Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 02 - Skyborn

aggravate the problem—shoved the throttles forward.
    It did not take long before Ben began to sense a calm place a little to port. He adjusted course and extended his Force awareness in that direction, then started to feel a strange, nebulous presence that reminded him of something he could not quite place—of something dark and diffuse, spread across a great distance.
    Ben opened his eyes again. “Dad, do you feel—”
    “Yes, like the Killiks,” Luke said. “We might be dealing with a hive-mind.”
    A cold shudder was already racing down Ben’s spine.His father had barely uttered the word
Killiks
before the memory of his stint as an unwilling Gorog Joiner came flooding back, and for the second time in less than an hour he found himself desperately wanting to withdraw from the Force. Gorog had been a dark side nest, secretly controlling the entire Killik civilization while it fed on captured Chiss, and Ben had fallen under its sway for a short time when he was only five. It had been the most terrifying and confusing time of his childhood, and had Jacen not recognized what was happening and helped Ben find his way back to the Force and his true family, he doubted very much that he would have been able to break free at all.
    Thankfully, the presence ahead was not all that similar to Gorog’s. There was certainly a darkness to it, and it was clearly composed of many different beings joined together across a vast distance—most of space ahead, really. But the distribution seemed more mottled than a Killik hive-mind, as though dozens of distinct individuals were joined together in something vaguely similar to a battle-meld.
    Ben was about to clarify his impressions for his father when a familiar presence began to slither up inside him. It was cold and condemning, like a friend betrayed, and he could feel how angry it was about the intrusion into its lair. The Force grew stormy and foreboding, and an electric prickle of danger sense raced down Ben’s spine. He could feel the darkness gathering against him, trying to push him away, and that only hardened his resolve to finally face the specter. He opened himself up, grabbed hold in the Force, and began to pull.
    The presence jerked back, then tried to shrink away. It was too late. Ben already had a firm grasp, and he was determined to follow it back to its physical location. He checked the hull temperature and saw that itwas hovering in the yellow danger zone. Then he focused his attention forward and saw—actually
saw
—a thumbnail-sized darkness tunneling through the swirling fires ahead. He pointed their nose toward the black oval, then shoved the throttles to the overload stops and watched the fiery ribbons of gas stream past the cockpit.
    The ribbons grew brighter and more deeply colored as the ship penetrated the accretion disk, and soon the gas grew so dense that the
Shadow
began to buck and shudder in its turbulence. Ben held on tight to the yoke …
and
to the dark presence he was clasping in the Force.
    His father’s voice sounded behind him. “Uh, Ben?”
    “It’s okay, Dad,” Ben said. “I’ve got an approach lane.”
    “A
what
?” Luke sounded genuinely surprised. “I hope you realize the hull temperature is almost into the red.”
    “Dad!”
Ben snapped. “Will you please let me concentrate?”
    Luke fell silent for a moment, then exhaled loudly. “Ben, the gas here is too dense for these velocities. We’re practically flying through an atmo—”
    “
Your
idea,” Ben interrupted. The black oval swelled to the size of a fist. “Trust me!”
    “Ben,
trust me
doesn’t work for Jedi the way it does for your uncle Han. We don’t have his luck.”
    “Maybe that would change if we trusted it more often,” Ben retorted.
    The black oval continued to expand until it was the size of a hatch. Ben fought the turbulence and somehow kept the
Shadow
’s nose pointed toward it, then the ship was inside the darkness, flying smooth and surrounded by a dim cone of orange radiance. Startled by the abrupt transition and struggling to adjust to thesudden change of light, Ben feared for an instant that the dark presence had led him off-course—perhaps even out of the accretion disks altogether.
    Then the cone of orange began to simultaneously compress and fade, becoming a dark tunnel, and a far worse possibility occurred to him.
    “Say, Dad, would we know if we were flying down a black hole?”
    “Probably not,” Luke said. “The