by Timothy Zahn
All strive for victory. But not all understand what it truly is.
To a soldier or pilot on the line, victory is surviving the current battle. To a politician, victory is an advantage one can bring to a bargaining table. To a warrior, victory is driving an enemy from the field of battle, or bringing him to surrender.
Sometimes the victory is greater than the warrior could ever hope for.
Sometimes it is more than he is able to bear.
—
“You’re kidding,” Arihnda said, eyeing the stack of twenty data cards her mother had handed her. “All of them?”
“All of them,” Elainye said firmly. “And if I find that other box before you drag us out of here, there’ll be ten more.”
“It’s the record of your life, Arihnda,” Talmoor reminded her. “Your dance recitals, your school debates, your first day working the mine. Everything up until you left for Coruscant.”
“Fine,” Arihnda said, managing to check her chrono without spilling the data cards all over the floor. “You’ve got fifteen minutes. And don’t forget to grab some of your own mementos.”
“You’re the most important part of our life together, Arihnda,” Talmoor said quietly.
“Well, get some of your own things anyway. You must have some memories from before I was born. The carrybags are where?”
“Downstairs, in the closet off the kitchen,” Elainye said. “There’s one big one and three smaller ones.”
“Okay,” Arihnda said. “I’ll load these in one of the small ones and bring the big one up. Remember: fifteen minutes.”
She headed downstairs, holding the data cards in a vertical stack pressed between her palms. Fifteen minutes should be enough time to get out of here before Gudry came back.
She was wrong. By exactly fifteen minutes.
“There you are,” Gudry’s voice came from behind her as she reached the bottom of the stairs.
Arihnda jerked, nearly spilling the cards as she spun around. Gudry had emerged from the dining alcove, a suspicious scowl on his face, a line of dried blood tracing out a path from the corner of his chin.
A small blaster gripped in his hand.
“Of course I am,” Arihnda said as calmly as she could. Damn. “Where else would I be?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Gudry said sarcastically. “Maybe at the hospital? Your mother being deathly ill and all.”
“False alarm,” Arihnda said. “We made her some tea, had her put her feet up, and she started feeling better.”
“Yeah, I can tell,” Gudry said. “I can hear the party they’ve got going on upstairs. A packing party, sounds like. Where’s the teacup?”
Arihnda felt her stomach tighten. Stupid, she berated herself. She knew better than to tell unnecessary lies, especially ones that could be easily checked. “What exactly are you implying?”
“I’m saying that you deliberately gave me the slip,” he said, taking a step toward her. “I’m saying that you were never going to help me find what we needed in there.”
“You’re the professional. I didn’t think you needed any help.”
“Whereas your parents do need your help to get out before this place goes to hell?” Gudry shook his head. “Sorry, sweetheart. This isn’t a rescue mission. It’s search and destroy.” He held up his comm. “Luckily for the Empire, I didn’t need you. I did the search, and now we’re ready for the destroy.”
Arihnda took a deep breath. Damn him, anyway. How could he have been so fast?
Or maybe how could she have been so slow? “Excellent,” she said. “What have we got?”
“We have an explosives cache and the shield generator.” He grinned slyly. “Oh yeah, I got all the way to the shield generator.”
Arihnda looked at his new blaster. “I assume that’s where you got the weapon?”
“Let’s just say the previous owner won’t need it anymore,” Gudry said. “I tied the triggers into my comm. Signal One is the shield, Signal Two is all the explosives.”
“All the explosives?”
“All of them,” he said. “Hell of a cache—it took four of my caps to cover all the piles. Never mind that. We’re ready, the navy task force and troops are ready, and it’s time to get the hell out of here. So put down those cards and let’s go.”
“We can still take my parents with us,” Arihnda said. “They won’t slow us down.”
“I don’t care if they can turn into Arkanian dragons and fly us out,” Gudry retorted. “A party draws attention we can’t afford. I’m in charge, and they’re not going.”
“I’m a governor,” Arihnda bit out, taking a step toward him.
