A New Dawn

by John Jackson Miller

  “Not good,” Hera said, grabbing his arm. Across the field, emergency crews were racing from the control tower to put out the blaze, even as Vidian stood up. Vidian hadn’t spotted Kanan and the others yet; there was too much flaming debris between them. But Kanan could see the cyborg’s creepy glowing eyes as he scanned the area. Fresh stormtroopers ran to the blast scene from the control tower, and several of Vidian’s companions rose, looking for their weapons. Overhead, a siren blared—and the ground was suddenly awash with searchlights cutting through the smoke.

  “There! At the hoverbus!” Vidian yelled, his voice artificially amplified to its loudest level.

  Kanan turned toward the door of the long hoverbus, three meters away, only to see a blaster shot strike just outside the door frame. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see at least a dozen stormtroopers taking positions behind pieces of the wreckage. No one had a bead on him yet, but the vehicle was another story. Hera knew it too. Like him, she was facing the hoverbus—but while she had her hand on her blaster, she hadn’t drawn it. She shook her head at him. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

  Story of my life, Kanan thought. In a nearly autonomic reaction, he let the bag with Skelly’s explosives slip from his hands and to the ground. Nothing exploded, which he almost thought was a shame.

  “Put your hands behind your heads!” came Vidian’s amplified call from behind.

  Above and to Kanan’s left, Skelly slipped off the bike, his hand finally having given out. He landed with a thud on the gravel.

  “Skelly, I’m going to die,” Kanan said, glaring down at the man on the ground. “But I’m going to kill you first!”

  When the other guy brought an army, it was best not to argue. Kanan kept his face toward the hoverbus. He could hear blasters being prepared, with more stormtroopers starting to move from cover to cover, working their way across the airfield.

  Hera hadn’t budged, either, but he could see her thinking. With the smoke blotting out the moon, the Imperials hadn’t seen either of their faces clearly yet, but that would change when he turned to run—or fight. And the latter option seemed impossible. They hadn’t taken a shot at an Imperial in all the day’s chaos, and he didn’t want to start now. The odds were just too long.

  Skelly sat a meter or so away from the bag, eyeing it. Vidian, with his sharp eyes, noticed. “Don’t touch it!”

  Kanan glanced again at Hera. It was a good run, he said to himself. He started to put his hands behind his head.

  “Put down your weapons!” called out another voice from behind and to Kanan’s right.

  “We’re not holding any!” Kanan yelled.

  “I didn’t mean you!” For a moment, the voice seemed strangely familiar to Kanan—until he realized it was familiar. Kanan and Hera looked to the right to see Gord walking purposefully from the direction of the cargo intake facility. “I’m here for Vidian!”

  The bulky security chief was bruised, Kanan saw: Hera had told him about Gord’s earlier beating. The Besalisk was also armed to the teeth, prepared to deal death with all four hands. He had come the same way they had, Kanan realized, on one of the other thorilide transports. He’d never seen the security chief looking so serious—or threatening.

  “Count Vidian! My name is Gord Grallik, security chief for Moonglow. You are under arrest for the murder of our supervisor—and my wife!”

  “On whose authority?” That was Sloane; she sounded stunned.

  “Mine,” Gord said. “Gorse City has a jail. You’ll be treated fairly—more fairly than you deserve!”

  “Enough of this,” Vidian yelled. “Blast him!”

  Gord shot first. And second. And third. Moving with startling speed, the Besalisk peppered the stormtroopers with blasterfire. The Imperials’ defensive positions protected them against the hoverbus, but not against anyone coming from his angle off to their right. Before anyone fired a shot in return, Gord hurled something with his fourth hand—a sonic grenade. It detonated amid the group of stormtroopers nearest him, emitting a shriek that sent them reeling.

  Hera, pulling her hands from behind her head, looked at Kanan. “Are we thinking the same thing?”

  Kanan nodded. “Run!”

  They began to move toward the hoverbus—only to both hit the ground as attentive stormtroopers fired at the doorway. As crimson shots struck the gravel ahead of them, Kanan scrambled for the only cover they could find: a chunk of the Imperial shuttle’s sublight ion engine, which earlier had hit the hoverbus roof and rolled off.

