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out.”
    Luke looked around the cockpit at the nervous faces watching him. “Maybe we should meld,” he said. “Pooling our concentration might make it easier for Mara to trace the source.”
    Danni had had only limited experience with the Jedi practice of mind-melding, but she nodded along with the others. Saba began the familiar exercises with a series of deep breaths. She felt the life-sparks of those around her, glowing like embers in a white-hot furnace. The strengthof the signal was such that it almost totally blanketed them. But she concentrated, bringing them steadily into focus, and slowly their thoughts joined in a tight embrace.
    Mara’s mind danced with hyperspace coordinates, instrument panels, and other space flight paraphernalia. Saba added her perceptions of the distant world-mind to the mix of thoughts and impressions gathering around Mara. Danni offered the clearest knowledge of astronomical forces. Saba imagined herself on the dark, red-lit world of Barab I, prowling low for shenbit bonecrushers, every sense keen. Zonama Sekot wasn’t the same thing as a flesh-rending giant lizard, but the principle was the same. They were hunting, and she was a
good
hunter …
    Mara took everything she was given and plotted a course.
Jade Shadow
’s hyperdrive roared into life, and Saba felt the familiar sensation of lights streaking past them and falling behind as the strange topology of hyperspace enfolded them.
    Here the territory belonged to Mara. Even with the Force to guide them, the way was tortuous and fraught with danger.
Jade Shadow
did her best to follow the path laid down for her, with the
Widowmaker
firmly in tow, but almost immediately she encountered the same barrier she had earlier. With a sickening wrench she was dumped back into realspace, only slightly closer to Klasse Ephemora than she had been before.
    Mara didn’t give up. The signal from the distant mind was as strong as ever. Saba concentrated on it, feeling out the insubstantial pathways between it and them. There was nothing but vacuum in the way, she told herself. Crossing that vacuum should be as easy as leaping across a room. Her tail quivered with effort as she imagined that hyperspace leap in detail.
    Jade Shadow
jumped again. The hull vibrated as Mara plunged the ship headlong through the strange spaces surrounding their objective. Saba received impressionsof incomprehensible shadows sweeping by, bizarre n-dimensional membranes reluctantly unfolding to let them pass. She didn’t know what they were or where they came from, but it seemed for a time as though Mara was making progress. They were getting closer—they had to be!
    Then, rattling like an old freighter, they were dumped back into realspace. They stopped long enough to check on the
Widowmaker
. The frigate limped from hyperspace seconds after
Jade Shadow
.
    “Is the
Widowmaker
holding up?” Mara asked.
    “It’s seen worse,” the Imperial captain assured her. “I imagine she’ll keep going long after we give up.”
    Satisfied, Luke gathered the Jedi minds around him for another try.
    “I think we can do it this time,” he encouraged them. “Mara was right when she said before that there had to be a way in. All we have to do is find it.”
    Grimly determined, they tightened the meld and tried again. Saba felt herself dissolving in the confusing sensations passing through and around her as hyperspace folded around them. The pull of Zonama Sekot was stronger than ever, and growing stronger with each passing second. She felt as though she were drowning in the massive outpouring of emotions, a mote of sand caught in a dust storm, swept up on a rising surge, unable to control where it took her.
    For a timeless moment, she completely lost all sense of herself. She was subsumed, absorbed, erased. The hunt consumed her. All her attention was focused on her quarry—on tracking it, finding it,
catching
it …
    Then, abruptly, something changed. She didn’t know what it was,