He took a deep breath and looked again out the viewport. “Trust me.”
* * *
—
It was time.
The shimmering disk of the Great Presence loomed large in Qilori’s unseeing eyes. The undulating rumble echoed in his unhearing ears. Reaching blindly to the hyperdrive lever at his right, he squeezed off the locking bar and wrapped his fingers around the lever. He waited until the disk filled his vision, then delicately pushed the lever forward. He waited another moment, savoring the experience one final time, then shut down the sound-blocking part of his headset.
The Great Presence vanished as a quiet hum of Chiss voices filled his ears. He pulled off the headset, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the muted bridge light, and peered through the viewport.
They had arrived.
Casually, he looked around him. All the stations were occupied, but none of the Chiss seemed to be watching him. Keeping his movements small, he reached into one of the storage pouches built into his ID sash and keyed his comm. He’d spent the last three rest periods recording a message for the Nikardun ships lurking out there and then figuring out how to tap into the ship’s short-range transmitter.
A sharp voice from the Chiss at the sensor station cut through the conversational hum. Qilori ran his eyes quickly over the displays, found the tactical one—
He felt his cheek winglets flutter. Three ships were angling in toward the Springhawk, one from starboard, the other two from behind. The markings on the display were all in unreadable Cheunh script, but he knew the ships had to be Nikardun.
His winglets fluttered harder. If the attackers had gotten his message—and if the blockade commander decided a Pathfinder was worth saving—they might go easy on their prey, at least until they’d battered most of the life out of it.
If the commander wasn’t feeling so charitable, Qilori had seen his last star-rise.
The deck gave a sudden jolt. Qilori jerked in response, fully expecting to see a flash of laserfire or a wall of flame from a missile blaze through the bridge wall. But nothing. He looked at the tactical again, frowning.
And tensed. The jolt hadn’t been a Nikardun attack, but the recoil as a shuttle separated from the Springhawk’s flank. Even as he watched, it headed toward the inner system and the planet Rapacc at an incredibly high acceleration.
He clenched his teeth. If Thrawn was hoping whoever was in there would escape, he’d already lost his gamble. The two aft pursuers veered off, accelerating in turn as they chased after the shuttle. Qilori couldn’t read the markings on the velocity/intercept curves, but he had no doubt the two Nikardun would catch the craft long before it reached Rapacc or even the relative safety of one of the asteroid clusters. They would catch it, and with a barrage of laserfire or the more delicate twist of a tractor beam they would destroy or capture it.
On the tactical, he saw that the Springhawk, its errand apparently fulfilled, was now angling away from the inner system and the fleeing shuttle. Attempting, no doubt, to clear the system’s collection of orbiting debris and reach a safe hyperspace jump-off point before its remaining pursuer could get into combat range. Qilori eyed the tactical, noting that the Nikardun had put on a burst of speed of his own.
He frowned. The remaining pursuer. The last of three Nikardun ships that had been sitting at the Springhawk’s entry point, ready to give battle.
A point that Thrawn had deliberately specified out of the handful of safe vectors available. Was it simply bad luck that had brought them to a spot where three Nikardun had been waiting?
Maybe. Maybe he just didn’t know enough about the system.
But in that case, why hadn’t he come out of hyperspace much farther out and done at least a quick recon before committing himself and his ship to this vector? At least then he might have found a way or route that would have given his shuttle a better chance of getting somewhere before it was destroyed.
A cold chill ran up his back. No, Thrawn couldn’t be that short-sighted. Not the Thrawn whose battle tactics Qilori had had the misfortune to see firsthand.
Which left only one other option. Thrawn had arrived on this particular vector because he wanted the Nikardun to attack him.
Qilori looked back and forth among the banks of displays, trying to make sense of it all. Was the Springhawk just a feint, a diversion to let the actual intruder slip into the Rapacc system unhindered? Could there be someone out there aiming for the asteroid clusters, maybe, moving stealthily in the hope that with Nikardun attention focused out here they wouldn’t be spotted until it was too late?
But he couldn’t see anything like that on any of the displays. No other ships, no other vectors, no indication of anything else in the system. Surely the Chiss would have their own vessels marked, even if they were stealthed and undetectable to the Nikardun. Wouldn’t they?
The pursuing Nikardun patrol ship put on an additional burst of speed. Qilori watched nervously as it finally reached firing range—
Abruptly, as if Thrawn had just noticed the threat coming up on his starboard side, the Springhawk made a sharp turn away from its attacker. The pursuing ship opened fire with its spectrum lasers, and a large piece of debris detached itself from the Chiss ship’s flank and fell backward. The Springhawk shifted direction, just slightly, the Nikardun adjusting its own vector to match.
And suddenly Qilori realized what was going on. The object falling behind the Springhawk wasn’t battle debris from the Nikardun attack, as he’d thought. It was, in fact, another of the Chiss ship’s shuttles.
And the Nikardun, now blasting toward the Springhawk at top speed, was about to run straight into it.
Qilori’s first horrible thought was that the shuttle would crash into the oversized bridge viewport that marked all of Yiv’s combat ships. But the Nikardun captain spotted the obstacle in time to twist the ship aside.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to twist it far enough. The shuttle missed the viewport to slam instead into the portside weapons cluster, wrecking that group of lasers and missile launchers and setting the ship spinning.
A second later the starscape outside the Springhawk’s viewport spun crazily as the Chiss ship did its own yaw rotation. Qilori gripped his armrests, fighting against vertigo, as the Springhawk’s movement brought the stern of the tumbling Nikardun into view. There was a multiple flash of laserfire, and the fiery yellow glow from the Nikardun’s thruster nozzles flared once and then faded as the damaged engines behind the nozzles shut down. Qilori held his breath, waiting for the salvo that would blast the helpless ship into dust.
The salvo didn’t come. Instead, the Springhawk slowed, waiting for the Nikardun’s momentum to bring it closer. The Chiss ship moved up and over, settling itself above the Nikardun’s dorsal sensor ridge, out of line from the remaining flankside weapons clusters. On the tactical, the green lines of two tractor beams winked into existence, connecting the two ships. The hazy circle of a Crippler net spun out from the Springhawk’s hull between the tractor beam projectors and wrapped itself around the Nikardun vessel, sending a high-voltage charge through the hull and eliminating the possibility that the crew might activate a scuttling system.