by James Luceno
“You will lose yourself, Relin. And you cannot do that. You have made yourself steward of Marr on this mission.”
Relin’s lip curled in a snarl. “He understands the risk. And it was your words that encouraged him to do something meaningful.”
Jaden heard the contempt in Relin’s tone and knew the man was nearly gone. Yet he could not deny Relin’s accusation. “You bring him back with you. Understood? I want your word.”
Relin brushed his dark hair off his forehead, and Jaden was struck with how pale and drawn the man appeared. “I will see that he returns.”
Jaden knew he would get no more. The silence sat heavy between them. More than just five thousand years separated them.
“What did you do, Jaden?” Relin asked at last.
At first Jaden did not understand, but when he saw the knowing look on Relin’s face, his heart jumped at the implicit accusation. “What do you mean?”
Relin leaned forward, his watery, bloodshot eyes nailing Jaden to his chair. “Anger pours off me? Well, doubt pours off you; uncertainty. I know what gives birth to that. What did you do?”
Jaden drew on his caf, hiding his face behind the mug’s rim. In his mind’s eye, he saw the faces through the viewport, pleading with him not to do it.
Relin smiled, though he managed to make it look unpleasant. “Something that shattered your image of yourself, yes?”
Jaden set down his cup and confessed. “Yes.”
Relin chuckled, the first genuine mirth Jaden had heard from him. “The Jedi have not changed in five thousand years. Our expectation of ourselves always exceeds the reality. I have no wisdom for you, Jaden.” He stood, extended a hand. “Good luck. I need to figure out a way to get my lightsaber charged.”
Jaden stood, took his hand, a bit puzzled by Relin’s parting words. He considered offering Relin the lightsaber he had crafted as a boy on Coruscant, since it required no power pack. But he knew Relin would not accept it.
“Marr will be able to help, I’m sure,” Jaden said.
“I am sure,” Relin said.
Before he exited the galley, Jaden said to his back, “May the Force be with you, Relin.”
Relin did not slow.
Khedryn found Marr in Junker’s cockpit, checking its instrumentation, testing systems. Khedryn hesitated in the doorway, thinking of all the flights he and Marr had sat beside each other in the cramped space while Junker hurtled through the black. The ship had carried them through some dangerous times. He cleared his throat.
Marr glanced over his shoulder but did not turn to face him.
“She ready?” Khedryn asked.
“Indeed,” Marr said. “The damage was minimal, and she weathered the strain on the engines remarkably well. Probably due to your fine-tuning.”
Khedryn recognized the praise as a gesture of reconciliation. He put a hand on the wall, felt the cool durasteel of his ship under his hand, and offered his own gesture. “Been a while since she’s flown without both of us sitting up here.”
“Indeed,” Marr said, more softly.
Khedryn shook off the sentimentality, stepped forward, and performed a cursory glance over the instrumentation, not really seeing it.
“These Jedi go all-in, don’t they?”
Marr smiled, stood, turned to face him. “They do. Push until it gives, right?”
“Right.” Khedryn smiled, too, but it faded quickly. “I am still not entirely sure why we are doing this.”
“It is the right thing,” Marr said.
“How are you always so certain, Marr? This isn’t math.”
“I am not always certain, but I am about this.”
“Because you learned you’re Force-sensitive?”
Marr colored. “Maybe. Partially.”
Khedryn did not press. He thought of all the scrapes he and Marr had been through the past six years and realized that all of them had been of his own making. Marr had simply followed his lead and respected Khedryn’s call. Khedryn figured he owed Marr the same, at least this once.
“Try not to get Junker shot up, eh? And you are on shuttle service and that’s an order. If it gets too hairy, you abort and jump out of the system, no matter what Relin says. If you get aboard that cruiser, you drop off that Jedi and get out. Flotsam can get Jaden and me out of the system if need be.”
Marr did not respond, and Khedryn liked the silence not at all. “That’s an order, Marr. Understood?”
“I will do my best,” Marr said.
