Heir to the Jedi

by Kevin Hearne

  He saw what I intended and stopped shooting to move first and skew the field of fire in his favor. He was a thin shadow topped with a red globe of a head, and he moved fast. I quit rolling and tried to pick him off before he found cover, but I wasn’t accurate enough. He ducked out of sight, and now I had to wonder if he would try to flank me or wait for me to try to flank him.

  A loud crack sounded in the hangar and echoed off the walls, almost simultaneously with the taut tapped-cable noise of his blaster firing. Another crack, then silence, and I realized I recognized that pattern.

  “It’s okay, Luke, he’s down,” Nakari called. “I just made sure he’ll stay down, too.” She stepped out from behind the landing ramp, slugthrower cradled in her arms. “You all right? You’re bleeding.”

  “I’ll be fine. Azzur Nessin won’t, though. Ruuf got him.” The cargo magnate clearly should have cultivated the habit of spying on his employees.

  Nakari noticed Nessin’s bloody remains on the tile floor and said, “Damn. I didn’t want our knocking on his door to bring him that kind of end.”

  “Me, neither. We’d better get out of here if we don’t want to end up like him,” I said. “Those two might have been acting alone, but they might have also called in some Imperials so they could hand us over.”

  “Or to serve as backup, yeah,” she said. “I think we’re just about ready. Status panels are looking green.”

  “Thanks for the assist, by the way.”

  She shrugged a shoulder. “Thanks for distracting him. He didn’t see me until it was too late.”

  There was no time and really no need to investigate the body; nothing about the bounty hunter would help us escape the system, and we had to be gone long before local authorities discovered what happened and tried to detain us. We boarded and closed the ramp and I caught Nakari up on what Azzur Nessin had said and the sequence of events before she had gotten involved. I made a quick trip to the bathroom to throw some disinfectant and adhesive on my scalp and forehead, hoping it wouldn’t scar.

  Artoo reported finding and eliminating not one but five different tracking programs hidden in the nav computer’s code sometime during the last few days. Drusil found another he missed, an Imperial Sleeper she called it, tied to the ship’s clock. It would become active at a set time, triggered by the turning of the clock, note our current course and position, and send a coded burst reporting it to the nearest Imperial world. There was no way to tell if they had been installed by a single person or several individuals, but at this point we had little choice but to run and hope we had found them all.

  Lifting out of the atmosphere was even rougher than descending to the surface; we weren’t as streamlined now with the modifications, and at one point a particularly bad stretch of turbulence surprised Nakari, causing her to bite her tongue.

  We emerged into vacuum on a heading to the galactic south, where an Interdictor and half a dozen Star Destroyers had bottled up exiting traffic bound in that direction. The Star Destroyers were sending shuttles of troops from ship to ship, inspecting and clearing them, and the Interdictor turned off its projectors periodically to allow cleared vessels to go about their interstellar business.

  We traveled with the sublight engines running at about half their capability. The uneven thrust from the replacement had introduced some resistance into turns or rolls to starboard, but otherwise it gave us respectable if not blistering speed.

  A curt Imperial query asking for our destination, business, and number of passengers and crew elicited a slightly impatient reply from Nakari, precisely the tone one should take. Once the Imperial traffic controller instructed us to hold course and prepare for boarding and Nakari acknowledged, I asked Artoo and Drusil if they were ready to run east and make the first jump.

  “Ready,” Drusil said. A clacking noise could be heard through the comm as she ran her fingers over her datapad. “Monitoring Imperial frequencies in system.” Artoo confirmed he was ready, as well, so I banked the Desert Jewel to port and opened up the engines to full.

  It didn’t take long for the Empire to notice aloud that we did not appear to be maintaining our course. Nakari ignored two requests to resume previous course and acknowledge transmission. Drusil’s voice blared over the intercom, reporting intercepted transmissions she had decrypted.

  “Bridge of the Interdictor is talking about us to the bridge of the flagship destroyer in the southern battle group.”

