Race to Crashpoint Tower

by Daniel José Older

  Zeen did as she was told, still not meeting Lula’s gaze.

  Of course Zeen was upset. She was about to be home again, and she was returning with the very people her friends and family distrusted the most: the Jedi. Word had probably gotten out that she’d used the Force—it wasn’t the kind of thing people just forgot about. Worse, Zeen’s childhood friend Krix Kamarat had seen it all happen. She’d saved him, too, but the ungrateful twerp seemed to hate her for it, and he’d run off with the Nihil raiders.

  “Okay, I’m not fine,” Zeen admitted. “But I will be.” She managed a sad smile.

  Lula picked up a pillow and whapped Zeen in the face with it. “Not good enough!”

  “Wow! Unhelpful!” Zeen yelled, shoving Lula right off the bed.

  “Padawan Talisola and Zeen Mrala!” The robotic voice of PZ1-3 boomed over the ship’s comm. “We are approaching Trymant IV! Report to the deck immediately!”

  Zeen and Lula traded glances. “You got this,” Lula said. “And we’ll be by your side no matter what.”

  Zeen nodded, and Lula could tell she was doing her best to hold it together.

  Jedi Master Kantam Sy paced back and forth on the deck of the Star Hopper as PZ1-3 navigated them closer and closer to Trymant IV. Sy was tall and slender, with sharp cheekbones and an impressive topknot. They seemed older than their actual age, in part because they often walked startlingly slow as a form of meditation. But Lula had seen Master Sy in action, and that gentle easygoing demeanor was nowhere to be seen when lives were on the line.

  Lula and Zeen slid into the seats at their stations. It was strange to be the only two young people on the Hopper. The bridge was normally alive with chattering and laughter, Farzala cracking jokes and Qort explaining something complicated while the others gossiped or traded tips. But everyone else was off fighting an army of carnivorous plant creatures called the Drengir, and only Zeen and Lula were left.

  Stars shimmered in the darkness outside the transparent dome covering the whole top level of the Hopper. Lula and her friends would sometimes take their sleeping bags up and lie on their backs late at night, watching the galaxy spin past.

  “Listen up, listen up,” Master Sy said, already in action mode. “We’ll be landing in a moment. The last time we were here, things were very different, of course. We had some confrontations—”

  “Almost died a whole bunch,” Lula added helpfully.

  “And made a new friend!” Sy said, flashing a winning smile at Zeen. “Now we’re here for a very specific reason, and that’s to follow up on a lead from Jedi Vernestra Rwoh. I’ll let her fill you in.”

  The small blue image of a girl not much older than Lula flickered up from the holo. This was Vernestra Rwoh? She had a slender, kind face and long straight hair. She wore the traditional temple robes, both simple and ornate, and stood with her back very straight. But how could she be so young? A prickly flash of emotion rose within Lula, and she tried to push it away. Envy. A very un-Jedi-like feeling indeed. She crinkled her nose with the strain of getting her emotions under control.

  Ever since she could remember, Lula Talisola had been determined to be the greatest Jedi of all time. She knew this ambition wasn’t very Jedi-like, either, but she figured she had time to get that part under control amid all her other training. And anyway, if she trained hard enough and excelled at every possible skill, she wouldn’t have to worry about becoming the best; she just would be the best!

  So she studied and trained and meditated, at least twice as much as all the other Padawans she knew. And she stayed at the top of her clan. She figured she was on track, for the most part. Meeting Zeen, seeing what she could do with the Force, even without training—that had thrown Lula at first, sure. But Zeen had quickly become one of her best friends, and Lula found she couldn’t be bothered to wonder how amazing a Jedi Zeen would’ve been if she had been raised in the Jedi Order instead of suppressing her Force sensitivity—not when they were having so much fun together.

  But Vernestra had already become a full Knight and she was so young! Who was this girl?

  A sharp nudge from Zeen ripped Lula from her spiral of overthinking.

  “Ow! What?” she whispered.

  “You’re doing it again,” Zeen hissed back.

  “Doing what?”

  “Thinking too hard about something and not paying attention to what’s going on around you!”

