Han watched him go, trying to figure out whether he admired the Senator more than he pitied him or vice versa. It was a useless exercise. “Our luggage is still back at our quarters,” he told Sena.
“I’ll have it sent over while you get the ship prepped.” She looked at Han, her eyes suddenly blazing with a smoldering fire. “But I want you to remember one thing,” she said with deadly earnestness. “You can go now, with our blessings. But if you betray the Senator—in any way—you will die. At my hand, personally, if necessary.”
Han held her gaze, considering what to say. To remind her, perhaps, that he’d been attacked by bounty hunters and interstellar criminals, shot at by Imperial stormtroopers, and tortured at the direction of Darth Vader himself. To suggest that after all that, a threat coming from someone like Sena was too laughable to even take seriously. “I understand,” he said gravely. “I won’t let you down.”
*
From the dorsal hatchway connection behind them came the creak of a stressed seal; and through the Lady Luck’s canopy the patch of stars visible around the bulk of the Dreadnaught abruptly flashed into starlines. “Here we go again,” Lando said, his voice sounding resigned. “How do I keep letting you talk me into these things?”
“Because you’re the respectable one,” Han told him, running an eye over the Lady Luck’s instruments. There wasn’t a lot there to see, with the engines and most of the systems running at standby. “And because you know as well as I do that we have to do it. Sooner or later the Empire’s going to find out that the Katana fleet’s been found and start looking for it themselves. And if they get to it before we do, we’re going to be in big trouble.” And here they were, stuck uselessly for another two days in hyperspace while the Harrier took them back to New Cov. Not because they wanted to go there, but because Bel Iblis wasn’t willing to trust them with the location of his stupid Peregrine’s Nest base—
“You’re worried about Leia, aren’t you?” Lando asked into the silence.
“I shouldn’t have let her go,” Han muttered. “Something’s gone wrong. I just know it. That lying little alien’s turned her over to the Empire, or the Grand Admiral’s out-thought us again. I don’t know, but something.”
“Leia can take care of herself, Han,” Lando said quietly. “And even Grand Admirals sometimes make mistakes.”
Han shook his head. “He made his mistake at Sluis Van, Lando. He won’t make another one. Bet you the Falcon he won’t.”
Lando clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, buddy, brooding about it won’t help. We’ve got two days to kill. Let’s go break out a sabacc deck.”
The Grand Admiral read the dispatch twice before turning his glowing eyes on Pellaeon. “You vouch for the reliability of this report, Captain?”
“As much as I can vouch for any report that doesn’t originate with an Imperial agent,” Pellaeon told him. “On the other hand, this particular smuggler has fed us fifty-two reports over the last ten years, forty-eight of which proved to be accurate. I’d say he’s worth believing.”
Thrawn looked back at the reader. “Endor,” he murmured, half to himself. “Why Endor?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Pellaeon said. “Perhaps they were looking for another place to hide.”
“Among the Ewoks?” Thrawn snorted derisively. “That would be desperation indeed. But no matter. If the Millennium Falcon is there, then so is Leia Organa Solo. Alert Navigation and Engineering; we leave immediately for Endor.”
“Yes, sir,” Pellaeon nodded, keying in the orders. “Shall I have Khabarakh brought up from Nystao?”
“Yes. Khabarakh.” Thrawn said the name thoughtfully. “Note the interesting timing here, Captain. Khabarakh comes back to Honoghr after a month’s absence, just as Solo and Organa Solo head off on secret errands to New Cov and Endor. Coincidence?”
Pellaeon frowned. “I don’t follow you, sir.”
Thrawn smiled thinly. “What I think, Captain, is that we’re seeing a new degree of subtlety among our enemies. They knew that the return of a survivor from the failed Kashyyyk operation would catch my attention. They therefore arranged his release to coincide with their own missions, in the hope I would be too preoccupied to notice them. Doubtless when we break Khabarakh, we’ll learn a great many things from him that will cost us countless man-hours to finally prove wrong.” Thrawn snorted again. “No, leave him where he is. You may inform the dynasts that I have decided to permit them the full seven days of public shame, after which they may perform the rites of discovery as they choose. No matter how useless his information, Khabarakh may still serve the Empire by dying painfully. As an object lesson to his race.”
