Star Wars - Thrawn Trilogy - Dark Force Rising 02 (11 page)

"A deal, huh?" he asked lazily. "What kind o' deal you got in mind?"

"What kind of deal do you want?" she countered. If there'd been a box anywhere near her feet, she might have been able to scoop it up with her foot and throw it at him. But though there was a fair amount of junk littering the street in this part of town, nothing suitable was within reach. Her half-boots were firmly fastened around her ankles, impossible to get loose without him noticing. Rapidly, she ran through an inventory of items she was carrying or wearing-nothing.

But the Emperor's intensive training had included direct manipulation of the Force as well as the long-range communication abilities that had been her primary value to his regime. Those skills had vanished at the moment of his death, reappearing only briefly and erratically in the years since then.

But if the sensory tingles and hunches had started again, perhaps the power was back, too :

"I'm sure we can double whatever you've been offered," she said. "Maybe even throw in something extra to sweeten the pot."

His grin turned evil. "That's a real generous offer, Red. Real generous. Lotta men'd jump on that right away, sure `nough. Me"-he lifted the blaster a little higher-"I like stayin' with a sure thing."

"Even if it means settling for half the money?" Two meters behind him, piled carelessly up against a retaining wall, was a small stack of scrap metal parts waiting to be picked up. A short length of shield tubing, in particular, seemed to he rather precariously positioned on one edge of a battered power cell case.

Setting her teeth, clearing her thoughts as best she could, Mara reached her mind out toward the tubing.

"On my pad, half a sure thing's better than twice o' nothin'," the man said. "Anyway, I don't 'spect you can outbid the Empire."

Mara swallowed. She'd suspected it from the first; but the confirmation still sent a shiver up her back. "You might be surprised at our resources, she said. The length of tubing twitched, rolled a couple of millimeters-

"Now, don't think so," the other said easily. "C'mon, let's go."

Mara tilted a finger back toward the dead man crouched at the box behind her. "You mind telling me first what happened here?"

Her assailant shrugged. "What's t' tell? I needed a decoy; he was wandering' around the wrong place at the wrong time. End o' story." His grin suddenly vanished. "Enough stalling Turn around and start walking:unless you're looking' to spite me by making me settle for the death fee instead."

"No," Mara murmured. She took a deep breath, straining with every bit of strength she possessed, knowing that this was her last best chance-

And behind her captor, the tubing fell with a muffled clank onto the ground.

He was good, all right. The tubing had hardly even finished its fall before he'd dropped to one knee, spinning around and spraying the area behind him with a splattering of quick cover fire as he searched for whoever was sneaking up on him. It took less than a second for him to recognize his mistake, and with another spray of blaster fire he spun back again.

But one second was all Mara needed. His desperate blaster spray was still tracking toward her when she shot him neatly in the head.

For a long moment she just stood there, breathing hard, muscles trembling with reaction. Then, glancing around to make sure no one was running to see what all the commotion was about, she holstered her weapon and knelt down beside him.

There was, as she'd expected, precious little to find. An ID-probably forged-giving his name as Dengar Roth, a couple of spare power clips for his blaster, a backnp vibroblade knife, a data card and data pad, and some working capital in both local and Imperial currency. Stuffing the ID and data card into her tunic, she left the money and weapons where they were and got back to her feet. "There's your twice of nothing," she muttered, looking down at the body. "Enjoy it."

Her eyes shifted to the piece of shield tubing that had saved her life. She'd been right. The twitches of power, as well as the hunches, were back. Which meant the dreams wouldn't be far behind.

She swore under her breath. If they came, they came, and there was nothing much she could do except endure them. For the moment she had other, more pressing matters to deal with. Taking one final look around, she headed for home.

Karrde and Dankin were waiting when she arrived back at the townhouse, the latter all but pacing the floor in his nervousness. "There you are," he snapped as she slipped in through the back door. "Where the blazes-?"

"We've got trouble," Mara cut him off, handing the Dengar Roth ID to Karrde and brushing past them to the still largely disassembled communications room. Pushing aside a box of cables, she found a data pad and plugged in the card.

"What kind of trouble?" Karrde asked, coming up behind her.