  Lula was extra annoyed because her friend was right. “How do you know?”

  “You’re grinding your teeth.”

  “And so,” Vernestra was explaining, “I looked deeper into the files from the Trymant IV disaster and discovered the story of your cohort and Zeen Mrala.” She nodded at Zeen, who acknowledged her with a shy wave. “The Nihil raiders you came into contact with might have something to do with the ones I faced on Wevo. From what I understand, their attack on Trymant IV didn’t follow their usual raid patterns.”

  An awkward moment passed; the young Jedi looked directly at Zeen. She was waiting for Zeen to say something, Lula realized. But Zeen’s head tendrils pointed directly down, tensed, and her brow was furrowed. The whole mess with Krix and everything that had happened since was too much to get into, especially with a strange Jedi on a flickering hologram.

  “Is it, ah, true,” Vernestra said, her voice suddenly gentle and uncertain, “that one of your closest friends ran off with the masked raiders?”

  Zeen nodded once, her whole face a frown.

  “We believe that the elder the Nihil rescued from the Emergence on Trymant IV—”

  “Elder Tromak,” Zeen said.

  “Yes.” Vernestra looked solemn. “We think he may have had some ancient information that the Nihil were after…. Master Yoda went to investigate—we think—”

  “Still no word from him?” Lula asked, trying not to sound too worried. Lula thought Master Yoda was the greatest Jedi the galaxy had known, and he’d been with her and the other Padawans for most of their adventures on the Star Hopper. Nothing had felt the same without him around, but she always figured he’d come back.

  “Nothing,” Vernestra said. “But in the meantime we must keep investigating.” She turned to Master Sy and nodded respectfully. “We were hoping you and your Padawans could investigate for us, Master Sy. And with Zeen’s help, maybe you could get some answers from the elders who weren’t taken by the Nihil.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Master Sy said. “Right, Zeen?”

  “Yes, Master Sy.”

  “I’m sure you already know,” Vernestra said, “that these raiders are ruthless, unpredictable, and extremely dangerous. We don’t think any are still in the Trymant system, but that doesn’t mean they won’t come back.”

  “We do know,” Master Sy said, with perhaps an edge of pride in their voice. “My Padawans have already faced them down several times.”

  “Entering Trymant system,” PZ1-3 announced from the pilot seat.

  Vernestra nodded at Sy, then turned to Lula and Zeen. “May the Force be with you all.” And she was gone.

  “Oh, dear,” PZ1-3 said, and everyone looked over to him. The droid swiveled in his seat and fixed his glowing eyes on Zeen. “We heard reports that the disaster had caused severe damage to the ecology of the planet, but we had no idea of the extent of that disruption.”

  “What?” Zeen cried, running to the front viewport. She gasped, one hand on PZ1-3’s shoulder.

  Lula was right behind her. Trymant IV had been a lush forest planet, its cities perched amid towering trees and gigantic lakes; whole networks of rivers had stretched across the surface, shimmering blue veins that you could see from kilometers above.

  Now it looked like nothing more than a dusty red desert.

  Ram had only ever used his lightsaber in practice sessions.

  He’d daydreamed about drawing it, sure. Every Padawan had. But those dreams had always seemed like far-off fantasies—tales of a world long gone, when the great wars raged between Jedi and Sith and danger lur
ked around every corner. These days, he’d be more likely to need his saber to fight off some wild animal than any nefarious baddies. At least, that’s what he’d always thought.

  But…the wind rushed against his face as V-18 wailed and the speeder engine blasted them higher and higher above the trees toward three blotches rising into the sky. Three blotches that had already taken a few potshots and probably committed some kind of sabotage on the comms tower. Ram steadied the handlebars with one hand and reached for his lightsaber with the other. His fingers trembled as he wrapped them around the hilt and pulled it from its holster.

  “Calm your mind, and the blade will move as part of you,” Master Kunpar always said at practice sessions.

  Ha. Easy to say when you weren’t hurtling through the air to face an unknown enemy without any kind of backup. But that was the point, wasn’t it? A calm mind was a calm mind, whether in the training hall or in battle. He took a deep breath, reached out for the vibrant tremble of the Force running through him, and ignited his blade.