  “Talking is fine. They can talk all they want.”

  “The destroyer has assigned a TIE squadron to pursue us,” Drusil continued. “I calculate intercept in approximately ten minutes. Too late to capture us before we jump, though they don’t know that. A shuttle is following to board us immediately.”

  “How long until we can jump, Artoo?” I asked.

  FOUR MINUTES EIGHT SECONDS, he replied.

  “The destroyer captain believes we are the ones they are looking for. He wants the Interdictor to redirect its gravity projectors.”

  That wouldn’t be good. They might be able to do it in time.

  “But now a third captain has interrupted from another destroyer,” Drusil said. “He argues that we couldn’t possibly be going anywhere without an established hyperspace lane in this direction, and it is more likely that we are a distraction. In other words, the real fugitives are already waiting in queue, and once they move the gravity projectors the lane to the south will be open and allow their escape. Amusing.”

  Nakari laughed in agreement.

  “The flagship captain points out that if I am on board, I might be capable of charting a new hyperspace lane on my own. That is sobering. I fear he may be distressingly competent.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “The Interdictor has just sent a request to Polser Couriers on Kupoh to confirm our transponder code and that we are conducting legitimate business on their behalf.”

  “That’s not going to end well,” Nakari said.

  “But it will take them some time to respond,” I reminded her. “Even if it’s a minute, that could help.”

  Drusil continued her reporting. “An argument rages. The flagship captain wants the gravity projectors to be redirected this instant; the other destroyer captain maintains we are a ruse; and the Interdictor captain insists that they wait on an answer from Polser before acting rashly.”

  Nakari looked at me. “Why doesn’t the flagship captain simply order it done?”

  “He probably will in a moment. The other captains are making sure their objections are heard and recorded so that if the operation goes badly they can’t be faulted for the decision.”

  “Ah, got it,” Nakari said, nodding with comprehension. “Standard operating procedure in a culture of blame where risk taking and initiative are punished. Always tell Lord Vader it was someone else’s fault.”

  “Polser Couriers just simplified matters,” Drusil said. “They report they currently have no outbound shipments headed that way and we are not one of their ships.”

  “That was fast.”

  “The flagship captain has ordered us stopped now, and the Interdictor captain is complying. Turning off gravitational projector to realign in front of our present course.”

  “Can they stop us?” Nakari asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Depends partly on the crew and partly on their power situation. They’ve been conducting operations for a while here, turning the projectors on and off, and their generators might be drained. Or they might not. I haven’t done this all that often in raids, much less alone. We’ll find out in a couple of minutes. Or less. Artoo, will you throw up a countdown giving us the time until the jump?”

  He chirped, and the display indicated we had eighty-nine seconds left.

  I’ve noticed the curious ability of time to linger and stretch instead of pass by under moments of stress or boredom, and yet it can slip past unnoticed during periods of rest and contentment. Right then it was a monstrous, lumbering creature that barely moved as we waited f
or the seconds to tick by.

  With thirty-two seconds to go, Drusil made another report. “Interdictor captain announced the projector is down and realigning to our sector. Spinning up.”

  Our intelligence was spotty here. Thirty seconds had to be a minimum time to get a gravity field projected—intelligence suggested it took more like a couple of minutes—but we weren’t safely outside of operational parameters yet.

  “You know what, Luke? You’re kind of cute when you’re nervous.”

  The twin shocks of being called both cute and nervous tore my eyes from the countdown. Nakari was smirking at me. “I also like how you’re completely calm when people are shooting at you but are easily rattled by compliments.”

  “It’s not everyone who can rattle me,” I said. “Just you.” She tilted her head and I added, “But in a good way.”

  Nakari flashed her teeth at me and said, “Of course. I’m the good kind of rattling.”

  And she was, because she successfully distracted me from the countdown, and the hyperdrive shot us out of that sector into a region of space more accurately charted by Drusil’s equations than any existing star charts.

