Samakro looked at Thalias. “Those being the times when she’s carrying out her caregiver duties?”
“Precisely.”
To Thalias, Samakro looked very much like he wanted to argue the point further. But he simply gave a small, stiff nod. “Yes, sir.” Half turning away, he brought the comm the rest of the way to his lips and began talking softly into it.
“With all respect, Senior Captain, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Thalias said quietly. “Asking other officers to obey my orders—or even pretend to do so—could cause discord and confusion aboard the ship. Not to mention what the Magys’s reaction might be if she finds out we misled her.”
“She won’t be aboard the Springhawk long enough for that,” Thrawn said.
“But—”
“This situation is a mystery, Caregiver,” Thrawn said. “It needs to be followed until it can be resolved.”
“Yes, sir, I understand,” Thalias said, trying one last time. “But Mid Captain Samakro—”
“Mid Captain Samakro will accept the reasoning in time,” Thrawn said, his tone making it clear the discussion was over. “Inform the Magys that she needs to gather whatever she and her companion wish to take with them. I’ll also need her navigational data before we leave here.”
“Yes, sir,” Thalias said with a sigh, flicking a quick look at Samakro’s profile as the Springhawk’s first officer continued his conversation with the ship. He was a good officer, she knew, and would follow Thrawn’s order. And he probably would accept the reasoning in time.
But that time wasn’t right now. Not even close.
Mid Captain Samakro will accept the reasoning in time, Thrawn had told Thalias at the edge of Samakro’s hearing. Maybe he would.
But then again, Samakro glowered to himself, maybe he wouldn’t.
What the hell was happening to his life? What the hell was happening to the fleet?
First he was summarily removed as captain of the Springhawk and Thrawn put in charge. Then there was the business of identifying and tracking down General Yiv and the Nikardun who were quietly chewing up territory on their way to the Ascendancy. That had ultimately turned out all right, but along the way Thrawn had taken the Springhawk right to the edge of insubordination and violation of standing orders.
Sometimes, in the opinion of many, Thrawn hadn’t just gone to the edge but had stepped across it. Along the way he’d thrown the ship into battle after battle, skirmish after skirmish, beating it and battering it and risking the lives of every officer and warrior aboard.
And now this. There was an order to things aboard a warship of the Chiss Expansionary Defense Fleet, regulations and protocols that needed to be followed. And while a caregiver could give orders even to the captain when a situation involved the welfare of the sky-walker, she was otherwise completely outside the chain of command. Ordering the Springhawk’s officers even to pretend that she had additional authority held the potential for confusion and hesitation and risked the smooth operation of the ship.
And the fact that it was Thalias made it even worse.
Samakro didn’t trust her. Not a single binary bit. She’d first come aboard without qualifications, and under suspicious circumstances. She professed loyalty to Thrawn and to the Springhawk, and to her credit Samakro had never caught her in anything that belied that allegiance.
But the personnel officer who’d first alerted Samakro to the irregularities in Thalias’s arrival had also told him that Syndic Thurfian had essentially forced through her request. And Samakro trusted Thurfian—or any other member of the Aristocra—even less than he trusted Thalias.
He’d met Thurfian only once, at one of the hearings the Syndicure had called after the climactic battle over the Vak homeworld of Primea, the battle that had defeated General Yiv and shattered the Nikardun Destiny as a threat. By that time the Syndicure had received the Council’s preliminary report on Yiv’s future plans against the Ascendancy, and most of the syndics had asked questions that were placid and perfunctory.
Not Thurfian. He’d pushed relentlessly against Samakro and the other Springhawk officers, leaning especially hard on questions regarding Thrawn’s role during the battle, his orders to them, and the subsequent damage to the ship. Even the other syndics had seemed surprised by Thurfian’s single-mindedness, one of them going so far as to offer a bit of mild and heavily veiled criticism.
Thurfian hadn’t even blinked. His goal seemed to be to discredit Thrawn, and if he needed to take down Samakro and the entire Springhawk in the process he seemed more than willing to do so.
What made it that much more astonishing was the fact that he and Thrawn were both from the same family. Intrafamily disputes were certainly common enough, but Samakro had never seen one bleed out into public view this way.
Which brought him straight back to Thalias. Before she’d ever come aboard the Springhawk she’d had some nebulous association with Thurfian. If Thurfian was violently opposed to Thrawn, could Thalias’s loyalty to her captain really be as solid as she professed?
He clenched his teeth. Politics. Every single time the thrice-damned Ascendancy politics came aboard his ship—every time internal squabbles or interfamily rivalries oozed their way into the precise and well-honed fleet machinery—he lived to regret it.
Not this time. Whether Thrawn was playing family games with Thalias, or whether Thalias was playing them with Thurfian, or whether all of them were playing games with, against, or sideways to one another, Samakro wasn’t going to let any of it make a mess. Not on his ship.
He finished his conversation with Kharill and closed down the comm. “All set, sir,” he said, turning back to Thrawn. Thalias, he noted, had in the meantime returned to the alien leader and was talking softly with her. “Your ship will be ready by the time we return.”
“Thank you, Mid Captain,” Thrawn said, nodding in acknowledgment. “You don’t approve.”
Samakro braced himself. “No, sir, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t like aliens aboard an Ascendancy warship. I especially don’t like heading out to an unknown system and an unknown situation without informing Csilla of our intentions.”
“Understood,” Thrawn said. “To be honest, I don’t like it, either. But the Paccosh don’t have a triad, and the Springhawk’s comm system won’t reach to any Ascendancy world from here.”
“We could head back into range and give our report,” Samakro suggested. “There should be enough time to do that, return here and pick up the Magys, and head to her world before we run into Uingali’s time limit.”
“And if that limit was miscalculated?”
Samakro scowled. There was always that possibility when dealing with three different time scales. Thrawn would certainly have checked Uingali’s numbers, but if the raw data was wrong, doing the math would only yield the same wrong answer.
And even if the numbers were right, the Springhawk could be delayed or, worse, summarily ordered to report back to Csilla. If Syndic Thurfian was still looking for something to use against Thrawn, an alien’s death aboard the Springhawk would be an entire salvo’s worth of ammunition on a platter. “Understood, sir,” he said. “I just hope this place will turn out to be worth it.”