Chaos Rising Read online

  “So noted,” Ziara said. “Run a check on the electrostatic barrier. I want to be ready in case we’re attacked.”

  Roscu was silent a moment, just long enough to show her displeasure and suspicion, just short enough to avoid an insubordination charge. “Yes, Senior Captain,” she said. Turning away, she crossed to the defense station.

  “She’s right,” Ziara said. “This is a military situation between two groups of aliens. Happens all the time out here. Nothing for us to get involved with.” She nodded toward the viewport. “As for your perceived threat, I’m not sure the attackers have even noticed us.”

  “They’ve noticed,” Thrawn said. “Two of the three attackers have repositioned to allow for quick disengagement, and the freighter-locked one has begun a slow rotation to align his main batteries with us.” He shook his head slowly. “I can beat them, Ziara. I can take all four, right now, without any serious damage to the Parala.”

  “Serious is a highly relative term,” Ziara pointed out. “Even if you can, we have no justification. Chiss territory hasn’t been invaded, and we haven’t been attacked.”

  “If we move closer, we might be.”

  “Deliberate provocation is also disallowed.”

  Again, Thrawn shook his head. “I can see it all,” he said, his voice strained. “Their tactics, their patterns, their weaknesses. I could tell you right here, right now, how to beat them.”

  “Even at four-to-one odds?”

  “The odds don’t matter,” Thrawn said. “I’ve studied Lioaoin art since our first encounter with the pirates. I know their tactics and their battle patterns. I know how they utilize their weapons and defenses, and how they take advantage of an enemy’s mistakes.”

  He turned, and Ziara was struck by the intensity of his expression. “No damage,” he said softly. “No damage.”

  Ziara turned away from that look to gaze again out the viewport. No damage…except the ruin of his career. And hers, if she gave him permission.

  People were fighting and dying out there. True, they were aliens, but Chiss merchants had traded with them and found them to be reasonable enough people. Even the Garwians who didn’t die today, those in the hub station for instance, would have their lives irrevocably changed. The Parala could cut short that destruction, possibly ensure that the Lioaoi would never return.

  At the cost of her career.

  It still wasn’t too late, she knew. If the rest of the bridge crew could be persuaded to keep quiet…

  But of course they wouldn’t. Not with family politics and rivalries coloring everything they did.

  Unless there was nothing for them to talk about.

  “You say you could tell me how to defeat them,” she murmured, still gazing out at the battle. “Could you tell anyone?”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw the subtle shift in his stance. “Yes,” he said. “May I remind the captain that the ranging lasers haven’t been checked recently for calibration.”

  “I believe you’re right,” she said. Not that the low-power ranging lasers, which gathered distance and velocity data during combat, ever went out of calibration in the first place.

  “Request permission to go to secondary command and run a check.”

  Ziara swallowed hard. Her career…“Permission granted,” she said. “While you’re there, you’d best make sure all other systems are likewise at battle readiness.”

  “Yes, Captain.” With a whisper of displaced air, he turned and headed to the hatchway.

  Roscu returned to Ziara’s side. “Getting him off the bridge, I hope?” she asked.

  “I sent him to check the weapons sensor systems,” Ziara said.

  Roscu snorted. “And you don’t think he’ll be tempted to use them? Because I wouldn’t put that past him.”

  “Senior Commander Thrawn understands the protocols.”

  “Does he?” Roscu countered. “I wouldn’t have responded to an alien’s distress call if I’d had deck officer duty. I daresay neither would you, Captain.”

  “Perhaps not,” Ziara said. “On the other hand, if the battle had been over when we arrived, we are permitted to render humanitarian aid.”

  “But the battle isn’t over.” Roscu paused, and Ziara could feel her gaze. “I assume he relinquished his deck officer position when he left the bridge?”

  In other words, with Ziara now back in full command, why was the Parala still here? “These pirates appear to be part of the same group I engaged last year off Kinoss,” she told Roscu. “I want to watch their attack, see if they’ve come up with any new weapons or tactics we should be aware of.”

