But she’d worry about getting more intel on the Nihil later. For now, Affie only needed to know that Nan and Hague hadn’t discovered their presence, and to judge by Nan’s nonchalant stroll, they hadn’t. That meant the Jedi were free to do whatever they were doing.

And Affie was free to get the proof she needed to make Scover back down.

“This is bad,” Reath repeated to himself as he slumped into the seat of the hyperspace pod. “This is very, very bad. This is what happens when you don’t have access to research materials.”

He trusted in his ability as a Jedi, and in the ways of the Force. His lightsaber remained at his side. So Reath could prepare himself to deal with whatever came.

But preparing himself included accurately assessing the situation he’d found himself in, which was in fact extremely terrible.

“I am in a hyperspace pod,” Reath said out loud. The rounded interior of the pod caught sounds and shaped them strangely. “No navicomputer on board that I can see, and besides, this has to be too small to have a hyperdrive of its own. I think…I think this has to be some kind of one-way transit vehicle, the human-sized equivalent of a probe droid.”

He tried very hard not to dwell on the words one-way. Panic couldn’t help him, while analysis…probably wasn’t going to help much, either, but it was at least worth trying.

“I don’t know where I’m going, what I’ll find there, or how to get back. Okay. That more or less sums it up.”

Hyperspace journeys could last anywhere from a few minutes to several weeks. Without any way of knowing how long this one would be, Reath began to be concerned about the lack of food, water, and an evac tube. But no sooner had he noticed that than the pod suddenly jolted out of hyperspace. He blinked as he stared at the thin windows in the hatch, the ones that had just blinked from electric blue to black night. A star field lay beyond. Had the pod deposited him in the middle of nowhere?

The one sensor within the pod began to blink, and Reath felt the rumbling that could mean only one thing: a tractor beam.

“At least I’m going someplace,” he said, taking his lightsaber from his belt. Whatever came next, he intended to be ready.

The pod tilted as it began descending through an atmosphere. Clouds didn’t vary that much planet to planet—assuming they were water vapor and not methane, which Reath profoundly hoped to be the case. He wasn’t going to be able to tell much on the way down; investigation would have to wait for the planet’s surface.

The tractor beam pulled the pod down inexorably, but in a controlled descent. Reath felt no more than a small thud as the pod settled into…something.