Crosscurrent

  “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 never 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 int
o 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.”

  Relin’s thoughts collided with Marr’s suggestion. “Jump? We are still in the planet’s gravity well, as is Harbinger. And there’s the moon’s well, too.”

  “We are at the outside of the gas giant’s well, and the moon’s is weak. I can account for all of that in such a short jump.” He paused, cocked his head. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Relin looked at the HUD. Debris from the rings blocked the moon and Harbinger from view. “You are talking about using the hyperdrive to jump between a planet and its moon. A second in hyperspace, maybe less.”

  “I do not see an alternative. Do you?”

  Relin did not. “I have never heard of this being done.”

  “Nor I,” said Marr. “But maybe now we see the actual purpose to which my talent is to be put.”

  Relin decided that he would have to trust in Marr’s gift, have to trust in the Force. Hypocrisy stabbed at him.

  “Do it,” he said. He looked at the chrono, counting down the time. “You have less than an hour to get the calculations done.”

  Marr leaned forward in his seat and started to turn off the magnified HUD display. Junker had shifted some, and he could once more see the moon and Harbinger.

  “Leave it up,” Relin said.

  As Marr began his work, Relin sat in his seat and gazed at Saes’s ship, letting memories put a spark to the kindling of his anger. Staring at the dreadnought, he recalled the black scar of twisted metal, all that remained of its primary bridge, all that remained of Drev.

  The pain in his ribs and arm faded in the flames from the pain in his heart. The ambient energy from the Lignan stoked his quiet rage and he let the flames grow, heedless of what they were consuming.

  He magnified the HUD further, growing Harbinger in his sight as anger grew in his core. And the alchemy of that anger transformed the pain of loss into the power of hate. He held it in and gave no outward sign of his feelings, though he thought he must soon burst.

  “Hurry, Marr,” he said, his voice choked by the emotional turmoil within him.

  Marr said nothing, simply continued his calculations. Even with his mathematical gifts, he relied heavily on assistance from the navigation computer. Relin could not follow all of the formulae, but he could see that Marr was making remarkable progress.

  Jaden glided through the rings at one-half power, Flotsam twisting and turning to avoid rocks and ice as necessary.

  Khedryn eased back in his chair, hands crossed behind his head. “A bit more controlled than your previous piloting, Jaden.”

  Jaden smiled distantly as he stared out of the slit of the cockpit window, his mind on something else altogether. Khedryn wondered if the Jedi regretted confessing to him.

  Khedryn said nothing more as they circumnavigated the gas giant, using its rings for cover. Eventually they caught up with the blue superstorm that looked like the planet’s eye, half of it lost in the night side, the other half still in light and staring. Jaden watched it as if hypnotized.

  “You all right?” Khedryn asked, concerned that Jaden might drift Flotsam into a rock.

  “Fine,” Jaden said, his voice soft.

  They planned to come around the gas giant and put the moon more or less between them and Harbinger, hoping that their small size would allow them to hide in the moon’s scanner signature.

  A HUD in the cockpit window showed the countdown. If all went as planned, Flotsam and Junker would break from the rings at the same time.

  Khedryn took out the chewstim Marr had given him, ripped it in half. He held a piece out.

  “Jaden?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “Hold it until we actually go,” Khedryn said.

  Jaden nodded. Together they watched the chrono and waited.

  Marr completed the calculations with ample time to spare, then double-checked them.

  “I am confident in these calculations,” the Cerean said.

  Relin only nodded, his mind already moving to what he would do when his feet hit Harbinger’s deck. He felt an unexpected exhiliaration at the thought of destroying the ship and killing so many aboard, including Saes. He would turn Drev’s grave into a burning pyre that would consume them all. He would—

  Marr’s hand closed on his shoulder, and he flinched at the touch. His skin felt hypersensitive.

  “Relin, you are unwell.”

  Relin knew he was sweating, breathing too rapidly. “I am all right.”

  He looked at the chrono: ten seconds.

  He had traveled five thousand years into the future to have his life hang on the thread of the single moment they would spend in hyperspace. He flashed on the wild trajectory of the escape pod when it’d been caught in Harbinger’s wake, the sickening twists and turns of the misjump.

  Marr put his hand on the lever that would engage the hyperdrive.

