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meant nothing had set its sights on the
Shadow
yet.
    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.
    The mass ahead was no longer a shadow. A silvery, elongated oval had taken shape in the middle of the display, the number-bar in its core now climbing past seven million tons. The oval was slowly drifting toward the bottom of the screen and shedding alphanumeric designators, indicating the presence of a debris field
and
the danger of an impending collision with the object itself. Ben hit the maneuvering thrusters
hard
, and the
Shadow
decelerated.
    He heard a toolbox clang into the main cabin’s rear bulkhead, and his father’s alarmed voice came over the intercom speaker. “What did you hit?”
    “Nothing yet.” Ben pulled back on the yoke, using his own strength to force the vector plates down. “The control yoke’s power assist is gone, and we’ve reached a debris field.”
    “What sort of debris?” his father demanded. “Ice? Rock? Iron-nickel?”
    Ben thumbed the SELECT bubble active and slid it over to one of the designators: OBJECT B 8. An instant later a density analysis offered a 71 percent probability that O BJECT B 8 was a medium transport of unknown make and model.
    But Ben did not immediately relay the information to his father. Asthe
Shadow’
s nose returned to its original plane, an enormous, gray-white dome was slowly coming into view. Dropping down from above and upside down relative to the ship, the dome hung at the base of a large, spinning cylinder ringed by a dozen small, attached tubes. Floating between the cylinder and the
Shadow
were nearly twenty dark flecks with the smooth lines and sharp corners suggestive of spacecraft, all drifting aimlessly and as cold as asteroids.
    “Ben, you’re worrying me,” his father admonished. “How bad is it?”
    “Uh, I don’t really know yet.” As Ben spoke, the
Shadow’
s lamp beams continued to slide up the spinning cylinder, to where it joined a gray metal sphere that looked to be about the size of one of Bespin’s smaller floating cities. “But maybe you should come back to the flight deck as soon as things are secure back there.”
    “Yeah,” Luke said. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
    As the lamp beams continued to reveal more of the station—at least that’s what Ben
assumed
he was looking at—he began to grow even more confused and worried. With a second, dome-capped cylinder rising out of the sphere directly opposite the first, the thing reminded him of a station he had helped infiltrate during the recent civil war. It didn’t seem possible that two such structures could exist in the galaxy by mere coincidence, or that he would have happened on this one by mere chance even if the two
were
related. He had the uneasy feeling that the Force was at play here—or, to be more precise, that the Force was putting
him
in play.
    Now that they were actually in visual range of their target, Ben brought the full suite of sensors back online and began to investigate. To both his relief and puzzlement, all of the contacts appeared to be derelict vessels. They ranged widely in size, from small space yachts like the
Shadow
to an antiquated Tibanna tanker with a capacity in excess of a hundred million liters. Ben did a quick mental calculation of the total tonnage of the abandoned ships and shuddered. If these were captured spoils, there were some very impressive pirates hiding around here somewhere.
    Starting to envision sensor masks and ambushes, Ben slid the
Shadow
into the cover of an old TGM Marauder. The ship looked asdeserted as its sensor profile suggested, tumbling slowly with cold engines, open air locks, and no energy