Pellaeon studied the Grand Admiral’s profile. It was, in his opinion, a pretty tenuous leap of logic. But on the other hand, he’d seen too many similar leaps borne out not to take this one seriously. “Shall I order a TIE fighter squadron to investigate, sir?”
“As I said, Captain, patience,” Thrawn said. “Even in sensor stealth mode with all engines shut down, he’ll have made sure he can power up and escape before any attack force could reach him.” He smiled at Pellaeon. “Or rather, any attack force from the Chimaera.”
A stray memory clicked: Thrawn, reaching for his comm just as Pellaeon was giving the ground forces the order to attack. “You sent a message to the rest of the fleet,” he said. “Timing it against my attack order to mask the transmission.”
Thrawn’s blue-black eyebrows lifted a fraction. “Very good, Captain. Very good, indeed.”
Pellaeon felt a touch of warmth on his cheeks. The Grand Admiral’s compliments were few and far between. “Thank you, sir.”
Thrawn nodded. “More precisely, my message was to a single ship, the Constrainer. It will arrive in approximately ten minutes. At which point”—his eyes glittered—“we’ll see just how accurate my reading of Karrde has been.”
Over the Wild Karrde’s bridge speakers, the reports from the scanning crew were beginning to taper off. “Doesn’t sound like they’ve found anything,” Aves commented.
“Like you said, we were thorough,” Mara reminded him, hardly hearing her own words. The nameless thing nagging at the back of her mind seemed to be getting stronger. “Can we get out of here now?” she asked, turning to look at Karrde.
He frowned down at her. “Try to relax, Mara. They can’t possibly know we’re here. There’s been no sensor-focus probe of the asteroid, and without one there’s no way for them to detect this ship.”
“Unless a Star Destroyer’s sensors are better than you think,” Mara retorted.
“We know all about their sensors,” Aves soothed. “Ease up, Mara, Karrde knows what he’s doing. The Wild Karrde has probably the tightest sensor stealth mode this side of—”
He broke off as the bridge door opened behind them; and Mara turned just as Karrde’s two pet vornskrs bounded into the room.
Dragging, very literally, their handler behind them.
“What are you doing here, Chin?” Karrde asked.
“Sorry, Capt’,” Chin puffed, digging his heels into the deck and leaning back against the taut leashes. The effort was only partially successful; the predators were still pulling him slowly forward. “I couldn’t stop them. I thought maybe they wanted to see you, hee?”
“What’s the matter with you two, anyway?” Karrde chided the animals, squatting down in front of them. “Don’t you know we’re busy?”
The vornskrs didn’t look at him. Didn’t even seem to notice his presence, for that matter. They continued staring straight ahead as if he wasn’t even there.
Staring directly at Mara.
“Hey,” Karrde said, reaching over to slap one of the animals lightly across the muzzle. “I’m talking to you, Sturm. What’s gotten into you, anyway?” He glanced along their unblinking line of sight—
Paused for a second and longer look. “Are you doing something, Mara?”
Mara shook her head, a cold shiver tingling up her back. She’d seen that look before, on many of the wild vornskrs she’d run into during that long three-day trek through the Myrkr forest with Luke Skywalker.
Except that those vornskr stares hadn’t been directed at her. They’d been reserved instead for Skywalker. Usually just before they attacked him.
“That’s Mara, Sturm,” Karrde told the animal, speaking to it as he might a child. “Mara. Come on, now—you saw her all the time back home.”
Slowly, almost reluctantly, Sturm stopped his forward pull and turned his attention to his master. “Mara,” Karrde repeated, looking the vornskr firmly in the eye. “A friend. You hear that, Drang?” he added, reaching over to grip the other vornskr’s muzzle. “She’s a friend. Understand?”
Drang seemed to consider that. Then, as reluctantly as Sturm had, he lowered his head and stopped pulling. “That’s better,” Karrde said, scratching both vornskrs briefly behind their ears and standing up again. “Better take them back down, Chin. Maybe walk them around the main hold—give them some exercise.”
