Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [35]
Word had it that similar conditions prevailed throughout the Middle Distance, which was the name given to the equatorial region where the Ferroans had settled more than seventy-five years earlier, when Zonama Sekot had resided on the other side of the galactic plane, in the Outer Rim of known space.
“Corran is coming,” Luke announced in a matter-of-fact tone.
Mara slipped out of his embrace and leaned out the entrance to gaze around, one hand clasping her long hair. “Where?” she said, just loudly enough to be heard. “I don’t see—”
She interrupted herself when she saw his head poke above the rungs of a wooden ladder that rose from a lower tier. Soaked to the bone, Corran held his jacket closed at the neck. Water dripped from his furrowed face and the graying beard and mustache that framed his mouth. His limp hair was pulled into a short tail at the back. He smiled when he noticed Mara, and hurried for the cliff dwelling, using his free hand to sluice some of the water from his forehead.
“Jacen and Saba’s airship has been spotted downvalley!” he shouted into the wind. “They should arrive any minute.”
Luke stepped out into the rain and wind to glance at the landing platform that jutted out over the canyon. “They might need some help. We’d better be on hand to meet them.” He looked back at R2, who was whining in apprehension.
“Stay here, Artoo. We’ll be right back.”
The three Jedi hurried for the ladder. Whereas Luke and Mara had been on Zonama Sekot for almost three months, Corran had arrived only three weeks earlier, in the company of Tahiri Veila and three Yuuzhan Vong agents. Two of the Yuuzhan Vong were now dead, and the third was believed to have escaped from the living world short of the act of sabotage that had hurled it through hyperspace.
First to reach the edge of the wind-tossed walkway that accessed the landing platform, Mara came to a sudden halt. “Is this thing safe?”
Luke regarded it for a moment. “It’ll hold!”
Corran frowned. “Could you be a bit more specific?”
Luke squeezed past him, out onto the swinging walkway, where he jumped in place, twice. “See?”
Mara threw Corran a look. “You can take the kid from Tatooine …” Leaving the remark unfinished, she dashed after Luke.
Corran was only steps behind when they reached the platform itself, square and cantilevered by thick timbers anchored in the cliff face. From downvalley, and drifting to and fro in the wind, appeared a cluster of what might have been balloons, holding aloft an oblong wooden gondola with an aft cabin.
“There she blows,” Corran said.
“You’re not kidding,” Mara said. She looked at Luke. “They’ll never be able to land!”
“They will. They have the Force at their backs.”
Luke set himself in the near-horizontal rain and focused his attention on the approaching airship. Through the Force, he could feel Mara and Corran join him, and he could also feel the tremendous power Jacen and Saba were exercising to prevent the airship from being blown where the howling wind wanted to take it. Confidence surged through him. The Jedi were working not against the natural forces, but in harmony with them, availing themselves of just those gusts that would maneuver the airship to the destination they had chosen.
Had there been better forewarning of the trap the three Yuuzhan Vong agents had sprung, Sekot also might have been able to maneuver Zonama through hyperspace to a safe landing. But the jump to lightspeed had been inadvertent—though fortunately in place of the planned destruction of the planet.
When Zonama Sekot first emerged from transit, conditions were even worse than those that followed. Luke could remember staring into an unfamiliar night sky; then, at daybreak, an enormous sun ballooning on the horizon like an explosion, too