My eyes narrowed. "Good, then we're a step ahead of them. With your help, we can find Mirax and take care of this situa-tion before it becomes more dire."

"Agreed, but there is a problem."

"What's that?"

Luke sighed. "I don't have your connection to Mirax. The abruptness with which your link to her was broken makes me wonder if she's in stasis.

I'll have to ask Leia what she felt when Han was sealed in carbonite-I know it hurt her terribly. What you felt, I bet, was a lot of what she felt."

I hugged my arms around myself. The thought of Mirax be-ing frozen in carbonite, or stuffed into a hibernation tube, filled me with dread.

"You're saying that you have no way of finding her."

"No, not right now, not over this distance."

My heart sank. "So she's lost."

"I didn't say that." Luke set his mug down on the table and stared into my eyes. "I think you can find her. I think you are strong enough in the Force to pick her out, even if she is in hibernation. Her thoughts may have been slowed to the point where they barely register, but through the Force you can find them. They will lead you to her."

"But I need to find her now!"

"No," he insisted calmly, "you need to find her. What you need to do now is learn how to find her."

Luke stood, circled behind his chair and leaned heavily on the back of it. 'Tve been thinking a lot on what has happened recently and I know there is no way Leia and I and her chil-dren, as they grow to maturity, can shoulder all the responsibili-ties that we're called upon to deal with now. Down through the thousand generations that the Jedi maintained peace in the galaxy, there were lots of Jedi; hundreds certainly, thousands probably. The Emperor's best efforts to destroy the Jedi were not wholly successful and there are Force-sensitive people still out there. Just like you, Corran, and me and Mara Jade. We need to create more Jedi to share the burden.

"I know I asked you before to join me and train with me. You rcfused for what were good and valuable reasons. Events since then have not let me push to reestablish the order, but now is the time. In a couple of days I plan to ask the senate to let me establish a Jedi academy. Just a basic search through databases has turned up a number of viable candidates. If I can get a dozen I think I will have enough to start. I'd like you to be one of them."

"How can I think of training to be a Jedi when my wife is gone?"

Wedge frowned at me. "Think for a second, Corran. If her abduction was meant to send you a message-a message only a Jedi could understand-then whoever has her is tough enough that they think they can take on a Jedi and survive. if you don't train to be a Jedi, what do you think are the chances of your being able to rescue her?"

Luke nodded. "Wedge is right. And, if you got the message because of your sensitivity to the Force and the kidnappers know nothing about it, Jedi training will make you that much more able to deal with them and save her."

Their logic was una.s.sailable, but I still felt uneasy about com-mitting myself to a course of training while Mirax languished in stasis. "I don't know."

The Jedi Master slowly smiled. "I would have expected no other honest answer. Two things for you to consider, Corran. The first is this: when Vader tortured my friends, it was to lure me to him and to disrupt my training. I made the most serious mistake of my career leaving my master at that point. It cost me my hand, nearly cost me my life and, as events went from there, could have seriously hurt the Rebellion. You have a chance, being faced with a similar challenge, to avoid the mistake I made. I hope you will take it."

I could feel the sincerity rolling off him. "What's the other thing?"

"The Corellian Jedi tradition is a strong one. In the annals of the Jedi, many Corellian Jedi are noted for their devotion to service. They tended not to range far from Coreilia-that sys-tem had more than enough for them to do-but their wisdom and courage made quite an impact. You are heir to that tradi-tion and I think weaving it back into the new Jedi traditions will be very important. What you do in joining the academy will not only let you rescue Mirax, but will help others come to their full potential in the Force."

"I hear what you are saying, Master Skywalker, but there are other problems." I shrugged. "I'm not you or Han Solo, but I'm not unknown in the New Republic. If Mirax's kidnappers hear I'm at your academy and being trained as a Jedi, her life would be forfeit."

Wedge pointed at me. "If nothing else, his status as a hero of the Rebellion would probably distract other students."

