Star Wars - Thrawn Trilogy - Dark Force Rising 02 (33 page)

Pellaeon nodded, feeling the stirrings of excitement again despite his best efforts to remain unemotional about this. The Katana fleet. Two hundred Dreadnaughts, just sitting there waiting for the Empire to take possession:

"I have the feeling, Admiral," he said, "that our final offensive against the Rebellion may be ready to launch a bit ahead of schedule."

Thrawn smiled. "I believe, Captain, that you may be right."

They had been sitting around the table in the maitrakh's house since early morning, studying maps and floor plans and diagrams, searching for a plan of action that would be more than simply a complicated way of surrendering. Finally, just here noon, Leia called a halt. "I can't look at this anymore," she told Chewbacca, closing her eyes briefly and rubbing her thumbs against throbbing temples. "Let's go outside for a while."

Chewbacca growled an objection. "Yes, of course there are risks," she agreed wearily. "But the whole village knows we're here, and no one's told the authorities yet. Come on; it'll be okay." Stepping to the door, she opened it and went out. Chewbacca grumbled under his breath, hut followed after her.

The late morning sunshine was blazing brightly down, with only a scattering of high clouds to interfere. Leia glanced upward at the clear sky, shivering involuntarily at the sudden sensation of nakedness that flooded in on her. A clear sky, all the way up to space:but it was all right. A little before midnight the maitrakh had brought the news of the Star Destroyer's imminent departure, a departure which she and Chewbacca had been able to watch with the macrobinoculars from the Wookiee's kit. It had been their first break since Khabarakh's arrest: just as it had begun to look like she and Chewbacca would be pinned down here until it was too late, the Grand Admiral had abruptly left.

It was an unexpected gift:a gift which Leia couldn't help but view with suspicion. From the way the Grand Admiral had been talking in the dukha she'd expected him to stay here until Khabarakh's humiliation period had ended, after which the shipboard interrogation would begin. Perhaps he'd changed his mind and had taken Khabath back early, with a backhand gesture of contempt for Noghri tradition. But the maitrakh had said that Khabarakh was still on public display in the center of Nystao.

Unless she was lying about that. Or was herself being lied to about it. But if the Grand Admiral suspected enough to lie to the maitrakh, why hadn't a legion of Imperial troops already swooped down on them?

But he was a Grand Admiral, with all the cunning and subtlety and tactical genius that the title implied. This whole thing could be a convoluted, carefully orchestrated trap:and if it was, chances were she would never even see it until it had been sprung around her.

Stop it! she ordered herself firmly. Letting herself get caught up in the mythos of infallibility that had been built up around the Grand Admirals would gain her nothing but mental paralysis. Even Grand Admirals could make mistakes, and there were any number of reasons why he might have had to leave Honoghr. Perhaps some part of the campaign against the New Republic had gone sour, requiring his attention elsewhere. Or perhaps he'd simply gone off on some short errand, intending to be back in a day or two.

Either way, it meant that the time to strike was now. If they could only find something to strike at.

Beside her, Chewbacca growled a suggestion. "We can't do that," Leia shook her head. "It'd be no better than a frill-blown attack on the spaceport. We have to keep damage to Nystao and its people to an absolute minimum."

The Wookiee snarled impatiently.

"I don't know what else to do," she snapped back. "All know is that death and massive destruction won't do anything but put us back where we were before we came here. It certainly won't convince the Noghri that they should leave the Empire and come over to our side."

She looked out past the cluster of huts at the distant hills and the brown kholm-grass rippling in the breeze. Glinting in the sunlight, the squat box shapes of a dozen decon droids were hard at work, scooping up a quarter cubic meter of topsoil with each bite, running it through some exotic catalytic magic in their interiors, and dumping the cleansed product out the back. Slowly but steadily bringing the people of Honoghr back from the edge of the destruction they'd faced:and a highly visible reminder, if anyone needed it, of the Empire's benevolence toward them.

"Lady Vader," a gravelly voice mewed from just behind her.

