Star Wars - Outbound Flight

Shortly before the Clone Wars break out, Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth asks the Senate to back the Outbound Flight Project. The plan is huge: a single vast ship, built for years of travel, carries six Jedi Masters, twelve Jedi Knights and fifty thousand civilians beyond the known galaxy. Their goals are to make contact with intelligent life and to settle worlds no one has charted.

Bureaucracy threatens to kill the expedition before it leaves. C'baoth uncovers a murderous conspiracy, and the political credit he earns gets the mission moving. Behind the scenes, though, the Sith Lord Darth Sidious is quietly helping the launch along. He has his own reasons for wanting the voyage to go ahead, and for wanting it to fail.

Sidious is not the worst threat. At the edge of Unknown Space, the ship meets the forces of the alien Chiss Ascendancy and the strategist known as Thrawn. Obi-Wan Kenobi is aboard with his young Padawan, Anakin Skywalker, but even he cannot head off the disaster.

This is a Star Wars novel set in the era before the Clone Wars. It begins as a hopeful voyage of exploration and darkens into a fight for survival against a clever enemy. It also tells the story of a project that later became a lost Republic legend and a grim chapter in Jedi history.