“Was he ever arrested or charged with a crime?”
“Nothing about that here,” Eli said. A thought struck him, and he keyed a new search. “No arrests for Tanoo himself, but his older brother was arrested for…” He trailed off, his throat tightening as he read the rest of the entry. “His older brother was arrested for possession of spice,” he said. “Specifically, a rare variety called scarn that forms under grain fields.”
Thrawn turned his glowing red eyes toward him. “Grain fields such as this one?”
“Yes,” Eli said, the taste of bile in the back of his mouth. Spice, in any of its dozens of varieties, was a plague on the galaxy: a horribly addicting drug that its victims would lie, steal, assault, and murder for. “This stuff is more a pre-spice compound, actually. It looks like you have to do some refining and chemical manipulation to make it full-fledged scarn.”
“Show me the method.”
Eli pulled up the file and handed over his datapad. For a few minutes Thrawn read in silence. Then he handed back the datapad and pulled out his comlink. “This is Commander Thrawn,” he said softly. “Are the shuttles and stormtroopers I ordered ready to fly? Good. Send them to this location for prisoner retrieval. Also add Lieutenant Gimm to the TIE escort. Launch when ready.” He got an acknowledgment and returned the comlink to his belt.
Eli did a quick run through the numbers. Normally, prep and travel time would mean the shuttles would show up in forty minutes. Thrawn’s foresight in having them ready to go should cut that in half. “How many stormtroopers are coming?”
“Twenty,” Thrawn said. “I didn’t know how large the conspiracy was when I gave the orders.”
“Better to err on the side of caution,” Eli agreed. And twenty stormtroopers was erring well on the side of caution. “Is Lieutenant Gimm one of the new TIE pilots?”
“Yes,” Thrawn said. “He’s also the best we currently have.”
Eli frowned. Here, on Cyphar’s open areas, it didn’t exactly take an ace to handle a high-cover mission. Was Thrawn expecting resistance in the form of enemy airspeeders?
He considered asking, decided it would be just as easy to wait and see, and turned his electrobinoculars back on the diggers.
They were making good progress. Already the long bags they were dragging behind them were starting to fill up. By the time the stormtroopers arrived, they might well be ready to scurry back across the border.
“What’s that?” A distant voice whipped faintly across the empty field.
Eli winced. Unless, of course, they spooked and took off sooner.
He focused on Tanoo. The man was staring up into the night sky, fumbling a civilian set of electrobinoculars from a pouch at his waist. He lifted them up to his eyes…
“Set on stun,” Thrawn said quietly as he drew his blaster. “I will move a hundred meters to the right and take up position beside that border-mark stone.”
“Understood,” Eli said. Peering across the ground, he located the rough obelisk at the edge of the field.
“You’ll stay here,” Thrawn continued. “I’ll deal with the landspeeders, while you target the raiders. Make certain none of them gets past us.”
“Understood,” Eli said again. Twelve against two…and all twelve of the raiders had holstered blasters. Briefly, he hoped Thrawn had taken those odds into account. “Do we attack together, or does one of us start?”
“I’ll start,” Thrawn said. “You’ll know when to open fire.”
Eli frowned. “I’ll know? How will I—?”
But Thrawn had already slipped out into the darkness.
Eli mouthed a silent curse. Great. He braced the side of his blaster against the edge of the meetinghouse doorway, hoping those long-ago Academy weapons classes would come back to him.
“It’s Lambda shuttles!” Tanoo said anxiously, his voice rising almost to a squeak. “Two of them. Everyone—back in the speeders. Come on, come on, come on.”
“Oh, bark it down,” someone growled contemptuously. “It’s probably just that idiot Imp bringing in a late buffet dinner or something.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when Thrawn opened fire.
His first shot burned through the rusty plating of the rearmost of the three landspeeders, blasting the starboard-aft repulsorlift. With a metallic screech the front of the vehicle pitched up as that corner slammed onto the ground.
The nearest raiders jerked as if they’d stepped on a static plate. Eli clenched his teeth, wondering if this was when he was supposed to make his appearance. Before he could decide Thrawn fired again, taking out the same repulsorlift on the vehicle in front of it.
That was enough for Tanoo. Shrieking something incomprehensible he dived into the third landspeeder, the one closest to him, and tried to spin it around back toward the border.
But with the disabled vehicles blocking the path behind him, and with the taller and stiffer stalks on either side resisting his attempts to get through them, he was having trouble breaking free. He kept trying anyway, battering at the stalks over and over, gaining a few centimeters with each lunge.
The rest of the raiders weren’t so easily rattled. They sprinted instead toward the disabled vehicles, their long bags dragging and bouncing behind them, yanking out their blasters and firing in the general vicinity of Thrawn’s concealment as they ran. Eli tensed, but they were in motion and none of them seemed to be particularly good with their weapons, and all the bolts went wild. The raiders tumbled into cover behind the landspeeders and dropped to their knees, ducking lower as Thrawn shifted to a standard rapid-fire pattern designed to keep an enemy pinned down. The raiders responded by popping their heads up at random and squeezing off return fire.
And as both sides settled down for battle, Eli realized that the raiders were now lined up neatly within his field of fire. Even better, pressed against the landspeeders and on their knees, they were not only stationary but also had limited capacity to move or dodge.
Eli smiled tightly. Thrawn had been right: He did know when to fire.
Lining up his blaster on the first pair, he squeezed the trigger.
The stun setting had a wider effective range than standard blasterfire, permitting each shot to take down two of the raiders. With their attention on Thrawn and his louder, more dangerous fire, the conspirators lost six of their number to Eli’s attack before the rest suddenly woke up to the new threat. Instantly they shifted their fire toward the meetinghouse, forcing Eli to throw himself sideways to avoid getting hit. He slammed onto the ground on his left shoulder, jarring his whole body and momentarily throwing off his aim.
It was, in retrospect, the wrong move. Up to that point his position had been somewhat obscured; now he was out in the open. Shots hammered the meetinghouse and the ground around him as he scuttled as quickly as he could on elbows and knees toward another border stone to the meetinghouse’s left.
Five meters into his mad scramble, he belatedly realized he probably should have gone the other way, past the raiders’ defense line, and tried instead to reach Thrawn. There, the two of them could have worked in unison to hold off their opponents until the reinforcements arrived from the Thunder Wasp.
Too late for that now. Swearing under his breath, Eli kept going, wincing with each shot that burned through the air or sizzled into the ground nearby—
And then, suddenly, all was silence.
Cautiously, Eli wobbled to a halt. Still silence. Even more cautiously, he lifted his head.
The men and women who’d been shooting at him were sprawled on the ground beside the landspeeders. Standing over them, his blaster trained on the still-trapped Tanoo, was Thrawn.
Feeling like a fool, Eli stood up, brushed himself off as best he could, and walked over to his commander.