Qilori felt his winglets quivering. He’d never anticipated he might need to communicate surreptitiously with the Benevolent on this trip, and so had never set up a tap into the freighter’s comm system. How could he warn him that Thrawn was goading him from here to keep him from anticipating the attack that would come from a completely unexpected direction?
“Pathfinder Qilori.”
Qilori jerked. “Yes?”
“You seem upset,” Thrawn said. “You’re possibly thinking I have another force prepared, waiting for the proper time to launch its attack?”
Qilori’s winglets flattened. How in the Depths did he do that? “I have no idea one way or the other,” he said diplomatically.
“But you know how it could be done, don’t you?” Thrawn persisted. “Even given the altered coordinates that you substituted for the ones in Yiv’s original message.”
“I don’t—” He broke off as Thrawn turned those glowing red eyes on him. “It’s not my concern.”
“Come now, Pathfinder, don’t be so modest,” Thrawn said. “You and I understand, even if many of Yiv’s victims don’t. For a long time he’s been using the Pathfinders’ ability to locate each other through hyperspace to coordinate his attacks.”
“No, of course not,” Qilori protested reflexively. “Direct cooperation with a military force would be a blatant violation of Navigators’ Guild rules.”
“And would likely lead the guild to eject the Pathfinders from its organization?”
Qilori swallowed hard. “It could happen,” he admitted.
“Not just could,” Thrawn said. “You’d prefer, then, that I keep that knowledge to myself?”
Qilori glared at him. “Of course,” he ground out. “What’s your price?”
Thrawn turned back to the viewport. “The price,” he said, “is for you to forget everything you see from this point on.”
“Fine,” Qilori said.
It was a simple enough promise, he told himself. Yiv would probably also want him to forget today’s events, and he had a long history of obeying the Benevolent’s orders.
“And as to your earlier fear,” Thrawn continued, “there’s no need for me to launch any attack. The battle for the Vak Combine is taking place over Primea, and has left Yiv with only two options. One: He can stay here and attempt to destroy me, thus giving the impression that he’s hiding from the battle. Two: He can leave to bolster his forces, and thus appear that he’s running from me.” He gestured toward the Deathless. “Even now he attempts to decide which of those scenarios will damage his reputation less.”
“It will be interesting to see which way he goes,” Qilori muttered.
And really, there would be no question of Thrawn keeping that potentially devastating knowledge about the Pathfinders to himself. Not once he was dead.
* * *
—
Another barrage of spectrum laser fire blasted across the Springhawk’s hull, knocking out three more sections of the electrostatic barrier and gouging a couple of fresh grooves in the metal. At least, Samakro thought distantly as he shouted orders, Ar’alani couldn’t claim he hadn’t obeyed his orders.
The Springhawk was keeping the Battle Dreadnought busy, all right.
“Watch it, Springhawk, you’ve got two gunboats angling in from ventral portside,” one of the other Chiss ships snapped in warning.
“On it,” Kharill said, and there was a double-thud as a pair of plasma spheres blasted off toward the attacking gunboats.
“Keep us rolling,” Samakro said, looking at the tactical. The two Nikardun were trying to veer out of the paths of the plasma spheres.
But it was too late. Both gunboats flared as the spheres hit them, spraying hot, ionized gas across their sensors and external control lines and sending high-voltage spikes into the deeper parts beneath the hull metal. There were multiple flickers as power systems overloaded or got shunted, and a second later both Nikardun were coasting along, temporarily dead.
“Azmordi, swing us around,” he ordered the helm. “Get us behind them. Use them as shields.”
“For whatever that’ll buy us,” Kharill warned quietly.
Samakro grimaced. It wouldn’t buy them much, unfortunately. He’d tried dodging, running, feinting, and straight-up toe-to-toe slugging, and while he was wearing down the Nikardun Dreadnought the Springhawk was wearing down even faster. Even frequent sniping sorties by some of the other Chiss hadn’t been enough to deflect the Nikardun captain from his single-minded pursuit.
Yiv didn’t just want Thrawn dead. He apparently wanted everything even associated with him to also be destroyed.
Two more salvos skated across the Springhawk’s hull before Azmordi got them into the protected zone behind the two disabled gunboats. “Okay, we’ve got a little breathing space,” Kharill said. “Any thoughts as to what to do with it?”
Samakro considered. They were still a good distance from the Battle Dreadnought, which was why they hadn’t been completely destroyed yet. But the vector they were currently on was taking them closer to their attacker than they’d been so far.
That wouldn’t be a particularly good thing once their Nikardun traveling companions got their systems back online. But for the moment…
He glanced at the tactical, did a quick distance calculation. Marginal, but it might just work. “How many breachers do we have left?” he asked, looking past the edge of the disabled ships at the Dreadnought and its mockingly big bridge viewport.
“Three,” Kharill said.
“Prep them,” Samakro ordered. “We’ll give it a few more seconds, get as close as we dare, then blast all three straight at the Dreadnought’s viewport.”
“Yes, sir,” Kharill said, a little uncertainly. “You do realize we’ve already tried that, right?”
“From considerably farther away,” Samakro reminded him. “If we get close enough, the Dreadnought can blast them whenever it wants to and the acid still won’t have time to dissipate before it reaches the viewport.”
“Worth a try,” Kharill agreed. “Okay; breachers prepped. Call it.”
Samakro counted out the seconds to himself, trying to gauge the right time to fire. Too soon and they’d be wasting their last breachers in a useless attempt; too late, and they would risk the two gunboats beside them waking up and adding their own bit of catastrophe into the Springhawk’s current mix. “Stand by to fire: Three, two, one.”