Chapter Eighty Seven

Master Fay stared out the small viewport of the bridge of the Lucrehulk that they had christened the Tyrant's Bane. A combative name not to Master Fay's liking, but it had been decided on via a vote. And she couldn't really argue about the sentiment behind the name.

It had taken them several jumps to reach the edge of the ever moving, almost completely un-chartable hyperspace territory surrounding Ruusan and the quadrants around it. But they were here now, and it was time to jump into the true unknown.

But something was making Fay pause from calling the others to the bridge, something that she had been sensing for a few days now ever since Master Yoda's call about Master Dooku.

That had been a trying time. Count Dooku had become, if not a friend, at least a well-respected colleague to Master Fay, and Lily had liked him too. But the one most hurt by Dooku's death had been Harry, who had looked up to the man as one of very few male role models he had had in his life.

Something about the Makashi master's death was calling to her, something that occurred afterwards. Concentrating on it made Fay not wish to turn her attention to anything else just yet, such as plotting a hyperspace route through the disturbances with the Force.

No navigation computer would be able to do that; it fell on the Jedi to use the Force to try from here on, and it would get harder the closer they came to Ruusan. Whether the nebulae was warped into its current unplottable form was through luck or from the Thought Bomb was unknown, and the whys of it didn't matter so much as the fact they would have to get through it somehow. The nebulae covered nearly the entire Terrab Sector and large segments of its neighboring Mid Rim sectors.

"I can't explain it better," she said, not looking away from the view as Lily's ethereal fingers floated through her hair. "The Force as a whole is once more not responding to my requests for knowledge. There is both hope and fear in the future, as if the future is suddenly in flux to a degree that I have never seen before. It is as if the impact of your and Harry's arrival has suddenly gained more impetus, or perhaps a rebounding effect? The dark has receded, but not enough. There are far too many variables for the Force to tell me which way it will go. There is something else there, something that is just on the edge of my senses, but I can't grasp it."

Fay now looked up at Lily, smiling slightly. "But because of Dooku's actions, hope is returned: the Light side has gained some strength. It falls on us to add fuel to that little fire so that it can keep growing."

"Isn't that good enough for now, love?" Lily said with a smile.

Master Fay smiled, raising her hand to catch Lily's hand with her own. It glowed with the Force for a moment and their fingers interlaced, Lily's hand feeling almost solid for a second. Their relationship had shifted somehow along the way, moving from friends to something far closer to lovers. It couldn't make that final leap, of course. Even with the Force, Fay couldn't touch Lily for more than a few seconds. She couldn't even send out her presence in such a way as to interact with Lily rather than with the Force as a whole.

But oddly enough, that was all right with Master Faye. She had never been in a relationship physical or otherwise, and she had always felt the mental and emotional aspect was more important than the physical. Harry and Aayla's bond certainly seemed to prove that, and both she and Lily were satisfied with what they had now.

For a moment the two were just silent, holding hands. But then Fay sighed, taking her hand away from Lily's, the Force draining out of her hand as a moment of tiredness struck her. "It is time for us to prepare for the next phase of our journey."

OOOOOOO

There were far better ways of being woken up than the intercom going off, Harry reflected, but if there was a better thing to wake up to than Aayla kissing his cheek, her body wrapped around his, Harry didn't know what it could be. He turned his head, kissing her lightly on the lips and staring into her eyes as their arms tightened around one another. They might have kept on kissing for some time if the intercom hadn't gone off again, rousing them from their little world. "Harry, Aayla, it's time. We are ready for our next hyperspace jump."

The two padawans quickly joined their fellow padawan, the single Knight, the single ghost, and the two Masters in the control room, which made Harry's lips quirk and he thought, My, we are an odd group aren't we? He felt Aayla's response, which caused his lips to form into a smile while the others all nodded at them in greeting.

Master Fay sat at the navigation controls, but with her chair turned around to the open area between the navigation position and the captain's chair. The others were already sitting down in a semicircle, and Harry and Aayla quickly slotted in. They didn't touch one another, but they sat in a circle, all of them in meditation poses and looking to Master Fay, who would lead them in this joint exercise.

She smiled at the three padawans and began to explain the method for reaching out through the Force to discern a route through hyperspace. It was something none of the trio had done before, since it was an advanced form of discerning the future somewhat, though it was more connected to the material plane than most such. Although, is the hyperspace really a material plane? Regardless, the longer the jump, the harder it was to actually discern.

