"Stang!"

Jet's warning forgotten, Ula stubbed his toe on the top of the ramp.

The Auriga Fire was by no means a luxury vessel. From above, the stocky freighter was almost perfectly triangular, with hyperdrives at the base; sensor arrays, shield generators, and comms at the upper point; and a c.o.c.kpit slightly off-center in the middle, above the main holds. Its low, cramped corridors were arranged in a rough Y, with main hold, crew quarters for five, and a cramped engineering bay at the termini. The c.o.c.kpit was one level up, accessed by a ladder. Additional holds filled every available piece of ship s.p.a.ce, including some, Ula was sure, that weren't visible to the naked eye. Jet claimed to have had a crew of ten on the run that had encountered the Cinzia. Ula wondered how they had all fit in.

The ship was hardly understocked in terms of equipment. On the short journey back from the refresher, Ula spotted a tractor beam, a crude interdiction device, and power supplies for no less than four tri-laser cannons. Thick cables suggested that the shields were well supplied with power, too. Jet might talk down its capabilities, Ula decided, but the ship could undoubtedly hold its own.

There was just enough room for everyone in the c.o.c.kpit. Shigar had the copilot's seat. Larin had clocked more flight hours, but until her hand was properly treated she was relegated to astrometrics. Clunker had patched himself in to the ship's flight-control systems and shut down his photoreceptors. That left Ula and Hetchkee to ride out the short hop to orbit in the pa.s.senger seats.

As the brown atmosphere faded away to stars, Ula instantly felt lighter, both physically and in spirit. Jet deftly guided the ship into a stable parking orbit and put it on autopilot. Then he swiveled in his seat and folded his hands behind his head.

"Now for the ten-trillion-credit question, " he said. "Where to?"

Everyone looked at Shigar, who shifted awkwardly in his seat.

"Easier asked than answered, I'm afraid, " he said. "Ta.s.saa Bareesh thinks we're going after Stryver, so I guess that's what we have to do. "

"Why don't we just run?" Ula asked.

"I can't, " said Jet.

"Because of a made-up contract?"

"Because she'll hunt me down and nail me to her wall if I do. She's planted a homing beacon somewhere on this old bucket. I'm sure of it. That's what I'd do in her shoes. "

"So we go looking for Stryver" said Larin. "He'll head for the hexes' home, for sure. "

"If we had the navicomp, " said Shigar, "we'd do the same. "

"He has to crack the cipher first, " said Jet. "We had a go or two at it on the way to Hutta, without any luck. "

"Is there any other data we haven't been given? For instance, when you interdicted the Cinzia, could you tell from its trajectory where it originated?"

Jet shook his head. "We tried that, too. Project the ship's route back, and you get empty s.p.a.ce to the edge of the galaxy, and then a lot more empty s.p.a.ce after that. Same with everything else we picked up. It all points nowhere. "

"They were smart, " said Larin. "And they really wanted to stay hidden. I wonder why. "

They pondered that question for a moment, in silence. Ula had no insight to offer into the psychology of Lema Xandret. The hexes were remarkable and strange, but that alone didn't reveal anything about the people who had made them.

Or did it? On Panatha, Ula's great-great-grandfather had been fond of collecting ancient Palawan sayings. "What you do speaks louder than what you say" was one of them. Another was "What you make makes you. "

Applying that philosophy to their present situation seemed impossible to Ula, until he remembered something Yeama had told him.

"The thing that built the hexes, " he said. "The nest. It was made of a strange alloy. What was it?"

"Lutetium and promethium, " said let.

"So they're rare metals. There can't be many worlds where both are found, right?"

Jet poured cold water on this spark of an idea. "There isn't a single surveyed world with those metals in abundance. "

"What about Wild s.p.a.ce? There are lots of unsurveyed worlds in there. "

"Sure, but it's a big place and they don't call it wild for nothing. "

Ula sagged back into his seat. "How did you convince Ta.s.saa Bareesh you had the slightest chance of finding this place?" he asked Shigar. "It seems hopeless to me. "

Shigar looked embarra.s.sed. "I reminded her that I'm a Jedi. I told her we have our ways. "

Larin reached into one of her suit's compartments and lifted out a strip of silvery metal. "This is how we're going to find the planet, " she said triumphantly, offering it to Shigar. "This, and your mysterious ways. "

Shigar's eyebrows went down in confusion, then down even farther in a frown. "No, " he said, pushing the metal away from him. "It won't work. "

"It has to, " she insisted. "You told me about your psychometric ability..."

