"How much time would that leave for your training?"

"Not much," Anakin admitted blithely. His eyes danced.

Obi-Wan pursed his lips in disapproval.

"Got you!" Anakin cried, grinning, and grabbed the packet. He stuffed it into his tunic and strapped it close to his body with the long remainder of cord. "I'll guard your old money," he said. "Who wants to be rich, anyway?"

Obi-Wan lifted an eyebrow. "To lose it would be unfortu nate," he cautioned.

Even from thirty thousand kilometers, Zonama Sekot was an odd-looking planet.

A spot of pearl white at the northern polar region was surrounded by an entire hemisphere of rich mottled green. Below the equator, the southern hemisphere was covered with impenetrable silvery cloud. Along the equator, a thin patch of darker gray and brown was broken by what looked like lengths of river and narrow lakes or seas. The edge of the southern overcast curled in elegant wisps, and the wisps broke free to form spinning storms.

While they waited for the planet's answer to their landing request, Charza was involved in a birthing in another part of the ship.

Anakin sat in the small side seat on the bridge with his elbows propped on his knees, watching Zonama Sekot. He had performed his first set of exercises for the day, and his thoughts were particularly clear. It seemed sometimes, when his mind was settled, when he had tamed his turbulence for the moment, that he was no longer a boy or even a human. His perspective seemed crystalline and universal, and he felt as if he could see all his life laid out before him, filled with accomplishment and heroism- selfless heroism, of course, as befitted a Jedi. Somewhere in that life would be a woman, though Jedi did not often marry. He imagined the woman to be like Queen Amidala of Naboo, a powerful personality in her own right, lovely and dignified, yet sad and shouldered with great burdens-which Anakin would help lift.

He had not spoken with Amidala in years, nor of course with his mother, Shmi, but in his present frame of disciplined consciousness, their memory acted on him like a distant and ineffable music.

He shook his head and drew his eyes up, turning his feelings outward, focusing them until they seemed to make a bright point between his eyes, and concentrated on Zonama Sekot, to see what he could see. .

Many paths to many futures flowed from any single moment, and yet, by being in tune with the Force, an adept could chart the most likely path for his awareness to follow. It seemed contradictory that one could prepare a path into a future, without knowing what that future would hold-yet that is what ultimately happened, and that is what a Jedi Master could do.

Obi-Wan was not yet so lofty in his accomplishments, he had told Anakin, but there had been hints that before any mission, any disciplined Jedi-even a mere Padawan-could also do a kind of looking forward.

Anakin was sure he was doing something like that now. It felt as if the cells in his body were tuned to a severely faded signal from the future, a voice, large and heavy, as if weighed down, unlike any voice he had ever heard. .

His eyes slowly grew wide as he stared at the planet.

The boy, Anakin Skywalker of Tatooine, son of Shmi, Jedi Padawan, only twelve standard years of age, refocused all of his attention on Zonama Sekot. His body shuddered. One eye closed slightly, and his head tilted to one side. Then he quickly closed both eyes and shuddered again. The spell was broken. The moment had lasted perhaps three seconds.

Anakin tried to remember something large and beautiful, an emotion or a state of mind he had just touched upon, but all he could conjure was the face of Shmi, smiling at him sadly and proudly, like a protective scrim over any other memory.

His mother, still so important and so far away.

He could never see the face of a father.

Obi-Wan sloshed past the fall into the pilothouse. "Charza is done with his younglings," he said. "They're in training now to tend the ship."

"So fast?" Anakin said.

"Life is short for some of Charza's kin," Obi-Wan said. "You look thoughtful."

"I'm allowed, aren't I?" Anakin asked.

"As long as you don't brood," Obi-Wan said. The look on his master's face was both irritated and concerned. Anakin suddenly jumped out of his chair and hugged his master with a fierceness that took Obi-Wan by surprise.

Obi-Wan held the boy gently and let the moment flow into its own shape. Some Padawans were like quiet pools, their minds like simple texts. Only in training did they acquire the depth and complexity that showed maturity. Anakin had been a deep and complex mystery from the first day they met, and yet Obi-Wan had never felt such a strength of connection with any other being-not even Qui-Gon Jinn.

Anakin drew back and looked up at his master. "I think we're going to face real trouble down there," he said.

"Think?" Obi-Wan asked.

Anakin made a face. "I can feel it. I don't know what it is, but. . I did some forwarding. Feeling ahead. It's trouble, all right."

"I've suspected as much," Obi-Wan agreed. "Even when Thracia Cho Leem was-"

The bridge was suddenly filled with a crowd of fresh, young, bright pink food-kin, all clattering and clacking with enthusiasm as they took their stations. Charza pushed through the shallow water onto the bridge with great dignity and weariness, as if he had accomplished something both satisfying and exhausting.

"Life goes on," he chuffed to Anakin as he took his seat. "Now… let us see if there has been an answer from the planet."

Raith Sienar entered the observation deck of his flagship, the Admiral Korvin, and stepped up on the commander's platform. He looked over the weapons arrayed within the circular assembly bay of the former Trade Federation heavy munitions cruiser, an antiquated hulk. He was both critical at the selection and dismayed that he was expected to coordinate this ragtag force.

To make matters worse, there was not a single craft of his own manufacture on board, a serious oversight, he believed, and perhaps a treacherous one.

Tarkin had either not described the force accurately, or he had remembered it with blind optimism.

Sienar flipped up the weapons list. E-5 droids. . His lips curled.

The cruiser carried three landing craft, one hundred Trade Federation troops, and over three thousand droids. Three smaller and decidedly less useful vessels completed the squadron that Tarkin was now handing over to him.