“I think I can show you what’s going on, Minister,” Tarr said.
The man had long fingers for a human, and they danced over his datapad.
“Let me give the data to the droid—it can project the information so we can all see.”
He tapped a few last commands, then unreeled a connection wire from his datapad and plugged it into the access port on the squat, hexagonal comms droid waiting in the corner of the room. It rolled forward, its single green eye lighting up as it moved.
From that eye, the machine projected an image on the large white wall in the minister’s office reserved for the purpose. Normally, presentations on the vidwall would be concerned with crop yields or pest eradication programs. Now, though, it displayed the entire Hetzal system, all its worlds and stations and satellites and platforms and vessels.
And something else.
To Minister Ecka, it looked like a field overrun with a swarm of all-consuming insects. Hundreds of tiny lights moved through his system at what had to be tremendous speed, all in the same direction: sunward. More particularly, planetward. Toward Hetzal Prime and the moons Fruited and Rooted not so far away, not to mention all those stations, satellites, platforms, vessels…many of which had people on them.
“What are they?” he asked.
“Unknown,” Tarr responded. “I got this image by linking together signals from the surviving satellites and monitoring stations, but they’re going down quickly, and we’re losing sensor capacity as they do. Whatever these anomalies are, they’re moving at near-lightspeed, and it’s very difficult to track them. And, of course, whenever they hit something, it’s…”
“Not good,” General Borta finished for him.
“Apocalyptic, I was going to say,” Tarr said. “I’m tracking a good number on impact paths with the primeworld.”
“Is there nothing to be done?” Ecka said, looking at Borta. “Can we…shoot them down?”
Borta gave him a helpless look. “Once, maybe, we’d have had a chance. At least some. But system defense hasn’t been a priority here for…a long time.”
The accusation hung in the air, but Ecka did not indulge it. He had made decisions that seemed correct at the time, with the best information he had. They were at peace! Everywhere was at peace. Why waste money that could help people in other ways? In any case, no looking back. It was time for another decision. The best he could make.
He did not hesitate. When the crops were burning, you couldn’t hesitate. As bad as things might be, the longer you waited, the worse they tended to get.
“Give the evacuation order. System-wide. Then send a message to Coruscant. Let them know what’s happening. They won’t be able to get anyone here in time, but at least they’ll know.”
Counselor Zaffa looked at him, her eyes hooded.
“I don’t know if we can actually implement that order effectively, Minister,” she said. “We don’t have enough ships here for planetary evacuations, and if these things are really moving close to lightspeed, there isn’t much time until—”
“I understand, Counselor Zaffa,” Ecka said, his voice steady now. “But even if the order saves just one person, then one person will be saved.”
Zaffa nodded, and tapped her datascreen.
“It’s done,” she said. “System-wide evac in progress.”
The group watched the projection on the wall, fritzes of static lancing through it now. Tarr’s makeshift network was losing capacity as more satellites met fiery ends, but the message was still clear. It was like a massive gun had been fired at the Hetzal system, and there was nothing they could do to save themselves.
“You should probably all try to find yourselves a way offworld,” Ecka said. “I imagine the starships we do have will be very full quite quickly.”
No one moved.
“What will you do, Minister?” Counselor Daan asked.
Ecka turned back to his window, looking out at the fields, golden to the horizon. It was all so peaceful. Impossible to believe anything bad could ever happen here.
“I think I’ll stay,” he said. “Broadcast to the people, maybe, try to keep folks calm. Someone has to look after the harvest.”
* * *
Across Hetzal Prime and the broad expanses of its two inhabited moons, the message of Minister Ecka traveled rapidly, appearing on datapads and holoscreens, broadcast across all communication channels, saying, in essence: Nowhere is safe. Get as far away as you can.
Explanation was limited, which caused speculation. What was happening? Some kind of accident? What disaster could be so huge in scope that an entire system needed to be evacuated?
Some people ignored the warning. False alarms had happened before, and sometimes slicers pulled pranks or showed off by breaking into emergency alert computer systems. True, nothing had ever happened on this scale, but really, that made it easier to dismiss the whole thing. After all, the entire system in danger? It just wasn’t possible.
Those people stayed in their homes, at their workplaces. They turned off their screens and got back to their lives, because it was better than the alternative. And if they glanced to the skies from time to time, and saw starships heading up and out…well, they told themselves the people in those ships were fools, easily spooked.
Others, elsewhere, froze. They wanted to find safety but had no idea how. Not everyone had access to a way offworld. In fact, most did not. Hetzal was a system of farmers, people who lived close to the land. If they traveled anywhere else in the Republic, it was for a special occasion, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Now, being told to find a way to space on a moment’s notice…how? How could they possibly do such a thing?
But some people in Hetzal did have starships, or lived in the cities where space travel was more common. They found their children, gathered their treasures, and raced to the spaceports, hoping they would be the first to arrive, the first to book passage. They, inevitably, were not. They were greeted by crowds, queues, ticket prices spiking to unattainable levels for all but the wealthiest, thanks to unscrupulous opportunists. Tension rose. Fights broke out, and while Hetzal did have a security force to calm these squabbles, these officers also eyed the skies and wondered if they would spend their last moments alive trying to help other people to safety. A noble end, if so…but a desirable one? The security officers were people, too, with families of their own.