"Very true, but that's not too difficult a problem to handle." Luke smiled easily. "Dye your hair, grow a beard, you'll look different. In your time with CorSec you performed undercover operations."

"Sure, but I wasn't known as Corran Horn during those as-signments, either."

"No, you changed your name." Luke nodded solemnly. "In researching the Corellian Jedi I saw a name-probably an an-cestor of yours. You may even have been named for him. He was Keiran Halcyon. You can use his name. It is close enough to your own for you to respond to it, yet far enough away to give you the cover you need."

Keiran Halcyon. The name rolled around in my brain and seemed to soothe the last lingering bits of pain from Luke's probe. "That might work. I have to think about it."

Luke reached out and patted me on the shoulder. "It is a big decision. Go home. Definitely think about it. Think about re-claiming the heritage the Empire tried to deny to you. This is yet another chance for you to defeat that evil and prepare your-self to battle new evils. If you truly want the galaxy to be safe for the children you and Mirax will have, learning to become a Jedi is the best possible course you can take."

Wedge ran me home and of-fered to stay and talk things over with me, but I let him go. "I appreciate the offer, Wedge, but you've got more important things to do than to listen to me argue this from all sides."

Wedge pressed his lips together in a grim grin. "Nothing I have to do is more important than my friends. Mirax is as close as I've ever come to having a little sister, and I definitely think of her as family. You're a good friend. As much as it bothers you to be able to do nothing at the moment, at least you have some options. I'm even more blind here than you are; but I'll be ready to help no matter what decision you make."

I shook his outstretched hand. "Thanks. Believe me, you'll be hearing from me."

"I'm counting on it."

I held a hand up. "One thing, please. Don't say anything to Booster."

Wedge frowned. "But he's her father. He should be told."

"Yeah, but if Cracken was afraid I'd be a neff in an antiqui-ties bazaar, just imagine what Booster will do." I shook my head. "The Errant Venture might not be in the greatest shape, but having an Imperial Star Destroyer show up and threaten a world probably won't be the best way to get Mirax back."

"You have a point there." Wedge smiled. "I won't lie to him, but I won't go out of my way to say anything to him until or unless I have some good news."

"Thanks. See you later, Wedge." I walked down the steps from the complex's common landing area and over to the apartment. The door slid open when I punched in the code. I was two steps inside before I noticed there were more lights on than when I'd left. Without a blaster or my grandfather's light-saber, I was defenseless against whoever had broken in. I was about to turn and head back out again, when a familiar hooting sounded from the living room. "Yes, Whistler, it's me."

The little green R2 unit rolled over, swiveled his head so his visual monitors could take in the hallway, then turned around and disappeared again. I walked down to the living area and found a variety of bags and containers of food piled on the holopad's table. The droid's pincer arm extended from its cylin-drical body and elevated a can of neff and gumes to the top of a shaky stack.

"Whistler, despite what Mirax told you months ago about my dietary habits when she's gone, I really can feed myself." I dropped to my knees on the floor beside him and caught the can he dropped in my lap. "Yes, I'm certain this would be good, but I'm just not hungry right now."

A whistle started low and spiked high.

"Why?" I snorted. "I don't know how much of this you can understand, Whistler." I ignored his derisive reply and pushed on, organizing my thoughts as I went. "Since you're here, I know you pulled the Skate's port logs and saw Mirax was gone. Fact is, she's really gone. Someone has taken her and Jedi Mas-ter Skywalker thinks she's being held in stasis somewhere. Why, none of us have any clue."

Whistler's mournful tone raised a lump in my throat. He tweetled and hooted a bunch of things after that, but I couldn't figure out what he meant. I reached out and patted him gently on the dome. His pincer gently tugged on the sleeve of my jacket.

"I've just come from talking with Wedge and with Luke Skywalker. They both think my learning to train as a Jedi is the key to finding Mirax, but I think that will take too long. Part of me knows they are right, but another part doesn't think Mirax can afford the time. I keep trying to think about what I should do, or what my father would do, but I have so many qu, ,tions that need answering that I'm lost."

