'd probably be in exactly the same position as Afyon was right now: trying to run a 920-crew ship with just fifteen men, hauling cargo in a ship meant for war.

  And, like as not, having to put up with hotshot X-wing pilots who sat around his bridge drinking tea and claiming with perfect justification that they were doing exactly what they'd been ordered to do.

  He hid a smile behind his mug. Yes, in Afyon's place, he'd probably be ready to spit bulkhead shavings, too. Maybe he ought to go ahead and let the other drag him into an argument, in fact, let him drain off some of that excess nervous energy of his. Eventually-within the hour, even, if Sluis Control's latest departure estimate was anywhere close-it would finally be the Larkhess's turn to get out of here and head for Bpfassh. It would be nice, when that time came, for Afyon to be calm enough to handle the ship.

  Taking another sip of his tea, Wedge looked out the viewport. A couple of refitted passenger liners were making their own break for freedom now, he saw, accompanied by four Corellian Corvettes. Beyond them, just visible in the faint light of the space-lane marker buoys, was what looked like one of the slightly ovoid transports he used to escort during the height of the war, with a pair of B-wings following.

  And off to the side, moving parallel to their departure vector, an A-class bulk freighter was coming into the docking pattern.

  Without any escort at all.

  Wedge watched it creep toward them, his smile fading as old combat senses began to tingle. Swiveling around in his seat, he reached over to the console beside him and punched for a sensor scan.

  It looked innocent enough. An older freighter, probably a knockoff of the original Corellian Action IV design, with the kind of exterior that came from either a lifetime of honest work or else a short and spectacularly unsuccessful career of piracy. Its cargo bay registered completely empty, and there were no weapons emplacements that the Larkhess's sensors could pick up.

  A totally empty freighter. How long had it been, he wondered uneasily, since he'd run across a totally empty freighter?

  "Trouble?"

  Wedge focused on the captain in mild surprise. The other's frustrated anger of a minute ago was gone, replaced by something calm, alert, and battle-ready. Perhaps, the thought strayed through Wedge's mind, Afyon wasn't past his prime after all. "That incoming freighter," he told the other, setting his cup down on the edge of the console and keying for a comm channel. "There's something about it that doesn't feel right."

  The captain peered out the viewport, then at the sensor scan data Wedge had pulled up. "I don't see anything," he said.

  "Me, either," Wedge had to admit. "There's just something . . . Blast."

  "What?"

  "Control won't let me in," Wedge told him as he keyed off. "Too much traffic on the circuits already, they say."

  "Allow me." Afyon turned
to his own console. The freighter was shifting course now, the kind of slow and careful maneuver that usually indicated a full load. But the cargo bay was still registering empty . . .

  "There we go," Afyon said, glancing at Wedge with grim satisfaction. "I've got a tap into their records computer. Little trick you never learn flitting around in an X-wing. Let's see now . . . freighter Nartissteu, out of Nellac Kram. They were jumped by pirates, got their main drive damaged in the fight, and had to dump their cargo to get away. They're hoping to get some repair work done; Sluis Control's basically told them to get in line."

  "I thought all this relief shipping had more or less taken over the whole place," Wedge frowned.

  Afyon shrugged. "Theoretically. In practice . . . well, the Sluissi are easy enough to talk into bending that kind of rule. You just have to know how to phrase the request."

  Reluctantly, Wedge nodded. It did all seem reasonable enough, he supposed. And a damaged, empty ship would probably handle something like an intact full one. And the freighter was empty-the Larkhess's sensors said so.

  But the tingles refused to go away.

  Abruptly, he dug his comlink from his belt. "Rogue Squadron, this is Rogue Leader," he called. "Everyone to your ships."

  He got acknowledgments, looked up to find Afyon's eyes steady on him. "You still think there's trouble?" the other asked quietly.

  Wedge grimaced, throwing one last look out the viewport at the freighter. "Probably not. But it won't hurt to be ready. Anyway, I can't have my pilots sitting around drinking tea all day." He turned and left the bridge at a quick jog.

  The other eleven members of Rogue Squadron were in their X-wings by the time he reached the Larkhess's docking bay. Three minutes later, they launched.

  The freighter hadn't made much headway, Wedge saw as they swung up over the Larkhess's hull and pulled together into a loose patrol formation. Oddly enough, though, it had moved a considerable distance laterally, drifting away from the Larkhess and toward a pair of Calamari Star Cruisers orbiting together a few kilometers away. "Spread out formation," Wedge ordered his pilots, shifting to an asymptotic approach course. "Let's swing by and take a nice, casual little look."

