to stop him.
Because Uncle Luke was wrong, this time. Anakin could feel it in his very center. The Jedi trainees were in grave danger; Talon Karrde would not get there in time. It might already be too late.
It was strange that Uncle Luke still insisted on thinking of Anakin as a child. Anakin had killed Yuuzhan Vong. He had seen friends die and caused the deaths of others. He was responsible for the destruction of countless ships and the beings who crewed them, and that only scratched the most recent skin of the matter.
It was a blind spot the adults in his life had, an ambivalence and a denial. They didn’t understand who he really was, only what he appeared to be. Even his mother and Uncle Luke, who had the Force to help them.
Aunt Mara probably understood—she had never really been a child, either—but even she was blinkered by her relationship with Uncle Luke; she had to take his feelings into account, as well as her own.
Well, there would be anger. He could explain to Uncle Luke about the feeling he had in the Force, but that might only alert the Master to Anakin’s certainty in thismatter. Even if Uncle Luke could be convinced to send someone
now
, it might be someone else, someone older. But Anakin knew it had to be
him
, he had to go. If he didn’t, his best friend was doomed to a fate much worse than death.
It was the only thing in his life he was really sure of right now.
“Cleared for takeoff,” the port control said.
“Power it up, Fiver,” Anakin murmured. “We’ve got someplace to be.”
CHAPTER THREE
When the stars rushed back into existence, Anakin put his XJ X-wing into a lazy tumble and cut power to everything but sensors and minimal life support. Ordinarily he wouldn’t play it so cautious; after all, someone would almost have to be watching for the hyperwave ripples of an X-wing entering the system to have any chance of detecting it. But given the feeling in his gut, there might just be someone doing that.
The roll and yaw he’d put the X-wing in wasn’t random, but was designed to give his instruments a full accounting of the surrounding space in the least possible time. While the sensors did their job, Anakin reached out with the sense he trusted most—the Force.
The planet Yavin filled most of his view, its vast orange oceans of gas boiling into fractal, elusive patterns. Its familiar face had marked the days and nights of much of his childhood. The praxeum—his uncle Luke’s Jedi academy—was located on Yavin 4, a moon of the gas giant. He could remember watching Yavin in the night sky, a colossal mirage of a planet, wondering what could be there, pushing his evolving Force senses to explore it.
He’d found clouds of methane and ammonia deeper than oceans, hydrogen so stressed by pressure it became metal, life crushed thinner than paper but still thriving, cyclones heavier than lead but faster than the winds of any world habitable by humans. And crystals, sparkling Corusca gems climbing those titan winds, spinning in anancient dance, capturing what light they could find in the thinner upper atmosphere and gripping it tight in their molecules.
He saw none of this as one might with eyes, of course, but over the nights, through the Force he had felt them, and with references to the library gradually understood them.
In his imagination he had seen more. Pieces of the first Death Star, which had met its end in these very skies, pounded into monomolecular foil by fierce pressure and gravity. Older things, relics of Sith, and species even more lost and distant in time. Once a planet like Yavin swallowed a secret, it wasn’t likely to give it up again. Given the other secrets that had turned up in the Yavin system—and the Sun Crusher Kyp Durron himself
had
once managed to pull from the belly of the orange giant—that was for the best.
Just beyond the vast rim of Yavin, a bright yellowish star winked—Yavin 8, one of the three moons in the system blessed with life. Anakin