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heavily—between an old TheedSpeed Galaxy Runner and a swoop-sized needle ship with a hatch about the size of a human hand. They completed the shutdown routine quickly, clicked out of their crash webbing, and went aft. Instead of following Luke to the suit locker, however, Ben stopped at the engineering station and began to call up system reports.
    “Let’s leave repairs for later,” Luke said. He pulled a light, combatrated vac suit from the locker and tossed it to Ben, then took another for himself. “I want to have a look around first.”
    Ben caught the suit with no outward sign of anxiety, but the sudden ripple in his Force aura was hard to miss. He was afraid of the strange presence monitoring them from the station center, and Luke wished he understood why. The snaky feel of its Force touch certainly suggested the “tentacle” that had touched his son at Shelter. But what, exactly, had the thing
done
that continued to haunt Ben more than a decade later?
    “Ben, it’ll be okay.” Luke opened his vac suit and began to push his feet into the legs. “If you’re remembering something else about your time at Shelter, it would be better to share—”
    “Dad, I’m not trying to avoid anything out there,” Ben said. “But we’ve already been attacked once, and the
Shadow
took some bad hits. It’s just sound tactics to get things ready in case we need to leave in a hurry.”
    It was hard to know whether Ben was unaware of how his fear was controlling him, or just allowing it to interfere with his judgment, but it really didn’t matter. The time was fast approaching when the young man had to face his demons or surrender to them, and—as much as Luke wished it otherwise—the choice was one that no father could make for his son.
    Continuing to don his vac suit, Luke peered out the viewport and scowled at the fleet of abandoned vessels. “Take a look outside, then tell me again about sound tactics.”
    Ben frowned and studied the equipment-strewn hangar outside, then slowly flushed with embarrassment.
    “Yeah … I see,” he said, opening his vac suit. “We aren’t going to have time finish our repairs.”
    “Probably not,” Luke agreed. “A Jedi needs to be observant, and being observant means—”
    “Thinking about what you see,” Ben finished, quoting one of Kam Solusar’s favorite sayings. “I should have asked myself why everyone was leaving their tools lying around. It could be that something has been drawing—or taking—the ship crews away, and it doesn’t look like anyone makes it back here to finish their repairs.”
    “Which means?”
    Ben peered out the viewport for a long time, obviously searching for some missed detail that would explain what was luring the crews away from their vessels—and why no one was returning. Finally, he turned back to Luke, shaking his head.
    “I don’t know,” he admitted. “All that occurs to me is that we shouldn’t make the same mistake everyone else did.”
    Luke smiled broadly. “Congratulations—that’s
exactly
what it means.”
    Ben looked more puzzled than before.
    “The trouble with
sound tactics
is that they make you predictable,” Luke explained. “Jedi shouldn’t be predictable.”
    Ben’s eyes finally lit in understanding. “Got it,” he said. “From now on, we eat when
I’m
hungry.”
    Luke laughed, glad to see that Ben was relaxed enough to joke. “I don’t think we have the supplies for that.” He pulled their helmets from the suit locker. “Space yachts don’t come with that much cargo capacity.”
    They sealed their suits and exited through the air lock into about a quarter standard gravity. Luke immediately began to feel a bit dizzy. Like Centerpoint Station, this habitat lacked true artificial gravity. Instead it created an imperfect imitation by rotating on its axis—amethod that wreaked havoc on the delicate inner ear of many bipedal species.
    Once the
Shadow’
s outer hatch had closed, Luke secured the