The surface beneath his booted feet was like hardened slag. He used his boot heel to scrape away the tarnish and space dust, exposing bare metal that shone in the faint starlight. Tilting his helmet upward, he saw the other rocks overhead, boulders like clouds casting random shadows across the core asteroid.
Tenel Ka strode beside Lowie, who stood tall and hulking in his environment suit. Tenel Ka’s grandmother had ordered a specially tailored suit for the young warrior girl, sealing off the extra sleeve for her missing arm so that the empty fabric would not get in her way.
Jaina trudged forward, toolkit in hand, pointing her facemask downward as she studied the pocked metal surface. She stepped to a fissure in the rock and squatted to let the light in her helmet shine into the fissure like a beacon.
“Look here,” she said, her voice echoing through their helmet comm system.
Jacen hurried forward with Tenel Ka and Lowie to see delicate crystalline growths sprouting like feathers made of ice chips. Transparent needles branched in random directions, beautiful and glistening in the glow from Jaina’s helmet light.
“What are they?” Jacen said, breathless with wonder. “Are they alive?”
“Some kind of silicon formation,” his sister answered.
“Ah. Aha,” Tenel Ka said. “Crystal ferns. I have heard of them in other asteroids. Some prospectors search for them. They are quite fragile and therefore are considered great treasures.”
“Should we take one of those for Mom?” Jacen asked.
“No, let them keep growing,” Jaina said. “I want something more … special. Something less fragile.” She hopped across the broad fissure, but misjudged the low gravity and ended up flying many meters beyond the edge.
“Hey, that looks like fun.” Jacen took a flying leap and soared over his sister’s head, tumbling in the air, and then gradually drifted back down to the surface.
“Be careful,” Jaina said. “It wouldn’t take too much to reach escape velocity on this little rock—you’d fly off into space, and we’d have to go through the trouble of capturing you again.”
“Oh,” Jacen said. “I guess that would be something to avoid.”
Jaina found a polished lake of pure solidified metal and knelt down, pulling her lightsaber free from its clip at her belt. “Looks like a good spot,” she said.
She switched on the lightsaber and scribed a rough octagon in the surface, cutting deep and angling toward the center. Tenel Ka and Lowie went to help. The pure metal vaporized, sizzling and popping in the cold vacuum as Jaina worked with slow precision to cut free a piece of what had once been the core of Alderaan.
While his sister continued her careful excavation, Jacen went to look at a series of small holes no wider than his leg punched into the surface of the asteroid. He ducked down, shining his helmet beacon into one of the deep round craters.
When his light gleamed on an open mouth and set of sharp teeth, he stumbled backward with a panicked cry. “Blaster bolts!” Just then, something lunged out—long and snakelike, with a body like a fat worm and a mouth that held much more than its share of teeth..
In the low gravity Jacen’s quick reaction sent him tumbling backward, end over end. When he finally righted himself, he saw a larval space slug still thrashing and snapping for victims, rooted inside its little crater tunnel.
“Friend Jacen, are you all right?” Tenel Ka had bounded over immediately upon hearing his outcry through their helmet comm systems.
“Just surprised, that’s all.” He gestured with a gloved hand toward the writhing space slug. “I didn’t expect anything alive out here—we’re in open space and hard vacuum.”
Jaina came over, laughing more with relief that her brother was safe than from any outright mirth.
Jacen took a deep breath. “Dad told us that when he and Mom were in the Hoth asteroid belt, what they thought was a cave turned out to be the gullet of a huge space slug. Those creatures are rare, though—I’ve never seen one before. Especially not a baby.”
Curious, he crept forward to look at the specimen as it withdrew slowly back into its hole. “This must be a young one. They feed on metal, I think, so this core asteroid would be a good place to raise larvae.”
Tenel Ka agreed gruffly. “The asteroid would provide nourishment for a very long time.”
As Jacen bent closer, his light startled the young space slug, and it lunged out again, snapping its teeth. The creature seemed blind, unable to locate its exact target. Jacen backed off. “I guess it doesn’t want to be disturbed,” he said dejectedly.
Jaina returned to her work and a few moments later lifted out a beautiful solid chunk. The heavy metallic prize glittered and shone in the soft light. The lightsaber cutting had given it polished sides and clean edges, so that the metal looked like a bright faceted gem.
“All right, we’ve got what we came for,” she said, delight and excitement pouring through her voice. “We promised Dad we’d head right home.”
The young Jedi Knights followed her back to the Rock Dragon, and Jacen cast one brief glance toward where the space slug had gone back to its lair.
Inside the ship again, their suits removed, Jacen powered up the comm system to send a message to Yavin 4. Raynar answered the signal, apparently assigned to communication duties again at the Jedi academy. “Hey, Raynar,” Jacen said, “we just wanted to report in.”
“Good. Han Solo’s been in here a dozen times, waiting to hear from you,” Raynar said. “He’s getting anxious.”
Jacen laughed. “You can tell Dad that we found what we wanted. Our mission is a complete success.”
“I’ll tell him that,” the young man from Alderaan said. “You’re being very mysterious.”
“Well, we are on sort of a secret mission, you know,” Jacen said with a grin. He signed off and sat back in his chair as the others fastened their crash webbing and Jaina powered up the Rock Dragon’s engines.
Time to go back to Yavin 4, before anything went wrong….
14
While Jaina sat back, polishing and admiring the chunk of metal she had taken from Alderaan’s core, Lowbacca took the pilot’s seat of the Rock Dragon, piloting them through the hazards of the asteroid belt.
“Just take us home, Lowie,” Jaina said. “I can’t wait until we give this to Mom. I think it’ll be the best present we’ve ever given her.”
The young Wookiee growled happily, and Em Teedee translated. “Master Lowbacca comments that the piloting task you requested is certainly within his capabilities and he is ready and willing to perform it.”
Jaina laughed. “I thought he just said, ‘Okay.’” Em Teedee gave a miffed bleep.
Lowbacca tested the ship’s systems, scanning the unfamiliar Hapan controls as he powered up the engines. Carefully, he released the Rock Dragon’s magnetic grip on the metal asteroid. The Hapan cruiser drifted free and floated out into the rubble stream that had once been Alderaan.
Checking for his best exit path, Lowie verified the orbital streams plotted on the navigation screen. He scratched his ginger-colored fur and hoped he wouldn’t have to resort to so many U-turn maneuvers to depart from the rubble field. Now that the companions weren’t aimlessly searching for some unknown target, charting their path back to the Jedi academy on Yavin 4 should be a simple task—or so Lowie hoped.
Just then a strange ship appeared from out of nowhere, its weapons powered up. Without warning, the enemy ship blasted at them.
The first set of high-energy bolts streaked by, heating up the edges of their shields. Luckily, because of all the space debris, Lowie had already set the shields to maximum as a simple precaution. He roared in alarm. The other young Jedi Knights cried out, trying to hold on through the concussion. Another laser blast hammered against their shields.