"Lowbacca can take care of himself," Tahiri said. "And if he is captured, what the Taat are doing now will only hurt him."

"Lowbacca won't be captured," Reya said. "The Colony does not wish it. "

The Taat continued to place themselves in front of their enemies, but instead of pursuing Tahiri and Jacen all the more ferociously, the clawcraft peeled away, giving them a clear route to freedom. Jaina exhaled in relief. At least Jag-or whoever was commanding this task force-still had the sense to back off before the conflict escalated.

Then a new tractor beam shot out from the Star Destroyer, capturing Tahiri, Jacen, and-judging by their surprise and anger-Alema and Zekk.

Jaina cursed at the same time she heard Tesar's irate hiss in her ears.

It was not easy to lock on to a wildly dodging s.p.a.cecraft visually, but if a beam crew knew the comm frequency being used by the target, they could follow the carrier wave straight to their victim. And while Reya had not initiated the contact with Tahiri, she had kept the young Jedi talking until the clawcraft dispersed.

Jaina was close enough to the battle now that she could see the laser cannons flashing inside the whirling cloud of dartships. Four waving fingers of darkness marked the areas where the tractor beams were sweeping the Taat out of s.p.a.ce, slowly pulling them toward the Star Destroyer. The vessel itself resembled a gray version of the Empire's old Victory-cla.s.s Star Destroyers, save that it was a little sleeker, longer, and narrower, with a conical hull that gave it a menacing, needle-like appearance. It was impossible to tell where the bridge was located-it was not in the Chiss nature to reveal such a crucial detail just for the looking - but a dome- shaped bulge amidships probably housed the cloaking equipment that had masked the vessel's approach.

Jaina dropped the nose of her StealthX and started a fast approach toward the bow of the Star Destroyer, then felt Tesar's excitement starting to mount as he initiated his own run. An image of his view of the ship appeared in the back of her mind. He seemed to be approaching from the opposite end, more or less head-on toward Jaina. They would have to be careful to avoid a collision.

"Sneaky, give me a ten-mag view of the area around the root of the nearest tractor beam," Jaina ordered.

Risky or not, she could not let the Chiss reel in four Jedi.

Over the comm, Reya said, "We will have you free in a minute, friends. "

Not kriffing likely, Jaina thought. Half of the Taat were already being sucked toward the Star Destroyer's capture bays, and the rest were too busy hurling themselves in front of clawcraft to disable any tractor beams.

"Help is coming." Reya's voice was rea.s.suring. "The Mueum are almost here."

The timely a.s.surance raised the hair on the back of Jaina's neck.

Recalling Taat's uncanny ability to sense what foods she and the other Jedi were longing for, she began to wonder what else Reya could sense.

Tesar began to think Reya was a better spy than they had thought.

Projecting his thoughts openly into the battle-meld, he wondered if he should eliminate her.

Jaina had the mental image of Tesar selecting Reya's lancet as a primary target, but realized instantly that the Barabel was only trying to test whether Reya knew what was happening in the battle-meld. He was pa.s.sing over the stern of the Star Destroyer and could not have targeted her if he wished.

When Reya did not fall for the ploy, Jaina checked her tactical display and found a blue storm of Mueum dartships cascading down from the direction of Eyyl and Jwlio-just as promised.

"Sneaky, do an EM sweep of the hull," Jaina ordered. She still did not see how the arrival of the fresh swarm was going to save Lowbacca and the others. "We might get lucky and locate an energy output that will tell us where those generators are."

Sneaky whistled an acknowledgment, then the image on her display switched to a rectangular portal set into a field of gray durasteel. The tractor beam itself was invisible, save for a few distortion ripples that suggested it was a very powerful beam indeed-one designed to drag in unwilling ships. As Jaina had feared, the portal was protected by a grid of blue energy-a repulsor screen designed to prevent someone from disabling the beam by dropping a piece of ordnance into it. The Chiss were far too good to overlook something that obvious.

"Go to five mag," Jaina ordered.

