CHAPTER SIX

After three weeks of Imperial hospitality, Cathi was beginning to wonder if they would ever let her go - or if this was just a big, cosmic joke that was being played on her. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that she was being held in one of the Star Destroyer's guest quarters rather than the brig. That was not to say that she had the run of the ship, of course. There was always a stormtrooper escort following her around wherever she went.

The door chimed a moment before opening, and the ever-present guard stepped through, followed a moment later by the ship's captain.

"Good news, Miss Riclin," he began. "Your navicomputer has been repaired and you are free to go."

She let out a sigh of relief. "That's it?"

The captain smiled. "Were you expecting to be held indefinitely?"

"Perhaps," Cathi replied. "As I remember, the Empire did not exactly have the best relationship with smugglers."

"The Empire has changed quite a bit," the captain remarked cryptically. "Would you like to see your ship?"

True to their word, they dropped her off in orbit of a fairly unremarkable planet in the Outer Rim. For hours, she sat in the cockpit trying to think of solutions. She could go down to the planet, sell the Headwind, and make a new life for herself. But what was the point in that? Eventually some bounty hunter would trace the ship back to her, and then she'd be killed. Or worse, like being sent to work in the spice mines of Ryloth for the rest of her life. She had also heard quite enough about the Twi'lek sex trade to have particularly vivid nightmares about what could happen with that.

Or she could jump to a place like Ord Mantell where she could pawn the ship off and get a new life. She shook her head. That only worked in the holovids. She'd heard of too many smugglers who simply disappeared, only to turn up dead months or years later at the hands of bounty hunters.

"Well, that settles it," she said to herself. She couldn't run, she couldn't hide for very long, and she wasn't enough of a slicer to cover her tracks very well. YT-2400 freighters were fairly common – CEC had made tens of thousands – but she had no credits in any accounts to pay for changing the ship's identification. She'd been counting on the payoff from this load of ryll to keep her until the next job, and now that payoff had simply evaporated along with the spice.

She pointed the ship away from the planet and closed her eyes. This wasn't how she had wanted her life to turn out. Once, in fact, she had dreams of exploring the galaxy and discovering one of the millions of still-unknown species in it. But life had chosen a different path for her, obviously.

She killed the safeties on the hyperdrive and grabbed the actuator levers. This was supposed to be quick and painless...

In a burst of charged plasma and Cronau radiation, the small freighter flashed to hyperspace.

.

. . .

.

Jacen was starting to see why Tenel Ka preferred the rugged, often arid planet to the overly cultured environment of Hapes. The day after their arrival, she had taken time to teach him, his sister, and Lowbacca how to ride rancors. The sight of the monstrous creatures at first startled him, and he remembered his uncle Luke's tale of the one he had encountered at Jabba's palace all those years ago. The more time he spent around them, however, the easier it was to connect with them, and he had discovered that they were actually quite intelligent despite their appearance.

Once they had mastered riding the giant creatures, Tenel Ka had led them out to a lake some thirty kilometers away from the fortress. They had spent the next few days camped out near the lake, hiking in the almost impossibly tall nearby mountains and then cooling off in the placid waters of the lake. Jacen had been surprised again there; despite only having one arm, Tenel Ka still managed to swim faster than he could. He'd laughed and said that he was out of shape, but he still had to admit that it was impressive.

When they had told Luke that they would be visiting Dathomir, he had suggested that they visit the ruins of the Chu'unthor. The old Jedi training ship was still slowly rusting away in the middle of a canyon, serving as a memorial to those that had fallen in combat with the Nightsisters hundreds of years before.

So it was that they had taken their rancor mounts and made their way out to where the wreckage of the Chu'unthor filled up an ancient canyon. They left the rancors up on the plateau where they could take care of themselves, and headed down the small, muddy path that lead to the slow-moving river that the ship had ended up in.

When they finally reached the muddy waters, Lowbacca dropped the pack he had been carrying, pulled out a bright orange inflatable raft, and set to work with a small pump. Soon they were plying their way across the river, and after a bit of work tied it up on a half-rusted antenna that jutted up from the tilted wreck of the ship.

Jacen already knew that there was probably very little that was new that could be learned from the wreck as Luke had retrieved the ship's store of datacards years before, and subsequent trips with Tionne had unearthed even more information, but just standing on it made his nerves tingle.

"Are we going to go inside or what?" Jaina suddenly asked from behind him.