  “I will power us down the moment we emerge from hyperspace. Are you ready?”

  Relin took a deep breath, feeling it against his broken ribs. “Yes.”

  They stared at the chrono as it counted down the final seconds.

  “Prepare yourself for the Lignan,” Relin said.

  Marr engaged the hyperdrive.

  Khedryn and Jaden popped the chewstim in their mouths as Jaden took Flotsam out to the edge of the rings. Open space beckoned before them, the moon bifurcated by the sun’s light. Khedryn dared not scan for Harbinger lest the cruiser’s passive scans pick up the probe.

  Both of them watched the HUD chrono roll to zero.

  “Mark,” Khedryn said.

  Jaden accelerated to full and blazed through space for the moon.

  Kell lurked in the black between the moon and the gas giant’s rings. He had positioned Predator as best he could to ensure that his scanners would pick up any ship exiting the rings in the direction of the moon.

  Predator’s cockpit had grown cold, but Kell modified his metabolism to maintain a comfortable body temperature. He sat in the darkness of his cockpit, staring into the void of space, wondering at its hidden meanings, seeking the truth of its many lines.

  His mind drifted on clouds of memory. He thought of the other Anzati he had met through the centuries. They did not see the daen nosi. One had thought Kell mad. In return, Kell had slowly consumed his soup for a standard month, keeping him alive until the very end.

  Kell was not mad. He was blessed, unique, chosen to see the truth of existence as written in the lines of the universe’s fate. And soon he would have its cipher.

  When he heard his sensor console beep to indicate a contact, he knew it was Jaden Korr. He knew, too, where Jaden was going and that he would kill him there.

  He examined the scan signature of the small craft darting out of the rings. A Starhawk, moving fast, heading for the dark side of the moon. Not Junker, but its attached shuttle.

  Where was Junker?

  Kell pushed the thought from his mind, waited a ten-count to give the Starhawk a nice lead, then brought Predator back online and fell in behind it.

  The Imperial beacon indicated danger on the planet’s surface, but given the age of the beacon and the extreme environmental conditions of the moon, Kell expected to find nothing but ice-choked ruins.

  Still, he would prepare for any eventuality, as always.

  Relin did not blink but felt as though he had. His visual senses registered only a blue afterimage
rather than a hyperspace tunnel. One instant Junker floated at the edge of the rings, the next it floated under Harbinger and the cold metal and hard angles of the dreadnought filled his sight lines.

  Power from the Lignan filled the space around the dreadnought like a fog. Relin felt it seep into him, feeding his seemingly boundless anger, his limitless need for revenge. He resisted at first, but it was halfhearted.

  It was right that he feed his anger, feed it until it grew into a monster. Drev’s fate merited anger. To feel something else would be to disgrace the memory of his Padawan.

  “Do you feel it, Marr?”

  Marr bared his teeth between clenched jaws, the chip in the incisor like a tunnel through which the Lignan’s effects could leak.

  “I feel it,” Marr said, taking a moment to angle the ship properly and verify velocity. “Powering down. Diverting everything to the power crystal array.”

  He hit the emergency shutdown for almost every system on the ship, including life support, and repurposed the power to the crystal array. Junker’s cockpit turned as dark as space and only their breathing broke the sudden silence, Relin’s ragged with pain, guilt, and power, Marr’s smooth but elevated. The ambient temperature dropped several degrees in a moment. The viewscreen remained active, though its clarity faltered and static clouded the image. A thick red beam from Junker’s top split the screen, slammed into Harbinger’s shields, and exploded into a spiral of red lines, an antique corkscrew boring into the Sith ship’s deflectors.

  “Is it supposed to look like that?” Relin asked.

  Marr inhaled deeply and put a hand over his stomach. “I am nauseated. The ore does not affect you?”

  “Not like it does you,” Relin said, and left it at that. “I could screen you.”

  Marr shook his head, his face wrinkled with discomfort. “Do not waste your energy. I can bear it.”

  Relin recalled one of the first lessons taught to Force-sensitives by the Jedi. He remembered being taught it himself by Imar Deez, remembered teaching it to Drev. The words came out of his mouth without thought, a reflex, as Junker coasted through the cold of space toward Harbinger.

  “Imagine in your mind a fortress of stone and steel, with crenellated walls. Within it stands a keep, itself walled.”