Whistler toddled forward and toppled one of the stack of cans he had created. His dataprobe came out and sank itself into the dataport on the holopad. In an instant the image of my father, standing slightly taller than Mirax had, appeared frozen on the holopad. Whistler hooted insistently at me, but I couldn't understand him.

"Slow down, slow down. What are you getting at?"

My father's image faded, replaced by the glowing words, "All you have to do is ask."

I was about to ask for a further explanation of that line, but the words struck a resonance inside me and I recognized them fairly quickly. Back before we had liberated Thyferra, before Thrawn and freeing the Lusankya prisoners, Whistler had in-formed me that my father had encrypted and loaded into him a holograph talking about my heritage. Whistler had said the message was recorded back before I joined CorSec. He'd been instructed to play it for me whenever I asked and could provide the encryption key.

I resisted listening to the message back then because I feared it would make me make choices that I didn't want to make. If my father had urged me to become a Jedi, to seek out a Master and to train, I knew I would have. At the time that would have meant leaving the squadron and leaving Mirax and abandoning the former Lusankya prisoners. I couldn't do that, so I set aside the idea of hearing what my father had to say.

After that, with Thrawn and everything else, I never got the chance to explore what my father had left for me. Mirax told me the message itself was not the last gift my father had given me. The last gift was the trust he showed in allowing me to choose when and if I listened to his message.

I cherished that gift and while I knew I should listen to the message, by putting off the decision I made that final gift last longer.

Even as that thought bubbled into my brain, I realized that listening to the message would not destroy my father's gift. His trust had been implicit in every aspect of our lives. My father had died in my arms and I had been powerless to prevent his death. Because of this I had allowed myself to imagine that in his last seconds of life he wondered where I was. He wondered why I had not been there to help him. I had to hope, for the sake of my sanity, that he knew I would have given my own life to save his. Somehow I did think that; I even knew it.

I smiled. "He recorded that message long before he died. It was never meant to be a legacy, but a failsafe. If something happened to him, I would not be left without information he thought I needed to know. And I need to remember that he never would have put me into a position to make a choice against my own best interests. I trust him in that, but by not listening to the message I've failed to act on that trust."

I nodded to Whistler. "Please, play the message for me.

Decryption code is Nejaa Halcyon."

My father's image reappeared and my throat tightened. He'd always been taller than me and, with me kneeling on the floor, I once again had to look up at him. His black hair had been closely cropped, his hazel eyes had golden highlights that spar-kled. He wore that easy smile I'd see so often. I'd probably been sixteen years old when he recorded the message-he still had his powerful build and only a hint of the thickening he would fight until the end of his life.

His voice came through clear and strong. "I am making this recording for you, Corran, because there are things you should know. Being in CorSec can be dangerous and I don't want any-thing to happen to me that would prevent you from learning about our family. I hope and trust right now that we're sitting together watching this, laughing at how young I looked when I recorded it. If not, I want you to know I love you and have always been very proud of you."

Whistler stopped the message as I closed my eyes against tears. The shock of Mirax's disappearance might have numbed me from feeling anything about her, but the pain of my father's death came roaring back to fill the void inside of me. I realized I was kneeling now the way I'd knelt in the cantina where he died, cradling his head in my lap. It was almost as if I could feel his blood soaking into my clothes again. The frustration I felt over Mirax compounded itself with the frustration I'd felt with my father's death and I almost walked away.

But neither of them would.

I sniffed and wiped my nose on my sleeve, then opened my eves and nodded to Whistler. "Thanks, my friend."

The message continued with my father smiling broadly. "This will sound like a wild tale, but it is all true. Your grandfather, Rostek Horn, is really your step-grandfather. As you know he partnered with a Jedi before the Clone Wars, and that Jedi died serving away from CoreIlia, right after the Clone Wars. That Jedi. Nejaa Halcyon, was my father. He served as my Master before he went away. I was all of ten years old when he died, and Rostek Horn saw to it that my mother and I wanted for nothing.