Leia jumped. "Good morning, maitrakh," she said, turning and giving the Noghri a solemn nod. "I trust you are well this morning?"

"I feel no sickness," the other said shortly.

"Good," Leia said, the word sounding rather lame. The maitrakh hadn't been so impolite as to say anything out loud, but it was clear enough that she considered herself to be in a no-win situation here, with dishonor and perhaps even death waiting for her family as soon as the Grand Admiral discovered what Khabarakh had done. It was probably only a matter of time, Leia knew, before she came to the conclusion that turning the intruders over to the Empire herself would be the least disastrous course still open to her.

"Your plans," the maitrakh said. "How do they go?"

Leia glanced at Chewbacca. "We're making progress," she said. It was true enough, after a fashion: the elimination of every approach they'd come up with did technically qualify as progress. "We still have a long way to go, though."

"Yes," the maitrakh said. She looked out past the buildings. "Your droid has spent much time with the other machines."

"There isn't as much here for him to do as I'd thought there would be," Leia said. "You and many of your people speak Basic better than I'd anticipated."

"The Grand Admiral has taught us well."

"As did my father, the Lord Darth Vader, before him," Leia reminded her.

The maitrakh was silent a moment. "Yes," she conceded reluctantly.

Leia felt a chill run up her back. The first step in a betrayal would be to put emotional distance between the Noghri and their former lord.

"That area will be finished soon," the maitrakh said, pointing to the laboring decon droids. "If they finish within the next ten days, we will be able to plant there this season.

"Will the extra land be enough to make you self-sufficient?" Leia asked.

"It will help. But not enough."

Leia nodded, feeling a fresh surge of frustration. To her, the Empire's scheme was as blatant as it was cynical: with careful tuning of the whole decontamination process, they could keep the Noghri on the verge of independence indefinitely without ever letting them quite make it over that line. She knew it; the maitrakh herself suspected it. But as for proving it:

"Chewie, are you familiar at all with decon droids?" she asked suddenly. This thought had occurred to her once before, but she'd never gotten around to following up on it. "Enough that you could figure out how long it would take the number of droids they have on Honoghr to decontaminate this much land?"

The Wookiee growled an affirmative, and launched into a rundown of the relevant numbers clearly, the question had occurred to him, too. "I don't need the complete analysis right now," Leia interrupted the stream of estimates and extrapolations and rules of thumb. "Have you got a bottom line?"

He did. Eight years.

"I see," Leia murmured, the brief flicker of hope fading back into the overall gloom. "That would have put it right about the height of the war, wouldn't it?"

"You still believe the Grand Admiral has deceived us?" the maitrakh accused.

"I know he's deceiving you," Leia retorted. "I just can't prove it."

The maitrakh was silent for a minute. "What then will you do?"

Leia took a deep breath, exhaled it quietly. "We have to leave Honoghr. That means breaking into the spaceport at Nystao and stealing a ship."

"There should be no difficulty in that for a daughter of the Lord Darth Vader."

Leia grimaced, thinking of how the maitrakh had effortlessly sneaked up on them a minute ago. The guards at the spaceport would be younger and far better trained. These people must have been fantastic hunters before the Emperor turned them into his private killing machines. "Stealing a ship won't be too hard," she told the maitrakh, aware of just how far she was stretching the truth here. "The difficulty arises from the fact that we have to take Khabarakh with us."

The maitrakh stopped short. "What is that you say?" she hissed.

"It's the only way," Leia said. "If Khabarakh is left to the Empire, they'll make him tell everything that's occurred here. And when that happens, he and you will both die. Perhaps your whole family with you. We can't allow that."

"Then you face death yourselves," the maitrakh said. "The guards will not easily allow Khabarakh to be freed."

"I know," Leia said, acutely aware of the two small lives she carried within her. "We'll have to take that risk."

"There will be no honor in such a sacrifice," the old Noghri all but snarled. "The clan Kihm'bar will not carve it into history. Neither will the Noghri people long remember."