The beam portal grew small in her display, and the white cave of a capture bay appeared beneath it. Jaina could see a pair of weapons turrets flanking a transparisteel viewing panel set high in the innermost wall, but no hint of the tractor beam generator.

Sneaky piped a warning, and Jaina looked up to see the Star Destroyer stretched out before her like the long gray plain of an empty speeder lot. The beam cannons, big and small, remained silent in their sunken firing pits-a sure sign that the gunners still had not detected the approaching StealthXs.

"Anything on that EM sweep, Sneaky?" Jaina asked.

The droid tootled a negative, and Jaina sensed that the same was true for Tesar. It was beginning to look like they would have to do this the hard way. The Jedi would have to eject and destroy their ships.

Tahiri did not want to leave her living ship. It was a gift from Zonama Sekot... and it was a friend.

But her only other choice was to let herself be captured-and Jaina forbade that. She would go EV with Jacen and everyone else. Ten seconds.

Lowbacca did not have ten seconds. Five-if he was lucky.

Three, then.

"Give us eight!" Reya pleaded. No doubt now about whether she could read their emotions in the Force. "The Mueum are almost here."

Sure-enough time for your friends to capture Lowbacca's StealthX, Jaina thought. Two seconds.

Tesar urged Jaina to wait. The Mueum were attacking.

Jaina glanced at her display and saw a single, tightly packed arrow of Mueum designators driving through a screen of Chiss clawcraft like a blaster bolt through a tunic. The Star Destroyer opened up with all bearing batteries, hitting the ma.s.s with a devastating fusillade that would have torn a minor moon in half.

The Mueum did not even slow down. Long furrows of dartships vanished into fiery nothingness, and the swarm simply flowed into the open s.p.a.ces, shrinking a little, but continuing toward the Star Destroyer amidships.

"No, Reya!" Jaina ordered. "Stop them!"

Lowbacca went EV, and Jaina lost all hope of bringing the conflict back under control. The Mueum took another volley of laser cannons and continued on as before, coalescing into a single black harpoon aimed at the heart of the Chiss Star Destroyer. Lowbacca's StealthX detonated in the mouth of the capture bay, taking with it fifty square meters of deck and several dozen dartships, but doing nothing whatsoever to interrupt the tractor beam.

Jaina rolled away from the Star Destroyer and started firing, trying to force as many clawcraft as possible away from Tahiri and the other captured Jedi. Tesar dropped in behind Jaina, firing to kill as a string of brave Chiss pilots jumped on her tail.

Finally, the Mueum reached the Star Destroyer. On her tactical display, Jaina glimpsed the lead dartships crashing into the vessel's particle shields, vaporizing themselves in an ever-broadening circle of light and fire. She thought for one moment that the suicide attack would come to no more than that; that the entire Mueum swarm would simply smash itself against the powerful Chiss shields.

Then the shields crackled, flashed, and fell. The Mueum a.s.sault smashed into the hull in a conflagration of rocket fuel and fire and burned through within seconds. Bodies and equipment began to tumble from the breached hull, but the swarm continued to pour through, streaming through the inner hull and spreading along the corridors to all the hidden corners of the vessel. Within moments, long tongues of flame began to lick out of the gun turrets, and towers of white fire started to shoot from the discharge vents.

A wave of explosions shook the Star Destroyer, and the hull began to come apart. Jaina was shaken by an all-too-familiar wave of anguish and fear, then a rip seemed to open in the Force as the huge vessel began to disintegrate from the inside.

The tractor beams sputtered into nothingness, and a sense of relief permeated the Force as Tahiri and Alema and Zekk finally regained control of their craft. A Chiss fighter appeared in front of Jaina, coming at her head-on and pouring angry streams of blaster bolts more or less in her direction. Jaina returned fire automatically, and she did not notice how her hand was shaking until after the clawcraft exploded.

Jaina reached out for Lowbacca and felt him drifting away, frightened and awed and lonely.

We'll find you! she promised. But he would have to stay open to the meld, he would have to help them find him.

She'll be doing well, Lowbacca thought, just to save herself.

