She looked up at Karrde, suddenly afraid of what his expression might be saying. But he was just standing there looking down at her, a slightly quizzical frown on his face. “They don’t appear to be coming,” he pointed out mildly.
She shook her head, feeling the pleading in her eyes. “You have to believe me,” she said, uncomfortably aware that she didn’t really believe it herself. “They’re getting ready to attack.”
“I believe you,” he said soothingly. Or perhaps he, too, recognized that there weren’t any other choices left. “Aves: lightspeed calculation. Take the easiest course setting that’s not anywhere toward Rishi; we’ll stop and reset later.”
“Karrde—”
“Mara is second in command,” Karrde cut him off. “As such, she has the right and the duty to make important decisions.”
“Yeah, but—” Aves stopped, the last word coming out pinched as he strangled it off. “Yeah,” he said between clenched teeth. Throwing a glower at Mara, he turned to the nav computer and got to work.
“You might as well get us moving, Mara,” Karrde continued, stepping over to the vacant communications chair and sitting down. “Keep the asteroid between us and the Chimaera as long as you can.”
“Yes, sir,” Mara said. Her tangle of emotions was starting to dissolve now, leaving a mixture of anger and profound embarrassment in its wake. She’d done it again. Listened to her inner feelings—tried to do things she knew full well she couldn’t do—and in the process had once again wound up clutching the sharp end of the bayonet.
And it was probably the last she’d hear of being Karrde’s second in command, too. Command unity in front of Aves was one thing, but once they were out of here and he could get her alone there was going to be hell to pay. She’d be lucky if he didn’t bounce her out of his organization altogether. Jabbing viciously at her board, she swung the Wild Karrde around, turning its nose away from the asteroid and starting to drive toward deep space—
And with a flicker of pseudomotion, something big shot in from lightspeed, dropping neatly into normal space not twenty kilometers away.
An Imperial Interdictor Cruiser.
Aves yelped a startled-sounding curse. “We got company,” he barked.
“I see it,” Karrde said. As cool as ever … but Mara could hear the tinge of surprise in his voice, too. “What’s our time to lightspeed?”
“It’ll be another minute,” Aves said tautly. “There’s a lot of junk in the outer system for the computer to work through.”
“We have a race, then,” Karrde said. “Mara?”
“Up to point seven three,” she said, nursing as much power as she could out of the still-sluggish engines. He was right; it was indeed going to be a race. With their four huge gravity-wave generators capable of simulating planet-sized masses, Interdictor Cruisers were the Empire’s weapon of choice for trapping an enemy ship in normal space while TIE fighters pounded it to rubble. But coming in fresh out of lightspeed itself, the Interdictor would need another minute before it could power up those generators. If she could get the Wild Karrde out of range by then …
“More visitors,” Aves announced. “A couple squadrons of TIE fighters coming from the Chimaera.”
“We’re up to point eight six power,” Mara reported. “We’ll be ready for lightspeed as soon as the nav computer gives me a course.”
“Interdictor status?”
“Grav generators are powering up,” Aves said. On Mara’s tactical display a ghostly cone appeared, showing the area where the lightspeed-dampening field would soon exist. She changed course slightly, aiming for the nearest edge, and risked a glance at the nav computer display. Almost ready. The hazy grav cone was rapidly becoming more substantial …
The computer scope pinged. Mara wrapped her hand around the three hyperspace control levers at the front of the control board and gently pulled them toward her. The Wild Karrde shuddered slightly, and for a second it seemed that the Interdictor had won their deadly race. Then, abruptly, the stars outside burst into starlines.
They’d made it.
Aves heaved a sigh of relief as the starlines faded into the mottled sky of hyperspace. “Talk about slicing the mynock close to the hull. How do you suppose they tumbled that we were out there, anyway?”
“No idea,” Karrde said, his voice cool. “Mara?”
“I don’t know, either.” Mara kept her eyes on her displays, not daring to look at either of them. “Thrawn may have just been playing a hunch. He does that sometimes.”
“Lucky for us he’s not the only one who gets hunches,” Aves offered, his voice sounding a little strange. “Nice going, Mara. Sorry I jumped on you.”
“Yes,” Karrde seconded. “A very good job indeed.”
“Thanks,” Mara muttered, keeping her eyes on her control board and blinking back the tears that had suddenly come to her eyes. So it was back. She’d hoped fervently that her locating of Skywalker’s X-wing out in deep space had been an isolated event. A fluke, more his doing than hers.
But no. It was all coming back, as it had so many times before in the past five years. The hunches and sensory flickers, the urges and the compulsions.
Which meant that, very soon now, the dreams would probably be starting again, too.
Angrily, she swiped at her eyes, and with an effort unclenched her jaw. It was a familiar enough pattern … but this time things were going to be different. Always before there’d been nothing she could do about the voices and urges except to suffer through the cycle. To suffer, and to be ready to break out of whatever niche she’d managed to carve for herself when she finally betrayed herself to those around her.
But she wasn’t a serving girl in a Phorliss cantina this time, or a come-up flector for a swoop gang on Caprioril, or even a hyperdrive mechanic stuck in the backwater of the Ison Corridor. She was second in command to the most powerful smuggler in the galaxy, with the kind of resources and mobility she hadn’t had since the death of the Emperor.
The kind of resources that would let her find Luke Skywalker again. And kill him.
Maybe then the voices would stop.
For a long minute Thrawn stood at the bridge viewport, looking out at the distant asteroid and the now superfluous Interdictor Cruiser near it. It was, Pellaeon thought uneasily, almost the identical posture the Grand Admiral had assumed when Luke Skywalker had so recently escaped a similar trap. Holding his breath, Pellaeon stared at Thrawn’s back, wondering if another of the Chimaera’s crewers was about to be executed for this failure.
Thrawn turned around. “Interesting,” he said, his voice conversational. “Did you note the sequence of events, Captain?”
“Yes, sir,” Pellaeon said cautiously. “The target was already powering up before the Constrainer arrived.”
“Yes,” Thrawn nodded. “And it implies one of three things. Either Karrde was about to leave anyway, or else he panicked for some reason—” The red eyes glittered. “Or else he was somehow warned off.”
Pellaeon felt his back stiffen. “I hope you’re not suggesting, sir, that one of our people tipped him.”
“No, of course not.” Thrawn’s lip twitched slightly. “Loyalties of your crewers aside, no one on the Chimaera knew the Constrainer was on its way; and no one on the Constrainer could have sent any messages here without our detecting them.” He stepped over to his command station and sat down, a thoughtful look on his face. “An interesting puzzle, Captain. One I’ll have to give some thought to. In the meantime, we have more pressing matters. The task of acquiring new warships, for one. Have there been any recent responses to our invitation?”