Threepio recoiled. “She said, ‘Quiet,’ ” he translated unnecessarily.
“I understood the gist,” Leia said, drawing herself up and bringing the full weight of her Royal Alderaanian Court upbringing to bear on the aliens facing her. Deference to local custom and authority was all well and good; but she was the daughter of their Lord Darth Vader, and there were certain discourtesies that such a person should not put up with. “Is this how you speak to the Mal’ary’ush?” she demanded.
Six Noghri heads snapped over to look at her. Reaching out with the Force, Leia tried to read the sense behind those gazes; but as always, this particular alien mind seemed totally closed to her. She was going to have to play it by ear. “I asked a question,” she said into the silence.
The Noghri in the center took a step forward, and with the motion Leia noticed for the first time the two small hard bumps on the alien’s upper chest beneath the loose tunic. A female? “Maitrakh?” she murmured to Threepio, remembering the word Khabarakh had used earlier.
“A female who is leader of a local family or subclan structure,” the droid translated, his voice nervous and almost too low to hear. Threepio hated being yelled at.
“Thank you,” Leia said, eyeing the Noghri. “You are the maitrakh of this family?”
“I am she,” the Noghri said in heavily accented but understandable Basic. “What proof do you offer to your claim of Mal’ary’ush?”
Silently, Leia held out her hand. The maitrakh hesitated, then stepped up to her and gingerly sniffed it. “Is it not as I said?” Khabarakh asked.
“Be silent, thirdson,” the maitrakh said, raising her head to stare into Leia’s eyes. “I greet you, Lady Vader. But I do not welcome you.”
Leia held her gaze steadily. She could still not sense anything from any of the aliens, but with her thoughts extended she could tell that Chewbacca had left the ship and was approaching the house. Approaching rather rapidly, and with a definite agitation about him. She hoped he wouldn’t charge brashly in and ruin what little civility remained here. “May I ask why not?” she asked the maitrakh.
“Did you serve the Emperor?” the other countered. “Do you now serve our lord, the Grand Admiral?”
“No, to both questions,” Leia told her.
“Then you bring discord and poison among us,” the maitrakh concluded darkly. “Discord between what was and what now is.” She shook her head. “We do not need more discord on Honoghr, Lady Vader.”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the doors behind Leia swung open again and Chewbacca strode into the room.
The maitrakh started at the sight of the Wookiee, and one of the other Noghri uttered something startled-sounding. But any further reactions were cut off by Chewbacca’s snarled warning. “Are you sure they’re Imperials?” Leia asked, a cold fist clutching her heart. No, she pleaded silently. Not now. Not yet.
The Wookiee growled the obvious: that a pair of Lambda-class shuttles coming from orbit and from the direction of the city of Nystao could hardly be anything else.
Khabarakh moved up beside the maitrakh, said something urgently in his own language. “He says he has sworn protection to us,” Threepio translated. “He asks that the pledge be honored.”
For a long moment Leia thought the maitrakh was going to refuse. Then, with a sigh, she bowed her head slightly. “Come with me,” Khabarakh said to Leia, brushing past her and Chewbacca to the door. “The maitrakh has agreed to hide you from our lord the Grand Admiral, at least for now.”
“Where are we going?” Leia asked as they followed him out into the night.
“Your droid and your analysis equipment I will hide among the decon droids that are stored for the night in an outer shed,” the Noghri explained, pointing to a windowless building fifty meters away. “You and the Wookiee will be more of a problem. If the Imperials have sensor equipment with them, your life-sign profiles will register as different from Noghri.”
“I know,” Leia said, searching the sky for the shuttles’ running lights and trying to remember everything she could about life-form identification algorithms. Heart rate was one of the parameters, she knew, as were ambient atmosphere, respiratory byproducts, and molecule-chain EM polarization effects. But the chief long-range parameter was—“We need a heat source,” she told Khabarakh. “As big a one as possible.”
