Star Wars

by Charles Soule

  “We’ll never catch them in time,” Bell said.

  “I know,” Loden said.

  He removed his hands from the reins of his steelee, but the creature didn’t slow its strong gallop, sparks shooting up with every step. Bell assumed his master was steering his mount via his knees and a judicious application of the Force. In a single smooth motion, Loden swung the metal tube he had salvaged from the wrecked Vanguard around his body, placing it atop one shoulder. He pulled his lightsaber from his holster, slapped it against the flat plate connected to the tube’s electronic components, and the power unit on the far end lit up glowing gold, the same color as Loden’s blade.

  Bell realized what Loden had taken from their vehicle—the Vanguard’s laser cannon, its kyber-keyed anti-ship weapon. He held his breath. He couldn’t believe this was about to happen.

  Loden fired, and a bolt of golden light shot from the end of the tube, like a lightsaber blade but somehow denser, more there. The edges of a saber blade faded out into an intense whiteness—but this blast thickened, darkened, into an amber like the first rays of an autumn sunrise. And the sound—Bell heard it with his bones, not his ears. In the moment of the weapon firing, all other sounds ceased.

  Bell’s steelee reared up, and he had to fight to get it under control—and so he missed the bolt’s impact. He heard it, though, an utterly unique sound of metal being overheated in an instant and flashing into vapor, followed by two distinct thunks.

  When his mount was calm, moving forward again to catch up with Loden—whose steelee hadn’t missed a step, of course—Bell saw what the weapon had done. One of the Nihil’s two ships had been sliced in half, the middle section of the vessel just…gone. The two remaining edges had fallen to the ground, sparks and flame already shooting up from the superheated edges.

  “Whoa,” Bell said.

  He nudged his steelee to greater speed and called ahead to Loden.

  “Get the other ship!”

  “I can’t,” his master answered, pointing ahead with the smoking weapon before tossing it to one side, where it clattered onto the hard, metallic soil and was left behind in an instant.

  Bell looked where Loden had indicated. He understood immediately. The Nihil had realized the danger to the one ship they had left, their last remaining escape route, and had repositioned themselves, moving the cart containing the kidnapped family so it was directly in the line of fire. The Vanguard’s cannon wasn’t a precision weapon, at least not removed from its housings in the vehicle. He couldn’t risk the shot—it would almost certainly hit the family.

  “Maybe for the best,” Loden said. “If I’d fired twice the whole thing might have blown up in my hands. I had to leave the cooling module back with the V-Wheel.”

  “What are we going to do, Master?” Bell asked.

  “Whatever we can,” he replied.

  Not reassuring. If Loden Greatstorm was out of ideas, things were dire.

  They were getting closer to the Nihil, and the complications of the situation were starting to overwhelm Bell’s ability to plan. He would have to trust in the Force, let it guide his choices.

  Something happened up ahead. Bell and Loden heard a blaster fire, and a moment later a person was thrown from the cart. The Nihil sped on, leaving the body lying motionless on the hard ground.

  “That wasn’t a Nihil,” Bell said. “No mask. Did they kill one of the hostages?”

  Loden remained silent.

  The Jedi raced forward, details becoming clearer with every meter. The victim was the mother.

  “She’s alive,” Bell said. “I can still sense her.”

  As if to validate Bell’s words, the woman lifted an arm from where she lay—a weak, pain-filled gesture, even at a distance.

  Beyond her, the Nihil had almost reached their ship.

  The Jedi reached the woman. They pulled their steelees to a stop and leapt from the saddles. She had a smoking hole in her side—probably non-lethal, at least not right away.

  “Please,” she said, her voice small, thin, “my children, my husband. Please, you have to…”

  “We will,” Loden said, his voice confident—whether real or for the woman’s benefit, Bell did not know. “What is your name?”

  “Erika,” she said. “Erika Blythe.”

  Loden reached a hand toward her blaster wound.

  “Erika, I can help with your injury, using the Force. I can stabilize you long enough to get you back to our outpost—there’s medical treatment there.”

