Into the Dark

by Claudia Gray

  But she’d never seen Leox Gyasi so close to losing his nerve.

  His hands remained fixed on the controls as he attempted to hold steady. “So,” she said, “what do we do now?”

  “We try to check whether our path is clear.” Leox would’ve looked almost relaxed to anyone who didn’t know him as well as Affie did. Only she and Geode could detect the tension coiled inside. “If we get hit by so much as a splinter of metal, we’re looking at explosive ejection from hyperspace, followed by your favorite and mine, a hull breach.”

  Hull breach. Every space traveler’s worst nightmare. A breach meant being blown out into the frigid void of space—which would kill you within two or three minutes. Within only seconds if you had any breath in your lungs, which would immediately expand and burst.

  Even worse: the electric blue of hyperspace was changing color. Shifting more violet, all the way to red. Affie had no idea why that was happening, but it couldn’t be good.

  The navicomputer began blinking fast, sending staccato crimson light across the bridge. “We’re picking up debris,” she managed to report. “Something huge.”

  Leox said what she was really thinking: “That thing’s got a bull’s-eye on us.”

  “Can we evade?”

  “We’re gonna find out.”

  Steering in hyperspace was no mean feat. Generally, there was no need to do so, since the navicomputer calculated and modified the jump at inhuman speeds. Today was an exception. Experienced pilots formed a kind of intuition about hyperspace—an instinct—that worked better than any droid or machinery. Leox had better instincts than any other pilot Affie had ever encountered. He could save them if anyone could.

  She just wished she didn’t know how big an if that was.

  “Hang on!” Leox’s voice rang through the shuddering Vessel. Reath, who was already hanging on as tightly as possible, felt his gut drop. The other Jedi maintained their calm, or seemed to, but Reath could only manage the appearance of it. Not the reality. His jittery mind kept talking: We should’ve held out for a better ship or a bigger ship or a ship with a more credible crew or basically any other ship except this one—

  WHAM! A bone-shaking jolt struck the ship, jarring Reath so hard he jerked against his safety straps and bit his tongue. Strange vibrations began rippling through the Vessel, more ominous than the crash had been. Was their ship about to fall apart?

  Over the intercom came Leox’s voice, lazy as ever. “Okay, so, there’s good news and bad news.”

  Master Cohmac and Orla shared a glance, which Reath caught out of the corner of his eye. He wasn’t the only one having doubts.

  “The good news is that instead of space debris smashing us into so much scrap metal, it only winged us,” Leox continued. “The bad news, as the astute among you have already perceived, is that we’ve taken some damage. Affie’s gonna check that out.”

  Already Affie was dashing past the jump seats, catching herself against the wall every time the ship lurched in a new direction, as it did constantly. Dez said, “Does anyone here have any expertise in starcraft repairs?”

  “I just finished the basic course,” Reath said, then waited for the other Jedi to chime in with their superior knowledge.

  Nobody did. “Your experience is more recent than any of ours, then,” Master Cohmac said. “See if you can help.” He winced, as if in pain, but said nothing more.

  Thinking that he might be the repair expert on board was almost as unnerving to Reath as the collision had been. But he immediately unfastened his straps and followed Affie.

  The ship lurched from side to side; Reath stumbled into one wall, then another, but managed to stay on his feet until he finally got to the ladder that led belowdecks. He grabbed the rungs firmly before venturing a foot down.

  “What are you waiting for?” Affie called. “Hurry!”

  Reath let go of caution, and of the ladder, dropping down into the inner workings of the ship. Affie was already hip-deep in machinery, tools in hand. He asked, “What’s going on?”

  Then he saw for himself what was going on—which was that the coaxium regulator had come completely unhitched from its station. Affie had grabbed the regulator with her bare hands, which were already turning blue with the severe cold. Shaking, trembling, she was managing to hold the regulator in place, directing its cool green beam of energy into the engines where it belonged.

  If she lost her grip, the beam would slide sideways and tear the Vessel in two.

  Affie didn’t look up. “We also need someone to reset the regulator station, if you think you can manage it.”