"Should we?" Jacen asked.

"Well, why not?" his sister argued. "There were training areas inside and I'm curious to see how they set those up. And it's not like there are any bodies aboard, the ship didn't crash after all." She reached into one of the many pockets on her brown jumpsuit and pulled out a datapad, calling up one of the schematics of the ship. "I think there's an access hatch we can use about twenty meters due west."

After following Jaina to where the schematic indicated the hatch was, Jacen frowned. "I don't see how we're supposed to open it. It looks like it's welded pretty tight."

Jaina was already kneeling down on the rusted metal, and pointed to a barely visible hairline seam in the panel. "Uncle Luke told me he and Tionne cut this door at a diagonal so its weight would keep it sealed," she said, coming to her feet and taking a step away from it. "We just need to levitate it up."

"Easy enough," Jacen agreed, and reached out toward the hatch. A moment later, he winced and dropped his arm back to his side as if it had been stung. "Kriff, that thing's heavy!"

"Perhaps we should try to work together?" Tenel Ka suggested.

"That's what I was going to say," Jaina added, "before you went off and tried to be the hero as usual."

Jacen flashed a typically lopsided grin. "Hey, I guess it runs in the family..."

After several false starts, they managed to lift the heavy slab of durasteel off the hatch opening, leaving just enough room for Lowbacca to squeeze through. After some four hundred years of sitting exposed to the elements in a tar pit, none of the emergency lighting was still functional on the ship and all the Jedi pulled out glowrods so they could see inside.

There was a slight growl from Lowbacca and moments later, Em Teedee piped up. "Master Lowbacca says that it smells quite terrible in here."

"So we noticed," Jacen said nasally, one hand pinching off his nose. The odor wasn't anything like the smell of anything rotting, but it was just a musty, dank odor that was quite disagreeable. Probably had something to do with the ship being welded shut for so long with no life support functions.

They navigated the corridors of the ship in silence for several minutes, eventually coming to one of the transparisteel-domed openings that had apparently served as a cafeteria. Plates, cups, and utensils still littered the tables as if someone had left in a hurry. They all seemed to be covered in a thick layer of dirt, which as Jacen approached he realized was actually the dried, decomposed remains of whatever food had been on the plates.

He sneezed as his footsteps kicked up some of the dust on the floor. "Whatever was growing in this mess is long dead," he remarked.

"No kidding," Jaina agreed. "Well, I don't think we're going to learn anything here. Let's keep going."

Another fifteen minutes of wandering dark and often collapsed corridors later, they came to another domed area. This one had patterns of lines painted on the floor, and several huge balls were scattered around.

"I do not understand," Tenel Ka declared. "Was this some sort of game? Or just for exercise?"

"There's one way to find out," Jaina said as she walked over toward one of the largest balls.

"Please tell me you're not going to do what I think you're going to," Jacen said.

"I've been dying to use that telemetric technique that Uncle Luke taught me," she replied. "Isn't this the perfect opportunity?"

"Yeah," Jacen said. "I also remember him warning you about how dangerous it could be if you used it on anything that had been touched by the Dark Side."

Jaina rolled her eyes in exasperation. "Now who's sounding like Mom? We're on a Jedi training ship that hasn't been touched by anyone except Uncle Luke in four hundred years. What's the worst that could happen?"

Jacen sighed. "Fine. Let's see how this game was played."

Jaina reached out toward the ball and put her hands on its surface, which still appeared unblemished compared to everything else on the ship. As Jacen watched, her eyes closed and she seemed to go into a trance-like state for only a few seconds before her eyes snapped back open. She turned back to them, silently, and Jacen waited for her to say something.

"Well?" he finally asked after what seemed like minutes had passed.

"It... for a moment, it felt like I was there," she finally managed to say. "I saw flashes of faces, the Jedi padawans playing the game. I think it was some sort of telekinetic exercise, they would bounce these balls back and forth without touching them, and if one went between these white lines, they scored a point against that person."

"Sounds fun," Jacen remarked. "Sort of like Limmie, I guess?"

"With more goalies," Jaina agreed.

Limmie, or bolo-ball as it was known outside the Core, was a relatively unpopular sport on Coruscant but had a fanatical following throughout the rest of the galaxy. It was played by only using the players' feet to kick a ball through goals on the opposite ends of a wide field.

