“I’m not traveling the stars looking for companions or places to see,” Hera said. “I have goals. I don’t need anyone who isn’t interested in them slowing me down.”
“But Zaluna—”
“—has performed a service to the galaxy in providing data about the Empire’s methods, and needs to start a new life where she can be safe. You, as near as I can tell, roll with whatever happens—and with whoever’s in charge.”
“That’s harsh.”
“It’s what I see,” she said. She offered her hand. “I do thank you for what you’ve done. Good luck to you.”
Tongue-tied, Kanan simply accepted the handshake. “Okay,” he finally said. “You’re sure?”
Hera nodded pleasantly, took her hand back, and turned away. “Oh,” she said, reaching into her cloak. Facing him again, she withdrew a small pouch and began counting out Imperial credits. “For your help.”
Kanan was startled. “What am I, a mercenary?”
“No. But I saw you putting money back into Okadiah’s safe, to pay for the hoverbus.” She offered the cash. “Take it. You’ll go farther.”
So I’m a hired hand now, Kanan thought. Oh, well. He took the money.
He looked at Skelly and Zaluna. “So long,” he said—and walked back toward the street. It would be a long trek to the spaceport, and sweaty in the robe. He doffed the cloak and threw it into the nightferns. He’d take his chances, as he always did.
Where the path met the street, he turned to get one last glimpse of Hera. They were all still there, getting ready to go their separate ways. He shook his head, wondering what was keeping him. Kanan Jarrus never looked back. He always looked upward, outward, following the pull of the beyond. Cynda, hanging big and bulbous, was the glowing light pointing the way to his future. Up to the sky, where…
The moon exploded!
The Gorse skyline lit up, awash in the light of a dawn for the first time in a geologic age. No explosion of Skelly’s had lit the cityscape so, and Kanan staggered, expecting some kind of thunderous sound. But there was none. And as the flash waned and his eyes adjusted, Kanan saw that, no, the moon hadn’t exploded.
But it wasn’t intact, either. Near the darkened lower limb of the near-full disk, a colossal plume of white ejecta was spreading downward and outward. It almost looked as if Cynda was shedding a teardrop—a teardrop a hundred kilometers across and widening as it moved.
Kanan had seen comets and meteors striking moons before. Those didn’t look like this. This was an eruption. An eruption, on a world volcanically dead.
And he knew that spot on Cynda. He landed there every day.
He looked back at the street. All traffic had stopped. People were outside their vehicles, next to their speeder bikes, looking up in fascination and horror. Kanan looked past them to the big glowing clock on the waterworks building behind. It said what the sickness in his stomach had already told him: Okadiah was on shift on the moon.
Everywhere, people began talking all at once, like the buzz at a sporting event. Kanan could hear Hera’s voice, too, the voice he loved hearing, calling out to him from behind. But he didn’t listen. He was running to a speeder bike paused in the middle of the street, grabbing it from the hands of its stunned rider. She and the speeder bike’s owner were still yelling as Kanan tore away down the thoroughfare, racing into Shaketown.
—
The world shook beneath Skelly. To one side, Zaluna’s voice was filled with horror. “It’s happening.”
“No,” Skelly said, looking up in wonder as the ground rumbled. “The groundquake’s just a coincidence. Call it a sympathy pang.”
He had removed his hood: No one was going to be looking at him. Not now. And a graveyard seemed to him the perfectly appropriate place to be witnessing the beginning of the end of the world. He looked back at Hera as the tremor subsided. “That was nothing compared with the quakes we’ll feel if they keep it up.”
“The Empire’s doing it,” Hera said, looking up in amazement. “They really are doing it.”
“You didn’t think they would?” Skelly asked.
“If they can do something, they will do something.” She shook her head. “I just didn’t think it was possible—or that it’d happen this fast.”
Zaluna tugged at the Twi’lek’s sleeve. “Do people need to leave, Hera? Is something going to happen to the planet?”
