PART SIX: BEYOND THE MAP

Chapter Twenty-Five: Signal Through Noise

The gentle beep of the navicomputer pulled Padmé from a muddy half-sleep, trilling a one-minute warning for their destination. She rubbed at her eyes, hissed a curse under her breath as she ground a speck of something deeper into a tear duct, then blinked furiously to try to flush it out. "Kenobi," she said aloud, "we're coming up on it."

At the periphery of her vision, she could see Obi-Wan rise from the cross-legged position he'd been maintaining for the last hour, a makeshift meditation rug spread across the space behind the pilot and copilot's seats. She might have ribbed him for leaving her to steer the ship herself, but truth be told she was in no rush to see how much the Jedi's piloting capabilities might have improved since the last time he'd flown a ship she was in.

Besides, anything that would aid his ability to foresee trouble was good. They'd need all the luck they could get.

"My contact should be waiting for us once we touch down," Obi-Wan said, easing himself into the copilot's chair and buckling in. "I'm hoping we can keep things fairly discreet—this place isn't technically military, but the Defense Force had the run of it starting shortly after the war began. I can't imagine the Grand Army has stepped down their presence."

"Wonderful how many different things the government can take over if they have security as an excuse," Padmé grumbled, fingers flying sightlessly across the control panel to trigger the right steps of their reversion to realspace. "This contact of yours, they're not Republic, right?"

"Erm. Well. In it and not of it might be the way of putting things."

She snorted. "Well, they and I have that in common, at least." Looking over at Obi-Wan, she broke out into a grin. "Hey, at least no military types we run into are likely to recognize you."

The Jedi rolled his eyes and ran a hand down his face in his usual gesture. This time, however, there was no hair to tug on—Padmé had insisted on keeping him somewhat incognito before they left Alderaan, taking a razor to his beard and mustache. The result, while it certainly wasn't bad-looking, kept eliciting a sudden urge to giggle within her.

The white alert light slid to red, and she punched a final command. The swirling realm of hyperspace refined itself into starlines, then snapped back to reality.

Whistling, Padmé took a moment to study their destination. "Busy place."

The Switchboard wasn't a planet—it didn't orbit any star, nor did it have an outer atmosphere. Too easy for those factors to interfere with signals, foster noise, drown out data. No, it was a space station, one that floated at the precise point between several star systems that could best be summed up as nowhere. It was a lonely but vibrant pocket of clarity, one that had no world to call home but pulsed with constant traffic.

Two kinds of traffic, in fact. The obvious one was travelers looking for a stopover—the five long spokes extending from the central hub were studded with docked spacecraft, from tiny passenger shuttles to full-on corvettes. But these weren't the Switchboard's primary clientele. No, to spot those one would need to use not their eyes but their ears. The station wasn't just a waypoint—it was a lightning rod for comms across the entire sector.

"So what if your guy doesn't know what this Snowblind thing is?" she asked, angling their ship toward the nearest free dock. "We could get in touch with Typhoon Division, see if any of them have touched it."

Obi-Wan shook his head. "There's no reason they'd be working with a prosecutor, and I don't want to get them involved in any case. Cody's been through enough. If we can't figure out what it might be . . . we move on to Tarkin, I suppose. Though showing up on Eriadu isn't the best way to keep a low profile."

"Yeah," she muttered, "last time I tried to dig into a politician's dirty laundry it didn't exactly go too well." When he shot her a quizzical look, she waved a hand and returned her attention to docking procedures. "Tell you about it later. Maybe."

Ahead, the dock extended a narrow umbilical. We'd better hope we don't run into any trouble. Whole lot easier to make a run for it from a hangar than it is to get undocked from a space station.

"The Force pointed us this way for a reason," Obi-Wan told her. "We'll get what we need."

Maybe it was the fresh-faced look, but he didn't seem certain. His expression was drawn, wary, as he stared at the approaching docking umbilical, as if waiting for something to jump out and grab them.

