Тимоти Зан - Star Wars - Thrawn Ascendancy (Book I - Chaos Rising)

“I’m glad you were willing to wait for my arrival.”

“I was happy to do so,” Qilori said. “For one thing, voyages with you are never boring. For another—” He hefted his mug.

“The tealeaf?”

“Yes,” Qilori said. “Very few Pathfinder employers remember their navigator’s preferences. A large number don’t even bother to learn our names.”

“It seemed appropriate,” Thrawn said. “Since this will likely be our last voyage together.”

“Really?” Qilori asked, frowning at the Chiss over the edge of the mug. “How so?”

“I’m going to Primea to ransom my two hostages from General Yiv,” Thrawn said. “I don’t expect the exchange to end well.”

“Oh,” Qilori said, trying for the right mix of surprise and concern. “Surely you’re not expecting treachery? Yiv the Benevolent has always struck me as upright and honorable in his dealings with others. At least when the other party has also been honorable. You aren’t planning any tricks, are you?”

“He wanted me to come alone in an unarmed freighter.” Thrawn waved a hand around them. “Do you see anyone else? Or any weapons?”

“Well, certainly not from here, ” Qilori said with a shrug. Though considering that he’d given the freighter’s hull a thorough visual inspection before coming aboard, and had spent his last rest period surreptitiously checking for weapons controls, he was considerably more certain than his offhanded comment made it look.

Still, there was something odd about the freighter’s shape, something that had caught his attention as he’d spiraled around it earlier. It was nothing hugely out of the ordinary for this class of ship, and he couldn’t even codify what it was that was different. Yet hours later, it was still nagging at him.

“You can therefore affirm that I’ve followed his instructions,” Thrawn said.

“In which case you should have nothing to fear,” Qilori said.

“Perhaps,” Thrawn said. “Are you ready for the final segment?”

“I am,” Qilori said, taking one last sip of his tealeaf and setting the mug aside. Thrawn was right: It would be their last voyage together. Qilori would have to thank the Benevolent later for letting him be present to watch the arrogant, Pathfinder-murdering Chiss die. “Another half hour, and we’ll be there.”

“Good,” Thrawn said, settling himself in his chair. “Let’s make an end of it, Qilori of Uandualon. One way, or another.”

Insight. In the end, Ar’alani mused, that was what it came down to. Analysis followed, then extrapolation and countermove. Those were what made a successful military campaign. But it all started with insight.

And if the insight was in error, the rest collapsed like an ice bridge over a bonfire.

Thrawn claimed to understand Yiv. He claimed to understand the Vaks.

But he’d also thought he understood the Lioaoi and the Garwians. His failure there had stirred up old animosities and political conflicts, had gotten a bunch of aliens killed, and had put the Ascendancy in the middle with dirt on its hands. If he was wrong this time, there would be more deaths.

Only this time, many of the dead would be Chiss.

There was a movement to her left, and she looked up to see Wutroow come to a stop beside the command chair. “Breakout in five minutes,” the Vigilant ’s first officer reported. “All systems and stations report ready.”

“Thank you, Senior Captain,” Ar’alani said. “Anything else?”

Wutroow pursed her lips. “I trust you realize, Admiral, that we’re walking on splintered eggs here. We only have Senior Captain Thrawn’s assumption that the Vaks haven’t completely gone over to the Nikardun side. If they have, we’re going to end up fighting both of them. And unless the Vaks attack us directly, we have no authorization whatsoever to fire on them.”

“It gets worse,” Ar’alani warned, thinking back to the Lioaoi fighters she and Thrawn had seen at the Lioaoin heartworld. “If the Vaks have joined Yiv, there may already be Nikardun crews aboard Vak warships. We won’t know for sure who’s who until they open fire.”

“And until then, they can maneuver all they want, play blocker for Nikardun ships, or even range their weapons against us,” Wutroow said darkly. “Until they actually fire, we can’t legally do anything.”

“Well, maybe we’ll get lucky and the Vaks will declare war as soon as they see us coming for them,” Ar’alani said. “That would make things easier.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Wutroow hesitated. “This Republic energy shield Thrawn brought back from the edge of the Chaos. How good is it, really?”

“I don’t know,” Ar’alani admitted. “I was there for some of the tests when they were figuring out how to wire it to Chiss power systems, and it looked pretty impressive. But how strong it is, and how long it’ll last under sustained fire—” She shook her head. “No idea. I suppose we’ll find out.”

“I suppose we will.” Wutroow huffed out a breath. “With your permission, Admiral, I think I’ll run the weapons crews through one final system check. I assume you’ve made arrangements to get sky-walker Ab’begh off the bridge as soon as we arrive at Primea?”

“I’ve assigned two warriors to take her back to the suite,” Ar’alani said. “They’ll stay there with her and her caregiver until the battle’s over.”

“Good idea,” Wutroow said. “Thrawn losing his sky-walker was bad enough. If we got boarded and lost ours, too, we’d never hear the end of it.”

Ar’alani had to smile. “And if that’s the only thing you have to worry about today, Senior Captain, your life must be going remarkably well.”

“Thank you, Admiral,” Wutroow said innocently. “I do my best. With your permission, I’ll get started on that weapons check.”

—

With a final urging from the Great Presence, and a final twitch of Qilori’s fingers, they arrived.

“Well,” Thrawn commented as Qilori pulled off his sensory-deprivation headset. “I see General Yiv has one final surprise for us.”

Qilori blinked moisture back into his eyes. Standing thirty kilometers off the freighter’s bow was a formation of four massive Battle Dreadnoughts. “Why, did he say he was going to come unarmed, too?” he asked, trying to keep the sudden nervousness out of his voice. That was a lot of military hardware out there, a good half of the force the Nikardun had in this region.

He’d assumed Yiv would be content to just bring the Deathless to the rendezvous. Apparently, the Benevolent had decided to err on the side of caution.

“No, of course I assumed he would bring extra ships,” Thrawn said. “I was referring to the fact that these aren’t the coordinates he sent in his message.”

“They’re not ?” Qilori asked, feigning surprise. These were the coordinates Yiv had given to him, but of course Thrawn wasn’t supposed to know that. “I don’t understand. These are the ones you downloaded into the ship’s computer before we left the concourse.”

“Then someone switched them after I handed them to the dispatcher.” Thrawn pointed to the left, where the planet Primea was a small dot in the distance. “We were supposed to come out in a high planetary orbit. Apparently, the general wanted to carry out our transaction in a less conspicuous part of the system.”

He reached to the control board and keyed the comm. “General Yiv, this is Senior Captain Thrawn. I trust my companions are undamaged?”

The comm display lit up. Yiv was seated in his command chair, his shoulder symbionts waving their usual unnerving rhythm. Kneeling on the deck in front of him were his two prisoners. One of them was the female whom Qilori had seen at the Primea diplomatic reception where Thrawn and Yiv had first met, the female he’d heard Thrawn refer to as a family hostage. The other was much younger, possibly not even in her teens, both of them wearing the same grotesque makeup. Whatever this hostage thing was the Chiss were running, it apparently started very young. “See for yourself the shape of your hostages, Captain,” Yiv said, leaning on the word as he waved a casual hand over them. “You have the ransom?”