  “But my family,” she said, her voice getting stronger as Loden did what he could for her wound.

  “We’ll save them,” he said again.

  Across the hardpan, all three heard the same sound—the Nihil ship’s engines activating.

  “No!” Erika Blythe cried, trying to struggle to her feet. Bell didn’t know what she thought she could do, but the despair in her voice was deeper than any pain she might still be feeling.

  Loden stood, taking his lightsaber from its holster.

  “What is it, Master?”

  The Nihil ship took to the air, moving up and away quickly. Loden ignited his blade.

  The ship curved in the air, turned, and headed back. Straight for them.

  “Are they going to kill her?”

  “No,” Loden said. “She was bait. They knew we would stop to help her. They’re going to try to kill us.”

  The Nihil starship whipped toward them, ugly and brutish, the three lightning strikes painted on its hull in reflective paint gleaming in the harsh glare of Elphrona’s sun.

  “Get behind me, Padawan,” Loden said. “Protect Erika.”

  How? Bell thought. That’s a starship.

  But he was dutiful. Lacking any other ideas, he placed himself between the Nihil ship and the injured woman, and reached for his lightsaber.

  Loden changed his stance, putting himself side-on to the approaching starship. His front knee was bent, and he held his saber hilt in both hands. He looked like a durasteel wall. Unbeatable.

  But that’s a starship, Bell thought again.

  The Nihil fired, a rain of blasts from their ship lasers. Most went wide—a person was a small target for a starship—but a few were dead-on.

  Loden Greatstorm roared, a battle cry echoing out into the empty deadlands of Elphrona. His lightsaber flashed, too fast for Bell to understand what he did, and the laser bolts wicked away. Loden’s feet skidded back, kicking up rust-colored dust, and he grunted, as if he had been hit hard in the stomach by a huge, heavy maul.

  He fell to his knees, his saber blade flickering out, as the Nihil ship whipped past overhead.

  “Master!” Bell cried.

  “I’m…all right,” Loden said. “But…I don’t think I can do that…again.”

  Bell looked up. The Nihil ship was coming around for a second attack run.

  He lit his lightsaber, the green blade flicking into humming, buzzing life.

  He turned side-on to the starship. He bent his front knee. He made himself a wall through which no evil could pass.

  There’s no way, he thought. If Loden could barely do it…

  There might be no way. There was also no choice.

  Bell reached out to the Force.

  Laserfire, high in the air. Five shots.

  Bell braced himself, looking inward, not up.

  A new sound—an explosion, like a cough, muffled.

  That was…

  He snapped his head up just as two Jedi Vectors overflew the Nihil starship, which was now leaking thick black smoke from one of its engines.

  They circled around in an incredibly tight curve, a two-craft Drift, and as they banked Bell saw that only one of the ships actually had a pilot.

  “Indeera,” Loden said, pushing himself painfully to his feet. “By the light
, look at her go.”

  In awe, Bell realized what he was seeing. Indeera was flying both ships. Some of the Vectors’ functions could be operated remotely via the Force in cases of extreme emergency—but operating was one thing, and piloting was another. Indeera was mirroring her motions in her own Vector in the second ship, a feat of concentration Bell could barely comprehend.

  It was spectacular.

  The Nihil seemed more terrified than impressed. Their ship jerked up and headed for open sky, accelerating slowly, trailing smoke.

  The two Vectors came in for a landing not far from Bell, Loden, and Erika—not as smooth as they might, skittering along the ground a bit before coming to a halt, but considering what Indeera was doing, Bell was not inclined to criticize.

  Both cockpits opened, and Indeera stood.

  “Come on!” she cried. “We can try to catch them before they make it to the hyperspace access zone and jump away.”

  Loden turned to Bell.

  “I would bring you, apprentice, but you have to get Erika back to the outpost. You have two steelees. Once you’re there, put her in the medbay and—”

  “I know what to do, Master,” Bell said. He wasn’t disappointed, exactly, but he knew where he could help the most, and it wasn’t slowly and carefully taking Erika Blythe back to their outpost.