We've gotta do what Anakin would do, rose unbidden within her mind. Have some fun with it. Make this an adventure.

Grimly, deliberately, Padmé took the thought and stomped down on it. If there was one thing she didn't need to be reminded of right now, it was her husband.

As the airlock on the station side of the umbilical hissed open, Obi-Wan bit down on the inside of his cheek. He'd been hoping the customs station would be droid-manned, as it had the last time he'd passed through here, but instead a gray-uniformed human male glanced up from some paperwork. Perhaps it was the Jedi's nervousness, but the man twitched in a way that reminded him quite a bit of Ponce Held.

Sighing, he reached up to rub at a beard that was no longer there, then took a step forward in unison with Padmé. No use just standing here.

"Please stay behind the red line," said the customs officer as they drew close, his tone suggesting that he considered the pair an offense to him personally. Wordlessly, he took the false identicards Padmé passed over, then asked, "What's your purpose for docking with the station?"

"Here on business," Obi-Wan replied, resisting the urge to stand at attention that the other man's gaze was inspiring in him. "One of the communications masters here is an old colleague; my partner and I are here to consult on some of the problems you've been having with reception."

The officer snorted. "We've been having problems, have we?"

Before the Jedi could rattle off the next line of the background he'd hastily worked up, Padmé broke in. "Not just with reception either, buddy. That docking collar is about a decade out of date, it's a miracle our ship was able to connect at all."

Oh dear. Personal affront flared within the man's aura in the Force—they seemed to have found the one Grand Army officer relegated to space-station duty who actually cared about his job. "The docking collar is irrelevant," he snapped, squinting at Padmé's face as if doing so would reveal a flaw in her ID. "If you're here to consult on communications, why was I not made aware of—"

"God's sakes, Ramfelt," said a new voice as the power door ahead swept open, "would you ease up on the tinpot dictator routine? You weren't even working here until two months ago."

Obi-Wan did his best to suppress a grin as a Sullustan a good foot shorter than Officer Ramfelt bustled past the red line and reached out to shake his hand. "Ben! How the hell you been? Bastards still working you to death over in the frontier sector?"

Gravely accepting the proffered hand, he replied, "Oh, it's a job. I don't know if you'll have met my partner, Naberrie?"

The alien grasped Padmé's hand in turn. "Pleasure. Cal Temn, I keep things running around here." He turned to Ramfelt with a glare. "Or try to, when these Grand Army blowhards aren't chasing people off the station."

The officer ground down on his back molars very hard for a moment, then extended the false identicards back across the red line. "You're free to enter."

"You could have come a little sooner," Padmé groused as the three of them passed through the power door.

"Look, lady," the Sullustan shot back, "in case you didn't notice, things are a little busy over here. We're trying to handle the comms traffic for the entire sector, and one of our major receivers just got fried by a power spike." He looked over his shoulder at Obi-Wan and rolled his eyes. "Your people don't exactly make things easier by triple-checking every damn requisitions request."

"Not my people anymore," he said, and then broke into the smile he'd been holding back. "It's good to see you, Cal."

His complaining aside, responsibility seemed to suit the Sullustan well; in the five years since their last meeting, he'd put on a little bit of weight and moved from a patched-up yellow jumpsuit to some rather snazzy blacks. "Yeah, not your people," he said with a snort. "Lady, lemme tell you, the only reason I'm working this job is because this asshole's people press-ganged me into service in the middle of a flippin' space battle."

"Trust me, you got off easy. I got to fly him through one."

It was fitting, Obi-Wan supposed, that the three of them were walking through a kind of bazaar—not the teeming community hub that Jira Grotto had been, but close enough. Shops stretched down both sides of the docking arm—food, clothing, duty-free pleasures of all kinds, even a stall that offered to shine one's boots (over three dozen species-specific footwear types serviced!). Tiny speedertaxis swept down the length of the shops every now and again, ferrying passengers and luggage; on foot, a few dozen beings of various species wandered up and down, searching for whatever respite from space struck their fancy.

