Джуд Уотсон - Jedi Apprentice Special Edition 2 - The Followers

The pilot got to his feet. Though it had been only minutes since he'd woken up, he was already quite steady. "No, I'll be fine," he replied. "But if you find my ship, you know where I am."

"Of course," Qui-Gon said. "We'll do what we can."

Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon quickly left the small hangar and made their way down the street and into a larger one. It was full of ships of all sizes, and pilots from all over the galaxy talking shop or tinkering with their vessels. It seemed like it would be easy enough to hire one of them.

Qui-Gon strode up to a pilot and asked if he would take them to Kodai. "Kodai?" the pilot repeated. "You've got the wrong guy."

"I'll take you there, but I won't land — at least not until next week," said another.

Qui-Gon asked half a dozen pilots before he finally found one who was willing to make the journey, a humanoid who wouldn't give them a last name.

"Call me Elda," she said before agreeing to drop them off and leave immediately. She could not be convinced to wait around for the return trip.

The Jedi could not afford to be choosy. They boarded right away.

While the pilot readied the ship, they settled in for the journey.

"Not many people want to go to Kodai right now," Elda said as she keyed the destination points into her navcomputer.

Qui-Gon raised an eyebrow. "I gathered as much," he said. "Why is that?"

The pilot turned to look over her shoulder at Qui-Gon, giving him an "If you don't know I'm not going to tell you," look.

Qui-Gon didn't prod. It's just as well, he thought. I can get the information from the Temple.

Stepping out of the cockpit and into the hold, Qui-Gon switched on his comlink. He had heard of Kodai, and thought it was located somewhere in the Outer Rim Territories. If he was not mistaken, its surface was mostly covered by a vast sea.

His comlink crackled to life and a moment later Temple Archivist Jocasta Nu's voice echoed quietly in the hold of the ship.

"It is good to hear from you, Qui-Gon," she said. "How is the mission going?"

"It's hard to tell at the moment," Qui-Gon responded honestly. "I was hoping you could provide me with information on the planet Kodai."

"Kodai, in the Outer Rim," she said. There was a brief silence as Jocasta plugged the data for the request into her Temple computer. "I seem to remember something about a massive, swelling sea."

Qui-Gon could hear Jocasta pressing buttons and keys on a computer.

Then she spoke.

"Kodai is, in fact, covered by a giant sea — a sea that hundreds of years ago swelled so much that it drowned most of the planet's land- dwelling inhabitants," she reported. "Today there is only one pocket of land — a single city. It is sparsely populated by a few thousand Kodaians who spend most of their time trying to preserve their way of life on land, in spite of the fact that most believe that the sea will rage again and kill them all." Jocasta was silent for a moment. Qui-Gon guessed that she was reading ahead.

"Interesting," she murmured. "It seems that the sea has shown no signs of raging in the last hundred years. In fact, the opposite seems to occur. Every ten years, when the planet's two moons sync up, the sea experiences a spectacularly low tide."

"I see," said Qui-Gon, filing away this information.

"That's not all," Jocasta said. "What's particularly fascinating is that the planet's moons will be syncing up the day after tomorrow."

"Interesting timing," Qui-Gon agreed. It seemed obvious enough that Lundi's trip to Kodai at this particular moment and his search for mining equipment were not coincidences. But he was still not clear about why it had been so difficult to find a pilot to take them to Kodai.

Jocasta was quiet for several long moments while Qui-Gon digested this information. When she did not end the transmission, Qui-Gon guessed that she had more to tell him.

"Is there something else?" he finally asked.

"Yes," Jocasta replied slowly. "Another collection of Sith materials was found — this time on the planet Tynna in the Expansion Region. And a strange explosion has occurred on the peaceful planet Nubia. Nobody has come forward to take credit for the blast, but a drawing of a crude Sith Holocron had been scraped onto a duracrete wall outside the ruined building."

Qui-Gon closed his eyes for a moment. The discovery of the additional stash was not surprising. But an explosion was something new — something deadly. The situation was heating up, and he felt a great deal of pressure to defuse it.

"Thank you for the information," Qui-Gon told Jocasta. "We will be in touch if we need anything further."

"Of course, Qui-Gon. I will be here if you need me."

As Jocasta switched off her comlink, Qui-Gon felt a pang of sorrow.

He wished that those parting words had been spoken by the woman at the Temple who had helped him with research in the past — Tahl. Qui-Gon had been deeply in love with Tahl, and though she had been killed several months ago, her absence still felt like a blade in his chest.

Qui-Gon put away his comlink and sat down on the floor to meditate until the path was clear. He was just beginning to feel his body relax when Obi-Wan rushed into the hold.

"Master!" he shouted, alarmed. "There's a bomb on board!"

Qui-Gon was on his feet in an instant. He followed his apprentice to the bridge, where the bomb had been planted underneath a low shelf. Bending down carefully, Qui-Gon examined the device. It was black and square with a simple timer on top — and a crude drawing of a Sith Holocron etched into the side.

"I suppose I should have expected something like this," Elda griped from her seat at the controls. "I just hope your famous Jedi powers can defuse that thing before it blows up my ship — and us along with it."

"I'll do my best," Qui-Gon said wryly. "Do you have a set of tools we could use?"

The pilot pointed to a small box in the corner. "You should find everything you need in there," she said.

Obi-Wan brought the tools over to his Master and crouched down beside him. "This symbol is becoming familiar," he noted. "But the device itself does not look too sophisticated."

"It should not be a problem to defuse," Qui-Gon said, casting a glance toward the captain. "But I'm not so sure about our pilot's temper."

Obi-Wan cracked a smile. Leave it to Qui-Gon to find humor in a moment like this.

Qui-Gon opened the tool kit and pulled out a long, slender pick.

After carefully inserting it into the side of the bomb casing, he slid it back and forth until he heard an audible beep. The box opened and several strands of colorful wire popped out. A timer behind the wires indicated that the bomb would go off in less than a minute.

"Not much time," Obi-Wan murmured quietly.

Qui-Gon knew his Padawan was right, and he had not expected to see so many different colored wires inside the bomb. It was a more complicated design than he'd originally thought.

Focusing his energy on the bomb, he snipped all of the red wires. But the timer did not switch off. It now read forty seconds, and was counting down.

"Perhaps it is this black wire," Obi-Wan suggested quietly.

Qui-Gon did not think this was likely. It was the only black wire, and too obvious a solution. But as he studied the wire, he sensed that there was indeed something significant about it. Still, he wasn't sure that cutting it was the right thing to do.

"Twenty seconds," Obi-Wan said.

Qui-Gon looked at the bomb more closely. One end of the black wire ran directly into the metal inside the casing. At the other end the black plasticoating ended a few millimeters before the wire touched the metal.

Underneath the missing black coating was a series of bright yellow wires.