Leia twisted her head to glare at him, furious at what he’d done … a fury that faded reluctantly behind the logic of the situation. Chewbacca had been fully prepared to throttle the life out of Khabarakh; and from personal experience, she knew how hard it was to calm down an angry Wookiee, even when you were his friend to begin with.
And Khabarakh had tried talking first. “Now what?” she asked the Noghri, digging a hand through Chewbacca’s thick torso hair to check his heartbeat. It was steady, which meant the stun weapon hadn’t played any of its rare but potentially lethal tricks on the Wookiee’s nervous system.
“Now be silent,” Khabarakh said, tapping his comm switch and saying something in his own language. Another mewing Noghri voice replied, and for a few minutes they conversed together. Leia remained kneeling at Chewbacca’s side, wishing she’d had time to bring Threepio up before the discussion started. It would have been nice to know what the conversation was all about.
But finally it ended, and Khabarakh signed off. “We are safe now,” he said, slumping a little in his seat. “They are persuaded it was an equipment malfunction.”
“Let’s hope so,” Leia said.
Khabarakh looked at her, a strange expression on his nightmare face. “I have not betrayed you, Lady Vader,” he said quietly, his voice hard and yet oddly pleading. “You must believe me. I have promised to defend you, and I will. To my own death, if need be.”
Leia stared at him … and whether through some sensitivity of the Force or merely her own long diplomatic experience, she finally understood the position Khabarakh was now in. Whatever waverings or second thoughts he might have been feeling during the voyage, the Star Destroyer’s unexpected appearance had burned those uncertainties away. Khabarakh’s word of honor had been brought into question, and he was now in the position of having to conclusively prove that he had not broken that word.
And he would have to go to whatever lengths such proof demanded. Even if it killed him.
Earlier, Leia had wondered how Khabarakh could possibly understand the concept of the Wookiee life debt. Perhaps the Noghri and Wookiee cultures were more alike than she’d realized.
“I believe you,” she told him, climbing to her feet and sitting down in the copilot seat. Chewbacca she would have to leave where he was until he was awake enough to help her move him. “What now?”
Khabarakh turned back to his board. “Now we must make a decision,” he said. “My intention had been to bring you to ground in the city of Nystao, waiting until full dark to present you to my clan dynast. But that is now impossible. Our Imperial lord has come, and is holding a convocate of the dynasts.”
The back of Leia’s neck tingled. “Your Imperial lord is the Grand Admiral?” she asked carefully.
“Yes,” Khabarakh said. “That is his flagship, the Chimaera. I remember the day that the Lord Darth Vader first brought him to us,” he added, his mewing voice becoming reflective. “The Lord Vader told us that his duties against the Emperor’s enemies would now be taking his full attention. That the Grand Admiral would henceforth be our lord and commander.” He made a strange, almost purring sound deep in his chest. “There were many who were sad that day. The Lord Vader had been the only one save the Emperor who cared for Noghri well-being. He had given us hope and purpose.”
Leia grimaced. That purpose being to go off and die as death commandos at the Emperor’s whim. But she couldn’t say things like that to Khabarakh. Not yet, anyway. “Yes,” she murmured.
At her feet, Chewbacca twitched. “He will be fully awake soon,” Khabarakh said. “I would not like to stun him again. Can you control him?”
“I think so,” Leia said. They were coming in low toward the upper atmosphere now, on a course that would take them directly beneath the orbiting Star Destroyer. “I hope they don’t decide to do a sensor focus on us,” she murmured. “If they pick up three life-forms here, you’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.”
“The ship’s static-damping should prevent that,” Khabarakh assured her. “It is at full power.”
Leia frowned. “Aren’t they likely to wonder about that?”
“No. I explained it was part of the same malfunction that caused the transmitter problem.”
There was a low rumble from Chewbacca, and Leia looked down to see the Wookiee’s eyes glaring impotently up at her. Fully alert again, but without enough motor control yet to do anything. “We’ve cleared outer control,” she told him. “We’re heading down to—where are we going, Khabarakh?”