Order began to break down.
On the Rooted Moon, a kind trader decided to open the doors of the starship he used to transport the exceedingly fresh produce of the moon to the voracious worlds of the Outer Rim. He offered space to all who could possibly fit, and though his pilot told him the vessel was old, and the engines were a bit past their prime, the trader did not care. This was a moment for magnanimity and hope, and by the light he would save as many as he could.
The ship, holding 582 people, including the trader and his own family, managed to take off from its landing pad, once the pilot pushed its engines to maximum. It just needed to escape the moon’s gravity well. Once they were in space, everything would get easier. They could get away, to safety.
The vessel achieved most of a kilometer before the overtaxed engines exploded. The fireball rained down over those left behind, and they were not sure whether they were lucky or not, considering they still had no idea what was coming for them. Minister Ecka’s message did not say.
A variant on that message was sent out from Hetzal to any other systems or ships that might hear it: We are in desperate trouble. Send aid if you can.
It was picked up by receivers in the other worlds of the Outer Rim—Ab Dalis, Mon Cala, Eriadu, and many more, spreading outward via the Republic’s relay system, and then inward to the planets of the Mid and Inner Rims, the Colonies region, and even the shining Core. Virtually everyone who heard it wanted to do something to help—but what? It was clear that whatever was
happening in Hetzal would be over well before they could arrive.
But ships were sent anyway—mostly medical aid vessels, in the hope they might be able to offer treatment to injured citizens of Hetzal.
If any survived.
* * *
“Get to your nearest offworld transport facility,” Minister Ecka said to a cam droid recording his words and image and broadcasting them across the system. “We will send ships to pick up people who don’t have other ways to leave the planet. It might take time, but stay calm and peaceful. You have my word, we will come for you. We are all of the same crop. Hearty stock. We will survive this the way we have survived harsh winters and dry summers, by pulling together.
“We are all Hetzal. We are all the Republic,” he said.
He raised a hand, and the cam droid ceased transmitting. This was the fourth message he had sent since the emergency began, and he hoped his communications were doing some good. Reports suggested they were not—riots were beginning at spaceports on all three inhabited worlds—but what else could he do? He broadcast his messages from his office in Aguirre City, demonstrating that he had not abandoned his people even though he surely could. A show of solidarity. Not much, but something.
Around him, the rest of his staff coordinated their own attempts to assist in whatever way they could. General Borta worked with his meager security fleet to both keep order and ferry people offplanet. With the help of Counselor Daan, they had organized a number of the huge crop freighters currently in transit to act as relay points, ordering them to dump their cargo and clear all space for incoming refugees. Each could hold tens of thousands of people. Not comfortably, of course, but this was not a situation where comfort mattered.
Smaller ships were ferrying Hetzalians up to the cargo vessels, off-loading their people then rushing back to pick up more. It was an imperfect system, but it was what they had been able to arrange on no notice. There was no plan for something like this.
Minister Ecka blamed himself for that—but how could he have known? This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was impossible, whatever it was. He was just a farmer, after all, and—
No, he thought, suddenly ashamed of himself. He was Minister Zeffren Ecka, leader of the whole blasted system. It didn’t matter if he couldn’t have anticipated this disaster—it was happening, and he needed to do everything he could.
As he considered that thought, he looked over at Keven Tarr, who had never stopped running his little network, trying to keep information flowing. The young man was now working with three separate datapads and a number of comms droids projecting various displays on the walls, pulling in as much data as he could about the scope of the disaster that continued to wreak havoc in the system. He still had no real answers, other than to continually confirm that Hetzal was being savaged by whatever was afflicting the system. Satellites, arrays, stations…smashed apart by the storm of death that had come calling. It was like the seasonal chewfly swarms that used to plague the Fruited Moon until they had been genetically modified out of existence.
If the swarm came, there was nothing you could do. You hunkered down, survived, and sowed your fields again once it was all done.
Ecka watched as Keven Tarr wiped sweat from his eyes, then looked back at his main datapad, the one he had propped up on the little side table he was using as a desk.
Tarr’s eyes widened, and his fingers froze, hovering over the screen.
“Minister,” he said. “I’m…I’m getting a signal.”
“What signal?” Ecka said.
“I’ll just…I’ll just put it through,” Tarr said, and there was an odd note in his voice, of surprise, or just something unexpected.
Words crackled into the air, one of the technician’s comms droids broadcasting the message out into Minister Ecka’s office. A woman’s voice. Just a few words, but they brought with them, yes…the one thing most needed at that moment.
“This is Jedi Master Avar Kriss. Help is on the way.”
That one thing.
Hope.
A vessel appeared in the Hetzal system, leaping out of hyperspace and rapidly slowing as it returned to conventional speeds. It was deeply sunward, and the gravity wells it needed to navigate would rip a lesser ship apart, or even this one, if its bridge crew did not represent the best the Republic had to offer.