  “Hey. Did we just get away?” I asked.

  “Yep. For the moment, anyway. Good job, pilot.”

  I sighed in relief and knew that Nakari was teasing me again. I’d had very little to do with it—this part of the trip was all made possible by math and physics and brains that could process it far faster and more accurately than I ever could. It wasn’t without its own tension, however. Without traveling established lanes, there was a chance we’d never come back into realspace again. But if we did, we’d have a view of the galaxy no one else had ever enjoyed before.

  Over the next eight hours, we wound up spending more time in realspace than hyperspace. Drusil’s short jumps dumped us into new systems, and she spent time with Artoo taking readings, scanning the stars, and then tweaking her calculations for the next jump. I encouraged her to take all the time she needed.

  Most of the systems we encountered were full of barren rocks and gas giants, but one had a habitable planet with life on it. We lingered there awhile longer, noted the coordinates and the path to get there, and took some preliminary scans of the planet to be analyzed later.

  “This might yield something useful for my father,” Nakari said. “A consolation prize for losing his advantage on Fex.”

  “It might also work as a base for the Alliance,” I said, making sure Artoo noted weather patterns and took some atmospheric readings. “If the water’s okay and it doesn’t have predators like Fex, it could be the kind of place Admiral Ackbar is looking for.”

  The worry of being lost in space got replaced by the worry of running into Imperials again once Drusil and Artoo announced that we were back on established routes, skirting the far side of Hutt Space and traveling to the galactic north, dropping into a deserted system, and then plotting our course from there into Omereth.

  Our eventual arrival into the Omereth system was an anticlimax. I didn’t realize how tense my shoulders were until I saw no threats on the scanners and hardly any ships at all in orbit around the planet. They were small personal yachts with few weapons.

  “Oh,” I said, consciously relaxing. “No one’s gunning for us. That’s a nice change. Kind of the galaxy I want to live in, honestly.”

  “I’ll take it,” Nakari said, and then brought up a current view of the planet on the holo. “Whoa. Are we sure there’s land on that thing? It looks like a solid blue marble with some clouds swirling above it.”

  “I assure you that dry land exists,” Drusil said over the comm. “I have provided the rendezvous coordinates to your outstanding droid.”

  “Thanks,” I replied, grinning over the fact that Artoo had now been upgraded to outstanding in Drusil’s eyes. He’d climbed so high so fast. “Artoo, go ahead and put them in and set our course. I’ll take back manual control if necessary.” His acknowledging chirp provoked a happy sigh from me. I looked over at Nakari and smiled. “Almost through with this mission.”

  “I know. Part of me can’t believe we made it.”

  My smile faltered and I tensed up again. Destiny sometimes finds it amusing to strike at people who believe they’re safe. I rechecked the scanners for threats and made sure the shields were still up and working.

  “What?” Nakari said. “Luke?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “I have a part of me that can’t believe it, either. The war’s made me believe that nothing is ever easy. But maybe we really did fake out the Empire with those uncharted hyperspace jumps.”

  Turned out we did fool the Empire and Drusil was right—they’d never look for her on Omereth. But that’s not who was waiting for us to enter the atmosphere.

  WHEN THE DESERT JEWEL bit into the atmosphere of Omereth, a starboard drag on the stick evolved that was much more severe than when we’d left Kupoh. It got noticeably worse as we descended, until we were flying with blue above and blue below. I didn’t see any smoke trail behind us but I almost felt there should be one—I definitely felt tremors in the ship.

  “Not good,” I murmured. Perhaps I’d pushed the engine too hard in our race to outrun the Empire, or perhaps there was a problem with the aerodynamics—the modifications we’d made to the chassis back there might have degraded in the turbulence of leaving Kupoh and worsened upon entering atmosphere here, introducing a worrisome tug on that side. It significantly reduced the ship’s maneuverability, and I doubted that we would find convenient repair facilities on this planet. Banking left was a chore, and banking right was now the ship’s default on a dead stick. If I pulled the stick to starboard we’d probably spin out of control.

