Crosscurrent (17 page)

Before he reached the cargo hold, the ship began to shake violently, its solidity responding to some destructive vibratory frequency created by the velocity and the jump error. He had only moments. With his Lignan-enhanced perception, he felt the rising tide of terror sweep through the crew. He ran into a Massassi security team emerging from a side corridor. Even their sharp ferocity had been dulled by concern over events. Still, they recognized him and bowed their heads as the ship shook under their feet.

“Accompany me to the cargo bay! Quickly!”

Bred and trained to obey, the hulking Massassi asked no questions. They ran before him, their boots thunderous on the deck, lanvaroks bare, gravelly voices shouting.

“Out of the way! Captain coming through! Out of the way!”

Crew hugged the walls as the Massassi and Saes stormed past. Many fell in behind them. By the time Saes descended the lift and reached the double doors that opened onto the cargo hold, he had more than a score of his crew trailing in his wake—engineers, security personnel, even a few Blade pilots still in flight gear.

The cargo bay doors did not respond to his open code, so the Massassi pried them open with their clawed
hands and lanvaroks. Power blew out of the hold, enough to cause Saes to rock on his feet.

“Sir?” asked one of the Massassi, wide-eyed, too, from the ambient dark side energies.

The ship lurched, throwing many of the crew against the wall. As one they uttered an alarmed moan.

Saes squeezed through the open doors into the vastness of the cargo hold. Loading droids dotted the deck, several stuck on their sides, wheels and treads spinning helplessly. The stacks of storage containers lay in disordered piles like the ruins of some lost city.

He did not need a droid or crew member to point him to the containers containing the Lignan. It drew him like a lodestone drew iron shavings. With each step he took closer to the ore, his mind and spirit opened further until he could not contain a laugh. It was as though he had been drawing power from a nearly exhausted well, and now drew it from an ocean.

He was vaguely aware of his crew trailing after him as he followed the power back to its source, to the stack of rectangular storage containers that held mounds of the ore. He felt giddy, rapturous from its effects.

He drew on the power the ore offered, filled himself with it, sank ever more deeply into the Force. Power coursed through him. His crew backed away, eyes wide—all except the Massassi, who fell to one knee and bowed their heads.

The ship screamed outrage at the stresses of the misjump. With a minor exercise of will, Saes used his enhanced telekinetic power to throw open several of the storage containers holding the Lignan. Ore spilled out onto the deck, bounced around. Power spilled out into the air, collected around Saes. He reached deeper until he was nested fully in the Force, alight with the Lignan’s power.

An impact jarred the ship. The hollow boom of an explosion
told of some distant destruction to fore. The buck of the ship sent three of the shipping containers skidding along the deck toward him, toward the crew. The Lignan allowed him to use his telekinetic powers to stop them cold with minor effort.

He reached out with the Force, with his augmented power, until his consciousness encapsulated the entire ship. The task challenged him. Dark energy swirled around him. Force lightning shot in jagged lines from his curled fingers, from his eyes. His crew turned and ran, all except the Massassi. They remained, though uncertainty filled their bestial faces.

Grunting, Saes took mental hold of the dreadnought, the pieces of it floating in its wake. His mental fingers closed over the hull and reinforced it, then righted the ship’s course.

As he exerted himself, the loose Lignan ore on the deck flared red, sizzled, and crumbled to dust. Apparently it could offer only so much before burning out. He burned through it like a wildfire through brush, like the mining cruisers through the crust of Phaegon III’s moon.

He gritted his teeth, his entire body shaking with the challenge of keeping the ship intact. The effort squeezed more Force lightning from his hands, his eyes, his entire body, and soon he was sheathed in a swirling cyclone of the energy. He roared as his power alone kept the ship from shattering.

More and more Lignan burned out around him until he stood in a field of dull gray rock, miniatures of Phaegon III’s moon. His heart pounded against his ribs, gonged in his ears. Corded veins and sinew made a topographic map of the exposed flesh of his forearms. The strain bore down on him, drove him to his knees. He was failing. He had to pull the ship out of its jump or they would all die.

