“Of course. Surely it’s only fitting that a Jedi Master have lesser Jedi serving beneath him. Jedi whom he may teach and command and punish at will.”
Something like a shadow crossed C’baoth’s face. “There are no Jedi left,” he murmured. “The Emperor and Vader hunted them down and destroyed them.”
“Not all of them,” Thrawn told him softly. “Two new Jedi have arisen in the past five years: Luke Skywalker and his sister, Leia Organa Solo.”
“And what is that to me?”
“I can deliver them to you.”
For a long minute C’baoth stared at him, disbelief and desire struggling for supremacy on his face. The desire won. “Both of them?”
“Both of them,” Thrawn nodded. “Consider what a man of your skill could do with brand-new Jedi. Mold them, change them, re-create them in any image you chose.” He cocked an eyebrow. “And with them would come a very special bonus … because Leia Organa Solo is pregnant. With twins.”
C’baoth inhaled sharply. “Jedi twins?” he hissed.
“They have the potential, or so my sources tell me.” Thrawn smiled. “Of course, what they ultimately became would be entirely up to you.”
C’baoth’s eyes darted to Pellaeon; back to Thrawn. Slowly, deliberately, he stood up. “Very well, Grand Admiral Thrawn,” he said. “In return for the Jedi, I will assist your forces. Take me to your ship.”
“In time, Master C’baoth,” Thrawn said, getting to his feet himself. “First we must go into the Emperor’s mountain. This bargain is dependent on whether I find what I’m looking for there.”
“Of course.” C’baoth’s eyes flashed. “Let us both hope,” he said warningly, “that you do.”
It took seven hours of searching, through a mountain fortress much larger than Pellaeon had expected. But in the end, they did indeed find the treasures Thrawn had hoped for. The cloaking shield … and that other small, almost trivial, bit of technology.
The door to the Grand Admiral’s command room slid open; settling himself, Pellaeon stepped inside. “A word with you, Admiral?”
“Certainly, Captain,” Thrawn said from his seat in the center of the double display circle. “Come in. Has there been any update from the Imperial Palace?”
“No, sir, not since yesterday’s,” Pellaeon said as he walked to the edge of the outer circle, silently rehearsing one last time how he was going to say this. “I can request one, if you’d like.”
“Probably unnecessary,” Thrawn shook his head. “It looks like the details of the Bimmisaari trip have been more or less settled. All we have to do is alert one of the commando groups-Team Eight, I think-and we’ll have our Jedi.”
“Yes, sir.” Pellaeon braced himself. “Admiral … I have to tell you that I’m not convinced dealing with C’baoth is a good idea. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think he’s entirely sane.”
Thrawn cocked an eyebrow. “Of course he’s not sane. But then, he’s not Jorus C’baoth, either.”
Pellaeon felt his mouth fall open. “What?”
“Jorus C’baoth is dead,” Thrawn said. “He was one of the six Jedi Masters aboard the Old Republic’s Outbound Flight project. I don’t know if you were highly enough placed back then to have known about it.”
“I heard rumors,” Pellaeon frowned, thinking back. “Some sort of grand effort to extend the Old Republic’s authority outside the galaxy, as I recall, launched just before the Clone Wars broke out. I never heard anything more about it.”
“That’s because there wasn’t anything more to be heard,” Thrawn said evenly. “It was intercepted by a task force outside Old Republic space and destroyed.”
Pellaeon stared at him, a shiver running up his back. “How do you know?”
Thrawn raised his eyebrows. “Because I was the force’s commander. Even at that early date the Emperor recognized that the Jedi had to be exterminated. Six Jedi Masters aboard the same ship was too good an opportunity to pass up.”
Pellaeon licked his lips. “But then … ?”
“Who is it we’ve brought aboard the Chimaera?” Thrawn finished the question for him. “I should have thought that obvious. Joruus C’baoth-note the telltale mispronunciation of the name Jorus-is a clone.”
Pellaeon stared at him. “A clone?”
“Certainly,” Thrawn said. “Created from a tissue sample, probably sometime just before the real C’baoth’s death.”