"The bounty hunter kind," Mara said, handing him the data pad. Neatly framed in the center of the display, under a large 20,000, was Karrde's face. "We're probably all in there," she told him. "Or at least as many as grand Admiral Thrawn knew about."

"So I'm worth twenty thousand now," Karrde murmured, paging quickly through the card. "I'm flattered."

"Is that all you're going to say?" Mara demanded.

He looked at her. "What would you like me to say?" he asked mildly. "That you were right and I was wrong about the Empire's interest in us?"

"I'm not interested in laying blame," she told him stiffly. "What I want to know is what we're going to do about it."

Karrde looked at the data pad again, a muscle tightening briefly in his jaw. "We're going to do the only prudent thing," he said. "Namely, retreat. Dankin, get on the secure comm and tell Lachton to start pulling the drop apart again. Then call Chin and his team and have them go over and repack the stuff in the equipment dumps. You can stay and help Mara and me here. I want to get off Rishi by midnight if at all possible."

"Got it," Dankin said, already keying the encrypt codes into the comm board.

Karrde handed the data pad back to Mara. "We'd better get busy."

She stopped him with a hand on his arm. `And what happens when we run out of backnp bases?"

He locked eyes with her. "We don't give up the Dreadnaughts under duress," he said, lowering his voice to just above a whisper. "Not to Thrawn; not to anyone else."

"We may have to," she pointed out.

His eyes hardened. "We may choose to," he corrected her. "We will never have to. Is that clear?"

Mara grimaced to herself. "Yes."

"Good." Karrde flicked a glance over her shoulder to where Dankin was speaking urgently into the comm. "We have a lot of work to do. Let's get to it."

Mara would have bet that they couldn't reassemble their equipment in less than twenty-four hours. To her mild surprise, the crews had everything packed and ready to go barely an hour after local midnight. With suitably generous applications of funds to spaceport officials, they were off Rishi and to lightspeed an hour after that.

And later that night, as the Wild Karrde drove through the mottled sky of hyperspace, the dreams started again.

From a distance it had looked like a standard-issue Bulk Cruiser: old, slow, minimally armed, with very little going for it in a fight except its size. But as with so very much of warfare, appearances in this case turned out to be deceiving; and if Grand Admiral Thrawn hadn't been on the Chimaera's bridge, Pellaeon had to admit that he might have been caught a bit by surprise.

But Thrawn had been on the bridge, and had recognized immediately the unlikelihood that the Rebellion's strategists would have put such an important convoy under the protection of such a weak ship. And so, when the Bulk Cruiser's bays suddenly erupted with three full squadrons of A-wing starfighters, the Chimaera's TIE interceptors were already in space and swarming to the attack.

"Interesting tactic," Thrawn commented as the gap between the Chimaera and the Rebel convoy began to sparkle with laser flashes. "If not especially innovative. The idea of converting Bulk Cruisers to starfighter carriers was first proposed over twenty years ago."

"I don't recall it ever being implemented," Pellaeon said, feeling a twinge of uneasiness as he eyed the tactical displays. A-wings were faster even than those cursed X-wings, and he wasn't at all sure how well his TIE interceptors would handle them.

"Excellent fighters, A-wings," Thrawn said, as if reading Pellaeon's thoughts. "Not without their limitations, though. Particularly here-high-speed craft like that are far more suited to hit-and-fade operations than to escort duty. Forcing them to remain near a convoy largely neutralizes their speed advantage." He cocked a blue-black eyebrow at Pellaeon. "Perhaps we're seeing the result of Admiral Ackbar's removal as Supreme Commander."

"Perhaps." The TIE interceptors did indeed seem to be holding their own against the A-wings; and the Chimaera itself was certainly having no trouble with the Bulk Cruiser. Beyond the battlefront, the rest of the convoy was trying to huddle together, as if that would do them any good. "Ackbar's people are still in charge, though."

"Obviously."

"We've been over this territory already, Captain," Thrawn said, his voice cooling slightly. "Planting a vacuum-tight collection of evidence against Ackbar would have ruined him far too quickly. The more subtle attack will still neutralize him, but it will also send ripples of uncertainty and confusion through the Rebellion's entire political system. At the very least, it will distract and weaken them just at the moment when we'll be launching the Mount Tantiss campaign. At its best, it could split the entire alliance apart." He smiled. "Ackbar himself is replaceable, Captain. The delicate political balance the Rebellion has created for itself is not."