Jacen looked around at the domed area again. The white lines formed an octagon, with three meter wide openings on each face. He guessed that the Jedi version the padawans had played involved about eight players, each one playing both goalie and offense, paired up against opposite sides of the room.

"Well, I think four of us can give it a shot," Jacen said as he walked over to one of the sides. He reached out and drew the nearest ball towards him. Tenel Ka walked to the opposite side of the octagon, and Jaina and Lowbacca took up positions at right angles to him.

"Who's going to keep score?" Jaina asked a moment later.

"I am capable of serving in that capacity," Em Teedee declared as he floated off Lowbacca's utility belt to a position high in the dome above.

"I'll try not to hit you with the ball, Em Teedee," Jacen laughed as the ball in front of him began to float in his grip.

"All players ready?" Em Teedee asked, changing his voice to sound like one of the HoloNet sports announcers. Jacen snorted at the little droid's antics and nodded.

"Play ball!"

Jacen launched his ball across the room at the same time as the others. As it sailed through the middle, it collided with a ball from Jaina and both went shooting off in diagonal directions, arcing back toward the floor and bouncing several times. As Jacen struggled to maintain his grip on the ball, he became dimly aware of another projectile flying straight at him and jerked himself sideways.

"First goal goes to Tenel Ka!" Em Teedee announced a moment later.

Chagrined, Jacen picked up the ball that was now rolling around behind him and lobbed it upward. As it began to arc across the dome, Jacen reached out to grab the first ball but Lowbacca had already sent it rolling toward Jaina. He gave it a shove sideways toward Tenel Ka, and the ball began to curve around the dusty floor just as she caught the flying ball in an invisible grip. As she sent the hovering ball back toward him, he reached out to swat the ball on the ground, sending it shooting toward an open space of floor near her feet. She reacted a moment too late, only managing to deflect the ball slightly off course.

"Goal: Jacen, against Tenel Ka."

The back and forth continued for several more minutes although both Jacen and Tenel Ka managed to block each other's attempts to score. Jaina and Lowbacca, meanwhile, kept scoring goals against each other. He watched, fascinated, as they made the balls spin in midair, almost dancing in a blur of colors. Then the spinning stopped and the balls shot down in opposite directions. Both Jedi caught the balls and hurled them back, where they collided in the middle and began orbiting once more.

Jacen hefted his ball and hurled it directly at the center, where Jaina and Lowbacca were having their contest. It impacted and sent both balls flying off at crazy trajectories. Maintaining his grip on the one ball, he continued to guide it straight at Tenel Ka, who was simply hovering her own ball in front of herself. He felt his ball come to a halt in front of her. He concentrated and struggled to push it closer, but it simply refused to budge.

Then three balls all slammed into him at once, knocking him over so hard that he landed on his tailbone. For several moments, he simply lay there, stunned, as he tried to recover his breath. When he finally propped himself up on one elbow to look at the others, they had all stopped playing and Jaina was laughing. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah, that hit just knocked the wind right out of me," he replied as he got back up and rubbed his back. "It was fun, though. They're going to love that back at the Academy."

"Hey, Em Teedee!" Jaina shouted up at the little droid. "Can you snap a picture of the whole room from up there?"

"Of course, Mistress Jaina," the droid replied, floating back down to Lowbacca's belt after a few moments.

Jacen peered up to see where the position of Dathomir's sun was. "What time is it, anyway?" The way the shadows were aligned, it had to be somewhere around midday.

"The time is 0937 hours," Em Teedee answered.

Then again, Jacen reflected, they had gotten up before dawn had even broken that morning. He wasn't usually a morning person, and trying to adjust himself from Yavin to Dathomir had been quite interesting so far; besides the day/night cycles, which were several hours shorter than a Coruscant standard day, there was also the matter that Dathomir's gravity was a bit lower than the jungle moon.

Jaina had already pulled out her datapad again and was scanning the schematics of the ship. "I think the lightsaber training room is the next dome we'll be going through," she said after tapping away for some time.

"Of course it would be," Jacen replied. "Let me see that thing. Didn't they have some kind of zoo aboard?"

"Sure. And they had a three ring circus with banthas," Jaina replied as she handed the datapad over.

Jacen gave her a pained look. "Come on now, I was being serious for a change."

"So was I... well, maybe not about the circus, but there's a bantha compound on the other side of the ship."

