“Well done, Ensign,” Thrawn said, his eyes and blaster still pointed at Tanoo. Tanoo, for his part, had abandoned his attempts to escape and was leaning resignedly over his landspeeder’s steering wheel. “Are you injured?”
“No, sir,” Eli said, feeling his face warming. Well done? Not even close. “Sorry, sir.”
Thrawn spared him a quick look. “Why are you sorry? You executed your part perfectly.”
“But I didn’t get them all,” Eli pointed out. “And when they fired at me I went the wrong direction.”
“I did not expect you to defeat them all,” Thrawn assured him. “And your decision to draw their fire away from me was what enabled me to move unnoticed to a position where I could bring a final end to their resistance.”
“Oh,” Eli said lamely, torn between the reflexive desire to tell Thrawn that it hadn’t been a decision at all and the equally reflexive reluctance not to argue with his commanding officer when he was being complimented.
Thrawn didn’t give him time to resolve either part of the quandary. “Come,” he said. “I expect Mr. Tanoo is ready to talk.”
Mr. Tanoo was.
“It wasn’t my idea,” he groaned, still draped across the steering wheel. “It was Polcery—she’s the one who came up with it.”
“Yet you were the one who refined the pre-spice for smuggling,” Thrawn said. “Having learned the technique from your brother.”
“They forced me,” he moaned. “I didn’t want to. But they forced me.”
“The technique is quite interesting,” Thrawn went on, as if Tanoo hadn’t spoken. “A small change in the formulation results in a product that appears to be scarn but with the effects drastically diminished. A man who is being forced to work against his will could easily sabotage their efforts and desires. Yet you did not.”
Tanoo raised himself from the steering wheel, and even in the darkness Eli could see the disgust in his face. He didn’t like being caught, and he especially didn’t like being caught by an alien. “You’re a clever little Imp, aren’t you? Fine; you caught us. Now what?”
“You will be turned over to a court for trial.”
“And what are you going to charge us all with?”
“Possession of an illegal substance,” Thrawn said. “Assault on Afe villages and their inhabitants.”
“I don’t think so,” Tanoo said. “See, there aren’t any raids going tonight—Polcery didn’t trust you not to put some stormtroopers on guard. So that’s off the list. And possession of pre-spice isn’t illegal.”
“Really,” Thrawn said. “Ensign?”
Eli already had his datapad out. A quick search…
Damn it. “He’s right, sir,” he said. “Pre-spice isn’t an illegal substance. There are too many other products it can be turned into that are perfectly safe and legal.”
“But the product you have created is illegal,” Thrawn pointed out.
“Maybe,” Tanoo said. “But you’ll never prove it. See, that’s what the others are doing tonight instead of poking at the Cyphari. They’re hiding all our product where no one will ever find it.”
“Perhaps.” Thrawn reached into the landspeeder and plucked the sensor from Tanoo’s belt. “Perhaps not.”
Tanoo barked a laugh. “If you think you’re going to search the enclave looking for our supply, you can forget it. That thing’s range is only twenty meters, and it only registers pre-spice, anyway. Face it: You’ve got nothing.”
“On the contrary, I have all I need,” Thrawn said calmly. “Twenty meters will be quite sufficient. One final question: Which of your group brought in Nightswan to advise you?”
Tanoo’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know about him?”
“Answer my question.”
Tanoo pursed his lips. “It was Scath,” he said. “She knew someone who knew him and thought he could help.”
“And so he did,” Thrawn said. “But not enough. His end will come. Yours has now arrived.”
And with perfect timing, the two shuttles and their three accompanying TIEs swooped past overhead. The shuttles curved around and angled toward the ground near Thrawn, the starfighters rising again into low-cover and high-cover formations.
Ten minutes later, the unconscious conspirators were aboard the first shuttle, binders firmly locked around their wrists and ankles. Eli used that time to check the landspeeders, hoping for contraband or something else that could be used against them in court.
But aside from the material in the collection bags, there was nothing. Unless there was some tweak in local law that made possession of pre-spice illegal, and if the others really had stayed home instead of raiding across the border, then Thrawn might very well have nothing.
“All secured, sir,” the stormtrooper commander reported as Tanoo trudged up the shuttle ramp under the blasters of a pair of watchful guards and disappeared inside. “Orders?”
“Take the prisoners back to the enclave by way of the Afe villages I have marked,” Thrawn said, handing him a data card. “If you see any fighting there you are to intervene on the side of the Afes. Do your best to take the human attackers alive, but you are free to use deadly force if you deem it necessary.”
“Yes, sir,” the commander said. “Do you want the other shuttle left here?”
“It will accompany you,” Thrawn said. “There will be more prisoners before the night is over, either in the villages or in the enclave. I will keep Lieutenant Gimm; you will take the other two TIEs as escort.”
“Yes, sir.” Stiffening briefly to attention, he strode toward the shuttles, giving orders as he went.
A few minutes later, the shuttles were back in the sky, the TIEs flying in flanking formation. “And now, we end this,” Thrawn said, fingering the sensor he’d taken from Tanoo. “Come.”
Lieutenant Gimm was waiting by his TIE, coming to attention as Thrawn and Eli neared him. “I’m told you need some fancy flying, Commander,” he said.
“Indeed,” Thrawn confirmed. “Running through the ground below our feet is a vein of material that is a precursor to a spice variety called scarn.”
The pilot stiffened a little further. “Yes, sir,” he said, his voice darkening. “I’ve heard of it.”
“This sensor will show its presence,” Thrawn continued. “It does, however, have only a minimal range, twenty meters or less, which will require ground-level flight. The vein itself almost certainly does not run straight, but twists and turns along its length. Do you think you can follow it?”
“May I see the sensor?”
Thrawn handed it over. The pilot peered at it, waved it back and forth around him, then nodded. “Yes, sir, I can,” he said. “May I suggest I also take a little gunnery practice as I fly over it?”
“Your enthusiasm is noted and appreciated, Lieutenant,” Thrawn said. “But I am told that the pre-spice runs deep in places, and I understand that a certain degree of heat is part of the refining process. We do not wish to accidentally turn it into the final, deadly product.”
“No, sir,” the pilot said. “If you just want it mapped, I can do that.”
“We will hardly be simply mapping, Lieutenant,” Thrawn assured him, pulling out his comlink. “As you said: gunnery practice. Lieutenant Commander Osgoode, this is Commander Thrawn. I have an interesting challenge for you.”
—
It was, Eli would afterward decide, the most insane military operation he’d ever seen or even heard of.
But it worked.
It was spectacular enough from the ground. It was probably even more so from low orbit. Gimm flew his TIE fighter low over the cropland, nearly brushing the tops of the stalks at times, then continued on over grazing lands, marshes, and more cropland. He flew in gentle curves or dizzying zigzags, wherever the trail led him, always following the line of pre-spice lurking beneath the soil.
And following along fifty meters behind him was a blazing wave of ground-shattering flame as the cleansing fire from the Thunder Wasp’s turbolasers carved out the same path, their focal point precisely matching the TIE’s maneuvers and burning the pre-spice into oblivion.
By morning, as Thrawn had predicted, it was over.
—