“You know,” she said, chin in hands. “I’d be willing to bet there’s enough room in there to install a hyperdrive.”
“You said that TIE fighters were short-range craft,” Tenel Ka said.
Lowie responded with a contemplative sound as he thought this over. Jacen merely moaned at the mention of more work.
“They were designed to be short-range,” Jaina said. “Never equipped with hyperdrives because the Emperor didn’t want to sacrifice the maneuverability.”
Jacen snorted. “Or maybe he didn’t want any of his fighter pilots making a quick escape.”
Jaina turned toward him and grinned. “I guess I never thought of it that way.” Her face lit with enthusiasm as she looked at her friends. “But there’s nothing to stop us from equipping this TIE fighter with a hyperdrive, is there? Dad gave me one to tinker with.”
“It is a possibility,” Tenel Ka said, without much enthusiasm.
They were all tired, Jaina knew. But her mind raced with the excitement of this new thought. She made a quick decision. “Okay, let’s go back to the academy. I want to make some measurements. We’ll call it a day.”
Jacen sighed with relief. “I think that’s been your best suggestion in hours.”
Back again the next afternoon, Jacen lay flat on his stomach, his chin resting on one clenched fist as he surveyed the moist ground beneath a tangle of low, thick bushes. He left his feet sticking out from beneath the bushes so that the others could locate him easily should they look up from their work—though there was little chance of that. From behind him he could hear thumping and clinking as Jaina labored to install the hyperdrive in the TIE fighter.
A thick splat told him that Tenel Ka and Lowbacca were applying sealant over the hole patch at the base of the reattached solar panel. The others were all busy, leaving Jacen free to hunt for “missing parts” again.
He watched, fascinated, as a leaf-shaped creature that matched the blue-green color of the foliage around him attached itself to a branch. It extended a long mottled brown tongue that flattened against the twig in a perfect camouflage. Jacen could sense the leaf creature’s anticipation. Soon a crowd of minute insects, drawn by a smell Jacen could not discern, landed on the “branch” and became stuck fast. Jacen chuckled and shook his head as the leaf creature retracted its tongue with an audible fwoookt.
With nothing interesting to be seen on the ground, he gave the bush a small shake once the leaf creature departed. He was rewarded with a hissing rustle as a dislodged object fell near his elbow. He picked it up.
It was an Imperial insignia.
He turned the metallic object over in his hand, but then he saw a familiar shimmer at the edge of his gaze, and he reflexively grabbed for it. Jacen wriggled backward out of the bushes, stood, and bounded over to the TIE fighter.
“Look what I found!” he crowed. His sister’s lower half protruded at an awkward angle from the cockpit, while she was apparently attempting to connect some part of the hyperdrive behind the pilot’s seat.
Her muffled voice drifted out to him. “Just a moment. I need a flash heater.”
Tenel Ka passed a small tool in from the other side of the open cockpit. She and Lowbacca, wiping sealant from their hands, came around to see what Jacen had discovered.
“A brooch of some sort?” Tenel Ka asked, examining it closely.
Jacen shook his head. “An Imperial insignia. Came off a uniform of some kind.”
“There,” Jaina said, extracting herself from the cockpit of the TIE fighter and jumping down beside them. “That should do it.”
Jacen handed her the insignia, and she nodded absently. “Look what else I found,” he said, holding up his left arm, which was wrapped in a glowing shimmer.
Jaina made a sound somewhere between a growl and a laugh, and backed away. “Great. Just what we need—another crystal snake that can get loose.”
Jacen used a tactic he knew his sister couldn’t resist. “Oh,” he said, letting disappointment show. “It’s just that you’ve always been so good at designing things—I thought you could come up with a cage that the snakes couldn’t escape from. But if you really don’t think you can …”
He saw Jaina’s face light at the challenge, but then her brandy-brown eyes narrowed shrewdly, and he knew that she had caught on. “That,” she said, “is a dirty trick. You know I could—” She shook her head, sighed in mock exasperation, and seemed to resign herself to the inevitable. “Oh, all right! I’ll build you a new cage for your crystal snakes—”
“Thanks,” a grinning Jacen cut her off before she could change her mind. “You’re the best sister in the whole galaxy!”
Jaina huffed indelicately. “But don’t bring this new snake back to your quarters until I have the cage ready.”
“Okay,” Jacen said, “I’ll keep it someplace safe—maybe in the cargo compartment. Can I have the Imperial insignia back, please?” Jaina tossed it to him, and he began to polish it against the sleeve of his jumpsuit. “I wonder if it belonged to the pilot.”
Lowbacca looked at the crashed TIE fighter and then back at Jacen and rumbled a question. “Master Lowbacca suggests it is unlikely that the pilot survived the crash, even if his fall was cushioned by the Massassi trees,” Em Teedee said.
Tenel Ka looked around the site with unblinking eyes. “No bones.”
Jacen shrugged. “After twenty years, that’s not surprising. Lots of scavengers in the jungle. I’ve been assuming he was thrown clear.”
Tenel Ka’s cool eyes looked troubled, but she nodded. “Perhaps.”
The four worked in companionable silence as they attached the final hole patch to the damaged hull. Then, while the other three applied the slow-drying sealant, Jacen hunted around in the underbrush. He knew he shouldn’t be out of sight for more than a few seconds, but he had already searched all of the thickets in clear view of the crash site.
Promising himself that he wouldn’t be gone long, Jacen pushed through a particularly thick tangle of dense, dark-leaved plants and emerged into a small clearing no wider than his outstretched arms. The dirt was completely devoid of plant life, as if some animal trampled it so often that vegetation no longer grew there. It extended deeper into the jungle—a path! It was narrow, but the hard-packed trail was unmistakable.
Forgetting his earlier promise to stay close, Jacen plunged through the bushes and followed the trail. The grove of Massassi trees was younger, their branches lower to the ground. Perhaps that was why none of the companions had seen this path from up above.
The jungle grew darker around him as he trudged on. The chitters, growls, and screeches of forest animals seemed more menacing.
Just as he began to realize that he was much too far away from the others, he came upon a clearing beside a small stream.
Some creature had built a dam across the stream, diverting some of the water into a depression beside it to form a wide, shallow pool. Against the burn-hollowed trunk of a huge Massassi tree at the water’s edge leaned a number of long, fat branches covered with moss and ferns to form a crude shelter—perhaps the lair of the creature whose path Jacen had been following.
Jacen reached out toward the little hovel with his mind, but sensed nothing larger than insects living around it. Skirting the small pond, he approached the low shelter, his heart pounding loudly in his chest. He knew he should be more cautious. But what was this place?
What if the beast that lived here was a predator? What if it returned as he was investigating?
Jacen jumped as he heard a loud crack—but it was only a twig snapping under his own foot. He bent forward to look into the branchy opening of the shelter, and gasped at what he saw there.