He frowned and looked down at the datapad. Sure enough, one area was labeled BANTHAS. "What the heck would they want with banthas on a Jedi training ship?"

"Perhaps they wanted real milk for the Padawans," Tenel Ka suggested in an absolutely serious tone.

The thought of a bantha dairy on a starship made Jacen crack up, but as comical as the idea sounded, it actually made a certain amount of sense. After all, the only thing banthas really needed was feedstock, water, and a certain amount of space to move around in. The Chu'unthor was certainly large enough to have met all three requirements.

Following the schematics, Jaina again led them through several hundred meters of hallways, although it would have been a much shorter route had so much of the ship not collapsed internally. The first room they entered was filled with dust-covered test equipment. A sheet was draped over something in one corner of the room, and Jaina immediately ran over. The sheet disintegrated in her hand as she pulled it off to reveal a slumped-over stocky, metallic humanoid form.

"Hey, it's a Cybot GA-series analysis droid!" Jaina exclaimed. "I wonder if it's still functional..."

She reached around and flipped a switch on the back of the machine, and was rewarded as its optical receptors lit up. It attempted to straighten itself but the centuries of neglect appeared to have frozen its servos.

"Cybot Galactica GA-16 Information Analysis Unit, serial number 465-besh-nern-44486. Error 483," the droid spoke in a voice that Jacen could have sworn sounded slightly rusty. "General servomotor failure. Please contact the Cybot Galactica support hotline to set up a service request."

Jaina turned to Lowbacca as the droid began to repeat the error message. "Anything you can do?"

Lowbacca shook his head and rumbled a reply, which Em Teedee translated as "Not without the right spare parts."

"Let's see if I can bypass the error message." Jaina switched the unit off and pried open one of its panels, flipping several switches inside. Apparently satisfied, she closed the panel and hit the power again.

"Cybot Galactica GA-16 Information Analysis Unit, serial number 465-besh-nern-44486. Service Mode Enabled. Please state your command."

"Access information records," Jaina pronounced carefully.

"What records would you like to access? Choices are..." The droid paused for several seconds as if stalled. "Error: Unable to access Chu'unthor central computer records. Please state your command."

"Diagnostics."

"Which diagnostic would you like to run?"

"Function test."

The droid began to rattle off a list of functions that Jacen had no clue about. The only information that he caught from it was that its ship datalink was currently down, unsurprising since Chu'unthor had not had power in several centuries, and that all primary servos had failed.

Jaina finally flipped the unit off in disgust. "Without the central computer, it's pretty much useless," she explained. "If we could somehow get the computer back up and running, it would be great to have."

"Doesn't matter anyway," Jacen replied. "Remember, Uncle Luke picked up all of this ship's records years ago."

Jaina scratched her head thoughtfully. "You know, we could probably make good use of this droid back at the Academy. They only replaced it with the GY-I around the time of the Clone Wars, so there are still a lot of them in service."

"Who's going to carry it?" Jacen pointed out.

Jaina looked at Lowbacca, who shook his head emphatically. She sighed, then continued. "Well, I guess if we find a working hoversled we might be able to do something."

"If you believe it will be that useful," Tenel Ka said, "we could all levitate it in front of us like we did with the entrance hatch."

"Let's just come back to it later," Jacen said after considering her suggestion. "We still have a lot of ship to explore."

Leaving the dilapidated data center behind, the next room turned out to be the lightsaber training dome. Several training remotes lay on the floor, collecting dust, and a number of what Jacen guessed were large bowls were scattered around. He walked over to one, picked it up, and frowned.

"Who puts straps in a bowl?"

"Let me see that," Jaina said as she took it out of his hand. "You dummy! It's not a bowl, it's a helmet... and from the size of the harness inside, I'd say it's for a pretty small kid." She took the helmet and dropped it on Jacen's head; the end result must have looked rather absurd, with the wide helmet perched halfway up and completely slanted. For a moment, Jacen thought he heard Tenel Ka snicker softly, but when he lifted the helmet to look up at her, her face was completely unreadable.

Lowbacca, meanwhile, was on the other side of the room. His tall form was bent down as he worked at something on the ground, and a minute later he walked back with some small cylinders in his massive paws.

"Are those lightsabers?" Jaina asked with no small degree of surprise. The cylinders were barely as long as her hand, Jacen noted as she picked one up. Then she pointed it away from everyone and depressed the activation stud. A short, dimly glowing green blade sprung to life with more of a fizzle than the usual crisp snap-hiss, then flickered several times before dying out completely.

