Thrawn was gazing at a mid-distance scan of the twin planets. "Stay with the program for now, Captain," he said. "Our preliminary data appear to have been adequate; you may choose targets at will. Remind your gunners once again that the plan is to hurt and frighten, not obliterate."
"Relay that," Pellaeon nodded toward the communications station. "Have TIE fighters so reminded, as well."
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Thrawn turn. "Master C'baoth?" he said. "What's the status of the attacks in the other two systems?"
"They proceed."
Frowning, Pellaeon swiveled around. It had been C'baoth's voice, but so throaty and strained as to be nearly unrecognizable.
As was, indeed, his appearance.
For a long moment Pellaeon stared at him, a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. C'baoth sat with unnatural stiffness, his eyes closed but visibly and rapidly moving behind the lids. His hands gripped the arms of his chair, and his lips were pressed so tightly together that the veins and cords in his neck stood out. "Are you all right, Master C'baoth?" he asked.
"Save your concern, Captain," Thrawn told him coldly. "He's doing what he enjoys most: controlling people."
C'baoth made a sound somewhere between a snort and a derisive chuckle. "I told you once, Grand Admiral Thrawn, that this is not true power."
"So you've said," Thrawn said, his tone neutral. "Can you tell what sort of resistance they're facing?"
C'baoth's frowning face frowned harder. "Not precisely. But neither force is in danger. That much I can feel in their minds."
"Good. Then have the Nemesis break off from the rest of its group and report back to the rendezvous to await us."
Pellaeon frowned at the Grand Admiral. "Sir-?"
Thrawn turned to him, a warning gleam in his glowing eyes. "Attend to your duties, Captain," he said.
-and with a sudden flash of insight, Pellaeon realized that this multiedged attack on New Republic territory was more than simply part of the setup for the Sluis Van raid. It was, in addition, a test. A test of C'baoth's abilities, yes; but also a test of his willingness to accept orders. "Yes, Admiral," Pellaeon murmured, and turned back to his displays.
The Chimaera was in range now, and tiny sparks started to appear on the tactical holo as the ship's huge turbolaser batteries began firing. Communications stations flared and went black; planetside industrial targets flared, went dark, then flared again as secondary fires were ignited. A pair of old Carrack-class light cruisers swept in from starboard, the Chimera's TIE fighter screen breaking formation to engage them. Off in the distance, the Stormhawk's batteries were blazing against an orbiting defense platform; and even as Pellaeon watched, the station flared into vapor. The battle seemed to be going well.
Remarkably well, in fact . . .
An unpleasant feeling began to stir in the pit of Pellaeon's stomach as he checked his board's real-time status readout. Thus far the Imperial forces had lost only three TIE fighters and sustained superficial damage to the Star Destroyers, compared to eight of the enemy's line ships and eighteen of its fighters gone. Granted, the Imperials vastly outgunned the defenders. But still . . .
Slowly, reluctantly, Pellaeon reached to his board. A few weeks back he'd made up a statistical composite of the Chimera's battle profiles for the past year. He called it up, superimposed it over the current analysis.
There was no mistake. In every single category and subcategory of speed, coordination, efficiency, and accuracy, the Chimaera and its crew were running no less than 40 percent more effective than usual.
He turned to look at C'baoth's strained face, an icy shiver running up his back. He'd never really bought into Thrawn's theory as to how and why the Fleet had lost the Battle of Endor. Certainly he'd never wanted to believe it. But now, suddenly, the issue was no longer open to argument.
And with the bulk of his attention and power on the task of mentally communicating with two other task forces nearly four light-years away, C'baoth still had enough left to do all this.
Pellaeon had wondered, with a certain private contempt, just what had given the old man the right to add the word Master to his title. Now, he knew.
"Getting another set of transmissions," the communications officer reported. "A new group of midrange planetary cruisers launching."
"Have the Stormhawk move to intercept," Thrawn ordered.
"Yes, sir. We've now also pinpointed the location of their distress transmissions, Admiral."
Shaking away his musings, Pellaeon glanced across the holo. The newly flashing circle was on the farthest of the system's moons. "Order Squadron Four to move in and destroy it," he ordered.
"Belay that," Thrawn said. "We'll be long gone before any reinforcements can arrive. We might as well let the Rebellion waste its resources rushing useless forces to the rescue. In fact-" the Grand Admiral consulted his watch "-I believe it's time for us to take our leave. Order fighters back to their ships; all ships to lightspeed as soon as their fighters are aboard."
