Reading Heir to the Empire

[McStabbington]

You should have a lot of doubt about that. Because if they was the case, why not shove ysalamiri all up in the ship?

. . . Because now that he knows what ysalamiri are, what they can do, what effect they have on him, and the barely-maintained and fragile detente he currently has with Thrawn, C'Boath isn't going to get on a shuttle that has even one ysalamiri on it. C'Boath can be tricked into a trap, sure, but he sure as heck isn't going to walk willingly into one.

This isn't hard to parse out. C'Boath just declared himself the new emperor of the Empire that Thrawn has both operational and military control over. And he just said that as part of his attempt to assume control, he's taking direct, personal command of the keystone project in Thrawn's entire plan. Only the heir to the throne of a kingdom of idiots could miss the implications of this action, and how Thrawn may well react. And C'Boath may be crazy, but he's not an idiot.

And, as it turns out, C'Boath isn't wrong, either.

Thrawn will not recklessly throw away assets, that is true. But he's also pretty ruthlessly analytical, and very astute at figuring out cost-benefit calculations. And the simple fact is that now that Mount Tantiss is underway, now that the Republic is reeling, and that he's got the Dark Force, it's very apparent that the only thing C'Boath is really good for, namely, raising operational performance levels on specific critical missions, isn't something that Thrawn needs any more. He needed that to put the odds in his favor when the Republic could, at any given time, field more ships crewed by more experienced men, led by more experienced commanders than what the Empire could field. None of those disadvantages exist by the end of The Last Command. And that's true even before we count the fact that C'Boath is now actively countermanding Thrawn's orders, seizing control of Thrawn's men, and jeopardizing Thrawn's missions.

You guys seem to forget that a) Thrawn is the villain, and b) Thrawn is always, always in command of the situation. There are a few things that he simply will not put up with. Seizing control of Thrawn's bridge crew? Foremost among them. The instant C'Boath did that, C'Boath became a greater liability rather than he could ever possibly be as an asset. There is no good that he could ever perform that compensates for the threat he poses insofar as he could seize control of Thrawn's bridge at a critical moment. And Thrawn does not allow liabilities to remain liabilities for any length of time.

So, I repeat my initial formulation, with the correction, as astutely noted by Bavarian itP, that if he's trying to box and trap C'Boath inside Mount Tantiss, he's not going to give Covell any orders that suggest anything is out of the ordinary. If Thrawn had learned one thing he didn't know from the prior two books, it was that Jedi were so good at coming at you laterally, that if you get an opportunity to take them out, you don't miss your chance, and you don't think twice about it. If, at any point in the prior two books, Thrawn could have exchanged Covell's life for Luke Skywalker's? Thrawn would have made that exchange without a moment's thought, or a moment's regret. Same principle applied to C'Boath the instant he threatened Thrawn's command of Thrawn's ship.