"You've been here for a while, then?" Obi-Wan asked, stomach rousing itself as they passed a particularly good-looking restaurant—when was the last time he'd eaten something that wasn't rations?

"Last three years or so," Cal replied. "Ended up on Had Abbadon way longer than I'd planned, but finally I bugged your Republic people til they got me a better post. 'Course, now that I'm here I miss the ground under my feet. Funny how that works." As Obi-Wan opened his mouth, the Sullustan held up both hands. "Nah, don't apologize, better here than stuck in a cave for a month again. Though at least there the Grand Army wasn't breathing down my neck every time I went to take a piss."

Even as he said it, a handful of white-armored troops marched by, blaster rifles prominently slung across their backs. "That pick up recently?" Padmé asked, her head following the three and then immediately whipping back toward her companions to avoid being seen.

"Everywhere, by the sound of it, but yeah, here too. Started crawling all over the place after Coruscant. Lemme tell you, having these clods look over your shoulder while you're trying to reroute transgalactic calls doesn't exactly brighten your outlook on the Republic."

"Speaking of—" Obi-Wan began, only for a quick slashing motion from the Sullustan to cut him off.

"Follow me to my office," Cal told them, lowering his voice as another cluster of gleaming white troops passed by. "No bugs in there. I sweep it every day to make sure."

"Gee," Padmé said, "you sure we're secure in here?"

"Cute," Cal said. "Look, when the entire place you work at is one big ear, it pays to be careful."

The Sullustan had certainly been that. Walking into his office was like entering a padded cell—sound-muffling material covered the walls, the floor, the ceiling, in a layer several inches thick. His desk, fabricated wood with a glass top, looked comically out of place, as did the liquor cabinet, not that Padmé was about to complain when Cal pulled out a few glasses and a bottle of what looked like Iridonian scotch. The alien at least had a nice view—behind the desk was a viewport opening up onto endless black dotted with star-flecks of white and blue.

"Besides," he continued, brusquely handing first her and then Obi-Wan a glass, "it keeps it quiet. I tell ya, you work in one of these places long enough and you start to swear the comm traffic comes up through the floor."

Padmé's Jedi companion drank, coughed, then shook his head. "Your taste in drinks remains unchanged, I see."

"I try." Looking over at Padmé, the Sullustan frowned. "You're not gonna indulge my hospitality?"

Unconsciously laying a hand against her stomach, she shook her head and pushed the glass away. "Gotta stay sharp."

If the alien noticed where her hand had flown, he didn't say anything. Instead, with a shrug, he slid her drink back across the desk.

After throwing his own glass back, Cal settled in behind his desk and looked up at the pair of them. "So how the hell did you two find out about this Snowblind thing, anyway?"

Before Obi-Wan could reply, his Sullustan friend waved his hand. "You know what, never mind. I don't wanna know. However you did, it wasn't good, clearly." He rummaged beneath his desk, punching at some sort of interface—a moment later, a holoprojector concealed beneath the glass shot to life. "Needless to say, what I'm about to tell you both doesn't exist, this conversation didn't happen, blah blah blah. Got it?"

"We've been around the block a few times, Temn," Padmé said, raising her glass to her lips once more and draining the dregs. "Just spill."

The blue bloom of light suspended above the desk coalesced into a spiral swirl of spheres—the galaxy, and all the star systems therein. Cal poked at it, and the view tightened—portions of the map dropped away, only Republic space remaining. "So, obviously my point of view's a little skewed here," the Sullustan said. "We're located right around—there," he said, poking at a blank space between systems somewhere near the middle of the galaxy map, "in that sector. Obviously the only outgoing calls we transmit originate in this area of space. But we route incoming transmissions from all over the place—not necessarily messages intended for this sector, either. Sometimes you gotta bounce a message all around the galaxy before it gets where it's going—we're just a waypoint for a communique some guy in the Core is sending to the Outer Rim, or the other way around. And that's where things get interesting."

