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“Nothing good. Abeloth has absorbed Master Nenn.”

“Which would be very bad.”

“Through Nenn’s guise, she can probably seize control of the Listeners. Who can spread word that we three are enemies of the Oldtimers. The Oldtimers still outnumber the Newcomers and the Latecomers by orders of magnitude. And I’m not sure the tsils can persuade the Listeners to reject Nenn’s words. Their voices are very soft and difficult to interpret; Nenn’s will be forceful and clear. I hope you have better news.”

“Some. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Luke bent over the crude diagram Ben had sketched out on a piece of salvaged flimsi. It rested on the starboard wing strut, motionless in the windless air.

Ben pointed out each feature in turn. “What we do is disassemble the solar wing arrays, the port side in three coherent sections, the starboard side for parts. We assemble them into a sail, the post mounted between the two main pods, cables attached to the trailing edges of the solar panels.”

Luke nodded. “So what we have is a wind rudder.”

“Co-rect. We’ll pull the cables from our respective pod interiors—we’ll rig pulleys, if we can figure out how, for efficiency. The repulsors work just fine. The port ion engine won’t come up again, but the wiring on the starboard fared a little better. We can get maybe twenty percent output through it—but no variability. It’s either all the way on or completely off.”

Luke sighed. “We built junk racers more sophisticated than this out of spare parts when I was ten.”

“Back in the old days. Back during the Empire. Back when starships were made of wood. Back when there were no holodramas, just puppet shows. Back when a hypercomm system was a long string stretched between two planets with a durasteel caf cup at either end …”

Luke snorted. “You’re not helping. All right.” He looked up in the direction of the rock ivory plant, hidden beyond an intervening hill ridge. “First things first. I’m going to go back to scuff out our footprints, if there are any, and pump out some water for our trip. We’re not going to sleep in the plant. It’s the one place they know to look for us, and as soon as Abeloth and Ship recover from being so close to the tsil when it perished, they’ll be out looking for us … starting here.”

Ben shrugged. “Then they’ll find us. If they can see the plant, they can see the shuttle. Blasted yellow paint job. We can’t fly her out of here even at ground level.”

“We have no thrust, but that doesn’t mean we can’t move her. We’re going to fire up the repulsors and push this baby as far away as we can reasonably move her.” Luke pointed down the ravine they’d ascended to reach the vicinity of the plant. “I’ll take one wing, you take the other, Vestara will shout directions, and we’ll let gravity do as much of the work as possible. We should be able to get a kilometer or two farther away, and maybe find something to shelter us from overhead scans. Then, there, we effect repairs.”

“Oh.” Ben slapped the side of his own head, a gesture of self-rebuke. “Duh. All right, you still get to do some of the thinking for us.”

Minutes later, returning with canteens filled with water, Luke paused on the ridge overlooking the shuttle on one side and the small tsil chimney on the other.

Something was different. He studied the vicinity of the tsils for a moment and knew what it was.

The spook-crystal that had lain a meter from the crystal chimney’s base was gone.

He looked around. There were no footprints or other tracks, excepting his own and the two teenagers’, to be seen. But an Oldtimer scout familiar with this area could have crept up this close to Ben and Vestara without being detected, especially when they could not productively open themselves to the Force without risking a Force storm. Still, why would an intruder take a spook-crystal?

Troubled, he joined Ben and Vestara. “Ready to move out?”

“Sure, Dad.”

“Vestara, fire up the repulsors.”

JEDI TEMPLE, CORUSCANT

IN THE MASTERS’ CHAMBER, SABA, CORRAN, CILGHAL,