Cautiously, she opened her eyes, squinting a little against the pain. The Grand Admiral was still standing where he’d been, in the center of the dukha:and as the last thunderclap faded into silence he spoke. “I am the law on Honoghr now, maitrakh,” he said, his voice quiet and deadly. “If I choose to follow the ancient laws, I will follow them. If I choose to ignore them, they will be ignored. Is that clear?”
The voice, when it came, was almost too alien to recognize. If the purpose of the Grand Admiral’s demonstration had been to frighten the maitrakh half out of her mind, it had clearly succeeded. “Yes, my lord.”
“Good.” The Grand Admiral let the brittle silence hang in the air for another moment. “For loyal servants of the Empire, however, I am prepared to make compromises. Khabarakh will be interrogated aboard the Chimaera; but before that, I will allow the first stage of the ancient laws of discovery.” His head turned slightly. “Rukh, you will remove Khabarath clan Kihm’bar to the center of Nystao and present him to the clan dynasts. Perhaps three days of public shaming will serve to remind the Noghri people that we are still at war.”
“Yes, my lord.”
There was the sound of footsteps, and the opening and closing of the double doors. Hunched against the ceiling above her, his sense in unreadable turmoil, Chewbacca rumbled softly to himself. Leia clenched her teeth, hard enough to send flashes of pain through her still throbbing head. Public shaming : and something called the laws of discovery.
The Rebel Alliance had unwittingly destroyed Honoghr. Now, it seemed, she was going to do the same to Khabarakh.
The Grand Admiral was still standing in the middle of the dukha. “You are very quiet, maitrakh,” he said.
“My lord ordered me to be silent,” she countered.
“Of course.” He studied her. “Loyalty to one’s clan and family is all well and good, maitrakh. But to extend that loyalty to a traitor would he foolish. As well as potentially disastrous to your family and clan.”
“I have not heard evidence that my thirdson is a traitor.”
The Grand Admiral’s lip twitched. “You will,” he promised softly.
He walked toward the double doors, passing out of Leia’s sight, and there was the sound of the doors opening. The footsteps paused, clearly waiting; and a moment later the quieter paces of the maitrakh joined him. Both left, the doors dosed again, and Leia and Chewbacca were alone.
Alone. In enemy territory. Without a ship. And with their only ally about to undergo an Imperial interrogation. “I think, Chewie,” she said softly, “we’re in trouble.”
Chapter 14
One of the first minor truths about interstellar flight that any observant traveler learned was that a planet seen from space almost never looked anything at all like the official maps of it. Scatterings of cloud cover, shadows from mountain ranges, contour-altering effects of large vegetation tracts, and lighting tricks in general, all combined to disguise and distort the nice clean computer-scrubbed lines drawn by the cartographers. It was an effect that had probably caused a lot of bad moments for neophyte navigators, as well as supplying the ammunition for innumerable practical jokes played on those same neophytes by their more experienced shipmates.
It was therefore something of a surprise to find that, on this particular day and coming in from this particular angle, the major continent of the planet Jomark did indeed look almost exactly like a precisely detailed map. Of course, in all fairness, it was a pretty small continent to begin with.
Somewhere on that picture-perfect continent was a Jedi Master.
Luke tapped his fingers gently on the edge of his control board, gazing out at the greenish-brown chunk of in is X-wing’s canopy. He could sense Jedi’s presence-had been able to sense it, in fact, since first dropping out of hyperspace-but so far he’d been unable to make a more direct contact. Master C’baoth? he called silently, trying one more time. This is Luke Skywalker. Can you hear me?
There was no response. Either Luke wasn’t doing it right, or C’baoth was unable to reply : or else this was a deliberate test of Luke’s abilities.
Well, he was game. “Let’s do a sensor focus on the main continent, Artoo,” he called, looking over his displays and trying to put himself into the frame of mind of a Jedi Master who’d been out of circulation for a while. The bulk of Jomark’s land area was in that one small continent-not much more than an oversized island, really-but there were also thousands of much smaller islands scattered in clusters around the vast ocean. Taken all together, there were probably close to three hundred thousand square kilometers of dry land, which made for an awful lot of places to guess wrong. “Scan for technology, and see if you can pick out the main population centers.”