Chapter 140 · The Gambit

Hyperspace wrapped around them in soft, shifting blue—a calmer lane than they’d flown in months. The Faded Glory hummed with new structural integrity, her reinforced frames settling like bones finally set right.

Eli leaned back in the co-pilot’s chair, letting the quiet spool out. Stent remained at the controls, posture precise even off-duty, hands resting near the switches as if ready to correct the universe at a moment’s notice.

They’d been sitting in companionable silence long enough that Eli almost drifted. Almost.

Then he caught it— the microadjustment Stent made while interpreting the nav-drift, the tiny shift in throttle, the compensatory slide before a jump wobble.

Not Chiss piloting. Not Imperial technique. Something else.

Eli blinked, sat up. “That drift correction—wait. That’s from one of Thrawn’s notes, isn’t it?”

Stent didn’t turn, but his voice carried the faintest echo of acknowledgment. “The lateral counter. It stabilizes the surge at high speed.”

Eli stared at him. “You’ve been studying his diaries a lot more than I thought.”

“I study what is useful,” Stent said. “Thrawn analyzed movement better than any pilot I’ve observed.”

“That explains the stunt with the debris field,” Eli said, eyeing him sideways. “And the shadow dive. And the fake overload. You just… combined some of his techniques in such an unique way.”

Stent lifted one brow. “Adaptation is survival.”

“Sure,” Eli murmured. “But ‘adaptation’ is starting to look familiar.”

Stent finally turned to meet his gaze, and Eli saw it clearly: not imitation— integration.

That was the moment it hit him. Sharp and sudden.

A piece of his memory unlocked—

Faro, in the officer’s lounge on the Chimaera, half-laughing, half-exasperated as she’d told him: “Heavy cannons come through two channels—the official one, and my mother’s meiloorun jam shipments. Guess which one actually arrives.”

The image of the station’s new cannon flickered through his mind. The way Stent had moved. The way the galaxy was falling apart. The way only a few Imperials had really understood Thrawn. And only one had been both loyal and sharp enough to keep up with him.

“Meilooruns…” Eli said under his breath. “I can’t believe I forgot!”

Stent’s attention sharpened at once. “Explain.”

Eli rubbed a hand across his face, half-amused, half-disbelieving. “Faro! Commodore Karyn Faro. She used to complain—constantly—about requisition delays. Said she got more reliable hardware from her mother’s meiloorun jam crates than from actual quartermasters.”

Stent frowned slightly. “Irregular. But efficient. But what does it have to do with this?”

“Exactly,” Eli said. “And if anyone has heard from Thrawn—at any point—it would be her. If she hasn’t… she’s the only Imperial I trust enough to ask.”

Stent was silent for a moment—a calculating kind of silence. Not refusal. Not skepticism.

Just thought.

Eli leaned forward. “We need to contact her. Somehow.”

“How?” Stent asked, genuinely curious. “Do you know where she is? Wasn’t her with the seventh fleet?”

“She might be alive, with her own task force. Thrawn told me she was to get promoted, and she would have to leave the Seventh once it happened, because there was no position available for her then.” he leaned back on his seat, crossing his arms. His fingers brushed briefly against the sensor on his bicep and he instinctively reached for the rader and checked it: he’d better have lunch soon. “If she was reassigned… She can be anywhere in the galaxy by now, with this war going on. Imperial channels are compromised. And standard communication would expose us.”

“I know,” Stent said.

Eli rubbed his palms together, trying to steady the idea long enough to shape it into something that made sense when spoken aloud. “We don’t contact Faro,” he repeated, slower now.

Stent waited. “Who, then?”

“We use her mother.”

A beat.

Stent turned fully toward Eli and stared at him with clinical, unblinking precision— the same look he used when analyzing a faulty power coil.

“…You intend to disguise yourself as her mother?”

“What? No!” Eli recoiled. “Absolutely not. I’m not wearing a wig and writing heartfelt notes about childhood summers. I mean—we pretend that her mother sent it. Through the proper channels.”

Stent did not relax. If anything, he looked more concerned.

Eli leaned in. “Her mother’s packages always got through. Always. When quartermasters ignored requests, when procurement froze shipments, when everything else got delayed… her mother’s parcels still arrived. Because they went through the Imperial mail service. That specific network.”

Stent blinked once. “You propose we access an Imperial correspondence hub.”

“Yep.”

“Infiltrate it.”

“More or less.”

“And submit a forged familial parcel under false credentials.”

“Exactly.”

Stent considered this for a very long second. Then: “This is fraud. But I still don’t get the purpose.”

“Yes, fraud.” Eli said. “But the friendly kind.”

“It is still fraud.”

"It's a strategic fraud." Eli gave him a candid smile. “We're sending a care package with fruit preserves.”

Stent’s silence conveyed that this distinction was not particularly helpful.

Eli pushed on. “We get a crate. Match her mother’s handwriting style. Use the labels common to her region. And we pack it with the wrong fruit—something that will make Faro stop in her tracks the moment she opens it.”

Stent folded his arms. “What fruit.”

“Lysatran quince,” Eli said immediately. “Or maybe a Jogan. Anything her mother would never send. She’ll know instantly something’s off.”

“And?”

“And inside,” Eli said slowly, “we hide a datachip. Tucked under the jar seals. Low profile. No detectable metals. Encrypted and time-delayed so it only opens under a specific signature. She’ll recognize the trick.”

Stent exhaled through his nose—not dismissal, not approval. Calculation.

“And you believe,” he said, “that a single mispacked fruit will reach the Commodore where messages cannot.”

Eli leaned back, breath steadying. “Faro will notice. And she’s the one person in the Imperial hierarchy who might answer honestly. If she’s alive. If she’s reachable. If she’s not under surveillance.”

Stent stared at him another beat, then—just barely—let out something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “That,” he said, “is exactly the kind of tactic Thrawn would applaud.”

Eli grinned. “So we find a crate, an Imperial mail hub, and something very, very wrong to put inside.”

“And fabricate her mother’s delivery records,” Stent added.

“Right. That part too. I can do it, I used to run errands for her when I was on the Chimaera, I didn’t mind helping. And I still have these records in my datapad. I track the route back.”

The spark solidified—no longer just an idea, but a direction.

A path through chaos. A coded gesture delivered by fruit. Hope, taking the shape of bureaucratic mischief.