“Yes, sir.” Pellaeon hesitated. “May I point out, though, that such a drastic psychological fragmentation and reconditioning is well outside the Rebellion’s usual operating procedure.”
“I agree,” Thrawn said grimly. “Which implies all the more strongly that whatever Organa Solo is looking for on Endor, it’s considerably more vital to the Rebellion’s war effort than mere sanctuary.”
Pellaeon frowned, trying to think of what might be on Endor that anyone could possibly want. “Some of the materiel left over from the Death Star project?” he hazarded.
“More valuable than that,” the Grand Admiral shook his head. “Information, perhaps, that the Emperor might have had with him when he died. Information they may think they can still retrieve.”
And then Pellaeon got it. “The location of the Mount Tantiss storehouse.”
Thrawn nodded. “That’s the only thing I can think of that would be worth this much effort on their part. At any rate, it’s a risk we can’t afford to take. Not now.”
“Agreed.” Pellaeon’s board pinged: Navigation and Engineering signaling ready. “Shall I break orbit?”
“At your convenience, Captain.”
Pellaeon nodded to the helm. “Take us out. Course as set by Navigation.”
Through the viewports the planet below began to fall away; and as it did so there was the short trill of a priority message coming through. Pellaeon pulled it up, read the heading. “Admiral? Report from the Adamant, in the Abregado system. They’ve captured one of Talon Karrde’s freighters. Transcript of the preliminary interrogation is coming through now.” He frowned as he glanced down to the end. “It’s rather short, sir.”
“Thank you,” Thrawn said with quiet satisfaction as he pulled up the report to his own station.
He was still reading it when the Chimaera made the jump to lightspeed. Reading it very, very carefully.
CHAPTER
17
Mara had never been to the Abregado-rae Spaceport before; but as she walked along its streets she decided it deserved every bit of the rock-bottom reputation it had worked so hard to achieve.
Not that it showed on the surface. On the contrary, the place was neat and almost painfully clean, though with that grating antiseptic quality that showed the cleanliness had been imposed from above by government decree instead of from below by the genuine wishes of the inhabitants. It seemed reasonably peaceful, too, as spaceports went, with lots of uniformed security men patrolling the streets around the landing pits.
But beneath the surface glitter the rot showed straight through. Showed in the slightly furtive manner of the locals; in the halfhearted swaggering of the uniformed security men; in the lingering stares of the plainclothes but just as obvious quiet security men. The whole spaceport—maybe the whole planet—was being held together with tie wire and blaster power packs.
A petty totalitarian regime, and a populace desperate to escape it. Just the sort of place where anyone would betray anyone else for the price of a ticket offplanet. Which meant that if any of the locals had tumbled to the fact that there was a smuggling ship sitting here under Security’s nose, Mara had about ten steps to go before the whole place came down on top of her.
Walking toward a faded door with the equally faded sign “Landing Pit 21” over it, she hoped sardonically that it wasn’t a trap. She would really hate to die in a place like this.
The door to the landing pit was unlocked. Taking a deep breath, acutely conscious of the two pairs of uniformed security men within sight of her, she went inside.
It was the Etherway, all right, looking just as shabby and decrepit as it had when Fynn Torve had had to abandon it in Landing Pit 63 of this same spaceport. Mara gave it a quick once-over, checked out all the nooks and crannies in the pit where an armed ambush squad could be skulking, and finally focused on the dark-haired young man lounging in a chair by the freighter’s lowered ramp. Even in that casual slouch he couldn’t shake the military air that hovered around him. “Hello, there,” he called to her, lowering the data pad he’d been reading. “Nice day for flying. You interested in hiring a ship?”
“No,” she said, walking toward him as she tried to watch all directions at once. “I’m more in a buying mood, myself. What kind of ship is this flying hatbox, anyway?”