by James Luceno
“Get clear, Drev,” Relin said. He reached one of the long corridors that connected the forward and rear sections of the dreadnought. Doors dotted its length. Each would open onto one of the ship’s 288 escape pods.
“Engine two is down. I’m on thrusters only.”
Laserfire still sounded in the background. Relin cursed. The Infiltrator would be an easy target maneuvering on only thrusters.
“Get out of that ship. I’ll pick you up in a pod.”
“I am not in a suit, Master,” Drev said, coughing. “And you know how long it takes me to put one on.”
Relin did know. Drev’s Askajian frame made donning a flexsuit a lengthy process. He imagined the cockpit filling with smoke, imagined losing another Padawan.
Relin moved to the nearest escape pod docking door and cut his way through it with his lightsaber, nearly short-circuiting the weapon’s power pack in the process, and piled into the cramped interior of the pod. He did not bother with the instrumentation or pause to strap himself into one of the four seats. Instead he simply found the emergency release button and struck it.
The pod exploded away from the dreadnought, throwing Relin against the wall. Wounded arm and shattered ribs protested the impact, but Relin endured. He reached out with the Force for his Padawan. The contact reassured him. He felt the lightness of his Padawan’s spirit, his joy in life.
“I’m clear. Put the ship on auto-evasive, get into a flexsuit, and get out. I’ll find you in the pod.”
“No,” Drev said, and Relin heard the smile in his Padawan’s voice. “Harbinger is going to jump. Your plan did not work, Master. We cannot let both of those ships get back to Sadow. You said so yourself.”
It took Relin a moment to understand what his Padawan intended. He rushed to the small viewport in the pod and scanned space for the Infiltrator. He spotted it under the dreadnought, swooping up and circling back toward the bridge. Even on thrusters Drev spun the Infiltrator in evasive arcs that danced through the laserfire.
Relin spoke in a low tone, the same tone he might use to calm an excited bantha.
“Drev, listen to me. Listen. There is another way.”
Drev’s laugh, full and loud, was his only answer. Relin imagined his head thrown back, his chin bouncing with mirth.
Funereal silence hung over the bridge. All eyes were on the viewscreen, waiting for the black of realspace to give way to the star streaks of hyperspace, then to the nothingness of oblivion.
“Seven seconds to jump.”
The Jedi Infiltrator came into view, operating on only thrusters, and swung around to face them. Laserfire crisscrossed the viewscreen and the Infiltrator danced among the blasts. Thrusters flared and the sleek Jedi ship accelerated directly at them, growing larger, dodging through the anti-ship fire.
“What is he doing?” someone said.
Dor knew exactly what he was doing, and despite the fatalism that had taken hold of him, he would rather die in a jump malfunction than at the hands of a Jedi.
“Blow him from space!” he shouted at the weapons officer.
“I cannot get a lock,” the officer said. “I cannot get a lock!”
The ship streaked toward the bridge, twisting, turning, wheeling. Laserfire converged on it at last, struck it once, twice. Flames exploded from one wing, from the nose, but the ship grew larger, larger, until it nearly filled the viewscreen. One of the crew screamed, a defiant snarl. Dor caught a split-second glimpse inside the Infiltrator’s bubble cockpit of the Jedi pilot, a young human, or perhaps an Askajian, and he was smiling, his mouth and flabby cheeks wrinkled with mirth, his eyes hard with resolve.
“Brace for impact!”
The smell of smoke and his own seared flesh brought Saes to his senses. He opened his eyes to a wailing alarm and the irregular vibrations of the damaged hyperdrive. It sounded not so much like a healthy heartbeat as one in fibrillation.
For a moment he stared up at a blinking light on the ceiling, still dazed, his thinking slowed by the viscosity of his thoughts. Events replayed in his mind—Relin, the flash of an explosion in the hyperdrive chamber. The pain of his seared flesh sharpened as the muzzy-headedness began to clear. He sat up on his elbow.
Relin was gone. He reached out with the Force but did not feel his former Master on the ship.
