Crosscurrent (8 page)

He landed in a crouch, lightsaber blazing. “I said run.”

The largest said, “We are six to your one, Jedi. With more coming.”

Relin tilted his head, holstered his blaster, and took his lightsaber in both hands.

Through the large double doors behind the Massassi, Relin heard the hyperdrive hum with pre-jump preparation. Pressure built on his eardrums. The hairs on his arms stood on end. He had no time to waste.

“You will be fewer than six in a moment. Flee now. Final chance.”

They lost their smiles but not their fire, and charged him in a loose arc, roaring. He charged them in silence, focused, the Force surging through his muscles.

When he’d closed to two paces, he bounded over them, flipping in midair and decapitating one as he landed behind their line. By the time they spun to face him, he’d put his lightsaber through a second.

Sidestepping the downward slash of a lanvarok from a third Massassi, he cut the metal weapon in half, ducked under a crosscut from another, and severed both legs of the nearest Massassi. He backflipped out of range, the screams of the dying loud in his ears.

The large Massassi put his lanvarok in the skull of the other whose legs Relin had severed, ending the screams, then all three remaining snarled and charged.

Relin threw his lightsaber at the first, impaling him through the neck. Surprise slowed the others a moment, and Relin took advantage of the reprieve to use the Force to pull his weapon back into his hands.

They licked their fangs, bounced on their feet, and charged anew.

He met their advance with his own, ducking, spinning, wheeling, slashing, killing. They could not match his speed, his skill, and within a five-count, pieces of the Massassi and their weapons dotted the bloody deck. All were dead but the one wounded on the foot by the blaster.

“You must gift me with death, too, Jedi,” the wounded Massassi snarled. “This.” He gestured at his wounded foot. “I will be as a child.”

Relin stared at him with contempt. He knew the Massassi had been bred as warriors, but their carelessness with their own lives sickened him. “We all live with ourselves.”

“Not like this! Kill me. I demand it.”

The Massassi crawled a blaster rifle, leaving a line of smeared blood in his wake.

“As you’ll have it, then,” Relin said, and put a blaster shot in his skull.

Deactivating his lightsaber, still centered in the calm of the Force, he turned to the doors. Body and mind tingled with fatigue, but he endured. Behind the door, energy gathered around the hyperdrive. He could feel the change in the air. The dreadnoughts would jump soon. He would not be able to stop
Omen
, but at least he could stop
Harbinger
.

He slipped the overrider over the control panel and hoped it would work quickly. Lights and beeps signified the beginning of the cryptographic holo-chess match. Relin could do nothing but wait. Despite the urgency of the moment, he put his back to the door, sat cross-legged on the floor, stared out and over a chamber of dead Massassi, and held his calm.

Several corridors opened into the chamber, and Relin heard shouts down two of them. They were coming. The
realization did nothing to disturb his calm. Taking comfort in his relationship to the Force, he held the hilt of his lightsaber in his hand, felt the coolness of its metal, studied its lines, recalled its making.

A long beep signaled the overrider’s victory.

“Checkmate,” Relin said, standing.

The hyperdrive chamber’s doors parted. Dry, warm air swarmed out. The gathering energy in the chamber created extreme static electricity. Relin’s hair stood on end. Insects seemed to crawl over his flesh. His robes clung to him as if trying to prevent him from entering.

The rectangular metal block of the hyperdrive hung in the center of the room from ceiling mounts and a series of power conduits as thick as Relin’s arm. A large, disk-shaped concavity in the floor yawned underneath it, the open mouth into which the drive fed its power. Circuitry crisscrossed the hyperdrive’s face, the circulatory system of interstellar travel.

A transparisteel window on the far side of the chamber opened onto an adjoining room. A pair of wide-eyed human engineers in the black uniforms of Sadow’s forces pointed at him, shouted something, and reached frantically for communicators. Relin used a telekinetic blast to slam both men against the far wall and they slumped to the floor, out of sight.

