She stared over their shoulders.

Anakin turned his head to look. The three of them were alone in the shelter.

"What did you do?" he whispered to Obi-Wan.

Obi-Wan shook his head. "Pardon me," he said to the woman.

She looked down from a vague distance and focused on Obi- Wan again. "The Magister tells me you are to go south," she said. "Your ship can remain for four more days."

The abrupt turnaround caught even Obi-Wan by surprise. She did not seem to be equipped with an ear-receiver. Some other comlink was concealed in her clothing, he surmised.

"This way, please," she said, and gestured for them to go through a small hatch on the opposite side of the empty dome. There, they found themselves again outside, in the middle of a biting, almost horizontal blast of snow.

Obi-Wan looked up at a ghostly shadow descending through the storm. Though the woman showed no concern, his hand slipped automatically through his jacket to his lightsaber.

What had alerted him? What stray bit of clue from the future had made him feel threatened by the expected arrival of a transport, of all things?

Not for the first time, he regretted this mission and its possible impact on his Padawan. The danger he felt came from no specific source but from all around-not threat of physical harm, but of a possible imbalance in the Force so drastic it overshadowed anything he had ever imagined.

Anakin Skywalker was not so much at risk as he was a possible cause of this imbalance.

For the first time since the death of Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi- Wan felt fear, and he quickly drew up the discipline instilled by long Jedi training to control and then quash it.

He reached out to grip Anakin's shoulder. The boy looked up at him with a brave grin.

"Your ride south," the woman announced over the wind as a broad, flat, disk-shaped transport landed in the blowing drifts of snow.

Obi-Wan lifted his own small comlink and opened a channel with the Star Sea Flower. "We are leaving the plateau," he told Charza Kwinn. "Stay here as long as they allow, and after that. . maintain a position nearby."

Given that Obi-Wan felt he could trust no one, flexibility was essential.

It should have been among the proudest moments of Raith Sienar's life. He had been given the rank of commander, in charge of a squadron, putting to use training he had once thought forgotten. The squadron of four ships was preparing to enter that most entrancing of places, hyperspace-entrancing for an engineer, if not a tactician-and yet he felt nothing but a cold, seedy dread in his viscera.

This was not what he wanted, and it was certainly not what he had imagined when he had purchased the Sekotan ship two years before.

Even learning the probable location of Zonama Sekot seemed a hollow triumph, since he had to share the knowledge. Sienar rarely liked sharing anything, especially with old friends. Most especially, now, with Tarkin.

Sienar was a competitive fellow, had recognized this since boyhood, but it had been a fragile knowledge, as he had realized over and over again, that his competitive nature had its limits. He had had to focus his efforts to win, and after a while, he had never failed to choose arenas in which his talents were most suited, and avoid those where they were not.

It was disheartening to be shown how much he had come to overestimate his greed, and to underestimate the infinite ambition of others. Of Tarkin.

But there was little time for ruing his precarious position. The adjutants, impatient and less than obsequious toward their new commander, had arrayed themselves on the command deck of the Admiral Korvin, and they expected dispatch.

He had to give the order for coordinated entry into hyperspace.

It was the final commitment he dreaded, leaving the system, in which he had pooled most of his armor, most of his political cronies and contacts, and all of his wealth.

Leaving home.

There had not been five seconds strung together in the last six hours since he had seen Tarkin off the ship in which he had been free enough to think things through. No time for arranging backup plans, escape plans. Instead, he had been involved in the minutiae of command: system checks, drills, and the inevitable, infuriating delays of old equipment breaking down.

Tarkin had from the very beginning herded him down a nar row chute like an animal in a slaughterhouse.

No time for self-pity, either. Sienar was not without resources. But getting his reflexes back into shape was going to take some time. He had built up considerable mental flab on Coruscant in the last decade, giving in to discouragement at the decline of the economy, embittered by the increasing corruption of the aristocracy that had been his mother even more than his real mother had.

He had put on a hard face and found that the expression comfortable, and not entirely false. It seemed natural for his uniform, which he had chosen the day before-that of an old-line Trade Defense officer, black and gray and red with opalescent striping.

He now had at least the illusion of control over these ships, these men. Might as well use that as a beginning, a stable ground on which to regain his footing and test how much power and independence he actually had.

"Are the squadron cores in synchrony, Captain?" he asked. "They are, Commander," Kett responded. Kett wore a merchant's uniform, a holdover from the Trade Federation, no doubt something he was used to, and less formal than Sienar's. Rumpled, actually.

We are all of us little better than pirates, but we choose our images carefully, Sienar thought. "Then let's blow the Stardust off our tails," he said, hoping that language was not too antiquated.

"Yes, sir." Kett made a small, secret smile.

Sienar stared through the forward ports, hands gripping the railing of his command pulpit. Kett, half a level below him, stood at bridge-rest position, hands folded behind his back, knees slightly bent, as the order was carried through to the linked squadron droid navigation system.

"Departure, Commander," Kett murmured to Sienar as the forward view skewed and fanned outward, then drew in to a brilliant point. "We are entering hyperspace."

"Thank you, Captain Kett," Sienar said.

"Estimated journey time, three standard days," Kett said.

"Let's use that time to examine and do more drills on defensive systems," Sienar said. That would serve as a good distraction for the flagship crew while he did other tasks. "And present me with the service records of every command officer in the squadron. The complete records, Captain Kett."