Smoke poured from the hyperdrive chamber. A broken power conduit spat sizzling sparks just within the chamber’s double doors. Saes climbed to his feet, grunting with pain, and activated his communicator.
“Dor, shut down the jump immediately. The drive is damaged.”
The dull boom of an enormous impact shook the ship, nearly knocking Saes to the ground.
“Dor! Status! What just happened?”
The whine of the hyperdrive increased in pitch; the vibrations grew more rapid, more intense, the dissonance nauseating. Saes felt the vibrations under his skin, deep in his bones. Harbinger was going to jump with a damaged drive. If they even made it into hyperspace, the ship would be torn apart. He limped to the hyperdrive chamber, dodging the power conduit, trying to raise Dor as he did.
“Abort the jump! Dor!”
Relin saw the tongue of fire reach out from Harbinger’s bridge and lick the black of space. It held there for a moment, frozen, then shrank to nothingness, as did his hope. He stared dumbfounded, the pain in his body forgotten in the wash of pain in his spirit. His Padawan’s laughter, even as Drev had died, lingered in his memory, replayed again and again.
He stared out the viewport of the escape pod at the thick black smoke pouring from the scar of the ruined bridge, as if he could will time to reverse itself. But the smoke continued to pour forth and his Padawan was still dead. Bodies floated free in space, the corpses fixed forever by the vacuum into contortions of pain and expressions of surprise.
Relin felt as if he’d been hollowed out, as if he’d become a hole, as scarred as Harbinger by Drev’s death.
And moment by moment, anger seeped into the hole and began to fill it. Anger at himself, at Drev, at Saes and all of the Sith. He felt like Harbinger’s floating dead, frozen forever in pain. He knew it was dangerous to give play to such feelings, but they felt too close, too real, to deny.
“You laugh too little,” he said, and tears fell. He suspected he would never laugh again.
Despite the danger, he had to see the damage up close, to bear witness to his Padawan’s grave, to remember. He seized the pod’s controls and piloted in close to examine the destruction.
Drev had opened a hole in the dreadnought, a screaming mouth with jagged pieces of charred metal for teeth. Cables squirmed from opened bulkheads, spitting energy. Metal glowed red-hot here and there, but dimly, losing its battle against space to retain heat. He saw nothing recognizable as the Infiltrator. The ship had been vaporized by the impact.
So, too, had Drev.
Secondary explosions tore through the front section of the ship and it began to glide to starboard, toward Omen.
Relin imagined the dreadnoughts smashing into each other, burning like twin comets, and almost smiled. That, too, was an event to which he would bear witness. The Lignan from neither ship would get to Kirrek, and Drev’s death would not be in vain.
“Good-bye, Saes.”
But Relin realized quickly that neither was aborting its jump sequence.
He saw his danger, then cursed and turned the escape pod about.
More explosions boomed in the distance, their force communicated to Saes through ominous vibrations in the hull. The ship lurched hard, turned abruptly. The gravitic stabilizers did not compensate fully for the sudden movement, and the ship’s momentum sent Saes scrambling. Another alarm sounded and a mechanical female voice proclaimed, “Proximity alert. Danger. Proximity alert.”
Saes ran to a viewport and the scene outside the ship pulled his mouth open.
Harbinger had listed to starboard and was accelerating toward Omen. Saes cursed as the Harbinger’s sister ship grew larger.
“Move yo
ur ship, Korsin!”
He imagined the two crews scrambling to avoid impact. Both were near the end of a jump sequence, and the ion engines were offline.
Omen did start to move at last, but Saes could see that it was too late. He gripped the viewport’s frame so tightly that his claws scored the metal.
The dreadnoughts were on slightly different planes, but the bottom of Harbinger’s fore section scraped the top of Omen’s aft engine section. The scale of the collision gave it an unexpected slowness that looked almost graceful. Harbinger bucked as the two enormous masses fought for positional dominance. Metal strained, screamed, buckled, the sound like the rumbles of angry gods. More explosions boomed. Pillars of flame erupted here and there from the mixed metal of the collision, garlands of orange heat decorating the void of space. Explosive decompressions echoed along Harbinger’s length, along Omen’s. Here and there, bodies were blown from vented compartments and floated free in space. And through it all, Harbinger’s hyperdrive continued to gather energy.
