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“Let me tell Dad, huh?” Jacen said.

“You’ve got it.” With a lighter step, she went to make her own preparations.

TWENTY-FIVE

The reversion to realspace was different in the Yuuzhan Vong ship, somehow. Slower, maybe. Anakin made a mental note to try to discover whether that was merely perceptual or real. If the latter, were the alien ships more vulnerable during reversion? It would be worth knowing.

“Well?” Corran said, studying the changed star chart. “Where are we? Are we surrounded again?”

Beneath the hood, Tahiri turned her head this way and that, as if looking for something.

“Nothing that I see,” she said. “There are plenty of ships in the system—most of them around that planet with three moons—but none of them look like Yuuzhan Vong yorik coral. And none of them seems to be paying attention to us.”

“Interesting,” Corran mused. “Three moons, eh? Is there a space station near that planet?”

“That could be what that is,” Tahiri said.

“From your description, this likely is the Yag’Dhul system. The Givin have pretty good detection equipment. I wonder if this ship somehow dampens the hyperwave shock during reversion? Or if it’s fully cloaked?”

“I’ll ask the ship if you want,” Tahiri said.

“Do that.”

After a brief pause, Tahiri shook her head. “It doesn’t know, or I’m not asking the right question. But it doesn’t detect any probes locked on us.”

“Maybe that’s why the slower reversion,” Anakin speculated.

“You noticed that too, huh?” Corran said. He rubbed his hands together. “Well, at least we didn’t jump straight from a supernova into a neutron star. Though I suspect we don’t have a lot of time here. Tahiri, any sense of what this ship was supposed to do once here?”

This time Tahiri nodded in the affirmative. “Yes. We’re supposed to scent the readiness of the enemy.”

“So it is a scout ship,” Anakin said.

“Which means the main fleet will be expecting intelligence from us,” Corran concluded. “The question is, how long will they wait before deciding something has gone wrong? Tahiri, can you fake a message? Stall them a little?”

Tahiri shook her head. “No. I’d have to use a villip, which means they would see my face.”

Anakin watched Corran ponder that unhappily for a few seconds. “There are always the prisoners,” he told the older Jedi.

“I realize that,” Corran said, “though I doubt we can hope for their cooperation. It’s worth a try, though. Meantime, we have to make contact with Yag’Dhul. Any ideas there?”

“The warmaster had a villip modified to broadcast on our frequencies,” Anakin said.

“True. Can you do that?”

“No,” Anakin confessed.

“Tahiri?”

“The ship doesn’t know how to, and neither do I. We can fire a remote villip at a ship if it gets near enough.”

Corran barked a phrase of laughter. “Which would certainly be interpreted as an attack. That’s a last-ditch option. Anything else?”

“Sure,” Anakin said. “I can modify the emergency beacon in the survival pack and run it through one of our wrist comm units.”

“Do it, then,” Corran told him. “Meanwhile, I’ll interrogate prisoners while Tahiri keeps an eye on surrounding space and an ear up for queries from the fleet. Anakin, be back here in half an hour.”

Corran surveyed the prisoners. The prison was makeshift—there probably was a real one someplace, but Corran hadn’t wanted to waste the time looking for it. Using medical tape from the survival pack, Corran had fastened the living captives to the walls of the corridor leading to the helm, where he could keep an eye on them.

He studied the shapers first. They both had headdresses that looked like squirming masses of snakes. One had a hand that resembled some sort of sea creature, except that the fingers had tool attachments: pincers, a knife, and so on. Tahiri had insisted that the shapers needed to be strip-searched, and Corran had agreed to a hasty one. The search had produced several dubious organisms that had been placed in another chamber some distance away.

The remaining survivors Anakin and Tahiri