Stepping over to the window, he looked up at the stars. You will know, Yoda had also told him, when you are calm, at peace. Taking a deep breath, Luke set about calming his mind.
Artoo’s soft warbling was starting to take on a concerned tone by the time he turned back around. “All right,” he told the droid. “I saw a world with a wide, deep canyon that had buildings built into the sides and a lot of lights at the bottom. Check the main computer and see where that might be.”
Artoo warbled an acknowledgment and jacked into the computer outlet. Luke stepped to his side and watched as a planet name and description came up on the display. “No, it wasn’t Belsavis,” he said. “The surface wasn’t covered with glaciers, and there were no domes. It was also a lot more pleasant.” He frowned, pulling the image back from his memory. “There were bridges arching all the way across the canyon I saw. There were … I saw a group of nine of them, arranged in a diamond pattern: one starting on one level, two more side by side crossing from the next level down, three on the next, then two and then one.”
Artoo whistled and searched some more. A half-dozen more systems scrolled across the display&mdash
“Wait a minute,” Luke said. “Back up one-Cejansij system. See if there are any pictures in the datafile.”
The display backed up, then altered to a succession of orbital, aerial, and ground pictures. Luke watched as they went past, and by the time the series came to an end, he knew it was the place. “That’s it,” he said. “The Canyonade on Cejansij. That’s where we’re going.”
The droid twittered uncertainly, his question scrolling across the bottom of the display. “I don’t know why,” Luke told him. “I just know I need to go there.”
There was another twitter, this one sounding slightly incredulous. “To be honest, I don’t understand it myself,” Luke conceded. “I saw a lot of things in that vision, things that are happening or maybe are about to happen. I saw my students leaving the academy-why, I don’t know. I saw Leia and Han in some kind of trouble-“
The droid warbled anxiously, and another question appeared. “No, I don’t know if Threepio was with them,” Luke told him. “The point is that there are a lot of places out there we could go where I might be able to affect things. Too many places.”
He pointed at the view of the vast canyon. “But the Canyonade is the only place where I actually saw myself. The one part of the vision where I felt peace.”
He looked out at the stars again. “So that’s where we’ll go.”
For a moment there was silence. Then Artoo warbled again. “Point taken,” Luke agreed with a smile. “If we’re going to go, let’s stop dithering and go.”
Besides which, he told himself as they headed for the docking bay, Leia’s a Jedi in her own right. She can take care of herself. And Han’s got a long history of beating the odds, too. And Rogue Squadron could manage without him, and wherever his Jedi students had been going they surely had a good reason for doing so. Whatever this trip to Cejansij was all about, all of them could do without him for a while.
Forty minutes later, once again in space, he pulled the hyperdrive lever and sent the X-wing jumping to lightspeed. Trying hard not to think about the vision he’d had of Mara.
CHAPTER
13
Ceok Orou’cya, First Secretary of the Combined Bothan Clans, was urbane, polite, and completely gracious. But beneath the polish, as near as Leia could tell, he also seemed genuinely surprised by her visit.
And beneath the surprise, she suspected, was a great deal of worry.
“You must understand my position here, Councilor Organa Solo,” he said for the third time as he ushered Leia, Han, and Threepio past the outer reception station and into the sumptuous three-story lobby/atrium that filled the front third of the Combined Clans Center Building. “Your visit, unannounced this way, is highly irregular. Your request”-his fur twitched despite obvious efforts to control it-“is even more so.”
“You have the letter from Gavrisom,” Han put in gruffly. “You have the letter from Fey’lya. What more do you want?”
The secretary threw a sideways look at Han, and despite the seriousness of the situation Leia had to fight to keep from smiling. Han was at his absolutely most intimidating: standing stiff and tall, scowling unblinkingly, his hand resting on the blaster holstered at his side. The knuckles of his gunhand were slightly whitened with pressure as he gripped the weapon, a subtlety she’d suggested to him on the trip here from Coruscant and one that clearly wasn’t lost on its intended audience.