"Have you asked the commander about them?" Lorana asked. Uliar, walking at the end of the line of prisoners, glanced over his shoulder and started to drift backward toward her. "Maybe they have nothing to do with him."

C'baoth snorted. "With all of s.p.a.ce for them to fly through? Please."

"What's going on?" Uliar asked softly.

Lorana hesitated. But all of Outbound Flight was in this together. "An unidentified fleet has arrived," she told him. "Over two hundred ships, at least a hundred of which seem to be warships."

"Who are you talking to?" C'baoth asked.

"We're trying to figure out whether they're Chiss ships, Chiss allies, or someone else entirely," Lorana continued, ignoring the question.

"What are their reactor emissions like?" Uliar asked. "Is it a similar spectrum to Mitth-whatever's ships, or something different?"

"Who is that?" C'baoth demanded. "Jedi Jinzler?"

"Reactor Tech Uliar says we might be able to deduce their ident.i.ty or affiliation from their reactor emission spectrum," Lorana said.

"And what precisely is Reactor Tech Uliar doing out of the imprisonment I ordered for him and his fellow conspirators?" C'baoth asked acidly.

"We're on our way there," Lorana said, feeling her resolve eroding beneath the weight and pressure of his personality. "I thought that since he's an expert in these things-"

"We have experts up here, too," C'baoth cut in. "Loyal experts. You concentrate on putting Uliar where he can't do any more harm and leave the alien fleet to-"

He broke off as a melodious voice, or possibly two of them, began to speak in the background. "What's that?" Lorana asked.

"They appear to be hailing us," C'baoth said. The alien voices grew louder as the Jedi Master moved closer to one of the bridge speakers.

Lorana listened closely. It was a strange language, highly musical, with a distinct singsong component to it. "Uliar?" she whispered.

He shook his head, his forehead creased in concentration. "Never heard anything like it before," he whispered back. "But it doesn't sound like the kind of language near humans like the Chiss would come up with."

Lorana nodded agreement. "Master C'baoth?" she called. "It doesn't sound like-"

"Get the conspirators to their holding area, Jedi Jinzler," C'baoth interrupted. "Then go to Dreadnaught-Four and report to Jedi Master Ma'Ning in the weapons blisters." There was a click as he shut off his comlink.

Lorana sighed. "Yes, Master C'baoth," she murmured as she returned her comlink to her belt.

"We're in trouble, aren't we?" Uliar asked quietly.

"We'll be all right," Lorana a.s.sured him, trying to convey a confidence she didn't feel. First Mitth'raw'nuruodo, and now this new threat . . .

and with Outbound Flight's defense resting squarely on the shoulders of their handful of Jedi.

And suddenly she was getting a very bad feeling about all of it. "I need to get up to D-Four to a.s.sist Master Ma'Ning," she told Uliar. "Get your people inside, and when these other matters are settled we'll get your problem straightened out."

Uliar snorted. "It's not our problem."

Lorana grimaced. "I know," she conceded. "Don't worry. We will straighten it out."

"They're probably not answering because they don't understand you,"

Car'das explained as patiently as his pounding heart would allow. "As I said, they're from the same region of s.p.a.ce I am, and we don't know the language of the mighty and n.o.ble Vagaari."

"You will soon learn it," the Miskara promised him coldly. "In the meantime, you will serve as translator."

Car'das grimaced. That was all he needed: the people on Outbound Flight a.s.suming he was a renegade or, worse, a traitor. Whatever necessary . . .

"Of course, Your Eminence," he said. "I stand humbly ready to serve the Miskara and the Vagaari people in any way you wish."

"Of course," the Miskara said, as if even a breath of hesitation on Car'das's part would be unthinkable. "Tell me first: how deeply within the vessels will the fighting machines be stored? Will they be at the surfaces, or deeper inside."

"Deep inside," Car'das told him, not knowing whether it was true but not about to take the time to try to actually think about it.

"Good," the Miskara said with satisfaction. "Then we may destroy as we will without risking our prize."

An unpleasant sensation tingled across Car'das's skin. With a hundred Vagaari warships blotting out the starscape around him, the Miskara's words were as close to a death sentence as anything he'd ever heard.