  “But we’re not going to intervene?” Roscu pressed.

  “Do you feel a need to quote the protocols to me?” Ziara asked mildly.

  “No, of course not,” Roscu said, her tone more subdued. “My apologies, Captain.”

  “Captain?” the operations officer called from his station. “I’m getting activity on the ranging lasers.”

  “It’s all right,” Ziara said. “I’m having the calibration checked.”

  “Understood,” the officer said, sounding puzzled. “Did you also order the frequencies to be modulated?”

  “Modulated how?” Roscu asked, frowning.

  “Just modulated,” the other said. “No particular pattern I can see.”

  “He’s probably running them through their full range,” Ziara said, focusing on the battle. The Garwian patrol ships were moving off their stand-and-fight positions, shifting to a sort of corkscrewing over–under flanking move against the three pirates. The pirates turned in response, pitching up and down to bring their weapons to bear.

  Only they turned too far, overcompensating and exposing their ventral sides to the Garwians. The defenders opened fire, quick precise bursts of spectrum laser blasts at the attackers’ exposed bellies—

  “Multiple hits!” Senior Commander Ocpior snapped from the sensor station. “Pirates’ ventral weapons launchers breached. Venting to space—”

  And abruptly both of the targeted pirate ships erupted in fiery blasts as their missile banks exploded.

  The third attacker, which had been beginning its own turn, jerked violently as it tried to get clear of the high-speed debris. It had managed to avoid the worst of it when one of the Garwian ships swooped inside its defenses and delivered a devastating salvo. The Garwian barely made it clear before its target suffered its own crippling blast.

  Roscu muttered something under her breath. “I’ll be cursed,” she said. “That was…how in hell’s name did they pull that off?”

  “Pirates disengaging,” Ocpior reported. “Spinning up their hyperdrives.”

  “Acknowledged,” Ziara said. The three crippled ships were angling toward deep space, trying to get away before the Garwians pressed their attack. The fourth pirate had taken the hint, releasing the freighter it had been looting and similarly running for its life.

  That fourth ship made it to the safety of hyperspace. None of its companions did.

  Ziara took a deep breath. “And now, I believe, we can leave. Helm, set course back to our patrol circuit.”

  She turned to Roscu. “I trust you’re relieved, Mid Captain Roscu?” she added.

  Roscu was still staring out at the remnants of the battle, a disbelieving expression on her face. “Relieved, Captain?” she asked mechanically.

  “Those cafés you mentioned,” Ziara said. “Looks like they’re still in business.”

  Thalias had never been on an alien ship before. No real surprise there—most of the travel she’d done outside the Ascendancy had been while she was a sky-walker, and the Syndicure wasn’t about to let such a valuable resource stray outside of Chiss control.

  But she had been on ships that hosted aliens from the Navigators’ Guild, usually diplomatic or military vessels that w
anted to maintain the illusion that the Chiss had no navigators of their own but also didn’t want to be at the mercy of those aliens if quick travel became necessary.

  She’d asked one of the senior officers once what would happen if the regular sky-walker had to take over navigation and the alien navigator learned the Ascendancy’s secret. The answer had been vague, but there’d been a coldness in the officer’s eyes that had kept her from ever asking again.

  But just because the aliens couldn’t be allowed to see her didn’t mean she wasn’t allowed to see them. On most of those trips, the ship’s commander was happy to let her watch one of the bridge monitor viewscreens, just to see how other navigators did things.

  It was never as exciting as she expected. Mostly the navigators just sat there, sometimes with their eyes closed, sometimes with them wide open, occasionally twitching the controls as something loomed ahead that the ship had to avoid. It was a long time before she realized that her own sky-walker performance was probably just as dull to watch as theirs.

