“Fine. You do it as soon as we’re back.”
Leia nodded with a quiet sigh. She knew that tone; and it wasn’t something she could wholeheartedly argue against, anyway. “All right. If I can find time.”
“You’ll make time,” Han countered. “Or I’ll have Luke lock you in the med center when he gets back. I mean it, sweetheart.”
Leia squeezed his hand, feeling a similar squeeze on her heart as she did so. Luke, off alone in Imperial territory … but he was all right. He had to be. “All right,” she told Han. “I’ll get checked out. I promise.”
“Good,” he said, his eyes searching her face. “So what was it you felt back at Filve?”
“I don’t know.” She hesitated. “Maybe it was the same thing Luke felt on the Katana. You know—when the Imperials put that landing party of clones aboard.”
“Yeah,” Han agreed doubtfully. “Maybe. Those Dreadnaughts were awfully far away.”
“There were probably a lot more clones, though, too.”
“Yeah. Maybe,” Han said again. “Well … I suppose Chewie and me’d better get to work on that ion flux stabilizer before it quits on us completely Can you handle things up here okay, sweetheart?”
“I’m fine,” Leia assured him, just as glad to be leaving this line of conversation. “You two go ahead.”
Because the other possibility was one she’d just as soon not think about right now. The Emperor, it had long been rumored, had had the ability to use the Force to exercise direct control over his military forces. If the Jedi Master Luke had confronted on Jomark had that same ability …
Reaching down, she caressed her belly and focused on the pair of tiny minds within her. No, it was indeed not something she wanted to think about.
“I presume,” Thrawn said in that deadly calm voice of his, “that you have some sort of explanation.”
Slowly, deliberately, C’baoth lifted his head from the command room’s double display circle to look at the Grand Admiral. At the Grand Admiral and, with undisguised contempt, at the ysalamir on its nutrient frame slung across Thrawn’s shoulders. “Do you likewise have an explanation, Grand Admiral Thrawn?” he demanded.
“You broke off the diversionary attack on Filve,” Thrawn said, ignoring C’baoth’s question. “You then proceeded to send the entire task force on a dead-end chase.”
“And you, Grand Admiral Thrawn, have failed to bring my Jedi to me,” C’baoth countered. His voice, Pellaeon noticed uneasily, was slowly rising in both pitch and volume. “You, your tame Noghri, your entire Empire—all of you have failed.”
Thrawn’s glowing red eyes narrowed. “Indeed? And was it also our failure that you were unable to hold on to Luke Skywalker after we delivered him to you on Jomark?”
“You did not deliver him to me, Grand Admiral Thrawn,” C’baoth insisted. “I summoned him there through the Force—”
“It was Imperial Intelligence who planted the rumor that Jorus C’baoth had returned and been seen on Jomark,” Thrawn cut him off coldly. “It was Imperial Transport who brought you there, Imperial Supply who arranged and provisioned that house for you, and Imperial Engineering who built the camouflaged island landing site for your use. The Empire did its part to get Skywalker into your hands. It was you who failed to keep him there.”
“No!” C’baoth snapped. “Skywalker left Jomark because Mara Jade escaped from you and twisted his mind against me. And she will pay for that. You hear me? She shall pay.”
For a long moment Thrawn was silent. “You threw the entire Filve task force against the Millennium Falcon,” he said at last, his voice under control again. “Did you succeed in capturing Leia Organa Solo?”
“No,” C’baoth growled. “But not because she didn’t want to come to me. She does. Just as Skywalker does.”
Thrawn threw a glance at Pellaeon. “She wants to come to you?” he asked.
C’baoth smiled. “Very much,” he said, his voice unexpectedly losing all its anger. Becoming almost dreamy … “She wants me to teach her children,” he continued, his eyes drifting around the command room. “To instruct them in the ways of the Jedi. To create them in my own image. Because I am the master. The only one there is.”
He looked back at Thrawn. “You must bring her to me, Grand Admiral Thrawn,” he said, his manner somewhere halfway between solemn and pleading, “We must free her from her entrapment among those who fear her powers. They’ll destroy her if we don’t.”
“Of course we must,” Thrawn said soothingly. “But you must leave that task to me. All I need is a little more time.”
C’baoth frowned with thought, his hand slipping up beneath his beard to finger the medallion hanging on its neck chain, and Pellaeon felt a shiver run up his back. No matter how many times he saw it happen, he would never get used to these sudden dips into the slippery twilight of clone madness. It had, he knew, been a universal problem with the early cloning experiments: a permanent mental and emotional instability, inversely scaled to the length of the duplicate’s growth cycle. Few of the scientific papers on the subject had survived the Clone Wars era, but Pellaeon had come across one that had suggested that no clone grown to maturity in less than a year would be stable enough to survive outside of a totally controlled environment.
Given the destruction they’d unleashed on the galaxy, Pellaeon had always assumed that the clonemasters had eventually found at least a partial solution to the problem. Whether they had recognized the underlying cause of the madness was another question entirely.
It could very well be that Thrawn was the first to truly understand it.
“Very well, Grand Admiral Thrawn,” C’baoth said abruptly. “You may have one final chance. But I warn you: it will be your last. After that, I will take the matter into my own hands.” Beneath the bushy eyebrows his eyes flashed. “And I warn you further: if you cannot accomplish even so small a task, perhaps I will deem you unworthy to lead the military forces of my Empire.”
Thrawn’s eyes glittered, but he merely inclined his head slightly. “I accept your challenge, Master C’baoth.”
“Good.” Deliberately, C’baoth resettled himself into his seat and closed his eyes. “You may leave me now, Grand Admiral Thrawn. I wish to meditate, and to plan for the future of my Jedi.”
For a moment Thrawn stood silently, his glowing red eyes gazing unblinkingly at C’baoth. Then he shifted his gaze to Pellaeon. “You’ll accompany me to the bridge, Captain,” he said. “I want you to oversee the defense arrangements for the Ukio system.”
“Yes, sir,” Pellaeon said, glad of any excuse to get away from C’baoth.
For a moment he paused, feeling a frown cross his face as he looked down at C’baoth. Had there been something he had wanted to bring to Thrawn’s attention? He was almost certain there was. Something having to do with C’baoth, and clones, and the Mount Tantiss project …
But the thought wouldn’t come, and with a mental shrug, he pushed the question aside. It would surely come to him in time.
Stepping around the display ring, he followed his commander from the room.
THE OLD REPUBLIC (5,000–33 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)
Long—long—ago in a galaxy far, far away … some twenty-five thousand years before Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars: A New Hope … a large number of star systems and species in the center of the galaxy came together to form the Galactic Republic, governed by a Chancellor and a Senate from the capital city-world of Coruscant. As the Republic expanded via the hyperspace lanes, it absorbed new member worlds from newly discovered star systems; it also expanded its military to deal with the hostile civilizations, slavers, pirates, and gangster-species such as the slug-like Hutts that were encountered in the outward exploration. But the most vital defenders of the Republic were the Jedi Knights. Originally a reclusive order dedicated to studying the mysteries of the life energy known as the Force, the Jedi became the Republic’s guardians, charged by the Senate with keeping the peace—with wise words if possible; with lightsabers if not.