The mission had begun as a seek-and-destroy. The target was one of the mysterious projectiles that had appeared in the Hetzal system. It was moving fast, but it was unarmed, and didn’t appear to be able to alter its trajectory. They just had to blow it up before it hit the moon. Difficult, but not impossible.
But now, thanks to Te’Ami and their other three Jedi colleagues on this mission, they knew that the object was, somehow, inhabited. There were people aboard it. Living people.
So, while the seek part of the mission was done and dusted, the destroy part was off the table—at least until they’d managed to rescue the people inside. Once that was done—however they might do it, and that was still very unclear—they would still have to blow the thing up, because it was on a collision course with the Fruit Moon, or whatever the people in this system called it.
One tricky mission had become an impossible one, with the original tricky mission still nested inside it.
Joss sighed, then began running through his operational assets.
A Longbeam, with all its capabilities and weapons and tools—a pretty magnificent ship, honestly. You could do a lot with a Longbeam. Beyond that, they had three Vectors containing four space wizards, and he’d always been a little fuzzy on what they were actually capable of. Jedi could do amazing things, sure, but which amazing things?
He considered that, extremely conscious that every moment he spent trying and failing to find a solution meant this fragment, this ship, whatever it was, got closer to smashing into the moon, obliterating everyone aboard as well as the planetoid itself.
So, what could Jedi do?
They could use those laser swords of theirs pretty well. Always fun to see in action, but he didn’t figure they would do much good just then. Jedi could jump high and run fast—but not as high as space, and not as fast as a ship moving at a pretty good percentage of lightspeed.
They could stand around and look cool. He’d seen them do that plenty of times.
They could…move things around with their minds.
Huh, Joss thought.
He turned to Pikka. “Magclamps?” he said, knowing he didn’t need to explain further. She’d get it right away—one of the reasons they worked well together, on and off duty.
“Maybe,” Pikka said, thinking. “What kind of cabling are they rigged with?”
“Egarian silk,” Joss answered. “They just did a refit on all these Longbeams, swapped it in instead of the duralloy line.”
“That’s good. Egarian’s got a higher tensile strength, and it’s got the variable elasticity. More electricity you run through it, the more rigid it gets. If we could latch on to the object, and start pretty stretchy and ratchet up the tension slowly…”
“Exactly. Do it gradual, so the cables don’t snap.”
Pikka nodded, tapping her finger on the control panel, thinking hard.
“But we’ll never hit it. Those clamps aren’t like blasters. They’re big, clunky. Bad for precision work. They’re designed to tow stationary wrecks back to dock for repairs. The anomaly’s moving too fast.”
“Yeah, well,” Joss said, “I had an idea about that, too.”
He activated his comm system.
“Master Te’Ami,” he said. He wasn’t sure if the Duros Jedi actually was a Jedi Master, or a Jedi Knight, or some other rank in the Order, but he called them all Master. Better safe than sorry. Joss didn’t know if the Jedi could even get offended, but why take a chance?
“Yes, Captain Adren?” came the Jedi’s voice, cool and utterly without tension, even though she was facing the same impossible problems he was.
“I might have an idea. But I have a question. You know how you guys can move things around by thinking about it?”
A bit of a pause.
“We use our connection to the Force, but yes, I know what you mean.”
“Can you stop things from moving around?”
Another, longer pause.
“I see where you’re going with this, Captain, but we’re not gods. We can’t just stop that thing cold.”
“Not asking you to,” Joss said, rolling his eyes at Pikka, who grinned at him. “We have something aboard that might be able to slow it down, but it’s not easy to use. We’ll have to try to match velocity with the fragment, and we all know how fast it’s going. It’ll take every bit of engine power we have, and a lot of our fuel, just to accelerate to where we need to be.
“If you can slow it down even a little, even five percent, even one percent, it could make a big difference. At these speeds, even a minor downward shift in velocity would still mean a significant reduction in the resources we’d have to expend.”
“One moment,” Te’Ami said. The line went cold, and Joss figured she was probably talking to the other Jedi, seeing if they thought this would work.
The comm hissed back to life.
“We’ll do what we can,” the Jedi said.
“Excellent,” Joss said. Then a thought, and he leaned forward and spoke into the comm again.
“And, uh, if you could maybe try to hold the fragment together, too, when you slow it down?”
“Why?”
“Because we’re going to hit it with these big metal clamp things, and we don’t know how fragile it is. We don’t even know what it is. Might cause it to just shatter. So if there’s anything you could do to, you know…prevent that…might be good.”
A very long pause.
“This is the best idea you have?”
“Only idea I have, Master Jedi. If we can connect to the thing, we can reverse engines, full power, but gradual, slow it down. We’re not seeing any drive signatures from it—it’s like a projectile from a slugthrower. Like someone whipped a rock real fast. If we could get some opposing force on it, should drain down the velocity pretty quick. If, uh, it doesn’t break apart. But that’s where you guys come in.”
The longest pause yet.