"My unreliable psychometric ability, Larin. "

"...and that your Master thinks you can tame it. What better time to try than now?"

"No better time, " he agreed, "but you can't make it work just by wanting it to. "

"I trust you, " she said with unaffected candor. "And you haven't let me down yet, not even once. I don't expect you to start now. "

That stopped his protests. He reached out, took the shard of metal from her hand, and held it up to the light. It gleamed like a metallic diamond.

"Is that what I think it is?" asked Ula.

"It's a piece of the nest, " she confirmed.

"And Shigar can use his mind to find out where it comes from?"

"I can try, "said Shigar, sternly. "That's all. I can't promise anything. "

"Well, it's a start. How long will it take?"

"I don't know. I'll talk to Master Satele, first. She might be able to guide me through this. Can you put a call through to Tython?"

"Faster than you can ask me to. "

"I'll take it in the main hold, " he said. "There's a holoprojector there. "

Shigar got up from the copilot's seat. Jet fiddled with the instruments in front of him, opening up comm channels and shunting data through the ship.

Larin was sitting thoughtfully, eyes staring blankly at the ladder down which Shigar had disappeared. A tiny worry line creased the bridge of her nose.

Ula leaned in to whisper, "You don't really think he can do this, do you?"

Her green eyes focused on him. "There's only one thing I think, " she said. "If he doesn't even try, that'd be worse than failing. "

Ula could only nod in the face of her unswerving integrity, and wish that he possessed half of it.

"Now, " she said, "I have to get this glove off and look at my hand. In the absence of a field medic, I need one of you two to help me out. Private Hetchkee? Envoy Vii?"

"I'll do it, " said Ula quickly. "You stay here and back up Jet, in case he needs it, " he told Hetchkee.

"Medkit's in the aft air lock" Jet called out. "Let me know when you have a destination and I'll get this crate moving. "

"Will do. "

Larin headed for the ladder and Ula followed her, frantically dredging up everything he'd learned about medicine from a brief training session on Dromund Kaas, years ago.

CHAPTER 23.

Shigar paced the Auriga Fire's cramped hold as best he could while waiting for Jet to patch him through to Tython. He wasn't doing a very good job of it. He could only manage three long strides from one side to the other, and he had banged his head on a protruding instrument panel twice already. The pointlessness of the exercise was just becoming apparent to him when the old-model holoprojector flickered and emitted a soft whisper of static.

He pulled from the opposite wall a retractable chair designed for someone much smaller than him and sat down, feeling all knees and elbows.

A blueish image of the Grand Master formed. It flickered and jumped but held firm enough to follow.

"Shigar, " Satele Shan said, raising her hand in greeting. "I'm pleased to hear from you. Are you on Hutta?"

He briefly outlined his current position: in a smuggler's vessel over the Hutts' homeworld, still wearing what remained of his impromptu disguise. "I find myself in an intractable position, and I need your counsel, Master. "

She smiled, slightly but not unkindly. "You have agreed to things you do not feel you can accomplish, or which you do not want to accomplish. Perhaps both. "

Her powers of perception startled him. "You can sense this from so far away?" Truly she was the most powerful Jedi in the galaxy!

She shook her head and smiled with charming self-deprecation. "No, Shigar. I just remember what its like to be in the field. Responsibility, decisions, consequences-they feel very different when a.s.sumed in isolation. Do they not, my Padawan?"

He lowered his head. "Yes, Master. "

"Tell me, " she said, "and I will offer what counsel I can. "

Shigar started at the beginning, with his and Larin's arrival on Hutta. He skipped the mundane details of his infiltration of the palace and described his first encounter with the unique technology offered for sale by Ta.s.saa Bareesh, the silver roots spreading out from the vault into the underground tunnels, and Larin's account of the droid-nest that Jet Nebula had pulled from the wreckage of the Cinzia. He described his three-way fight with Dao Stryver and the young Sith, then the emergence of the hexes and their near-escape.