“I’ve got the blaster.”
There was a sudden gasp from the stairs. Arihnda’s mother had frozen halfway down the steps, gripping a shimmering multicolored crystal, her eyes bulging at the sight of Gudry’s blaster. Arihnda took another quick step toward Gudry as he reflexively spun to face the unexpected noise—
And as he spun back toward Arihnda, she hurled her stack of data cards into his face.
He was quick. But he was also half turned, his balance was off, and his blaster was pointed the wrong way. He ducked his head away from the flying data cards, flinging up his free hand to fend them off, then spun back toward Arihnda.
Too late. She caught his wrist with her right hand, and as he tried to break it free she swung the arm upward, ducked under it, grabbed the blaster with her other hand, and pulled his elbow down sharply across her shoulder. There was a faint sound as the joint snapped, a barely louder grunt as Gudry reacted to the pain. Arihnda twisted the blaster free of his grip and started to dive out of his reach—
And gasped in pain as he slammed the heel of his other hand against the back of her head.
She fell forward and away from him, her head spinning, her knees wobbling. She threw out her free hand blindly, managed to catch the arm of a chair as she fell past it. She pivoted around the arm and slammed onto her back on the floor.
“Cute,” Gudry growled as he strode toward her, clutching his broken elbow with his other hand. “We’ll try that again in the dojo after they put my arm back together. Get up—it’s time to go.”
“With my parents,” Arihnda managed between gasps of air.
“No,” Gudry bit out. “Let ’em die here with all the rest of these Outer Rim freaks.”
Lifting the blaster, Arihnda shot him three times in the chest.
He collapsed in a heap, dead before he even had time to change expression. Holding the back of her head, wincing at the knives of pain shooting through her skull, Arihnda climbed back to her feet.
Her mother was still standing on the stairs, her eyes even wider than before. “See?” Arihnda managed, pointing her blaster at the crystal clutched in Elainye’s hands. “You do have memories of your own.”
“Arihnda,” Elainye breathed. “Oh, Arihnda—”
“I had no choice, Mother,” Arihnda interrupted. “He was going to leave you and Father behind. And he was probably going to kill me once I’d gotten him out of the area.” Which wasn’t true, of course. But if it made her mother feel better, she was more than happy to tell the tale. “Let me get the suitcase—”
“I’ll get the suitcase,” Elainye said, finally coming unglued from the stairs and hurrying toward her daughter. “You just sit down. No—wait—let me get the medpac first.”
“Just get the suitcase,” Arihnda said. “I’ll get the medpac. We haven’t got much time.”
Elainye looked at Gudry, turned quickly away. “We’ll be ready,” she murmured.
With a last look at her daughter, and no look at all at the dead man lying on her floor, she headed toward the closet and the carrybags.
For a long moment Arihnda stared at Gudry, wondering if she should feel something at what she’d done. But there was nothing. No guilt, no sorrow, not even any queasiness. Gudry had threatened her parents. He’d gotten in her way.
He’d paid the cost.
Caref
ully, mindful of her shaky balance, she walked over to him. He still had all their special gear, after all, including the blasting caps, the comm trigger mechanism he’d set up, and whatever else he’d decided to bring along.
Arihnda might not need anything except the trigger. But then again, she might.
Easing down onto her knees, she began to search the body.
—
“Still no response from Pryce or Gudry.” Yularen’s voice came from the Chimaera’s bridge speaker. “Have you received anything?”
“Not since Agent Gudry’s transmission confirming the shield had been sabotaged,” Faro said. “I assume you also have the necessary triggering code?”
“Yes, but I’d rather not use it until and unless we give them up as captured. Or dead.”
Eli looked forward along the command walkway. Thrawn was standing by the forward viewport, his hands clasped behind his back, unmoving as he gazed at the planet below.
The admiral hadn’t had much to say since his return from that clandestine visit to the Creekpath area. Eli had received a private communication from Yularen as Thrawn was returning to the ship, but the message hadn’t said much except that questions about the admiral’s motives or strategies had been satisfactorily answered.