He looked up from the projection at Obi-Wan, who was studying it intently as if trying to divine information from the view alone. "I ran a search for this Snowblind thing of yours, and as far as calls originating in this sector—zip. Nothing in military or civilian channels, in Basic or any other language the translation protocols were able to turn up.

"That meant sifting through all the incoming calls, and lemme tell you two, doing that in a way that wouldn't get me caught wasn't easy. There's a lotta data that comes through this place every day, and the quick ways to search it woulda gotten flagged and logged if this thing is tied to whatever trouble you both are in. No offense."

"Trust me, buddy," Padmé said, rolling her eyes, "we don't want you joining our little fugitive parade anytime soon." Where the hell did Obi-Wan meet this guy?

"Padmé," her Jedi friend said in a longsuffering plea—she wasn't sure whether it meant Don't say fugitive that way or He's nice once you get to know him. Turning back to Cal, he said, "I take it your work paid off."

"Took some doing, but when General Kenobi says 'jump,' I eventually get around to it." The Sullustan flexed his stubby fingers, then pointed at another portion of the map—this time, the image zoomed inward, halting on a square cross-section of space billions of miles distant. "This is the Ebon Sector, or as we like to call it here, the Black Box. Pretty much all the comms traffic in and out of it's encrypted—sort of a dumping ground for Republic secrets, even back in the Defense Force days. Since things got rebranded as the Grand Army, it's locked down even tighter. Still, they've gotta pass their messages through the holonet same as everyone else—some kinda dark comms network isn't gonna be able to span one end of the Republic to the other. Which means we still get 'em coming and going.

"So I ran a scan, tried to crack the decryption real quietlike. And sure enough, the holonet node in that sector is crawling with Snowblind. Popped up all over the place without me even having to look too hard."

Cal leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together, eyes gleaming triumphantly. When neither of his guests spoke, he pulled his hands apart, sounding mildly annoyed. "Well, a thank-you would be nice."

"So you've got the sector," said Padmé, bringing her hands together in a single clap. "What is it?"

"Well, I don't know that!" the alien shot back, punctuating the point with a button-punch—the holographic map winked to nothingness. "Running a full decryption from this office ain't exactly within my capabilities, and even if it were, I'm sticking my neck on the chopping block as it is. Word gets out that I'm browsing through this kinda stuff, and I won't exactly get an honorable discharge and severance pay."

She wanted to fume at the little son of a bitch, but it wasn't worth it—time was wasting, and the longer they stayed on this station, the more she worried that Officer Ramfelt was going to decide to snoop in their ship while Cal Temn was otherwise engaged. "Right, well, guess we've got a sector to explore. Come on, Kenobi, let's maybe grab some food before we leave—"

"Hey!" Though it was hard to read the all-black eyes, the Sullustan's expression looked a little wounded. "I didn't say that was it, did I?"

"Padmé." Obi-Wan held a hand in her direction, along with a quick, apologetic flick of his eyes, then looked at Cal. "Go on, Cal, please."

With a miffed little snort, the Sullustan pulled out a tiny piece of plastic from underneath the glass desk top. It looked like a minidrive, thought Padmé, as Cal put it in Obi-Wan's hand. The Jedi turned it back and forth, as if expecting it to spit out the missing piece they were looking for.

"Our data logs wipe themselves clean of any encrypted messages about an hour after they're sent, just in case anyone were to try to breach the station's security and download the archive," Cal informed him. "Before they did that, I took a big chunk of the messages where Snowblind was popping up and put 'em on that drive. I can't guarantee anything, but if you're looking for an explanation it'd be in there."

Obi-Wan nodded, frowning. "We don't have any sort of military-grade decryption software on our ship."

"I figured as much." The alien threw an absurd little glance behind him, as though someone could be watching over his shoulder from the other side of the viewport, and then leaned closer to the pair of them. "That, uh, power spike that fried one of the main receivers? Let's just say it wasn't entirely mechanical failure."