He drew from the last well of his strength. The cargo
hold lit up like a pyrotechnic display as more of the Lignan flashed and died. He held
Harbinger
in his mind’s eye and felt the intermittent, flawed tunnel of hyperspace around it, felt the ship as a needle through the fabric of space and time, darning in and out of hyperspace and realspace.

Using the Force to time a moment when the ship moved into realspace, he tried to deactivate the damaged hyperdrive, but failed. The pitch of the damaged drive turned to a scream as it poured radiation into the ship and burned out as completely as the used Lignan.

Saes answered its scream with one of his own, straining to hold the ship together and jerk it back into realspace. With a roar of Force power, he changed its course and tore it from the grips of the misjump.

The ship was steady beneath him. The scream of strained metal was silent.

Exhausted, he sagged fully to the ground, his breath ragged but his mind exultant.

“Sir?” said one of the Massassi.

Saes inhaled and stood on wobbly legs. The Massassi moved to assist him but he waved them off. He gathered himself and walked across the cargo hold to a viewport.

Outside, he saw the calm of realspace, a distant blue planet, an orange sun. The stars in the background of space did not look familiar to him, though. He did not know where in the universe they were, but he knew he had saved the ship. The power of the dark side had saved the ship.

Jaden awoke to the metallic shriek of a thrown hatch lever. The door opened to reveal Marr’s lined face and
smooth gray hair. The Cerean’s goatee was so precisely groomed that Jaden imagined Marr gave its angles and length as much attention as he did jump solutions.

“We will be there soon,” Marr said.

“How long was I out?”

“Six standard hours and eleven minutes. There is caf in the galley.”

Jaden stood, chuckling at the Cerean’s precision. Marr turned to go, but Jaden halted him with a question.

“How did you and Khedryn meet, Marr? With your gifts, it seems as if … you might have done something else.”

“My gifts,” Marr said softly, and trailed off. He looked up. “Perhaps I did do something else.”

“Of course. I meant no offense.”

“I took none.” He turned once more as if to go, but stopped himself and faced Jaden. “When I was young, I once spent a week calculating the probabilities that my life would take this or that turn.” He smiled, and Jaden noticed for the first time that one of his front teeth was badly chipped. “I even deduced a small possibility that I would become a Jedi. Amusing, isn’t it?”

Jaden chose his words carefully. “Perhaps you could have been.”

Marr seemed not to hear him. His deep-set eyes floated in some sea of memory where he had experienced a loss. “I was wrong about all of it, of course. It was a silly exercise. Life does not follow a predictable path. There is no way to capture the infinite variables involved. I think it reflected more my view of myself, or maybe my hopes back then, than anything else.”

“Life is not predictable,” Jaden agreed, thinking of the course of his own life, thinking of an air lock activation switch he wished he’d never seen.

“Later I decided that I needed to
live
life, not think
about living it, not mathematically model living it. Not long after that I met Captain Faal. He’s a good man, you know.”

“I see that. And so are you. Where did you receive your training in mathematics?”

Marr frowned. “Not at a university. I had a series of private tutors, but I am mostly self-taught. Born to it, I guess.”

“It’s intuitive,” Jaden said, unsurprised.

“Yes.”

Jaden nodded, considered the idea of telling Marr that he was Force-sensitive, but decided against it. Why burden him? Jaden had been happier using the Force in ignorance. “Come on, let’s get to the cockpit. I need to see this moon.”

They found Khedryn already in the cockpit, his feet up, relaxed in his chair. He nodded at the cerulean swirl visible through the window.

“Beautiful, isn’t it? I’ve heard it can drive you mad to stare at it. I’ve been doing it for years, though.”

“That may not support the claim you suppose it does,” Marr said, smiling, and took his seat.

Khedryn grinned. “Six years I’ve put up with this, Jaden. Six years.”

“Six standard years, four months, and nineteen days,” Marr corrected.

“You see?” Khedryn said to Jaden, and Jaden could not help but smile. The camaraderie between the two was infectious. Long ago Jaden had felt similarly in the company of his fellow Jedi, but those feelings had vanished. In the company of two rogues on the fringe of space, he found himself feeling as light as he had in months.

