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:
“So just in her dream state,” Thrawn said thoughtfully. “Was this the first time she’s had these dreams?”
“It’s the first time I heard her in the middle of one,” Thalias said. “But I asked her about it while we were waiting for you, and it turns out she’s had two or three others over the past two weeks. Not nearly as vivid or terrifying, though, she said. Just odd.”
“And all of them occurring after we brought the Magys out of hibernation to look at the nyix brooch.”
Thalias nodded. So he was thinking the same thing she was. “Yes.”
For a moment Thrawn was silent. “I checked the hibernation chamber,” he said. “There’s no indication of any malfunction.”
“So how is she doing it?”
“I don’t know,” Thrawn conceded. “Perhaps her dreams are somehow intersecting with Che’ri’s.”
“I thought people in hibernation didn’t dream.”
“Chiss in hibernation don’t,” Thrawn said. “But the Magys is an alien. Her mental and physiological responses may be different.” He nodded toward Che’ri. “There is, of course, one other obvious possibility.”
Thalias winced. “You think she’s connecting somehow with Che’ri’s Third Sight?”
“It’s a possibility,” Thrawn said. “Especially given the Magys’s still-undefined connection to the Beyond.”
“That seems so strange,” Thalias said, shaking her head. “To connect with something you can’t see or touch.”
“Very strange, indeed,” Thrawn said.
Thalias looked at him, feeling her eyes narrow. There’d been a hint of dry humor in his tone. “It’s nothing like Third Sight,” she insisted. “We just see dangers that are in front of the ship and maneuver to get around them. We’re not connecting with anything.”
“Perhaps,” Thrawn said. “The question has been debated for centuries without a resolution. Again, I find myself thinking about my conversations with General Skywalker concerning the Force. There was a certain vagueness in his descriptions, too, but he seemed quite capable of tapping it for both power and insight.”
“Well, it’s creepy,” Thalias declared darkly. “Especially when she’s picking on someone like Che’ri. Do you think we should … I don’t know. Wake her up and tell her to stop?”
“I think not,” Thrawn said. “If it’s not deliberate, the effect on Che’ri would likely distress her. If it is deliberate, we would be confirming for her that her scheme is working.” He hesitated. “More concerning to me is that if she’s affecting Che’ri this strongly while asleep, the danger may be much greater once she’s conscious.”
“Yes, that would be bad,” Thalias agreed. Though if the connection was there only when Che’ri was asleep … but they really didn’t have enough data one way or another on that. “So what do we do?”
“We continue on this path,” Thrawn said. “We’re currently seven hours from Rapacc by sky-walker, forty-nine by jump-by-jump. We’ll keep going as long as Che’ri can stay awake, then continue jump-by-jump while she sleeps. If she’s again woken early by more nightmares, and if she’s alert enough, she can again take over navigation.”
“You’re talking a lot of awake time, Senior Captain,” Thalias warned, looking down at Che’ri. The girl still looked all right, but Che’ri knew the toll this was taking on her mind and body. “More than is legally allowed.”
“I know,” Thrawn said. “But a ship’s captain has leeway in extraordinary circumstances. At any rate, a rest period hardly seems useful if she’s unable to rest.”
“That may be,” Thalias said. “But I don’t know how much she can take before she risks serious damage.”
“I did look into that possibility,” Thrawn said. “The medical data suggests that in the case of prolonged wakefulness, her body will force her to sleep before any damage occurs. It also suggests that a sleep cycle continually interrupted by nightmares isn’t much better for her, either. Still, even if she only gets two or three hours’ sleep at a time before we reach Rapacc, we’ll arrive in less than two days. At this point, I think the best thing we can do for her is get her there as quickly as possible and get the Magys off the Springhawk.”
Thalias breathed out a sigh. She still didn’t like it, but couldn’t think of anything better to offer. “All right,” she said. “I’ll stay here and watch her until she needs to sleep.”
“Or until you need to sleep,” Thrawn said. “I can have someone else watch her.”
Thalias squared her shoulders. “I’ll stay here,” she repeated firmly, “until she needs to sleep.”
“Understood,” Thrawn said, and Thalias could hear the quiet approval in his tone. “Carry on, Caregiver.”
The trance ended, the Great Presence faded back into the mists of thought and waking dream, and with a final twitch of his fingers Qilori of Uandualon brought the Kilji war cruiser Anvil out of hyperspace. With a tired sigh, he pulled off his sensory-deprivation headset—
“Why do we stop here, Pathfinder?” a gruff voice came from behind him, chewing the Taarja words like they were sour fruit.
Qilori’s cheek winglets twitched in disgust and annoyance. General Crofyp, commander of the Anvil, was short, loud, impatient, and his wrinkled, rubbery skin was utterly repulsive. All other things being equal, Qilori would probably have refused the job of guiding Crofyp and his ship to Rapacc.
But this trip had been undertaken under Jixtus’s orders. And with Jixtus, nothing else was quite equal.
“The Hammer has lagged a bit, General, and is a few minutes behind us,” Qilori explained, half turning to face him. “You said earlier that you wanted both ships to arrive at the same time, so I thought we’d stop an easy jump outside the Rapacc system and wait for them to catch up.”
“Foolish unenlightened,” Crofyp said, his voice fairly dripping with disdain. “We are here, and Colonel Tildnis is in hyperspace. He will not know we’ve stopped, but merely pass us by unnoticed.”
“I don’t think so,” Qilori said. “I expect the Hammer to appear nearby in approximately four minutes.”
Crofyp made some rude-sounding noises in his own language and shifted his attention to the status displays. Qilori turned back to his nav board, his winglets twitching with some scorn of his own. He wasn’t surprised at the Kilji’s skepticism; the fact that Pathfinders could sense, locate, and follow each other in hyperspace was a closely held secret.
Still, Jixtus probably knew, and General Yiv had certainly known, and anyone who had dreams of conquest really should have done some basic research into the people who made long-distance travel feasible.
Besides, anyone who talked about enlightenment as much as Crofyp should have learned a little more understanding and humility regarding the limits of his knowledge.
Qilori reached down to the warmer beside his knee and pulled out his flask of galara tealeaf. This whole mission was something of a mystery to him; not the kind that was pleasantly intriguing, but the kind that made him nervous. From what little Jixtus had told him, it sounded like the Grysks had sent at least a couple of quiet probes into the Rapacc system, all of them having apparently been chased away. Whatever Jixtus’s goal was, sending in a pair of Kilji warships sounded like a serious escalation.
The big question was: Why Rapacc, of all places? Qilori had been there once before, hired by the dangerous Chiss military leader Thrawn, during the period when one of General Yiv’s commanders had been occupying and blockading the system. Rapacc was an off-the-path place, not allied or even trading partners with anyone Qilori knew of, with nothing special in the way of resources or inhabitants. Qilori hadn’t known at the time why the Nikardun were even interested in the place, and he still didn’t know.