“Excellent,” Thrawn said, his voice glacially calm. “Prepare for lightspeed.”
Pellaeon threw a glance at the Grand Admiral, then returned his attention to the bank of tactical and status readouts facing him. To the readouts, and to the blackness outside that seemed to have swallowed up the rest of Pellaeon’s five-ship task force. Three-thousandths of a light-year away, the Bpfassh system’s sun was a mere pinprick, indistinguishable from the other stars blazing all around them. Conventional military wisdom frowned on this business of picking a spot just outside the target system as a jumping-off point-it was considered dangerously easy for one or more ships to get lost on the way to such a rendezvous, and it was difficult to make an accurate hyperspace jump over so short a distance. He and Thrawn, in fact, had had a long and barely civilized argument over the idea the first time the Grand Admiral had included it in one of his attack plans. Now, after nearly a year of practice, the procedure had become almost routine.