In a manner Padmé still wasn't entirely used to now that it wasn't framed by mustache and beard, Obi-Wan broke out into a grin. "You don't want to tell me anything more than that, I'm sure."

"See, this is why I like you, Kenobi, eventually you do catch on." Cal lowered his voice til it was just above a whisper. "Now look. While that primary receiver is down and the secondary receivers are picking up its slack, all the hardware connected to it is cut off from the holonet. But it still functions locally. You plug that"—he nodded at the drive—"into the decryption unit, and it'll spit out the fully decoded messages. Should be pretty easy, I already identified the encryption method used on 'em. And since the decryption unit isn't plugged into the 'net—"

"—no traceable evidence that it was ever used on the messages so long as we wipe the local record of it," Padmé finished for him, feeling her own grim smile forming in spite of herself. "We still get to do the dirty work, of course."

"Yeah, you're right, frying the most important piece of equipment on the station didn't get my hands dirty at all." Still, she couldn't help but note Cal sounded pretty pleased with himself. "Look, your cover story should take care of getting you into the decryption lab backstage. You won't have long, but it should be enough time. When you're done, just head back out and meet me—we'll have a long enough lunch to make things look good and then get you the hell off my switchboard."

Still smiling, Obi-Wan deposited the drive in his pocket and snapped his fingers. "We'll make it quick. And Cal—thank you."

"You can thank me by never ever contacting me again," the Sullustan groused. "And if you do get hauled in for whatever it is you're doing, just make sure you resist interrogation long enough for me to defect."

Not for the first time, Obi-Wan felt a burning desire to reach for his hip and touch the cool metal of his lightsaber, just to assure himself it was there—only to remember that it wasn't there, it was back on Coruscant and had most likely been picked up as evidence by Tarkin's people by now. Besides, he scolded himself, you wouldn't be lightsabering your way through a communications station even if things did get out of hand.

"So what do you want to bet Snowblind's a person?" Padmé asked him quietly as they strolled down a cramped hall, heading for the defunct receiver Cal had pointed them toward. "I was doing some thinking while you were comatose—"

"—meditating—"

"—and there's no way this Vader is the only person doing Palpatine's dirty work, right? He's just the only one we know about. And all his stuff has been ex-Confederate targets. Guy like Palpatine's gonna want someone to handle home business too."

"Well, hopefully we'll find out in about ten minutes." He dropped his voice as a Rodian in a comms officer's uniform walked past, looking the pair of them up and down for a moment before continuing on. "Though if Palpatine has someone like Vader working with Tarkin on what's allegedly a legal investigation . . . that would be extraordinarily bad."

"Yeah, Bail's worried about getting iced by the guy," Padmé replied with a snort. After a moment, she continued, less amused, "I don't think our little rebellion has actually done anything worth sending a black-ops guy after. But what you and I are doing . . . you sure you trust this Temn guy?"

"I would argue that those who complain loudest about helping are the ones you can trust the most. After all, look at my traveling companion."

Up ahead, the corridor split into five branches, each with some glowing Aurebesh characters set above—and each with a white-armored Grand Army soldier stationed in front. First to the left read Decryption in emerald green, the light reflecting off the trooper's helmet in a radiation sheen. As Obi-Wan and Padmé approached, the trooper drew himself to full attention, the blaster carbine in his hands snapping to his chest. Once again, the Jedi felt a spasm of longing for a lightsaber.

You don't need it, he chided himself. Trust the Force, not a weapon.

"This area is restricted to authorized personnel only, sir, ma'am," emitted from the trooper's helmet through a dead-voiced filter. "Especially while the receiver is under repair."

"We're authorized," Obi-Wan replied, keeping his voice even and authoritative—the old general's tone, a former set of clothes that was still easy to slip back into. "Comms Master Temn brought us in to consult on the equipment failure. If you check the station log, you'll see we were admitted for that purpose just an hour or so ago."

