Wild Space and from there into Myto’s Arrow, while Tuden Sal and Thi Xon Yimmon counseled that they take a more mundane approach along a heavily traveled trade lane.
Myto’s Arrow was a narrow corridor that would take them from the fringes of the galaxy directly to Dantooine through a patch of unstable space stressed by the gravitational tides of a particularly violent binary star system most pilots called simply the Twins. Its saving virtue was that the heavily fluctuating magnetic fields around the binary pair cloaked any attitude changes a ship made as it passed by. Theoretically, a master pilot with an enemy in hot pursuit could flee into the binary’s gravity coil, drop out of hyperspace just long enough to make a radical course change, then leap again in a completely different direction while the pursuer tried to figure out which way he’d gone.
The mere mention of Myto’s Arrow made Tuden Sal’s face pucker. His recommendation that they make port on Bandomeer made Laranth’s eyes roll.
“There’s still a pronounced Imperial presence on Bandomeer, Sal,” she had objected. “After Vader crushed the miners’ revolt last year, the Emperor has kept a watchful eye on things.”
“Which is why no one would expect a ship full of subversives to make port there,” Sal argued. “You would be just one more cargo ship doing its mundane business in an Imperial port.”
Ultimately, Thi Xon Yimmon had made the call. “What’s less remarkable than a freighter stopping at regular ports of call? I think Sal’s right. If anyone does suspect Far Ranger of being anything more than what she seems, they may well have lost interest when all we do is drop into a series of ports to off-load and take on cargo.”
And so they had ended up here, on the well-plied Hydian Way, headed out toward the Corporate Sector … except that they had no intention of going that far. They would make port on Bandomeer, communicate briefly with the nascent resistance cell there, then move on, stopping sequentially at Botajef, Celanon, Feriae Junction, and Toprawa, where they would contact the remnant of the Antarian Rangers.
The Rangers—little less reviled by the Emperor than the Jedi—had disappeared from the Empire’s scanners, but they were far from dead. There was, in Jax Pavan’s heart, a deep but fragile hope that perhaps the same was true of the Jedi. That perhaps he was not, as he often suspected, the last one.
At Bandomeer there was, indeed, an Imperial presence. There were also one or two Inquisitors, which meant that Jax and Laranth remained aboard Far Ranger in a state of dormancy. I-Five and Den carried out the playacting necessary to barter for ionite—which also resulted in contact and an exchange of information with members of the Bandomeer version of Whiplash.
Ionite was a substance of extraordinary properties—it canceled out whatever charge it was presented with, be it negative or positive—which made it ideal for defeating such devices as shield generators and communications grids. It had also proved an effective component in weaponry, which made it valuable to the resistance.
Cargo holds full of ore and ingots, Far Ranger lifted again and continued her sojourn, making several ports of call along the Hydian Way and navigating the final leg with an amount of ionite sufficient to the needs of their allies on Toprawa.
They made Toprawa ten days after leaving Coruscant—their plan: to pause there before backtracking slightly to pick up the Thesme Trace toward Dantooine. Toprawa was a world whose temperate zones were covered with lush forests that encroached on every port and outpost. The small spaceport they called at was on the outskirts of Big Woolly township in the cool northern reaches of a major landmass. “Big Woolly,” Jax had learned, was a reference to the appearance of the nearby mountain range, with its fleece of native conifers. They elected to berth away from the main docking complex on an open landing pad, intending to call as little attention to themselves as possible.
It was near sunset when Jax debarked from Far Ranger to find himself surrounded by massive conifers whose sweet, tangy perfume overwhelmed the mechanical scents of the spaceport. He was overwhelmed, as well, by the sheer vividness and vitality of the forest. It was neither as lofty as the growth on the Wookiee homeworld, Kashyyyk, nor as lush as the rain forests of Rodia, but it wrapped the constructed artifacts of the spaceport with teeming life. It was exhilarating and soothing at once, and Jax wished, for a