Race to Crashpoint Tower

by Daniel José Older

  “In,” Idrax grunted as the gangplank slid toward them. “You’re in VSF custody now.”

  Yes, Ram preferred the company of mechanical doodads and electronic wiring and Bonbraks to most other sentient beings. And one of the main reasons for that was that none of the former ever manhandled you. But here he was, along with V-18, Tip, and Breebak, being gripped and grabbed and shoved rudely into a seat on the VSF ship by a Neimoidian VSF captain.

  A bored-looking human in a similarly outsized uniform glanced at them from the cockpit, shrugged, and went back to fiddling with his datapad.

  “I have caught some unfortunate interlopers, Officer Torgo!” Idrax Snat announced triumphantly once he’d gotten them all clamped into restraint seats.

  “Yeah okay great,” the pilot muttered. “Let me know when you’re ready to go.”

  The security cushioning dug into Ram’s shoulders, pinning him against the wall and making it hard to breathe. “You gotta listen to me,” he pleaded. “Someone breached the comms perimeter. We might be under atta—”

  “Security advice from a trespasser?” Idrax snapped at him. “I think not! Torgo, away! Bring us to the detention center.”

  The engine roared as they pulled off into the sky, the lights of Lonisa City spinning sickeningly below.

  Ram had never been great at the whole mind tricks part of being a Jedi. Mostly because it just seemed invasive and unnecessary. But that was before Nihil raiders had attacked his planet and shot at him. Everything was different now, especially with all the most important dignitaries of the Galactic Republic gathered in one place.

  If he didn’t warn someone soon about what had happened, it could mean total disaster.

  “Excuse me,” Ram said. He locked eyes with Idrax, trying to remember each step Master Kunpar had taught him. The Force was with him. It was part of him. It flowed through him, through everything. Locking his connection with the VSF captain would be just like tapping into that engine on the raider’s speeder, easier maybe. It was just a matter of using what he already knew about the machinery and figuring out the right switch to pull. “You will release me from this restraint seat.”

  Idrax scoffed. “I will do no such thing, you insolent slug!”

  Drat, drat.

  “What’s that?” Torgo called from the front.

  Oh, the hand wave! Master Kunpar said it wasn’t totally necessary but it did help sometimes with stubborn adversaries. Ram flailed his arm to one side, the best he could do given the security restraint. “You will release me from this restraint seat!”

  Idrax blinked at him blandly. “I will…” His voice trailed off like he’d forgotten what he was about to say. It was working! Almost!

  “You will release me from this restraint seat!” Ram said, flapping his hand back and forth a few times.

  “I can’t hear you!” Torgo yelled over the roar of the engines.

  “I will release you from the restraint seat!” Idrax declared proudly.

  “Yes!” Ram yelled. Idrax pushed a couple of buttons, and the restraint gave a mechanical sigh and lifted.

  “Wait—what?” Torgo said. “What’s happening back there?”

  “You will take me to warn the Republic officials and Jedi about what I have learned.”

  “I will take you to warn the Republic,” Idrax agreed, “about what I have learned.”

  “Er, close enough.”

  Torgo leaned into the back, his face concerned. “Captain? You all right?”

  “To the Republic headquarters!” Idrax demanded. “Make it snappy!”

  “Wait!” Ram yelped. This was not how it was supposed to go. But Torgo had already whirled around and pulled the ship off in a different direction. “No one’s at the headquarters right now! Everyone’s at the welcome ceremony where we just were!”

  “To the Republic headquarters!” Idrax said again, even more excited this time.

  “I’m going, I’m going!” Torgo barked from the cockpit. “Sheesh!”

  Ram and Idrax’s footsteps echoed down the long, empty main hall of the Lonisa City Galactic Republic headquarters. Even the custodians and security staff had headed out to catch the welcome ceremony.

  “Well, here we are,” Idrax said, pleased with himself. Then he paused, glancing around. “That’s odd…. Doesn’t seem like anyone’s around.”

  Ram sighed. “That’s what I’ve been saying for the past ten minutes!”

  “Ah.”