“As I said, Captain…we will do what we can.”
“Great,” Joss said.
He snapped off the comm and turned to Pikka.
“The space wizards don’t seem very excited about this,” she said.
“Eh,” he answered. “They’ll be excited when it works.”
“Is it going to work?” she asked. “Or will the thing break apart, or will the cables snap and whiplash us off into space, or will we just not be able to latch on no matter what we try?”
“Eh,” Joss said again.
He pushed the throttle all the way forward, and the Longbeam leapt into space, the engines roaring, every surface vibrating with power.
“Let’s find out.”
A line of four vessels, carrying approximately thirty-five hundred people, moved at a steady pace away from Hetzal Prime. They sought safety from the barrage of deadly projectiles that had infiltrated the system and continued to wreak havoc. From the farthest reaches all the way to the gas harvesting stations near the three suns that powered Hetzal’s endless growing seasons, destruction reigned.
Two of the ships were passenger liners, and two were cargo freighters temporarily repurposed as transports for the duration of the emergency. While the passenger liners were capable of greater speed than the freighters, all four captains had opted to remain together as they traversed space on their way out of the system, so as to render aid to one another if needed.
Minister Ecka’s evacuation order had asked all ships to reach “minimum safe distance” but was vague on what that might actually mean. To find their path to safety, the captains were relying on the Republic vessel that had transited into the system at the start of all this. It was coordinating efforts from the surface of Hetzal Prime, sending out a tracking feed. From that, the captains could see the path of the deadly rain of projectiles falling on the system. It gave them a sense of where safety might lie.
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br /> Based on what they could see, they should be out of the danger zone soon. After that…who knew? Apparently, the Republic and their Jedi colleagues were executing some sort of plan, but no one on the ships knew what it was, or when it would be possible to return to their homeworld. Assuming they ever could. For all they knew, the situation was permanent, and they would never set foot on Hetzal Prime again.
This turned out to be true.
In less than the blink of an eye, the ships vanished, replaced with four slowly expanding balloons of fire and vapor and shredded metal and molecular remnants of the thousands of people aboard. One of the projectiles had exited hyperspace directly in their path, and because the vessels had grouped together for safety, it pierced them all, one after the other, like a skewer through bits of meat. The ships were gone.
On the Third Horizon, Jedi Master Avar Kriss heard the new silence of all those souls, lost to the Force forever. Her mouth tightened.
She continued to listen. Something was off, a bad note in the melody. She tried to understand what she was hearing, sensing, knowing that she was stretching her abilities to their limits. There was too much happening in the Hetzal system all at once, and her mind was not truly capable of processing it. She was pushing, trying to make the Force reveal the answer to her—that was not the way. She needed to pull back, not shove forward. Let the Force give her what it willed, in its own time.
Avar slowed her breathing, slowed her heart, felt calm return to her mind and spirit. She listened again for the bad note—as she did, a projectile finally hit the surface of Hetzal Prime, a sea impact, destroying thousands of square kilometers of algae farms, sending water vapor high into the atmosphere and tsunamis outward in a rapidly expanding circle. People died—but hundreds, not thousands or millions, as the farms were mostly automated and droid-managed. Perhaps more would be lost when the waves hit the coasts, but it all could be worse, much worse. The hyperspace fragment was small, and greatly slowed by the water. It did not penetrate the planet’s crust.
A bad note, certainly…but no worse than the other bits of ugliness and pain she was hearing. The system remained out of balance, despite the ongoing efforts of the Jedi and Republic to save it. No, what she was seeking was not a bad note.
It was a missing note. There was a hole, right in the middle of her awareness. Something she was not hearing, something the Force was trying to point out to her. But with everything else she was tracking—the anomalies, the fear of the people trapped aboard some of them, her own teams trying to help, and just the web of life within the system—it was all too complex, too distracting.
She was missing something. And if she could not find a way to hear it, she believed everything they were doing here might, in the end, mean nothing.
Avar Kriss opened her spirit as much as she could.
She listened.
“Now, Petty Officer,” ordered Captain Bright, and Innamin activated the fire suppressor systems. A line of green foam arced out from nozzles mounted below the Longbeam’s cockpit, impacting the flames rippling across the damaged sunfarm’s docking ring.
The moment the fire was out, Bright maneuvered the ship forward, trying to get a good seal with the docking mechanism. It wasn’t easy. The array had been badly damaged when the hyperspace projectile smashed through its outer arms, and the whole station was in a loose, fast spin. The giant mess of solar panels, bracing struts, and the large central crew compartment were all equipped with external thrusters, which were trying to compensate for the spin. But whatever droid brain was in charge of the anti-spin system didn’t seem to understand that the mass of the array had changed drastically when it lost so many arms in the collision.
All the little attitude adjustments, vapor buzzing out into space from the maneuvering jets…they just made things worse. The central sphere, where the operations crew lived and worked, was vibrating, buzzing like a hive full of irritated insects. Connecting the Aurora IX to the station’s docking system without destroying ship, station, or both required the most skillful possible flying.