“Skelly says we’re okay. But we should get back to my ship, just in case.” She looked back to the street. “That’s what I was trying to tell Kanan.” Hera had something in her hands, Skelly saw—some device she’d been struggling with since not long after Kanan fled the scene. “I’ve been trying to get any information I can, but there’s too much interference on the airwaves.”
“Everyone’s talking,” Skelly said.
A Recon transport drove past as if nothing were happening, aiming a searchlight in the opposite direction from them. Skelly could hear another approaching down an intersecting street.
“They’re still after us,” he said glumly. “Even with what’s going on up there.”
“Then we can’t wait around,” Hera said, pocketing the gadget. “Looks like your plan’s been overtaken by events, Skelly. Let’s head for my ship.”
“To go where?” Zaluna asked.
“I can drop you both someplace safe,” Hera said, removing her cloak. “But first, I may need to stop Kanan before he does something rash.” She glanced up at the sky with worry. “I think I know where he’s going. There’s only one pilot in a million that could navigate that debris up there. I’m afraid of—” She stopped herself. “Let’s go.” She headed down the path out of the cemetery.
Skelly tried to follow. But before he could limp to the street, the roar of engines came from above. And light. Not as bright as before, but closer, and more directed. Skelly yelled out, “The Empire’s found us!”
“I don’t think so,” Hera said as the dark mass of a starship descended toward the street.
“Your ship?” Zaluna asked, quivering.
“It’s Kanan!” Skelly exclaimed, recognizing the shape. “It’s Expedient!”
The rear ramp descended as the mining ship settled half a meter over the street. Kanan appeared in it. “Hurry,” he called to Hera. “I need you to get me to that blast site. Next to you, I’m an amateur!”
Hera gestured toward her companions. “They come with us!”
“I don’t care. I’ve got Okadiah’s team on the comm,” Kanan said. “They’re dying!”
EXPEDIENT ROCKETED THROUGH the exosphere into space. Kanan had guessed right. He’d missed two work shifts, but with Lal dead and Vidian’s appointed caretaker not yet in place, his ship hadn’t been reassigned to anyone. His identification had gotten him onto the tarmac—but nobody was looking at the ground anyway. He found that the passenger seat had been replaced, but the ship hadn’t yet been reloaded with explosives. The latter fact was helping Expedient’s handling enormously.
Only he wasn’t the one handling it.
“Busy,” Hera said, guiding the control yoke. From the passenger seat, Kanan could see that all the traffic normally headed toward Cynda at this hour had joined the ships fleeing it. A colossal cone of silvery debris rose into space from Cynda’s southern hemisphere, blooming outward like an upside-down snowfall. Contact with the fast-moving ejecta could be catastrophic, and the other freighter pilots knew it.
Kanan knew it, too, which was why he’d surrendered the controls to Hera. After their experience on the hoverbus, he’d been left with little doubt that Hera wasn’t just a good pilot; she was great. At the moment, he was upset, not the master of his emotions—and he knew how that could compromise the focus and reflexes necessary to do the kind of piloting that was about to be required: They had to go exactly to the one place everyone else was fleeing.
“No more info on the comm,” he said. There’d been nothing but static for long minutes, ever since he’d heard Okadiah’s team send their distress call. Th
e other companies’ channels had similarly gone dead. Looking at the long-range scope, he could see why. The fragments emanated from a point less than a kilometer away from the main entrance to the mining complex. He couldn’t make out a single landmark. What hadn’t blown outward had caved in.
Hera weaved Expedient through the rush of oncoming freighters. Half of them didn’t seem to know where they were going, Kanan thought: All were seeking refuge, either on Gorse or around it. “They’re afraid it’s going to happen again.”
“Good bet,” Hera said. “But not today.”
Maybe it’s just a natural disaster, he thought. That, or an industrial accident. He wanted more than anything for his worst fears to be wrong. Would the Empire—would anyone—really test a far-fetched theory while everyone was still at work? It made no sense. But then he looked out onto Ultimatum, the only ship not in motion. It simply sat, the indifferent observer at a safe distance. No rescue vehicles had been released: only probe droids, headed toward the debris field.
