He closed his eyes and leaned back into the copilot's chair.

"Don't nod off without giving me some idea," she said, unable to keep the worry from her voice.

"I'm not sleeping," he said without opening his eyes. "I'm meditating-or trying to. Jedi can sometimes see visions of the future."

He looked tense and awkward. She had never seen the hands folded across his lap so still. Surely, she thought, this wasn't the kind of training Darth Vader had given him. Meditating had nothing to do with hunting and killing, or the persecution of the innocent.

"Have you done this before?" she asked, wondering if it was training he had set himself down the years.

He shook his head once. "I've never been a Jedi before."

An intense stillness flowed through him, as visible as though he had changed color. She opened her mouth, then closed it. Better that he concentrate and she got on with the business of prepping the ship for hyperspace.

Corellia shrank to a blue-green ball behind them, and the traffic thinned out. She took navigation readings from the planet's orbital factories and double-checked them against the system's four other habitable worlds. Everything was in accord with the nav computer's settings. Next she ran a thorough check of the hyper-drive to make sure it hadn't been tampered with by the Imperials. The ship had been out of her sight for less than an hour, but .1 lot could be done in that time. Inertial dampeners could be rigged to fail at a critical moment, crushing everyone aboard in the tremendous accelerations achieved during a jump. Shields could flutter, leaving the ship vulnerable to impacts with interstellar dust. Null quantum field generators could be timed to dump them in the middle of nowhere. She could think of a dozen ways that Vader might have covered his bets against their escape. She checked all of them herself, one by one.

No one had followed them from Corellia. As far as she could tell no one was monitoring their departure.

Beside her, Galen breathed slowly and steadily with his eyes closed. An hour passed and nothing changed. Whatever he was doing, it obviously didn't come easily. Her understanding of the Force was limited to stories mocking the superstitious beliefs of an old and outdated religion-plus the rumors that continued to circulate through Imperial ranks. The Jedi Purge might have been years ago, but people had long memories. Serving officers of a certain generation still remembered Order 66 and the Clone Wars. The telling and retelling of such stories had created a strange backdrop of distorted facts, mistaken beliefs, and pure misinformation that emerged whenever the word Jedi was mentioned.

A faint vibration made the ship's decks rattle. Concerned, she checked the sublights. Finding everything in order, she assumed that they had just passed through a dense region of interplanetary dust.

When the vibration returned, stronger and longer than before, and the cause still remained unknown, she began to worry about what form of sabotage she could have missed-to the generator, the stabilizers, even life support. . .

A faint sound to her left interrupted her train of thought. She turned to look at Galen and her eyes widened in surprise.

His lightsaber was floating in the air in front of him, turning slowly as though in free fall.

Juno stared at it for a moment, and then reached out to check the gravity generators. She stopped herself, knowing that they hadn't been tampered with. She could feel the field around her, operating normally. Yet still the lightsaber floated, and as she watched more items in the cockpit joined its aerial display: her blaster and holster, a cup, a datapad. The ship shuddered again, as though something powerful and mysterious was subtly interfering with its function.

Galen's eyes rolled under his closed eyelids. A line had formed between his eyebrows. His lips twitched.

She raised a hand to shake him, but found her fingers effortlessly deflected. The Force filling the ship was emanating from him.

His frown deepened. His head turned to the right, then to the left.

"Galen? Are you all right?"

His hands clenched and unclenched, then his whole body twitched, making her jump. "Galen, can you hear me?"

He moaned softly, as though caught in a nightmare. His skin was slick with sweat.

She crouched in the pilot's seat, unable to do anything but watch.

He moaned again, louder this time. His legs kicked out, making the whole cockpit shake. The objects floating in the air began to spin around them. The lights flickered.

"No," he said distinctly. His head jerked from side to side, his face locked in a rictus of pain. "No, Kota-!"

His eyes shot open. She gasped. The objects around them crashed to the floor. He stared at nothing for a second, wildly, frightened. His chest rose and fell as though he had just run a marathon. His breathing was the only sound in the suddenly still cockpit.

"What?" she asked when she could bear the silence no longer. "What did you see?"

He turned to her and stared as though he didn't recognize her.

Then he shook his head and the visions clouding his sight fell away.

"A terrible thing," he said in a shaky voice. "A massive space station-still under construction..." He lunged suddenly and took her hand. His fingers gripped hers with surprising strength.

"Yes," he said. "Plot a course for the Outer Rim. The Horuz system."

A chill colder than the snow of Corellia's mountains swept through her. "What's waiting for us there, Galen?"

"I'll tell you on the way," he said, pulling back slightly. "What I know of it, anyway."

She saw a new grief in his eyes, and that frightened her. "Do you know how this is going to end?" For Kota? For us?

He hesitated, and then shook his head. "No."

She wasn't sure that she believed him, but she let the matter drop and turned to prep the starship for lightspeed.

Chapter 36