“Jump sequence initiated,” said the same mechanical voice that had announced the collision.
Saes turned from the viewport and saw that the air in the hyperspace chamber was distorted by the storm of loose energy. Waves of power pulsed from the chamber.
“No!” he shouted, but the mechanical voice was implacable.
“Hyperdrive activated.”
Relin turned the engines to full, tried to accelerate away from Harbinger in time. A quiet, steady beep was the only alarm on the minimally equipped pod, and Relin’s heartbeat outpaced it two to one.
He had not cleared enough distance before Harbinger jumped. The pod jerked to a halt, throwing Relin forward. It was stuck in the dreadnought’s wake, pulled along in its energy draft. Though he suspected it was futile, he redirected more power to the engines. They whined, fought against the pull, but failed. He slammed himself into a seat and snapped on a restraining harness, fumbling with the latch.
Black turned blue and the churn of his stomach told him that Harbinger had entered hyperspace and dragged the pod along behind it. He could tell immediately that something was wrong, that the hyperspace tunnel was unstable. The pod began to spin, then flip over, again and again, careering wildly, a cork caught in a river’s rapids.
Gritting his teeth, Relin tried to keep his bearings, but he could get no frame of reference. He caught sporadic glimpses out of the viewport and saw the black of realspace flickering intermittently with the streaks of hyperspace.
They were stuck in a bad jump. If he could not get out of it …
The escape pod was not built to withstand hyperspace unattached to a mother craft, and its gravitic compensators could not adequately handle the velocity. They did their best, but Relin was flattened against his seat, his blood flow affected. He was moving in and out of consciousness and tried to use the Force to keep himself sensate.
The pod shook as it spun, creaked. He would not have long before the integrity of the pod failed and it decompressed. Through squinted, watering eyes, he saw instruments that provided nonsensical readings, saw starlines swirling in and out of existence, trading time with realspace. The effect was disorienting. Each time the black of space oozed through the streaks of hyperspace, the pod lurched as if it had struck something.
Harbinger tore through space before him, swirling in his spiraling vision as if it, rather than he, were spinning wildly. Strands of energy streamed from the dreadnought’s edges like glowing garlands. Pieces of Harbinger flew from it, and Relin winced as they sped past the pod like bullets down a barrel. Some of the debris was caught in the flashing transitions between hyperspace and realspace and blinked out of sight, presumably left behind in the black, a scattered trail of metal bread crumbs someone could follow all the way to Harbinger’s ruin and Relin’s death.
Another jarring collision at the boundary between hyperspace and realspace rattled the pod, caused Relin to bite a wedge in his tongue. Blood warmed his mouth; pain spiked his mind.
He had to pull the pod out of hyperspace.
Mentally and physically exhausted from his efforts aboard Harbinger, Relin nevertheless found a final reserve of strength. Getting the pod to exit hyperspace could be done, but only with the aid of the Force.
He inhaled, dwelled in the Force, and with it fought against the pressure of the velocity as he attempted to take control of the pod’s flight through the maddening swirl.
He perceived time slowing. His breathing steadied. His thoughts and reflexes came faster. He heard the beeps of the alarm but it seemed as though a standard hour passed between each. The instruments still provided no worthwhile readings, so he would have to rely entirely on feel.
He felt as if he were being stretched thin, as if he existed everywhere at once, and nowhere at all. He took hold of the pod’s controls, managed to right its flight and end its spin. He waited for the right moment, waited, waited, and when he felt it arrive, he jerked the controls hard to starboard, toward the black of realspace.
Instead the black disappeared in a wash of blue and his abrupt change of direction sent the pod to spinning, worse than before. Anger and frustration built in him until it burst out in a shout that seemed to echo into forever.
“Saes!”