"I think they're low-powered training sabers," he observed, picking another one out of Lowbacca's hand. Pointing it outward, he ignited it and made a slicing movement toward the deck. Instead of carving a line into the deck plating, the saber bounced off without leaving a mark, then sputtered out.

"So how old do you think the trainees were?" Jacen asked.

Jaina shrugged and looked at the helmet again. "They couldn't have been very old. Maybe four."

"That's a lot younger than we were," he remarked.

"Tell me about it," Jaina agreed. "If they were training with sabers at four... I wonder when they started?"

"I've heard that some were taken as infants," a voice behind them said, causing all four Jedi to turn around and draw their lightsabers in alarm. When they saw that the voice belonged to Kyp, they relaxed and switched off their blades.

"How long have you been standing there?" Jaina asked.

The older Jedi shrugged. "Only about five minutes. You guys were pretty preoccupied." He looked around the dusty room. "Man, this place really is falling apart."

Jaina frowned in thought. "About what you said... where did you hear that, anyway?"

"Imperial propaganda," Kyp replied. "Got a heavy dose of it at Kessel. Claimed that the Jedi were baby-snatchers. Maybe that part of it wasn't very far from the truth after all."

Jacen and Jaina exchanged looks. "Well, you know what Master Luke says about half-truths often being more effective than outright lies," Jaina said after a moment. "So, anyway, what took so long? I thought we'd be meeting up sometime last week."

"We ran into some snags with the weapons loadout on the XJs," Kyp answered. "They put three torpedo launchers on the fighter in place of the original single launcher. Because of that, the torpedoes are incompatible with all of my other fighters."

"But they managed to keep the firepower the same," Jaina remarked. "That's impressive with such a small warhead."

Kyp nodded. "Anyway, I was contacted by a rep from the Extragalactic Society after you left. One of their observation stations out in the Tingel Arm hasn't reported in in over a month. They sent a ship last week to investigate and haven't heard back from them either, so they want us to take a look."

"So that's our next stop?" Jacen asked.

"No, we'll still check out the convoy first, since it's closer." Kyp replied. "Well, I'm going to head back to my fighter. I'll meet you guys back at the Singing Mountain Clan."

"Wait," Jaina said suddenly. "Could you help us move something first?"

He paused in mid-stride. "Sure. Where is it?"

"The old GA-series in the next room. Its servos are frozen, but Lowbacca and I can repair it back at the Praxeum. I figured Tionne could use the help."

Together they picked up the old droid and levitated it in front of themselves all the way back to the entrance hatch. While Kyp took off in his X-wing, which he had landed on a flat part of the Chu'unthor, Lowbacca wrapped a rough blanket around the droid to cover any sharp edges and placed it into the inflatable raft.

The mood was quiet during the hour-long ride back to the Singing Mountain Clan. Once there, they said their goodbyes to the clan, and set about preparing the Rock Dragon for takeoff. Two hours after that, they were back in space hurtling through hyperspace toward the location of the distress signal.

"You know, this doesn't really make any sense," Jacen said as he paced back and forth in the passenger lounge. "The only link we have between the convoy and Bimmiel is reports of attacking asteroids. And then there's this ExGal station on Belkadan that nobody's heard from. Who would attack such random targets?" He waved his hands emphatically. "I mean, think about it: a scientific research station, a convoy, and an archaeological expedition on an uninhabitable planet."

Jaina regarded him with a bemused look. "We don't even know if Belkadan and the convoy are related to Bimmiel. As far as we know, ExGal 4 could have had a communications problem, while the convoy was probably a pirate attack. The aliens on Bimmiel were probably just upset over the researchers invading their burial grounds!"

He shrugged. "That's a possibility, but..."

"We'll find out when we get there, won't we," Jaina cut him off.

Jacen glared at his sister. "I'd still like to have some idea of what's going on before we get into the middle of things. So far we're only going on sketchy information."

"I know - We know, Jacen." She paused for a moment. "I'm just as nervous as you are about this. But we don't have any choice now; we're going to arrive in a few hours." Jaina gave him a friendly pat on the back. "Try not to worry about it. I'm going to head back to the cockpit and see if Tenel Ka or Lowbacca need to do anything."

