Reflection was so foreign to him that the impulse to look inward left him momentarily astonished—though not enough to keep him seated at the ship’s controls. Shrugging out of the acceleration chair’s harness, he rose and paced from the control console to the aft arc of passenger seats; then from the entrance of the lift to the power-cell array access panels. Though Tatooine was light-years behind him, he couldn’t shake the planet from his thoughts, and despite the Scimitar’s speed and cloaking ability, it was as if the sleek ship, too, were incapable of outracing the past. If I had it to do over again … In his thoughts he was dropped into the speeder bike’s open cockpit, racing across Tatooine’s desolate landscape; in the next moment, executing an impromptu though acrobatic leap that carried him to the yellow ground, his lightsaber in hand, its energy blade meeting that of the Jedi Master whose name he had since learned was Qui-Gon Jinn. Probe droids Maul had dispatched upon landing on Tatooine had located the bearded human Jedi in the stands of the Podrace stadium and later in the settlement known as Mos Espa.
