'The bounty hunter kind,' Mara said, handing him the data pad. Neatly framed in the center of the display, under a large 20,000, was Karrde's face.
'We're probably all in there,' she told him. 'Or at least as many as grand Admiral Thrawn knew about.'
'So I'm worth twenty thousand now,' Karrde murmured, paging quickly through the card. 'I'm flattered.'
'Is that all you're going to say?' Mara demanded. He looked at her. 'What would you like me to say?' he asked mildly.
'That you were right and I was wrong about the Empire's interest in us?'
'I'm not interested in laying blame,' she told him stiffly. 'What I want to know is what we're going to do about it.'
Karrde looked at the data pad again, a muscle tightening briefly in his jaw. 'We're going to do the only prudent thing,' he said. 'Namely, retreat. Dankin, get on the secure comm and tell Lachton to start pulling the drop apart again. Then call Chin and his team and have them go over and repack the stuff in the equipment dumps. You can stay and help Mara and me here. I want to get off Rishi by midnight if at all possible.'
'Got it,' Dankin said, already keying the encrypt codes into the comm board.
Karrde handed the data pad back to Mara. 'We'd better get busy.' She stopped him with a hand on his arm. And what happens when we run out of backnp bases?'
He locked eyes with her. 'We don't give up the Dreadnaughts under duress,' he said, lowering his voice to just above a whisper. 'Not to Thrawn; not to anyone else.'
'We may have to,' she pointed out.
His eyes hardened. 'We may choose to,' he corrected her. 'We will never have to. Is that clear?'
Mara grimaced to herself. 'Yes.'
'Good.' Karrde flicked a glance over her shoulder to where Dankin was speaking urgently into the comm. 'We have a lot of work to do. Let's get to it.'
Mara would have bet that they couldn't reassemble their equipment in less than twenty-four hours. To her mild surprise, the crews had everything packed and ready to go barely an hour after local midnight. With suitably generous applications of funds to spaceport officials, they were off Rishi and to lightspeed an hour after that.
And later that night, as the Wild Karrde drove through the mottled sky of hyperspace, the dreams started again.
CHAPTER
6
From a distance it had looked like a standard-issue Bulk Cruiser: old, slow, minimally armed, with very little going for it in a fight except its size. But as with so very much of warfare, appearances in this case turned out to be deceiving; and if Grand Admiral Thrawn hadn't been on the Chimaera's bridge, Pellaeon had to admit that he might have been caught a bit by surprise.
But Thrawn had been on the bridge, and had recognized immediately the unlikelihood that the Rebellion's strategists would have put such an important convoy under the protection of such a weak ship. And so, when the Bulk Cruiser's bays suddenly erupted with three full squadrons of A-wing starfighters, the Chimaera's TIE interceptors were already in space and swarming to the attack.
'Interesting tactic,' Thrawn commented as the gap between the Chimaera and the Rebel convoy began to sparkle with laser flashes. 'If not especially innovative. The idea of converting Bulk Cruisers to starfighter carriers was first proposed over twenty years ago.'
'I don't recall it ever being implemented,' Pellaeon said, feeling a twinge of uneasiness as he eyed the tactical displays. A-wings were faster even than those cursed X-wings, and he wasn't at all sure how well his TIE
interceptors would handle them.
'Excellent fighters, A-wings,' Thrawn said, as if reading Pellaeon's thoughts. 'Not without their limitations, though. Particularly here-high-speed craft like that are far more suited to hit-and-fade operations than to escort duty. Forcing them to remain near a convoy largely neutralizes their speed advantage.' He cocked a blue-black eyebrow at Pellaeon. 'Perhaps we're seeing the result of Admiral Ackbar's removal as Supreme Commander.'
'Perhaps.' The TIE interceptors did indeed seem to be holding their own against the A-wings; and the
