Dark Force Rising

by Timothy Zahn

  Are you willing to stake your life on that assessment? Mara thought sourly. But she kept the retort to herself. He was probably right; and anyway, if the Chimaera or any of its TIE fighters started toward Wild Karrde, they would have no trouble punching the engines up to power and going to lightspeed well ahead of the attack.

  The logic and tactics seemed clean. But still, Mara could feel something nagging at the back of her mind. Something that didn’t feel good about all this.

  Gritting her teeth, she adjusted the ship’s sensors to their highest sensitivity and checked once more that the engine prestart sequence was keyed in and ready. And then settled in to wait.

  The scanning crew was fast, efficient, and thorough; and it took them just over thirty minutes to come up completely dry.

  “Well, so much for that.” Pellaeon grimaced as he watched the negative reports scroll up his display. A good practice session for the ground forces, perhaps, but otherwise the whole exercise seemed to have been pretty useless. “Unless your observers have picked up any reactions in Hyllyard City,” he added, turning to face Thrawn.

  The Grand Admiral’s glowing red eyes were on his displays. “There was a small twitch, as a matter of fact,” he said. “Cut off almost before it began, but I think the implications are clear.”

  Well, that was something, anyway. “Yes, sir. Shall I have Surveillance begin equipping a long-term ground team?”

  “Patience, Captain,” Thrawn said. “It may not be necessary, after all. Key for a midrange scan, and tell me what you see.”

  Pellaeon swiveled back to his command board and tapped for the appropriate readout. There was Myrkr itself, of course, and the standard TIE fighter defense cloud ranged around the Chimaera. The only other object anywhere within midrange distance— “You mean that little asteroid out there?”

  “That’s the one,” Thrawn nodded. “Nothing remarkable about it, is there? No, don’t do a sensor focus,” he added, almost before the thought of doing one had even occurred to Pellaeon. “We wouldn’t want to prematurely flush our quarry, would we?”

  “Our quarry?” Pellaeon repeated, frowning at the sensor data again. The routine sensor scans that had been done of the asteroid three hours earlier had come up negative, and nothing could have sneaked up on it since then without being detected. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t see any indication that anything’s out there.”

  “I don’t either,” Thrawn agreed. “But it’s the only sizable cover available for nearly ten million kilometers around Myrkr. There’s really no other place for Karrde to watch our operation from.”

  Pellaeon pursed his lips. “Your permission, Admiral, but I doubt Karrde is foolish enough to just sit around waiting for us to arrive.”

  The glowing red eyes narrowed, just a bit. “You forget, Captain,” he said softly, “that I’ve met the man. More important, I’ve seen the sort of artwork he collects.” He turned back to his displays. “No; he’s out there. I’m sure of it. Talon Karrde is not merely a smuggler, you see. Perhaps not even primarily a smuggler. His real love is not goods or money but information. More than anything else in the galaxy, he craves knowledge … and the knowledge of what we have or have not found here is too valuable a gem for him to pass up.”

  Pellaeon studied the Grand Admiral’s profile. It was, in his opinion, a pretty tenuous leap of logic. But on the other hand, he’d seen too many similar leaps borne out not to take this one seriously. “Shall I order a TIE fighter squadron to investigate, sir?”

  “As I said, Captain, patience,” Thrawn said. “Even in sensor stealth mode with all engines shut down, he’ll have made sure he can power up and escape before any attack force could reach him.” He smiled at Pellaeon. “Or rather, any attack force from the Chimaera.”

  A stray memory clicked: Thrawn, reaching for his comm just as Pellaeon was giving the ground forces the order to attack. “You sent a message to the rest of the fleet,” he said. “Timing it against my attack order to mask the transmission.”

  Thrawn’s blue-black eyebrows lifted a fraction. “Very good, Captain. Very good, indeed.”

  Pellaeon felt a touch of warmth on his cheeks. The Grand Admiral’s compliments were few and far between. “Thank you, sir.”

  Thrawn nodded. “More precisely, my message was to a single ship, the Constrainer. It will arrive in approximately ten minutes. At which point”—his eyes glittered—“we’ll see just how accurate my reading of Karrde has been.”

