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Chiss Expansionary Defense Fleet pilot Stybla’che’ri rushed to the hangar bay of the heavy cruiser Perseverance. She panted as she ducked around warriors in the hall, eager not to be late for her shift.
Not that today was anything special. Still, her commander, Ufsa’ransa’ndui, was waiting for her. He would tell her if was flying that day. If a pilot was late reporting for duty, they would be grounded the whole shift and consigned to janitorial tasks.
Lacher much preferred to fly, even if her course was nothing exciting. After all, today was bound to be dominated by cleanup duty. Yesterday, the Perseverance had chased a Grysk ship from Paataatu space to their current system. The Grysk had been in the middle of an engagement with Chiss forces when they suddenly fled. The Chiss followed them through hyperspace by pressuring a member of the Navigator’s Guild. The battle continued. Yet the second the battle turned decisively in the Chiss’s favor, the Grysk pulled an old trick: self-destruction.
The Chiss always scoured the scene of the explosion after the battle was over. It was a matter of protocol, if not a practical use of time. Lacher grew tired of searching empty space for dust after every encounter. It beat the mop, but barely.
This time was different. “Lacher, there you are. I have something for you. I need you to perform a reconnaissance mission on an uninhabited moon in our system. The sensors are picking up a signal from the surface. Old fleet frequency and distress pattern, but no Chiss presence reported in the area. No recent shipwrecks or fleet activity in this system either.”
Lacher’s panting stopped as she took in the mission details. “What do we think it is, sir?”
Saransa shrugged. “If we knew, we wouldn’t be sending you down there to check things out, now would we? The captain doesn’t think it’s hostile, but someone out there knows our old codes. It’s worth asking where they got that information.”
“I’ll prep my ship.” Lacher waited to be dismissed, then jogged over to her fighter.
A mystery signal on a strange moon? Someone who knew the fleet’s codes from several years ago? Could it really be…?
No. Lacher grit her teeth as she strapped her helmet on. She had to contain her enthusiasm. After all these years, the chances of her ever seeing Thrawn again were cold and remote.
Senior Captain Mitth’raw’nuruodo had been exiled from the Chiss Ascendancy when Lacher was eleven. Back when she was still only Che’ri. Lacher had hoped to see Thrawn again countless times in the intervening years. Each time disappointed her in a new way.
Lacher spent her last three years as a skywalker hoping her missions would take her to Lesser Space. She never got close. When the last glimpses of Third Sight left her body for good, she waited until she was the minimum age required to re-enlist in the Chiss Expansionary Defense Fleet, surprising her adoptive family in the process.
“Are you sure this is what you want, Lacher? Most skywalkers never want to serve on those ships ever again.”
“I know what I want. I’m going to be a pilot.”
Lacher had rejoined the CEDF for the same reason her ex-momish had first found work as a caregiver. She had to see Thrawn again.
She hadn’t yet.
Once she slid into the fighter’s cockpit, Lacher activated her craft with the push of a button. She rolled through her list of preflight checks. For her, the procedure felt as natural as breathing.
Thrawn had been her first ever flight instructor. When Lacher had been young and helpless, Thrawn had empowered her with the skills she needed to fly a spacecraft. That way, she could guide a ship with or without the Third Sight. No longer was she merely a vessel for power beyond her grasp. Lacher was her own person, someone with unique skills and abilities.
Only during her time at the academy had Lacher realized how much she’d relied on her Third Sight as a crutch. She couldn’t wait for her Sight to tell her if there was an obstacle in her way. Lacher had to learn how to read the sensors. See with her own two eyes.
Now every time Lacher pulled out of the hangar and into space, she thought of Thrawn. At first, the thought had brought her excitement, purpose. Yet after more than a decade of flying in the CEDF, the thought had grown mundane. One more routine check in a long list of preparations.
Despite scoring decently well at Taharim, Lacher had never been assigned to a ship flying close to Lesser Space. Those missions were the furthest away from the Chiss Ascendancy and went only to the most trusted commanders of the fleet. No matter how hard Lacher tried, she was never good enough to serve under the esteemed Admiral Ar’alani.
Lacher's heart ached when she heard that Ar’alani’s ship had picked up trafficked skywalkers from Lesser Space. Fifteen years ago, one of those girls could have been her. The second kicker was the rumor that in the pickup, Admiral Ar’alani had made contact with an exiled Chiss. The legendary Mitth'raw'nuruodo.
Lacher used her trip through empty space to stew on her resentment. If Admiral Ar’alani was still allowed to talk to Thrawn in his exile, why couldn’t anyone else? Why hadn’t the people who cared about him been offered that chance? Why hadn't she been on that mission?