And he was the one who'd pointed the Vagaari in that direction.

"Now: speak this," the Miskara continued. " 'You of the vessel known as Outbound Flight: we are the Vagaari. You will surrender or be destroyed.'

22.

. . . Or be destroyed."

Lorana looked across the weapons blister at Ma'Ning, at the tight set to his mouth. The first voice from the unknown ships had definitely not been human. This one just as definitely was.

And the human had been speaking Basic, as well. This wasn't good. "A captive from the Republic?" she suggested.

"Or a traitor," Ma'Ning said grimly. "Either way, it's going to make this that much trickier."

"Not at all," C'baoth's voice came from the comm speaker. "There's nothing even a traitor could have told them that will have prepared them for the kind of coordinated defense a Jedi meld can offer."

"With a hundred or more warships at their disposal I can't see them worrying overly much about how tight our defense is," Ma'Ning countered.

"Patience, Master Ma'Ning," C'baoth said, his voice glacially calm.

"Trust in the Force."

"They're moving forward," Captain Pakmillu's voice cut in. "All weapons stations stand ready."

Lorana took a deep breath as she stretched out to the Force for strength and calm. This was it: the first genuine test of the Jedi control system C'baoth had spent so much of his time teaching the rest of them.

"What in the name-?" Abruptly, Ma'Ning hunched closer to his sensor displays. "Master C'baoth?"

"I see them," C'baoth said. "So this is the sort of enemy we face."

"What is it?" Lorana asked, swiveling her chair to her own displays.

"Look at the warships," Ma'Ning said. "See all those plastic bubbles on the hulls?"

Lorana felt her chest tighten. "There are people in there!"

"Living shields," C'baoth confirmed, his voice thick with contempt. "The most evil and cowardly defense concept ever created."

"What do we do?" Lorana asked, a sudden trembling in her voice. "We can't just slaughter them."

"Courage, Jedi Jinzler," C'baoth said. "We'll simply shoot between the hostages."

"Impossible," Ma'Ning insisted. "Not even with Jedi gunners. Turbolasers simply aren't accurate enough."

"Do you a.s.sume me to be a fool, Master Ma'Ning?" C'baoth demanded scathingly. "Of course we won't fire until we're close enough for the necessary accuracy."

"And meanwhile we just sit here and take their fire?" Ma'Ning countered.

"Hardly," C'baoth said, an edge of malicious antic.i.p.ation creeping into his voice. "The Vagaari have a surprise in store for them. All Jedi: prepare to meld. Stretch out to the Force . . . and then, to the Vagaari."

"They make no answer," the Miskara said accusingly, as if Outbound Flight's silence was Car'das's fault.

"Perhaps they're still consulting among themselves, Your Eminence,"

Car'das suggested, shifting his eyes back and firth across the sky. The Vagaari ships had started to close the gap between themselves and Outbound Flight, moving together into groups of tight-formation cl.u.s.ters that would provide them the protection of overlapping forward shields.

They were preparing to attack.

And still nothing from Outbound Flight. Or from Thrawn, for that matter.

His ships had to be around here somewhere. But where?

"You will give them a new message," the Miskara ordered. " 'The time for discussion is ended. You will surrender now or-' "

And in the middle of the sentence, his voice abruptly dissolved into a confused burbling.

Car'das frowned, pressing the comlink to his ear. The whole bridge seemed to have collapsed into the same helpless babbling, as if the entire crew had had a ma.s.s mental attack.

Which was, he suspected, exactly what had happened.

He looked out again at Outbound Flight, an unpleasant shiver running through him. He'd heard the stories about all the ways Jedi could use their mind control tricks to confuse attackers, everything from creating false noises in their ears to making them unable to properly focus on controls or weapons systems. But while the stories also claimed that a group of them together could use that power on this ma.s.sive a scale, he'd never heard of something like that actually happening.

Until now.

And with that, he knew, it was all over. The final card had come up double-down-nine, and the rest was as fixed and inevitable as a planetary orbit.

With the comlink still pressed to his ear, he settled down to wait for the end.

"So your tales were correct," Mitth'raw'nuruodo murmured. "Your Jedi have reached across the distance to the Vagaari and numbed or destroyed their minds."

