“Almost there,” Wutroow said. There was a small clunking sound as the shrapnel from a pair of disintegrated Lioaoin missiles bounced off the Vigilant’s hull near the viewport. One final, desperate, useless attack. “Aboard,” Wutroow confirmed. “Crash webbing’s deployed…confirmed capture…outer hatch closing…outer hatch sealed.”

“All right, Che’ri, we’ve got him,” Ar’alani said. A long road, with a blaze of fire and noise at the end of it. She could only hope Thrawn had found everything he’d come here for. “Take us home.”

Memories IX

“How much longer?” Senior Captain Ziara asked.

“Two minutes,” the tense reply came from the helm.

Ziara nodded, wincing to herself. Two minutes. Two hours since Thrawn’s emergency call, with no communication possible in hyperspace, and now two more minutes. Depending on how deep the excursion liner had been in the planetary gravity well when Thrawn and his newly assigned patrol boat reached it, Ziara and the Parala could arrive just in time to join Thrawn in watching helplessly as eight thousand people fell to their blazing deaths in the thick planetary atmosphere. “Tractor beams ready?” she asked.

“Ready and waiting, Captain.”

“Standing by for breakout,” the pilot announced. “Three, two, one.” The hyperspace swirl vanished—

And there, ten kilometers ahead, the drama stretched out in front of them.

Ship losses of this sort were rare these days, but no less horrific for all that. The excursion liner, a compact cylinder with a pair of wide D-shaped wings stretching out on opposite sides and housing the more expensive suites, was deep into the roiling upper atmosphere of the triple-ringed gas giant planet it had been cruising past. Already its wake was visible as it plowed through the tenuous gasses, the drag eroding its orbital velocity and threatening it with a death spiral into the crushing depths. A few hundred meters in front of it, trailing a smaller wake, was the Boco, straining for all it was worth to stabilize the liner.

Straining, and losing. Even without running the numbers, Ziara could see that the sheer difference in mass between the two ships would make it impossible for the Boco to pull the liner free. In fact, even adding the Parala’s tractors to the mix might not be enough.

“Senior Captain Ziara,” Thrawn’s voice came from the bridge speaker. “Thank you for your prompt response. Would you join me off the liner’s bow?”

“On our way,” Ziara said, gesturing the order to the helm. The sensor display lit up with the relevant numbers…

Just as she’d feared. “But it won’t do any good,” she added quietly. “Even together we can’t make this work. Are the passengers off yet?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Thrawn said. “By the time the thrusters failed, the liner was already too deep into the radiation and magnetic bands to launch escape pods.”

“They’re still aboard?”