As her inner child peeked through the surface, Lacher’s experience as an adult pushed it down. Maybe the fleet had thought Lacher would abuse her access to Thrawn. Contact him too much and neglect her duties on the Springhawk. Maybe it was part of Thrawn’s punishment that he could only speak to one person from his old life. And even then only sometimes.
Back then, Lacher had known Thrawn’s exile to Lesser Space wasn’t fair. Now, Lacher knew what his exile had really been. A sacrifice.
Ever since Thrawn’s exile, the CEDF’s role in responding to Grysk attacks had increased exponentially. All the other officers who had been present in his battle over Sunrise had gone on to achieve true battlefield glory. Admiral Makro was proof enough of that.
The battle over Sunrise was illegal, but it had been necessary. The war against the Grysk would go down in history as the defining event of Lacher’s generation. Thrawn had started the Chiss off in the best possible military position, and for doing so, they exiled him. All while enjoying the benefits of his service.
By the time Lacher finished her tenure as a navigator, the work of the CEDF had far eclipsed its domestic counterpart. When Lacher first joined the academy, all the cadets dreamed of fighting the Grysk as part of the CEDF. After a dozen years of flying, the eagerness Lacher once felt to fight the Grysk had expired. Today, the task was but a chore. Every time the Chiss thought they’d scored an advantage, they lost it again. Every system they beat the enemy out of was a system the Grysk weaseled back into next year. As with everything else in life, Lacher’s passion for fighting had drained out of her.
She pulled up on the orbit of the forest moon. Before breaking atmosphere, Lacher commed her commander. “Where on the moon is the signal coming from?”
Saransa wasted no time with his response. “Check for yourself. Tune in to the old fleet frequency. Channel 3546.”
“Yessir.” Lacher closed the comm channel with her commander, then keyed open a new one. Because the frequency was no longer CEDF standard, Lacher had to dial in manually.
As soon as she finished entering the channel frequency, she heard it. The first flight code Lacher had ever learned in her time at Taharim.
The distress code.
Lacher used her connection to the frequency to search for a source. While she waited for her ship to pin it down, she decided to initiate conversation. See what trade languages this stranger knew.
Lacher began with Minnisiat. Not because it was the most common language in the region, but because it was the one she spoke the best. “Unidentified ship. This is the Chiss Expansionary Defense Fleet. State your business using this frequency.”
No response. Lacher waited another few seconds, then took hold of the steering. The signal was coming from the other side of the moon. She set course for a half orbit.
Lacher repeated her statement in Minnisiat one more time. Silence again. She switched to Taarja. She was midway through her second utterance when she saw what was hiding on the other side of the moon. Lacher gasped.
A shipwreck. The ship was so big, Lacher could make it out from space.
She called it in. “Perseverance. We have a shipwreck. Large ship, light gray in color. Sharp triangle shape, bad condition. I’m going to check for survivors. One of them must be broadcasting on our old frequency.”
Lacher didn’t wait for a response. It was only when she heard the broken voice on the end of the line that she realized her mistake. The male stranger spoke to her in Cheunh. “Come quickly.”
She hadn’t yet switched back to the CEDF's frequency. Yet the Cheunh… there was a Chiss down there!
Needing no further invitation, Lacher set her ship’s thrusters to atmospheric penetration. Just before the flames of breathable air engulfed her hull, Lacher had one last thing to say. “Hold fast. The CEDF is on its way.”
Fire engulfed her vision. Lacher grinned. Planetary landings were her favorite. She didn’t get too many of them in her work with the CEDF. It was only contingency that her single person fighter was equipped for surface landings at all.
Once her view was clear again, Lacher surveyed the wreckage from her place in the sky. The forest surrounding the ship was blackened, signaling there had been fires. A whole swath of forest had also been crushed under the ship’s hull.
The ship… Lacher took in its broken majesty with dread. Its hull had been painted with the mark of a tentacled beast. Not unlike how some Paccosh marked their ships. Only this ship couldn’t be further from the Paccian design. It was too angular. Too sharp.
Where the ship lacked sharp corners, it had purple tentacles sticking out from the sides. No, not the sides. The… bottom?
Lacher flew in closer to the source of the signal. On her second look, she realized the tentacles weren’t part of the ship at all. They came from a giant animal. Had this ship landed on giant forest creatures when it crashed here?
Pointed at one of the crushed tentacles was a cannon. The ship had weapons mounted on all sides. If Lacher had doubted the purpose of this spacecraft before, the cannons left no room for speculation.
This was a warship.
Lacher couldn’t wait. If there was an unknown warship in the system with them, in any condition, Lacher was obligated to report it. She switched back onto the Preserverance’s comm frequency. “Mid Commander. We have a warship that crashed on the far side of the moon.”
“Grysk ship?”
“Negative.” Lacher gave her description of the vessel a second time. “I have made contact with one of the survivors. We have a Cheunh-speaking male in need of aid. I’m on my way to help him.”
