Crosscurrent

by Paul Kemp

Marr’s brow was smooth, his eyes untroubled. “Even so.”

  “You’re certain?” Relin asked.

  “Too certain, I’d say,” Khedryn said.

  “Yes,” said Marr, eyeing first Relin, then Khedryn. “I am certain.”

  “Very well,” Relin said.

  Khedryn shook his head, finished off his caf. “We are all crazy on this boat. I need another caf. Anyone else?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Drinks all around, then,” Khedryn said, and started to rise.

  “I will get it, Captain,” said Marr. The Cerean rose, placing his hand on Khedryn’s shoulder as he passed, the small gesture a reminder of the years they had been friends.

  “Let’s talk specifics,” Khedryn said to the Jedi. “What are your plans?”

  Relin gestured for Jaden to go first.

  “I fly down to the moon. Find what I am supposed to find.”

  “Alone?”

  Jaden nodded.

  “No,” Khedryn said. “I am not leaving my ship down on that moon if you … find something unexpected. I can shuttle you down in Flotsam. We’ll be able to dodge the cruiser’s sensors and get you into the atmosphere. From there you can locate the source of the beacon. But I expect more when we’re done. The Order owes me. Another five thousand on top of what we already agreed. Yes?”

  “Agreed.”

  “You hear that, Marr?”

  “Heard it, Captain.”

  Haggling over fees made Khedryn feel more like himself, more in control of events. He looked to Relin.

  “And what about you? How do you plan to get aboard that cruiser?”

  “I need Marr to fly me in.”

  “In where?”

  “Into the ship.”

  Khedryn scoffed, then frowned when he saw that Relin was serious. “That isn’t happening.”

  Relin’s jaw tightened, and loosened, masticating his thoughts. “My Padawan died trying to bring that ship down. I am going back aboard and destroying what needs destroying. There’s only one way for me to do that. We fly this ship right down its throat.”

  “Fly my ship, you mean.”

  “Yes, your ship.” Relin’s tone turned earnest. “Listen to me. Harbinger’s weapons systems are down. They have to be. Otherwise they would have blown your ship from space already. Saes had to deploy fighters to attack you rather than his batteries. So Marr flies your ship out of the rings and into the landing bay before they can stop us.”

  “You look a lot less sick when you’re talking about risking lives,” Khedryn said. “The ship has active deflectors. How do you propose getting through those?” He felt a pang of guilt even asking the question.

  Relin’s expression fell. “The shields? I … don’t know.”

  Khedryn did know but could not bring himself to mouth the words.

  “There has to be a way,” Relin said.

  Khedryn stared at Marr, who was pouring caf, willing him to hold his silence, but the Cerean ignored him. “We could use the power crystal to open a temporary hole in the shields.”

  Khedryn blew out an irritated sigh.

  Jaden looked startled. “You have a power crystal?”

  Khedryn glared at Marr, at Jaden, at Relin. “We’ve used it twice, to board uncrewed derelicts when the autopilot kept the shields operational.”

  “Where did you get it?” Jaden asked.

  “There’s a whole lot of things floating in the black, Jedi. I told you that. Just need to know where to look.”

  Jaden looked around, as if he expected a power crystal to burst out of a closet. “Where is it?”

  “In my pocket,” Khedryn snapped, then recovered himself. “Mounted on the beam projector behind Junker’s dish.”

  “It is a power sink,” Marr said. “We’ll have to divert most of our power to operate it. But it should work.”

  “The problem appears solved,” Relin said. “Thank you, Marr.”

  “Yes, thank you, Marr,” Khedryn said.

  Relin went on as if he had not heard Khedryn’s sarcasm. “Saes will not expect it. He thinks we’re destroyed. The Blades flying patrol will be too far out and none of the fighters on the ship will scramble in time to intercept us.”

  “That is madness,” Khedryn said. “Marr, did you hear this?”

  “I heard it, Captain.” Marr returned to the table, distributed the caf.

