Star Wars

by Charles Soule

  They looked like a flock of birds, or perhaps fallen leaves swirling in a gust of wind, all drawn in the same direction, linked together by some invisible connection…some Force. Bell had seen an exhibition on Coruscant once, as part of the Temple’s outreach programs. Three hundred Vectors moving together, gold and silver darts shining in the sun above Senate Plaza. They split apart and wove into braids and whipped past one another at incredible, impossible speed. The most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. People called it a Drift. A Drift of Vectors.

  But now the Nova was flying alone, with just two Jedi aboard. Him, Jedi apprentice Bell Zettifar, and up ahead in the pilot’s seat, his master, Loden Greatstorm. The Jedi contingent aboard the Third Horizon had split up, Vectors heading to locations all over the system. There were too many tasks to be accomplished, and too little time.

  Their destination was the largest inhabited planetary body, Hetzal Prime. Their assignment, vague but crucial: help.

  Bell glanced out the viewport to see the curve of the world below—green and gold and blue. A beautiful place, at least from this height. Down on the surface, he suspected things might be different. Drive signatures from starships could be seen all the way to the horizon, a mass exodus of vessels heading offworld. The Nova and a few other Vectors and Republic Longbeams he could see here and there were the only ships heading inward to the planet.

  “Entering the upper atmosphere, Bell,” Loden said, not turning. “You ready?”

  “You know I love this part, Master,” Bell said.

  Greatstorm chuckled. The ship dived, or fell, it was hard to tell the difference. A roar filtered in from outside as space transitioned to atmosphere. The precision-manufactured leading edges of the Vector’s wings sliced the air as finely as any blade, but even they encountered some resistance.

  The Nova tore its way through the highest levels of Hetzal Prime’s atmosphere—no, not tore. Loden Greatstorm was too fine a pilot for that. Some Jedi used their Vectors that way, but not him. He wove the craft, sliding through the air currents, riding them down, letting the ship become just another part of the interplay of gravity and wind above the planet’s surface. The ship wanted to fall, and Greatstorm let it. It was exhilarating, deadly, unsurvivable, and the Vector was designed to transmit every last vibration and shimmy to the Jedi inside, so they could let the Force guide them to the best response. Bell clenched his hands into fists. His face stretched into a grin.

  “Spectacular,” he said, without thinking. His master laughed.

  “Nothing to it, Bell,” Loden said. “I just pointed us at the planet. Gravity’s handling the rest.”

  A long, gliding curve, smooth like the bend of a river, and then the Nova straightened out, now close enough to the planet’s surface that Bell could make out buildings, vehicles, and other smaller features below. It looked so peaceful. No indication of the disaster-in-progress in the system. Nothing but the increasing number of ships launching from the surface.

  “Where should we put down?” Bell said. “Did Master Kriss tell you?”

  “It was left to our discretion,” Greatstorm replied, glancing to one side, his profile dark, craggy, mountainlike, his Twi’lek lekku sweeping back from his skull. His eyes tracked the drive trails from the ongoing planetary evacuation. “We help any way we can.”

  “But it’s a whole planet. How will we know where to…”

  “You tell me, kid,” Loden said. “Find me somewhere to go.”

  “Training?” Bell asked.

  “Training.”

  Loden Greatstorm’s philosophy as a teacher was very simple: If Bell was theoretically capable of something, even if Loden could do it ten times as fast and a hundred times more skillfully, then Bell would end up doing that thing, not Loden. “If I do everything, no one learns anything,” his master was fond of saying.

  Loden didn’t have to do everything, but Bell would have been fine if, occasionally, he did something. Being the apprentice to the great Greatstorm was an endless gauntlet of impossible tasks. He had been training at the Jedi Temple for fifteen of his eighteen years, and it had never been easy, but being Loden’s Padawan was on an entirely different level. Every day, without exception, pushed him to his limits. Any personal time Bell ever got was spent desperately collapsing into the deepest sleep of his life until it all began again. But…he was learning. He was better now than he was even six months ago, at everything.