“Negative, pilot.” Saransa spit the word back at her. “The Grysk just left the area. This could be a trap from a vassal species.”
“A trap that speaks Cheunh? There’s a Chiss down there!”
“The Grysk have kidnapped Chiss before. They could be holding a man hostage to sell the ploy. Do not land on that moon’s surface. That is an order.”
Lacher growled, “yessir.” She slammed the comm channel off.
What could she do? Lacher didn’t believe this was a Grysk trap. The Grysk hadn’t been in the system long enough to lay one.
The crash had been here before the Grysk arrived. For all she knew, the crash was why the Grysk had coem to the system in the first place.
Lacher lowered her altitude in the sky until she was a few meters above the treeline. Saransa had ordered her not to land, but he hadn’t said anything about closer observation. Her mission was still reconnaissance, after all. Lacher looked for anything that would grant her justification to violate orders.
A short distance away from the shipwreck, she found a small campfire. Gathered around it were several battered aliens dressed in green-gray uniforms. Caps covered their heads, making facial features hard to identify, but their skin ranged in color from deep brown to light beige. Some walked while others hobbled. Injuries must be extensive among the warship’s crew. When they saw her, the aliens began to point and wave. They must need help.
As Lacher watched the group from above, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen aliens like these before. A long time ago, on a journey taking her far, far away. These weren’t just any aliens. They were humans.
This was a Lesser Space warcraft. A Lesser Space warcraft bearing a Paccian hull design could only mean one thing. Thrawn was here.
Lacher required no further justification. She landed her fighter in a clearing close to the shipwreck, then ran back to the campfire she’d seen. When she arrived, the humans looked even worse than they had from above. Their skin was covered in red blood and purple bruises, their uniforms stained with death. The smell assaulted Lacher through her helmet.
She threw her helmet off so the humans could see her face. As the humans began babbling in their Lesser Space language, Lacher struggled to remember what trade language Thrawn had used with them all those years ago. Meese Caulf? Sy Bisti?
Lacher was awful at both languages, but she tried Meese Caulf first. “Where is Mitth’raw’nuruodo?”
The humans started at her words. They kept talking in a language Lacher didn’t recognize. She only caught one word they said: “Thrawn.”
Lacher nodded rapidly at the woman who had said the name. She tried Sy Bisti this time. “Thrawn! Thrawn! Take me to Thrawn.”
The humans took another look at Lacher’s face. Her blue skin and red eyes. They must recognize she was a Chiss as well. After a minute of whispering amongst themselves, one human motioned for her to follow. A middle aged woman with a slight limp.
Lacher followed the human from the campfire back into the shipwreck. The human woman led her through a maze of broken corridors up into what could only be the ship’s bridge. Slumped over a panel in tattered white clothes sat Mitth’raw’nuruodo. Lacher gasped.
The human woman said something. Lacher didn’t register it. She raced towards Thrawn with a child’s frenzy. It was an eleven year old’s dream come true.
Lacher embraced Thrawn in his chair. He winced in pain, causing Lacher to draw back. She spoke to him in Cheunh. “What’s wrong?”
Only then did Lacher look down at Thrawn’s midsection. The clothes there were riding up, revealing deep purple bruises underneath. It looked like someone had attempted to strangle him on the stomach.
And his face… Lacher could see the Thrawn she knew if she squinted. The man she remembered and revered now wore a mask of age and pain. The eyes that once glowed so brightly had faded to near darkness. Her own gut twisted at the sight.
Thrawn wheezed. “Who are you… Chiss pilot?”
Lacher’s face fell. She should have known Thrawn wouldn’t recognize her, but the child inside wailed.
Instead of answering with words, Lacher unzipped the front of her flight suit. She reached beneath her undershirt and pulled out an old piece of flimsi paper. On it was a drawing of a flashfly. The drawing was colored with various graph markers, but its most distinct feature was the burgundy outline.
Thrawn took the drawing from her, his hands shaking. As he examined the drawing on the page, his jaw went slack. The creases around his forehead disappeared. The mask fell away, leaving only the Thrawn Lacher knew.
He handed the drawing back to her. This time when he spoke, his voice held steady. “I drew this years ago, under the direction of… you.” He met her gaze, eyes getting a small fraction of their glow back. “You are Che’ri.”
“It’s Lacher now. Stybla'che'ri.” she corrected. “There’s a Chiss heavy cruiser in the system. We got your signal. We’re here to take you home to the Ascendancy.”
This time, Thrawn initiated the embrace. It was the human’s turn to gasp.
Lacher returned the embrace gentler this time. Because Thrawn was sitting and Lacher was standing, their height difference was awkward. Like Lacher was hugging a child.
And in a way, she was. Che’ri was hugging Thrawn as much as Lacher at that moment.
Her inner child’s dream had come true.
Lacher’s mission was complete.