For several seconds, the trooper simply stared blankly forward without speaking. The blak skull's eyes of the helmet made it impossible to tell if he was actually checking the log or just gazing at the two of them. Beside him, Obi-Wan felt Padmé experiencing a remarkably similar longing to the one he'd had a few minutes ago—not for a lightsaber but for a gun.

Finally, the helmet's mouthpiece spoke again. "I'll need to check this with my supe—"

Keeping his arm below his waist, Obi-Wan almost imperceptibly raised his hand. "No need to check with your superior. You've seen the log."

The soldier's posture, almost painfully upright just the moment before, visibly relaxed. The blaster drooped toward the ground. "No need to check with my superior. You're free to enter."

With a faint clack of boots against metal, the guard took a step aside as the door swept open. Cautiously, Obi-Wan extended his perceptions to the other nearby guards—if one of them were suspicious, this could get more complicated very quickly—but they were complacent, bored. Giving their man a nod, he strode through the door, Padmé following behind.

"When this is all over," she said, "you're coming with me to Hutt space and we're finding the richest mark we can convince to hand over his fortune."

"Hutts don't tend to be weak-minded, alas." Up ahead, some plastic ribbons of curtain hung down to the floor. "Shall we?"

They pushed through into the decryption wing.

There were no windows of any kind, just computer banks ringing the entire chamber. A central console was elevated to standing position—in case, Obi-Wan supposed, after a long hard day of codebreaking in pitch darkness one needed to stretch one's legs. The perimeter consoles were dotted at even intervals by black leather chairs, all set for human height—something Cal had no doubt found time to complain about during his time here.

"Might as well go for the one in the middle," Padmé said. "I'll handle the drive, you guard the way out in case whatever you did to our armored pal wears off."

When he reached for his pocket, he frowned, then felt his pulse spike—the minidrive's hard square of plastic against his chest was gone. He patted the pocket harder, already picturing the pair of them retracing their steps to search the station floor—

Padmé chuckled. "Good to know I can still pull off a lift." When he whirled around, she was waggling the drive between the fingers of her right hand. "Relax, Kenobi."

Obi-Wan responded with a very Amidala roll of his eyes, then turned to watch the exit as she plugged the thing in.

After about thirty seconds of watching the motionless plastic curtaining while listening to the whir of the mainframe, Obi-Wan decided it was reasonable to assume the mind-trick hadn't worn off. Turning, he strode to join Padmé at the center console, where the computer was projecting lines of crimson gibberish across her face.

"I bet you a hundred credits it's another executor," she told him, keeping her eyes on the scrolling text. "Or some new warship or something."

"Exactly why are you so eager for the thing we're hunting to be something capable of shooting at us?"

"That just means we're capable of blowing it up."

He took a long look around the chamber at that, waiting for a klaxon to blare or an armored guard to burst in. Perhaps Cal's paranoia was catching.

As Padmé's eyes flitted back and forth, watching for patterns in the data to be rendered legible, Obi-Wan quietly watched her, pondering. She and Bail had filled him in on the subject when he'd arrived on Alderaan; then, on the journey to the Switchboard, Padmé had read aloud a breaking holonet news item on the successful strike on Tipoca City's cloning facility led by the executor. You're rather interested in him, Obi-Wan had noted, giving up on meditating and cracking his eyes open.

It's one man doing what the entire new Grand Army can't, she'd shot back, voice a bit more ill-tempered than Obi-Wan had thought the situation called for. Aren't you?

Perhaps he should have been. Perhaps this was a sign that he'd lost his general's mind, his ability to keep track of all the moving pieces on the board. Because truly, he wasn't.

Remarkable how little it had taken, he thought, to jar all thought of the Clone Wars from his mind. Maul and Valis, the Sith back from the dead, the greatest enemy the Jedi had ever faced—and all it had taken to drive them from his mind was a summons gone wrong and Palpatine's pet lawyer. Whoever this Vader was, he was fighting on a different front, in a different theater. He may as well have been a galaxy away.

