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Jaina guessed that the sight would always be too painful, but hoped that a special shard of her mother's destroyed home would make a fine memento.

She gripped the controls of the Rock Dragon. 'You ready, Lowie?" she said.

"We're going inside."

"Oh, do be careful," Em Teedee said.

Jacen and Tenel Ka quietly checked their crash webbing, but did not interrupt the two pilots as they cruised into the scattershot storm of planetary debris.

Around them, the rocks coursed and ricocheted, spinning about to display jagged edges, raw craters. Over two decades, the debris had collided again and again, slowly settling into an organized cloud. Some of the shards clung together through their own gravity, gradually fusing into clusters of rock.

"This place has a strong... feel to it," Tenel Ka said. "As if I sense the ghosts of... many life forces obliterated at once."

Jacen nodded. 'Uncle Luke talks about how there was a great disturbance in the Force when Alderaan was destroyed."

"I still feel a disturbance," Tenel Ka said.

"Like echoes."

Jaina scanned the debris with the ship's sensors. Some of the meteoroids were composed of rock, others of metals from different portions of the planet-the crust, the mantle, the core.

Lowie barked a comment, and Em Tbedee translated. "Master Lowbacca wishes to know what, exactly, he should be searching for."

"Something... special," Jaina answered.

Jacen added, "But we don't know what it is yet." The asteroids grew denser around them.

Lowie flicked his yellow gaze down to the labyrinth of orbital paths diagrammed on the screen. Jaina saw the lines tightening up, the paths becoming more congested.

"'Erne for some fancy flying, Lowie," she said, then smiled back over her shoulder at Tenel Ka. "Let's see what the Rock Dragon has to show for itself."

'Oh, my," Em Teedee said.

The Hapan passenger cruiser skimmed between two of the larger asteroids and circled back, curving below the plane of the debris cluster and then arrowing back fl=ugh again. While simultaneously flying, watching out for obstacles, and studying the navigational diagram, Jaina continued to glance at the sensors, searching for exactly the right place to go. She felt she would know the place by instinct, as soon as she laid eyes upon it.

When she let her attention flicker for just a moment, Lowie bellowed in surprise and wrenched the copilot controls, spinning the Rock Dragon in a backward loop to avoid a jagged splinter of stone. He arced back in a U-turn and returned the way they had come. Their ship plunged once more through the rubble field.

"Hey, Jaina, are you sure you know where you're going.?" Jacen said.

@wie growled something reassuring, then performed another U-turn to head back through the rocks.

"This is kind of fun," Jaina said, accelerating as she circled around one of the larger chunks so that they could see the cratered landscape below them.

"I am glad you approve of our Hapan technology, Captain," Tenel Ka said.

"My grandmother assured me you would approve of the special modifications she ordered to this ship."

"I'm not sure I understand all the features of the engines and their subsystems yet," Jaina answered, 'but that leaves more for me to tinker with. A pilot's duty, you know.

Thanks for @g me the chance to fly this, Tenel Ka."

Jacen kept peering out the side winaow, shaking his head. 'It's amazing to think this was once a whole planet... Alderaan. I heard that some smugglers or pirates had been using this rubble as a relay station or a hideout, just like the asteroid field around Hoth."

Tenel Ka grunted. "There will always be such stories. Some are true, others are not. I doubt we will find pirates here."

Jaina let Lowie handle the flying while she studied the sensors again, hoping to spot that special something she was looking for. The Hapan ship had plenty of unusual diagnostic devices; it seemed as if Tenel Ka's grandmother had installed every imaginable system. But Jaina used only the diagnostics with which she was most familiar, analyzing