“Yes.” Ar’alani took a deep breath. “I want full sensor and tactical readings on everything here,” she ordered, raising her voice to carry across the entire bridge. “Deploy a squad to check out the base, see if there’s anything useful in there, and send a shuttle to examine the asteroid fragments. Full sensor scan there, too, and collect a few pieces to take back to Csilla.”
She looked at Wutroow. “After that, we’ll head back to that last Nikardun base, the one our friends here also got to first, and do a full analysis of that one. If we’re lucky, between the two of them we’ll find a clue as to who exactly is trying to move into this neighborhood.”
Thalias hadn’t thought very much of her first time down in the secondary command room. She’d hoped her second time would be better.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t looking likely.
But there was no choice. Thrawn wanted the Magys on the bridge in case he had any questions about what they found, or needed to talk to someone on the ground. He also needed Che’ri and her Third Sight to bring the ship in across the last few light-years and to be ready to get them out quickly if the need arose, which meant the girl needed to be at a control console.
Technically, of course, only Che’ri had to be down here. But there was no way Thalias was going to abandon the girl at such a critical moment, especially among a group of officers neither of them knew very well.
As Thalias had noted the first time she was here, the room’s designers had apparently never thought a caregiver might join the sky-walker and therefore hadn’t included a dedicated chair for her near the nav station. At that first visit, Thalias had simply stood behind Che’ri, squeezing herself into the narrow space behind the girl. This time, though, Senior Commander Kharill was in charge, and he insisted that everyone be properly seated and strapped in.
Thalias was fully prepared to fight that ruling if she had to. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Kharill didn’t argue against her presence, but instead found a way to shuffle the sensor officer elsewhere so that Thalias could have the seat next to Che’ri.
Though from the scowl on Kharill’s face, she guessed that the repositioning and accommodation hadn’t been his idea.
Almost there. Thalias looked closely at Che’ri’s face, expressionless while at the same time with an underlying concentration as her Third Sight guided the Springhawk through the final minutes of the flight. The space between Rapacc and the Magys’s world was more tangled than usual, even for the Chaos, which had put an additional strain on Che’ri. Thalias could only watch the girl struggling with her task and hope that this side trip would be worth it.
“Your strap’s twisted.”
She looked up. Laknym, the plasma sphere specialist she’d met the last time she and Che’ri were down here, had unstrapped and was maneuvering into the narrow space between the helm and his own seat at the weapons station. “What?” she asked.
“I said your strap’s twisted,” he repeated as he sidled behind Che’ri to Thalias’s side. “Pop the catch and I’ll fix it.”
Thalias craned her neck, trying to look over her shoulder. Sure enough, there was an extra half turn in the strap. “Thanks,” she said, releasing the tension on the restraints.
“It’s easy to do,” Laknym said, giving the strap a half turn and handing the end back to her. “Not as much room for the anchors down here, so the restraints are done a little differently than those on the bridge.”
“Hopefully we won’t need them,” Thalias said. “You’re on official duty here now? I thought the last time was just a one-shot.”
“So did I,” Laknym said, giving Che’ri’s restraints a quick look and nodding in satisfaction. “As you may have noticed, sometimes Senior Captain Thrawn throws people into new positions or situations just to see how they react. For whatever reason, I guess he or Mid Captain Samakro liked what they saw the last time he put me down here.”
“Unless this is another one-time thing.”
“It could be that, too,” Laknym conceded. “Either way, it’s a promising sign. Especially for someone of my rank.”
Thalias winced. Officially, lieutenant commander was a sort of probationary rank, sandwiched between lieutenant and junior commander and given to officers who showed promise of someday being deemed capable of moving up the higher command structure.
But unofficially, at least from what Thalias had been able to piece together from bits of overheard conversation, it had also become a convenient place to dump officers from the Nine Ruling Families or the Forty Great Families whom the Council had already concluded would never rise any higher. It was supposed to be a sop to those individuals, a grand-sounding label to keep the more powerful Chiss families from taking offense that their beloved blood and cousins and ranking distants hadn’t been as good as they’d all hoped.
Of course, since the whole thing had become pretty much an open secret, it hardly qualified as a subterfuge anymore. But the continued willingness of all parties to play along kept the game going.
Laknym, as a member of one of the Forty, was already poised to be in the second category. Whether he broke out of that and joined the first was something only time would tell.
“Prepare for breakout,” Thrawn’s voice came over the speaker from the bridge.
“That’s you,” Laknym said as he again squeezed past Che’ri and took his own seat. “Is she ready?”
“Yes,” Thalias said, studying the bridge monitor display. The Magys, she noted, was standing beside Thrawn’s command chair, with her companion a half step farther back. On Thrawn’s other side stood Mid Captain Samakro, his hands clasped behind him. To the rear of the whole group were two watchful guards, holstered charrics at their sides. “It’s really no different for her being down here than it would be on the bridge,” she added to Laknym.
“Civilians will be quiet,” Kharill growled from his seat behind the helm station. “And officers will not engage in idle conversation. Everyone stay sharp—we don’t know what we’re heading into.”
Thalias hunched her shoulders once, working out a bit of her tension. Whatever they found, she reminded herself firmly, Thrawn could handle it. The hyperspace swirl became star-flares became stars—
A lot of stars, she saw, emblazoned all across the exterior displays. Stars, and absolutely nothing else.
Flying blind into an unknown system, Thalias knew, was likely to put a ship into the middle of nowhere. Apparently, that was exactly where they’d landed.
“Scan for planetary bodies and space vehicles,” Thrawn ordered. “We are in your system, Magys,” he continued, switching to Taarja. “As soon as we locate your world, we will learn its condition. What is its name, if I may ask?”
“We do not share that with outsiders,” the Magys said stiffly.
“Ah,” Thrawn said. “Well, then, for our convenience, we’ll name it Sunrise.”
The Magys’s tongues darted out. “You mock our destruction?”
“Not at all,” Thrawn said. “I choose to nurture hope.”
“There is no hope.”
“We will know soon enough,” Thrawn said. “Until then, I will hold to hope.”
Belatedly, Thalias noticed that Che’ri was breathing a little heavily. “You okay?” she whispered, reaching over and touching the girl’s arm.
“Yes,” Che’ri said. “That was a little … weird.”
“In what way?” Thalias asked.
“Just … I don’t know,” Che’ri said, flexing her fingers. “It seemed harder than the charts showed.”