A muted beep began to issue from the computer bank. The next moment, the text on the screen fizzled and rolled over itself, sliding from red to blue. Blinking hard a single time to dispel the fog, Obi-Wan leaned in over Padmé's shoulder. "And so we have . . ."

Requisitions requests, mostly. From the last six months, in regular intervals, directives for supplies to be redirected from official Republic supply routes to a string of numbers somewhere within the Black Box. "Gotta be planetary coordinates," Padmé said, reaching into her pants pocket and pulling out a crumpled sheet of flimsi and a stubby pencil. She scribbled, checked the screen, scribbled again. "Wonder if the Senate knows that our pal Tarkin is skimming off the top of official military aid."

"So Snowblind isn't a sector or a planet," Obi-Wan murmured, skimming text as quickly as he could. "It's . . ."

Well, that was still unclear. XB-27886 requires another month's supply of ration packs—personnel increases consuming stores more quickly than anticipated. Route through Snowblind.

"So Snowblind's a quartermaster?" Padmé said with a disbelieving snort. "One that Tarkin's boys just happened to be thinking about."

For an absurd moment, Obi-Wan's thoughts flitted to Qlik. "No, that doesn't fit. If Snowblind were a person making these requests, they wouldn't be referring to themselves in the message."

Nodding, she skimmed further back. "Additional construction units needed for Snowblind expansion to proceed. Extreme cold proving difficult to adapt existing units to. Work one month behind . . . bingo." Snorting ruefully, she turned to the Jedi. "Guess I owe you a hundred credits."

"A base of some kind. From the sound of it, a military staging ground."

"Or a staging ground for something." Padmé drummed her fingers absentmindedly against the screen, thinking. "If you were running an investigation against the Jedi, and you knew they had ears everywhere, wouldn't you want a super-secret base within Black Box space where you could do your scheming?"

Obi-Wan thought back to memories of himself sitting in Chancellor Organa's executive office. Qui-Gon walking through the Senate building, in between tasks for Interplanetary Outreach. Then to what Bail had told him after he'd met with Palpatine, just before the latter replaced him. To what Palpatine had said on the subject of Jedi.

Whether the Jedi really move objects with their minds or wield lightsabers, I don't care. But influence upon this government from within, by a group that does not belong there . . . that concerns me.

"Yes," he said aloud. "I suppose I would."

"Well then." Without warning, she ripped the drive from the computer, then started punching at the console to access the local data log. "When we get back to the ship, we punch these coordinates into the map, see what planet it is we're hitting next. Wherever it is, sounds like we're gonna want to pick up some coats before stopping over."

I'm going to pick up a coat, he almost told her, you're going back to Alderaan. I brought you on for a research mission, not infiltration.

Instead, he nodded and snatched the drive back from her. "And I'll take a chance and contact the Temple. It's time they knew what's going on."

Republic Archives: Ebon Sector Test and Training Range

[see also: "Black Box"]

The Ebon Sector Test and Training Range is a highly classified region of space operated by the Grand Army of the Republic. Specific details about what the sector is used for are not made available to the general public. The Grand Army says the space is utilized for "equipment testing and personnel training"—this is commonly believed to involve the development and initial deployment of experimental weapons and spacecraft.

The Ebon Sector is often referred to as a Black Box. Communications into and out of the sector are encrypted, and publicly available star charts contain no planetary mapping or navigational data for the area—it is instead an empty square, a literal "black box" on the map. Navigational entry points into the Ebon Sector are highly patrolled by convoys of Star Destroyers, or "fenced off" by artificial gravity well generators to disrupt attempted hyperspace travel.

Conspiracy theories about the Ebon Sector run rampant on the holonet—from suggestions that the Republic keeps uncontacted alien species in containment cells and experiments on them, to the long-running narrative that Duros scientists have successfully invented a time machine, to the notion that the asteroid field which blankets one side of the sector was created on purpose by blowing up a planet. The Grand Army of the Republic refuses to comment on any rumors, believing that a direct denial of one will only fuel speculation that others are true.