“Yes, sir-but how far? She could have jumped all the way to Byss, for all we know. “
The mere mention of the former Emperor’s throne world, deep in the Core, darkened the mood on the bridge still further.
“Let’s hope not, sailor, ” said Pakkpekatt. “Let us earnestly hope not. “
Chapter 12
Long before they reached Lucazec, Luke Skywalker settled onMud Sloth as the name for Akanah s previously unnamed Verpine Adventurer.
He realized he had been spoiled by years in high-performance military spacecraft, operating under wartime conditions or a military waiver.
But realizing that didn’t make it any easier to adjust to civilian navigation restrictions. Not only wasMud Sloth a dawdler in realspace, but its hyperspace motivator simply refused to enter or leave hyperspace within a planetary Flight Control Zone.
Luke didn’t object in principle to FCZ regulations. They helped ensure that less experienced pilots in less capable ships made slow approaches to populated worlds and busy spacelanes. But he had never been subjected to a four-day realspace crawl just to leave Coruscant. He was accustomed to reaching for the hyperdrive moments after his ship cleared the atmosphere.
Mud Slothinsisted on waiting until it had cleared the star system.
But there was nothing to be done about it. The Adventurer wouldn’t accept his military waiver, and didn’t even have a System Configuration option on its cockpit displays. It was designed to prevent such meddling.
Driven by impatience, Luke briefly considered powering down the hyperdrive and opening up the service access to see what he could do with it. But he soon talked himself out of it, realizing that reprogramming a motivator was beyond his talents as a tinkerer. Even a starship as simple as the Adventurer was far more complex than the Incom T-16s
and landspeeders he’d spent so many days hopping and rebuilding back on Tatooine.
No, when it came to hyperspace, it was too easy for a small oversight to become a final, fatal error.
Anyone who’d flown for long had heard the stories and respected the danger. Of all the risks inherent in traveling unimaginable distances at incalculable speeds, the one that entered most pilots’ nightmares was the one-way jump-never coming out of hyperspace. Even Han and Chewie left the exacting business of rebalancing a motivator to professionals, and never begrudged them their hefty fees.
But that had left Luke trapped in cramped quarters with Akanah for just over eleven days on the way to Lucazec-something he had not been prepared for.
After months in isolation, he had not been prepared for that much close contact with anyone. Luke wondered how he would have borne it if Akanah had not been so willing to make allowances.
She did not force conversation on him, either idle or earnest. Nor did she make him feel as though he was being watched, that she was waiting for him to do something. Without his ever asking, she granted him the only kind of privacy available under the circumstances-the privacy of the mind and heart. She did not intrude there without his invitation, hiding her own needs and curiosity so perfectly that they seemed more like comfortable old friends than strangers.
At her suggestion, they adopted a watch schedule that had them sleeping at opposite ends of the day, spaced so that neither of them had to climb into a hot bunk. She seemed to welcome the reassurance that someone was awake while she rested, and did not seem to mind that the schedule reduced their time together to a few hours twice a day.
Luke thought Akanah must be accustomed to being alone, for she seemed to have mastered the art of keeping time moving without restless motion. She read from a battered old datapad, meditated in the copilot’s couch, and intently studied the Adventurer’s owner, pilot, and system helps.
At times she even sought privacy for herself.
Akanah practiced her Fallanassi craft in silence behind the drawn curtain of the sleeper, and stripped to a body-hugging monoskin to exercise only when it was Luke’s turn in the zippered bunkbag. She even politely ignored him when he made both discoveries, making it unnecessary for him to apologize, or for her to explain.
They did take meals together, dipping twice a day into Akanah’s modest cache of stabilized
foodstores-many of
them long-expired
Imperial expedition packs, a telltale sign of desperately tight finances. But even meals did not become an occasion for substantive conversation until near the end, with Lucazec visible through the viewport and the reason for their journey too much in their thoughts to be ignored.
“Sixteen more hours, ” Luke said, tearing open a pouch of Noryath brown meatbread. “I hate the waiting. I want to crawl back in the bunk and sleep until the autopilot starts asking whether we want to orbit or land. “