  They passed vacant desk after vacant desk. At the far end of the room, a light blinked on the mainframe comms system. “But maybe…” Ram said, raising an eyebrow. Every Republic outpost had a direct line to Starlight Beacon. Ram broke into a run.

  “Hey, wait up!” Idrax called, hurrying after him.

  “Do you have the security codes to call Starlight?”

  “Of course,” Idrax said, looking around warily like he was waking up from a long nap. “But why would I give them to you? And why aren’t you in a detention cell?”

  “Uh-oh,” Ram said.

  “Hey, you didn’t—”

  “You will help me contact Starlight Beacon.” Ram waved a hand past Idrax’s face.

  “Hey!” Idrax swatted it away.

  I am one with the Force, Ram thought, narrowing his eyes. And the Force is with me. “You will help me contact Starlight Beacon and warn them about what I found out.”

  “We should contact Starlight Beacon,” Idrax said. “Warn them about what I found out.”

  Ram nodded, quietly exhaling. “Close enough. Go ahead.”

  “I’ll just punch in my security code here.”

  A holo of an elderly Dug appeared between them. “Starlight Beacon. Which area of the station are you trying to reach?”

  “I’m calling to warn the Ram about what Starlight found out!” Idrax yelped.

  “What?”

  Ram groaned. It was going to be a long night.

  Vernestra Rwoh had light green skin and the easy, gentle demeanor of someone who had been around much longer than sixteen years. Also, she was way shorter than Lula had thought she’d be. But then, Lula was pretty sure she’d imagined the girl into a giant for no other reason than that Vernestra’s very existence made Lula feel smaller. A Jedi Knight so young? It hardly seemed fair.

  And even more unfair was that Lula couldn’t stop this entirely un-Jedi-like thought process from cycling through her head. It felt like she was suddenly spiraling further and further from her goals, and she hadn’t even had a chance to prove herself yet!

  “Lula Talisola?” Vernestra said, which made Lula blink to attention.

  “Yes, Master Rwoh!”

  She waved the honorific title away with a soft laugh. “Please, call me Vernestra. Just not Vern. Never Vern.”

  Lula glanced at Master Sy for confirmation it was okay to be so casual with a Jedi Knight. Sy shrugged with a why not roll of their eyes.

  “Yes, Vernestra!”

  “You’ll come with me, and—”

  “I…I…” Lula stuttered. Of course she’d been too busy feeling shy and insecure to pay attention while Vernestra was running down the mission briefing. Now all she wanted to do was crawl inside herself and disappear for a few thousand years, please and thank you. “Okay!”

  “Okay?” Vernestra said. “Good. You can ask me any questions you have on the way. Zeen, you and Master Sy will stay up here with my Padawan, Imri.” She nodded at the tall, stocky teen at her side. “I want him to get some experience running ops from the bridge, if that’s all right. We need everyone on the Star Hopper to monitor any activity on the lunar surface and watch for ships coming out of hyperspace. We’ll be pretty exposed down there, so if someone gets the jump on us, it’ll be tough to fight our way out in that little ship. Clear?”

  Once again the world seemed to have slid into some kind of raucous, sped-up version of itself. Lula could barely catch her breath.

  “Clear, Master Vernestra!” Zeen and Lula yelled at once.

  Vernest
ra nodded at Lula. “Feel like piloting?”

  Lula watched the mottled broken surface of Vrant Tarnum slide past as she swung Vernestra’s borrowed clunker between naturally formed pillars. The Varonchagger handled like a rusty Old Republic tank that someone had attached wings and a hyperdrive to, but Lula was excited to get a chance to show off her piloting skills.

  It rumbled and complained like an old man every time she turned too hard, like the whole thing might snap apart at any moment. “The Starlight folks really went above and beyond for you, huh?”

  Vernestra chuckled. “What, ol’ rent-a-junk here? Shipmaster Nubarron might’ve been upset because I crashed my last Vector.”

  “Oh, wow!”

  “Long story. Anyway, she’ll hold up all right in a fight. Hopefully.”

  Somewhere within one of those canyons that snarled across the moon like a jagged gash, there was probably a Nihil outpost, with who knew how many enemy fighters ready to pounce. Lula charted how she’d slide into evasive maneuvers and then dash back to the Hopper if they were attacked.