  “Time to join the party,” Hera said, whipping out her blaster. She leaned over the metallic barrier, took quick aim, and fired. One of the snipers stopped shooting at the hoverbus.

  Kanan looked at her and drew his weapon. He’d done his best to avoid such situations—but this jam wouldn’t let go of him, no matter what. Fine, then! “Let’s dance!”

  Kanan fired. Off to the north, Gord was still letting it rip, somehow shrugging off a glancing shot to his left leg. Hera and Kanan supplied him with cross fire, driving the Imperials to move Vidian and Sloane back to a more protected position.

  Continuing to shoot, Kanan grew concerned about being outflanked on his right or attacked from behind. Things looked all clear to the south, he saw. And behind him, the hoverbus—

  —was moving!

  Kanan’s eyes darted to the ground, where Skelly had lain. The bag with the bombs was gone. He nudged Hera. “The bus! It’s being stolen again!”

  Imperial blaster shots glancing off it ineffectually, the hoverbus rose a meter into the air—and then slammed into the ground again, nearly tipping over. A mechanical groan sounded above the gunfire, and the vessel lifted once more. But only part of it: One back corner steadfastly refused to lift, and the long vehicle dragged it across the ground as it tried to accelerate.

  Hera squinted back through the dust. “Is that Skelly driving?”

  Kanan yelled back. “I wouldn’t call it that!” Skelly was trying—probably with one hand and certainly in a mad panic—to make the Smoothride fly, something Kanan knew it couldn’t do anymore. But at least the vehicle was taking the fire that had been meant for them.

  All at once the rear corner of the hovercraft yanked free from the ground. In response, the rest of it lurched, starting a wild sideways swing in their direction. Kanan yelled, “Look out!”

  He and Hera went flat as ten thousand kilograms of metal careened just over their heads, grinding and snapping away the debris that had been their cover.

  Kanan raised his head to see Gord making a running charge across the open ground toward the Imperials—wild-eyed and completely heedless of the hoverbus, now dipping low as it swung widely in an arc toward him.

  “Gord, look out!” There was no way for the Besalisk to hear him in the chaos. The spinning bus swept through Gord’s position, knocking him off balance and causing him to lose two of his blasters. Gord scrambled for them, only to take a glancing blaster shot to the chest. That provided the opportunity Vidian needed. He leapt from cover toward Gord. The dazed Besalisk raised his meaty arms, ready to put up a struggle. But Vidian charged forward, knocking his attacker to the ground.

  Kanan had no shot. He winced as he saw Vidian raise his fists—and lower them, again and again. But before he could think again about the security chief’s fate, the wayward hoverbus completed another revolution—and was heading back for him and Hera. She saw it, too, and was already on her feet, holstering her blaster. “Come on!”

  Heedless of the blaster bolts coming his way, Kanan bolted from the ground and followed. The Smoothride yawed wildly toward them with more altitude than it had before. Hera made a running leap for its underside. Kanan followed a second later.

  Hera was rewarded for acting first. She had hold of one of the support struts that made up the hoverbus’s chassis. Kanan, meanwhile, had only managed to hook his right hand around one of the rings attached to the rear turbofan—putting him right in the path of the straining engine’s exhaust.


  The hovercraft pitched and fell again, nearly scraping the hangers-on away against a horizontal obstacle. Kanan realized only afterward that it was the outer wall of the Imperial spaceport. They were on their way—somewhere!

  From behind the chunk of shuttle wing she’d been using for cover, Sloane watched in stupefaction as the lumbering metal machine improbably crested the permacrete barrier. Her comlink was already in her hand. “Everyone after that thing, now!”

  Climbing out from behind the twisted wedge of metal, she dashed toward her charge. “Count Vidian! Count Vidian!”

  “Yelling is unnecessary.” His voice filled her with relief, for a change. But just for a moment. Vidian rose from the corpse of the Besalisk, his regal outfit bloodied and torn. “I live, no thanks to your forces. Another bomb—and now these attackers. You call this security?”

