5

The former Imperial Information Center lay buried deep beneath the old palace, covered by layers of shielding walls and guarded by tight security at every entrance. To keep the temperatures within tolerable limits for the great data archive machines, vast heat-exchanger systems and powerful cooling units filled the room with a background roar.

Hunched over fourteen consoles were lumpy dull-gray slicer droids, hardwired into the terminals as they meticulously hacked at the security encryption codes and backup viruses set up in the Emperor’s mainframes. The slicer droids had been working for a full year, ferreting out vital tidbits from the labyrinthine databases. Already they had exposed twenty-three Imperial spies in deep cover trying to sabotage the burgeoning New Republic.

The hum of the cooling units and the motionlessness of the slicer droids blanketed the Center with an echoing emptiness. Lonely and fidgety, the protocol droid See-Threepio paced back and forth, his servomotors whirring, as he viewed the room with his optical sensors for the hundredth time.

“Haven’t you found anything yet, Artoo?” he said.

Jacked into one of the information ports, Artoo-Detoo bleeped an impatient negative and continued whirring as he tunneled through the overwhelming amounts of information.

“Don’t forget to double-check everything,” Threepio said, and began pacing again. “And don’t be afraid to follow unlikely leads. Master Luke would call them hunches. This is very important, Artoo.”

Artoo hooted indignantly.

“And remember to check every planet from the Old Republic. The Empire didn’t necessarily have time to update its information on all of them.”

This time Artoo did not bother to reply but continued to work.

A moment later Threepio heard the outer doors open, and a shadowy figure moved toward them with silent grace. As always, Luke Skywalker wore his Jedi cloak, but this time the hood was draped casually over his shoulders. Luke walked with an eagerness in his step.

Threepio was glad to see a resurgence of the excited boyishness that had so characterized young Luke when the droids first met him after they had been purchased from the Jawas on Tatooine. Of late Luke’s eyes had not been able to hide the haunted look and the barely contained power of a Jedi Master.

“Master Luke! How good of you to check on us!”

“How’s it going, Threepio? Found anything yet?”

Artoo beeped an answer, which Threepio translated. “Artoo says he’s going as fast as he can, but he wishes me to remind you of the enormous amount of data he must inspect.”

“Well, I’ll be leaving in a few hours to follow up on some earlier leads I uncovered by myself. I just wanted to make sure you two have everything you need before I take off.”

Threepio straightened in a gesture of surprise. “Might I ask where you are going, Master Luke?”

Artoo chittered and Luke turned to him. “Not this time, Artoo. It’s more important that you stay here and continue the search. I can fly by myself.”

Luke turned to answer Threepio’s question. “I’m going to Bespin to check on somebody there, but first I want to go to an old outpost called Eol Sha. I’ve got reason to believe that at least one lost Jedi descendant might be there.” With a swish of his cloak, Luke turned to depart from the Information Center. “I’ll check back with you when I come home.” The door slid shut behind him.

Threepio spoke immediately to Artoo. “Punch up the data on Eol Sha—let’s see where Master Luke is going.”

Artoo obliged, as if the idea had been in his own circuits. When the planetary statistics came up on the screen accompanied by ancient two-dimensional images, Threepio raised his golden mechanical arms in horror. “Earthquakes! Geysers! Volcanoes and lava! Oh my!”

When Luke emerged from hyperspace, the starlines in the viewport funneled into points. Suddenly brilliant pastel colors splashed across the universe—magentas, oranges, and icicle-blues of ionized gas in a vast galactic ocean known as the Cauldron Nebula. The automatic dimmers in the pilot’s compartment muted the glare. Luke looked at the spectacle and smiled.

Leaving the hyperspace node, he punched in the coordinates for Eol Sha. His modified passenger shuttle arced through the wispy gas, leaving the nebula above him as the engines kicked in. The double wedge-shaped craft descended toward Eol Sha.

He had wanted to take his trusty old X-wing, but that ship was a single-person craft, with room for only an astromech droid in the back. If Luke’s hunches about Jedi descendants proved correct, he would be bringing two candidates back to Coruscant with him.…

According to outdated records, the settlement on Eol Sha was established a century before by entrepreneurs who intended to use ramjet mining ships to plow through the Cauldron Nebula and scoop up valuable gases. The mineship pilots would distill the gaseous harvest into pure, rare elements for sale to other outposts.

Eol Sha was the only habitable world close enough to support the commercial venture, but its days were numbered. A tandem moon orbited very close to the planet, spiraling in on a death plunge as gravity dragged it down. Within another hundred years the moon would crash into the planet, smashing both into rubble.