  FFFZZzzzzzzhhhhwwooosssSHHHHH! Ram’s lightsaber sang as a bright yellow glow lit the twilight. And not a moment too soon, either. Up above, one of the figures yelled to another, and then an explosion rocked the sky.

  “Incoming!” V-18 warned. Ram veered to the side just as the laser blast sizzled past, then pushed the propulsors to their limit. The one who’d fired on him had been forced to slow down to change course. This was Ram’s chance. He steadied himself in the saddle and reached out with his free hand, willing the speeder up ahead to slow.

  The figure on board still had her back turned. It looked like a tall Togruta woman with a gas mask on and various mismatched kinds of armor draped all over her.

  Ram felt the Force flow through him, past him, and smiled slightly as it clicked with the rumbling engine of the speeder ahead. He imagined the Force sliding into the metal casing, streaming through the gears and pipes, drawing on the machine’s churning heart. He closed his fist. The buzzing sound stuttered, sputtered, and then stopped completely.

  Yes!

  The speeder had stalled; in seconds it would plummet. Ram grabbed the handlebars again with one hand, saber still extended in the other, and gunned the engine.

  “Uh, Master Ram?” V-18 muttered.

  The masked Togruta turned and threw something round—a pod of some kind, about the size of a helmet. Ram watched it plummet toward the ground and land somewhere near the base of the tower with a little golden poof. Then he looked back up just in time to see the woman pull a blaster from her boot holster and point it at him.

  “Master Ram!” V-18 shrieked. Ram swung hard to the side as the woman’s speeder started to fall. He waved his lightsaber in a wild arc, winging one of the blaster shots and sending it off into space even as two more zipped past and a fourth slammed into his engine cover with a fizzly smack. V-18 yelped.

  “Hold on!” Ram yelled, although he was the only one who really needed to be holding on to anything. The shot had jolted them to the side, and the engine was smoking but not totally busted.

  The sudden roar of the Togruta’s speeder filled the air. His sabotage had only been a temporary fix, it seemed. Ram looked up just as she sent three more shots his way. He deflected the first two with his saber, and the third went wide, but by then she’d sped past. Up above, a starship loomed; the other two raiders must’ve already boarded. The ship wasn’t like any Ram had seen before—a gunship of some kind, by the size of it, with a long cockpit and a rusty, worn-out ring circling its center. The boarding ramp was lowered, revealing a gaping maw that the Togruta zipped into easily, like she was being gobbled up by a space beast.

  The ship released a barrage of scattered fire toward Ram, none of it getting very close, then turned and zoomed off.

  Ram squinted after it. Something seemed strange about that ring circling it. It almost looked like a—all of a sudden, the ring itself seemed to catch fire as booster blasts shot out all across it. And then, with a series of pops, the ship vanished entirely, leaving only a fading trail of engine exhaust in its wake.

  “Whoa,” Ram said, raising his goggles and blinking at the empty sky where the ship had just been. They were sinking slowly back toward the forest as smoke rose steadily from the shot-up engine. V-18 muttered something in a language Ram was glad he didn’t understand. “Did you see that, Vee-Eighteen?”

  “See us almost get murdered by a bunch of space pirates? Yes. Yes, I did. From a front-row seat, in fact.”

  “No,” Ram said. “Well, yes. That too. But did you see that ship just make the jump to hyperspace while still in atmosphere?”

  “Mm, I guess. I was busy trying not to make the jump to blasted-to-pieces space, myself.”

  Ram knew two things for sure:

  One, it was weird for such a small, busted ship to be able to make the jump to hyperspace.

  Two, even if it could, no one in their right mind would be reckless enough to make the jump from within a planet’s atmosphere, risking almost certain destruction!

  And those two things added up to a third, undisputable fact.

  The one thing that the entire Republic feared most, the thing the Jedi and local security forces had spent months hoping to avoid, was happening: the Nihil had come to Valo.