"So it would seem," Doriana agreed, feeling a little numb himself. Even if it was just the Vagaari commanders and gunners who'd been affected, and even given the fact that the aliens would have had no forewarning of what was coming, it was still a terrifying feat.

And it was being performed by a relative handful of Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights.

Predictably, it was Kav who broke the awed silence first. "And our part is to sit by and do nothing?" he prompted.

"Our part is to do that for which we have come," Mitth'raw'nuruodo said.

Reaching to his board, he keyed a switch. "It is time for the Vagaari to die."

"The Vagaari?" Kav echoed. "No! You were given my starfighters for use against Outbound Flight."

"I was not given the starfighters at all," Mitth'raw'nuruodo corrected him coolly. Ahead, the droid starfighters were rising in waves now from their asteroid staging area, heading at full speed toward the cl.u.s.ters of Vagaari warships. "I will choose how to use them."

Kav snarled something in his own language. "You will not get away with this," he bit out.

"Walk cautiously, Vicelord," Mitth'raw'nuruodo warned, his glowing eyes flashing at the Neimoidian. "Don't forget that the starfighters aren't the only Neimoidian technology I've taken from you."

Doriana felt a sudden tingling on the back of his neck. He spun around, expecting to find the two droidekas Mitth'raw'nuruodo had taken from the Darleveme standing behind them in full combat stance.

But there was nothing there. "No, Commander, the combat droids are not here," Mitth'raw'nuruodo a.s.sured him. "They're where they can be of far more useful service."

"And where is that?" Doriana asked.

"Where else?" Mitth'raw'nuruodo said, smiling tightly. "On the bridge of the Vagaari flagship."

The sudden multiple stutter of blasterfire in his ear sent Car'das twitching to the side, and he banged his elbow against the edge of the bubble as he hastily moved the comlink farther away. His head was still ringing as the rhythmic fire of the droidekas was joined by the more deliberate shots from the four battle droids' rifles. Apparently, Thrawn had had a secondary control pattern laid in beneath the program Car'das had set up earlier for the Miskara. The sounds of shooting shifted subtly as the six droids began to move across the bridge, mowing down the helpless gunners and commanders.

And as they systematically chopped off the head of the Vagaari leadership hierarchy, the droid starfighters arrived.

The first and second waves flashed overhead without slowing, skimming the hull barely five meters from Car'das's face as they drove toward the cl.u.s.ters of Vagaari ships in the distance. The third wave arrived in full combat mode, their laser cannons raking the flagship with a brilliant sheet of fire. Car'das flinched back, but almost before he had time to be frightened they, too, were past, leaving torn pieces of shattered hull material and white jets of escaping air in their wake. Blinking against the multiple purple afterimages, he peered through the dissipating gases at the other bubbles around him, half afraid of what he would see.

But the starfighters had pulled it off. In every single one of the bubbles within his view, the Geroon hostages were still alive-terrified, certainly, some of them clawing mindlessly at the plastic as if trying to tunnel their way out. But they were alive. With Outbound Flight's Jedi preventing the Vagaari gunners from defending their ships, and with the sharp-edged precision the droids' electronic targeting systems and close-approach attack had permitted, the starfighters had sliced their way neatly through the warship's hull between the Vagaari's living shields.

And not just aboard the flagship. All around him, Car'das could see clouds of debris and escaping air enveloping the other nearby Vagaari warships, the haze scintillating with the fiery glow of the starfighters'

drives as they finished each set of targets and moved on to the next.

Already in this first attack, he estimated Thrawn's a.s.sault had taken out over a quarter of the alien warships.

And still with no response from the remainder. The question now, he knew, was whether the Jedi control of the aliens would last long enough for the starfighters to finish the job. Switching on his macrobinoculars, listening with half an ear to the one-sided carnage still going on beneath him on the bridge, he focused on Outbound Flight.

It was like nothing Lorana had ever felt before. Like nothing she had ever dreamed she would ever feel, or need to prepare herself for. Even as she submerged herself in the Jedi meld, allowing C'baoth to guide her and the others as they spread confusion across the Vagaari commanders and gunners, the alien minds she was wrapped around suddenly began exploding into death.