Pellaeon tapped keys at his station, giving the Chimaera’s status a quick prelightspeed check. Another bit of conventional military wisdom was that Star Destroyers should play the role of mobile siege stations in this kind of full-planet engagement; that to employ them in hit-and-fade6 operations was both wasteful and potentially dangerous.
But then, proponents of such theories had obviously never watched someone like Grand Admiral Thrawn in action.
“Order the other two forces to break off their attacks, as well,” Thrawn told C’baoth. “I presume you are in close enough contact to do that?”
“You question me too much, Grand Admiral Thrawn,” C’baoth said, his voice even huskier than it had been earlier. “Far too much.”
“I question all that is not yet familiar to me,” Thrawn countered, swiveling back around again. “Call them back to the rendezvous point.”
“As you command,” the other hissed.
Pellaeon glanced back at C’baoth. Testing the other’s abilities under combat conditions was all good and proper. But there was such a thing as pushing too far.
“He must learn who’s in command here,” Thrawn said quietly, as if reading Pellaeon’s thoughts.
“Yes, sir.” Pellaeon nodded, forcing his voice to remain steady. Thrawn had proved time and again that he knew what he was doing. Still, Pellaeon couldn’t help but wonder uneasily if the Grand Admiral recognized the extent of the power he’d awakened from its sleep on Wayland.
Thrawn nodded. “Good. Have there been any further leads on those mole miners I asked for?”
“Ah—no, sir.” A year ago, too, he would have found a strange unreality in conversing about less than urgent matters while in the middle of a combat situation. “At least not in anything like the numbers you want. I think the Athega system’s still our best bet. Or it will be if we can find a way around the problems of the sunlight intensity there.”
“The problems will be minimal,” Thrawn said with easy confidence. “If the jump is done with sufficient accuracy, the Judicator will be in direct sunlight for only a few minutes each way. Its hull can certainly handle that much. We’ll simply need to take a few days first to shield the viewports and remove external sensors and communications equipment.”
Pellaeon nodded, swallowing his next question. There would, of course, be none of the difficulties that would normally arise from blinding and deafening a Star Destroyer in that way. Not as long as C’baoth was with them.
“Grand Admiral Thrawn?”
Thrawn turned around. “Yes, Master C’baoth?”
“Where are my Jedi, Grand Admiral Thrawn? You promised me that your tame Noghri would bring me my Jedi.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Pellaeon saw Rukh stir. “Patience, Master C’baoth,” Thrawn told him. “Their preparations took time, but they’re now complete. They await merely the proper time to act.”
“That time had best be soon,” C’baoth warned him. “I grow tired of waiting.”
Thrawn threw a glance at Pellaeon, a quietly smoldering look in his glowing red eyes. “As do we all,” he said quietly.
Far ahead of the freighter Wild Karrde,7 one of the Imperial Star Destroyers centered in the cockpit’s forward viewport gave a flicker of pseudomotion and disappeared. “They’re leaving,” Mara announced.
“What, already?” Karrde said from behind her, his voice frowning.
“Already,” she confirmed, keying the helm display for tactical. “One of the Star Destroyers just went to lightspeed; the others are breaking off and starting prelightspeed maneuvering.”
“Interesting,” Karrde murmured, coming up to look out the viewport over her shoulder. “A hit-and-fade attack—and with Star Destroyers, yet. Not something you see every day.”
“I heard about something like that happening over at the Draukyze system a couple of months back,” the copilot, a bulky man named Lachton, offered. “Same kind of hit-and-fade, except there was only one Star Destroyer on that one.”
“At a guess, I’d say we’re seeing Grand Admiral Thrawn’s influence on Imperial strategy,” Karrde said, his tone thoughtful with just a hint of concern mixed in. “Strange, though. He seems to be taking an inordinate amount of risk for the potential benefits involved. I wonder what exactly he’s up to.”
“Whatever it is, it’ll be something complicated,” Mara told him, hearing the bitterness in her voice. “Thrawn was never one to do things simply. Even back in the old days when the Empire was capable of style or subtlety, he stood out above the rest.”
“You can’t afford to be simple when your territory’s shrinking the way the Empire’s has been.” Karrde paused, and Mara could feel him gazing down at her. “You seem to know something about the Grand Admiral.”
“I know something about a lot of things,” she countered evenly. “That’s why you’re grooming me to be your lieutenant, remember?”
“Touché,” he said easily. “—there goes another one.”
Mara looked out the viewport in time to see a third Star Destroyer go to lightspeed. One more to go. “Shouldn’t we get moving?” she asked Karrde. “That last one will be gone in a minute.”
“Oh, we’re scratching the delivery,” he told her. “I just thought it might be instructive to watch the battle, as long as we happened to be here at the right time.”
Mara frowned up at him. “What do you mean, we’re scratching the delivery? They’re expecting us.”
“Yes, they are.” He nodded. “Unfortunately, as of right now, the whole system is also expecting a small hornet’s nest of New Republic ships. Hardly the sort of atmosphere one would like to fly into with a shipload of contraband materials.”
“What makes you think they’ll come?” Mara demanded. “They’re not going to be in time to do anything.”
“No, but that’s not really the point of such a show,” Karrde said. “The point is to score domestic political gains by bustling around, presenting a comforting display of force, and otherwise convincing the locals that something like this can never happen again.”
“And promising to help clean up the wreckage,” Lachton put in.
“That goes without saying,” Karrde agreed dryly. “Regardless, it’s not a situation we really want to fly into. We’ll send a transmission from our next stop telling them we’ll try to make delivery again in a week.”
“I still don’t like it,” Mara insisted. “We promised them we’d do it. We promised.”8
There was a short pause. “It’s standard procedure,” Karrde told her, a touch of curiosity almost hidden beneath the usual urbane smoothness of his voice. “I’m sure they’d prefer late delivery to losing the entire shipment.”
With an effort, Mara forced the black haze of memory away. Promises … “I suppose so,” she conceded, blinking her attention back to the control board. While they’d been talking, the last Star Destroyer had apparently gone to lightspeed, leaving nothing behind but enraged and impotent defenders and mass destruction. A mess for the New Republic’s politicians and military people to clean up.
For a moment she gazed out at the distant planets. Wondering if Luke Skywalker might be among those the New Republic would send to help clean up that mess.
“Whenever you’re ready, Mara.”
With an effort, she shook away the thought. “Yes, sir,” she said, reaching for the board. Not yet, she told herself silently. Not yet. But soon. Very, very soon.