"I'm not doing it for the praise of the Noghri people," Leia sighed, suddenly weary of banging her head against alien misunderstandings. She'd been doing it in one form or another, it seemed, for the whole of her life. "I'm doing it because I'm tired of people dying for my mistakes. I asked Khabarakh to bring me to Honoghr-what's happened is my responsibility. I can't just run off and leave you to the Grand Admiral's vengeance."

"Our lord the Grand Admiral would not deal so harshly with us."

Leia turned to look the maitrakh straight in the eye. "The Empire once destroyed an entire world because of me," she said quietly. "I don't ever want that to happen again."

She held the maitrakh's gaze a moment longer, then turned away, her mind twisted in a tangle of conflicting thoughts and emotions. Was she doing the right thing?

She'd risked her life countless times before, but always for her comrades in the Rebellion and for a cause she believed in. To do the same for servants of the Empire-even servants who'd been duped into that role-was something else entirely. Chewbacca didn't like any of this; she could tell that much from his sense and the stiff way he stood at her side. But he would go along, driven by his own sense of honor and the life-debt he had sworn to Han.

She blinked back sudden tears, her hand going to the bulge of her belly. Han would understand. He would argue against such a risk, but down deep he would understand. Otherwise, he wouldn't have let her come here in the first place.

If she didn't return, he would almost certainly blame himself.

"The humiliation period has been extended for four more days," the maitrakh murmured beside her. "In two days' time the moons will give their least light. It would be best to wait until then."

Leia frowned at her. The maitrakh met her gaze steadily, her alien face unreadable. "Are you offering me your help?" Leia asked.

"There is honor in you, Lady Vader," the maitrakh said, her voice quiet. "For the life and honor of my thirdson, I will go with you. Perhaps we will die together."

Leia nodded, her heart aching. "Perhaps we will."

But she wouldn't. The maitrakh and Khabarakh might die, and probably Chewbacca beside them. But not her. The Lady Vader they would take alive, and save as a gift for their lord the Grand Admiral.

Who would smile, and speak politely, and take her children away from her.

She looked out at the fields, wishing Han were here. And wondered if he would ever know what had happened to her.

"Come," the maitrakh said. "Let us return to the house. There are many things about Nystao which you must yet learn."

"I'm glad you finally called," Winter's voice came over the Lady Luck's speaker, distorted slightly by a not quite attuned scrambler package. "I was starting to worry."

"We're okay-we just had to run silent awhile," Han assured her. "You got trouble back there?"

"No more than when you left," she said. "The Imperials are still hitting our shipping out there, and no one's figured out what to do about it. Fey'lya's trying to persuade the Council that he could do a better job of defense than Ackbar's people, but so far Mon Mothma hasn't taken him up on the offer. I get the feeling that some of the Council members are starting to have second thoughts about his motivations for all of this."

"Good," Han growled. "Maybe they'll tell him to shut up and put Ackbar back in command."

"Unfortunately, Fey'lya's still got too much support to ignore completely," Winter said. "Particularly among the military."

"Yeah." Han braced himself. "I don't suppose you ve heard from Leia."

"Not yet," Winter said; and Han could hear the underlying tension in her voice. She was worried, too. "But I did hear from Luke. That's why I wanted to get in touch with you, in fact."

"Is he in trouble?"

"I don't know-the message didn't say. He wants you to rendezvous with him on New Cov."

"New Cov?" Han frowned down at the cloudspeckled planet turning beneath them. "Why?"

"The message didn't say. Just that he'd meet you at the, quote, money-changing center, unquote.

"The-?" Han shifted his frown to Lando. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"He's talking about the Mishra tapcafe in Ilic where he and I met while you were following Breil'lya," Lando said. "Private joke-I'll fill you in later."

"So that means there's no question Luke sent the message?" Winter asked.

"Wait a minute," Han put in as Lando started to answer. "Didn't you talk to him personally?"

"No, the message came in printed," Winter said. "Not on any scrambler, either."

"He doesn't have a scrambler on his X-wing, does he?" Lando asked.

"No, but he could get a message coded at any New Republic diplomatic post," Han said slowly. "Is this private joke something only you two would know about?"