Pellaeon tapped keys at his station, giving the Chimera's status a quick prelightspeed check. Another bit of conventional military wisdom was that Star Destroyers should play the role of mobile siege stations in this kind of full-planet engagement; that to employ them in hit-and-fade operations was both wasteful and potentially dangerous.
But then, proponents of such theories had obviously never watched someone like Grand Admiral Thrawn in action.
"Order the other two forces to break off their attacks, as well," Thrawn told C'baoth. "I presume you are in close enough contact to do that?"
"You question me too much, Grand Admiral Thrawn," C'baoth said, his voice even huskier than it had been earlier. "Far too much."
"I question all that is not yet familiar to me," Thrawn countered, swiveling back around again. "Call them back to the rendezvous point."
"As you command," the other hissed.
Pellaeon glanced back at C'baoth. Testing the other's abilities under combat conditions was all good and proper. But there was such a thing as pushing too far.
"He must learn who's in command here," Thrawn said quietly, as if reading Pellaeon's thoughts.
"Yes, sir," Pellaeon nodded, forcing his voice to remain steady. Thrawn had proved time and again that he knew what he was doing. Still, Pellaeon couldn't help but wonder uneasily if the Grand Admiral recognized the extent of the power he'd awakened from its sleep on Wayland.
Thrawn nodded. "Good. Have there been any further leads on those mole miners I asked for?"
"Ah-no, sir." A year ago, too, he would have found a strange unreality in conversing about less than urgent matters while in the middle of a combat situation. "At least not in anything like the numbers you want. I think the Athega system's still our best bet. Or it will be if we can find a way around the problems of the sunlight intensity there."
"The problems will be minimal," Thrawn said with easy confidence. "If the jump is done with sufficient accuracy, the judicator will be in direct sunlight for only a few minutes each way. Its hull can certainly handle that much. We'll simply need to take a few days first to shield the viewports and remove external sensors and communications equipment."
Pellaeon nodded, swallowing his next question. There would, of course, be none of the difficulties that would normally arise from blinding and deafening a Star Destroyer in that way. Not as long as C'baoth was with them.
"Grand Admiral Thrawn?"
Thrawn turned around. "Yes, Master C'baoth?"
"Where are my Jedi, Grand Admiral Thrawn? You promised me that your tame Noghri would bring me my Jedi."
Out of the corner of his eye, Pellaeon saw Rukh stir. "Patience, Master C'baoth," Thrawn told him. "Their preparations took time, but they're now complete. They await merely the proper time to act."
"That time had best be soon," C'baoth warned him. "I grow tired of waiting."
Thrawn threw a glance at Pellaeon, a quietly smoldering look in his glowing red eyes. "As do we all," he said qu
ietly.
Far ahead of the freighter Wild Karrde, one of the Imperial Star Destroyers centered in the cockpit's forward viewport gave a flicker of pseudomotion and disappeared. "They're leaving," Mara announced.
"What, already?" Karrde said from behind her, his voice frowning.
"Already," she confirmed, keying the helm display for tactical. "One of the Star Destroyers just went to lightspeed; the others are breaking off and starting prelightspeed maneuvering."
"Interesting," Karrde murmured, coming up to look out the viewport over her shoulder. "A hit-and-fade attack-and with Star Destroyers, yet. Not something you see every day."
"I heard about something like that happening over at the Draukyze system a couple of months back," the copilot, a bulky man named Lachton, offered. "Same kind of hit-and-fade, except there was only one Star Destroyer on that one."
"At a guess, I'd say we're seeing Grand Admiral Thrawn's influence on Imperial strategy," Karrde said, his tone thoughtful with just a hint of concern mixed in. "Strange, though. He seems to be taking an inordinate amount of risk for the potential benefits involved. I wonder what exactly he's up to."
"Whatever it is, it'll be something complicated," Mara told him, hearing the bitterness in her voice. "Thrawn was never one to do things simply. Even back in the old days when the Empire was capable of style or subtlety, he stood out above the rest."
"You can't afford to be simple when your territory's shrinking the way the Empire's has been." Karrde paused, and Mara could feel him gazing down at her. "You seem to know something about the Grand Admiral."
"I know something about a lot of things," she countered evenly. "That's why you're grooming me to be your lieutenant, remember?"
"Touche," he said easily. "-there goes another one."
Mara looked out the viewport in time to see a third Star Destroyer go to lightspeed. One more to go. "Shouldn't we get moving?" she asked Karrde. "That last one will be gone in a minute."
"Oh, we're scratching the delivery," he told her. "I just thought it might be instructive to watch the battle, as long as we happened to be here at the right time."
