C’baoth awakened suddenly, his black-edged dreams giving way to the sudden realization that someone was approaching.
For a moment he lay there in the darkness, his long white beard scratching gently against his chest as he breathed, his mind reaching out through the Force to track along the road from the High Castle to the cluster of villages at the base of the rim mountains. It was hard to concentrate—so very hard—but with a perverse grimness he ignored the fatigue-driven pain and kept at it. There … no … there. A lone man riding a Cracian Thumper, laboring over one of the steeper sections of the roadway. Most likely a messenger, come to bring him some news from the villagers below. Something trifling, no doubt, but something that they felt their new Master should know.
Master. The word echoed through C’baoth’s mind, sparking a windblown tangle of thoughts and feelings. The Imperials who pleaded for him to help them fight their battles—they called him Master, too. So had the people of Wayland, whose lives he had been content to rule before Grand Admiral Thrawn and his promise of Jedi followers had lured him away.
The people of Wayland had meant it. The people here on Jomark weren’t quite sure yet whether they did or not. The Imperials didn’t mean it at all.
C’baoth felt his lip twist in disgust. No, they most certainly did not. They made him fight their battles for them—drove him by their disbelief to do things he hadn’t attempted for years and years. And then, when he’d succeeded in doing the impossible, they still held tightly to their private contempt for him, hiding it behind those ysalamiri creatures and the strange empty spaces they somehow created in the Force.
But he knew. He’d seen the sideways looks among the officers, and the brief but muttered discussions between them. He’d felt the edginess of the crew, submitting by Imperial order to his influence on their combat skills but clearly disliking the very thought of it. And he’d watched Captain Aban sit there in his command chair on the Bellicose, shouting and blaspheming at him even while calling him Master, spitting anger and impotent rage as C’baoth calmly inflicted his punishment on the Rebel ship that had dared to strike at his ship.
The messenger below was approaching the High Castle gate now. Reaching out with the Force to call his robe to him, C’baoth got out of bed, feeling a brief rush of vertigo as he stood erect. Yes, it had been difficult, that business of taking command of the Bellicose’s turbolaser crews for the few seconds it had required to annihilate that Rebel ship. It had gone beyond any previous stretch of concentration and control, and the mental aches he was feeling now were the payment for that stretch.
He tightened the robe sash around him, thinking back. Yes, it had been hard. And yet, at the same time, it had also been strangely exhilarating. On Wayland, he had personally commanded a whole city-state, one with a larger population than that which nestled beneath the High Castle. But there, he’d long since gone beyond the need to impose his will by force. The humans and Psadans had submitted to his authority early on; even the Myneyrshi, with their lingering resentment of his rule, had learned to obey his orders without question.
The Imperials, as well as the people of Jomark, were going to have to learn that same lesson.
Back when Grand Admiral Thrawn had first goaded C’baoth into this alliance, he’d implied that C’baoth had been too long without a real challenge. Perhaps the Grand Admiral had also secretly thought that this challenge of running the Empire’s war would prove too much for a single Jedi Master to handle.
C’baoth smiled tightly in the darkness. If that was what the glowing-eyed Grand Admiral thought, he was going to be in for a surprise. Because when Luke Skywalker finally got here, C’baoth would face perhaps the most subtle challenge of his life: to bend and twist another Jedi to his will without the other even being aware of what was happening to him.
And when he’d succeeded, there would be two of them … and who could tell what might be possible then?
The messenger had dismounted from his Thumper and was standing beside the gate now, his sense that of a man prepared to await the convenience of his Master, no matter how long that wait might be. That was good: exactly the proper attitude. Giving his robe sash one final tug, C’baoth headed through the maze of darkened rooms toward the door, to hear what his new subjects wished to tell him.
CHAPTER
7
With a delicacy that always seemed so incongruous in a being his size, Chewbacca maneuvered the Falcon into his precisely selected orbital slot above the lush green moon of Endor. Rumbling under his breath, he switched over the power linkages and cut the engines back to standby.
Seated in the copilot seat, Leia took a deep breath, wincing as one of the twins kicked her from inside. “Doesn’t look like Khabarakh’s here yet,” she commented, realizing even as she said it how superfluous the comment was. She’d been watching the sensors from the moment they dropped out of lightspeed; and given there were no other ships anywhere in the system, there wasn’t much chance that they could have missed him. But with the familiar engine roar now cut back down to a whisper, the silence felt strange and even a little eerie to her.
Chewbacca growled a question. “We wait, I guess,” Leia shrugged. “Actually, we’re almost a day early—we got here faster than I’d expected.”
Chewbacca turned back to his board, growling his own interpretation of the Noghri’s absence. “Oh, come on,” Leia chided him. “If he’d decided to make this meeting into a trap, don’t you think they’d have had a couple of Star Destroyers and an Interdictor Cruiser waiting to meet us?”
“Your Highness?” Threepio’s voice called from down the tunnel. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I believe I’ve located the fault in the Carbanti countermeasures package. Could you ask Chewbacca to step back for a moment?”
Leia raised her eyebrows in mild surprise as she looked at Chewbacca. As was depressingly normal with the Falcon, several bits of equipment had gone out early in the flight from Coruscant. Up to his elbows with more important repairs, Chewbacca had assigned the relatively low-priority work on the Carbanti to Threepio. Leia had had no objections, though given the results the last time Threepio had tried to work on the Falcon, she hadn’t expected very much to come of it. “We’ll make a repair droid out of him yet,” she said to Chewbacca. “Your influence, no doubt.”
The Wookiee snorted his opinion of that as he got out of the pilot’s seat and headed back to see what Threepio had found. The cockpit door slid open, closed again behind him.
Leaving the cockpit that much quieter.
“You see that planet down there, my dears?” Leia murmured, rubbing her belly gently. “That’s Endor. Where the Rebel Alliance finally triumphed over the Empire, and the New Republic began.”
Or at least, she amended silently to herself, that was what the histories someday would say. That the death of the Empire occurred at Endor, with all the rest of it merely a mopping-up action.
A mopping-up action which had lasted five years, so far. And could wind up lasting another twenty, the way things were going.
She let her eyes drift across the brilliant mottled green world turning slowly beneath them, wondering yet again why she’d chosen this place for her rendezvous with Khabarakh. True, it was a system that practically every being in both the Republic and Imperial sections of the galaxy had heard of and knew how to find. And with the major planes of contention long gone from this sector, it was a quiet enough place for two ships to meet.
But there were memories here, too, some of which Leia would just as soon not bring to mind. Before they’d triumphed, they’d very nearly lost everything.
From down the tunnel, Chewbacca roared a question. “Hang on, I’ll check,” Leia called back. Leaning over the board, she keyed a switch. “It reads ‘standby/modulo,’ ” she reported. “Wait a minute—now it reads ‘system ready.’ Do you want me to—?”
And abruptly, without any warning, a black curtain seemed to drop across her vision.…
Slowly, she became aware that there was a metallic voice calling to her. “Your Highness,” it said over and over again. “Your Highness. Can you hear me? Please, Your Highness, can you hear me?” She opened her eyes, vaguely surprised to discover they were closed, to find Chewbacca leaning over her with an open medpack gripped in one huge hand, an agitated Threepio hovering like a nervous mother bird behind him. “I’m all right,” she managed. “What happened?”
“You shouted for help,” Threepio put in before Chewbacca could answer. “At least, we thought it was for help,” he amended helpfully. “You were brief and rather incoherent.”