  Over the Wild Karrde’s bridge speakers, the reports from the scanning crew were beginning to taper off. “Doesn’t sound like they’ve found anything,” Aves commented.

  “Like you said, we were thorough,” Mara reminded him, hardly hearing her own words. The nameless thing nagging at the back of her mind seemed to be getting stronger. “Can we get out of here now?” she asked, turning to look at Karrde.

  He frowned down at her. “Try to relax, Mara. They can’t possibly know we’re here. There’s been no sensor-focus probe of the asteroid, and without one there’s no way for them to detect this ship.”

  “Unless a Star Destroyer’s sensors are better than you think,” Mara retorted.

  “We know all about their sensors,” Aves soothed. “Ease up, Mara, Karrde knows what he’s doing. The Wild Karrde has probably the tightest sensor stealth mode this side of—”

  He broke off as the bridge door opened behind them; and Mara turned just as Karrde’s two pet vornskrs bounded into the room.

  Dragging, very literally, their handler behind them.

  “What are you doing here, Chin?” Karrde asked.

  “Sorry, Capt’,” Chin puffed, digging his heels into the deck and leaning back against the taut leashes. The effort was only partially successful; the predators were still pulling him slowly forward. “I couldn’t stop them. I thought maybe they wanted to see you, hee?”

  “What’s the matter with you two, anyway?” Karrde chided the animals, squatting down in front of them. “Don’t you know we’re busy?”

  The vornskrs didn’t look at him. Didn’t even seem to notice his presence, for that matter. They continued staring straight ahead as if he wasn’t even there.

  Staring directly at Mara.

  “Hey,” Karrde said, reaching over to slap one of the animals lightly across the muzzle. “I’m talking to you, Sturm. What’s gotten into you, anyway?” He glanced along their unblinking line of sight—

  Paused for a second and longer look. “Are you doing something, Mara?”

  Mara shook her head, a cold shiver tingling up her back. She’d seen that look before, on many of the wild vornskrs she’d run into during that long three-day trek through the Myrkr forest with Luke Skywalker.

  Except that those vornskr stares hadn’t been directed at her. They’d been reserved instead for Skywalker. Usually just before they attacked him.

  “That’s Mara, Sturm,” Karrde told the animal, speaking to it as he might a child. “Mara. Come on, now—you saw her all the time back home.”

  Slowly, almost reluctantly, Sturm stopped his forward pull and turned his attention to his master. “Mara,” Karrde repeated, looking the vornskr firmly in the eye. “A friend. You hear that, Drang?” he added, reaching over to grip the other vornskr’s muzzle. “She’s a friend. Understand?”

  Drang seemed to consider that. Then, as reluctantly as Sturm had, he lowered his head and stopped pulling. “That’s better,” Karrde said, scratching both vornskrs briefly behind their ears and standing up again. “Better take them back down, Chin. Maybe walk them around the main hold—give them some exercise.”

  “If I can find a clear track through all the stuff in there, hee?” Chin grunted, twitching back on the leashes. “Come on, littles—we go now.”

  With only a slight hesitation the two vornskrs allowed him to take them off the bridge. Karrde watched as the door shut behind them. “I wonder what that was all about,” he said, giving Mara a thoughtful look.

  “I don’t know,” she tol
d him, hearing the tightness in her voice. With the temporary distraction now gone, the strange dread she’d been feeling was back again in full force. She swiveled back to her board, half expecting to see a squadron of TIE fighters bearing down on them.

  But there was nothing. Only the Chimaera, still sitting harmlessly out there in orbit around Myrkr. No threat any of the Wild Karrde’s instruments could detect. But the tingling was getting stronger and stronger …

  And suddenly she could sit still no longer. Reaching out to the control board, she keyed for engine prestart.

  “Mara!” Aves yelped, jumping in his seat as if he’d been stung. “What in—?”

  “They’re coming,” Mara snarled back, hearing the strain of a half dozen tangled emotions in her voice. The die was irrevocably cast—her activation of the Wild Karrde’s engines would have set sensors screaming all over the Chimaera. Now there was nowhere to go but out.

