And she certainly wouldn’t have had the satisfaction of killing him herself.
She looked down at the lightsaber clenched in her hand, watching the afternoon sunlight glint from the silvery metal as she hefted its weight. She could do it now, she knew. Could go in there to check on him and claim he had tried to jump her. Without the Force to call on, he would be an easy target, even for someone like her who hadn’t picked up a lightsaber more than a handful of times in her life.10 It would be easy, clean, and very fast.
And she didn’t owe Karrde anything, no matter how well his organization might have treated her. Not about something like this.
And yet …
She was coming up on four shed, still undecided, when she heard the faint whine of a repulsorlift.
She peered up into the sky, shading her eyes with her free hand as she tried to spot the incoming ship. But nothing was visible … and as the whine grew louder, she realized abruptly that it was the sound of one of their own vehicles. She spun around and looked over toward the maintenance hangar—
Just in time to see one of their two Skipray blastboats rise above the treetops.
For a pair of heartbeats she stared at the ship, wondering what in the Empire Karrde thought he was doing. Sending an escort or pilot ship for the Imperials, perhaps?
And then, abruptly, it clicked.
She twisted back and sprinted for the four shed, pulling her blaster from its forearm sheath as she ran. The lock on the room inexplicably refused to open; she tried it twice and then blasted it.
Skywalker was gone.
She swore, viciously, and ran out into the compound. The Skipray had shifted to forward motion now, disappearing behind the trees to the west. Jamming her blaster back into its sheath, she grabbed the comlink off her belt—
And swore again. The Imperials could be here at any minute, and any mention of Skywalker’s presence would land them all in very deep trouble indeed.
Which left her with exactly one option.
She reached the second Skipray at a dead run and had it in the air within two minutes. Skywalker would not—would not—get away now.
Kicking the drive to full power, she screamed off in pursuit.
C H A P T E R 23
They showed up almost simultaneously on the scopes: the other of Karrde’s fighter ships pursuing him from behind, and the Imperial Star Destroyer in orbit far overhead. “I think,” Luke called back to Artoo, “that we’re in trouble.”
The droid’s reply was almost swallowed up in the roar as Luke gingerly eased the drive up as high as he dared. The strange fighter’s handling wasn’t even remotely like anything he’d ever flown before; slightly reminiscent of the snowspeeders the Alliance had used on Hoth, but with the kind of sluggish response time that implied a great deal of armor and engine mass. With time, he was pretty sure he’d be able to master it.
But time was something he was rapidly running out of.
He risked a glance at the aft-vision display. The other fighter was coming up fast, with no more than a minute or two now separating the two ships. Obviously, the pilot had far more experience with the craft than Luke had. That, or else such a fierce determination to recapture Luke that it completely overrode normal commonsense caution.
Either way, it meant Mara Jade.
The fighter dipped a little too deep, scraping its ventral tail fin against the tops of the trees and drawing a sharp squeal of protest from Artoo. “Sorry,” Luke called back, feeling a fresh surge of perspiration break out on his forehead as he again carefully eased the drive up a notch. Speaking of overriding common sense … But at the moment, sticking to the treetops was about the only option he had. The forest below, for some unknown reason, seemed to have a scattering or scrambling effect on sensor scans, both detection and navigational. Staying low forced his pursuer to stay low, too, lest she lose visual contact with him against the mottled forest backdrop, and also at least partially hid him from the orbiting Star Destroyer.
The Star Destroyer. Luke glanced at the image on his overhead scope, feeling his stomach tighten. At least he knew now who the company was Mara had mentioned. It looked like he’d gotten out just in the nick of time.
On the other hand, perhaps the move to that storage shed implied that Karrde had decided not to sell him to the Imperials after all. It might be worth asking Karrde about someday. Preferably from a great distance.
Behind him, Artoo suddenly trilled a warning. Luke jerked in his seat, eyes flickering across the scopes as he searched for the source of the trouble—
And jerked again. There, directly above his dorsal tail fin and less than a ship’s length away, was the other fighter.
“Hang on!” Luke shouted at Artoo, clenching his teeth tightly together. His one chance now was to pull a drop-kick Koiogran turn,1 killing his forward momentum and loop-rolling into another direction. Twisting the control stick with one hand, he jammed the throttle forward with the other—
And abruptly, the cockpit canopy exploded into a slapping tangle of tree branches, and he was thrown hard against his restraints as the fighter spun and twisted and rolled out of control.
The last thing he heard before the darkness took him was Artoo’s shrill electronic scream.
The three shuttles came to a perfectly synchronized landing as, overhead, the TIE fighter escort shot by in equally perfect formation. “The Empire’s parade-ground expertise hasn’t eroded, anyway,” Aves murmured.
“Quiet,” Karrde murmured back, watching the shuttle ramps lower to the ground. The center one, almost certainly, would be Thrawn’s.
Marching with blaster rifles held ceremonially across their chests, a line of stormtroopers filed down each of the three ramps. Behind them, emerging not from the center but from the rightmost of the shuttles, came a handful of midranking officers. Following them came a short, wiry being of unknown race with dark gray skin, bulging eyes, a protruding jaw, and the look of a bodyguard. Following him came Grand Admiral Thrawn.
So much, Karrde thought, for him doing things the obvious way. It would be something to make a note of for future reference.
With his small reception committee beside him, he walked toward the approaching group of Imperials, trying to ignore the stares of the stormtroopers. “Grand Admiral Thrawn.” He nodded in greeting. “Welcome to our little corner of Myrkr. I’m Talon Karrde.”
“Pleased to meet you, Captain,” Thrawn said, inclining his head slightly. Those glowing eyes, Karrde decided, were even more impressive in person than they were on a comm display. And considerably more intimidating.
“I apologize for our somewhat less than formal greeting,” Karrde continued, waving a hand at his group. “We don’t often entertain people of your status here.”
Thrawn cocked a blue-black eyebrow. “Really. I’d have thought a man in your position would be used to dealing with the elite. Particularly high planetary officials whose cooperation, shall we say, you find you require?”
Karrde smiled easily. “We deal with the elite from time to time. But not here. This is—was, I should say,” he added, glancing significantly at the stormtroopers, “—our private operations base.”
“Of course,” Thrawn said. “Interesting drama a few minutes ago out there to the west. Tell me about it.”
With an effort, Karrde hid a grimace. He’d hoped the sensor-scrambling effect of Myrkr’s trees would have hidden the Skipray chase from Thrawn’s view. Obviously, it hadn’t. “Merely a small internal problem,” he assured the Grand Admiral. “A former and somewhat disgruntled employee broke into one of our storage sheds, stole some merchandise, and made off with one of our ships. Another of our people is in pursuit.”