Khedryn gave him a gentle shove. “You come back with the same look in your eyes as these Jedi and I’m throwing you off the ship for good.”
Marr smiled, the tooth he’d chipped in a brawl Khedryn had started on Dantooine a jagged reminder of his loyalty. Khedryn looked out the cockpit window at the grainy, rough surface of the asteroid on which Jaden had set Junker down.
“This didn’t exactly go as planned, did it?” he said.
“It rarely does,” Marr said. “Variables. Always variables.”
A fist formed in Khedryn’s throat. He stared at his reflection on the transparisteel and swallowed it down. He wanted to say more to the best and only real friend he’d had since leaving the Empire of the Hand as a young man, but managed only to turn, reach out, and say, “Good luck.”
Marr took Khedryn’s hand, shook it. “And you.”
Khedryn took one last look around Junker’s cockpit, moved past Marr, and started to go, but Marr’s voice pulled him around.
“Captain. For you.”
Khedryn turned to find Marr holding out a stick of chewstim.
He took it, supposing it said all that needed to be said.
When Khedryn had Flotsam prepped and loaded with envirogear, he got on Junker’s shipwide communicator.
“All hands to the galley one more time. Attendance is mandatory.”
He took a roundabout way to the galley, walking Junker’s corridors, cognizant of the fact that it, and Marr, might not return from Harbinger’s landing bay.
If they made it to the landing bay.
He knew he was getting sentimental; knew, too, that he could not afford to do so. He was the captain and as such had certain obligations.
Beginning with this one, he thought.
When he reached the galley, he found Jaden, Relin, and Marr standing at the table, looking questions at one another.
“Time is short,” Relin said.
“Gotta make time for this,” Khedryn said.
He went to the food locker, pulled four drink glasses, and poured all of them a double from the only bottle of decent keela he kept on the ship. He carried the glasses to the other three men, handed one to each in turn. Relin sniffed at the glass.
“I do not consume alcohol,” he said.
“You do now,” Khedryn said. “Captain’s orders.”
Relin half smiled and relented with a shrug.
Khedryn held aloft his glass, and the others mirrored his gesture. With nothing better to say, he recited an old spacers’ toast he remembered from his adolescence.
“Drink it down, boys, for the black of space is cold. Drink it down, boys, for it’s always better to live hard and die young than live not and die old.”
Everyone smiled. No one laughed. All drank.
Khedryn slammed his glass down on the table. “We go.”
Khedryn took the copilot’s swivel seat in Flotsam’s tiny cockpit. It had been a while since he’d sat in the Starhawk’s cockpit, and the tight confines made him feel like he was sitting in a metal coffin.
Instrumentation was live. He shook off the sense of foreboding and performed a final preflight check. Everything showed green. He stared out the tapering transparisteel window, eyeing the swirl of rock and ice, faintly backlit by the cerulean balloon of the gas giant. They were coming around to the planet’s dark side. The deep blue oval of the superstorm was nowhere in sight. They would pass unmarked by the planet’s giant eye.
“We are go for release,” he said.
“Go fo
r release,” Jaden said from the pilot’s seat. “Warming engines. Disconnecting.”
The modified couplings released with a series of deep clicks and Flotsam floated free of Junker, just another piece of debris floating in the gas giant’s belt of ice and rock. Repulsors carried them safely away from Junker and the asteroid.
Khedryn felt a moment of intense vertigo as they moved off, and he knew it had nothing to do with motion sickness. Jaden must have noticed his feelings.
“When is the last time you sat in the cockpit of something other than Junker?”
“Been a while,” Khedryn acknowledged. Usually Marr flew Flotsam, if it proved necessary on a job. “Marr will take good care of her.”
“Of course he will,” Jaden said. He activated the comm and raised Junker. “We are clear.”
“Copy that,” said Relin. “You are clear.”
Hearing Relin’s disembodied voice struck Khedryn oddly, made him experience the same sense of disconnectedness he sometimes did while watching time-lagged events on the vidscreens in The Hole.