  But here, on a Garwian ship, with her identity and former status of no interest to anyone, she might have a chance to actually observe the navigator up close. Maybe see if there was enough left of her Third Sight to sense what he or she was actually doing.

  That was fiercely unlikely, of course. In fact, the chances were virtually zero. Third Sight always left a sky-walker by age fourteen or fifteen, and those years were far in Thalias’s past.

  Still, as far as she knew, no one had ever tried putting a former sky-walker next to a functioning alien navigator. That alone made it worth trying. As Thrawn had once told her, negative information was still information.

  The nighttime bridge crew turned out to be even smaller than the equivalent aboard Chiss ships: just three Garwians, plus of course the navigator. One of the Garwians, presumably the officer in charge, looked up as Thalias came through the hatch. “What are you doing here, Chiss?” she challenged.

  “I am companion to Artistic Master Svorno,” Thalias said, bowing low and keeping her shoulders hunched. She and Thrawn had discussed just how much they wanted to broadcast her supposed hostage identity: too little and the Nikardun might not hear about it, too much and the fact it was allegedly a Chiss cultural secret could start unraveling. Their decision was for her to call herself a companion, but at the same time present the stance and manner of someone whose life was held in another’s hands.

  A role that was proving disturbingly easy to settle into. “He asked me to note and memorize the artistic tattoos on our navigator’s face.”

  “Your master is ill informed,” the Garwian said tartly. “It’s the Vector One navigators who have tattoos. We fly today with a Pathfinder.”

  “They have no tattoos?” Thalias asked, frowning. “Are you certain?”

  The officer waved toward the figure in the navigator’s seat. “See for yourself.”

  Hiding a smile, Thalias crossed to the board, focusing on the figure as she stretched out with all her senses. She caught a whiff of something spicy—somehow, none of the material she’d read on Pathfinders had mentioned they had a distinctive odor—but there was nothing else. She kept at it, coming right up behind him. Still nothing.

  Negative information. Still, it had been worth a try. She stepped around the side of the chair, remembering she was supposed to confirm Pathfinders didn’t tattoo their faces—

  It was all she could do to keep from gasping with surprise and horror. The alien sitting there—the facial contours, the shape of the cheek winglets, the flow pattern of the bristles above his eyes—she’d seen this one before. In fact—

  “I told you,” the Garwian said, her tone a mix of satisfaction and contempt.

  Thalias nodded, searching for her voice as she took one final, painfully careful look. There was no doubt. “You were right,” she agreed. She stepped away from the chair and bowed again to the Garwian. “My apologies for the intrusion.”

  Thrawn was in the study section of their suite when she returned. “We have trouble,” she said without preamble.

  He set down his questis, his eyes steady on her. “Explain.”

  “You remember that Pathfinder you hired for the Springhawk’s raid on Rapacc?” Thalias asked.

  “Of course. Qilori of Uandualon.”

  “Right,” Thalias said. “He’s on the bridge right now.”

  Thrawn raised an eyebrow. “Is he, now.”

  “That’s all?” Thalias demanded. “Is he, now? Seems to me a situation like this calls for a stronger response than just is he, now.”

  “What would you suggest we do?” Thrawn asked calmly. “Ask Frangelic to stop the ship so we can get off? Urge him to imprison Qilori the minute we leave hyperspace, possibly resulting in a boycott of the Garwian Unity by the entire Navigators’ Guild?”

  “No, of course not,” Thalias ground out. She hated when people went immediately to worst-case scenarios. “What if he sees us? Or rather, what if he sees you? What if the Nikardun are on Primea? Because they’re already out for your blood. A casual word or slip of the tongue from Qilori, and we’ll be running for our lives.”

  “Perhaps,” Thrawn said, his eyes narrowing in thought. “On the other hand…”

  “On the other hand what?”

  “Hardly the right tone for a hostage to take toward her master,” Thrawn said.

  “I’ll keep that in mind. On the other hand what?”