  “Wha…what happened here, Master Sy?” Lula asked, squeezing Zeen’s hand as the transport carried them through the broken streets of Bralanak City. Zeen just frowned at the dusty glint of red sky visible through the narrow windows above them.

  They’d boarded the transport in the lower belly of the Star Hopper and then zoomed directly out, down the gangplank and onto the surface.

  Sy shook their head. “None of the larger shrapnel from the Legacy Run crashed here, thank the Force. Though, as you all know firsthand, plenty of smaller shards did. I checked some data as we were landing, and it seems the closest moon, a small, uninhabited one called Praknat 3, took a direct hit from the main hull of the ship, and the impact misaligned the gravitational balance of the whole system. Trymant IV tilted closer to the second sun than it’s ever been, and that in turn vaporized all the aboveground sources of water.”

  “Wow,” Lula said. “Is it still…can people live here?”

  “They’re trying,” Sy said. “But I’m sure it hasn’t been easy. I’d heard the Republic sent a fleet of drill freighters to search for underground water sources rumored to run beneath the lower valley area, south of here. But I had no idea how bad it was.”

  So much destruction, Lula thought. So many lives upended. And for what? The Nihil had caused the original hyperspace disaster, and they’d exploited it to their ends before being routed by Jedi and Republic forces. But they were still out there, being reckless and destructive with people’s lives and homelands. She clenched her fists and then realized she was squeezing Zeen’s hand too hard and forced herself to calm down.

  PZ1-3 stepped onto the walkway. “I’m afraid I must insist you each wear one of these.” He placed a box full of breathing masks on the floor. “I know it’s not ideal, given the circumstances. But the amount of dust in the air has transformed the atmosphere of the planet, and it’s not entirely safe to breathe.”

  “Gear up,” Master Sy called. “We’ll have to walk the rest of the way from here.”

  Lula swallowed hard. She’d faced danger many times, more than most Padawans she knew. But danger was something you could face and then fight. This was something very different, and much heavier. The immediate danger had already come and gone from Trymant IV, and it trailed a long shadow of destruction and mourning in its wake. There was no enemy to confront and defeat, just the slow sadness of a world barely holding on to its own existence.

  Zeen hadn’t moved. “Can you do this?” Lula asked.

  Zeen scowled. “You know the most messed-up part?” She picked up two breathing masks and handed one to Lula. “I don’t even miss this place, not really. I mean, it’s home. I spent my whole life here. But on the compound, they don’t deal with moms
and dads and stuff. There’s just the elders and the rest of us. We don’t even know who our real parents are. And sure, we’re all supposed to be family, but you know…it’s not the same.”

  Lula had heard her talk about this before, but it felt different now that they were back on the planet together.

  “And my only friend…” Zeen’s voice trailed off the way it always did when she talked about Krix, who had sworn to protect her and then cast her aside. That familiar sadness gathered around her, mixed with flashes of anger. Lula tried to think of the right thing to say, but Zeen looked up at her and smiled. “But now I have you all. And you’re better than anything that came before.” She pulled her mask on and clasped the straps beneath her gently swaying tendrils. “Now let’s do this.”

  Bralanak City looked like a scrap of fabric someone had crinkled up and dyed red, then tossed aside and kicked through the dirt a couple of times. Lula had no idea if they were in one of the areas she’d passed through during the rescue operation, but it wouldn’t have mattered either way—nothing was recognizable. Barely anything was left.

  They wound single file down an alleyway, crumbling facades and shattered windows on either side. A shredded banner flapped in the hot dusty wind, and a million tiny particles flitted through the air around them, but beyond that, not much was moving.

  “Recognize anything, Zeen?” Lula asked, her voice garbled by the mask vocalizer. They sounded like the Nihil. Lula hated it.

  “I think we’re a little south of downtown BC,” Zeen said. “Is that right, Master Sy?”

  “Correct, Zeen.”

  “Which means the compound I grew up in should be just up…oh.”

  Everyone stopped. At the far end of the alley, a group of masked and hooded figures stood in front of a towering wall. Lula’s hand went right to her lightsaber hilt. Anyone could be Nihil in these dusty streets.

  “You’re not welcome here, Jedi fiends!” one of them called.