My mother and Rostek fell in love and married, and Rostek adopted me.

More importantly, when the Empire began to hunt down Jedi and their families, he managed to destroy records and fabricate new ones that insulated us from the Em-pire's wrath.

"I know this is quite a secret to keep from you, but the de-ception was necessary. I know you, Corran, and know you would have been very proud of your heritage. You would have told others of it, sharing it with them, and that would have been your destruction. Lord Vader and the others hunting Jedi have been relentless. I have seen the results of their handiwork. Keeping you ignorant is keeping you safe. It's a terrible bargain to make, but the only one that can be made."

My father's face screwed up in that expression he wore when things were not going exactly the way he wanted. "The Halcyon family is well known among the Corellian Jedi. We were well respected and many were the tributes to Nejaa Halcyon upon his death. You can find no record of them now, of course. What the Empire did not destroy, Rostek did destroy or hid away-he won't even tell me where the records are, but I cannot believe he would have allowed all traces of his friend to perish. The Halcyons were strong in the Force but not flashy or given to public displays of power. A word here, an act there, allowing people to choose between good or evil at their own speed and peril was more our way.

"And so, here, with this message, I give you a choice. I will be proud of you and love you no matter what you choose. The fact that you say you want to join CorSec has filled me and your grandfather with more pride than you can imagine. There is no greater honor you could show us than to follow in our foot-steps. I do want you to know, though, that my choice bridges two paths. While Rostek and my father worked together, Cor-Sec and Jedi, I have used what I learned from my father to work within CorSec. In this way I serve both the Halcyon and Horn traditions."

My father's image opened his hands. "If you have the chance, if you feel the need, I hope you will also make yourself open to both traditions. It is not that being a Jedi is better than serving in CorSec-not at all. But there are so few who are able to become Jedi that to turn away from that path is a tragedy. I have been forced away from it. It is my hope that you will not also be barred from it and, if possible, that I will be able to instruct you the way my father instructed me."

My father smiled and pride burned in his eyes. "There you have it, my son. Now you know more of who you are and what you have the potential to become. The only limits on you are the limits you will place on yourself.

I know that whatever you will decide, it will be the right thing. You're that good, Corran, and that special. I will know great joy if you bring the Halcyons back into the Jedi Order, but even that will be nothing compared to the joy I know in having you as my son and knowing you are happy and well."

The message stopped and Whistler offered to play it again, but I shook my head. "He wants me to train. He knows it is the right thing for me to do." I thought for a moment. "And I guess I know it, too. I always saw my service in CorSec as the utmost I could do to prevent the innocent from coming to harm from evil. That's what it was then, just as flying with Rogue Squadron became later. Now, the utmost I can do is to become a Jedi, like Luke Skywalker and my father's father. To do anything less is to be unworthy of the trust they all place in me."

I slowly stood. "To do anything less means I fail in my re-sponsibilities to Mirax. I'm not going to let that happen."

I walked down the hallway and into my bedroom. I slid back a false panel in my nightstand and withdrew the slender silver cylinder that had been Nejaa Halcyon's lightsaber. My right thumb punched the black b.u.t.ton on it, allowing the silver-white blade to hiss to life. It hummed as I turned toward Whistler and wove the blade through the air.

"Luke Skywalker is looking for students, and I need a teacher." I smiled as Whistler trumpeted triumphantly. "Keiran Halcyon is born."

Seve emerged from the apart-ment's refresher, finished toweling off my hair as I walked toward the living room, and smiled at Iella as she came into view. "There, what do you think?"

She narrowed her brown eyes at me, then nodded. "Not a hint of green."

"Good." I hung the white towel around my neck, holding on to each end of it. "It's going to take a while to get used to seeing my reflection with my hair this close to white."