Satisfactorily for the colonel and ISB, maybe. Not so much for Eli. The fact that Thrawn had returned safely from Batonn had relieved a lot of his concerns and stress. But the matter of the vulnerable cruisers still hung over the situation like a dark nebula.
Especially since Eli had now proved, at least to his own satisfaction, that Admiral Kinshara had been right about the insurgents sneaking ships off Denash.
It hadn’t been just a few ships, either. His estimates, gleaned from the lists of spare parts and equipment shipments that Kinshara had retrieved from the captured base, indicated there were no less than thirty midsized ships lurking somewhere nearby. All of them armed, all of them ready to pounce.
Even for an Imperial Star Destroyer, a force of thirty armed ships wasn’t to be taken lightly. In a situation like that, the Chimaera needed its screening vessels close at hand.
Only it didn’t have them. The three cruisers were still sitting in their private little circles of isolation, far distant from the Chimaera, each half cocooned with supply ships and repair barges. The two frigates were useless, having been sent by Thrawn to high observation duty in case Nightswan attempted to bring new weapons or personnel to his ground forces.
Eli had reported his findings to Faro, who had responded by emptying the Chimaera’s hangars and doubling the TIE fighter sentry screen around the planet. But the TIEs couldn’t begin to cover everything, and the nearest warships that could respond to a call were over thirty hours away. By the time any aid could arrive, the battle would be over.
Eli looked at the tactical, feeling his stomach knot up. Every ship of the 96th was vulnerable. But there was only one that truly mattered. If Nightswan’s thirty lurking ships took out the Chimaera, the whole system was open to them. If they didn’t, they’d already lost.
The Chimaera wasn’t just a target. It was the target.
“Colonel Yularen, what is your troop status?” Thrawn called.
“We don’t have enough for an encirclement, Admiral, but we can probably mount a solid punch-through,” Yularen said. “I should also mention that Gudry’s report of an unknown number of gunships and skim fighters has the ground commanders a bit worried.”
“Once the shield is down, those fliers should not be a problem,” Thrawn assured him. “The Chimaera can descend to effective firing distance within three minutes, more than enough time to deal with combat aircraft of that size.”
“We’ll probably need that support, sir.”
“You shall have it,” Thrawn said. “Before all the troops are committed to battle, I want you to separate out a special-duty squad for me.”
“Yes, sir. Their mission?”
“Once the battle begins, I want them to make their way to the house of Governor Pryce’s parents,” Thrawn said. “If she and Agent Gudry were compromised, they might have taken refuge there.”
“Understood, sir,” Yularen said. “Actually, we may not need to wait for the battle to get under way. If I’m reading the maps and images correctly, the house is far enough out from the center that we should be able to slip a squad in whenever we want.”
“That was also my conclusion,” Thrawn said. “But the situation on the ground is often more complex than it appears from orbit. How long will it take the squad to reach the house?”
“Give me fifteen minutes to cut out a squad and prep them,” Yularen said. “Probably thirty more to slip them through the outer picket line and make their way inward. Forty-five minutes, an hour at the most.”
“Good. Proceed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And inform the commanders that they are to ready their troops,” Thrawn added. “If Governor Pryce and Agent Gudry are not at the Pryce home, and if we have not otherwise heard from them by then, we will assume their mission has failed and proceed accordingly.”
“Yes, sir,” Yularen said.
“Captain Faro?”
“Admiral?” Faro replied, taking a step down the walkway.
“Prepare the Chimaera for combat,” Thrawn said. “I expect enemy forces to appear at any moment.”
“Yes, sir.” Faro gestured to the crew pits. “Turbolasers stand ready. Shields at standby power.”
“Shields at standby, sir,” a voice acknowledged.
“Turbolasers at—” a second voice began.
“Incoming!” the sensor officer snapped. “Midsized ships—ten—incoming on vector one-ten by eighty. Range, one hundred thirty kilometers.”