  Bell knew what his master wanted him to do. Another impossible task—but he was a Jedi, or getting there, and through the Force all things were possible.

  He closed his eyes and opened his spirit, and there it was, the small light within him that never stopped burning. Always at least a candle flame, and sometimes, if he concentrated, it could surge up into a blaze. A few times, he’d felt as bright as the sun, so much light pouring through him he was afraid he might go blind. Honestly, though, it didn’t matter. From spark to inferno—any connection to the Force chased away the shadows.

  Bell delved into the light within himself, feeling for the connection points to other life, other repositories of the Force on the planet below. Very near to him, he felt a source of great power and energy. It was currently banked, like coals in a fire, but enormous reservoirs of strength were clearly available if needed. This was his master, Loden. Bell pushed on past him. He was looking for something else.

  There. Like a long-distance holo coming into focus when the signal finally gained enough strength, the Force web connecting the minds and spirits of Hetzal Prime’s billions snapped into Bell’s mind. It wasn’t an entirely clear picture; more like impressions, a map of emotional zones, not so different from the patchwork of cropland flashing along far below the Nova.

  Mostly, what he sensed was panic and fear—emotions the Jedi worked very hard to purge from themselves. According to the teachings, a true Jedi’s only contact with fear was supposed to be sensing it in other beings; a common enough experience. Bell had felt those reflected emotions many times, but always alongside love and hope and surprise and many shades of joy; the spectrum of feelings inherent in all beings.

  Well, usually. On Hetzal Prime, at this moment, it pretty much was just panic and fear.

  Bell wasn’t surprised. He’d heard the evacuation order: “System-scale disaster in progress. All beings are immediately ordered to depart the Hetzal system by any available means, and remain at a minimum safe distance.” No explanation, no warning, and the math had to be obvious to everyone. Billions of people, and clearly not enough starships to evacuate all of them. Who wouldn’t panic?

  On a world seething with that sort of negative energy, it was hard to think of what two Jedi would be able to accomplish. But Loden Greatstorm had set Bell a task, and so he continued to reach out, seeking a place they could help.

  Something…a knot of tension, coiled, dense…a conflict, a question, a feeling of things not being as they should, a sense of injustice.

  Bell opened his eyes.

  “East,” he said.

  If there was injustice out there, well…they would bring justice. The Jedi were justice.

  The Nova banked, accelerating smoothly under Loden’s control. Bell’s master did let him fly occasionally—the ship could be controlled from either seat—but the Vectors required almost as much skill to handle as a lightsaber. Under the circumstances, Bell was happy to let Loden take the lead.

  Instead he served as navigator, using his still-strong connection to the Force to guide their Vector toward the area of intense conflict he had sensed, calling out directions to Loden, fine-tuning the ship’s path.

  “We should be directly above it,” Bell said. “Whatever it is.”

  “I see it,” Loden said, his voice clipped, tight. Ordinarily, his words carried a smile, even when delivering a brutal critique of Bell’s Jedi scholarship. Not now. Whatever Bell was sensing, he knew Master Greatstorm
could feel it, too, and probably on a more intense level. Down on the surface, just below where the Vector circled, people were going to die. Maybe already had.

  Loden banked the ship again as he flew in a tight circle, giving them both a clear look at the ground through the transparisteel of the Nova’s cockpit bubble.

  A hundred meters below was a compound of some kind, walled. Large, but not enormous—probably the home of a wealthy individual or family rather than a government facility. A huge crush of people surrounded the walls, focused around the gates. A single glance gave Bell the reason.

  Docked inside the compound was a large starship. It looked like a pleasure yacht, big enough to comfortably hold twenty or thirty passengers plus crew. And if the passengers didn’t care about comfort, the yacht could probably cram in ten times that many people. The ship had to be visible from ground level—its hull protruded above the compound walls, and the people crowding the gates clearly thought it was their only way offworld.