  “She won’t make it,” came a voice.

  Bell and Loden turned, to see that Porter Engle had appeared, as if from nowhere, Ember at his side. A third steelee stood nearby, and the ancient Jedi was down on one knee next to Erika, with his hand hovering above her wound.

  “This is serious. She needs treatment on the way. I’ll have to take her back. I’m the best medic of the four of us, by far.”

  Loden wasted no time. The Nihil were getting farther away with every second.

  “May the Force be with you, Porter,” he said. “Bell, with me.”

  He ran toward the waiting Vector.

  “It’s time to fly.”

  Pikka Adren stretched, feeling her muscles ease a little. She wanted to ask Joss to rub her shoulders, but the thirty-ninth Emergence was set to happen soon enough that she didn’t want to risk him being out of the pilot’s seat when it happened. They still had a few minutes, but there was no reason to take a chance.

  Her husband could give her a massage later. Assuming “later” ever actually arrived. Somehow, they’d been swept up in the efforts to solve all the backscatter from the Legacy Run disaster, and that was all well and good—they were getting hazard pay and doing something noble besides. But they were supposed to be on vacation. She had booked them a trip to Amfar once their shift helping to build the Starlight Beacon was over, and those days had come and gone. She’d lost the deposit, and had no idea whether the Republic would let her expense it, and—

  Ugh. She was annoyed at herself for focusing on something so petty. She and Joss were literally saving the galaxy here. Or at least a good chunk of it.

  But still. She was supposed to be on a beach right now, wearing something tiny, sipping something delicious, lying next to her handsome husband who was also in something tiny, thinking about later, when they would both ditch even those tiny things and think of inventive ways to make each other feel good.

  “You ready, my darling?” Joss said.

  He sounded excited. Clearly he wasn’t thinking he’d rather be on a beach. He lived for this stuff.

  But really, she thought, so do I.

  Couple of spanner-slinging contractors out saving the Outer Rim Territories, doing it together, doing it in style. Not so bad.

  “Ready, my darling,” she said, putting her hands back on her console.

  “I just checked with the rest of the team,” Joss said. “Everyone’s good to go. Whatever pops out, we can handle it.”

  Pikka murmured in agreement, pulling her mind away from Amfar and back to the task at hand. Somehow the Republic had figured out how to predict where the Emergences were going to happen—she’d heard a story about some sort of mega-processor made out of tens of thousands of droids linked to the Force that could predict the future, but that surely had to be nonsense. In any case, they had identified three spots as the most likely candidates for where the Legacy Run’s flight recorder would emerge, and had set up a team to intercept them, one after the other.

  Other teams were working to recover potential survivors from other Emergence sites—it was possible some could still be alive in passenger modules despite the length of time since the original disaster, and all efforts were being made to bring them home. Those missions were obviously hugely important, but the flight recorder was crucial—it would provide information about how the ship had been destroyed in the first place, and help prevent it from happening again.

  The hyperspace blockade of the Outer Rim was still in effect, and Pikka knew that many worlds were hurting. She’d heard rumors of food riots in the sinkhole cities of Utapau, even though Chancellor Soh had authorized special aid shipments. And of course, Starlight Beacon’s construction had finally been completed, but the dedication and official opening were on hold. As a matter of professional pride, that stung a bit. That place would be beautiful, and help so many people. She and Joss had worked hard on their little part of it, and she wanted to see it operational on time.

  The retrieval team included four Longbeams and two Jedi Vectors—it was her old friends Te’Ami and Mikkel Sutmani, which made sense. After all, the four of them had devised the techniques used back in Hetzal that had saved the Fruited Moon during the original disaster. They’d refined those ideas, and now, whatever happened, they’d be ready for it.

  Pikka thought this Emergence would probably just be a piece of wreckage, nothing interesting about it. If so, they could just let it go. They were in an uninhabited region of space, far from anything to which a chunk of former starship might pose a threat.

