The Grand Admiral’s glowing red eyes were on his displays. “There was a small twitch, as a matter of fact,” he said. “Cut off almost before it began, but I think the implications are clear.”
Well, that was something, anyway. “Yes, sir. Shall I have Surveillance begin equipping a long-term ground team?”
“Patience, Captain,” Thrawn said. “It may not be necessary, after all. Key for a midrange scan, and tell me what you see.”
Pellaeon swiveled back to his command board and tapped for the appropriate readout. There was Myrkr itself, of course, and the standard TIE fighter defense cloud ranged around the Chimaera. The only other object anywhere within midrange distance— “You mean that little asteroid out there?”
“That’s the one,” Thrawn nodded. “Nothing remarkable about it, is there? No, don’t do a sensor focus,” he added, almost before the thought of doing one had even occurred to Pellaeon. “We wouldn’t want to prematurely flush our quarry, would we?”
“Our quarry?” Pellaeon repeated, frowning at the sensor data again. The routine sensor scans that had been done of the asteroid three hours earlier had come up negative, and nothing could have sneaked up on it since then without being detected. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t see any indication that anything’s out there.”
“I don’t either,” Thrawn agreed. “But it’s the only sizable cover available for nearly ten million kilometers around Myrkr. There’s really no other place for Karrde to watch our operation from.”
Pellaeon pursed his lips. “Your permission, Admiral, but I doubt Karrde is foolish enough to just sit around waiting for us to arrive.”
The glowing red eyes narrowed, just a bit. “You forget, Captain,” he said softly, “that I’ve met the man. More important, I’ve seen the sort of artwork he collects.” He turned back to his displays. “No; he’s out there. I’m sure of it. Talon Karrde is not merely a smuggler, you see. Perhaps not even primarily a smuggler. His real love is not goods or money but information. More than anything else in the galaxy, he craves knowledge … and the knowledge of what we have or have not found here is too valuable a gem for him to pass up.”
Pellaeon studied the Grand Admiral’s profile. It was, in his opinion, a pretty tenuous leap of logic. But on the other hand, he’d seen too many similar leaps borne out not to take this one seriously. “Shall I order a TIE fighter squadron to investigate, sir?”
“As I said, Captain, patience,” Thrawn said. “Even in sensor stealth mode with all engines shut down, he’ll have made sure he can power up and escape before any attack force could reach him.” He smiled at Pellaeon. “Or rather, any attack force from the Chimaera.”
A stray memory clicked: Thrawn, reaching for his comm just as Pellaeon was giving the ground forces the order to attack. “You sent a message to the rest of the fleet,” he said. “Timing it against my attack order to mask the transmission.”
Thrawn’s blue-black eyebrows lifted a fraction. “Very good, Captain. Very good, indeed.”
Pellaeon felt a touch of warmth on his cheeks. The Grand Admiral’s compliments were few and far between. “Thank you, sir.”
Thrawn nodded. “More precisely, my message was to a single ship, the Constrainer. It will arrive in approximately ten minutes. At which point”—his eyes glittered—“we’ll see just how accurate my reading of Karrde has been.”
Over the Wild Karrde’s bridge speakers, the reports from the scanning crew were beginning to taper off. “Doesn’t sound like they’ve found anything,” Aves commented.
“Like you said, we were thorough,” Mara reminded him, hardly hearing her own words. The nameless thing nagging at the back of her mind seemed to be getting stronger. “Can we get out of here now?” she asked, turning to look at Karrde.
He frowned down at her. “Try to relax, Mara. They can’t possibly know we’re here. There’s been no sensor-focus probe of the asteroid, and without one there’s no way for them to detect this ship.”
“Unless a Star Destroyer’s sensors are better than you think,” Mara retorted.
“We know all about their sensors,” Aves soothed. “Ease up, Mara, Karrde knows what he’s doing. The Wild Karrde has probably the tightest sensor stealth mode this side of—”
He broke off as the bridge door opened behind them; and Mara turned just as Karrde’s two pet vornskrs bounded into the room.
Dragging, very literally, their handler behind them.
“What are you doing here, Chin?” Karrde asked.
“Sorry, Capt’,” Chin puffed, digging his heels into the deck and leaning back against the taut leashes. The effort was only partially successful; the predators were still pulling him slowly forward. “I couldn’t stop them. I thought maybe they wanted to see you, hee?”
“What’s the matter with you two, anyway?” Karrde chided the animals, squatting down in front of them. “Don’t you know we’re busy?”
The vornskrs didn’t look at him. Didn’t even seem to notice his presence, for that matter. They continued staring straight ahead as if he wasn’t even there.
Staring directly at Mara.
“Hey,” Karrde said, reaching over to slap one of the animals lightly across the muzzle. “I’m talking to you, Sturm. What’s gotten into you, anyway?” He glanced along their unblinking line of sight—
Paused for a second and longer look. “Are you doing something, Mara?”
Mara shook her head, a cold shiver tingling up her back. She’d seen that look before, on many of the wild vornskrs she’d run into during that long three-day trek through the Myrkr forest with Luke Skywalker.
Except that those vornskr stares hadn’t been directed at her. They’d been reserved instead for Skywalker. Usually just before they attacked him.
“That’s Mara, Sturm,” Karrde told the animal, speaking to it as he might a child. “Mara. Come on, now—you saw her all the time back home.”
Slowly, almost reluctantly, Sturm stopped his forward pull and turned his attention to his master. “Mara,” Karrde repeated, looking the vornskr firmly in the eye. “A friend. You hear that, Drang?” he added, reaching over to grip the other vornskr’s muzzle. “She’s a friend. Understand?”
Drang seemed to consider that. Then, as reluctantly as Sturm had, he lowered his head and stopped pulling. “That’s better,” Karrde said, scratching both vornskrs briefly behind their ears and standing up again. “Better take them back down, Chin. Maybe walk them around the main hold—give them some exercise.”
“If I can find a clear track through all the stuff in there, hee?” Chin grunted, twitching back on the leashes. “Come on, littles—we go now.”
With only a slight hesitation the two vornskrs allowed him to take them off the bridge. Karrde watched as the door shut behind them. “I wonder what that was all about,” he said, giving Mara a thoughtful look.
“I don’t know,” she told him, hearing the tightness in her voice. With the temporary distraction now gone, the strange dread she’d been feeling was back again in full force. She swiveled back to her board, half expecting to see a squadron of TIE fighters bearing down on them.
But there was nothing. Only the Chimaera, still sitting harmlessly out there in orbit around Myrkr. No threat any of the Wild Karrde’s instruments could detect. But the tingling was getting stronger and stronger …
And suddenly she could sit still no longer. Reaching out to the control board, she keyed for engine prestart.
“Mara!” Aves yelped, jumping in his seat as if he’d been stung. “What in—?”
“They’re coming,” Mara snarled back, hearing the strain of a half dozen tangled emotions in her voice. The die was irrevocably cast—her activation of the Wild Karrde’s engines would have set sensors screaming all over the Chimaera. Now there was nowhere to go but out.