the Wild Karrde around, turning its nose away from the asteroid and starting to drive toward deep space And with a flicker of pseudomotion, something big shot in from lightspeed, dropping neatly into normal space not twenty kilometers away. An Imperial Interdictor Cruiser.
Aves yelped a startled-sounding curse. 'We got company,' he barked.
'I see it,' Karrde said. As cool as ever ... but Mara could hear the tinge of surprise in his voice, too. 'What's our time to lightspeed?'
'It'll be another minute,' Aves said tautly. 'There's a lot of junk in the outer system for the computer to work through.'
'We have a race, then,' Karrde said. 'Mara?'
'Up to point seven three,' she said, nursing as much power as she could out of the still-sluggish engines. He was right; it was indeed going to be a race. With their four huge gravity-wave generators capable of simulating planet-sized masses, Interdictor Cruisers were the Empire's weapon of choice for trapping an enemy ship in normal space while TIE fighters pounded it to rubble. But coming in fresh out of lightspeed itself, the Interdictor would need another minute before it could power up those generators. If she could get the Wild Karrde out of range by then...
'More visitors,' Aves announced. 'A couple, squadrons of TIE fighters coming from the Chimaera.
'We're up to point eight six power,' Mara reported. 'We'll be ready for lightspeed as soon as the nav computer gives me a course.
'Interdictor status?'
'Grav generators are powering up,' Aves said. On Mara's tactical display a ghostly cone appeared, showing the area where the lightspeed-dampening field would soon exist She changed course slightly, aiming for the nearest edge, and risked a glance at the nav computer display. Almost ready. The hazy grav cone was rapidly becoming more substantial... The computer scope pinged. Mara wrapped her hand around the three hyperspace control levers at the front of the control board and gently pulled them toward her. The Wild Karrde shuddered slightly, and for a second it seemed that the Interdictor had won their deadly race. Then, abruptly, the stars outside burst into starlines.
They'd made it.
Aves heaved a sigh of relief as the starlines faded into the mottled sky of hyperspace. 'Talk about slicing the mynock close to the hull. How do you suppose they tumbled that we were out there, anyway?'
'No idea,' Karrde said, his voice cool. 'Mara?'
'I don't know, either.' Mara kept her eyes on her displays, not daring to look at either of them. 'Thrawn may have just been playing a hunch. He does that sometimes.'
'Lucky for us he's not the only one who gets hunches,' Aves offered, his voice sounding a little strange. 'Nice going, Mara. Sorry I jumped on you.'
'Yes,' Karrde seconded. 'A very good job indeed.'
'Thanks,' Mara muttered, keeping her eyes on her control board and blinking back the tears that had suddenly come to her eyes. So it was back. She'd hoped fervently that her locating of Skywalker's X-wing out in deep space had been an isolated event. A fluke, more his doing than hers. But no. It was all coming back, as it had so many times before in the past five years. The hunches and sensory flickers, the urges and the compulsions.
Which meant that, very soon now, the dreams would probably be starting again, too.
Angrily, she swiped at her eyes, and with an effort unclenched her jaw. It was a familiar enough pattern ... but this time things were going to be different. Always before there'd been nothing she could do about the voices and urges except to suffer through the cycle. To suffer, and to be ready to break out of whatever niche she'd managed to carve for herself when she finally betrayed herself to those around her.
But she wasn't a serving girl in a Phorliss cantina this time, or a come-up deflector for a swoop gang on Caprioril, or even a hyperdrive mechanic stuck in the backwater of the Ison Corridor. She was second in command to the most powerful smuggler in the galaxy, with the kind of resources and mobility she hadn't had since the death of the Emperor.
The kind of resources that would let her find Luke Skywalker again. And kill him.
Maybe then the voices would stop.
For a long minute Thrawn stood at the bridge viewport, looking out at the distant asteroid and the now superfluous Interdictor Cruiser near it. It was, Pellaeon thought uneasily, almost the identical posture the Grand Admiral had assumed when Luke Skywalker had so recently escaped a similar trap. Holding his breath, Pellaeon stared at Thrawn's back, wondering if another of the Chimaera's crewers was about to be executed for this failure. Thrawn turned around. 'Interesting,' he said, his voice conversational. 'Did you note the sequence of events,