  Khedryn raised his eyebrows. “And?”

  “What other choice is there?”

  “We go back to Fhost, forget this whole thing,” Khedryn said, but everyone responded as if he had not spoken at all. Events had passed him by.

  “That gets you aboard,” Jaden said. “How do you get back?”

  Relin hesitated a beat too long, Khedryn thought. “Marr need only drop me off and get back out. He could jump anywhere he wanted to after that. Or he could flee back into the rings until you and Jaden return from the moon.”

  Marr pulled back a chair, sat. “The fighters will pursue and I cannot pilot Junker through the rings. I’d have to jump out and return later.”

  Khedryn tried to sip his caf but his hand was shaking. Embarrassed, he put the cup down. “You are seriously entertaining this? This is not a plan. It’s madness.”

  “That tells us how Marr gets out,” Jaden said, and leaned forward. “How do you plan to get out?”

  This time Relin answered a beat too quickly. “Escape pod, same as before.”

  Jaden and Relin shared a long look before Relin buried his eyes in the depths of his tea.

  “When does all this happen?” Khedryn said, dreading the answer.

  Relin looked up. “Now.”

  * * *

  Kell held Predator at a distance from the cruiser and followed on his scanner as the fighters nosed up and out of the rings and returned from their pursuit of Junker. There were several fewer than had entered.

  Kell decided that they had either lost the freighter or simply called off the pursuit. He knew they had not destroyed it. The skein of Fate was too strong. Jaden Korr’s destiny was not to die in laserfire. It was to die in Kell’s hands, as Kell devoured his soup and transcended.

  Content that his destiny was unfolding as it should, he engaged Predator’s low-output ion engines and piloted the ship near the edge of the rings. His baffles and screens would keep him invisible to the scanners of the cruiser. There he waited, a lurking spider.

  The opalescent moon glittered against the black of space. He watched it turn, the featureless ball where his life would find fulfillment. He could have surveyed the moon, reported his findings back to Darth Wyyrlok. But he would not. He would wait, watchful, and descend to its surface only when Jaden Korr did so. Their lines were knotted together in a common fate, tethered to each other, and he would put down on the moon only when pulled down by Jaden. He could no more go to the moon’s surface without Jaden than a Twi’lek could separate its lekku.

  His hands were shaking, partly from hunger, partly from exaltation. He had not fed since leaving Fhost, nor would he. His next meal would be, had to be, Jaden Korr.

  He powered down Predator but for the scanners, life support, and the speaker, which played the Imperial beacon, the sound that had summoned all of them to this one place, at this one time, and waited.

  “I will prep Junker,” Marr said, and rose to leave. Khedryn put his hands on the table, pushed himself up as if he weighed a thousand kilos. “And I will … do something else. Stang, I cannot believe I agreed to this.”

  The two Jedi said nothing, and he turned to go. When he stood in the hatch leading out, Khedryn glanced back and said to Relin and Jaden, “Listen, when we get back to Fhost, we gamble, all of us together. Yes? As reckless as you two are, I might actually win some credits. As long as Jaden doesn’t cheat. You have credits in your time, Relin?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Then you’ve got something I can win. You play sabacc?”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “I will teach you.” A
pparently thinking better before his exit, he returned to the food locker, poured and drank a final jigger of pulkay. “I’ll get Flotsam prepped. Then I will pray.”

  Jaden smiled him on his way. After Khedryn had gone, Relin, too, rose but Jaden halted him with a word.

  “Stay.”

  Relin eased back into his chair, grimacing at the pain in his ribs.

  But Jaden knew that physical pain was not driving him. He waited until he was sure Khedryn would not return.

  Before Jaden spoke, Relin said, “You do not need to say it.”

  But Jaden did. “Anger is pouring off you. I feel it more strongly than I do the effect of the Lignan.”

  “Saes must pay. My Padawan—”

  “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.

  Khedr
yn 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 for 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.”