  “All right,” Vernestra said from the tech seat behind Lula. “What do we do?”

  Lula actually guffawed. “Excuse me? Aren’t you supposed to tell me that?” The words came out before she could stop them, and she realized, too late, how rude they must’ve sounded. “I mean…”

  Vernestra laughed. “It’s okay—you’re right. And I could tell you, sure. But how are you going to learn if you’re always just doing what people tell you?”

  “I…”

  “Exactly. So you tell me. What do we do now?”

  Lula narrowed her eyes at the crisscrossing canyons. “You said the signal you picked up came from roughly this area, but it vanished quickly, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you suspect the Nihil base is underground somewhere.” She swung lower, scanning the ground, but all she could make out were endless cracked rocky expanses and occasional calcified pillars. “So we turn our scanners on and fly low, and cover as much of this immediate area as possible to get a sense of where they might be.”

  “Good,” Vernestra said. “And when we find ’em?”

  “Blast ’em!” Lula yelled. Then, quickly: “Kidding, kidding.” Vernestra was already laughing though, luckily. “We stay out of sight and see what we can find out, yeah?”

  “Exaaactly.”

  Lula loved flying. She pulled the throttle and zipped through a naturally formed loop of rock, then reeled in a wide curve, letting the lunar winds dip them sideways to get a better view of the ground streaming past. Even with her mind eased, insecurities crept in. Of course Vernestra had accomplished so much at such a young age: she was the coolest person ever! And she was letting Lula run things and pilot? Amazing. The other Jedi had given them plenty of free rein, sure. Both Masters Sy and Yoda had sent the Padawans off on missions where they’d had to make tough decisions—life-and-death ones. But that had mostly been out of necessity, and whenever the elder Jedi were around, they were the ones who called the shots.

  And then here came Vernestra, who more than anyone else had something to prove, and she had just handed over command to a Padawan.

  Lula slid the Varonchagger so low that they skimmed just above the surface, speeder style. She spotted the charred wreckage of a small flier on a nearby hill, but other than that, the place seemed deserted. Even with Vernestra being so open-minded, Lula felt a thousand more kilometers away from her goal.

  A flurry of beeps erupted from the scanner. “Whoa!” Vernestra yelped. “Powering up shields and cannons. Keep stealth mode on!”

  Lula gaped at the screen, where at least a dozen dots had popped up a few klicks northwest of where they flew. She swerved low, banking behind a long rock formation, then eased the thrusters to bring them to a steady glide. A fiery burst of panic tried to rise in her, and she did her best to calm it. More dots blipped onto the screen. A lot more. The Nihil had been defeated again and again, and they kept coming back. How? Everyone assumed they were on the run for the most part, barely scraping by. Those ships could find them, swarm them, destroy them in seconds. “What do you think?”

  “You tell me,” Vernestra said, and Lula heard tension tighten her voice for the first time. “Quick.”

  The dots had appeared scattered at first, but looking more carefully, Lula realized they were soaring in a tangled formation. “The Nihil are on the move,” she said.

  “Yep.” Vernestra clicked the comm. “Imri, we have movement in our sector. Keep an eye out.”

  “Copy,” Imri’s voice crackled in response.

  “Now, Lula: where are they going?”

  Lula shook her head and took a deep breath. The Nihil didn’t seem to be heading their way, but it was hard to tell. She checked the depth measurements on the scanner. The numbers were all going in one direction: up. The surface was point zero, and those fliers were racing toward it. “They’re coming out of their hidden base.”

  “Yep.”

  “Fast.”

  “So any second, we should—”

  “Ah, Master Vernestra,” Imri’s voice came over the comm. “Star Hopper to Jedi Master Ver—”

  “Go with your message, Hopper.”

  “We just received a transmission from Starlight. I’m going to forward it along to you so we can all watch at the same time. They said they haven’t watched it all, just sent it directly to us since it mentions the Nihil and they know you’re investigating them.”