"That will not be necessary," a voice behind her said. "The navicomputer will give us fair warning before we exit hyperspace."

The twins turned about to face Tenel Ka, standing as alert as she typically did. She inclined her eyebrows. "Of course, there is always the danger of pirates, but with the Dozen-and-Two Avengers nearby, I would hope that any would-be attackers might realize discretion is the better part of valor."

"They wouldn't even know what hit them," Jacen jokingly commented. "At least judging by the attitudes of Kyp's pilots," he hastily added in response to a slightly confused look from the warrior.

"Ah," Tenel Ka nodded. "Aha."

"If they would spend as much time working on their piloting as massaging their egos, they would rival Rogue Squadron," Jaina added derisively. "Brand-new XJs or not, I really wouldn't want to fly in a squadron like that."

"And I thought you looked almost eager when Kyp asked you if you wanted to join his squadron."

Jaina spun about to face her brother, irritation clearly evident on her face. "Maybe I was, for a moment. You should know that I've always wanted to fly in a professional squadron... but the Avengers are really just amateurs with fancy hardware."

He raised his eyebrows. "Have to admit, they've done a pretty good job against pirates for a bunch of amateurs."

"Hah. Pirates," she remarked scornfully. "They're nothing compared to a professional military force." Her tone changed slightly, gaining a worried edge. "Although that does have me concerned; if you're right and this isn't just some third-rate group that's been causing trouble, then we are going to have serious problems."

By the time the navicomputer signaled that reversion from hyperspace was imminent, the four Jedi were in their positions and the ship was ready, its deflectors and sensors already powered up and waiting. Jaina had taken over piloting, with Tenel Ka sitting in the copilot's seat; while she couldn't easily fly with only one arm, running the navicomputer and various other systems was far from difficult.

"We're powered up and ready," Jacen reported from the port laser turret. A Wookiee roar, which needed no translation, echoed him.

"Standby," Tenel Ka reported, her voice sounding smooth despite the stress that all of them were facing. She waited for the navicomputer to count down...

The Rock Dragon smoothly decelerated, the mottled sky of hyperspace gradually streaking and then turning into a field of points.

"Avengers, report in," Tenel Ka said over the comm.

"We're all accounted for," Kyp's voice responded. "Nothing's turned up on passive sensors yet."

A collective sigh of relief came from the four Jedi aboard the transport. "I'll run a full-power scan," Jaina commented, her hands flying across the console. "It should show anything that's sensor-stealthed."

After a short period of time, she spoke up again. "I've got what looks like a debris cloud, range about ten thousand klicks. No lifesigns anywhere. Sending vectors right now."

As they neared the debris field, the Jedi aboard the Rock Dragon heard a snort come across the com. "Isn't this a little small to be from a convoy?"

"Miko, keep the comm clear," Kyp replied.

Jacen stared out the forward viewport, wondering about the dispersed debris field. Whatever was passing through his mind was interrupted by his sister.

Keying the com on, Jaina spoke into it. "Avengers, this is Jaina. Let me know if you find anything we can use for identification." She switched it off and turned to Lowbacca. "Lowie, I need you to use the tractor beam. Drag in anything that looks promising."

The Wookiee urfed a reply as Jaina got up, giving the controls to her brother. She turned to exit the cockpit. "I'll be in the main hold. If there's nothing on whatever you bring in, I'll dump it back."

"Got it," Jacen replied, focusing on the debris through the Force, trying to see if there was anything that drew his attention. A few minutes later, he noticed a small piece that seemed mostly intact, and Lowie snagged it with the tractor beam.

"Good catch," an excited voice echoed from the hold. "It has some numbers on it, but I'm not quite sure what it's from." There was silence for a moment. "Jacen, can you come here and take a look at this?"

Jacen stood up, leaving Tenel Ka and Lowie with the task of flying the ship. Moments later, he reached the hold.

"Take a look at these," Jaina commented, pointing towards a set of deep scratches in the plate. "I could almost swear that these are tooth marks."

He knelt down, inspecting the plate. 'You're right," Jacen eventually agreed. "That's kind of odd, though. I don't think there would be any space slugs this far from an asteroid, and they're about the only organic I can think of that could do this kind of damage.

"Well, they did show asteroids attacking them," Jaina replied.

Jacen rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on. Even I've had enough orbital mechanics lessons to know that any asteroid that did this would still be close to the debris."