  Sloane fought the impulse to argue. It was the Imperial Army garrison’s responsibility to secure the landing area, not hers—but now wasn’t the time to quibble. The chase was on. Squat gray Imperial troop transports loaded with stormtroopers were already heading out the west gate, and she had more than that in mind.

  “Order the local authorities to put up roadblocks at every intersection—keep them penned into Highground!” she called on the comlink. “Contact ground and satellite surveillance—make sure we know where the vehicle is at all times!”

  And across the tarmac, far from the blast site, she saw something she did have direct control over: two TIE fighters, parked and waiting. “Get those in the sky,” she called out to the spaceport chief.

  “Right away, Captain!”

  “There were others with the saboteur,” Vidian said, looking back at officers heading for the TIEs. “That makes this a conspiracy. I want Skelly shot on sight, but bring the others to me!”

  Sloane hadn’t gotten a good look at the two who’d been facing the hoverbus, and she doubted anyone else had. One of the traitors had shot out the one surveillance cam covering the area; that someone had known what he or she was doing. But Skelly should stand out—and they wouldn’t get far in that monstrosity they were driving.

  “I want those renegades,” she called out to the troopers. “Now!”

  The way to control your fear of being on a ledge, Master Billaba had said, is not to think about it until you are off the ledge. Even at the time, Kanan had thought that advice could go two different ways. Off the ledge could mean you were safely inside—or it could mean you were plummeting. A lot of Jedi adages seemed to have that problem: They always assumed everything would work out.

  Kanan wasn’t assuming that at the moment. The underside of a landspeeder normally wouldn’t have offered any clearance for a hanger-on—and the Smoothride, while designed for flight, had been little more than a landspeeder for years. Taking it more than a meter off the ground sent the thing wobbling crazily off axis to the left and right. Okadiah’s drivers all knew that.

  But Skelly wasn’t one of Okadiah’s drivers. “Look out!” Kanan called forward to Hera as the machine lost altitude. Hera kicked her legs up before they brushed the mud-covered street below. Kanan, taller, felt the front of his boots smack the surface.

  Kanan strained, pulling himself upward so he could get a second handhold. Ahead, he saw Hera nimbly swinging her leg upward to catch a hanging support strut. That wasn’t an option for him—not with the whirling blades of the turbofan directly ahead. He had to shift his weight and reverse his handholds, turning himself around.

  Doing so, he saw the pursuers. Two—no, three Imperial troop transports hurtled up the dark lane in the hoverbus’s wake, occasionally slowed by oncoming traffic. Skelly wasn’t bothered by the traffic at all, Kanan realized: Every few seconds, the vehicle slammed off something to the left or right—or pitched upward, having simply climbed over its obstacle. Kanan had to heave his body upward each time the machine came back down to keep from being scraped off. But there wasn’t any choice except to hang on—not with Imperials behind and Hera in danger up ahead.

  When the first blaster shot from the twin-cannon turret on the lead transport struck a few meters shy of the hoverbus, Kanan had had enough. Seeing a slight recess just inside the rear of the underchassis, he pitched his legs upward and caught his boots beneath the lower flange. That allowed him to reach off to a more secure handhold on the left, leaving the turbofan housing behind.

  With as much care as was possible in the whipping wind, Kanan felt around in the darkness, then began working his way backward across the Smoothride’s bottom, feeling a bit like a mynock who’d lost suction. Groaning against the strain, he heaved his body across the opening of the recess to a place he could cling to just the inside of the rear of the undercarriage.

  He waited there, breathing hard, as the hoverbus pitched and rolled. Waiting was excruciating—but he had to, for the right moment. Finally it came. The hoverbus struck something hard on the left, causing it to tip almost onto its right side. Seeing air opening up between him and the ground racing beneath, Kanan rolled his body around and onto the rear bumper.

  This time, the Smoothride did slam against the ground when it righted itself—and Kanan began to fall backward, off the bumper.

  “I’ve got you, Kanan!”

  Kanan looked up, astonished. Someone did have him. Skelly was hanging out the shattered back window, his bionic right hand clasped around Kanan’s belt. Skelly screamed in agony as Kanan scrambled over his shoulders and through the open pane.