  “Send it. And stand by for a surge of activity. They’re about to—”

  The first ship, a battered blockade runner, burst into the dark sky above them. The telltale external hyperspace booster formed a mechanical ring around the hull, interrupted with green half spheres of a strange design. Almost immediately, it lit up with a fierce blue light, and then the ship was gone.

  A few more ships roared up behind that one, mostly single-pilot fliers of different shapes and levels of disrepair. All of them flared their external hyperdrive rings and hurled into nothingness.

  “Where are they going?” Lula asked. It hadn’t occurred to her that the next worst thing to being swarmed and attacked would be that the enemy just zipped away into the untraceable vastness of space. There was no way to stop them, no way to follow.

  A holo popped up on the control panel, the message Imri had relayed from Starlight. A very confused-looking Neimoidian in a ridiculous, poorly fitting uniform stood beside a short human in tattered, filthy Padawan robes. The Padawan was a little younger than Lula, with a round face and light brown skin. He looked utterly fed up.

  The image was scratchy, and the sound kept getting garbled, but Lula could just make it out. “And so,” the Neimoidian was saying, “in conclusion, what I have seen is the why of the when where what.”

  The Padawan shook his head. “Ugh! We’re trying to reach someone at Starlight to let you know about a possible Nihil—”

  “That the comms tower has been replaced!”

  “Sabotaged!”

  “Sabotaged has been the comms tower! Possibly! By an unknown we don’t know with a thing!”

  What were they going on about? The Neimoidian wasn’t making any sense, but it seemed like the human kid was trying to get him to say something….

  “By raiders in a ship with an external hyperdrive!” the Padawan insisted. “The Nihil!”

  “I am Padawan Ram Jomaram!” the Neimoidian declared.

  “No! You are Captain Idrax Snat of the Valo Security Force. I am Padawan Ram Jomaram.”

  “Wait!” The Neimoidian rounded on Ram, blinking his eyes like he was just waking up. “You are Padawan Ram Jomaram! And you’re under arrest!”

  Ram pointed at something in the distance. “Oh, no! What’s that?”

  Idrax Snat whirled around. “Where?”

  Ram ran.

  “Hey!”

  The transmission cut out.

  “The Republic Fair is on Valo,” Lula said. “If the Nihil tried to sabo
tage the comms tower—”

  “I didn’t think the Nihil were strong enough to risk an attack on such a major target, but we gotta get to Valo now and make sure,” Vernestra said. “We’ll tell Starlight what we’ve found once we get there. For now, alert the Hopper to follow us and prepare to make the jump to hyperspace!”

  Ram awoke to the murmur of a hushed conversation in the cell across from his. It sounded a little like a burbling river, he thought idly, before the realization of everything that was happening came crashing back to him. He had to get out of there! He had to warn the other Jedi that something was going on! But also: whatever those two women were discussing might be important.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the tall dark-skinned one said in a raspy, fed-up voice. She had long light-blue hair and magenta eyes, and she wore an elaborate metal guard across her forehead that reached up on either side in two small points and stretched down around her face. “It won’t do us any good to break out, not now. You want to be a wanted criminal on top of everything else, Mantessa? Believe me, it’s not as glamorous as they make it look in the holos.”

  Ram recognized the other woman, Mantessa, as a Kuranu—she was tall and slender, and had light-purple skin that had been meticulously cleansed of even a single hair. She stood in the middle of the cell in an elegant pantsuit, glancing around irritably as if a germ or spot of dirt might jump up and attach itself to her at any moment. “Nobody’s going to put me on a wanted list, Ty. Don’t be ridiculous. And anyway, the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Clear it up with your Jedi buddies and let’s be on our way. There are deals to be made, hm? And anyway, we have to find Klerin.”

  “They’re not my buddies,” Ty muttered.

  Across the room, a security droid stared at a control panel, occasionally hitting buttons. He probably had keys on him, Ram figured. If he could just…He reached out with the Force, feeling along the control panel and desk and then the length of the droid.

  “Tried that,” the Tholothian woman, Ty, said gruffly. “No good.”

  Ram sat up, blinking through the bars at her. “Oh, you’re…you’re…” Your Jedi buddies, Mantessa had said.