Thrawn Ascendancy Book 3: Lesser Evil

“I’m sorry, but we cannot spare a ship to take you home,” Uingali said firmly. “If you wish a different answer, you must talk to Senior Captain Thrawn.”

“I will,” Qilori said, standing up. “Thank you for your time and your words.”

He found Thrawn outside at the edge of the mining compound, sitting alone on a rock outcropping at the edge of a patch of thick woods. The Chiss was gazing meditatively at the last sliver of sun still visible over the hills to the west, the failing light starting to fill the valley below them with twilight. An evening breeze whispered gently through the woods a few meters to Thrawn’s left, stirring the branches and creating little swirling eddies in the dead leaves on the ground all around them. The Magys was nowhere to be seen, having apparently taken her search for a new navigator elsewhere.

Nor were there any bodyguards in attendance. Apparently, Thrawn wasn’t as concerned about predators as Uingali was.

“Senior Captain Thrawn,” Qilori greeted the Chiss as he walked up behind him. “It’s Qilori of Uandualon.”

“I know,” Thrawn said, not turning. “I heard your footsteps as you approached.”

Qilori hadn’t realized his steps could even be heard over the breeze and evening noises. “I urgently need to speak with you,” he said as he came up beside the Chiss. “If now is inconvenient, please set a time when it will be.”

“Now is acceptable,” Thrawn said. “Before we speak, I must first apologize for the Magys’s needlessly unkind words.”

“No apology needed,” Qilori assured him, his winglets twitching. The Magys and her strange comments could wait. Finding a way off Sunrise was the more critical issue here. “Uingali foar Marocsaa told me—”

“Because you certainly aren’t useless,” Thrawn continued. “On that we all agree. You’re only useless to her attempts to see through time.”

“—that he couldn’t get me back to—” Qilori broke off as Thrawn’s comment suddenly registered. “Excuse me? You said she wants to see through time?”

“Yes,” Thrawn said. “You see, she’s more than simply a political or social leader, as we first believed. Just as you have a connection to what you name the Great Presence, she has a connection to something she calls the Beyond. She is hoping to use those connections and similar ones to see into the future.”

Into the future. So that was the not-space she wanted him to navigate. “But how can the future be seen? Is it not created by the combined yet separate decisions of trillions of beings?”

“How can a Pathfinder see into the future to know where a hyperspace path will lead to danger and thus change the ship’s course to avoid it?” Thrawn countered.

“That’s not how we navigate,” Qilori told him. “The Great Presence guides us away from such dangers.”

“Then how does the Great Presence know?”

“The Great Presence is—the Great Presence,” Qilori finished, wincing at how lame that sounded. “We don’t know how it functions. Or even, really, what it is.”

“As I don’t fully understand the thought behind the Magys’s quest.” Thrawn gave a little shrug. “Still, though the future is indeed uncertain and ever-changing, it may be that certain events are fixed once those making the proper decisions have committed themselves to those paths.”

“It would certainly make navigating easier,” Qilori commented. “If we could plot out a course even ten or fifteen minutes in advance, it would make for much easier travel.”

“I don’t think the Magys is concerned with hyperspace travel,” Thrawn said, his voice going darker. “Her goals are more focused on the defense of her world.”

Qilori’s winglets stiffened. He hadn’t even thought about how something like that could be applied to warfare.

But the possibilities were instantly clear. If she knew in advance Jixtus’s commitment to destroy the Chiss Ascendancy, or the commitment the Grysks would surely make to take back this world, it would give her a huge strategic advantage. “You’re speaking of knowing an enemy’s overall plans?” he asked.

“Perhaps even the sequence of a particular battle,” Thrawn said.

Qilori’s winglets twitched. “That seems terrifying.”

“Only if you’re the aggressor facing such foreknowledge,” Thrawn said. “The Magys would use it solely to defend her people.” He paused. “Though others, of course, have been hoping from the start that they could utilize it for conquest.”

“Others?” Qilori asked carefully. “What others?”

“Let us follow the history,” Thrawn said. “First, General Yiv brought his Nikardun forces against the star nations in this part of the Chaos, seeking to conquer or otherwise subdue them. At some point, while nearly all attention was on him, Sunrise was destroyed by a civil war orchestrated from the outside by creatures called the Agbui.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them,” Qilori murmured.