FOURTEEN.

After a week of travel and three off-course jumps, the dark-banded surface of Qoribu's night side was finally swelling in the Shadow's forward viewport, biting an ever-larger crescent from the blue-green sun behind it. The planet was girded by a spectacular ring system, and the dusky shadows of its penumbra were brightened by a litter of twinkling moons, but Luke's gaze kept drifting to the velvet void beyond, to a few bright stars where the Chiss frontier hung stretched like the web of some dark, deadly spider better left undisturbed.

The Chiss prided themselves on never being the aggressor people. By their own law, they never attacked first. Their military doctrine took the edict even farther, decreeing that an enemy must attack them within Ascendancy s.p.a.ce before they responded. So Luke did not understand how the Chiss had ended up in a border conflict when both sides acknowledged that the Colony was still over a light-year from the border.

Perhaps doctrine had changed. After all, the war with the Yuuzhan Vong had changed almost everything else. And Luke knew from his last journey into the Unknown Regions that there were things happening out here that the Galactic Alliance still did not understand. The number of Chiss ruling houses been reduced from nine to four for some unknown reason, and the Empire of the Hand had mysteriously vanished. So it certainly seemed possible the Chiss had changed their doctrine.

Still, Luke doubted that the Chiss would abandon their most basic tenet-the prohibition against attacking first. The law had stood for a thousand years, and Thrawn-the Chiss Grand Admiral who had nearly defeated the New Republic single-handedly-had been exiled from the Ascendancy for violating it.

To Luke, there was only one logical conclusion. The Colony had brought this conflict on itself-or Raynar had.

Just the thought of what Raynar had become filled Luke with guilt and sorrow. The Myrkr mission had cost his nephew Anakin and six other young Jedi their lives, and Raynar had suffered horribly, alone and with no reasonable hope of rescue. Could he be blamed for becoming the ent.i.ty that he was now?

"It was war," Mara said softly from the pilot's seat. She glanced up at the activation reticle in the canopy, then looked at Luke in the section that mirrored over. "You're not responsible for what happened.

Billions of good people were lost."

"I know that," Luke said. The blue star was completely hidden behind Qoribu's dark side now, and the yellow ring system looked as though it encircled a ghost planet. "But Raynar isn't lost. I may be able to bring Raynar back."

"You dream big, Skywalker," Mara said, shaking her head. "But it's not going to happen this time. For better or worse, Raynar is entwined with the Colony. I doubt that they can be separated."

"You're probably right," Luke said. "But something here feels wrong."

"Define wrong," Mara ordered. "Something to do with Raynar?"

"Maybe. It frightens me when Jedi become emperors."

"The galaxy had a bad experience with that," Mara admitted. "But Raynar is hardly another Palpatine. He seems very concerned about his, uh, people."

"For now," Luke said. "But how long before power becomes the end instead of the means?"

"So it's your job to set it right?" Mara asked. "We have enough to worry about in the Galactic Alliance."

"The galaxy is larger than the Galactic Alliance."

"And the Jedi can't be responsible for all of it," Mara retorted.

There was a long silence while they continued the discussion on a deeper, more intimate level, wrapping themselves around the other's viewpoint, trying to understand completely, but also searching for a way to consolidate what seemed to be opposing opinions. Such moments were one of the secret b.u.t.tresses of their marriage. They understood how they fit together, how each had strengths and insights that complemented the weaknesses and blind spots of the other, and they had learned early in their relationship-during a desperate, three-day hike fleeing Imperials in a vornskyr-filled forest-that their future always looked brighter when they relied on each other.

But this time there seemed no way to reconcile their concerns. Jedi resources were already stretched too thin to try separating Raynar from the Colony, even if Luke could convince the rest of the council that it was the right thing to do. Yet he could not escape the feeling that something important had fallen out of balance; that his Jedi Knights were busy plugging vac holes while their ship flew down a black hole.

"Life was a lot simpler when we could just draw a lightsaber and cut the bad guy down to size," Luke said.

