“It’s a Harkners-Balix Nine-Oh-Three,” the other sniffed with a second-rate attempt at wounded pride. “Flying hatbox, indeed.”
Not much of an actor, but he was clearly getting a kick out of all this cloak-and-blade stuff. Setting her teeth firmly together, Mara sent a silent curse down on Torve’s head for setting up such a ridiculous identification procedure in the first place. “Looks like a Nine-Seventeen to me,” she said dutifully. “Or even a Nine-Twenty-Two.”
“No, it’s a Nine-Oh-Three,” he insisted. “Trust me—my uncle used to make landing gear pads for them. Come inside and I’ll show you how to tell the difference.”
“Oh, that’ll be great,” Mara muttered under her breath as she followed him up the ramp.
“Glad you finally got here,” the man commented over his shoulder as they reached the top of the ramp. “I was starting to think you’d been caught.”
“That could still happen if you don’t shut up,” Mara growled back. “Keep your voice down, will you?”
“It’s okay,” he assured her. “I’ve got all your MSE droids clattering around on cleaning duty just inside the outer hull. That should block out any audio probes.”
Theoretically, she supposed, he was right. As a practical matter … well, if the locals had the place under surveillance they were in trouble, anyway. “You have any trouble getting the ship out of impoundment?” she asked him.
“Not really,” he said. “The spaceport administrator said the whole thing was highly irregular, but he didn’t give me any major grief about it.” He grinned. “Though I suppose the size of the bribe I slipped him might have had something to do with that. My name’s Wedge Antilles, by the way. I’m a friend of Captain Solo’s.”
“Nice to meet you,” Mara said. “Solo couldn’t make it himself?”
Antilles shook his head. “He had to leave Coruscant on some kind of special mission, so he asked me to get the ship sprung for you. I was scheduled for escort duty a couple systems over anyway, so it wasn’t a problem.”
Mara ran a quick eye over him. From his build and general manner … “B-wing pilot?” she hazarded.
“X-wing,” he corrected her. “I’ve got to get back before my convoy finishes loading. Want me to give you an escort out of here?”
“Thanks, but no,” she said, resisting the urge to say something sarcastic. The first rule of smuggling was to stay as inconspicuous as possible, and flying out of a third-rate spaceport with a shiny New Republic X-wing starfighter in tow didn’t exactly qualify as a low-profile stance. “Tell Solo thanks.”
“Right. Oh, one other thing,” Antilles added as she started past him. “Han also wanted me to ask you if your people might be interested in selling information on our friend with the eyes.”
Mara sent him a sharp look. “Our friend with the eyes?”
Antilles shrugged. “That’s what he said. He said you’d understand.”
Mara felt her lip twist. “I understand just fine. Tell him I’ll pass on the message.”
“Okay.” He hesitated. “It sounded like it was pretty important—”
“I said I’ll pass on the message.”
He shrugged again. “Okay—just doing my job. Have a good trip.” With a friendly nod, he headed back down the ramp. Still half expecting a trap, Mara got the hatchway sealed for flight and went up to the bridge.
It took a quarter hour to run the ship through its preflight sequence, almost exactly the amount of time it took the spaceport controllers to confirm her for takeoff. Easing in the repulsorlifts, she lifted clear of the landing pit and made for space.
She was nearly high enough to kick in the sublight drive when the back of her neck began to tingle.
“Uh-oh,” she muttered aloud, giving the displays a quick scan. Nothing was visible; but this close to a planetary mass, that meant less than nothing. Anything could be lurking just over the horizon, from a single flight of TIE fighters all the way up to an Imperial Star Destroyer.
But maybe they weren’t quite ready yet …
She threw full power to the drive, feeling herself pressed back into the seat cushion for a few seconds as the acceleration compensators fought to catch up. An indignant howl came from the controller on the comm speaker; ignoring him, she keyed the computer, hoping that Torve had followed Karrde’s standard procedure when he’d first put down on Abregado.
He had. The calculation for the jump out of here had already been computed and loaded, just waiting to be initiated. She got the computer started making the minor adjustments that would correct for a couple of months of general galactic drift, and looked back out the forward viewport.
There, emerging over the horizon directly ahead, was the massive bulk of a Victory-class Star Destroyer.
Bearing toward her.
For a long heartbeat Mara just sat there, her mind skimming through the possibilities, all the time knowing full well how futile the exercise was. The Star Destroyer’s commander had planned his interception with exquisite skill: given their respective vectors and the Etherway’s proximity to the planet, there was absolutely no way she would be able to elude the larger ship’s weapons and tractor beams long enough to make her escape to lightspeed. Briefly, she toyed with the hope that the Imperials might not be after her at all, that they were actually gunning for that Antilles character still on the surface. But that hope, too, evaporated quickly. A single X-wing pilot could hardly be important enough to tie up a Victory-class Star Destroyer for. And if he was, they would certainly not have been so incompetent as to spring the trap prematurely.
“Freighter Etherway,” a cold voice boomed over her comm speaker. “This is the Star Destroyer Adamant. You are ordered to shut down your engines and prepare to be brought aboard.”
So that was that. They had indeed been looking for her. In a very few minutes now she would be their prisoner.
Unless …
Reaching over, she keyed her mike. “Star Destroyer Adamant, this is the Etherway,” she said briskly. “I congratulate you on your vigilance; I was afraid I was going to have to search the next five systems to find an Imperial ship.”
“You will shut down all deflector systems—” The voice faltered halfway through the standard speech as the fact belatedly penetrated that this was not the normal response of the normal Imperial prisoner.
“I’ll want to speak to your captain the minute I’m aboard,” Mara said into the conversational gap. “I’ll need him to set up a meeting with Grand Admiral Thrawn and provide me transport to wherever he and the Chimaera are at the moment. And get a tractor beam ready—I don’t want to have to land this monster in your hangar bay myself.”
The surprises were coming too fast for the poor man. “Ah—freighter Etherway—” he tried again.
“On second thought, put the captain on now,” Mara cut him off. She had the initiative now, and was determined to keep it as long as possible. “There’s no one around who can tap into this communication.”
There was a moment of silence. Mara continued on her intercept course, a trickle of doubt beginning to worm its way through her resolve. It’s the only way, she told herself sternly.
“This is the captain,” a new voice came on the speaker. “Who are you?”
“Someone with important information for Grand Admiral Thrawn,” Mara told him, shifting from brisk to just slightly haughty. “For the moment, that’s all you need to know.”
But the captain wasn’t as easily bullied as his junior officers. “Really,” he said dryly. “According to our sources, you’re a member of Talon Karrde’s smuggling gang.”
“And you don’t believe such a person could tell the Grand Admiral anything useful?” she countered, letting her tone frost over a bit.
“Oh, I’m sure you can,” the captain said. “I simply don’t see any reason why I should bother him with what will be, after all, a routine interrogation.”
Mara squeezed her left hand into a fist. At all costs she had to avoid the kind of complete mind-sifting the captain was obviously hinting at. “I wouldn’t advise that,” she told him, throwing every bit of the half-remembered dignity and power of the old Imperial court into her voice. “The Grand Admiral would be extremely displeased with you. Extremely displeased.”
There was a short pause. Clearly, the captain was starting to recognize that he had more here than he’d bargained for. Just as clearly, he wasn’t ready yet to back down. “I have my orders,” he said flatly. “I’ll need more than vague hints before I can make you an exception to them.”
Mara braced herself. This was it. After all these years of hiding from the Empire, as well as from everyone else, this was finally it. “Then send a message to the Grand Admiral,” she said. “Tell him the recognition code is Hapspir, Barrini, Corbolan, Triaxis.”