Just before Luke entered hyperspace, he took the chance of one final holocall to Ben.

"Ben," he said, once his son had picked up. The subtle flush on his cheeks was not disguised entirely by the blue overtones of the holocomm. "I can tell exactly what you and Vestara have been getting up to in my absence, and think you ought to know that you will be expelled from the Order if I come back and she happens to be pregnant."

"Wilco, dad. No getting her pregnant 'til you get back."

"I mean it"

"I love you."

Luke rang off, smiling at his son's somewhat insubordinate humour.

~0~

The slight lurch as the falcon dropped out of hyperspace brought Leia out of a light sleep of the kind which had become remarkably easy to fall into at the falcon's controls, now the cockpit had been renovated. Then Leia remembered that the girl responsible had been one of the things she and Luke had talked about during his all-too-brief time on the capital world. That she had been allowed back into the order alarmed Leia, but she knew her brother was a little too trusting at times. Ben was simply in love with her. Leia, however, would be waiting for treachery. Vestara Khai was the one girl Ben had dated she would not want to have as a niece-in-law.

As she guided the falcon through the omnipresent debris from the Battle of Endor, Leia made the usual calls to the spaceport authority, and was surprised when a Ewok answered the call.

"Threepio, get up here!" she called to the protocol droid.

"Yes mistress." The droid called back.

As she waited for the droid to arrive, Leia began to wonder whether there would be anything to find.

~0~

It took a full day for Ben to begin to become restless. Without his father or any other being he normally interacted with, even Vestara's company began to grow slightly boring. His sixteen year-old mind and body had almost become used to adventure during his father's exile, and he wanted something to do.

It took him about ten minutes to slice into his father's data terminal. In half an hour, he issued an order, dated two hours after they got back, for him to go and hunt down a small pirate gang attacking ships on routes near Ossus. He would be able to base himself out of the temple spaceport, rather than the sort of space station where a StealthX starfighter attracted unwelcome attention. It was a decision with unforeseen consequences.

~0~

As Luke reverted from hyperspace at the last known position of Jaina's emergency signal, which had faded about a day before, except for the life sign trace, which used a carrier wave that was not compatible with a locator, as it could only carry continuously changing data.

The sight which greeted him, from a scientific point of view was very predictable; the black hole cluster of the Maw. Luke had been there too recently not to shudder at his memories of Abeloth, a dark-side, immortal entity which had been imprisoned within for millennia. They had managed to banish her into the force, but he knew she would be back.

As he keyed the starfighter's navicomputer for the first set of coordinates, he already knew where he was going. Shelter.

~0~

Because of the rules on Vestara his father had laid down, Ben could not put her in command of the shadow, acting as bait for the pirates he was hunting.

Instead, he had borrowed a newly qualified knight, already tipped for the Jedi fighter squadrons, a young Twi'lek known Lima. He had avoided Vestara seeing her, as the Twi'lek was female and did look somewhat attractive.

With Ben loaded into his StealthX, and the cockpit set to remain open until he lifted up, the shadow, operating under the name Flower of Ryloth, the two Jedi made a unsecured distress call indicating the craft was a smugglers ship hauling a mixture of foodstuffs and a small cache of weapons and ship parts, and had suffered a hyperdrive failure. The pirates did not waste time in showing up. Within a few minutes, a small corvette had dropped out of hyperspace and was bleeding a mixture of Headhunters and Uglies into space; a force the sensors estimated as a squadron of each. He launched his StealthX, while sending the code to reveal the vessel's true colours.

To their credit, the pirates didn't hesitate to press the attack. As the Jade Shadow's cannons deployed, then turned space red, Ben was looping round to deliver a shadow bomb into the rear of the corvette.

After the first discharge, aimed for the corvette's shield generators, in the moments before the craft's point defence gunners could pick him out on the targeting displays, he deployed a pair of shadow bombs straight into the vessels engines, sending it sprawling to starboard as they detonated.

He then activated the comlink onboard, simply broadcasting the message he wanted to send into the ether.

"This is Jedi Knight Ben Skywalker, calling the pirates engaging the space yacht Jade Shadow. Your corvette has been disabled. You are stranded here, unless you surrender."