Mara smiled. "Simpler-not necessarily easier."

They were close enough to Qoribu now that its moons had begun to resolve into colored shapes, from twinkling yellow specks to creamy fist-sized disks. Luke counted twenty-five different satellites glimmering in the penumbral grayness to either side of the gas giant's murky face, and the navigation display revealed another thirty hidden in the complete darkness of umbra.

Luke reached out in the Force. A diffuse insect presence blanketed six different moons, all currently cl.u.s.tered together near the penumbra's outer edge. Jaina and most of the other Jedi seemed to be on a moon near the center of the group, and-to his great relief-they exhibited only a hint of the Joiner double presence. But Lowbacca was floating a little behind the group, just inside Qoribu's pitch-black umbra, frightened and alone amid a ma.s.s of Chiss presences.

One of the Jedi in the main group stirred beneath Luke's Force-touch, then extended a welcoming embrace.

Luke recognized Jacen's presence, but before he could respond with his own feeling of warmth, his nephew's voice sounded inside his head.

Hurry.

Jacen seemed more concerned than alarmed, and Luke had the clear impression that things were about to get crazy. He raised a hand to point toward the moon with their Jedi, but Mara was already swinging the Shadow's nose toward it. He would have liked to open a hailing channel and raise Jaina on the comm, but there were certain to be Ascendancy listening posts all over the system-and the less the Chiss knew about who was approaching, the better.

"Faster." Saba's voice came over a vessel-to-vessel tight-beam channel that would be difficult for the Chiss to intercept; she was aboard the XR808g serving as Juun's copilot until Tarfang recovered. "It feelz like our Jedi Knightz are preparing a battle rage."

"You heard him, too?" Luke asked. "Jacen?"

"Yes." Saba's breathing began to grow heavy and deliberate. "It felt like they were about to go crazy. They must have found a great evil, or Tesar would never awaken the Hungry One."

"The Hungry One?" Mara echoed. "Take it easy, Saba. I don't think crazy means the same thing to humans as to Barabels."

Saba's breathing slowed. "No?"

"It just means unpredictable," Luke said, amazed at how little he still understood Barabels. "A bit out of control."

"Unpredictable?" Saba's voice returned to normal. "What a relief.

This one does not like to set her mind aside."

Grimacing at the thought of a Barabel robbed of all restraint, Luke brought up a tactical display and found a trio of frigates drifting in unpowered orbit near Lowbacca's presence. They were being tended by a swarm of rescue craft, with a shield of clawcraft fighters hovering between them and the Killik-occupied moons. Floating just above the ring system were several ma.s.sive chunks of flotsam that gave Luke a very bad feeling.

"Artoo, give me a composition a.n.a.lysis on that debris in the middle of the Chiss task force."

R2-D2 tweeted an listless acknowledgment, and a moment later the a.n.a.lysis appeared in an inset on Luke's screen. The flotsam was metallic, irregular, and mostly hollow. Starship pieces.

Luke started to comment that there had been a battle, but stopped when he heard a pair of small feet slapping onto the flight deck behind him.

"Hurry!" Ben cried from the door. "Jacen needs us!"

Luke turned to find his son charging forward in his night tunic, his red hair still pillow-mussed and his eyes bleary with sleep.

Luke opened his arms. "You heard Jacen?"

Nanna clomped onto the deck behind him. "I apologize. He woke and jumped up before I could get to him." She extended her hand, saying to Ben, "Come back to bed. It was only a dream."

Luke motioned her to wait. "It wasn't." He hoisted Ben onto his knee. "We heard Jacen, too."

Ben's mouth dropped open. "You did?"

"Yes," Luke answered. "Through the Force."

This brought a flash of alarm to Ben's eyes.

"It's okay, Ben," Mara said in a soothing voice. "There's nothing to be scared of. You touched the Force all the time, when you were younger."

"During the war, I know." Ben stretched his arms toward Nanna. "I wanna go back to bed."

Luke didn't lift him toward the droid. "You're sure? We're coming up on Qoribu now."