Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 02 - Skyborn

time–space distortion would make the journey last forever, at least relative to Coruscant-standard time. Why do you ask?”
    “Oh, no reason,” Ben said, deciding not to alarm his father any more than necessary. If he
had
flown them past an event horizon, it was too late to do anything about it now. “Just curious.”
    Luke laughed, then said, “Relax, Ben. We’re not flying down a black hole—but will you
please
slow down? If you keep this up, you really
are
going to melt the hull.”
    Ben glanced at his display and frowned. The hull temperature had climbed into the critical zone, which made no sense at all. The surrounding darkness and the lack of turbulence meant they were no longer being blasted by heat from the accretion disk. The hull ought to be cooling rapidly, and if it wasn’t …
    Ben jerked the throttles back and was pitched against his crash webbing as friction instantly began to slow the
Shadow
. The area surrounding them wasn’t dark because it was
empty—
it was dark because it was filled with cold matter. They had entered Stable Zone One, where gas, dust, and who-knew-what-else was floating in limbo between the two black holes. Worried that they weren’t decelerating fast enough, he used the maneuvering thrusters to slow the ship down even further … then realized that during the excitement, he had lost contact with the dark presence he had been using as a reluctant guide.
    “Blast,” Ben said. He expanded his Force awareness again, but felt only the same meldlike presence he had sensed earlier—and it was too diffuse to be much of a navigation beacon. “We’re back to flying blind. I can’t feel anything useful now.”
    “That’s not really a problem,” Luke pointed out. “There’s only one place in here where anything can have a permanent habitat.”
    Ben nodded. “Right.”
    Stable Zone One wasn’t actually very stable. Even the slightest perturbation would start a mass on a long, slow fall into one of the adjacent gravity wells. Therefore, anything
permanently
located inside the zone could only be at the precise center, because that was the only place where the forces were in absolute equilibrium.
    Ben brought the navigation sensors back up. This time, the screen showed nothing but a small fan of light at the bottom, rapidly fading to darkness as the signals were obscured by cold gas and dust. He activated the
Shadow
’s forward flood lamps and continued onward. The beams tunneled ahead for perhaps a kilometer before vanishing into the black fog of dust and gas. Ben decelerated even further, then adjusted headings until all external forces affecting the
Shadow
’s travel vector were exactly zero, and set a waypoint. Theoretically, at least, they were now on course for the heart of the stable zone.
    When Ben shifted his attention forward again, he saw a blue fleck of debris floating in the light beam ahead. He instantly fired the maneuvering thrusters to decelerate again, but in space, even a relative creep was a velocity of hundreds of kilometers an hour, and they covered half the distance to the object before the
Shadow
responded.
    Instead of the stony boulder or ice ball that Ben had expected, the object turned out to be a young Duros.Ben could tell that he was a Duros because he wasn’t wearing a pressure helmet, and his blue, noseless face and big red eyes were clearly visible above the collar of a standard Jedi-issue flight suit. Hanging on his shoulder was what, at that distance, appeared to be a portable missile launcher.
    “Dad?” Ben asked. “Are you seeing this?”
    “Duros, no helmet?”
    “Right.”
    Luke nodded. “Then yes, I—”
    The Duros was silhouetted by a white flash, and the silver halo of an oncoming missile began to swell in front of the
Shadow
’s cockpit. Ben shoved the yoke forward and hit the thrusters, but even a Jedi’s reflexes weren’t that quick. A metallic bang echoed through the hull, and damage alarms began to shriek and blink. In almost the same instant, the Duros and the missile launcher floated past mere meters above the cockpit, and the muffled thud of an impact sounded from far back in the stern.
    “Definitely no hallucination,” Luke commented.
    “Dad, that looked like—”
    “Qwallo Mode, I know,” Luke replied. Mode was a young Jedi Knight who had disappeared on a standard courier run about a year earlier. When an exhaustive search had failed to find any trace of him, the Masters had finally concluded that he