Hera swung the ship out of traffic and onto a wide approach vector to the moon. Kanan looked back into the windowless rear of the cockpit. Light reflecting from Cynda intensified, casting his and Hera’s shadows darkly upon their passengers. Skelly sat, unusually mute and reserved, on the acceleration couch to the left, his head bowed. Zaluna was on the little chair behind Kanan’s, facing in the opposite direction. Initially excited by the takeoff, she’d refrained from looking out the forward viewport as they closed in on the disaster site.
“All those people,” she said in a low voice. “I watched them every day.” In an odd way, Kanan thought, the woman had been going with them to work on the moon for years.
Kanan looked forward as Hera expertly brought Expedient into a roll. He saw the length and shape of the debris field now. “No, that doesn’t look suspicious at all,” she said. “It’s like a funnel.”
“Yeah. Channeling outward.” He blinked. “None of it’s falling back down!”
“It won’t,” Skelly said morosely. “A normal blast would emanate outward spherically. You’d have a lot of fragments raining down again. This was the result of a shaped charge—a bunch of simultaneous blasts placed to direct most of the debris up and out at escape velocity.”
Kanan stared at the unnatural-looking formation. “How do you know?”
“It was my idea.” Skelly groaned. “It was on the holodisk.”
Kanan grew sick as he studied the sensors. “Outgassing at the main landing bay. The complex has been ruptured.” He unsnapped his restraint and headed for the rear of the compartment. “I’ve got to get down there.”
Hera punched several buttons. “I can needle us in beneath the cloud. Where do you want to go?”
Skelly unhooked himself and came forward. Studying the scene, he pointed. “The auxiliary bay!”
Half in the space suit he’d retrieved, Kanan came forward to look. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”
Skelly directed Hera toward a small dark indentation clear of the blast zone. The auxiliary bay had been the shipping-and-receiving area for a smaller network of caverns, long since abandoned for the richer veins of the main expanse. An airlock separated the sections, installed due to fears that the old complex might vent to space.
Now that the opposite had happened, Kanan thought, it could provide the only way in.
Hera directed the ship into a deep crater. The surface beneath was coated with ashen residue from the blast, but the rectangular opening cut into the southern wall was intact.
“Magnetic field’s still holding,” she said. “But it’s dark.”
“Lights are on a different power grid,” Kanan said, putting on his boots. “Can you handle it?”
“Of course.” Effortlessly, Hera guided Expedient toward the maw.
As the ship entered the blackness, Hera activated the exterior floodlamps. At once, the occupants of Expedient were bathed again in light—their own, mirroring off and coruscating through the thousand stalagmites on the cavern’s ceiling.
“We saved a lot on lighting this way,” Skelly said.
Zaluna leaned around Kanan’s chair for a look as Expedient touched down. She gasped at the beauty—and then retreated into her seat as Cynda rumbled. The moon hadn’t quaked before to Kanan’s memory, but he didn’t care. He was already donning the helmet of the environment suit. The air in the bay was fine, but what lay ahead might not be. “I’m patching my suit comm into Moonglow’s audio channel. Hold station here.”
“I’m going,” Hera said, rising. “You’ve got two suits.”
Stuffing a bag full of oxygen masks, Kanan shook his head. “I need you here. Someone’s got to fly these guys out of this place.”
She was already suiting up. “Is this a rescue or a suicide mission? Now get the ramp open, because I’m going!”
—
Kanan felt like an insect making its way into a pile of brambles—in the dark. That was what had become of the region beyond the reinforced airlock. Passageways that had been horizontal and shafts that had been vertical had both gone diagonal as gravity sought to fill in the gap left by the explosion.
The thorilide-rich crystals that were the Empire’s goal were, in fact, the only reason there was room to move at all: Even damaged by the blast, their tensile strength was amazing, giving the place a continued semblance of structure. Kanan didn’t have time to think on the irony. He kept going downward, inward, ever farther into the darkness, lit only by his and Hera’s helmet lights.
Hera had somehow kept up with him, even as he’d scrambled over and under and around barriers. She was unspooling a microfilament cable they’d found in the landing bay; there was no expectation of getting back to the ship otherwise.