THE PRESENT:
41.5 YEARS AFTER THE BATTLE OF YAVIN
Khedryn used a digital calibrator to fine-tune another power exchange relay in Junker’s propulsion systems. He’d been optimizing his freighter’s ion engines for hours. Like all good salvage jockeys, he was as much tinkerer as pilot, and he refused to let a maintenance droid touch his ship.
“Has to be it,” he muttered, tweaking a manifold on the exchange.
He pulled a portascan from his belt, attached it, and checked the relay’s theoretical efficiency. The readout showed 109 percent of manufacturer’s spec, drawing a smile.
He intoned his personal motto as if it were a magic spell. “Push until it gives.”
He pulled his communicator from his belt, smug even in his solitude, and flicked it open.
“Marr, efficiency on number three power exchange is one hundred nine percent. Let that settle in, my Cerean friend. Just bask in it.”
His navigator and first mate’s calm voice answered. “Basking, as ordered.”
Khedryn grinned. “Didn’t I say I would get it there?”
“You did. I believe that means I owe you a distilled spirit of your choice.”
Khedryn nodded. “I believe it does, at that. Unfortunate that this rock doesn’t have much of that in the way of quality. Pulkay it is, then.”
“Are you still at the hangar?”
“Of course. Where are you?”
“I’m in The Hole. There is an empty chair at the private sabacc table.”
Khedryn checked his wrist chrono. He was already late. “Stang!”
“Indeed,” said Marr, calm to the point of annoyance. “I will simply continue to bask.”
Khedryn slammed the relay cover closed and sprinted from the open-top hangar, shedding his tool belt as he ran.
“Pick that up,” he called to a nearby maintenance droid.
“Yes, sir,” said the droid.
“And don’t touch my ship!”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m coming now,” he said into his communicator. “Tell Himher to hold the first hand.”
Marr’s voice remained unperturbed.
“I will see what I can do to delay the start of the game. Reegas is here. And there appears to be some interest in our recent … discovery.”
That halted Khedryn before his Searing swoop bike. He squinted in Fhost’s sun. “The signal, you mean? How did that leak to anyone?”
“If memory serves, and I am certain it does, the leak originated in your consumption of several jiggers of spiced pulkay combined with a desire to impress a trio of Zeltron dancing girls. I believe it worked.”
Khedryn ran a hand over his cheeks, rough with three days’ growth of whiskers. “Three?
Zeltrons? Really?” He thought of their smooth red skin and curves, his own average appearance. “Were they drunk, too?”
“That seems probable.”
Khedryn saddled up on his swoop and started it. The engine growled like a feral rancor. He had forgotten his helmet. No matter. “You still basking?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I should’ve had my mouth occupied with things other than our discovery, but I guess that’s burned fuel I’ll never get back. On the upside, it should make the sabacc game more interesting. Someone will offer on it, if it comes to that.”
“Given your luck, I suspect it will come to that.”
“Right.” He revved the Searing. “You’re really quite excellent for my ego. Are you aware of that?”
“I am.”
“I’m en route.”
“Please try not to collide with anything.”
Khedryn pocketed the communicator and covered his mouth and nose in a scarf against the dust. He angled upward to fifty meters of altitude and loosened the reins on the engine. Below him, ships of questionable space-worthiness and even more questionable registration dotted the thirty square kilos of flat, dusty ground and the handful of decrepit hangars that served as Farpoint’s official landing field.
A control tower built of cast-off parts and scrap metal stood sentry in the middle of the field. Landing beacons blinked here and there in the swirl. A sonic boom rolled over Khedryn’s ears, indicating a ship entering atmosphere.
A few speeder bikes and another swoop darted through the sky over the field at lower altitudes than Khedryn. Treaded cargo droids unloaded goods from an old freighter, and crews in dungarees worked at their ships’ engines and landing gear. Other than Junker, not a single vessel on the field was less than two decades old. Expensive technology trickled out to the fringe of the galaxy only after it had been replaced by something newer and became affordable on the secondary market.
Once clear of the field, Khedryn ducked low behind the swoop’s windscreen and gave the Searing its head. He squinted into the spray of dust and wind and sped for Farpoint, glinting ten kilos in the distance, and looking not so much like a town as a junkyard.