Vision of the future

But that glory was far behind them; and if something didn't break soon, Nalgol was going to have a serious personnel problem on his hands.

Outside, there was a brilliant flash from the upper portside quadrant. Relatively brilliant, at least: the glowing drive from one of their probe ships, carefully made up to look like a battered old mining tug. Nalgol watched as it circled around to vanish beneath the arrowhead-shaped hull toward the hangar bay.

No, the unremitting blackness didn't bother him. Still, he had to admit it had felt good to stretch his eyes there for a moment.

There was a step on the command walkway beside him. 'Preliminary report from Probe Two, sir,' Intelligence Chief Oissan said in that tone of voice that always sounded to Nalgol like someone smacking his lips. 'The warship count around Bothawui has gone up to fifty-six.'

'Fifty-six?' Nalgol echoed, taking the other's datapad and skimming the numbers. If he remembered the list from yesterday's probe run— 'Four new Diamalan ships?'

'Three Diamalan, one Mon Calamari,' Oissan said. 'Probably there to counter the six Opquis ships that arrived two days ago.'

Nalgol shook his head in wordless amazement. From the beginning he'd had quiet but serious doubts about this mission—the idea that the Bothan homeworld would become a focal point for any military activity, let alone a confrontation of this magnitude, had been ludicrous on the face of it. But Grand Admiral Thrawn himself had apparently come up with this scheme; and plagued if old red-eyes hadn't been right.

'Very good,' he told Oissan. 'I want Probe Two's complete report filled within the next two hours.'

'Understood, Captain.' Oissan seemed to hesitate. 'I don't mean to pry into top-level affairs, sir, but at some point I'm going to need to know what's going on out there if I'm to do my job properly.'

'I wish I could help you, Colonel,' Nalgol said candidly. 'But I really don't know a lot myself.'

'But you did receive a special briefing from Grand Admiral Thrawn at Moff Disra's palace, didn't you?' the other persisted.

'It hardly qualified as a briefing,' Nalgol said. 'He basically just gave us our assignments and told us to trust him.' He nodded in the direction of the comet and the other two Star Destroyers riding cloaked alongside it. 'Our part is simple: we wait until all those ships out there have battered themselves and the planet into as much rubble as they're going to, then we come out of cloak and finish them off.'

'Finishing off Bothawui will be a good trick,' Oissan commented dryly. 'I doubt the Bothans have scrimped on their planetary shield system. Thrawn give any idea how he's going to handle that?'

'Not to me,' Nalgol said. 'Under the circumstances, though, I'm inclined to assume he knows what he's doing.'

'I suppose,' Oissan muttered. 'I wonder how he got all those ships to face off like that?'

'Best guess is that rumor you picked up from your fringe contacts just before we cloaked,' Nalgol said. 'That thing about a group of Bothans having been involved in the destruction of Caamas.'

'Hardly seems something worth getting worked up over,' Oissan sniffed. 'Especially not after all this time.'

'Aliens get worked up over the strangest things,' Nalgol reminded him, feeling his lip twist with contempt. 'And from the evidence out there, I'd say Thrawn found exactly the right hot spot to hit them with.'

'So it would seem,' Oissan conceded. 'How are we supposed to know when to come out of cloak and attack?'

'I think a full-scale battle out there will be fairly obvious,' Nalgol said dryly. 'Anyway, Thrawn's last message before we went under the cloak said there would be an Imperial strike team on Bothawui soon, and that they'd be feeding us periodic data via spark transmission.'

'That'll be useful,' Oissan said thoughtfully. 'Of course, knowing Thrawn, he'll probably have the battle timed for the comet's closest approach to Bothawui, to give us the maximum benefit of surprise. That's about a month away.'

'That makes sense,' Nalgol agreed. 'Though how he's going to get them to follow that tight a timetable I haven't a clue.'

'Neither do I.' Oissan smiled tightly. 'That's probably why he's a Grand Admiral and we're not.' Nalgol smiled back. 'Indeed,' he said; and with that admission, one more layer of his private doubts seemed to melt away. Yes, Thrawn had proved himself in the past. Many, many times. However this magic of his worked, it was apparently still working.

And under the spell of Thrawn's genius, the Empire was about to get some of its own back. And that was really all Nalgol cared about.