[Thrawn Trilogy] - 01(114)

His eyes bored into Pellaeon’s face. “And to handle Karrde,” he added softly, “if he turns out to be a traitor.”

The last bits of dark blue had faded from the tiny gaps in the canopy overhead, leaving nothing but blackness above them. Turning the survival kit’s worklight to its lowest setting, Mara set it down and sank gratefully to the ground against a large tree bole. Her right ankle, twisted somehow in the Skipray crash, had started to ache again, and it felt good to get the weight off it.

Skywalker was already stretched out a couple of meters on the other side of the worklight, his head pillowed on his tunic, his loyal droid standing at his side. She wondered if he’d guessed about the ankle, dismissed the question as irrelevant. She’d had worse injuries without being slowed down by them.

“Reminds me of Endor,” Skywalker said quietly as Mara arranged her glow rod and blaster in her lap where they’d be accessible. “A forest always sounds so busy at night.”

“Oh, it’s busy, all right,” Mara grunted. “A lot of the animals here are nocturnal. Including the vornskrs.”

“Strange,” he murmured. “Karrde’s pet vornskrs seemed wide enough awake in late afternoon.”

She looked across at him, mildly surprised he’d noticed that. “Actually, even in the wild they take small naps around the clock,” she said. “I call them nocturnal because they do most of their hunting at night.”

Skywalker mulled that over for a moment. “Maybe we ought to travel at night, then,” he suggested. “They’ll be hunting us either way-at least then we’d be awake and alert while they were on the prowl.”

Mara shook her head. “It’d be more trouble than it’s worth. We need to be able to see the terrain as far ahead of us as possible if we’re going to avoid running into dead ends. Besides, this whole forest is dotted with small clearings.”

“Through which a glow rod beam would show very clearly to an orbiting ship,” he conceded. “Point. You seem to know a lot about this place.”

“It wouldn’t take more than an observant pilot flying over the forest to see that,” she growled. But he was right, she knew, as she eased back against the rough bark. Know your territory was the first rule that had been drilled into her … and the first thing she’d done after establishing herself in Karrde’s organization had been to do precisely that. She’d studied the aerial maps of the forest and surrounding territory; had taken long walks, in both daylight and at night, to familiarize herself with the sights and sounds; had sought out and killed several vornskrs and other predators to learn the fastest ways of taking them down; had even talked one of Karrde’s people into running bio tests on a crateload of native plants to find out which were edible and which weren’t. Outside the forest, she knew something about the settlers, understood the local politics, and had stashed a small but adequate part of her earnings out where she could get hold of it.

More than anyone else in Karrde’s organization, she was equipped to survive outside the confines of his encampment. So why was she trying so hard to get back there?

It wasn’t for Karrde’s sake-that much she was sure of. All that he’d done for her-her job, her position, her promotions-she’d more than repaid with hard work and good service. She didn’t owe him anything, any more than he owed her. Whatever the story was he’d concocted this afternoon to explain the Skipray chase to Thrawn, it would have been designed to protect his own neck, not hers; and if he saw that the Grand Admiral wasn’t buying it, he was at perfect liberty to pull his group off Myrkr tonight and disappear down one of the other ratholes he had scattered throughout the galaxy.

Except that he wouldn’t. He would sit there, sending out search party after search party, and wait for Mara to come out of the forest. Even if she never did.

Even if by doing so he overstayed Thrawn’s patience.

Mara clenched her teeth, the unpleasant image of Karrde pinned against a cell wall by an interrogation droid dancing in front of her eyes. Because she knew Thrawn-knew the Grand Admiral’s tenacity and the limits of his patience both. He would wait and watch, or set someone to do it for him, and follow through on Karrde’s story.

And if neither she nor Skywalker ever reappeared from the forest, he would almost certainly jump to the wrong conclusion. At which point he would take Karrde in for a professional Imperial interrogation, and eventually would find out who the escaping prisoner had been.

And then he’d have Karrde put to death.

Across from her, the droid’s dome rotated a few degrees and it gave a quietly insistent gurgle. “I think Artoo’s picked up something,” Skywalker said, hiking himself up on his elbows.