Thrawn Ascendancy Book 3: Lesser Evil

“Second mark: Three, two, one.”

Once again, Thrass felt a small twitch of acceleration as the compensators lagged slightly behind the surge of the main thrusters’ emergency power. The Jandalin again leapt forward, and he looked back at the displays, wondering if Thrawn’s baffling maneuver had cost them the race to the transport.

He was still trying to figure it out when the glow of a plasma sphere sizzled past the viewport across the Jandalin’s bow.

Thrass jerked, feeling his mouth drop open. “What in the—?”

“Roscu fired on us,” Lappincyk said, his voice hovering somewhere between disbelief and fury. “She fired on us.”

“As I said,” Thrawn called back to them. “There’s little she wouldn’t dare.”

“How did you know?” Thrass asked.

“About the plasma sphere?” Thrawn gave a little shrug. “I served with her. I know how she thinks and behaves.”

“And you knew she would attack us?”

“I suspected she would try to disable us,” Thrawn said. “She probably reasons that once she has the transport and its cargo, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Thrass mouthed a curse. Thrawn was right on that one, anyway. The Stybla could file a complaint once the Jandalin was back in the Ascendancy, but in the meantime the Clarr would have the transport and the cargo.

The cargo that belonged to the Stybla. The cargo that Lappincyk and Patriarch Lamiov were desperate to retrieve. The cargo Roscu was going to simply walk away with.

He squared his shoulders. Like hell she was.

“Are you saying there’s nothing we can do to stop her?” Lappincyk demanded.

“He’s not saying that at all,” Thrass said before Thrawn could answer. “The comm, if you please?”

Lappincyk sent him a brief, speculative look. Then, without comment, he pulled the comm speaker from its holder and handed it over. “Thank you,” Thrass said. “Pilot: Communications, if you please.”

“You have comm,” the pilot confirmed.

“Thank you.” Thrass keyed the mike. “Orisson, this is the Jandalin,” he said. “Captain Roscu, you should be aware that someone under your command has just committed a serious violation of Ascendancy law. As I assume you know, launching an attack on a member of the Syndicure can be considered an act of internecine war. I’m sure your Patriarch would be shocked to hear that someone aboard your ship has been careless enough to put him in that position.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Roscu’s scornful voice came back. “You already identified yourself as nothing more than a senior aide.”

“Attacking a Patriarch’s senior aide is also a serious breach of protocol,” Thrass said. “But this isn’t Senior Aide Lappincyk. You’re talking to Syndic Mitth’ras’safis. I suggest you think long and hard before you continue along your current path.”

There was a short pause. “You’re lying,” Roscu accused. “Why would a Mitth Syndic be aboard a Stybla patrol ship?”

“For the same reason Mid Commander Thrawn is aboard,” Thrass said, an odd thought suddenly occurring to him. Family relationships were sometimes vague and always complicated, and the perceptions of those relationships were often even more so.

But if properly presented, erroneous perceptions could be useful, providing leverage and manipulation in a way that couldn’t later be denounced as outright falsehoods. Thrass, as a Mitth cousin, had some of the same rights and privileges as those enjoyed by blood.

And one of those rights, he knew, was to make personal declarations of—

“My brother and I were asked by our Patriarch to assist Senior Aide Lappincyk in his recovery operation,” he continued, dropping the critical word into the conversation with a casual familiarity, as if he’d referred to the relationship a thousand times over the years. The question now was whether Roscu would catch the designation and the significance he hoped she would place on it.

From the length of the silence at the other end of the comm, it appeared that she had. “This operation is a matter for the Clarr,” Roscu said at last.

Quietly, Thrass let out the breath he’d been holding. “Retrieval of the cargo is a matter for the Stybla,” he countered. As he’d hoped, Roscu had taken the most literal meaning of his comment.

And really, it would have been extraordinary if she hadn’t. She didn’t know Thrawn’s standing with the Mitth—she would assume he was a merit adoptive, as were most of the Nine’s military personnel, but would never have been so crass as to ask.

Now that lack of definitive information had turned around to sting her. Syndics were always either blood, cousins, or ranking distants; and Thrass’s identification of Thrawn as his brother strongly implied that he, too, was in that lofty peak of the Mitth family pyramid.

Roscu might be willing to kill a Stybla Patriarch’s senior aide, especially if she could make it seem like a result of the brief battle with the Paataatus. Killing a high-ranking Mitth, on the other hand, would be far more dangerous.