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They were communicating.

Ben’s initial flush of anger began to fade and he started to think.

He reached out through the Force, looking for his enemies. He found them, six in all, circling. He sensed that they were waiting for a moment’s inattentiveness on his part, waiting for the lightsaber to go out. They understood that it could only bite them when they were close to him.

He offered them the Jacen Solo you’ve-underestimated-me grin. Left-handed, he drew Faskus’s blaster. Aiming through the Force, he fired.

There was a howl of pain out in the darkness, and he could both hear and detect through the Force the wounded nek bounding away.

He chose another target, not bothering even to look in that direction, and fired a second time. The result was the same: one animal wounded and fleeing.

The rest turned and faded away into the surrounding forest. Comparative silence fell on the camp; the only thing to be heard was the buzz of Ben’s lightsaber. Now the cold began to eat into him again, and he shivered.

“Are they gone?” Kiara asked.

Ben holstered the blaster, drew his glow rod from his pouch, and switched it on and the lightsaber off at the same moment. “Yeah. But we’re going to spend the rest of the night up in the tree, to be sure.” He looked at Shaker. The droid had withdrawn its arm stump and shut the cover plate over it; the rest of the arc-welder arm lay on the snow. “Sorry about that, little guy,” Ben said. “You did good.”

Shaker gave him a pleased-sounding trill.

Minutes later, once he and Kiara were nestled together up in the tree—high enough, he hoped, that these neks could not reach them—Ben had time to think again.

He wouldn’t have been so oblivious to the neks’ arrival, but he had been deep in sleep. He was getting more tired every day, and not sleeping as lightly as he used to, as lightly as a Jedi or an Alliance Guard needed to.

And he’d been dreaming.

In the dream, the voices that pressed close all around had finally learned his name. “Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben,” they had chanted, and it was so much harder to ignore his own name.

He couldn’t, in fact, and once they knew he was listening to them, they learned to say other things. “Protect girl,” they whispered. “Protect girl.”

That seemed so strange, that in this place famous among the Jedi for evil deeds, the ghostly voices would offer such a positive message. Was it because they cared?

Or because they knew he would listen to a message like that?

On that thought, he fell asleep again, and the voices returned.

“Ben…Ben…”

CORUSCANT SYSTEM ERRANT VENTURE

This time there was a kind of electricity to the conversation, as if everyone involved knew they were steps closer to their goal. The interesting thing, Wedge noted, was that there were so many goals, but everyone was making progress.

“So Lando and I have been cashing in old favors,” Han was saying. “Sometimes very old. And it turns out Captain Lavint is right. There’s a major Confederation gathering being put together. And it’s not just to elect their warlord. News trickling out of that whole mess suggests they’re assembling a fleet at the election spot, and from there the new warlord will lead some sort of fleet action. But no one knows where or against what.”

“Shipyards.” Wedge and Jag said the word at the same time, and looked at each other.

“Kuat, Coruscant,” Wedge began.

“Sluis Van, Thyferra, any number of places. But shipyards,” Jag said.

Zekk frowned. “How do you know?”

Wedge had noticed that Zekk frowned just about every time Jag spoke, and Jag frowned just about every time Zekk spoke. “The pattern of the last several days’ worth of Confederation attacks and raids,” Wedge said. “Mostly against orbital shipbuilding facilities. Their clear strategy is to diminish the Alliance’s production and repair of warships. That way, despite the fact that the Confederation has fewer worlds than the Alliance by orders of magnitude, they’ll come closer to parity in shipbuilding resources.”

“Which sounds,” Jag interrupted, “as though they have a pretty