“Coming out of hyperspace,” Marr said. “In three, two, one.”

“Disengaging,” Khedryn said, and disengaged the hyperdrive.

Blue gave way to black. Stars appeared in the dark blanket of space. The day side of a blue gas giant filled half the viewport. Clouds of gas swirled in its atmosphere, echoing the swirl of hyperspace. A midnight-blue oval, a storm hundreds of kilometers wide, stared out of the planet’s equatorial region, an eye that would bear witness to Jaden’s fate. Thick, churning rings of ice and rock, the largest ring system Jaden had ever seen, whirled around the planet at an angle fifteen degrees off the equator.

“Nothing on the scanners,” Marr said. “We’re alone.”

“No way Reegas gets someone out here this fast,” Khedryn said. “We’re on the chrono, though.”

Jaden tried to speak, found his throat dry, tried again. “The moon?”

“Coming around now,” Marr said, and they watched an icy moon, as pale and translucent as an opal, come into view, under the scrutiny of the planet’s dark eye.

Seeing it stole Jaden’s breath. He stared in silence for a time before he finally managed, “That is it. Marr, put it on the speakers.”

“Put what on the speakers?” Khedryn asked, but Marr understood. The Cerean flicked a few switches, tapped a few keys, and the repeating signal of the Imperial distress call fell over the cockpit, not a recording but the real thing, as faint and regular as an infant’s heartbeat.

Help us. Help us
.

“You all right?” Khedryn asked Jaden, taking him by the arm. “It’s just a distress beacon, right?”

It was more than that to Jaden. “I need to get down to the surface of the moon.”

“What is down there?” Marr asked.

“I do not know,” Jaden said. “I only know that I am supposed to find it.”

Khedryn and Marr shared a look before Khedryn shrugged.

“We’ll take
Flotsam,
” Khedryn said, Jaden assuming he meant the attached Starhawk. “I’m not landing
Junker
down there.”

“We’ll need to break out the enviro-suits—” Marr said.

The rhythmic beep of the proximity alarm cut short their conversation, joining its clarion to the distress signal coming from the moon. Marr spun in his seat to the scanner console. Khedryn leaned over his shoulder.

“What do we have?”

Marr bent over the sensor screen, his brow lined with concern. “Unknown, but coming in fast. Very fast.”

“From where?”

“From out of the system,” Marr said.

Harbinger
was still moving under its own power, blazing through the star system at full speed but no longer lost in the nether region between hyperspace and realspace. It was damaged, but repairable.

Pleased, Saes turned and found himself facing not only the Massassi but also many of those of the crew who had fled when he had drawn on the Lignan.

As one, they stood to attention and saluted. Saes returned the gesture and activated his communicator to the channel that would carry his voice across the entire ship.

“This is the captain. All members of the night-watch bridge crew assemble on the secondary bridge.”

He assumed Los Dor and his bridge crew had died when
Harbinger
had lost its primary bridge. He needed
to figure out where the ship was, then figure out how to get his wounded dreadnought and its remaining ore to Primus Goluud.

Without warning, the pod ceased shaking and Relin, his equilibrium still off, struggled to right the spinning craft. A planet flashed in and out of the viewport, a blue gas giant with thick, busy rings of rock and ice, and a large, ice-covered moon that hung against the black of space like a shimmering gemstone. Relin did not recognize the planet or the system.

Gripping the controls with his remaining hand, wincing at the pain in his ribs, he activated the reverse thrusters to slow the pod and gradually righted it. Using the pod’s rudimentary sensor array, he scanned the area around him. He picked up
Harbinger
, apparently intact and slowing, and another ship near the moon. He did not recognize its signature and turned the pod so that he could see it out of the viewport.

“Who are you?” he murmured.

He’d never seen a ship like it—disk-shaped, with an attached boat off the starboard side and what looked like some kind of docking rings aft. He wondered where in the universe the jump had stranded him.

Wheeling the pod around, he brought
Harbinger
into view and almost collided with the dreadnought. The Sith ship filled the viewport as it passed under the pod, the charred scar of its destroyed bridge the hole into which Drev had fallen, into which Relin had poured his rage.