"You fought a Sith?" Master Satele asked him, sounding impressed.

"I believe she was an apprentice like myself, " he admitted, "else I wouldn't have survived. "

"Regardless. A Sith and a Mandalorian at once, and you did survive. Few Padawans could boast of such a thing, Shigar. The fact that you are not boasting of it I take to be a sign of good character. "

"Master, I do not believe I survived by skill, or even luck. " In the retelling, he noticed several things that hadn't occurred to him at the time. "Stryver would have defeated both myself and the Sith apprentice, given time. The interruption of the hexes changed everything. He no longer fought us. He stood back to watch us fight this new enemy. I believe he was holding back. "

She leaned back into her seat, cupping her chin with one hand. Shigar recognized the background; she was in her private study, an austere, minimalist s.p.a.ce with few ornaments, but constructed from the finest possible orowood.

"I see" was all she said. "Go on. "

He described the hexes in more detail, beginning with the sixfold symmetry of their basic appearance, their identical lack of personality or individuality, and their deadly unwillingness to stand down, then moving on to the glimpses of their internal structure that he had received while killing one of them.

"The technology is quite outside my experience, " he said, remembering honeycomb matrices and strange oily fluids leaking from the body. "The hexes are no more resourceful than any normal droid-certainly no more so than the training droids on Tython-but they display an adaptability I've never seen before. An injured one merged with another to form a single eight-legged version. Later, one activated a camouflage system that the others didn't seem to possess, and the weapons of a third became more powerful. It almost seems like... "

"Like what, Shigar?"

"I don't want to say evolving, Master, but I do think they're capable of adaptive redesign. "

"In the heat of combat?"

"Yes. Particularly so, I suspect. "

"That makes them very remarkable droids indeed, " she said. "Who could have built such things?"

"Envoy Vii was interrogated by Dao Stryver, Master. The Mandalorian let slip that Lema Xandret was a droid maker. "

"Do you think these are her creations, Shigar?"

"I have too little information to say for certain, but what we do have is suggestive. "

She nodded. "Indeed. Dao Stryver was hunting both a particular droid maker and a ship containing the means to build remarkable droids. Lema Xandret is most likely the architect of these things. But what is their purpose? If they are weapons, whom are they meant for?"

"It's possible, Master, that they aren't weapons at all. Not aimed weapons, anyway. They may simply have been fighting to get home. "

"To do what?"

Shigar had no speculation to offer on that point. He vividly remembered the droids' screeching rage at being obstructed in their quest to escape. Such emotional programming was not normal for combat droids-or any droids at all, in his experience.

"There's something else, " he said. "When Stryver confronted the Sith apprentice, he said something about her mother. I don't know exactly what he meant, but it got a reaction from her. Whoever her mother is, she's connected somehow. "

He let that fact sit where it was. As it stood, the Sith's involvement was unexplained. While tempted to draw conclusions from suggestive facts, he thought it best to wait until they had more information. The wrong conclusion could be deadly, if they based their actions upon it.

Master Satele, it seemed, agreed.

"So, " she said, "the thing in the Cinzia wasn't an ancient artifact that we or the Sith might find useful. It was something strange and new. Where does that leave us?"

"The Mandalorian has the navicomp, " he said. "He'll be decoding the information it contains as we speak. "

"And then what?"

"His motives are unknown, " Shigar said, casting his mind back to the things Ula and Larin had said on the way to orbit. "I believe that the Mandalorians have been involved in this from the beginning. Stryver may have wanted the navicomp, in part, to destroy evidence that the Cinzia's 'diplomatic mission' was with Mandalore-but that makes less sense the more I think about it. Mandalorians aren't unified, and they don't parley with anyone. Fight or conquer, that's their philosophy. "

"They allied themselves with the Empire against us, " Master Satele reminded him.

"Yes, but that's the Empire, not some isolated colony in the middle of nowhere. "