An: Thank you again to all of those who reviewed Chapter 2!

ImperialWarlord, nice to have you back. sexyninjalady, good to still have you with us.

Frodogenic: Thrawn never thinks in these situations that he won't be able to do something. It simply isn't in his nature. Otherwise, he would never have survived that planet he was dropped on. Thrass unfortunately isn't my character, he's Zahn's.

Well, Thrawn is not out of the woods yet...

Chapter 3: Wandering Officers

"Tell me you've found him," Captain Voss Parck announced to the room as he strode in. Military etiquette forbid his raising his voice, but it nevertheless carried across the small room as well as if it had been a Bantha market on Tatooine. The sudden silence, where a moment before there had been the quiet tick of keys, the low murmur of voices conferring data, was telling.

"Sir," one young ensign said, standing at attention beside one station. "We've found the security footage of the Vice-Admiral entering the Palace itself."

"That's excellent, Ensign. You've managed to confirm something we already knew from two other sources. What I need is to find out where he is now!"

"Captain," the station operator said, raising her eyes to look at his face. "There is no record of the Vice-Admiral leaving the premises from any of the official exits. We've run both computer and visual inspection teams over all the footage from the last 42 hours. There is no one matching his description, bio-signature or species, even."

Parck nodded slowly. "So, you are saying that Thrawn has been with the Emperor for almost 2 standard days now? What are they doing, then, planning the entire Rebellion campaign down to the last droid?"

"Sir?" she said, looking up at her superior officer. The Ensign gave a long-suffering sigh, nodded, and walked away. At Voss's confused look, she explained. "I'm not really supposed to know how to do this, but…"

"Ah. Creative searching, are we?"

"Something like that, sir. You see, I thought that if he hadn't left the building, then it should be possible to see where after the throne room he went. We know that he actually did meet with the Emperor at the correct time, so it was simple enough to monitor all the security cams on the turbolifts that exit that level." She typed in a few key strokes and an unfamiliar program popped to life on the screen. "It seemed that there was a blip in the system, sir, and a good half hour was erased. So, I expanded the search parameters to include anything in the hour after that blip."

"Wait, how did you manage that? You're talking about hundreds of cameras and weeks' worth of combined footage, if you had to search it all by visual inspection," Parck countered.

"That's where this program comes in, sir. If you input a certain number of statistics on a being, and several high resolution holograms of them, you can actually search using that as your key terms and have a pretty high level of success."

Parck shook his head, leaning over her shoulder to look closer at the screen. "We don't have a program that will… wait just a moment, I've heard of that company – That is a Rebellion program."

"You need to pretend that you don't see that logo, sir. Besides, its freeware if you know where to look."

"In Rebel intelligence systems?"

She smirked outright. "They need better security on their backdoor entrances. The program found him twice, Captain."

Parck promptly forgot everything to do with hacking and illegal copies of files. "Show me."

Instantly, one holographic video was playing on the screen. In it, two stormtroopers held the Vice-Admiral tightly, and were dragging the alien Admiral from the throne room into a turbolift. The second, equally short, was of presumably the same troopers escorting him out of another turbolift into a prison area.

"The holos were from the private detention area of the Imperial Palace," she said quietly. "I can try to get into that system, but you'll need to give me a lot of time, and I can't guarantee I will even be able to access that system."

"No," Parck answered after a moment's thought. "No, you've done enough. Can you set an alert the moment they take him out of there or there is another crash of the system?"

"Easily, sir."

"Thank you, Crewman …"

"Crewman Divins, sir."

"Crewman Divins. See to it that I am alerted the moment the Vice-Admiral's status changes."

Parck strode from the room, deep in thought. There was nothing he could do, he knew, to get the Chiss officer out of the personal cellblock of the Emperor. Hopefully, whatever the Vice Admiral had done to get himself thrown in, it wasn't something that would have his head handed back to him on a platter.