Thrawn Ascendancy Book 3: Lesser Evil
- Автор: Зан Тимоти
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Random House
- ISBN: 9781473596580
- Жанр: Боевая фантастика
Электронная книга - «Thrawn Ascendancy Book 3: Lesser Evil». Краткое содержание книги:
Perhaps such a story would persuade the Grysks to avoid this part of the Chaos in the future. More likely, it would simply ensure they would send an entire armada the next time. In that case, not only would the Chiss be doomed, but so would everyone else in the region.
And if the Grysks continued to employ the strange alien Attendants as their navigators, that doom might not stop at Concourse 447 or all the rest of the Pathfinder bases. Or at the Pathfinders themselves.
Qilori’s winglets suddenly stiffened. Yes, Jixtus’s story would be the only one told … but only as long as there were no other witnesses to the Grysk debacle. Witnesses such as the remaining Kiljis.
Witnesses such as Qilori.
The FateSpinner was moving up behind and beneath the Whetstone, and from the sudden slowing of its acceleration Qilori could tell that Jixtus had spotted the opening he was looking for. If he turned in the next thirty or forty seconds, he could angle up, slip through the gap before anyone could move to stop him, and be gone.
And on the way to that gap, he would pass directly in front of the Whetstone.
Qilori looked at the Kilji vassals, still hunched over their consoles. “Generalirius Nakirre called you his vassals,” he reminded them. “Jixtus called the Whetstone a pathetic little war cruiser. Do you agree with either of them?”
The Kilji at the helm raised his head a little. “We are as he says,” he said in a low voice. “We can make no move, nor create any thought, without our master.”
Qilori looked desperately at the tactical. There had to be something he could do to revive these brain-deadened aliens.
Maybe the answer was right there in front of him. “Without your master?” he asked. “Or without a master?”
This time, all the heads came up a little. “What do you say?” the pilot asked.
“I say that I am your new master,” Qilori replied with all the confidence and bravado he could manage. “I will lead you until you can return to your people.”
And suddenly, the Kiljis all sat upright, their hands once again poised over their control boards. “What do you order?” the pilot asked.
“How quickly can the peace-sealing be removed from the Whetstone’s lasers and missile tubes?” Qilori asked.
“Very quickly.”
“Do it.”
One of the Kiljis keyed a series of controls, and Qilori felt a sputtering shudder through the deck as a series of explosive bolts detonated. “Weapons are clear,” the Kilji confirmed.
“Good,” Qilori said, wondering distantly if he was really doing this. The Navigators’ Guild forbade its members from engaging in any military activity … “The FateSpinner is about to pass in front of us. When it does, we’re going to show Jixtus what a Kilji war cruiser can do.”
“Which weapons do you wish us to use?” the Kilji at the weapons station asked.
Qilori looked again at the tactical. “All of them,” he said. “At point-blank range, as accurately as you can.”
“I obey.”
“Tell me when you’re ready.”
Another pair of ships had appeared now on the tacticaclass="underline" the Paccian gunship carrying the gravity-well generator and one of the two Chiss heavy cruisers. They were angling on an intercept vector, clearly hoping to get to the FateSpinner before it cleared the battleground and keep it from escaping.
Qilori’s winglets flattened. He would show them what a Kilji war cruiser could do, too.
“Weapons ready.” The Kilji’s hands stretched out over the board as he keyed the various switches.
And suddenly, for no apparent reason, Qilori’s mind flashed back to Thrawn’s warship as they chased the Hammer from the Rapacc system. Qilori sitting at the nav station, wondering why the chair was set so far forward.
He stared at the Kiljis’ arms and hands. Kilji arms stretched over their boards; Chiss arms presumably stretched the same way over theirs. Only the two spans were different, with the Chiss one markedly smaller—
And then, it hit him. The truth—the strange, inexplicable truth, slammed squarely into his head.
The Chiss navigators were children!
The revelation vanished into the mists of Qilori’s mind as the reality of the moment rushed back over him. The FateSpinner was coming into range, angling up right where Qilori had expected it to, trying to get through the gap before the shifting forces moving across the battleground sealed it closed. The warship would cross in front of the Whetstone barely three hundred meters away …
“Fire,” Qilori said.
And as the viewport erupted in a blazing firestorm of laserfire and missile explosions, the FateSpinner’s entire starboard aft flank disintegrated.
For a long moment an awed, disbelieving silence filled the Grayshrike’s bridge. “Well,” Vimsk managed at last. “That’s something you don’t see every day, either.”
“No, it’s not,” Ziinda agreed. “Mid Captain Apros?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“You can throttle back a little,” she told him. “I don’t think there’s any rush now. Admiral Ar’alani?”
“Yes, ease off, Apros,” Ar’alani confirmed. “In fact, both of you head toward the Aelos—I’ll rendezvous with you along the way and escort you back.
“I think the battle is just about over.”
But it wasn’t. Not completely.
“Jixtus?” Thrawn called, his voice sounding oddly subdued as it came from the Vigilant’s bridge speaker. “Are you still there?”
“For the moment,” Jixtus’s voice came back. There was pain there, Ar’alani could tell, and a quiet anger. But mostly what she could hear was resignation. “Are you calling to gloat?”
“No,” Thrawn said. “I wanted to state our terms of surrender and offer medical aid for your people.”
“You know I can’t accept,” Jixtus said. “Neither you nor any other Chiss is ever to see our faces or know our forms. Not until we sit on the thrones of the ancient kings on Csilla.”
Ar’alani tensed. The last time they’d wrecked a Grysk warship—“All ships: Move immediately away from the Grysks,” she ordered urgently. “Even the wrecks. Move away now.”
“Actually, there are no such thrones or ancient kings,” Thrawn corrected mildly. “But I understand your meaning. I’ll look forward to our next encounter with your people.”
An instant later, all across the battleground, the Grysk warships exploded.
All of them except the FateSpinner.
“A question, if I may,” Jixtus continued calmly, as if he hadn’t just ordered the final destruction of his fleet and his warriors. “Just to satisfy my curiosity. There are no Magysines, are there? Not aboard your ship, nor on Sunrise.”
“No, there are none that I know of,” Thrawn confirmed. “The Magys has told me that she is the only one. Still, even an imaginary bargaining point can be of use.”