Kanan couldn’t rely on positioning technology to guide him down here in the underworld. All he had was the distress signal in his helmet, still being weakly broadcast from somewhere in the chaos. Every so often, they had seen a sign of past occupation: a cart, smashed and sideways, or the arm or leg of a droid. But there had been no indication of life.
He found a dark triangular opening up ahead. Shining his light into it, he saw what amounted to a floor several meters down. He pulled the loop of cable he’d been carrying from around his arm and lashed it to a seemingly solid crystal support. “Wait here,” he said into his helmet mike.
“No.”
There was no time to stop and argue. He slipped over the side and dangled, trying to find the surface somewhere beneath him. Letting go, he hit the ground—and slid downward into the darkness.
“Kanan!” Hera called.
“I’m all right,” he said, shining his light around where he’d come to rest. “We’re getting close.”
She rappelled down the cable and slid down behind him. “Close? How can you tell? It’s hard to see anything!”
“I can tell,” Kanan said. He pointed his light to illuminate a battered head, sticking out from the ceiling.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah.” It was Yelkin. His body was crushed, embedded in the new strata of the moon.
Kanan could tell the sight chilled Hera. It didn’t do him much good, either. But as the opening started to go more horizontal, they saw more corpses, dropped like sticks this way and that amid the broken crystal columns. It was like tunneling into a graveyard. Kanan recognized a uniform next—and then a hovercart, like the one he used daily. He was in the right place.
“Kanan!” Hera called.
Crawling over a mound of debris, he found her kneeling beside a half-buried equipment console. “That’s your distress beacon,” she said, looking around. “But I don’t see—”
“Okadiah!”
Kanan leapt over jutting obstacles in the dark, hurrying to a spot up ahead. It was an elevator car, diagonal but still held in shape by the frame of its onetime shaft.
Okadiah was under it. Kanan shone his light on the old man’s face. Okadiah’s skin was blue; his eyes and lips were covered with frost. The volume of
air in the underground network was vast relative to the new vents to space, and further collapses had closed those portals off. But pressure had dropped considerably, and the air that remained was frigid. Kanan whipped his pouch open and removed an oxygen mask. Carefully wrapping it around the miner’s head, he was relieved to hear the old man cough.
“Kanan—”
“Don’t move,” Kanan said.
“That…a joke? Not funny.”
Kanan pulled the thermo-wrap from his bag and covered Okadiah’s chest and shoulders. Then he looked to the old man’s legs. They had been crushed beneath the elevator car, but not fully pinned. “Hang on!”
Kanan turned and looked for something to use for leverage. Hera was right there, gripping a tough-looking stalactite. Kanan took it from her and inserted it beneath the side of the car. “You pull him out,” he said to Hera—and heaved. The mass, already lopsided, gave way in the opposite direction, tilting backward enough for Hera to slide the old man free.
Kanan collapsed, panting, on the ground next to Okadiah.
Okadiah struggled to say something. “S-s-stormtroopers…”
“What?”
“Stormtroopers. Came in…ordered us out of Zone Sixty-Six. Had their own charges…”
Kanan exhaled. “I knew it.” Feeling strength returning to his muscles, he got to his knees. “We’re going to get you out of here.”
“Too…late,” Okadiah said.
Kanan looked back at Hera. She was looking away, off into the darkness, respectfully.
“C-c-come here,” Okadiah mumbled. “Where…I can see you.”
Kanan cradled the old man’s battered frame in his arms. “What is it, Okadiah?”
“Not…you,” Okadiah said, before coughing. “The…pretty one.”
Hera stepped to the other side of Kanan and knelt. “I’m here.”
“Ah,” he said, smiling as if laying eyes on her were medicine enough. “You…listen. This boy…is good to have around.” Okadiah coughed again, this time much more violently. “You ought to…stick by him. Think…he needs…”
Okadiah stopped talking and closed his eyes. The inside of the transparent oxygen mask, once fogged, went clear.
The Rise of the Empire Page 53