The nebula mining scheme had never paid off. The incompetent entrepreneurs had not counted on the true costs of ramjet ships and the unremarkable composition of the Cauldron’s gases. The outpost on Eol Sha had been left to fend for itself. At about that time the Emperor’s New Order had begun, and the Old Republic had crumbled to pieces. The few survivors on Eol Sha had been forgotten in the chaos.

The outpost had been rediscovered two years ago by a New Republic sociologist who had visited them briefly, recorded his insights, and filed a report recommending immediate evacuation of the doomed colony—all of which was promptly forgotten in the already blossoming bureaucracy of the New Republic and the depredations of Grand Admiral Thrawn.

The item that had attracted Luke’s attention, though, was that a woman named Ta’ania—an illegitimate descendant of a Jedi—had been one of the original colonists on Eol Sha. Luke would have suspected the Jedi’s bloodline had ended there, except for one small detail.

According to the sociologist’s report, the leader of the ragtag colonists, a man named Gantoris, was said to be able to sense impending earthquakes, and he had miraculously survived as a child when his playmates were killed in an avalanche. Somehow Gantoris escaped injury while the others, a mere arm’s length away on either side of him, had been crushed.

Luke attributed many of these stories to exaggeration in retelling, for even someone with a great deal of Jedi potential could not control such things without training—as he himself knew. But still the clues and the circumstantial evidence led him to Eol Sha. He had to follow every lead if he was to find enough candidates for his Jedi training center.

Luke took the modified shuttle on a figure-eight trajectory around the looming moon and vectored in on the remnants of the outpost on Eol Sha. After crossing the terminator where the planet’s night fell into day, Luke looked out the viewport at the scabbed and uninviting surface of the planet.

His hands worked the controls automatically. As he swooped low, he could see the decrepit and shored-up habitation modules that had been battered by natural disasters for decades. In the near distance hardened mounds of lava sprawled around a volcanic cone from old eruptions. Curling smoke rose from the heart of the volcano, and glowing orange smudges showed where fresh lava seeped through cracks in its side.

Luke took the shuttle past the battered settlement and beyond a stretch of cratered, jumbled terrain. The shuttle settled onto the rocky hardpan, and Luke exited through flip-up doors behind the passenger seats.

The air of Eol Sha smoldered in his nostrils, filled with acrid sulfurous smoke and chemical vapors. The gigantic moon hulked on the horizon like a platter of beaten brass, casting its own shadows even in daylight. Murky clouds and volcanic ash hovered in the air like a hazy blanket.

When Luke stepped away from the passenger shuttle, he could feel the ground hum beneath his boots. With senses heightened from the Force, he could touch the incredible strain the close moon placed on Eol Sha, squeezing and tearing it with tidal forces that grew worse each passing year as the moon spiraled closer. A hissing white noise permeated the air, as if the innumerable steam vents and fumaroles breathed out gasps of pain from the world.

Pulling the dark cloak about him and securing the lightsaber at his belt, Luke strode across the rough terrain toward the settlement. Around him small craters and deep pits dotted the ground, encircled by white and tan mineral deposits. Sounds of gurgling steam came from deep beneath them.

Halfway to the settlement Luke fell to his knees when a jolt went through the ground. The rocks bounced and the earth rumbled. Luke spread his arms to keep his balance. The tremors rose, then fell, then increased again before stopping abruptly.

Suddenly, the random craters around him crackled, then belched towers of steam and scalding droplets of water. Geysers, all of them—he had walked into a field of geysers, triggered by the earthquake to erupt simultaneously. Steam rolled over the ground like a dense fog.

Luke pulled the hood over his head for protection and took shallow breaths as he trudged forward. The settlement was not far away. On all sides of him the geyser field continued to gasp and howl, gradually lessening as the spumes declined in intensity.

When Luke finally emerged from the steam, he saw two men staring at him from the doorway of a rusted and ancient prefab shelter. The outpost on Eol Sha had been built from modified cargo containers and modular self-erecting shelters. By the looks of the hovels, though, the maintenance subsystems had failed decades before, leaving the forgotten people to eke out a crude existence. The rest of the settlement seemed deserted and quiet.

The two men stopped their work shoring up a collapsed entranceway, but they didn’t seem to know how to react to the presence of a stranger. Luke was probably the first new person they had seen since the sociologist had visited them two years earlier.

“I have come to speak with Gantoris,” Luke said. They looked at him with bleak expressions. Their clothes appeared worn and patched, sewn together from pieces of other garments. Luke’s gaze held one of the two men. The other shied back into the shadows. “Are you Gantoris?” Luke asked softly.

“No. My name is Warton.” He fumbled for words; then they came out in a rush. “Everyone is gone. There’s been a rock slide in one of the crevasses. It buried two of our youngest, who went out to spear bugdillos. Gantoris and the others are there, trying to dig them out.”

