Chapter I, Part I

"I hope you know I'd be there, helping you if I could. But someone needs to be here with Mom and Elli is, of course, too busy with her schooling. You know she doesn't believe you anyway. I don't know where you are, and it's better, of course, for us if you don't tell us. But if you could maybe find some way of letting us know you're okay, it would do a lot of good for Mom and me. Take care of yourself, Tev. We all want to see you again.

Love,
Maggie

Tev switched the datapad off, put it back in his satchel, and rolled over in his sleeping bag.
"I don't know where you are...I'd be there, helping you..."
I wish you were here too, sis, thought Tevan. I wish someone were here.
But there was no one for hundreds of kilometers. Just Tevan, the stars, and the vast and lonely Dantooine wilderness.

The sun woke Tevan Kearu up the next morning, and with a stretch to loosen the muscles, he got up and started packing. What a waste, was his first thought. But it wasn't a waste, he decided on further reflection. At least he knew where the Rebellion wasn't. One more planet down, he thought, millions to go. Tevan wasn't a pessimist by nature, but having traveled several hundreds of lightyears for essentially nothing had him in a fairly foul mood. He had found, in fact, a Rebel base. But all that remained were a few useless pieces of electronic equipment and some clothes. It looked as thought the Rebels had left some time before. So now it was time to decide where to try next.

Tevan had begun his search for the Rebellion two months before. His first step was to casually gather information. Though young, Tevan was smart enough to know that it was virtual suicide to try any kind of open inquiry, especially on his homeworld of Corellia. True, there was a large resistance movement comprised of Corellians who didn't like the Empire. But the Imperial presence in the system made it virtual suicide to brazenly announce favor towards the Corellian Resistance. He didn't have the computer skills of his younger sister, Ellidara, otherwise he might have tried a bit of slicing. So he simply kept his eyes and ears open.

One day, as Tevan sat in a cantina in Coronet, the capital of Corellia, he overheard a pair of Imperial pilots talking about Rebel ships conducting hit-and-fade attacks on Imperial patrols at Bastion and Telos. The pilots said that after the attacks, the Rebel Y-Wings has fled Core-ward. This meant that they could have come from any one of a thousand systems that lie between Bastion and Telos, and the galaxy's Core.

A week later, a freighter pilot, over a very tall glass of Corellian rum, told the bartender at the same cantina that he had seen a scuffle between Rebel bombers and an Imperial convoy just outside the Agamar system. What Tevan found interesting is that in this attack, the pilot said the Rebels escaped in the direction of the Galactic Rim.

Tevan thought about that. General thought dictated that the Rebels were likely making a series of hyperspace jumps before the skirmishes, so as to mask their approach vectors. Tevan wondered at the likelihood of this, because while it made perfect strategic sense, he had heard of logistical problems in the Rebellion, increasing the chances of Rebel ships making no more than one or two jumps to their targets. If that were true, then the Rebels conducting the hit-and-fades would have to be staging from some system between Agamar and Telos or Bastion.
Tevan first considered the Laharan sector, as that would give the Rebels access to agricultural resources. But he ruled that out, due to the increasing presence of Imperial garrisons and fleets. That left the Tadrin and Raioballo sectors as the most likely.

Tevan decided to start with the Raioballo sector, knowing full well that it was likely Imperial Intelligence had come to the same conclusions he had, and that the Rebels might be long gone. But it was somewhere to start, and maybe along the way he would find more information that would allow him to refine his search.