Fortunately, Captain Bright was a very skillful flier.
“Let’s get in there,” he said, watching his control panel light up green as the diagnostics told him the docking seal was good. He looked up and saw his team—Petty Officer Innamin and Ensign Peeples, both of whom had suited up in emergency rescue gear pulled from the Longbeam’s lockers.
“This station had a crew complement of seven,” Bright said. “It’s not that big, but there are still plenty of places to hide. They aren’t responding to our comms, which means either they’re injured or the array’s systems were damaged when the projectile hit. We’ll have to do a sweep. We’ll split up, each of us taking a third of the decks. If you find someone, bring them back to the air lock. If you need help, call for the droid.”
He nodded toward the floating silver cylinder hovering just outside the cockpit, vertically oriented and rounded on top and bottom. A pill droid. Very simple design, with one large, round crystal eye and a speaker grille below. It didn’t seem particularly functional, but that was deceptive. Bright had seen these things work. The droid had a variety of extender arms hidden behind sleek panels on its body, and could use them for everything from moving wreckage off trapped victims to performing basic on-site surgery. Handy machine to have around.
“Let’s go,” Bright said, and pressed the release that opened the Aurora IX’s air lock.
A wash of furnacelike air flooded out from the damaged station, bringing with it odors of chemically tinged smoke, melted plastoid, and overheated metal.
“It’s burning,” Ensign Peeples said, his proboscis vibrating almost as intensely as the station itself. “It stinks. Maybe the solar array had too much pharphar for lunch.”
“Yeah, well, I’m getting it, too—my tentacles are almost as sensitive as your nose, Peeples. Just put on your mask and take shallow breaths. We have a job to do.”
The three operatives spread out through the station. The smoke thickened, and despite the tech-enhanced goggles they all wore, it rapidly became obvious that a visual search would be ineffective. The searchers called out as they moved along the decks, paused to listen for responses, then kept going.
Bright was becoming increasingly sure that everyone on the station was dead when he heard a weak voice call out from behind a collapsed control console.
“Please, I’m here…please…”
He moved toward the sound and saw a dark-skinned human sitting with her back against a bulkhead. Blood ran down the side of her face from a wound on her scalp. Another crewmember lay beside her, unconscious. She had taken his head in her lap but didn’t seem to be able to offer anything else by way of assistance to the man.
“I’m from the Republic,” Bright said to the woman. “My name is Captain Bright. Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ll get you both out of here. What’s your name?”
“Sheree,” she said, her voice weak. “This is Venn. I’m…not sure if he’s…He might be dead. He hasn’t moved in a while.”
“Don’t worry about that now, Sheree. Are the other members of your crew still alive?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We lost contact with one another when…everything caught fire. The station’s comms are down.”
As I expected, Bright thought.
He pulled a comlink from his belt and lifted it to his mouth.
“Innamin. Peeples. I have two survivors. One is too injured to move. I’m going to call the pill droid and get them back to the Longbeam. Have either of you had any luck?”
As he spoke, he tapped a remote clipped to his belt that would summon the rescue droid to his location. Hopefully the machine would be able to do something for the unconscious man—Venn. And if not, the medical bay on the Aurora IX was equipped to handle a number of different emergencies.
Bright’s comlink crackled to life.
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“No other survivors yet, Captain,” Innamin said, his voice clouded by static—evidently the damage to the station was causing interference. “But we have another problem.”
“Talk to me,” Bright said, watching the rescue droid glide silently into the room.
He signaled to Sheree that he was going to keep moving, continue his search. She nodded, her expression pained but grateful.
“I started on the lowest level,” Innamin continued. “It’s where they stuck the operational stuff for the station—power, life support, all that. I had a hunch and wanted to check the main reactor. I’m glad I did. It took some serious damage. It’s unstable. If it’s not repaired, it’ll blow for sure.”
Blast it, Bright thought. Not that he’d expected this to be easy, but this was an entirely different level of challenge.
“How long do we have?” he said.
“Honestly, sir, if it were up to me, I’d pull us out right now. It could go at any second.”
“Can you do anything? Stabilize it, even just long enough for us to continue our search? I found two survivors—there are bound to be more.”
Innamin was an engineer by training. Of the three crewmembers of the Aurora IX, he was the only one with the skill set to even consider fixing a damaged reactor. That also meant he was the only one who would be able to accurately assess whether he could do anything about it. Innamin could easily just say, Sorry, nope, can’t do anything, we need to leave now, we did our best, and who would know the difference? The kid was young, had a lot to live for. Bright almost wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d said it was time to go.
“I can try,” Innamin said. “Might be able to buy us a few minutes.”
Bright felt a surge of pride wash over him.
“We’re all the Republic,” he said.
“We’re all the Republic,” Innamin replied.
“We’re all dead if we don’t finish searching the station,” Ensign Peeples chimed in from another deck. “I have another survivor. Badly injured. Send me the pill.”
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