  Reath grabbed a tool packet and jumped down into the workings beside her. “I can do it. But if you’d rather I held the regulator while you did the repairs—”

  “No. If the ship lurches during handoff, we’re done for.” Affie shivered from the cold but kept hanging on. “Just be quick about it, okay?”

  He worked as fast as he could, welding the station frame firmly enough that the worst turbulence shouldn’t shake it. The ship continued bucking and shaking, and once Affie seemed on the verge of losing her balance. Reath reached out with the Force to steady her as best he could. He didn’t have the finesse necessary to hold the regulator exactly in place, but he could keep her upright.

  “Whoa,” Affie said. “What is that? Do you—is that a third hand or something?”

  “It’s the Force.”

  “Seriously? You can feel it!” She laughed out loud with surprise, and maybe even delight. “You’re not a monk. You’re a wizard.”

  “Yes! Monk-wizards. That’s us.” Reath checked what he’d done; it looked right, but a more experienced eye was called for. “Are you able to see my work? Do we have it?”

  Affie glanced over her shoulder. “Yeah. That should do it. Help me lift this.”

  Reath put his hands on the regulator, too, and nearly cried out. It was freezing, so much so he could feel stabbing pain in every bone of his arms. Affie had to be in agony. But she did no more than wince as they carefully, carefully pushed it upward. The metallic click of the regulator snapping back into position was one of the best sounds he’d ever heard.

  Groaning, Affie stumbled back from the machinery. Her hands remained blue, and blisters had formed on her palms. “A stim stabilizer,” she gasped. “The medpac’s in that orange emergency box—”

  Reath had it before she could finish talking. Quickly he pressed it to her neck until he heard the hiss-click of medication being dispensed. In only seconds, her hands began to return to their normal color, and the blisters flaked away.

  “Great,” he said. “We made it.”

  “We’re not out of this yet,” Affie said. Already shaking off the earlier pain, she climbed the ladder.

  “What do you mean? More repairs?” Reath looked around for any sign of further damage, but nothing seemed apparent.

  “Please think about this—something in hyperspace hit us. And I thought I saw…” Her voice trailed off, and she dashed back toward the bridge.

  “If we had to get hit, I wish it would’ve been by anything else. Any damn rock out there in space,” Leox said. “No offense.”

  Geode’s amiable silence indicated that none was taken.

  Affie hurried back into the cockpit, breathless. “Are we all right?”

  “We are for now. Good job on the repairs, by the way.”

  “The kid monk helped me. But, that freighter—Leox, that looked like a fragment of a passenger craft.”

  Leox sighed. So much for breaking it to her gently. “Yeah, it was.”

  “There would’ve been hundreds of people aboard. Maybe even thousands.” Her face was stricken; moments like these reminded him how young Affie really was.

  “Horrible way to die,” Leox agreed. Might as well hit her with all of it up front—even if she was still a kid, she could handle the truth better than she would any lie. “Listen, I can’t be sure, but going over the readouts…that looked a hell of a lot like wreckage of the
Legacy Run to me.”

  Affie’s dark eyes widened. “But—the Legacy Run is a Byne Guild ship. Scover travels on it sometimes.”

  “I didn’t say it was the Legacy Run. They’re similar. Maybe not the same. Just—you oughta brace yourself. All right?”

  She nodded, already attempting to focus herself back on the matters at hand despite the febrile reddish light of disturbed hyperspace all around them. His heart went out to her. Not every girl could throw herself into her work when she’d just found out her momma might’ve died.

  Scover is fine. Scover is absolutely fine.

  Affie repeated this to herself as she settled back into the copilot’s seat. Scover Byne rarely traveled on Guild runs; she preferred to remain on their hub planets, overseeing their fleet in its entirety. She hadn’t mentioned any recent plans to do otherwise. So Affie refused to panic.