“The bake house,” the Noghri said, pointing to a windowless building three down from where they stood. At its back was a squat chimney from which wisps of smoke could be seen curling upward in the backwash of light from the surrounding structures.
“Sounds like our best chance,” Leia agreed. “Khabarakh, you hide Threepio; Chewie, come with me.”
The Noghri were waiting for them as they stepped from the shuttle: three females standing side by side, with two children acting as honor wardens by the doors of the clan dukha building. Thrawn glanced at the group, threw an evaluating sweep around the area, and then turned to Pellaeon. “Wait here until the tech team arrives, Captain,” he ordered Pellaeon quietly. “Get them started on a check of the communications and countermeasures equipment in the ship over there. Then join me inside.”
“Yes, sir.”
Thrawn turned to Ir’khaim. “Dynast,” he invited, gesturing at the waiting Noghri. The dynast bowed and strode toward them. Thrawn threw a glance at Rukh, who’d taken Ir’khaim’s former position at the Grand Admiral’s side, and together they followed. There was the usual welcoming ritual, and then the females led the way into the dukha.
The shuttle from the Chimaera was only a couple of minutes behind them. Pellaeon briefed the tech team and got them busy, then crossed to the dukha and went in.
He’d expected that the maitrakh would have managed to round up perhaps a handful of her people for this impromptu late-evening visit by their glorious lord and master. To his surprise, he found that the old girl had in fact turned out half the village. There was a double row of them, children as well as adults, lining the dukha walls from the huge genealogy wall chart back to the double doors and around again to the meditation booth opposite the chart. Thrawn was seated in the clan High Seat two-thirds of the way to the back of the room with Ir’khaim standing again at his side. The three females who’d met the shuttle stood facing them with a second tier of elders another pace back. Standing with the females, his steel-gray skin a marked contrast to their older, darker gray, was a young Noghri male.
Pellaeon had, apparently, missed nothing more important than a smattering of the nonsense ritual the Noghri never seemed to get enough of. As he moved past the silent lines of aliens to stand at Thrawn’s other side, the young male stepped forward and knelt before the High Seat. “I greet you, my lord,” he mewed gravely, spreading his arms out to his sides. “You honor my family and the clan Kihm’bar with your presence here.”
“You may rise,” Thrawn told him. “You are Khabarakh, clan Kihm’bar?”
“I am, my lord.”
“You were once a member of the Imperial Noghri commando team twenty-two,” Thrawn said. “A team that ceased to exist on the planet Kashyyyk. Tell me what happened.”
Khabarakh might have twitched. Pellaeon couldn’t tell for sure. “I filed a report, my lord, immediately upon leaving that world.”
“Yes, I read the report,” Thrawn told him coolly. “Read it very carefully, and noted the questions it left unanswered. Such as how and why you survived when all others in your team were killed. And how it was you were able to escape when the entire planet had been alerted to your presence. And why you did not return immediately to either Honoghr or one of our other bases after your failure.”
This time there was definitely a twitch. Possibly a reaction to the word failure. “I was left unconscious by the Wookiees during the first attack,” Khabarakh said. “I awakened alone and made my way back to the ship. Once there, I deduced what had happened to the rest of the team from official information sources. I suspect they simply were unprepared for the speed and stealth of my ship when I made my escape. As to my whereabouts afterward, my lord—” He hesitated. “I transmitted my report, and then left for a time to be alone.”
“Why?”
“To think, my lord, and to meditate.”
“Wouldn’t Honoghr have been a more suitable place for such meditation?” Thrawn asked, waving a hand around the dukha.
“I had much to think about. My lord.”
For a moment Thrawn eyed him thoughtfully. “You were slow to respond when the request for a recognition signal came from the surface,” he said. “You then refused to land at the Nystao port facilities.”
“I did not refuse, my lord. I was never ordered to land there.”
“The distinction is noted,” Thrawn said dryly. “Tell me why you chose to come here instead.”
“I wished to speak with my maitrakh. To discuss my meditations with her, and to ask forgiveness for my … failure.”