Eli turned to the tactical, his throat tightening. The ten ships had jumped out of hyperspace thirty kilometers behind the Shyrack and were heading straight toward it, accelerating to attack speed as they came. Exactly as he’d feared. “Admiral—the Shyrack—”
“Incoming!” the sensor officer cut him off. “Eleven more midsized on vector—”
“Two more groups incoming,” the secondary sensor officer corrected, her voice tight. “This one also eleven vessels. Admiral, they’re targeting the cruisers.”
“I see them,” Thrawn said, his voice like glacial ice.
Then do something! The words screamed in Eli’s brain. The three attack squadrons hadn’t yet opened fire, but the respite would only last another few seconds. Another twenty kilometers, and their blaster cannons would cut through the defenseless cruisers like a fruit knife through a demi-husk.
And once they’d destroyed the cruisers, there was nothing between them and the Chimaera.
Eli gazed at the display, his mind beating furiously at the situation, trying to find a way out. But there wasn’t one. The Chimaera was too deep in Batonn’s gravity well to jump to lightspeed. With the main drive still on standby, it would take nearly ten minutes to climb to the necessary distance. There were no ground-based weapons that could assist, and Batonn had no orbiting weapons platforms. All that remained was for the Star Destroyer to sit here and slug it out with the enemy ships.
Was that Thrawn’s plan? To make the attackers waste energy on the cruisers, possibly burning out some of their weapons in the process, then hope that the Chimaera’s armor and weapons would be enough to hold them off? Certainly the admiral couldn’t want the newcomers joining Nightswan and his insurgents on the ground—was this his way of making sure they stayed in space and out of Nightswan’s reach until the Creekpath battle was over?
A motion caught Eli’s eye, and he turned to see Thrawn walking back along the command walkway. Not hurrying, as if he were concerned about being too close to the viewport when the attack began, but with the measured tread of a man secure in his plan and his command.
He paused beside the comm section of the crew pit, almost as if it were an afterthought. “Signal the ground commanders,” he ordered. “The units on the west and north may open f
ire on the Creekpath insurgents. But they are to remain on the edges of the complex—harassment fire only—until the shield is down or until I give further orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
Thrawn continued down the walkway, stopping before Eli and Faro. “Colonel Yularen’s retrieval squad will benefit from diversionary fire elsewhere on the perimeter,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Eli said, a small part of his mind feeling a twinge of chagrin that he’d been so preoccupied with the attacking ships that he hadn’t put those pieces together. “Sir…the ships?”
“Yes, Commander: the ships,” Thrawn agreed, turning again to gaze out the viewport. “Let us now discover how well I have read our opponent.”
“And whether we’re about to die,” Eli muttered.
“Yes,” Thrawn said. “And whether we are about to die.”
—
Arihnda and her parents were nearly to the insurgents’ outer picket line when the complex to the north and west lit up with blasterfire.
“Talmoor?” Elainye murmured tensely, clutching at her husband’s arm.
“I hear it,” Talmoor said, his voice grim. “So it’s happened. I hoped it wouldn’t.”
Arihnda peered across the semi-lit area in front of them, trying to spot the Imperial troops out there. But they were still hunkered down and quiet, just as they’d been when she and Gudry headed inward earlier across their line. Had those squads missed the order to attack?
Hardly. If they were still in place, it was because they’d been ordered to stay that way.
In which case the attacks in the distance were either a single-vector penetration or a diversion.
She smiled tightly in the darkness. Of course. She’d been ignoring the increasingly frequent calls on her comm and the comm she’d taken from Gudry, not wanting to speak to Thrawn until she knew exactly what she was going to say. If that blasterfire was a diversion, it was so that a team could head in from some other direction to look for her.
Her smile faded. The logical place to start a search would be her parents’ house. If the team made it there and found Gudry’s body…
She might be able to talk her way out of it. But she might not. The fact that Gudry was dead without Arihnda and her parents sporting so much as a blaster scorch would require a very tricky lie to explain.