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This time Artoo did not bother to reply but continued to work.

A moment later Threepio heard the outer doors open, and a shadowy figure moved toward them with silent grace. As always, Luke Skywalker wore his Jedi cloak, but this time the hood was draped casually over his shoulders. Luke walked with an eagerness in his step.

Threepio was glad to see a resurgence of the excited boyishness that had so characterized young Luke when the droids first met him after they had been purchased from the Jawas on Tatooine. Of late Luke’s eyes had not been able to hide the haunted look and the barely contained power of a Jedi Master.

“Master Luke! How good of you to check on us!”

“How’s it going, Threepio? Found anything yet?”

Artoo beeped an answer, which Threepio translated. “Artoo says he’s going as fast as he can, but he wishes me to remind you of the enormous amount of data he must inspect.”

“Well, I’ll be leaving in a few hours to follow up on some earlier leads I uncovered by myself. I just wanted to make sure you two have everything you need before I take off.”

Threepio straightened in a gesture of surprise. “Might I ask where you are going, Master Luke?”

Artoo chittered and Luke turned to him. “Not this time, Artoo. It’s more important that you stay here and continue the search. I can fly by myself.”

Luke turned to answer Threepio’s question. “I’m going to Bespin to check on somebody there, but first I want to go to an old outpost called Eol Sha. I’ve got reason to believe that at least one lost Jedi descendant might be there.” With a swish of his cloak, Luke turned to depart from the Information Center. “I’ll check back with you when I come home.” The door slid shut behind him.

Threepio spoke immediately to Artoo. “Punch up the data on Eol Sha—let’s see where Master Luke is going.”

Artoo obliged, as if the idea had been in his own circuits. When the planetary statistics came up on the screen accompanied by ancient two-dimensional images, Threepio raised his golden mechanical arms in horror. “Earthquakes! Geysers! Volcanoes and lava! Oh my!”

When Luke emerged from hyperspace, the starlines in the viewport funneled into points. Suddenly brilliant pastel colors splashed across the universe—magentas, oranges, and icicle-blues of ionized gas in a vast galactic ocean known as the Cauldron Nebula. The automatic dimmers in the pilot’s compartment muted the glare. Luke looked at the spectacle and smiled.

Leaving the hyperspace node, he punched in the coordinates for Eol Sha. His modified passenger shuttle arced through the wispy gas, leaving the nebula above him as the engines kicked in. The double wedge-shaped craft descended toward Eol Sha.

He had wanted to take his trusty old X-wing, but that ship was a single-person craft, with room for only an astromech droid in the back. If Luke’s hunches about Jedi descendants proved correct, he would be bringing two candidates back to Coruscant with him.…

According to outdated records, the settlement on Eol Sha was established a century before by entrepreneurs who intended to use ramjet mining ships to plow through the Cauldron Nebula and scoop up valuable gases. The mineship pilots would distill the gaseous harvest into pure, rare elements for sale to other outposts.

Eol Sha was the only habitable world close enough to support the commercial venture, but its days were numbered. A tandem moon orbited very close to the planet, spiraling in on a death plunge as gravity dragged it down. Within another hundred years the moon would crash into the planet, smashing both into rubble.

The nebula mining scheme had never paid off. The incompetent entrepreneurs had not counted on the true costs of ramjet ships and the unremarkable composition of the Cauldron’s gases. The outpost on Eol Sha had been left to fend for itself. At about that time the Emperor’s New Order had begun, and the Old Republic had crumbled to pieces. The few survivors on Eol Sha had been forgotten in the chaos.

The outpost had been rediscovered