The ship was the Third Horizon, and it was beautiful. The ship’s surfaces rippled along its frame like waves on a silver sea, tapering to a point, with towers and crenellations along its length, like a fortress laid on its side, all wings and spires and spirals. It spoke of ambition. It spoke of optimism. It spoke of a thing made beautiful because it could be, with little consideration given to cost or effort.
The Third Horizon was a work of art, symbolic of the great Republic of worlds it represented.
Smaller vessels began rolling off berths on the ship’s hull, peeling away like flower petals in a breeze, darting specks of silver and gold. These were the craft of the Jedi Order, their Vectors. As the Jedi and Republic worked as one, so did the great ship and its Jedi contingent. Larger ships exited the Third Horizon’s hangars as well, the Republic’s workhorses: Longbeams. Versatile vessels, each able to perform duties in combat, search and rescue, transport, and anything else their crews might require.
The Vectors were configured as single- or dual-passenger craft, for not all Jedi traveled alone. Some brought their Padawans with them, so they might learn what lessons their Masters had to teach. The Longbeams could be flown by as few as three crew, but could comfortably carry up to twenty-four—soldiers, diplomats, medics, techs—whatever was needed.
The smaller vessels spun out into the system, accelerating away from the Third Horizon with purpose. Each with a destination, each with a goal. Each with lives to save.
On the bridge of the Third Horizon, a woman, human, stood alone. Activity churned all around her, in the arched spaces and alcoves of the bridge, as officers and navigators and specialists began to coordinate the effort to save the Hetzal system from destruction. The woman’s name: Avar Kriss, and for most of her three decades or so, a member of the Jedi Order. As a child, she came to the great Temple on Coruscant, that school and embassy and monastery and reminder of the Force connecting every living thing. She was a youngling first, and as her studies advanced, a Padawan, then a Jedi Knight, and finally…
…a Master.
This operation was hers. An admiral named Kronara was in command of the Third Horizon—itself part of the small peacekeeping fleet maintained by the Republic Defense Coalition—but he had ceded control of the effort to save Hetzal to the Jedi. There was no conflict or discussion about the decision. The Republic had its strengths, and the Jedi had theirs, and each used them to support and benefit the other.
Avar Kriss studied the Hetzal system, projected on the flat silver display wall in the bridge by a purpose-built comms droid hovering before it. The images were a composite gathered from in-system sources as well as the Third Horizon’s sensors. In green, the worlds, ships, space stations, and satellites of Hetzal. Her own assets—the Vectors, Longbeams, and the Third Horizon itself—were blue. The bits of hot death moving through the system at incredible speed, source and nature as yet unknown, were red. As she watched, new scarlet motes appeared on the display. Whatever was happening here, it was not yet over.
The Jedi reached to her shoulder, where a long white cape was secured by a golden buckle made in the shape of her Order’s symbol—a living sunrise. This was ceremonial clothing, appropriate for the joint Jedi–Republic conclave the Third Horizon had attended at the just now completed, galaxy-changing space station called Starlight Beacon. Now, though, considering the task at hand, the ornamental garments were a distraction. Avar tapped the buckle and the cape released. It slipped to the ground in a puddle of fabric, revealing a simpler white tunic beneath, ornamented in gold. At her hip, in a white
sheath, a metal cylinder, a single piece of sleek silver-white electrum, like the handle of a tool without the tool itself. Along its length, a spiraling incised line of bright-green seastone, serving as both grip and ornament, running up to a crossguard at one end. A weapon, with which she was skilled—but she would not need it today. The Jedi’s lightsabers would not save Hetzal. It would be the Jedi themselves.
Avar sank to the ground, settling herself, legs crossed. Her shoulder-length yellow hair, seemingly on its own, moved back and away from her face. It folded itself into a complex knot, a mandala, the creation of which was itself an aid to focus. She closed her eyes.
The Jedi Master slowed her breathing, reaching out to the Force that surrounded her, suffused her. Slowly, she rose, ceasing once she floated a meter above the deck.
Around the bridge, the crew of the Third Horizon took notice. They nodded, or smiled faintly, or simply felt hope bloom, before returning to their urgent tasks.
Avar Kriss did not notice. There was only the Force, and what it told her, and what she must do.
She began.
Bell Zettifar felt the first licks of atmosphere touch the craft. Their Vector didn’t have a name, not officially—all the ships were basically the same, and in theory interchangeable among their Jedi operators—but he and his master always used the same one, with the scoring along the wings from an ion storm they’d once flown through. The pattern looked like little starbursts, and so Bell—only in his mind, never spoken aloud—called their ship the Nova.
The Vectors were as minimally designed as a starship could be. Little shielding, almost no weaponry, very little computer assistance. Their capabilities were defined by their pilots. The Jedi were the shielding, the weaponry, the minds that calculated what the vessel could achieve and where it could go. Vectors were small, nimble. A fleet of them together was a sight to behold, the Jedi inside coordinating their movements via the Force, achieving a level of precision no droid or ordinary pilot could match.
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