The Noghri took a deep breath, let it out in an odd sort of whistle. “We will go to my home, a small village near the edge of the Clean Land. I will hide you there until our lord the Grand Admiral leaves.”
Leia thought about that. A small village situated off the mainstream of Noghri life ought to be safely out of the way of wandering Imperials. On the other hand, if it was anything like the small villages she’d known, her presence there would be common knowledge an hour after they put down. “Can you trust the other villagers to keep quiet?”
“Do not worry,” Khabarakh said. “I will keep you safe.”
But he hesitated before he said it … and as they headed into the atmosphere, Leia noted uneasily that he hadn’t really answered the question.
The dynast bowed one last time and stepped back to the line of those awaiting their turn to pay homage to their leader. Thrawn, seated in the gleaming High Seat of the Common Room of Honoghr, nodded gravely to the departing clan leader and motioned to the next. The other stepped forward, moving in the formalized dance that seemed to indicate respect, and bowed his forehead to the ground before the Grand Admiral.
Standing two meters to Thrawn’s right and a little behind him, Pellaeon shifted his weight imperceptibly between feet, stifled a yawn, and wondered when this ritual would be over. He’d been under the impression they’d come to Honoghr to try to inspire the commando teams, but so far the only Noghri they’d seen had been ceremonial guards and this small but excessively boring collection of clan leaders. Thrawn presumably had his reasons for wading through the ritual, but Pellaeon wished it would hurry up and be over. With a galaxy still to win back for the Empire, sitting here listening to a group of gray-skinned aliens drone on about their loyalty seemed a ridiculous waste of time.
There was a touch of air on the back of his neck. “Captain?” someone said quietly in his ear—Lieutenant Tschel, he tentatively identified the voice. “Excuse me, sir, but Grand Admiral Thrawn asked to be informed immediately if anything out of the ordinary happened.” Pellaeon nodded slightly, glad of any interruption. “What is it?”
“It doesn’t seem dangerous, sir, or even very important,” Tschel said. “A Noghri commando ship on its way in almost didn’t give the recognition response in time.”
“Equipment trouble, probably,” Pellaeon said.
“That’s what the pilot said,” Tschel told him. “The odd thing is that he begged off putting down at the Nystao landing area. You’d think that someone with equipment problems would want his ship looked at immediately.”
“A bad transmitter isn’t exactly a crisis-level problem,” Pellaeon grunted. But Tschel had a point; and Nystao was the only place on Honoghr with qualified spaceship repair facilities. “We have an ID on the pilot?”
“Yes, sir. His name’s Khabarakh, clan Kihm’bar. I pulled up what we have on him,” he added, offering Pellaeon a data pad.
Surreptitiously, Pellaeon took it, wondering what he should do now. Thrawn had indeed left instructions that he was to be notified of any unusual activity anywhere in the system. But to interrupt the ceremony for something so trivial didn’t seem like a good idea.
As usual, Thrawn was one step ahead of him. Lifting a hand, he stopped the Noghri clan dynast’s presentation and turned his glowing red eyes on Pellaeon. “You have something to report, Captain?”
“A small anomaly only, sir,” Pellaeon told him, steeling himself and stepping to the Grand Admiral’s side. “An incoming commando ship was slow to transmit its recognition signal, and then declined to put down at the Nystao landing area. Probably just an equipment problem.”
“Probably,” Thrawn agreed. “Was the ship scanned for evidence of malfunction?”
“Ah …” Pellaeon checked the data pad. “The scan was inconclusive,” he told the other. “The ship’s static-damping was strong enough to block—”
“The incoming ship was static-damped?” Thrawn interrupted, looking sharply up at Pellaeon.
“Yes, sir.”
Wordlessly, Thrawn held up a hand. Pellaeon gave him the data pad, and for a moment the Grand Admiral frowned down at it, skimming the report. “Khabarakh, clan Kihm’bar,” he murmured to himself. “Interesting.” He looked up at Pellaeon again. “Where did the ship go?”
Pellaeon looked in turn at Tschel. “According to the last report, it was headed south,” the lieutenant said. “It might still be in range of our tractor beams, sir.”