  Kanan hit the back floor of the hoverbus, wheezing. But he couldn’t stay. The hoverbus had struck the street—anyone beneath would have been dislodged. “We’ve got to go back for Hera!” he called out. Then he blinked at Skelly. “Who’s driving?”

  Before he got an answer, the Smoothride again bounced over something, sending Kanan sliding on his back up the aisle as the vehicle tipped downward.

  Upside down next to the driver’s seat, he looked up. “Sorry,” Hera said, grinning. “Still getting the hang of it. But welcome aboard!”

  Kanan rolled over and scrambled to his feet. He saw Skelly had somehow made it forward, clearly in great pain but unable to rest. The shorter man was sitting in the stairwell of the open left doorway, his right arm wrapped around the support rail while his other hand fished around in his bag. A moment later, Skelly slung a small pipe bomb out the door.

  The landspeeders parked along the left side of the street went up in an inferno that lit the area, upending them. The shock wave caught the rear section of the Smoothride, tipping the hoverbus halfway onto its right side as it hurtled toward an intersection. Kanan grabbed for the support post as Hera ably got control, using the momentum to take the vehicle down a side street.

  Skelly just grinned, showing teeth broken and blackened. He reached into his bag again.

  “Can you make him stop that?” Hera called back.

  “Happily,” Kanan said. He stepped over and yanked Skelly’s satchel from him.

  “Hey!” Skelly said, reaching for it—and nearly tumbling out the open door.

  Kanan grabbed him—and immediately regretted it. “I should—”

  Before he could finish, blasterfire shattered the windows on the left side. Kanan ducked, trying to protect his head from the flying shards. Through the open door, he could see where the blasts were coming from: one of the Recon transports, ambushing from a side street. A second later the windows on the right exploded with fire coming from the opposite direction.

  “We’re in a shooting gallery!” Kanan yelled. They had to get out of here—but that meant finding out where they were. Slinging the bag over his shoulder, he pulled his blaster and scrambled atop one of the seats.

  It was almost impossible, watching the world whizzing by in darkness. Okadiah had never gotten the vehicle’s navigation system working: Who needed it, for runs back and forth to the bar? But Kanan searched in desperation for any landmark.

  “There!” The odd shape of Transcept’s World Window Plaza, lit from within and without as always,
whisked past. “Go right,” Kanan yelled. “The old miners’ highway. Let’s make for The Pits!”

  The Smoothride lurched. Hera barely slowed the vehicle—and yet somehow it easily made the turn onto the entrance ramp. The old elevated thoroughfare had the benefit of limited access: Now, rather than passing side streets with Imperial gunners, they were passing buildings and rooftops on either side. They were hemmed in, true—but there was very little traffic to run into on the highway anymore, and Hera opened up the throttle. Kanan scrambled off the seat and ran toward the back.

  The Recon transports were racing along behind, he saw. He removed Skelly’s bag from his shoulder. There were still close to a dozen improvised explosive devices inside. Now that they were out of traffic, the odds of doing more than random property damage with them were better. He called back to Skelly, still in the middle of the hoverbus. “How do I activate these?”

  “Plug in the leads and let it rip!”

  Pulling out a cylinder not much larger than a shot glass, Kanan quickly snapped together the two loose wires attached to it. Looking back, he took aim. He hurled it out the rear window and watched as the jetwash took it, whisking it toward the oncoming Imperials.

  Fire blossomed before the lead Recon transport. Beneath it, the highway structure, already stressed from years of quakes, shook violently. The first transport flipped trying to avoid the blast, sending the stormtroopers riding outside it hurtling away—but that was better for them, as one after another the rear vehicles slammed into it.

  “Three for one!” Kanan yelled, pumping his fist.

  “We’ve got bigger problems!” Skelly yelled.

  Kanan looked forward, startled. He hadn’t expected clear driving all the way ahead, but it was kilometers from another on-ramp. “There shouldn’t be anyone out in front of us yet!”

  But before he could run forward to look, light blazed outside the left and right windows, blinding him. Feeling a sudden rush of heat, he realized it wasn’t searchlights flooding the hoverbus, or small-arms fire from the Imperials. A high whine passed overhead. “Is that—”