  She looked up at Karrde, suddenly afraid of what his expression might be saying. But he was just standing there looking down at her, a slightly quizzical frown on his face. “They don’t appear to be coming,” he pointed out mildly.

  She shook her head, feeling the pleading in her eyes. “You have to believe me,” she said, uncomfortably aware that she didn’t really believe it herself. “They’re getting ready to attack.”

  “I believe you,” he said soothingly. Or perhaps he, too, recognized that there weren’t any other choices left. “Aves: lightspeed calculation. Take the easiest course setting that’s not anywhere toward Rishi; we’ll stop and reset later.”

  “Karrde—”

  “Mara is second in command,” Karrde cut him off. “As such, she has the right and the duty to make important decisions.”

  “Yeah, but—” Aves stopped, the last word coming out pinched as he strangled it off. “Yeah,” he said between clenched teeth. Throwing a glower at Mara, he turned to the nav computer and got to work.

  “You might as well get us moving, Mara,” Karrde continued, stepping over to the vacant communications chair and sitting down. “Keep the asteroid between us and the Chimaera as long as you can.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mara said. Her tangle of emotions was starting to dissolve now, leaving a mixture of anger and profound embarrassment in its wake. She’d done it again. Listened to her inner feelings—tried to do things she knew full well she couldn’t do—and in the process had once again wound up clutching the sharp end of the bayonet.

  And it was probably the last she’d hear of being Karrde’s second in command, too. Command unity in front of Aves was one thing, but once they were out of here and he could get her alone there was going to be hell to pay. She’d be lucky if he didn’t bounce her out of his organization altogether. Jabbing viciously at her board, she swung the Wild Karrde around, turning its nose away from the asteroid and starting to drive toward deep space—

  And with a flicker of pseudomotion, something big shot in from lightspeed, dropping neatly into normal space not twenty kilometers away.

  An Imperial Interdictor Cruiser.

  Aves yelped a startled-sounding curse. “We got company,” he barked.

  “I see it,” Karrde said. As cool as ever … but Mara could hear the tinge of surprise in his voice, too. “What’s our time to lightspeed?”

  “It’ll be another minute,” Aves said tautly. “There’s a lot of junk in the outer system for the computer to work through.”

  “We have a race, then,” Karrde said. “Mara?”

  “Up to point seven three,” she said, nursing as much power as she could out of the still-sluggish engines. He was right; it was indeed going to be a race. With their four huge gravity-wave generators capable of simulating planet-sized masses, Interdictor Cruisers were the Empire’s weapon of choice for trapping an enemy ship in normal space while TIE fighters pounded it to rubble. But coming in fresh out of lightspeed itself, the Interdictor would need another minute before it could power up those generators. If she could get the Wild Karrde out of range by then …

  “More visitors,” Aves announced. “A couple squadrons of TIE fighters coming from the Chimaera.”

  “We’re up to point eight six power,” Mara reported. “We’ll be ready for lightspeed as soon as the nav computer gives me a course.”

  “Interdictor status?”

  “Grav generators are powering up,” Aves said. On Mara’s tactical display a ghostly cone appeared, showing the area where the lightspeed-dampening field would soon exist. She changed course slightly, aiming for the nearest edge, and risked a glance at the nav computer display. Almost ready. The hazy grav cone was rapidly becoming more substantial …

  The computer scope pinged. Mara wrapped her hand around the three hyperspace control levers at the front of the control board and gently pulled them toward her. The Wild Karrde shuddered slightly, and for a second it seemed that the Interdictor had won their deadly race. Then, abruptly, the stars outside burst into starlines.

  They’d made it.

  Aves heaved a sigh of relief as the starlines faded into the mottled sky of hyperspace. “Talk about slicing the my-nock close to the hull. How do you suppose they tumbled that we were out there, anyway?”

  “No idea,” Karrde said, his voice cool. “Mara?”

  “I don’t know, either.” Mara kept her eyes on her displays, not daring to look at either of them. “Thrawn may have just been playing a hunch. He does that sometimes.”

  “Lucky for us he’s not the only one who gets hunches,” Aves offered, his voice sounding a little strange. “Nice going, Mara. Sorry I jumped on you.”