  Even if Scover wasn’t on board (and she wasn’t), the destruction of the Legacy Run was bad enough. The Republic’s arrival in their sector had driven shipping to feverish levels of activity; everyone wanted to move cargo before it could be taxed, tariffed, or outlawed. Settlers wanted to reach the frontier badly and paid for transport by the thousands every day. Every single ship went out packed with as much living and inert freight as it could possibly contain. Even the Vessel had traveled to Coruscant with so many crates of denta beans that Geode hadn’t been able to get through the corridors. Any loss would be a major loss. And the Legacy Run…there would’ve been hundreds of families aboard, thousands of people, even small children.…

  “The ship’s still acting weird,” she said, both to snap herself out of worrying and because it was true.

  “That’s because hyperspace is still acting weird, though now I think it’s got more to do with the freighter wreck throwing absolutely everything outta whack. I mean, look at this.” Leox gestured at the readings. “Debris is flying all over hyperspace. Navicomputer’s shutting down lanes faster than we can count them.” He shook his head. “We’re changing course.”

  Affie went cold, as though the coaxium regulator had been dropped back into her arms. “In hyperspace?”

  “Yeah, I know—and don’t even start, Geode. Thing is, we gotta drop out of hyperspace as fast as possible. We can’t do that and get where we’re going. So now we’re going someplace else. Hopefully someplace safe.”

  She braced herself as preset coordinates began scrolling down the nav screen. Whatever preset would get them into realspace fastest was their new destination. She’d have to trust that the Vessel wouldn’t be preprogrammed with coordinates that led to, say, the center of a dwarf star.

  The final preset clicked in. Leox said, “Kid monk back in his jump seat?”

  “If not,” Affie said, “it’s on him. By the way, he’s actually a wizard.”

  Leox raised his eyebrows as though to say, Not bad. “Hang on!” he called out over the intercom, and then—

  They were in realspace. No bounce, no jostling, as sweet a reentry as anybody could hope for. Affie and Leox shared a grin as she called, “Good pick, Geode.”

  “Now we can figure out what the hell went wrong out there,” Leox said, “and then we can get on our way.”

  Relief washed over Affie as she looked out at the largely empty sector of space surrounding them. They weren’t facing hostile ships, or intruding into a war zone, or anywhere near the heart of a star. They were…pretty much nowhere.

  Despite the giddiness of their escape, she couldn’t help wondering, Why would the ship be programmed to take us here?

  “What happened?” Orla Jareni whispered. Her white face had gone even paler. “The voices crying out—”

  “Many have died,” Master Cohmac said. “You felt it, too, Reath?”

  Reath had sensed something was terribly wrong far beyond the Vessel itself—and that it was tied to the disaster—but he felt nothing like the kind of shock reflected in both Orla and Master Cohmac’s expressions. It occurred to him for the first time that there might be certain advantages to not being as acutely Force-sensitive as the average Jedi. “Can you tell what happened exactly?”

  Unsurprisingly, Master Cohmac pulled himself together first. “No. We should contact Starlight Beacon immediately. We need more information, and we wouldn’t want our delay to cause alarm.”

  Reath agreed. Well, mostly he agreed. A small, unworthy part of him wanted Master Jora to feel a little alarm—just enough to make her say, You know, the frontier’s a needlessly dangerous place for us to be. We should return to Coruscant right away.

  Still, he rose and went with Master Cohmac to the Vessel’s comm station. It was unlikely that Cohmac would need help sending their messages, but it was the role of the Padawan to be prepared to offer assistance to any Jedi, at any moment.

  The comm station was a small area with a curved ceiling, hardly big enough for even one adult humanoid. Two were already crammed inside: Leox and Affie, the former of whom was holding an amp unit to his ear. Apparently Geode was alone on the bridge, which Reath didn’t find reassuring. Master Cohmac knelt at the door, as smoothly as though that was what he’d prepared to do all along, and said, “I realize your ship has urgent communications to make, Captain Gyasi, but—”

  Leox held up one hand. “Hang on.”

  If Master Cohmac felt impatience, he showed no sign, merely nodded. But Reath could sense tension building within Leox and Affie—a tension that was catching. He blurted out, “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything, from the sound of it.” Leox put down the amp unit and flipped a switch, projecting into the room instead.