Relin had seen a hyperdrive bisected once for engineers to study. The complexity of the circuitry, the odd geometry of its inner workings, had left him nauseous. And now that complexity, that geometry, began to do its work. Machinery clicked, connected, turned. The power conduits squirmed like snakes as more energy coursed through them. The hum increased in volume. Relin felt light-headed. Radiation filled the room, he knew. He would need treatment for radiation poisoning if he survived.

If.

He placed a hand on the hyperdrive. The metal felt warm, as slick as talc. It pulsed like a living thing, seeming to shift, to flow under his touch. A headache rooted in his left temple, intensified. His stomach flirted with nausea.

He removed three of his mag-grenades from the pocket of his flexsuit, attached two of them to the face of the hyperdrive, a third to the main power conduit connection. He checked his chrono to mark the time and rapidly set the timers.

The grenades began ticking away the remaining moments of
Harbinger
’s existence.

He turned for the door, activating his communicator. “Charges are set. Heading out now, Drev.”

“Understood. The Blades have cleared out. Perhaps I have frightened them.”

Relin heard the beginning of a smile in his tone.

Drev went on: “I am alone out here. Well, except for the two hulking dreadnoughts bristling with weapons.”

Relin stood amid the Massassi he had slaughtered. “Jump out of the system. With their ships clear, the cannons may fire.”

“They’re preparing for a jump, Master. They won’t risk firing.”

“They may. Jump out, Drev.”

“I am not leaving you.”

“Jump, Drev. That is an order.”

“No.”

Relin cocked his head. “No?”

“I’m not leaving, Master. Both ships are in jump prep. Neither will risk firing.”

Relin shook his head, incredulous at his Padawan’s stand. “You are leaving.
Harbinger
will not be able to jump, but
Omen
will. There’s nothing we can do about
that now. But we can warn Odan-Urr and Memit Nadill about the ore and what it can do. That is your task.”

“No. I won’t. We go together or not at all.”

Relin lost his calm for the first time since coming aboard the dreadnought.

“You will do it and do it now. That is a direct order.”

“You’re breaking up, Master.”

“Blast it, Drev! You heard—”

“Understood, Master. I will get in close, scrape the surface of the ship. The laser cannons from
Omen
will not be able to engage me there, and for
Harbinger
it will be like using a club to swat a fly. Get to an escape pod and we’ll dock. Out. And they won’t fire anyway. Out, again.”

The link went quiet. “Drev? Drev?”

His Padawan did not respond.

“Blast!”

“You have a way of losing your Padawans,” said a coarse voice behind him, a voice that Relin still heard in the quiet, solitary moments of his life when he had only his failures for company.

“Saes.” The word came out a curse, and Relin accompanied its pronounciation with the sizzling sound that came with activation of his lightsaber.

The Sith entered from the same corridor Relin had used. He wore the loose browns and blacks favored by dark side users. The red blade of his lightsaber filled the space between them. His scaly, reddish brown skin was the color of blood. He strode among the scattered Massassi parts that littered the bloody floor of the chamber, his eye ridge cocked, a sneer curling his lip over one of the small horns that jutted from the side of his jaw. His long hair, bound into a rope with bone circlets, hung to his waist.

“I should have known it was you on my ship. Who else but a Jedi? Who else but Relin Druur? I learned such
things from you.” He shook his head, poked a Massassi corpse with a toe. “It seems long ago now.”

“You destroyed every life-form on that moon. You learned nothing from me.”

Saes laughed, the sound fat with contempt. “I learned much from you, but it was not what you sought to teach. You should not have come here, Relin. But then you always were the fool.”

“There are many things I should not have done.”

Saes’s eyes narrowed at that.

Shouts carried from three of the corridors that opened onto the chamber.

Relin said, “Your servants will arrive soon.”

Saes raised a clawed hand and the blast doors closed, one after another, blocking the corridors from which Relin had heard the sounds of pursuit.

“This is between us, and is long overdue. Do you agree?”

They approached each other, circled at four paces, lightsabers blazing. Saes was the taller between them, the physically stronger, but Relin was faster.

“I do.”

Relin’s chrono continued its countdown. Thirty-three seconds.

“I have missed your company from time to time,” Saes said, and Relin heard sincerity in the words.

“You have chosen a lonely path, Saes. It is never too late to turn away.”

