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Luke Skywalker and a man named Kell Tainer worked on Luke’s X-wing, patching up the damage done during the last attack. The damage was mostly minor, hull scoring and components shaken loose, but if allowed to accumulate it would gradually render the snubfighter useless.

Tainer was tall and in shape, the leanness of his muscles suggesting that they were for use rather than for show. His brown hair was receding from his forehead but long in back and braided. He wore a droopy mustache and a close-trimmed beard. He looked like nothing so much as an asteroid miner or backworld mechanic, but Luke knew better.

“I thought you were Intelligence,” Luke said. A needle-thin stream of lubricant sprayed from the engine he was working on, the one at lower starboard, and left a zigzag red-black mark on his cheek and forehead. He tightened the clamp over the perforated hose and mopped ruefully at the fluid on his face. “A Wraith, right?”

“You’re not supposed to know that.” Kell’s voice was muffled. His upper body was wedged into the snub-fighter’s tiny cargo compartment; he dangled from the waist down out of the access hatch at the underside of the X-wing’s bow. It looked as though the X-wing had decided to begin a career as a carnivorous beast and Kell had been its first, unresisting prey. “Now I have to kill you.”

Luke grinned. “What are you doing working with the mechanics?”

“Used to be a mechanic. Worked for a while in a Sluis Van refitting shop that Admiral Thrawn’s forces eventually blew up, in fact. But I could ask you the same thing. Thought you were a Jedi Master. What are you doing working with the mechanics?”

“Same answer, more or less. I had to maintain all my machinery on Tatooine when I was a kid and many times since. And this is my X-wing.”

“Get in there, you little—all right. Your ejector mechanism should be working again. Let me get this panel dogged down so your feet don’t drop into the cargo compartment.”

“I’d appreciate that. Not that my feet always reach the floor anyway.” Luke finished sealing off the second of two valves. He removed the damaged tubing in between and began attaching its replacement.

Kell slid out from the compartment as though the carnivorous X-wing had decided he just wasn’t worth swallowing. He landed on his feet, nimble for such a big man. “Want to test it?”

“No, thanks.”

“Go ahead, hop in and fire it off. That’s the only way to be sure it works.”

Luke glanced up at the drooping metal docking bay ceiling five meters above their heads. “No, thanks.”

“Spoilsport.” Kell grabbed the lip of the hull beside the cockpit—the canopy was raised, allowing him the grip—and heaved himself up, leaning over into cockpit, his upper half disappearing from view again.

“You’re Tyria Sarkin’s husband, aren’t you?”

“Aha, that’s how you knew I was a Wraith. Yes, I am.”

“How is she doing?”

Kell was silent for long moments. Luke heard the ratcheting sound of the man’s hydrospanner. “She’s doing well,” Kell said. “Mostly she travels with our boy, Doran. Teaching him the ways of the Jedi. She travels so far afield … she probably doesn’t even know how bad the Yuuzhan Vong invasion has gotten. We have pretty much a long-distance marriage. Months of separation alternating with extravagant welcome-home celebrations. Back when you confirmed her in her rank as a Jedi Knight, that thrilled her for months. Years.”

“She earned it.” Luke finished fitting the second tube end and reopened the valves. The tube stiffened a little as lubricant coursed through it, but it held.

Tyria Sarkin walked a strange and solitary path for a Jedi, Luke knew, but it was a path he was familiar with; it had been his own. He’d tested her about twenty years ago, when he’d first heard of her, a New Republic pilot candidate with Force abilities, but discovered that her powers were weak, her self-discipline inadequate to the task of shaping her into a Jedi. He’d let her down easy and suggested that she concentrate on her piloting skills. But sometime in the next few years she’d found