  The others acknowledged. Wedge glanced down at his nav scope, made a minor adjustment to his speed, looked back up again-

  And in the space of a single heartbeat, the whole thing went straight to hell.

  The freighter blew up. All at once, without any warning from sensors, without any hint from previous visual observation, it just came apart.

  Reflexively, Wedge jabbed for his comm control. "Emergency!" he barked. "Ship explosion near orbit-dock V-475. Send rescue team."

  For an instant, as chunks of the cargo bay flew outward, he could see into the emptiness there . . . but even as his eyes and brain registered the odd fact that he could see into the disintegrating cargo bay but not beyond it-

  The bay was suddenly no longer empty.

  One of the X-wing pilots gasped. A tight-packed mass of something was in there, totally filling the space where the Larkhess's sensors had read nothing. A mass that was even now exploding outward like a hornet's nest behind the pieces of the bay.

  A mass that in seconds had resolved itself into a boiling wave front of TIE fighters.

  "Pull up!" Wedge snapped to his squadron, leaning his X-wing into a tight turn to get out of the path of that deadly surge. "Come around and re-form; S-foils in attack position."

  And as they swung around in response, he knew with a sinking feeling that Captain Afyon had been wrong. Rogue Squadron was indeed going to earn its pay today.

  The battle for Sluis Van had begun.

  They'd cleared the outer system defense network and the bureaucratic overload that passed for Control at Sluis Van these days, and Han was just getting a bearing on the slot they'd given him when the emergency call came through. "Luke!" he shouted back down the cockpit corridor. "Got a ship explosion. I'm going to go check it out." He glanced at the orbit-dock map to locate V-475, gave the ship a fractional turn to put them on the right vector-

  And jerked in his seat as a laser bolt slapped the Falcon hard from behind.

  He had them gunning into a full forward evasive maneuver before the second shot went sizzling past the cockpit. Over the roar of the engines he heard Luke's startled-sounding yelp; and as the third bolt went past he finally had a chance to check the aft sensors to see just what was going on.

  He almost wished he hadn't. Directly behind them, batteries already engaging one of the Sluis Van perimeter battle stations, was an Imperial Star Destroyer.

  He swore under his breath and kicked the engines a little harder. Beside him, Luke clawed his way forward against the not-quite-compensated acceleration and into the copilot's seat. "What's going on?" he asked.

  "We just walked into an Imperial attack," Han growled, eyes flying over the readouts. "Got a Star Destroyer behind us-there's another one over to starboard-looks like some other ships with them."

  "They've got the system bottled up," Luke said, his voice glacially calm. A far cry, Han thought, from the panicky kid he'd pulled off Tatooine out from under Star Destroyer fire all those years back. "I make it five Star Destroyers and something over twenty smaller ships."

  Han grunted. "At least we know now why they hit Bpfassh and the others. Wanted to pull enough ships here to make an attack worth their while."

  The words were barely out of his mouth when the emergency comm channel suddenly came to life again. "Emergency! Imperial TIE fighters in orbit-dock area. All ships to battle stations."

  Luke started. "That sounded like Wedge," he said, punching for transmission. "Wedge? That you?"

  "Luke?" the other came back. "We got trouble here-at least forty TIE fighters and fifty truncated-cone-shaped things I've never seen before-"

  He broke off as a screech from the X-wing's etheric rudder came faintly over the speaker. "I hope you've brought a couple wings of fighters with you," he said. "We're going to be a little pressed here."

  Luke glanced at Han. "Afraid it's just Han and me and the Falcon. But we're on our way."

  "Make it fast."

  Luke keyed off the speaker. "Is there any way to get me into my X-wing?" he asked.

  "Not fast enough," Han shook his head. "We're going to have to drop it here and go in alone."

  Luke nodded, getting out of his seat. "I'd better make sure Lando and the droids are strapped in and then get up into the gun well."

  "Take the top one," Han called after him. The upper deflector shields were running stronger at the moment, and Luke would have more protection there.

  If there was any protection to be had from forty TIE fighters and fifty truncated flying cones.

  For a moment he frowned as a strange thought suddenly struck him. But no. They couldn't possibly be Lando's missing mole miners. Even a Grand Admiral wouldn't be crazy enough to try to use something like that in battle.

  Boosting power to the forward deflectors, he took a deep breath and headed in.

  "All ships, commence attack," Pellaeon called. "Full engagement; maintain position and status."

  He got confirmations, turned to Thrawn. "All ships report engaged, sir," he said.

  But the Grand Admiral didn't seem to hear him. He just stood there at the viewport, gazing outward at the New Republic ships scrambling to meet them, his hands gripped tightly behind his back. "Admiral?" Pellaeon asked cautiously.