  “Weapons hot,” she said. “Everything else is good to go, too—magclamps, fuel looks good, the whole deal.”

  “Great,” Joss said. “As soon as we’re done here, we’ll have to zip away to the next Emergence spot. We’ll barely have enough time to get there.”

  “You really think we might get in a fight?” she asked.

  “I doubt it, but you know what happened at Eriadu. Someone else out there predicted an Emergence, too. Three, actually. We’re looking for a ship called the New Elite, a modified corvette. Admiral Kronara went over it at the mission briefing. We don’t know how they’re involved, but there’s at least some chance they might show up here, too. We need to be prepared for anything. If we get into a fight, we get into a fight.”

  Privately, Pikka was planning to just let the Jedi handle it, if it came to that—she wasn’t afraid of a firefight, but she was basically a mechanic. She was more than happy to leave combat to the highly trained space wizards.

  “Here it comes,” Joss said. “Thirty-ninth Emergence in five, four, three…”

  * * *

  “…two, one,” Belial said, from his post at the monitoring station. “There it is.”

  “Scan it, and tell me if it looks like the flight recorder,” Lourna Dee said.

  She was standing with her arms crossed on the bridge of her flagship, the Lourna Dee, looking out at the little fleet the Republic had put together for their little mission. Bunch of heroes. Hooray.

  Lourna Dee loved her ship, and that was why she had named it after herself. Anyone who had an issue with that was welcome to discuss it with her. So far, no one ever had.

  Each of Marchion Ro’s Tempest Runners had a personal warship, a testament to its owner’s taste as well as the possibilities inherent in the Nihil as an organization. Work hard, hunt well, follow the Paths, and you, too, might someday own a customized battle cruiser. Kassav’s New Elite felt like the interior of a trashy nightclub. Pan Eyta’s ship, the Elegencia, was beautiful, with surf
aces covered in soft leather, lighting designed to perfectly accent every lovely little tasteful design choice he made.

  The Lourna Dee was unique in a completely different way.

  The cruiser was outfitted with all sorts of devices and shielding that made it all but impossible to pick up on a scan. Heat baffling, ablative plating, double-sealed engines that recycled almost all of its exhaust signature into the ship’s life-support and weapons systems, and more. It cost her a pile of credits, but it made her Tempest’s flagship nearly invisible to even the most powerful sensors.

  Usually, an attack by the Lourna Dee went like this: The enemy pilot thought, Wait, where’d that ship come fr— and then they were blasted into vapor.

  Here…well, it remained to be seen. The Lourna Dee packed enough punch to take out four Longbeams and a few wispy little Vectors, if she could take them by surprise and kept moving. But that could mean revealing her ship, and that was not on the menu for this operation. The Tempest Runners were in rare agreement when they voted to approve this mission: The Nihil needed to avoid any suggestion they were connected to the Emergences or the Legacy Run.

  There were two reasons for that. First, obviously, was Kassav’s massive screwup at Eriadu. His stupid attempt at extorting that planet, the one that had gone so wrong and was so obviously a shot at taking the entire proceeds of that job for himself, shone an unwelcome spotlight on the Nihil. The Eriaduans had splashed Kassav’s name and the specs of his ship all over the HoloNet. While there was no direct connection to the Nihil, that was still more heat than they wanted. And after that, Kassav had had the nerve to come crawling back to the Great Hall. He’d offered up the thirty million credits he said he’d made on the Eriadu job and asked for protection.

  Pan Eyta and Lourna Dee had wanted to throw Kassav out of the hall right then and there—the hard way—but Marchion Ro had voted to keep him around, to give him a chance to fix his mess. Said something about how his experience might be useful, since he was an old-timer, and how his Tempest was so loyal to him…maybe it wasn’t a good time for unrest in the crews. Mostly, though, since Kassav didn’t get a vote it was her and Pan against Marchion’s two votes, and since by Nihil tradition ties went to the Eye…Kassav was still around.