Except in Relin’s case the lag was five thousand years rather than only a few months. It was as if Relin had already happened, as if he were a foregone conclusion that Khedryn could only watch but not affect.
He cleared his mind, his throat, tasted the afterburn of keela in his phlegm.
“Do you find it odd that Relin asked nothing of the current state of the galaxy? I’d be as curious as a spider monkey.”
Jaden fiddled with the instruments, and Khedryn imagined him putting a filter around his thoughts. “I am not surprised, no.”
“No?”
“He knows he is going to die,” Jaden said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Whether he succeeds or not, he is dead. The radiation will kill him.”
Khedryn’s voice was not matter-of-fact. “What about Marr?” He reached for the comm, not sure what he would say, but Jaden’s hand closed over his.
“Relin will ensure Marr’s safety as best he can. He is a Jedi.”
“Jedi.” Khedryn spat the word as if he were trying to rid himself of a foul taste. He recalled stories of C’baoth’s betrayal of Outbound Flight, and feelings he had not known he possessed bubbled up from his gut and slipped between his lips. “You Jedi think you know right from wrong, always making life-and-death decisions for others. How can you be so certain about it? These are lives, people.”
“I am certain of nothing,” Jaden said, and Khedryn heard a surprising resignation in the Jedi’s tone. Khedryn’s anger floated away with the rocks and ice.
“Why are you really here, Jaden? I mean, why really? The vision, yes, but it’s more than that.”
Jaden licked his lips, stared out the cockpit glass, then finally turned in his seat to face Khedryn.
“You really want to know?”
Khedryn sensed that Jaden wanted him to really want to know. He nodded.
Jaden stared straight at him, no evasion, and spoke in a tone as flat as a droid’s.
“During the civil war, when the Jedi assaulted Centerpoint Station, I led one of the teams.”
“I heard of that. The whole station was destroyed.”
“My orders were to move fast and leave no one behind us as we advanced. At one point, we met stiff resistance from the Confederation and some Corellian sympathizers. Eventually we forced them back and they fled into a cargo hold and sealed the doors.”
Khedryn could see that Jaden was not seeing the present. He was looking at Khedryn, but his eyes had followed his memory back into the past. He was seeing whatever ghosts haunted him.
“You blew the doors? Cut through them?”
Jaden’s voice gained volume, as if he feared he would not be heard. “I activated the air lock and spaced all of them.”
For a moment, Khedryn thought he might have misheard.
“You spaced them?”
Jaden nodded, his eyes narrowed, fixed on some distant point in his past where his guilt lived.
“Most were Confederation soldiers,” Jaden said. “But there were noncombatants there, too. Engineers. Women. But I could not take the time to dig them out or negotiate a surrender. Leave none behind me. Those were my orders. From a fellow Jedi. I followed them.”
Khedryn watched Jaden’s jaw and fists clench and unclench, his tracheal lump rise and fall in his throat like a heartbeat.
“Stang,” Khedryn said, the word pathetically unsuited to the job of articulating the mix of emotions he felt.
Jaden’s eyes refocused on the present.
“So, Khedryn, when it comes to knowing right from wrong, I do not profess to knowing anything. Not anymore.”
Khedryn searched his mind for some words that might offer solace. “It was war, Jaden. People die in war. What difference does it make if it’s by blaster, lightsaber, or the vacuum?”
Jaden inhaled deeply and looked past Khedryn. “It makes a difference.”
Khedryn thought about that. Finally he nodded. “I suppose it does.”
Jaden wore a pained, self-conscious smile behind his beard. “You have sins you want to confess, Captain? Now seems to be the time. Something about this cockpit, maybe.”
Khedryn laughed, and it dispelled some of the mood. “If I started confessing my sins, Jedi, we’d never get this party started. You ready?”
Jaden looked out the glass at the churn of the rings, the gas giant. “Engaging ion engines,” he reported to Junker.
“Confirmed,” responded Relin.
“At this speed it will take us an hour to get around the planet and be ready to go,” Khedryn said over the comm.