"Jedi knight Skywalker," the snarled reply came back. "You do not scare us. You will die before we do. You have one yacht and a single fighter. If you do not surrender to us in the next ten standard minutes, we will destroy the yacht. Even a Jedi cannot destroy our entire complement of fighters and our corvette with one fighter." The man's tone was less convinced of his words than might have been expected.

"If you surrender now I will consider you and all of your men prisoners. Ben stated into the com.

"Why would we…" the snarling thug suddenly broke off, and then continued in a more wheedling tone." We surrender."

The change in the thug's manner had been prompted by the appearance of a 'pirate nabber' star destroyer, which had already deployed its fighter wings before making itself known.

"Admiral Kalarooh," Ben greeted the vessel's Wookie commander. "What kept you?"

-My hyperdrive suffered a coolant problem. - The text appeared on the screen a moment later. –We had to use the back-up-

"Good to know you made it. I was about to start wiping these loudmouths out."

-You would have done so- the Wookie stated, before using his tractor beam to begin the arrest process.

-Fleet Intel have been hunting these guy's for months.-

"Good to know we got them."

Suddenly, Ben felt a alarm in the force, seeming connected both to his neck and mental picture of Vestara.

~0~

As Vestara watched the two visitors to the academy from behind one of the many hedges to delimitated sections of the academy grounds, she realised how close she had come to destroying that scene before it came into being, with her attempt to prove herself by murdering Allana Solo. The knowledge began to gnaw at her, and she felt a sudden blow in her mind as the realisation of her actions once again struck home.

~0~

After finally getting permission to land at the former imperial base on Endor, once the human controller, returning from his tea-break, had removed the Ewok, who, hearing a voice, had answered the com.

Her memories of the planet were good, but she could still remember when Ben had proven, in an old briefing room, that Jacen had killed Mara.

Once she arrived, she sought out the tribal representatives who were based in the building, and enquired whether they had any knowledge of what she sought.

She got better news than she had been expecting.

~0~

When Tahiri finally got back from the weekly shopping trip, carrying multiple bags of goods instead of the single bag she usually needed, she called to Anakin to "come and help me put this kriffing pile of junk in the fridge."

There was no response.

Worried, she dropped the bag and hurried into the apartment. In their shared bed, she found Anakin, clutching a bottle of very cheap potato vodka possessively.

"Anakin Solo!" she screeched. "What are you doing?"

"Feeling haappy." He replied, the slurring of his voice leaving her in no doubt of the fact he had not been sharing the bottle with anyone.

She wasted no time in ripping the bottle out of his hand, sending it into the recycler before he had time to react.

"Wad you do that for?" he demanded.

She replied by levitating him out of the double bed and depositing him on the sofa.

"You can sleep there." She told him, before calling a housekeeping droid to dispose of the shopping, and darting into the bedroom.

~0~

The cell Daala had moved Jaina into was somewhat more primitive than even the nick in Mos Eisley, which she had, admittedly, spent a night in as a young pilot, after starting a brawl in a cantina. She had been drunk, and the memories of the night were somewhat hazy, except for a moment of pleasure in a corner, courtesy of her current cellmate, Jagged Fel.

The room, as was predictable, used a bucket for sanitation, along with a sack of straw fir each of them to sleep on. Their ankles, as was usual in any imperial prison, were joined by a pair of magnacuffs, fitted with an 18" chain. That was enough to impede Jaina, who lost a quarter of her stride to the devices.

The door, unusually, was made using planks of what looked like Kashyyyk ironpine, wood even Wookie artisans rarely attempted to work in, due to the wood's very dense grain. It was almost impossible to burn, unless you had a lightsaber or plasma torch handy.

Jaina was even cut off from the Force by the seemingly omnipresent Ysalamiri Daala had scattered through the facility like glowsticks, and knew that her chances of finding a Ysalamir free corridor to work in were minimal, even if she did get out.

Jag, being Jag, was making an attempt with a piece of stone sheered off the wall. Over the three hours he had been using it, it had shrunk by several centimetres, while the door remained intact, except for a tiny grove that was full of stone powder.

Then her own project paid off, as she managed, without killing herself, to extract a length of live electrical wiring from a small wired comlink.

Reaching for the bucket of excrement, she tipped it over her bed, before pressing the wire into the mixture. One spark later, she knew, she would be on her way out of the cell, and one step closer to a shuttle-borne jailbreak.