  “Yes,” Karrde seconded. “A very good job indeed.”

  “Thanks,” Mara muttered, keeping her eyes on her control board and blinking back the tears that had suddenly come to her eyes. So it was back. She’d hoped fervently that her locating of Skywalker’s X-wing out in deep space had been an isolated event. A fluke, more his doing than hers.

  But no. It was all coming back, as it had so many times before in the past five years. The hunches and sensory flickers, the urges and the compulsions.

  Which meant that, very soon now, the dreams would probably be starting again, too.

  Angrily, she swiped at her eyes, and with an effort unclenched her jaw. It was a familiar enough pattern … but this time things were going to be different. Always before there’d been nothing she could do about the voices and urges except to suffer through the cycle. To suffer, and to be ready to break out of whatever niche she’d managed to carve for herself when she finally betrayed herself to those around her.

  But she wasn’t a serving girl in a Phorliss cantina this time, or a come-up flector for a swoop gang on Caprioril, or even a hyperdrive mechanic stuck in the backwater of the Ison Corridor. She was second in command to the most powerful smuggler in the galaxy, with the kind of resources and mobility she hadn’t had since the death of the Emperor.

  The kind of resources that would let her find Luke Skywalker again. And kill him.

  Maybe then the voices would stop.

  For a long minute Thrawn stood at the bridge viewport, looking out at the distant asteroid and the now superfluous Interdictor Cruiser near it. It was, Pellaeon thought uneasily, almost the identical posture the Grand Admiral had assumed when Luke Skywalker had so recently escaped a similar trap. Holding his breath, Pellaeon stared at Thrawn’s back, wondering if another of the Chimaera’s crewers was about to be executed for this failure.

  Thrawn turned around. “Interesting,” he said, his voice conversational. “Did you note the sequence of events, Captain?”

  “Yes, sir,” Pellaeon said cautiously. “The target was already powering up before the Constrainer arrived.”

  “Yes,” Thrawn nodded. “And it implies one of three things. Either Karrde was about to leave anyway, or else he panicked for some reason—” The red eyes glittered. “Or else he was somehow warned off.”

  Pellaeon felt his back stiffen. “I hope you’re not suggesting, sir, that one o
f our people tipped him.”

  “No, of course not.” Thrawn’s lip twitched slightly. “Loyalties of your crewers aside, no one on the Chimaera knew the Constrainer was on its way; and no one on the Constrainer could have sent any messages here without our detecting them.” He stepped over to his command station and sat down, a thoughtful look on his face. “An interesting puzzle, Captain. One I’ll have to give some thought to. In the meantime, we have more pressing matters. The task of acquiring new warships, for one. Have there been any recent responses to our invitation?”

  “Nothing particularly interesting, Admiral,” Pellaeon said, pulling up the comm log and giving it a quick scan to refresh his memory. “Eight of the fifteen groups I contacted have expressed interest, though none were willing to commit themselves to anything specific. We’re still waiting on the others.”

  Thrawn nodded. “We’ll give them a few weeks. If there’ve been no results after that time, we’ll make the invitation a bit more compulsory.”

  “Yes, sir.” Pellaeon hesitated. “There’s also been another communication from Jomark.”

  Thrawn turned his glowing eyes on Pellaeon. “I would very much appreciate it, Captain,” he said, biting off each word, “if you would try to make it clear to our exalted Jedi Master C’baoth that if he persists in these communications he’s going to subvert the whole purpose of putting him on Jomark in the first place. If the Rebels get even a hint of any connection between us, he can forget about Skywalker ever showing up there.”

  “I have explained it to him, sir,” Pellaeon grimaced. “Numerous times. His reply is always that Skywalker is going to show up. And then he demands to know when you’re going to get around to delivering Skywalker’s sister to him.”

  For a long moment Thrawn said nothing. “I suppose there’ll be no shutting him up until he gets what he wants,” he said at last. “Nor of getting any uncomplaining work out of him, either.”

  “Yes, he was grumbling about the attack coordination you’ve been having him do,” Pellaeon nodded. “He’s warned me several times that he can’t predict exactly when Skywalker will arrive on Jomark.”