فصل 11

Chapter Eleven

Hetzal System. Interplanetary Space. 40 minutes to impact.

A line of four vessels, carrying approximately thirty-five hundred people, moved at a steady pace away from Hetzal Prime. They sought safety from the barrage of deadly projectiles that had infiltrated the system and continued to wreak havoc. From the farthest reaches all the way to the gas harvesting stations near the three suns that powered Hetzal’s endless growing seasons, destruction reigned.

Two of the ships were passenger liners, and two were cargo freighters temporarily repurposed as transports for the duration of the emergency. While the passenger liners were capable of greater speed than the freighters, all four captains had opted to remain together as they traversed space on their way out of the system, so as to render aid to one another if needed.

Minister Ecka’s evacuation order had asked all ships to reach “minimum safe distance” but was vague on what that might actually mean. To find their path to safety, the captains were relying on the Republic vessel that had transited into the system at the start of all this. It was coordinating efforts from the surface of Hetzal Prime, sending out a tracking feed. From that, the captains could see the path of the deadly rain of projectiles falling on the system. It gave them a sense of where safety might lie.

Based on what they could see, they should be out of the danger zone soon. After that…who knew? Apparently, the Republic and their Jedi colleagues were executing some sort of plan, but no one on the ships knew what it was, or when it would be possible to return to their homeworld. Assuming they ever could. For all they knew, the situation was permanent, and they would never set foot on Hetzal Prime again.

This turned out to be true.

In less than the blink of an eye, the ships vanished, replaced with four slowly expanding balloons of fire and vapor and shredded metal and molecular remnants of the thousands of people aboard. One of the projectiles had exited hyperspace directly in their path, and because the vessels had grouped together for safety, it pierced them all, one after the other, like a skewer through bits of meat. The ships were gone.

On the Third Horizon, Jedi Master Avar Kriss heard the new silence of all those souls, lost to the Force forever. Her mouth tightened.

She continued to listen. Something was off, a bad note in the melody. She tried to understand what she was hearing, sensing, knowing that she was stretching her abilities to their limits. There was too much happening in the Hetzal system all at once, and her mind was not truly capable of processing it. She was pushing, trying to make the Force reveal the answer to her—that was not the way. She needed to pull back, not shove forward. Let the Force give her what it willed, in its own time.

Avar slowed her breathing, slowed her heart, felt calm return to her mind and spirit. She listened again for the bad note—as she did, a projectile finally hit the surface of Hetzal Prime, a sea impact, destroying thousands of square kilometers of algae farms, sending water vapor high into the atmosphere and tsunamis outward in a rapidly expanding circle. People died—but hundreds, not thousands or millions, as the farms were mostly automated and droid-managed.

Perhaps more would be lost when the waves hit the coasts, but it all could be worse, much worse. The hyperspace fragment was small, and greatly slowed by the water. It did not penetrate the planet’s crust.

A bad note, certainly…but no worse than the other bits of ugliness and pain she was hearing. The system remained out of balance, despite the ongoing efforts of the Jedi and Republic to save it. No, what she was seeking was not a bad note.

It was a missing note. There was a hole, right in the middle of her awareness. Something she was not hearing, something the Force was trying to point out to her. But with everything else she was tracking— the anomalies, the fear of the people trapped aboard some of them, her own teams trying to help, and just the web of life within the system—it was all too complex, too distracting.

She was missing something. And if she could not find a way to hear it, she believed everything they were doing here might, in the end, mean nothing.

Avar Kriss opened her spirit as much as she could.

She listened.