  Armed guards posted on the walls at all sides seemed to feel differently. As Bell watched, a blaster bolt shot into the air from near the gate—a warning shot, thankfully, but it was clear that the time for warnings was rapidly coming to an end. The tension in the crowd was mounting, and you didn’t need to be a Jedi to tell.

  “Why aren’t they letting the people in?” Bell asked. “That ship could get plenty of them to safety.”

  “Let’s find out,” Loden said.

  He flipped a toggle switch on his control panel. The cockpit bubble slid smoothly back, vanishing into the Nova’s hull. Loden turned back, smiling, the wind whipping past them both, sending Loden’s lekku and Bell’s dreadlocks streaming out from their heads.

  “See you down there,” he said. “Remember. Gravity does most of the work.”

  Then he jumped out.

  “You sure about this, Captain?” Petty Officer Innamin said, pointing at his screen, which displayed the rough path of one of the hyperspace anomalies as it sped toward the center of the system. “We need to shoot this thing down before it kills someone. Maybe a lot of someones. The problem is that our targeting computers can’t calculate the trajectory. The anomaly’s moving too fast. At best, I’d say we’d have a one-in-three chance of hitting the target.”

  Captain Bright shook his head, his tentacles rustling against his shoulders. He knew he should probably reprimand Innamin for questioning his orders. The kid did it all the time—he was young for a human, little more than two decades old, and as a rule thought he knew better. Bright usually let him get away with it. Life was too short, and the ships they flew were, on balance, too small to bring unnecessary tension into the mix. A thoughtful question from time to time wasn’t exactly insubordination.

  One in three, he thought. He didn’t know exactly what he’d expected. Just…better than one-in-three odds that they could actually accomplish their mission.

  The Longbeam, call sign Aurora IX, was state-of-the-art, a brand-new design from the Republic shipyards on Hosnian Prime. It wasn’t a warship per se, but it was no pushover, either. The vessel had distributed processors that could handle multiple target firing solutions and prepare a spread of blasterfire, missiles, and defensive countermeasures in a single salvo. Not too hard on the eyes, either. Bright thought it looked like one of the hammerfish he used to hunt back home on Glee Anselm—a thick, blunt skull tapering into a single elegant, sinuous tailfin. It was a tough, beautiful beast, no doubt about it. On the other hand, their target, one of the mysterious objects racing through the Hetzal system, was moving at a velocity near lightspeed. It had whipped out of hyperspace like a red-hot pellet fired from a slugthrower. The Aurora IX might be state-of-the-art, but that didn’t mean the ship could work miracles.

  Miracles were for the Jedi.

  And they were, apparently, otherwise occupied at the moment.

  “Fire six missiles,” Bright ordered.

  Innamin hesitated.

  “That’s our full complement, sir. Are you sure—”

  Bright nodded. He gestured at Innamin’s cockpit display. A red threat indicator—the projectile—on a collision path with a larger green disk, representing a solar collection station equidistant from all three of the Hetzal system’s suns. The thing was still some distance away but moving closer with every moment.

  “The anomaly is headed straight for that solar array. The data we got from Hetzal Prime says the station has seven crew aboard. We can’t get there in time to evacuate before it gets hit, but our missiles can. If we have a one-in-three chance at shooting the object down, then sending six doubles our chances. Still not perfect odds, but—”

  The final member of his crew, Ensign Peeples, buzzed his proboscis as if he was about to speak, but Bright waved him off, continuing without stopping.

  “Yes, Peeples, I know that math is off. I’m mostly worried about a different equation: If we fire six missiles, we might save seven people. Let’s see what we can do.”

  The Aurora IX’s targeting systems chugged along, not seeming quite so state-of-the-art now as the deadly red dot crept closer to people trapped on a solar farm with no way to escape. The Longbeam zoomed toward the array at its own top speed, narrowing the distance its weapons had to travel, sort of an interesting problem of trajectory and acceleration and physics, something that awakened Bright’s own three-dimensional instincts built on much of a life lived underwater. He shook his head again, rustling the cloud of thick green tentacles that emerged from the back of his skull, angry at himself for getting distracted when people out there were praying for their lives.