Saes smiled around his horns, an expression that did not reach his eyes, and the hollowness of the expression reminded Relin of the gulf between the natures of his first Padawan and his second.

“
You
have chosen the lonely path. The Jedi teach denial of self. That is their weakness. No sentient can long abide that. The Sith embrace the self, and therein lies their strength.”

“You understand so little,” Relin said. “The Jedi teach the interdependence of life. The understanding that all is connected.”

A flash of anger animated Saes’s eyes, and he spit at Relin’s feet. “A lie. You tried to steal what is best in me, to make me as empty as you.”

Relin sneered, but Saes bored deeper.

“When is the last time you felt anything with passion? When is the last time you laughed, Relin? Felt a woman’s touch? When?”

The words cut close to bone, echoing, as they did, Relin’s own thoughts about his training of Drev.

Saes must have seen it in Relin’s expression. “Ah, I see you’ve thought of these matters yourself. And you were right to think them. It is never too late for
you
to learn wisdom. Join me, Relin. I will present you to Master Sadow myself.”

“I think not,” Relin said.

“Very well,” Saes answered. He reached down to a pouch at his belt. “May I?”

Relin knew what he would draw forth and nodded.

Saes removed a white memory mask from the pouch, placed it before his face. It adhered, shaping itself into a likeness of the skull of an erkush, one of the largest predators on Kalee.

“You used to wear a mask of real bone,” Relin said.

“I reserve that now for only special prey,” Saes said, and attacked.

Jaden’s ship emerged from hyperspace and the navicomp automatically removed the tint of his cockpit window
while R6 confirmed coordinates. Jaden checked the readout. They’d had a good jump and reentered realspace at the edge of the Unknown Regions.

“Well done, Arsix.”

Ahead, Fhost spun through space, night side facing out. He saw only an old weathersat and commsat in orbit. Like many planets so far out on the Rim, Fhost had no orbital dock and processing station, no planetary defenses, no sign of Galactic Alliance bureaucracy at all. The population of Fhost was on its own.

He felt a sudden, overwhelming impulse to throw away everything and start anew on some wild, independent backworld like Fhost, free of rules and obligations, but he had enough self-awareness to recognize the feeling for what it was: a desire to run away from his old life, not a desire to run
to
a new one.

He engaged the ion engines on his customized Z-95 and sped around the planet, outpacing its spin, chasing the day, until he saw the system’s star crest the horizon line.

“Put us in geosynchronous orbit, Arsix,” he said, and the droid complied.

Jaden stared out the cockpit’s window as the planet rotated into day. Light filled his cockpit and washed over the planet’s surface by increments, unveiling a quilt of clouds floating over the red, orange, and tan of vast deserts, the blue smear of an ocean, the spine of a mountain range that ran the length of the main continent. To Jaden, it was like watching the slow reveal of a masterful work of art, a sculpture of land and water, wondrous in its lonely, whirling trek through the emptiness of space. He always tried to see a starcrest from orbit before setting foot on a planet. He wasn’t sure why—maybe he wanted to see every world in its best light before putting down on its surface.

Unbidden, he recalled a starcrest over Corellia that he’d seen from a viewport aboard Centerpoint Station as he and his strike force had moved through the metal maze of its corridors.

He dismissed the memory quickly, pained by the realization that his actions on Centerpoint had polluted even this, one of the small pleasures he had long enjoyed.

Frowning, he looked out of the cockpit, past Fhost, and into the field of stars that dotted the Unknown Regions.

“There be dragons,” he said, smiling.

R6 beeped a question.

“Something Kyle once said to me,” Jaden explained.

What you seek can be found in the black hole on Fhost
.

Fhost’s largest population center was Farpoint. He would start there, keep an ear to ground, and try to figure out how something could start in the lightlessness of a black hole. He’d pose as a salvager with old Imperial–era hulks to sell for scrap. The fact that he piloted a Z-95 would add credibility to the claim.

“Why do I fly an old Z-Ninety-five, Arsix?”

The droid beeped and whistled in answer, though Jaden needed none. He flew the Z-95 for the same reasons he still bore an old lightsaber in the small of his back.