  Nakari grimaced when I explained that to her. “Well, I suppose the engine served its purpose, right? It was always going to be temporary anyway. Can we make it back to the fleet with just one engine?”

  “Sure. It’ll be a bit slower, but we’ll make it. There’s nothing wrong with the hyperdrive. I’m thinking of just killing the engine now. I might get some maneuverability back if it’s the engine shaking loose on that side causing the trouble.”

  I powered down the starboard engine and some of the shaking and drag eased, which was a relief. The stick became more responsive, too, though it still wished to drag us to starboard a little. We lost quite a bit of speed, of course, but I was just thinking we didn’t need much anymore when an alarm blatted.

  “Luke,” Nakari said, “there’s something on the scanner. Two somethings. Ships inbound from our rendezvous coordinates.”

  Drusil heard this over the comm and ventured with a hopeful note in her voice, “Perhaps my family is coming to meet me.”

  I didn’t reply at first, instead studying the data scrolling across the scanner readout. I’d have to tell Drusil that her guess was highly improbable. “I don’t think so. Those aren’t personal shuttles. They’re custom ships like this one, moving very fast. And whoa—they just threw up their deflector shields. Definitely not friendly.”

  I raised our own shields, and my heart sank as I considered our options. Those ships were much faster than us right now, and might still be faster even if I turned on the starboard engine again. And turning it on would mean I’d lose what little agility I currently had for a speed gain that wouldn’t be enough. There were no canyons or other land features for me to exploit, either: We were over open water for kilometers.

  “Who are these guys?” Nakari asked.

  “Bounty hunters,” I grated. Patient ones. And the only way they could have been here waiting for us was if they had followed Drusil’s family here. Major Derlin’s half of the operation, as I’d feared, had to have been compromised. It was no wonder we’d never gotten any news about it. I hoped the Givin’s family was still safe; there was no bounty on them as far as I knew, so maybe the bounty hunters had merely been staking them out, waiting for our arrival. And I hoped the major was all right if he was still on the planet.

  Drusil had n
o comment to make over the comm. She was brilliant, and now that she had new information she could see the probabilities much more clearly than I could.

  “Nakari,” I said, my voice pitched low. “No matter what I do, we’re at a severe disadvantage here. We’d better prepare for an emergency water landing.”

  “Oh. Right.” She nodded and began to unbuckle. “What about your droid?”

  “His electrical systems are watertight so he can survive a dunking, but he’s not a good swimmer. We’ll have to help him get out.”

  “Got it.” She bent to kiss the top of my head as she exited. “Fly well, my pilot.”

  The bounty hunter ships were designed with narrow silhouettes like the Desert Jewel to make them difficult to target. One was dark, flat, and chunky, like a malevolent piece of armed and flying toast, and the other sailed like a vertical needle, similar to a B-wing, cockpit at the top and a rectangular battery of lasers below that fired in sequence and repeated, a barrage of blasts almost impossible to dodge.

  Only the needle ship fired, and while I managed to avoid many of the bolts and landed a couple of hits myself, we still got pounded so many times on the first pass that our shields were reduced to dangerous lows. We probably wouldn’t survive the next pass.

  But a strange situation developed. An angry voice berated the needle ship over an open channel, demanding that it stop firing or be destroyed. Since there were no other ships around, the voice could only belong to the pilot of the flying toast. He took issue with the pilot of the needle attempting to destroy us, since we represented a sizable bounty and they could hardly collect if we disappeared into the ocean. I took advantage by searching for a way out. There was an island ahead and slightly to port, maybe only two or three dozen square kilometers in size, sporting forested hills above a sheltered lagoon with a sandy beach. If we could land on the beach and run for cover that would be best, but I remembered Admiral Ackbar’s warnings about the planet’s seas, and in case we were forced down before we reached that island, I wanted us to have as little water to cross as possible.