"I understand all that, Admiral," Pellaeon growled. "My concern is with your assumption that that Bothan on the Council can be relied upon to push things so close to your theoretical breakup point.

"Oh, he'll push, all right," Thrawn said, his smile turning sardonic as he gazed out at the battle blazing on around the enemy convoy. "I've spent many hours studying Bothan art, Captain, and I understand the species quite well. There's no doubt at all that Councilor Fey'lya will play his part beautifully. As beautifully as if we were pulling his strings directly."

He tapped a key on his board. "Starboard batteries: one of the Frigates in the convoy is easing into attack position. Assume it's an armed backup and treat it accordingly. Squadrons A-2 and A-3, move to protect that flank until the Frigate has been neutralized."

The batteries and TIE wing commander acknowledged, and some of the turbolaser fire began to track on the Frigate. "And what happens if Fey'lya wins?" Pellaeon persisted. "Quickly, I mean, before all this political confusion has a chance to set in. By your own analysis of the species, any Bothan who's risen as high as Fey'lya has would have to be highly intelligent."

"Intelligent, yes, but not necessarily in any way that's dangerous to us," Thrawn said. "He'd have to be a survivor, certainly, but that kind of verbal skill doesn't necessarily translate into military competence." He shrugged. "Actually, a victory by Fey'lya would merely prolong the whole awkward situation for the enemy. Given the kind of support Fey'lya's been cultivating among the Rebellion military, the politicians would have to go through another polarizing struggle when they realized their mistake and tried to replace him."

"Yes, sir," Pellaeon said, suppressing a sigh. It was the kind of tangled subtlety that he'd never really felt comfortable with. He just hoped the Grand Admiral was right about the potential gains; it would be a shame for Intelligence to have engineered such a brilliantly successful bank job and then not get anything of real value out of it.

"Trust me, Captain," Thrawn said into his unspoken worries. "I dare say the wasting of political effort has already begun, in fact. Ackbar's staunchest allies would hardly have left Coruscant at this critical point unless they were desperately searching for evidence to clear him."

Pellaeon frowned at him. "Are you saying that Solo and Organa Solo are headed for the Palanhi system?"

"Solo only, I think," Thrawn corrected thoughtfully.

"Organa Solo and the Wookiee are most likely still trying to find a place to hide from our Noghri. But Solo will be going to Palanhi, firmly convinced by Intelligence's electronic sleight-of-hand that the trail leads through that system. Which is why the Death's Head is on its way there right now."

"I see," Pellaeon murmured. He'd noticed that order on the daily log and had wondered why Thrawn was pulling one of their best Imperial Star Destroyers off battle duty. "I hope it will be equal to the task. Solo and Skywalker have both proved hard to trap in the past."

"I don't believe Skywalker is going to Palanhi," Thrawn told him, his face settling into a somewhat sour expression. "Our esteemed Jedi Master apparently called it correctly. Skywalker has decided to pay a visit to Jomark."

Pellaeon stared at him. "Are you sure, Admiral? I haven't seen anything from Intelligence to that effect."

"The information wasn't from, Intelligence," Thrawn said. "It came from Delta Source.

"Ah," Pellaeon said, feeling his own expression go a little sour. The Chimaera's Intelligence section had been nagging him for months now to find out what exactly this Delta Source was that seemed to feed such clear and precise information to the Grand Admiral from the very heart of the Imperial Palace. So far all Thrawn would say was that Delta Source was firmly established and that the information gained through it should be treated as absolutely reliable.

Intelligence hadn't even been able to figure out whether Delta Source was a person, a droid, or some exotic recording system that was somehow able to elude the Rebellion's hourly counter intelligence sweeps of the Palace. It irritated them no end; and Pellaeon had to admit he didn't much like being kept in the dark about it, either. But Thrawn had personally activated Delta Source, and long years of unwritten protocol in such matters gave him the right to keep the contact confidential if he chose. "I'm sure C'baoth will be pleased to hear it," he said. "I presume you'll want to give him the news yourself."