Star Wars the Truce at Bakura - Kathy Tyers [81]
Fifteen minutes later, the others were still talking strategy when his medtechs patched the complex medstation’s powerful main sensors to his handheld model, which still lay on the table. He used directional keys on his touchboard to focus a smaller zone between Skywalker’s belt and collarbone.…
Two minuscule fourteen-hour larvae squirmed in the left bronchial passage. Primitive circulatory systems pumped for dear life.
There’d been three eggs in the pod, but one Olabrian Trichoid larva was deadly. Any good alien parasitologist knew that.
Solo, who’d pitched insults at both sides for two hours, finally objected with a straight face. “Commander Thanas, there’s one thing about this I don’t like. Look.” He waved at the projected complete maneuver. “Go back three steps,” he ordered the programming circuit. Ship dots swirled backward. “There,” he said. “Stop. Do you see? You’ve—”
Nereus cleared his private screen. Solo paused. Skywalker nudged him to continue.
“You’ve got Alliance fighting pairs at every point of maximum risk,” Solo insisted. “Your projection isn’t showing losses by subgroup. If you fed those in, there’d be a lot less silver dots in the ‘completion’ frame. I don’t like that.”
Perhaps the smuggler had some grasp of tactics after all, Nereus observed. Commander Thanas, who’d been fidgeting with his souvenir pocket knife, dropped it into a breast pocket and said, “Commander Skywalker suggested I consider your forces my own. If those were my fighters, that’s how I’d deploy them to minimize overall losses.” He keyed his console. “Show phase four, with projected losses.” The pattern changed. “Now I’ll program a switch of squadrons to replace half of those key positions with regulars. Fair enough, General?”
Solo spread his hands.
“There.” Commander Thanas touched a key. “Phase four, projected losses, with squadrons switched.”
A significant number of specks extinguished, both Imperial and Alliance.
Skywalker exhaled easily. The cough would probably come in four to six hours, depending on his general physical condition—about two hours before massive thoracic hemorrhaging. “Convinced, General Solo?”
“I suppose.”
Skywalker folded his hands on the table. “I think we can confirm it. Alliance forces will spearhead each thrust. We’ll break the blockade and cut off that cruiser for you to en-globe. Destroy one cruiser and we might change their minds. Destroy two …” He trailed off. “Well, we’ll see what they actually throw at us.
“One more question.” Skywalker addressed Commander Thanas. “If the Ssi-ruuk go on waiting for us, how long do we keep them waiting?”
Nereus cleared his throat for attention. “Tomorrow evening,” he said. By then, young Jedi, you’ll be dead.
“I’d like to move sooner,” Thanas said carefully. “The element of surprise will work in favor of the attacking—”
“Tomorrow evening,” Nereus repeated. Commander Thanas would have to redeem himself according to Nereus’s plan, not his own wishes. The whole plan … or become a slave miner himself. Nereus would make that clear when they met privately tonight.
“Very well,” said Thanas. “Commander Skywalker. General Solo. Until tomorrow.”
Nereus shook hands all around, keeping his gloves on. Larvae weren’t transmissible at this stage, but the very idea nauseated him. Olabrian Trichoids used almost all higher animals as breeding hosts. He’d tried infecting the Ssi-ruuk already, but apparently they destroyed enteched prisoners’ bodies immediately. Skywalker, he guessed, might be kept around long enough to nurse a brood of the large, voracious adults—which emerged from a brief pupation already fertile. If the Ssi-ruuk didn’t take Skywalker offplanet, of course, he’d have to be destroyed tonight. He might even volunteer, to head off a planetwide infestation. Young idealism sacrificed itself so nobly.
But Skywalker would almost certainly pass through Pad 12 at least once in the next eight hours.
Luke felt Governor Nereus’s stare follow as he and Han strode out of the Ops Room. Nereus expected never to see him again.
Once they passed the first corner,