  Immediately they were inundated with noise, more than a dozen signals trying to break through at once, overlapping and blurring one another:

  “—lost all power, stranded in the Bespin system, signaling any craft within—”

  “—at least one thousand souls lost, possibly more—”

  “—littered with the stuff, like someone mined hyperspace—”

  “—can’t even begin to assess the damage until we can get through to—”

  “What sector are these messages coming from?” Master Cohmac asked quietly.

  Affie’s expression was grim. “All of them.”

  “So many fragments of the truth,” Master Cohmac said. “No complete picture. Which of course is more frightening than the whole truth could ever be.”

  “We hope,” Affie retorted.

  Orla Jareni appeared in the doorway behind Reath and murmured, “Any news?”

  He whispered back, “It sounds like—like this is a pretty epic disaster. Many people have already been killed.”

  Killed. The word was so final, so absolute. Reath suddenly felt ashamed to have been unhappy about his frontier assignment, to have been unhappy about his future when so many beings had lost their futures entirely.

  Then a new transmission came through, louder than the rest:

  “All hyperspace lanes should be considered closed until further notice. For travelers beyond the boundaries of the Republic, through to the Outer Rim, we reiterate that hyperspace is currently unnavigable and extremely hazardous. All traffic is advised that hyperspace travel should be avoided at all costs.”

  “Well, that’s that.” Leox shut the transmissions off. “You heard the lady. Looks like we’re sticking around here for a while.”

  “Where is here?” Reath asked.

  Affie replied, “Pretty much nowhere.”

  They were in a near-empty corner of space, unable to either move forward or get back home. For now, and for an unknowable amount of time to come, they were stranded.

  “Listen,” Leox said. “Sure, we can look at this as being marooned in deep space. But when you think about it, it’s all just space, really.”

  Reath was uncomforted. He went to the bridge, which at least felt potentially useful, and for one moment was alone with Geode, who still sat—stood?—at the navigator’s station. “Um,” Reath began. “Hi. This is terrible, huh?”

 
“Please,” Affie whispered as she entered the bridge just after him. “Don’t try to talk to him about it yet. Geode’s incredibly sensitive.”

  “Of course,” Reath said. “But—I thought you said he was a wild man?”

  Leox, who was passing by, interjected, “His is a capricious nature, one of many moods and climes.” After that, and a fond glance at Geode, he continued on his way. Reath studied Geode for a few seconds, wondering what exactly he was missing, because it was just a big rock sitting there.

  Affie settled into the copilot’s seat, apparently to kill time, but then frowned at a blinking sensor. “What’s that?”

  “Is it more damage to the ship? Something else we need to repair?” Reath was only beginning to realize how badly he needed something to do, to make him feel less helpless.

  Affie shook her head. “It’s a beacon. A signal beacon. Not an actual message, but an indicator from a ship nearby that needs help.”

  “Nearby?” Reath asked. “How near does that mean?”

  “Within this system, reachable by sublight,” Affie said slowly. “We’re not alone. Somebody’s out there.”

  “Don’t answer!” Orla called. She’d been walking by the bridge, apparently, but had halted at their words. “You don’t know who’s out there.” Her gaze had gone distant. “You never know.”

  Padawans Orla Jareni and Cohmac Vitus were steering the T-1 shuttle through hyperspace, and Orla couldn’t believe her luck. To judge by the grin on Cohmac’s face, he was equally pleased.

  It was the role of a Padawan to do whatever task a Master required help with. Yes, sometimes this included thrilling acts of heroism, but it could also involve mending robes or cleaning the floors. Piloting a ship counted as a high-quality assignment, particularly when that meant bringing them closer to another, even more exciting task: rescuing two kidnapped rulers from the system of Eiram and E’ronoh.

  This system lay far beyond the Republic’s borders, in an area that had long resisted Republic membership or help—which the residents labeled “interference.” While Jedi occasionally traveled into this zone of space, such voyages were rare, and the citizens seemed determined to keep it that way. This was, they proclaimed, independent space.