  The missiles fired, six quick whmphs transmitted through the ship’s hull, and the Aurora IX was down to lasers only. The weapons shot away, leaving thin trails of smoke behind to mark their path. They were out of visual range in an instant, accelerating to their max velocity in seconds.

  “Missiles away,” Innamin said.

  Now it was up to that fancy distributed processor, and whether it had successfully transmitted effective firing solutions to the missiles. Maybe all six would hit. It wasn’t impossible.

  The deck crew looked as one at the display screen tracking the six missiles, the fast-moving anomaly, their own ship, and the solar array that was rapidly becoming the collision point for all nine objects.

  The first of the missiles blinked out on the screen. Nothing else changed.

  “Missile one is a miss,” Innamin said, unnecessarily.

  Two more missiles vanished. Bright held up a hand before Innamin could speak again.

  “We can all see, Petty Officer,” he said.

  Two more misses. Leaving one. All else remained unchanged.

  The last missile vanished from the display, nowhere near the incoming anomaly. A communal sigh of despair washed across the bridge.

  “Blasters?” Bright asked, knowing the answer.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Ensign Peeples said, his voice a high-pitched, reedy whine. “Even the best gunner in the universe couldn’t make that shot, and I would guess I’m barely in the top ten.”

  Bright sighed. Peeples’s species had a radically unique understanding of humor—not the jokes themselves, which were often decent enough, but the appropriate moment to deploy them.

  “Thank you, Ensign,” Bright said.

  The solar array was now visible in the viewscreen—a large, spindly structure, like one of the feather corals back in Bright’s homesea. Hundreds of long arms arranged in a spiral spinning out from a central sphere in which the crew lived and worked. Each of those arms fitted with collection eyes along its length, blinking and rotating slowly as they drank in the light of the three suns that gave Hetzal Prime and its satellite worlds their uniquely long growing seasons. The array fed the sunlight back to the cropworlds, storing and beaming it down through proprietary technology that was the pride of the system.

  The array was be
autiful. Bright had never seen anything quite like it. It looked grown—and maybe it was. Supposedly every crop in the galaxy could grow somewhere on the worlds of Hetzal. Perhaps that extended to space stations.

  Then, a bright streak, too fast to process even with eyes as capable as Bright’s large, dark orbs, designed by evolution to pick out details in the lightless depths of the seas of Glee Anselm. In an instant the solar array was destroyed. One moment it was intact, performing its function. The next, it was ablaze, half the collection arms shattered, drifting slowly away into space.

  The central sphere remained, though flames washed across its outer hull, the muted dance of fire in zero gravity. As Bright watched, the array’s exterior lighting blinked, flickered, and went out.

  Bright put a hand to his forehead. He blinked, too. Once, slowly.

  Then he turned to his crew.

  “We don’t know for sure that the people aboard that station are dead,” he said, looking at his crew’s solemn faces.

  “I would like to try to attempt a rescue, but that”—here he pointed out the viewscreen at the wrecked, burning array, getting larger as the Aurora IX approached—“could collapse at any moment. Or explode. Or implode. I don’t know. The point is, if we’re docked when it goes, we’re dead, too.”

  Bright tapped one of his tentacles with a fingertip.

  “I’m Nautolan, a fact of which I’m sure you’re both aware. Green skin, big black eyes, what else would I be? What you might not know is that these tentacles of mine let me pick up pheromones from other beings, which I translate into an understanding of their emotional states. That’s how I know you two…are terrified.”

  Peeples opened his mouth, then, somehow, miraculously, thought better of making a joke and closed it again.

  “I get that you’re scared,” Bright went on, “but we have a duty. I know it, and you both know it, too. We need to do this.”