• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Within a few minutes' walk, they reached the first bank of machinery on the right-hand sloping wall of the cavern. First in their path was a cabinet-like structure the size of a warehouse. Its panels, mostly black, gleamed with what looked like thousands of small rectangular lights.

Leia put her hands on her hips and stared up at the thing. “Where to start?”

“Something's powering it. If it doesn't have some sort of internal reactor, there's probably a series of cables entering it somewhere. And unless it's doing whatever it does in isolation, it's receiving or sending data—by cable, by broadcast, somehow.”

At nearly ground level, a bogey emerged from the face of the machine. It hovered there, a few meters from Han and Leia, and emitted a faint chittering noise, like a whole colony of curious insects.

“Or maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about,” Han said.

CITY OF DOR'SHAN, DORIN

Fresh from the Jade Shadow's sanisteam and dressed in a clean robe, Ben joined his father in the main cabin. Dinner consisted of prepackaged meals heated in the yacht's tiny pulse oven, but Ben was all right with that; the nerf loaf, tuber mash, and seasoned greens in the individual compartments of the tray reminded him of food from home—bad food from home.

“So,” his father said. “What did you learn today?”

“A little bit about the difference between the way skinny limbs with dense, leather muscles move compared with human arms and legs. That's about it. Oh, and you know that thing where the sages decide that it's time to die, and they just will themselves to do it?”

Luke nodded.

“One of the Baran Do Masters has decided to do that. Charsae Saal, the senior combat instructor. He worked with Tistura Paan and me today.”

“Did you talk to him about it?”

Ben nodded. “I didn't, you know, just blurt it out, Why have you decided to die? or anything like that. But Tistura Paan had some questions about his ceremony tomorrow. She was pretty sad. She was his special student. He gave her a datacard with his memoirs and instruction manuals on it. He'd just finished it.”

“What did you ask him?”

“Well, I said that from the human perspective, it was always sad when a good person died, when he took his knowledge with him. He said he was leaving his knowledge behind. I asked if he had family, and he said he would be seeing them again someday, by which I took it he meant they were already dead.”

“He plans to die tomorrow.”

Ben nodded.

Luke frowned.

“What?”

“Turn of phrase.” But Luke said no more on the subject.

“What did you learn today, Dad?”

“I learned to make a ball float at a constant altitude, but not to make it be still.”

“You had an exciting day.”

“I also learned that there's something about Jacen's visit here, or about the former Master of the sages, that Tila Mong doesn't want me to know. That was probably the hidden thought I kept feeling last night.”

“Once you've figured out the scanner-blanking technique and you've pried all of Tila Mong's secrets out, where are we going next?”

Luke shrugged. “We'll have to take that as we come to it.”

UNEXPLORED DEPTHS, KESSEL

HAN WATCHED LEIA AS, UNAFRAID, SHE APPROACHED THE BOGEY. UNLIKE the previous one, this creature did not retreat at her approach, but hung in the air as if watching her.

She came within a meter of it and still it did not move, though its chittering grew louder and the lights within it swirled even faster.

“Leia, be careful …” Torn between a need to know what was happening with his wife and an equally strong need to know they were not being crept up on, Han kept switching his attention from the tableau with the bogey to the surrounding machinery and field of fungi.

“I don't sense any hostile intent. Or, for that matter, any life.” Leia raised a hand as if to touch the bogey.

Her hand penetrated its outer boundaries. Colorful lights swirled around her fingers as if they were the center of some new maelstrom. Leia's hair rose, standing on end, and a crackling noise joined the chittering Han heard. “Leia, keep talking.