  “Our goal is to gather information on the Nikardun and their plans,” Thrawn said slowly, his eyes still narrowed. “We’ve stirred them up at Rapacc and Urch. Perhaps it’s time now to do the same at Primea.”

  “That sounds dangerous,” Thalias warned. “What if Frangelic doesn’t agree?”

  “I wasn’t planning to tell him.”

  Thalias felt her lip twist. “That’s what I thought.”

  “Don’t worry,” Thrawn soothed. “If we do it right, none of it will reflect badly on the Garwians.”

  “Great,” Thalias said heavily. She could appreciate Thrawn’s consideration for their hosts.

  But to be honest, it wasn’t the Garwians she was worried about.

  * * *

  —

  Qilori had always hated foreign receptions. Diplomatic receptions were even worse. The strange voices and sounds, the odd and often disgusting faces and body types, the alien odors—especially the alien odors—all of it added up to the waste of an evening, a day, or occasionally an entire excruciating week. All in all, he would much rather have stayed in orbit on the Garwian ship.

  But Yiv was here, and he’d ordered Qilori to come down to deliver a firsthand report on the situation in Qilori’s part of the Chaos. And so Qilori was here, too, suffering through the alien odors, watching and waiting his turn from a distance as the Benevolent held jovial court in a corner with some alien diplomats. If Yiv finished his debriefing quickly enough, maybe he could talk the Garwian shuttle pilot into running him back to the ship while the rest of the delegation talked or drank themselves stupid or did whatever else they’d come here for.

  “Your makeup is untidy,” a severe voice came quietly from behind him. “A family hostage needs to maintain proper decorum. Go elsewhere and fix it.”

  A familiar voice, somehow. Frowning, Qilori turned around.

  A pair of Chiss, one male and one female, stood a couple of meters back. The male was tall with a haughty demeanor and full Chiss formalwear robes draped over his shoulders, while the female was shorter, dressed in a far less elaborate outfit, with some kind of thick, textured makeup slathered on her face. Her shoulders were rounded, her eyes lowered, her expression like that of a favored pet who’s just been slapped. Qilori watched as she bowed low and slipped away through the crowd of chatting dignitaries.

  Qilori looked back at the male, wondering who the female was to him and why she’d reacted so strongly
to his rebuke. His face, now in profile, seemed as vaguely familiar as his voice.

  He felt his winglets go rigid. The face—the voice—

  It was Thrawn.

  The Chiss turned away, but for those first few seconds Qilori was rooted to the spot. He’d been told there were two Chiss aboard the Garwian ship he’d been hired to navigate, but they were supposed to be some stuffy academic type and his companion or servant or some such.

  Only it wasn’t. It was Thrawn. Thrawn in civilian garb, running under an assumed name. And that could only mean one thing.

  A big, fat bonus.

  His first impulse was to head straight over to the Benevolent, cut into whatever conversation he was having, and give him the news. But common sense and caution intervened. Even if Yiv didn’t have him whipped for sheer insolence, breaking protocol that way would draw unwelcome attention. Better—and safer—to wait until the Benevolent had a moment free.

  And while he waited for that moment…

  Thrawn was standing by the sweet-sour section of the food array, surveying the different offerings, when Qilori caught up with him. “I’d stay away from the kiki,” he warned, pointing to a mix of red, orange, and pale-blue half-moons. “It takes a particular set of digestive juices to handle it properly.”

  “Interesting,” Thrawn said, peering more closely at the bowl. “Odd that our hosts would even include such a specialized dish.”

  “Maybe,” Qilori said. “But you’d be surprised how many people will gladly trade a minute of delectable taste for an hour of gastric discomfort. I believe you were aboard my ship.”

  “Your ship?” Thrawn frowned, and then his expression cleared. “Ah—you mean you were Envoy Proslis’s navigator. I’m Artistic Master Svorno, chief curator of the Nunech Art Collection.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Qilori said, wondering briefly if he should give his own name or instead come up with something fictitious.