“Say, Dad, would we know if we were flying down a black hole?”
“Probably not,” Luke said. “The time–space distortion would make the journey last forever, at least relative to Coruscant- standard time. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no reason,” Ben said, deciding not to alarm his father any more than necessary. If he hadflown them past an event horizon, it was too late to do anything about it now. “Just curious.”
Luke laughed, then said, “Relax, Ben. We’re not flying down a black hole—but will you pleaseslow down? If you keep this up, you really aregoing to melt the hull.”
Ben glanced at his display and frowned. The hull temperature had climbed into the critical zone, which made no sense at all. The surrounding darkness and the lack of turbulence meant they were no longer being blasted by heat from the accretion disk. The hull ought to be cooling rapidly, and if it wasn’t . . .
Ben jerked the throttles back and was pitched against his crash webbing as friction instantly began to slow the Shadow.The area surrounding them wasn’t dark because it was empty—it was dark because it was filled with cold matter. They had entered Stable Zone One, where gas, dust, and who- knew- what- else was floating in limbo between the two black holes.
Worried that they weren’t decelerating fast enough, he used the maneuvering thrusters to slow the ship down even further . . . then realized that during the excitement, he had lost contact with the dark presence he had been using as a reluctant guide.
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“Blast,” Ben said. He expanded his Force awareness again, but felt only the same meldlike presence he had sensed earlier—and it was too diffuse to be much of a navigation beacon. “We’re back to flying blind. I can’t feel anything useful now.”
“That’s not really a problem,” Luke pointed out.
“There’s only one place in here where anything can have a permanent habitat.”
Ben nodded. “Right.”
Stable Zone One wasn’t actually very stable. Even the slightest perturbation would start a mass on a long, slow fall into one of the adjacent gravity wells.
Therefore, anything permanentlylocated inside the zone could only be at the precise center, because that was the only place where the forces were in absolute equilibrium.
Ben brought the navigation sensors back up. This time, the screen showed nothing but a small fan of light at the bottom, rapidly fading to darkness as the signals were obscured by cold gas and dust. He activated the Shadow’s forward flood lamps and continued onward. The beams tunneled ahead for perhaps a kilometer before vanishing into the black fog of dust and gas. Ben decelerated even further, then adjusted headings until all external forces affecting the Shadow’s travel vector were exactly zero, and set a waypoint. Theoretically, at least, they were now on course for the heart of the stable zone.
When Ben shifted his attention forward again, he saw a blue fleck of debris floating in the light beam ahead.
He instantly fired the maneuvering thrusters to decelerate again, but in space, even a relative creep was a velocity of hundreds of kilometers an hour, and they covered half the distance to the object before the Shadowresponded.
Instead of the stony boulder or ice ball that Ben had expected, the object turned out to be a young Duros.
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Ben could tell that he was a Duros because he wasn’t wearing a pressure helmet, and his blue, noseless face and big red eyes were clearly visible above the collar of a standard Jedi- issue flight suit. Hanging on his shoulder was what, at that distance, appeared to be a portable missile launcher.
“Dad?” Ben asked. “Are you seeing this?”
“Duros, no helmet?”
“Right.”
Luke nodded. “Then yes, I—”
The Duros was silhouetted by a white flash, and the silver halo of an oncoming missile began to swell in front of the Shadow’s cockpit. Ben shoved the yoke forward and hit the thrusters, but even a Jedi’s reflexes weren’t that quick. A metallic bang echoed through the hull, and damage alarms began to shriek and blink. In almost the same instant, the Duros and the missile launcher floated past mere meters above the cockpit, and the muffled thud of an impact sounded from far back in the stern.
“Definitely no hallucination,” Luke commented.
“Dad, that looked like—”
“Qwallo Mode, I know,” Luke replied. Mode was a young Jedi Knight who had disappeared on a standard courier run about a year earlier. When an exhaustive search had failed to find any trace of him, the Masters had finally concluded that he had perished. “He’s a long way from the Tapani sector.”
“Assuming that wasQwallo.” Ben extended his Force awareness behind them, but did not sense any hint of the Jedi’s presence. “Should I make another sweep to see if we can recover him?”
Luke thought for a moment, then shook his head.
“Even if he’s still alive, let’s not give him another shot at the Shadow.Before we start taking those kinds of chances, we need to figure out what’s going on here.”
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“Yeah,” Ben agreed. “Like how come he didn’t need a helmet.”
“And how he got here in the first place—and why he’s shooting at us.” Luke clicked out of his crash webbing, then added, “I’ll handle the damage. If you see anyone else floating around with a missile launcher and no pressure suit, don’t ask questions, just—”
“Open fire.” Ben deployed the blaster cannons, then checked the damage display and saw that they were bleeding both air and hyperdrive coolant. To make matters worse, the yoke was sticking, and that could mean a lot of things—none of them good. “Got it.
We’ve taken enough damage.”
Ben switched his threat array to the primary display.
At the top of the screen, the gray form of a mass shadow was clarifying out of the darkness. A yellow number- bar was adding tons to the mass estimate faster than the eye could follow, but he was alarmed to see that it was already into the high five digits and climbing toward six. There was no indication yet of the object’s overall shape or energy output, but the tonnage alone suggested something at leastas large as an assault carrier.
Unsure whether it was better to slow down to prevent a collision or accelerate to avoid being an easy target, Ben started to weave and bob. There was just a vague hint of danger tickling the base of his skull, but that only meant nothing had set its sights on the Shadowyet.
On the third bob downward, the yoke jammed forward and wouldn’t come back. Ben cursed and tried to muscle it, but he was fighting the hydraulic system, and if he fought it too hard, he would break a control cable.
He hit the emergency pressure release, dumping the control system’s entire reservoir into space, and then checked his threat array again.
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The mass ahead was no longer a shadow. A silvery, elongated oval had taken shape in the middle of the display, the