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It took Boba Fett four standard hours to realign his electrical systems, power them up again, and purge the bad signals from his memory banks.

Moorlu's ion cannon had done significant, but not irreparable damage.

Finally able to get down to the business of searching for his real quarry, Fett returned to the scraps of hull metal he had found earlier.

He used a tractor beam to haul the shrapnel into his cargo bay, then carefully analyzed the burned edges and each outer surface.

Surprisingly, the scrap hull plates contained a sequence of identifying serial numbers, enough to prove that this debris had unquestionably come from Bornan Thul's ship.

But he still couldn't find enough wreckage to account for the entire craft. If the vessel had exploded here, there should have been more debris.

No, the amount and the placement of the debris seemed too convenient, too. calculated, too easy. He had found only one large piece of metal-and it just happened to contain a crucial serial number? Yes... convenient.

Fett analyzed again and found that all the scraps had been carefully removed.

Nothing was vital. An engine cowling could easily be replaced, and the bits of exterior hull had no doubt been stripped away from a portion of the vessel that already had double plating, or from some area that could afford to be weakened.

Fett stood up from the pitted pieces of hull metal. Boman Thul had planted this debris here on purpose, hoping to convince pursuers that his ship had been destroyed in the planetary rim.... If the ruse had been successful, Nolaa Tarkona would have had no choice but to believe her cargo lost and call off the entire bounty hunt Boba Fett crawled forward into the cockpit, quite pleased with himself for unraveling the ruse.

This Bornan Thul was proving to be a much more challenging quarry than he had anticipated.

He would enjoy hunting the man down.

JAINA STARED PENSIVELY at the wide, greenish-brown river that flowed past the Great Temple. Her boots sank into the soft, dark mud of the riverbank. In his defeat and despair at the end of the battle with the Shadow Academy, Zekk had covered himself with that mud, as if it could hide him from what he had done.

The sunlight that had burned away the earlier mist poured down onto the water and reflected back into the air, drenching the jungle with vibrant greens, blues, purples, and browns. Insects swarmed about, humming, buzzing, reveling in the change of weather.

Jaina wasn't sure what had drawn her here, but after visiting Zekk's room for the third time in as many hours, only to find him still asleep, she had decided to take a walk alone, hoping to sort out her thoughts.

She felt something unsettling in the atmosphere, and she didn't know what it was-or perhaps she did. Everything seemed different to her somehow.

Familiar, yet different. Since the attack by the Second Imperium, the Jedi academy had changed.

Jaina made her way across steppingstones in the river shallows to a broad, flat rock. Sitting down on it, she dangled the soles of her boots in the warm water, letting the strong current carry away the caked mud.

Why was change so difficult to accept, even when the changes were supposedly for the good? The academy felt different.

Her studies felt different. Jedi trainees no longer spent their days in quiet contemplation and individual exercises; they had too much work to do repairing the damage from the recent battle-the conflict of Jedi against Jedi. Though Luke Skywalker's trainees had won, the Shadow Academy had shown them their vulnerabilities, their weaknesses. Nothing would ever be the same.

Even the Great Temple was different, many of its ancient blocks shattered in the explosion. Under the direction of her uncle Luke, the pyramid would be rebuilt, of course. But it could never be the same again.

Was that bad, though?

After all, the Jedi academy's greatest outside threat had been vanquished. The Shadow Academy station was gone forever, destroyed in orbit by