But their route forward was so congested that the padawans' inexperience actually wasn't as much of a burden as it would've been otherwise. This was proven a few moments later as Master Giiett shook his head slightly, not coming out of his own meditation but breaking his concentration to both continue the exercise and speak aloud. "The hyperspace routes are more cluttered than even I had feared. I cannot see any route forward."

"I can," Master Fay said serenely. "But these will be short jumps: very short. And I fear that each jump in turn will be more difficult the further we go into the nebula."

Quinlan nodded his head. "I can see a way through for a single hyperspace jump of a single parsec out system. But we'll be coming out between star systems. I've never done that before."

"Ah, there it can my turn to be the voice of experience, for I have" Giiett said. "Due to a faulty hyperspace computer, admittedly, rather than through any actual plan, but it isn't that different. We should, however, close the viewports. A normal individual's mind is not ready to see how dark it is out between star systems. Ah, I mean that literally rather than in terms of the Force," he joked.

"Understood, master," said the three padawans in turn, all three rolling their eyes at Micah's attempts to lighten the atmosphere. Even so, it had worked, and he smiled, satisfied.

The next second all of them turned their attention once more to joining their Force powers. Master Fay led them, but this did not mean that the others could not speak their minds, although, admittedly, splitting their attention between doing so and keeping the connection going was somewhat difficult.

"Are we ready?" Master Fay asked, despite it not being needed at the moment. The others simply sent back affirmative thoughts through their momentary connection, and she slowly turned and began to input the coordinates for the jump.

A moment later it was done and they all came out of the meditation and moved to their various positions. Once they were situated, Harry brought up the ship's shields, concentrating them on the forward bow, just in case. And then the Tyrant's Bane hopped into the unknown.

They came out several moments later after a hundred light years had passed. And, like Master Quinlan had said, they came out between two star systems. Directly ahead of them was a giant asteroid blocking their way forward through hyperspace. The areas between star systems were not empty as many people thought, they were filled with detritus like this: wandering planetary bodies which had not been grabbed by a sun or which were stuck between various different gravity systems, muddying up hyperspace.

"Well done, everyone," Master Fay said, smiling at them all. "We have taken our first hyperspace jump into the anomaly. Now, let us concentrate on the next one."

Several hours of meditation passed before the group consciousness was satisfied with their next jump. It was again a short one, this time only fifty parsecs. And again they came out in the darkness between two star systems. They all looked at one another as Master Fay input the command for that jump. "This is going to take a very long time, isn't it?" Harry asked.

"Months or years, more like," Quinlan said with a nod. "We tend to forget how much space is between star systems, but here, I'm afraid, we are going to be getting a rather pointed lesson in that fact."

"Nonetheless," Master Fay replied serenely. "It is what we need to do."

The other Jedi Masters looked at her, while the padawans all simply nodded. Giiett asked, "I take it that you have felt something?"

"I did the moment we began that first jump. We are on the path the Force wants us to follow," Master Fay replied. "Beyond that, we will have to see."

"Good enough for me," Master Giiett said with a faint smile. He made no mention of the Balance or the Force in general. At this point, with the Veil still in place, more Light was precisely what he felt was needed in the universe.

Concentrating like this on trying to find their route, however, was the mental equivalent of playing hundreds of mental chess games all at once, when every move they made on one had to affect all the others. The trio of padawans were all exhausted after three jumps, and Quinlan was not faring much better. Even Giiett was feeling it after the third jump.

"Go to sleep," Master Fay ordered. "Master Giiett and I will discuss how to organize our time from here on out, but it makes no sense for us to simply concentrate on speeding along. I'm getting no sense of urgency, so it behooves us to use this time much more wisely."

The trio of youngsters all nodded and headed off wearily, followed quickly by Master Quinlan. Once they were alone, Giiett looked at Fay and Lily quizzically. "No sense of urgency?

"None. There is a sense of waiting, of anticipation. But there is no sense of urgency attached to our personal mission, and I cannot see that allowing the passage of time will hurt or hinder anything beyond us," Fay replied. "Indeed, I am getting the exact opposite feeling: that the more we are out of sight, the better." Although it would be more accurate to say, the longer Harry and Aayla are out of sight the better. While my own future is important, the future in its entirety still changes with the actions of the two of them.

"Ah, but that doesn't mean it won't, just that we can't sense it?" Micah asked.

"I can tell you only what I can sense, Master Giiett," Fay said sighed.

Master Giiett thought for a moment, then nodded slowly. "That will have to do, then. When a man is blind, he would be foolish to say he would not follow the one eyed man."

"That is the most mangled phrase I've ever heard," Lily said, and all three of them laughed before turning their attention to other things.