“If I can find a clear track through all the stuff in there, hee?” Chin grunted, twitching back on the leashes. “Come on, littles—we go now.”
With only a slight hesitation the two vornskrs allowed him to take them off the bridge. Karrde watched as the door shut behind them. “I wonder what that was all about,” he said, giving Mara a thoughtful look.
“I don’t know,” she told him, hearing the tightness in her voice. With the temporary distraction now gone, the strange dread she’d been feeling was back again in full force. She swiveled back to her board, half expecting to see a squadron of TIE fighters bearing down on them.
But there was nothing. Only the Chimaera, still sitting harmlessly out there in orbit around Myrkr. No threat any of the Wild Karrde’s instruments could detect. But the tingling was getting stronger and stronger …
And suddenly she could sit still no longer. Reaching out to the control board, she keyed for engine prestart.
“Mara!” Aves yelped, jumping in his seat as if he’d been stung. “What in—?”
“They’re coming,” Mara snarled back, hearing the strain of a half dozen tangled emotions in her voice. The die was irrevocably cast—her activation of the Wild Karrde’s engines would have set sensors screaming all over the Chimaera. Now there was nowhere to go but out.
She looked up at Karrde, suddenly afraid of what his expression might be saying. But he was just standing there looking down at her, a slightly quizzical frown on his face. “They don’t appear to be coming,” he pointed out mildly.
She shook her head, feeling the pleading in her eyes. “You have to believe me,” she said, uncomfortably aware that she didn’t really believe it herself. “They’re getting ready to attack.”
“I believe you,” he said soothingly. Or perhaps he, too, recognized that there weren’t any other choices left. “Aves: lightspeed calculation. Take the easiest course setting that’s not anywhere toward Rishi; we’ll stop and reset later.”
“Karrde—”
“Mara is second in command,” Karrde cut him off. “As such, she has the right and the duty to make important decisions.”
“Yeah, but—” Aves stopped, the last word coming out pinched as he strangled it off. “Yeah,” he said between clenched teeth. Throwing a glower at Mara, he turned to the nav computer and got to work.
“You might as well get us moving, Mara,” Karrde continued, stepping over to the vacant communications chair and sitting down. “Keep the asteroid between us and the Chimaera as long as you can.”
“Yes, sir,” Mara said. Her tangle of emotions was starting to dissolve now, leaving a mixture of anger and profound embarrassment in its wake. She’d done it again. Listened to her inner feelings—tried to do things she knew full well she couldn’t do—and in the process had once again wound up clutching the sharp end of the bayonet.
And it was probably the last she’d hear of being Karrde’s second in command, too. Command unity in front of Aves was one thing, but once they were out of here and he could get her alone there was going to be hell to pay. She’d be lucky if he didn’t bounce her out of his organization altogether. Jabbing viciously at her board, she swung the Wild Karrde around, turning its nose away from the asteroid and starting to drive toward deep space—
And with a flicker of pseudomotion, something big shot in from lightspeed, dropping neatly into normal space not twenty kilometers away.
An Imperial Interdictor Cruiser.
Aves yelped a startled-sounding curse. “We got company,” he barked.
“I see it,” Karrde said. As cool as ever … but Mara could hear the tinge of surprise in his voice, too. “What’s our time to lightspeed?”
“It’ll be another minute,” Aves said tautly. “There’s a lot of junk in the outer system for the computer to work through.”
“We have a race, then,” Karrde said. “Mara?”
“Up to point seven three,” she said, nursing as much power as she could out of the still-sluggish engines. He was right; it was indeed going to be a race. With their four huge gravity-wave generators capable of simulating planet-sized masses, Interdictor Cruisers were the Empire’s weapon of choice for trapping an enemy ship in normal space while TIE fighters pounded it to rubble. But coming in fresh out of lightspeed itself, the Interdictor would need another minute before it could power up those generators. If she could get the Wild Karrde out of range by then …
“More visitors,” Aves announced. “A couple squadrons of TIE fighters coming from the Chimaera.”
“We’re up to point eight six power,” Mara reported. “We’ll be ready for lightspeed as soon as the nav computer gives me a course.”