Mara frowned up at him. "What do you mean, we're scratching the delivery? They're expecting us."
"Yes, they are," he nodded. "Unfortunately, as of right now, the whole system is also expecting a small hornet's nest of New Republic ships. Hardly the sort of atmosphere one would like to fly into with a shipload of contraband materials."
"What makes you think they'll come?" Mara demanded. "They're not going to be in time to do anything."
"No, but that's not really the point of such a show," Karrde said. "The point is to score domestic political gains by bustling around, presenting a comforting display of force, and otherwise convincing the locals that something like this can never happen again."
"And promising to help clean up the wreckage," Lachton put in.
"That goes without saying," Karrde agreed dryly. "Regardless, it's not a situation we really want to fly into. We'll send a transmission from our next stop telling them we'll try to make delivery again in a week."
"I still don't like it," Mara insisted. "We promised them we'd do it. We promised."
There was a short pause. "It's standard procedure," Karrde told her, a touch of curiosity almost hidden beneath the usual urbane smoothness of his voice. "I'm sure they'd prefer late delivery to losing the entire shipment."
With an effort, Mara forced the black haze of memory away. Promises . . . "I suppose so," she conceded, blinking her attention back to the control board. While they'd been talking, the last Star Destroyer had apparently gone to lightspeed, leaving nothing behind but enraged and impotent defenders and mass destruction. A mess for the New Republic's politicians and military people to clean up.
For a moment she gazed out at the distant planets. Wondering if Luke Skywalker might be among those the New Republic would send to help clean up that mess.
"Whenever you're ready, Mara."
With an effort, she shook away the thought. "Yes, sir," she said, reaching for the board. Not yet, she told herself silently. Not yet. But soon. Very, very soon.
The remote swooped; hesitated; swooped again; hesitated again; swooped once more and fired. Leia, swinging her new lightsaber in an overlarge arc, was just a shade too slow. "Gah!" she grunted, taking a step backward.
"You're not giving the Force enough control," Luke told her. "You have to- Wait a minute."
Reaching out with the Force, he put the remote on pause. He remembered vividly that first practice session on the Falcon, when he'd had to concentrate on Ben Kenobi's instructions while at the same time keeping a wary eye on the remote. Doing both together hadn't been easy.
But perhaps that had been the whole idea. Perhaps a lesson learned under stress was learned better.
He wished he knew.
"I'm giving it all the control I can," Leia said, rubbing her arm where the remote's stinger blast had caught her. "I just don't have the proper techniques down yet." She impaled him with a look. "Or else I just wasn't cut out for this sort of fighting."
"You can learn it," Luke said firmly. "I learned it, and I never had any of that self-defense training you got when you were growing up on Alderaan."
"Maybe that's the problem," Leia said. "Maybe all those old fighting reflexes are getting in my way."
"I suppose that's possible," Luke admitted, wishing he knew that, too. "In that case, the sooner you start unlearning them, the better. Now: ready-"
The door buzzed. "It's Han," Leia said, stepping away from the remote and closing down her lightsaber. "Come in," she called.
"Hi," Han said as he walked into the room, glancing in turn at Leia and Luke. He wasn't smiling. "How's the lesson going?"
"Not bad," Luke said.
"Don't ask," Leia countered, frowning at her husband. "What's wrong?"
"The Imperials," Han said sourly. "They just pulled a three-prong hit-and-fade on three systems in the Sluis sector. Some place called Bpfassh and two unpronounceable ones."
Luke whistled softly. "Three at once. Getting pretty cocky, aren't they?"
"That seems par for them these days." Leia shook her head, the skin around her eyes tight with concentration. "They're up to something, Han-I can feel it. Something big; something dangerous." She waved her hands helplessly. "But I can't for the life of me figure out what it could be."
"Yeah, Ackbar's been saying the same thing," Han nodded. "Problem is he's got nothing to back it up. Except for the style and tactics, this is all pretty much the same rear-guard harassment the Empire's been pulling for probably the last year and a half."
"I know," Leia gritted. "But don't sell Ackbar short-he's got good military instincts. No matter what certain other people say."
Han cocked an eyebrow. "Hey, sweetheart, I'm on your side. Remember?"
She smiled wanly. "Sorry. How bad was the damage?"
Han shrugged. "Not nearly as bad as it could have been. Especially considering that they hit each place with four Star Destroyers. But all three systems are pretty shook up."
"I can imagine," Leia sighed. "Let me guess: Mon Mothma wants me to go out there and assure them that the New Republic really is able and willing to protect them."
"How'd you guess?" Han growled. "Chewie's getting the Falcon prepped now."