Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy Trilogy 02_ Dark Apprentice - Kevin J. Anderson [46]
On the floor the newly constructed lightsaber lay where Gantoris had dropped it, as if he had tried to fight something—and lost.
Luke leaned against the cool stone wall to catch his balance. His vision blurred, but he could not tear his gaze from his dead student sprawled in front of him.
By now the other eleven trainees had gathered. Luke grasped the worn stone bricks at the edge of the door until even the rounded corners bruised his fingers. He applied a Jedi calming technique three times before he felt confident enough to trust his voice. The words tasted like wet ash in his mouth, as Yoda had told him so long ago.
“Beware the dark side,” he said.
11
After eight seemingly random hyperspace jumps to shake any possible pursuit, Ackbar took his B-wing fighter along the correct vector to the hidden planet Anoth. Terpfen had “borrowed” the fighter for him, claiming to have purged the records of its existence; Ackbar didn’t want to know how his mechanic had gotten through the security systems so easily.
For years isolated Anoth had been a haven for the Jedi children, protected by its perfect obscurity and anonymity. The twins had gone home to Coruscant only a month or two before, but the youngest child—one-year-old baby Anakin—remained under the protection of Leia’s devoted servant Winter, far from prying Imperial eyes or dark-side influences that could corrupt the baby’s fragile Force-sensitive mind.
As space snapped into sharp focus, Ackbar saw the clustered multiple planet of Anoth. The world was composed of three large fragments orbiting a common center of mass. The two largest pieces hovered nearly in contact, sharing a poisonous stormy atmosphere. The third and more distant fragment orbited in a precarious, almost-safe position where Ackbar, Luke, and Winter had set up a hidden stronghold.
Skittering electrostatic discharges danced from the two touching pieces of Anoth, and the ionized fury bathed the habitable chunk in electrical storms that served to mask the planet from prying eyes. The entire system was unstable, and in a blink of cosmic time it would destroy itself, but for the last century or so it had been possible for humanoid life to establish a foothold there.
Ackbar brought his B-wing in on close approach through the deep-purple skies of Anoth. Sparks discharged from the wing of his fighter, but he felt no threat. This was not like flying through the storms of Vortex.
Inside the cramped B-wing, Ackbar wore only a flightsuit over his big frame, not his admiral’s uniform. Later he would leave the “borrowed” fighter in the Calamarian shipyards, where a New Republic pilot could shuttle it back to Coruscant. Ackbar would not be flying a starfighter again, so he had no need of it.
He sent a brief signal to inform Winter of his arrival, but he did not respond to her surprise or her questions. Switching off the fighter’s comm unit, he rehearsed how he would tell her all that had happened. Then he concentrated on guiding the B-wing in for a landing.
Below him the surface of Anoth was a craggy forest of rocky spires, sharp ledges, and clawlike peaks that were riddled with caves left behind when volatile inclusions in the rocks had evaporated over the centuries, leaving only glasslike rock.
Inside the labyrinth of smooth tunnels Winter had made a temporary home with the Jedi babies. Now she had only one child left to care for; and in another year, when Anakin reached the age of two, Winter could return to Coruscant and to active service with the New Republic government.
The small white sun never brought much daylight to Anoth, bathing the world in Gothic purple twilight lit by stark flashes of interplanetary lightning discharges. Ackbar and Luke Skywalker had found this planet, choosing it from among the possibilities as the safest place to hide the Jedi children. And now Ackbar had come one last time before returning to his homeworld of