Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 09_ Edge of Victory 02_ Rebirth - J. Gregory Keyes [36]
He raised his gun. “Place your weapons on the ground,” he said.
“We didn’t do this,” Tahiri exploded. “We were trying to help.”
“Put it down, now, girlie.”
“Girlie?”
“Do as he says, Tahiri,” Anakin said, carefully detaching his weapon and placing it near his feet.
“Why?”
“Do it.”
“It’s good advice, kid,” the officer said.
Radiating anger, Tahiri placed her lightsaber on the duracrete.
“Good. As officers of the judicials, it is now my duty to inform you that we are detaining you for questioning and possible prosecution.”
“What? You’re arresting us?” Tahiri said.
“Until we sort this out, yes.”
“Ask the crowd. They saw what happened.”
“We will; don’t worry. There will be a thorough investigation. Make this easy on yourselves.”
But words are only the shadows of thoughts, and behind the officer’s words, Anakin felt something that suggested that this was going to be anything but easy.
THIRTEEN
By the time Jaina reached the vicinity of the Sernpidal system, her X-wing felt like a suit of clothes she’d been wearing for way too long.
In fact, her clothes felt that way, too, but more so.
Jedi meditation techniques and isometrics made the long hyperspace jumps bearable, but nothing could hide the fact that there was no room on an X-wing for a shower. Or room to stand up, to walk, to run.
That’s not likely going to happen anytime soon, she chided herself. So concentrate!
She was near her goal now. Somewhere down there—or so the tracer told her—was Kyp Durron. Or his X-wing, at least.
Or merely the tracer beacon, if Kyp was more clever than Uncle Luke imagined. Jaina started sweeping with longrange sensors.
Kyp wasn’t at Sernpidal anymore, but a system several very strange jumps away. The star at the bottom of the gravity pit was old, a white dwarf that at this distance was barely brighter than its much more distant, hotter cousins. It was wreathed with a lazy torus of nebulas ejected when the star collapsed into its present pale form. Jaina had appeared in the inner fringe of the gas cloud.
She punched up the stellar survey and found a brief entry more than two hundred years old. The star had a number but not a name. Six planets. The nearest to the sun was a lifeless rock; the next three were sheathed in frozen carbon dioxide and water ice. On the outer planets, the ice got more exotic: methane, ammonia, chlorine in various compounds. The largest planet, a gas giant, had picked up its own nebula from the outbound gases expelled from the parent star.
No known intelligent life in the system, no known life at all. No resources that couldn’t be found more easily elsewhere, and no reason to come back.
But Kyp Durron had come here.
She followed the beacon in, dropping from above the plane of the elliptic. It took her to the fourth planet, a rock half the size of Coruscant that made Hoth seem like a hothouse. She tried not to fidget.
She hadn’t expected to come in unnoticed, and she didn’t. As she was making orbit a pair of X-wings rose up to meet her. One had the beacon in it.
A few moments later, she answered what turned out to be Kyp’s hail.
“Amazing,” he said. “Simply amazing. Jaina Solo, you continue to find ways to surprise me.”
“Hello, Kyp.”
“I’d ask you what could have possibly brought you to this place, but I almost don’t want to know. If the Force guided you, it’s almost too frightening.”
“How so?”
“Because I was just about to come looking for you and Rogue Squadron,” Kyp answered, sounding sardonic.
“Really.”
“Yep. I’ve found something, Jaina—something I can’t handle with my Dozen. Something that could strike a death blow to the New Republic if we don’t deal with it now, while we can.”
“What are you talking about?” Jaina asked.
“I’d rather tell you in person. Follow me in—we don’t have much down there, but it’s better than the cockpit of an X-wing.”
Kyp and his followers had melted tunnels and caves through the water ice and sealed