“One standard hour, seventeen minutes, and thirty-six seconds,” Marr answered, eliciting a smile from Khedryn.
“Mark,” he said, and marked the in-ship chrono to count down the timeline.
They would navigate slowly through the rings—an easy task at low velocity—come around the gas giant’s dark side, and try to come at the moon from the opposite side, undetected by Harbinger’s sensors, while Junker burst out of the rings and flew right down the cruiser’s throat.
Relin felt his body failing, his cells popping under the weight of the radiation poisoning. Fatigue and emotional exhaustion made his vision blur from time to time. Sweat dampened the tunic and trousers under his robes, pasted them to his flesh. He sought comfort in his connection to the Force, but it, too, was under assault, popping under the weight of his anger.
He found it difficult to maintain a passive screen against the Lignan’s ambient energy. It leaked through his defenses in dribs and drabs, though it no longer caused him the same degree of discomfort it had previously. He had become inured to its worst effects. The radiation had polluted his body. The Lignan had polluted his spirit. He was failing all over.
Marr had Junker’s controls. Even if Relin had not lost a hand, the unfamiliar instrumentation would have made it difficult for him to fly. The chrono in the HUD counted down the timeline as they moved into position.
He flashed back to the past, his past, recalled sitting beside Drev in the Infiltrator, countless times, recalled his Padawan’s laughter, his joy. It seemed long ago, yet to Relin it had been only a day. The wound of his grief still bled freely, unscabbed, unscarred.
“You are thoughtful,” Marr said, adjusting course.
“I was thinking of my Padawan.”
“I see,” Marr said.
Hunks of rock and ice floated past the cockpit window. Marr did a fine job of steering them through the debris. No doubt he was an excellent pilot.
Just like Drev.
“Before our assault on Harbinger, Drev piloted our ship through an asteroid belt not unlike this.”
“At speed?”
“Yes, using the Force.” Relin remembered Drev’s smile and tried to answer it with one of his own, but he simply could not summon it. His lips twisted into something he imagined looked more like a bared snarl than a smile.
“He must have been an extraordinary pilot,” Marr said. “I have ne
ver seen anything like what Jaden Korr did with Junker. You must have been an exemplary teacher.”
Relin appreciated what Marr was trying to do but it brought him no comfort. He shook his head. He had lost one Padawan to the dark side and another to battle. “I was a poor teacher, I fear.”
To that, Marr said nothing.
“You have not consulted the navigation computer,” Relin said. “You do all of the computations in your head?”
Marr nodded.
“I have never seen so narrowly focused a gift from the Force. I suspect it has a purpose you do not yet see.”
Marr smiled, Relin noticing his chipped tooth. “Perhaps this moment is its purpose.”
“Perhaps,” Relin said, liking Marr despite himself.
Moving at one-eighth power while watching the HUD chrono, Marr maneuvered them through the rings until they neared the edge.
“Far enough,” Relin said. He did not want them hanging out there too far, visible to Harbinger’s passive scans. The debris in the rings would give them cover until Flotsam got into position. Meanwhile, they could gather some situational intelligence.
Through the debris field they could see the milky glow of the gas giant’s moon.
“I will magnify on the HUD,” Marr said.
The moon, filling a section of the cockpit window, grew larger with each press of a button—larger, larger, until it filled about half the window. Rock and ice floated before them and blocked a clear view, but Marr could see it well enough to note the long, dark form silhouetted against the moon’s glow.
“The cruiser has moved into orbit around the moon,” he said.
“That is more distance that we’ll need to close,” Relin said. “Harbinger will have more time to respond to our approach.”
Marr tapped a few keys on his console. “Two hundred eighty-one thousand three hundred two kilometers from here to there.”
Relin estimated the math in his head. “How fast does Junker fly at sublight?”
“We can cover that distance in about a minute.”
“A minute,” Relin said, thinking. “Too long. The high-alert Blades will scramble.”
Marr licked his lips. “Alternatively, we can attempt to jump right under Harbinger.”