[Thrawn Trilogy] - 02(94)

Mara sent him a sharp look. “Our friend with the eyes?”

Antilles shrugged. “That’s what he said. He said you’d understand.”

Mara felt her lip twist. “I understand just fine. Tell him I’ll pass on the message.”

“Okay.” He hesitated. “It sounded like it was pretty important-“

“I said I’ll pass on the message.”

He shrugged again. “Okay-just doing my job. Have a good trip.” With a friendly nod, he headed back down the ramp. Still half expecting a trap, Mara got the hatchway sealed for flight and went up to the bridge.

It took a quarter hour to run the ship through its preflight sequence, almost exactly the amount of time it took the spaceport controllers to confirm her for takeoff. Easing in the repulsorlifts, she lifted clear of the landing pit and made for space.

She was nearly high enough to kick in the sublight drive when the back of her neck began to tingle.

“Uh-oh,” she muttered aloud, giving the displays a quick scan. Nothing was visible; but this close to a planetary mass, that meant less than nothing. Anything could be lurking just over the horizon, from a single flight of TIE fighters all the way up to an Imperial Star Destroyer.

But maybe they weren’t quite ready yet:

She threw full power to the drive, feeling herself pressed back into the seat cushion for a few seconds as the acceleration compensators fought to catch up. An indignant howl came from the controller on the comm speaker; ignoring him, she keyed the computer, hoping that Torve had followed Karrde’s standard procedure when he’d first put down on Abregado.

He had. The calculation for the jump out of here had already been computed and loaded, just waiting to be initiated. She got the computer started making the minor adjustments that would correct for a couple of months of general galactic drift, and looked back out the forward viewport.

There, emerging over the horizon directly ahead, was the massive bulk of a Victory-class Star Destroyer.

Bearing toward her.

For a long heartbeat Mara just sat there, her mind skimming through the possibilities, all the time knowing full well how futile the exercise was. The Star Destroyer’s commander had planned his interception with exquisite skill: given their respective vectors and the Etherway’s proximity to the planet, there was absolutely no way she would be able to elude the larger ship’s weapons and tractor beams long enough to make her escape to lightspeed. Briefly, she toyed with the hope that the Imperials might not be after her at all, that they were actually gunning for that Antilles character still on the surface. But that hope, too, evaporated quickly. A single X-wing pilot could hardly be important enough to tie up a Victory-class Star Destroyer for. And if he was, they would certainly not have been so incompetent as to spring the trap prematurely.

“Freighter Etherway,” a cold voice boomed over her comm speaker. “This is the Star Destroyer Adamant. You are ordered to shut down your engines and prepare to be brought aboard.”

So that was that. They had indeed been looking for her. In a very few minutes now she would be their prisoner.

Unless :

Reaching over, she keyed her mike. “Star Destroyer Adamant, this is the Etherway,” she said briskly. “I congratulate you on your vigilance; I was afraid I was going to have to search the next five systems to find an Imperial ship.”

“You will shut down all deflector systems-” The voice faltered halfway through the standard speech as the fact belatedly penetrated that this was not the normal response of the normal Imperial prisoner.

“I’ll want to speak to your captain the minute I’m aboard,” Mara said into the conversational gap. “I’ll need him to set up a meeting with Grand Admiral Thrawn and provide me transport to wherever he and the Chimaera are at the moment. And get a tractor beam ready-I don’t want to have to land this monster in your hangar bay myself.”

The surprises were coming too fast for the poor man. “Ah-freighter Etherway-” he tried again.

“On second thought, put the captain on now,” Mara cut him off. She had the initiative now, and was determined to keep it as long as possible. “There’s no one around who can tap into this communication.”

There was a moment of silence. Mara continued on her intercept course, a trickle of doubt beginning to worm its way through her resolve. It’s the only way, she told herself sternly.

“This is the captain,” a new voice came on the speaker. “Who are you?”

“Someone with important information for Grand Admiral Thrawn,” Mara told him, shifting from brisk to just slightly haughty. “For the moment, that’s all you need to know.”