“Leia Organa Solo and her twins?”
“Exactly.” Thrawn nodded, his eyes glittering. “Once C’baoth has them in his hand, these little excursions with the Fleet will be no more to him than distracting interludes that take him away from his real work.”
Pellaeon found himself looking away from the intensity of that gaze. The theory seemed good enough; but in actual practice … “That assumes, of course, that the Noghri are ever able to connect with her.”
“They will.” Thrawn was quietly confident. “She and her guardians will eventually run out of tricks. Certainly long before we run out of Noghri.”
In front of Pellaeon, the display cleared. “They’re ready, sir,” he said.
Thrawn turned back to the freighter. “At your convenience, Captain.”
Pellaeon took a deep breath and tapped the comm switch. “Cloaking shield: activate.”
And outside the view window, the battered freighter—
Stayed exactly as it was.
Thrawn gazed hard at the freighter. Looked at his command displays, back at the freighter … and then turned to Pellaeon, a satisfied smile on his face. “Excellent, Captain. Precisely what I wanted. I congratulate you and your technicians.”
“Thank you, sir,” Pellaeon said, relaxing muscles he hadn’t realized were tense. “Then I take it the light is green?”
The Grand Admiral’s smile remained unchanged, his face hardening around it. “The light is green, Captain,” he said grimly. “Alert the task force; prepare to move to the rendezvous point.
“The Sluis Van shipyards are ours.”
Wedge Antilles looked up from the data pad with disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he told the dispatcher. “Escort duty?”
The other gave him an innocent look. “What’s the big deal?” he asked. “You guys are X-wings—you do escort all the time.”
“We escort people,” Wedge retorted. “We don’t watchdog cargo ships.”
The dispatcher’s innocent look collapsed into thinly veiled disgust, and Wedge got the sudden impression that he’d gone through this same argument a lot lately. “Look, Commander, don’t dump it on me,” he growled back. “It’s a standard Frigate escort—what’s the difference whether the Frigate’s got people or a break-down reactor aboard?”
Wedge looked back at the datapad. It was a matter of professional pride, that’s what the difference was. “Sluis Van’s a pretty long haul for X-wings,” he said instead.
“Yeah, well, the spec line says you’ll be staying aboard the Frigate until you actually hit the system,” the dispatcher said, reaching over his desk to tap the paging key on Wedge’s datapad. “You’ll just ride him in from there.”
Wedge scanned the rest of the spec line. They’d then have to sit there in the shipyards and wait for the rest of the convoy to assemble before finally taking the cargo on to Bpfassh. “We’re going to be a long time away from Coruscant with this,” he said.
“I’d look on that as a plus if I were you, Commander,” the dispatcher said, lowering his voice. “Something here’s coming to a head. I think Councilor Fey’lya and his people are about to make their move.”
Wedge felt a chill run through him. “You don’t mean … a coup?”
The dispatcher jumped as if scalded. “No, of course not. What do you think Fey’lya is—?”
He broke off, his eyes going wary. “Oh, I got it. You’re one of Ackbar’s diehards, huh? Face it, Commander; Ackbar’s lost whatever touch he ever had with the common fighting man of the Alliance. Fey’lya’s the only one on the Council who really cares about our welfare.” He gestured at the datapad. “Case in point. All this garbage came down from Ackbar’s office.”
“Yeah, well, there’s still an Empire out there,” Wedge muttered, uncomfortably aware that the dispatcher’s verbal attack on Ackbar had neatly shifted him to the other side of his own argument. He wondered if the other had done that on purpose … or whether he really was one of the growing number of Fey’lya supporters in the military.
And come to think of it, a little vacation away from Coruscant might not be such a bad idea, after all. At least it would get him away from all this crazy political stuff. “When do we leave?”
“Soon as you can get your people together and aboard,” the dispatcher said. “They’re already loading your fighters.”
“Right.” Wedge turned away from the desk and headed down the corridor toward the ready rooms. Yes, a quiet little run back out to Sluis Van and Bpfassh would be just the thing right now. Give him some breathing space to try to sort out just what was happening to this New Republic he’d risked so much to help build.
And if the Imperials took a poke at them along the way … well, at least that was a threat he could fight back against.
C H A P T E R 28
It was just before noon when they began to notice the faint sounds wafting occasionally to them through the forest. It was another hour after that before they were close enough for Luke to finally identify them.
Speeder bikes.
“You’re sure that’s a military model?” Mara muttered as the whine/drone rose and fell twice more before fading again into the distance.
“I’m sure,” Luke told her grimly. “I nearly ran one of them into a tree on Endor.”
She didn’t reply, and for a moment Luke wondered if the mention of Endor might not have been a good idea. But a glance at Mara’s face relieved that fear. She was not brooding, but listening. “Sounds like they’re off to the south, too,” she said after a minute. “North … I don’t hear anything from that direction.”
Luke listened. “Neither do I,” he said. “I wonder … Artoo, can you make up an audio map for us?”
There was an acknowledging beep. A moment later the droid’s holo projector came on and a two-color map appeared, hovering a few centimeters over the matted leaves underfoot.
“I was right,” Mara said, pointing. “A few units directly ahead of us, the rest off to the south. Nothing at all north.”
“Which means we must have veered to the north,” Luke said.
Mara frowned at him. “How do you figure that?”
“Well, they must know we’ll make for Hyllyard City,” he said. “They’re bound to center their search on the direct approach.”
Mara smiled thinly. “Such wonderful Jedi naïveté,” she said. “I don’t suppose you considered the fact that just because we can’t hear them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
Luke frowned down at the holographic map. “Well, of course they could have a force lying in wait there,” he agreed. “But what would it gain them?”
“Oh, come on, Skywalker—it’s the oldest tactical trick in the book. If the perimeter looks impossible to crack, the quarry goes to ground and waits for a better opportunity. You don’t want him to do that, so you give him what looks like a possible way through.” She squatted down, ran a finger through the “quiet” section on the map. “In this case, they get a bonus: if we swing north to avoid the obvious speeder bikes, it’s instant proof that we’ve got something to hide from them.”
Luke grimaced. “Not that they really need any proof.”
Mara shrugged and straightened up again. “Some officers are more legal-minded than others. The question is, what do we do now?”
Luke looked back down at the map. By Mara’s reckoning, they were no more than four or five kilometers from the edge of the forest—two hours, more or less. If the Imperials had this much organization already set up in front of them … “They’re probably going to try to ring us,” he said slowly. “Move units around to the north and south, and eventually behind us.”