"Or on an intersecting orbit," Jaina added. "Hang on, let me plot out some of the objects in this system and see if any would have intersected this orbit in the past week or two." She tapped away at the comm-scan computer for several minutes. "Huh. Looks like only a couple of rocks came within a few hundred thousand klicks of this location. Let's check them out anyway."

One short hyperspace jump brought them to the first of the objects, which turned out to be a small, dried-out dustball of a comet. Sensor scans came up blank, so they made several passes around the old comet to try and find any trace of silicon lifeforms like a space slug. Each time, they came up empty-handed. After several minutes of that, Jaina gave up and plotted a jump to the second object, which turned out to be just as uninhabitable as the first: a smooth, metal-rich lump of an asteroid with no distinctive surface features and only one crater right in the middle of its hourglass-shaped mass. It was most certainly too small to host a space slug, barely larger than a Corellian CR-90 corvette.

Just to be sure, several pilots in Kyp's squadrons took shots at the asteroid, but nothing at all happened.

"Hey, I think I've got something," Jaina said a moment later. "Looks like more debris, about ten degrees spinward of our original location." She frowned and looked back at the display panel. "Not sure why I didn't see that before..."

When they emerged from the jump at the newly discovered debris field, Miko let out a low whistle. "This is more like it. There's gotta be pieces of a hundred different ships here..."

Jacen leaned forward to look out the viewport at the black expanse beyond, and tapped at some of the controls to call up a magnified, high-contrast view of the area ahead. The dead hulks of several ships were drifting aimlessly through space. At least one appeared to be a light freighter of Corellian design, while several others had probably been pleasure yachts.

"What do you think happened?" he asked his sister.

"I don't see any carbon scoring," she replied without taking her eyes off the sensor readouts. "Strange... that freighter over there looks like the hull just sort of melted in places."

Kyp and Miko accelerated away from the rest of the squadron and navigated their way through the field of debris to pull up to one of the largest hulls.

"What can you see there?" Jaina asked.

"Maybe I'm imagining things, but it looks like someone splattered the hull with melted rock. The hull plating is deformed around the impact areas."

Jaina suddenly let out a whoop. "I'm picking up a short-range distress signal. Kyp, Miko, can you help triangulate it?"

"We hear it," Kyp replied. "I'll send you my data."

"Copy that," Miko added. "Transmitting now."

After a brief search to find the lone pod in the middle of the wreckage field, Tenel Ka deftly pulled the transport to within a hundred meters of the pod. Lowbacca snagged it with a tractor beam and drew it in to within a meter of the port hatch, then set up a forcefield tunnel between the ship's hatch and the pod hatch.

Several minutes later, lightsaber at the ready, Jacen knocked on the pod's hatch, and was greeted by a weak knock from the other side. The hatch slowly began to hiss open, and Jacen wrinkled his nose at the stench from inside. He counted six people inside the pod, and began dragging them into the passenger lounge. Once the pod had been emptied, he closed the ship's hatch behind him and Lowbacca jettisoned the now-useless escape pod.

"Thank you," one of the men said weakly after downing several full glasses of water. "We were beginning to think we'd never be rescued..."

"No problem," Jacen replied. "I'm Jacen Solo, Jedi Knight. Where are you guys from?"

"Garqi," the man replied. "Name's Ragle." He gestured around at the others sitting on the acceleration couch. "Coda, Lancam, Opardi, Minas, and Walwitt."

"Have you been out here since the attack?"

"Yeah," Ragle replied. "How long has it been, anyway?"

"About a month. How did you manage to survive for that long?"

"Beats me. We ran out of ration bars a while ago, and the water recycling unit broke down... well, I have no idea when but it couldn't have been longer than a week."

"Can you describe the attack?"

Ragle shrugged. "From what I did see, this asteroid-ship shows up and seems to break into hundreds of pieces. Only they're not shards, they're fighters, because the next thing we know, they're shooting at us and we can't hit them for some reason. It was like our turbolaser bolts just disappeared when they got close to them."

Jaina, still standing beside her brother, frowned. "They didn't try to communicate with you?"

"Nope," Ragle replied. "And believe me, we tried. First the standard frequencies, then we just went across everything. The only things we heard were cries for help from the other ships."

"That's terrible," Jaina replied. "Well, we're going to keep searching for any more survivors. You can move around and stretch if you like, or just strap yourselves in to one of the acceleration couches."