She tucked a lock of golden-brown hair behind her left ear. "It makes you look older. The moustache and goatee change the outline of your chin just enough that I almost didn't recog-nize you when you called earlier."

"You don't think the green had anything to do with that?" I snorted. "I didn't think dyeing my hair would be that compli-cated."

"Corran, you're supposed to read the instructions on the box."

"I did."

"And then you're supposed to follow them." She gave me a look of mock disgust. "Once you've ingested the metabolizing agent, you have to be very specific about how long you leave the color targeting gel on. If you get the timing wrong, you have problems."

I plucked at the hair on my chest. "Yeah, but I was trying to do my whole body here. Slathering that stuff on takes time."

"Which is why you take it in stages, not try to do it all at once." She began to laugh and I blushed. "You went from em-erald to pale green at your toes. Your beard did match your eyes, though."

"But it would have been unending trouble to accessorize." I gave her a snooty glare, then smiled. "At least I won't need to repeat this ordeal for a year or so."

"True, that's usually how long it takes for the metabolizer to leave the follicles, but be careful. Weird foods can affect the chemistry there."

She stretched. "Speaking of which, where are you going to take me for this lunch you promised?"

I shrugged. "You pick. Fact is that I've not been thinking much about food over the past couple of weeks."

Iella frowned at me. "You know, I'm still a bit angry with you. I thought we were friends, but your wife goes missing and vou don't call me or tell me about it?"

I closed my eyes and nodded. "I know I should have."

"You're d.a.m.ned right you should have." Her voice softened and I felt her hand caress my bare arm. "You were there for me when I lost Diric. I don't think I could have gotten through it without you. I owe you a lot and even if I didn't, I'd want to help with this sort of thing."

I opened my eyes and gave her a brave smile, but swiped at a tear with my towel. "I wanted to talk to you, but you're working for New Republic Intelligence and I didn't want to place you in a position where you'd feel a conflict between your job and our friendship. No, wait. I know you and respect you and your pro-fessionalism. I know you would have and will do what is right and in the best interest for everyone. I also know that isn't exactly what I want. I didn't want you thinking you'd failed me because you couldn't say anything."

Iella nodded, then gave me that indulgent grin I remembered from our years partnering in CorSec. "Your squadron briefings about the Invids probably have told you just about everything I know of fact about the Invids."

I arched a newly blond eyebrow. "But there are rumors?"

"Vague, insubstantial rumors." She pursed her lips for a mo-ment. "On some of the early raids, when Leonia Tavira deigned to travel dirtdown and tour the ruins her people left behind, survivors have reported seeing armored figures accompanying her. Never more than one, and everyone has described them as having a Vaderish air about them; but both male and female figures have been described. With Riizolo's report to add into the mix, we think we have at least four distinct individuals."

I scratched at the back of my neck. "When you say 'Vader-ish,' are we just talking masks, cloaks and heavy breathing, or are they doing the virtual-garrote thing or other Force power displays?"

"Nothing more solid than image, though Riizolo insists they were special.

I don't know to trust his reports, though. I think he's telling us a lot of what we want to hear so we'll find him a hole to hide in." leila shrugged. "From everything we know about Tavira, it would be just like her to cultivate a Vader im-age for her henchmen, making her appear to them as the Em-peror was to Vader. All reports seem to agree that she may be smart, but she's also decidedly vain."

I nodded. "Interesting information. Thanks. So, where do you want to eat?"

She slapped a hand playfully against my belly. "We should find a place to fatten you up. You've lost weight."

'Tve been in training. It's been almost two weeks since I decided to join the Jedi academy and took my leave from the squadron." I tossed my towel on a chair, not really caring that the cleaning droid would notify Whistler and he'd scold me for it. "You remember how the Corellian Security Force academy training went, and I got through that when I was a kid. Physical training at dawn, long runs, cla.s.ses, more runs, exercises, stand-ing watch. We're going to have all that and more in the Jedi academy."

Iella smiled. "You will be the elite of the elite. Think you're up to it?"