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“Do you really think that Jacen—that Caedus set all this up?” he asked. “The Jedi going crazy, the stuff they know—do you really think he planned all this?”

Luke sat back up and began laying in a course for the Kathol Rift. “It’s a possibility, and it would explain a lot.”

“Wouldn’t explain how he was able to actually do it.”

“With any luck, we’ll find the Aing-Tii in a congenial frame of mind, and they’ll choose to enlighten us.”

Ben couldn’t help what escaped his lips next. “Do you think we’ll have to flow-walk in order to find out?”

“I hope not, Ben. I truly hope not.”

ABOARD THE JADE SHADOW

“YOU KNOW,” BEN GRUMBLED, “WHEN I SAID I WANTED TO COME WITH you, I didn’t realize that I was signing up for the Mobile Chapter of the academy.”

Luke, his eyes on the holographic star chart that looked like someone had spilled watered-down blue milk all over it, chuckled softly.

“Studying is good for you,” he said. “Builds character.” He adopted an old man’s creaky voice. “Why, when I was your age, my young apprentice, all I wanted to do was go to the academy. Uphill, both ways, in a sandstorm.”

“Yeah, Uncle Han told me about that,” Ben retorted, his own mouth twitching as he suppressed a grin. “You didn’t want to get a good education. You wanted to go hang out with your friends.”

It was a bittersweet joke; Luke indeed had ended up flying with his best friend Biggs Darklighter, but under completely different circumstances. It had not been a joyride or race or friendly competition; it was an assault on the Death Star, and it had cost the lives of everyone in the Red Squadron except Wedge Antilles and Luke Skywalker.

But Luke smiled fondly at the comment. The memories he held of Biggs were all good ones. Biggs had not been the first to die for a cause he devoutly believed in, and he wouldn’t be the last. But he’d died making a difference, and that was the way Luke knew his friend had wanted it.

So it was easy for Luke to shoot back to his son, “Too bad you don’t have any close friends that aren’t your family. Maybe you’ll become friends with an Aing-Tii kid.”

Ben grimaced. “I’m … not too sure about that.”

A few hours before, Cilghal had transmitted everything she had been able to learn so far about the Kathol Rift and the Aing-Tii. It wasn’t a lot, but the two Skywalkers had divvied up the research between them. Luke had given Ben the information on the Aing-Tii, while he had studied the complex and extremely dangerous spatial phenomenon that was the Rift. Ben was certainly a capable pilot, though one could always be better and Luke had often given his son the helm during the journey in order for Ben to have more flying hours under his belt. But the Rift was something else again, and Luke felt more comfortable managing it himself.

It was difficult to navigate for a whole host of reasons. To begin with, it was huge—a cloud of wildly unstable gases, the birthplace of thousands of stars, that was several parsecs wide. Several parsecs was about as precise as one could be, considering that the cloud was constantly shifting. At first glance, this place of powerful electromagnetic lightstorms and sensor-distorting radiation seemed impossible to traverse. But the Aing-Tii, who were thought to live on one of the thousands of planets believed to lie inside the Rift, seemed to navigate it just fine. Uncannily fine, as a matter of fact. They seemed completely able to avoid the lightstorms that were quite capable of destroying entire fleets of ships in a matter of minutes, and by all accounts their vessels appeared untouched by particle buildup that could render sensors pretty much useless and weapons systems utterly nonfunctional.

They could do this because there were currents in the Rift—the literature referred to them as “corridors”—that twined throughout the stunningly beautiful, colorful, and incredibly dangerous gas cloud.

The trick was that the corridors changed position. Frequently. One report stated that they changed as often as dozens of times in a twenty-four-hour day. The logical conclusion was