Akanah hibernated—or hid—for nearly ten hours.
But rather than frustrating Luke’s curiosity, her absence redirected it. For the last five hours of her isolation, Mud Sloth drifted in realspace on the fringe of Atzerri’s Oort Cloud with only the cold methane-ice comets for company.
With all his inhibitions about making inquiries behind Akanah’s back gone, Luke made full use of the time, his credits, and his priority access codes.
From Carratos he requested any information available from newsgrid, political, or police records on Akanah Norand Pell, Andras Pell, and Talsava. He sent the same query to Coruscant’s criminal records office and citizen registry and to the home offices of both the Coruscant Global Newsgrid and the New Republic Prime Newsgrid.
From the New Republic Reference Service, he requested a quickreport on naming conventions on Lucazec and Carratos, thinking he might parse another lead from the names in hand.
A second request to the same source asked for five-hundred-word excerpts from all matches on the key words “Fallanassi” and “White Current.” After a short debate with himself, and despite the pathetic and sensa tional inaccuracies of Secrets of the Jedi, Luke also contacted an information broker on Atzerri and paid a hundred credits for a search on the same keys.
He also requested a Current Terms & Conditions brochure from the chief librarian’s office on Obroa-skai.
The library computers there were the only resource offering both a greater variety and a greater volume of records than those held by Coruscant.
But Obroa-skai’s generosity with its planetary treasure was limited.
To protect against theft of the library, and to provide the resources needed to maintain it, accessing the records meant either going to Obroa-skai or hiring one of the library’s own trained contract researchers.
In either case, Obroa-skai was not a resource one turned to for quick answers. The official language of New Republic recordkeeping was Basic, and everything held by Coruscant was kept in one of several readily searchable data specifications. But the Obroa-skai library was a collection of primary documents, in ten thousand storage formats and uncountable languages.
The most complete general index covered only fifteen percent of the library’s holdings, and all the specialty indexes combined added only a few percent to that.
Those were the principal reasons why the brochure-which Luke received within minutes of requesting it, as the first response to any of his inquiries—reported that a normal single-part library search was averaging eight days. The waiting list for terminal time was holding at fifteen days, and the backlog for contract researchers had climbed to seventy.
Discouraging as those numbers were, Luke dispatched a command-control message to Artoo and Threepio on Yavin 4, instructing them to go to Obroa-skai and search the library on his behalf, as they had done once before.
The only request he made that was refused outright was for the Fleet Office’s daily Tactical Briefing Memo randum, also known as the trouble map—a compendium of situation reports from all the various Fleet and base commands. Unlike that aboard his E-wing, Mud Sloth’s hypercomm wasn’t military-rated, and there was no persuading the Intelligence Section to send a white-star file to what they considered an unsecured receiver.
Luke thought about comming Admiral Ackbar directly to ask his appraisal of the trouble in Farlax—the news digest Luke had picked up on Atzerri was almost as sensational and unbelievable as the Jedi document. But doing so promised to invite questions Luke wasn’t ready to answer, and possibly force a decision he wasn’t ready to make.
Instead, he chose to contact the public information offices of both the Senate and the General Ministry. He asked for the official record of the past twenty days, hoping he could read between the lines well enough to know if it was time to head home.
Then he lowered the lights in the flight compartment, stretched out on the deck behind the control couches, and closed his eyes. All his pending requests required patience, from minutes to hours to days. But just reaching out had left him feeling better about his circumstances.
Even if some of his efforts returned nothing useful, the next time he and Akanah talked, he expected to be in a much stronger position.
Sorry as I am to say it, what I have to have now is reason to trust you, not just reason to want to, he thought. If we’re going to go on any farther together, you’re going to have to start trusting me.
Prompted by a sensation like a feather tickling somewhere inside his skull, Luke became aware of two things at once: that he had fallen asleep on the deck, and that he was being watched.
He turned his head in the direction of the sensation and opened his eyes. He found himself looking directly at Akanah. She was sitting on the edge of the bunk, hands folded on her lap, her hair bed-tousled.