Luke felt a stab of urgency and grasped Warton’s arm. “Take me there. Maybe I can help.”

Warton allowed himself to be nudged into motion, and he took Luke along a winding path through jagged rocks. The second man remained behind among the collapsing shelters. Luke and Warton descended through switchbacks down the steep wall of a crack in the ground, a split wrenched apart by tidal forces. Down here the air seemed thicker, smellier, more claustrophobic.

Warton knew exactly where to find the other survivors in the maze of side channels and partial landslides. Luke saw them shoulder to shoulder in an elbow of the crevasse, scrambling over newly fallen rock, working to haul boulders aside. Every one of the thirty people there wore the same implacable expression, as if their optimism had burned away but they could not allow themselves to give up their duties. Two of the women bent over the rubble, calling into the cracks.

One man worked with twice the effort of the others. His long black hair hung in a braid on the left side of his face. His eyebrows and eyelashes had been plucked away, leaving his broad face smooth and angular and flushed with his exertion. He shoved rocks aside, which the other people hauled away. They had already managed to clear some of the debris, but they had not yet uncovered the two victims. The dark-haired man paused to glance at Luke, failed to recognize him or understand his presence, then returned to his efforts. By the way Warton and the others looked to him, Luke guessed the man must be Gantoris himself.

Before Warton had taken him to the base of the rockfall, Luke stopped and, with a quick glance, took in the positioning of the boulders. He let his arms fall to his sides, rolled his eyes back in concentration, and reached out through the Force, using the strength he found there to feel the boulders, to move them, and to keep other rocks from doing further damage. When Yoda had trained him to lift large stones, it had been merely a game, a training exercise; now two lives depended on it.

He paid no attention to the astonished sounds as the colonists stepped back, ducking out of the way as Luke mentally hurled boulder after boulder from the top of the rock pile, tossing them into other parts of the crevasse. He could feel life down in the shadowy depths, somewhere.

When the rocks began to show splashes of blood, and he exposed a pale arm, part of a shoulder hunched in the secret shadows of the avalanche, several people rushed forward. Luke made an extra effort to keep the unstable pile of rocks steady enough for the rescue operations. He continued to remove fallen boulders.

“She’s alive!” someone shouted, and several helpers rushed into the debris, brushing away stones and hauling free a young girl. Her face and legs were battered and bloody, one arm was obviously broken; she began weeping with pain and relief as the rescuers pulled her out. Luke knew she would be all right.

Near the girl, however, the young boy had not been so lucky. The avalanche had crushed him instantly. The boy had been dead long before Luke arrived.

Luke continued to work grimly, until they had excavated the body. Amid sobs of grief, he released himself from his semitrance and opened his eyes.

Gantoris stood directly in front of him. Barely suppressed anger seethed beneath his controlled expression.

“Why are you here?” Gantoris asked. “Who are you?”

Warton stepped up beside Luke. “I saw him walk out of the geyser field. All the geysers went off at once, and he just strode out of the steam.” Warton blinked in awe as he looked at Luke. “He says he has come for you, Gantoris.”

“Yes—I know,” Gantoris muttered to himself.

Luke met the other man’s eyes. “I am Luke Skywalker, a Jedi Knight. The Empire has fallen, and a New Republic has taken its place.” He drew a deep breath. “If you are Gantoris and if you have the ability, I have come to teach you how to use the Force.”

Several of the others walked up, bearing the broken, rag-doll body of the dead boy. The man carrying the boy let his stony expression flicker for just an instant.

The look on Gantoris’s face seemed a frightening mixture of horror and eagerness. “I have dreamed of you. A dark man who offers me incredible secrets, then destroys me. I am lost if I go with you.” Gantoris straightened. “You are a demon.”

Surprised, especially after his efforts to save the two children, Luke tried to placate him. “No, that isn’t it.”

Other colonists gathered around the confrontation, finding a focus for their anger and suspicion. They looked at Luke, at this stranger who had arrived in time to usher in the death of one of their dwindling number.

Luke glanced at the people around him and decided to gamble. He stared directly into Gantoris’s eyes. “What can I do to prove my intentions to you? I am your guest, or your prisoner. What I want is your cooperation. Please listen to what I have to say.”

Gantoris reached out to take the body of the boy in his own arms. The man who had been carrying him looked forlorn and lost as he stared at the bloodstains on his sleeves. Gantoris nodded back to Luke. “Take the dark man.”

Several people reached forward to grasp Luke’s arms. He did not struggle.

Bearing the dead boy, Gantoris led a slow procession out of the chasm. He turned once briefly to glare at Luke. “We will learn why you are here.”