فصل 15

Chapter Fifteen

Hetzal System. Above The Fruited Moon. 20 minutes to impact.

Three Jedi Vectors flew in formation above and to either side of the Republic Longbeam piloted by Joss and Pikka Adren. Te’Ami to the larger ship’s right, Mikkel Sutmani to its left, and Nib Assek and Burryaga above. They had accelerated to the limits of their ship’s capabilities, chasing the speeding projectile due to impact the Fruited Moon in a matter of minutes, killing billions—those on the moon as well as the people aboard the anomaly.

They had closed a great deal of distance, burning almost all of their fuel in the process, but were now within striking range of the object.

Their sensors had finally identified it as a modular passenger compartment, the sort of thing snapped into cargo ship frameworks to temporarily allow them to transport travelers. Largely self-sufficient, with dedicated life-support systems and onboard batteries, even individual hyperspace field emitters linked to the mothership’s navigation and propulsion. At the moment, it was functioning almost like a large escape pod, though without engines, unable to direct or slow itself. While that explained how it could have people aboard, it did not clarify how it had suddenly appeared in the Hetzal system from hyperspace with no warning.

Te’Ami had her suspicions. She visualized a ship traveling through hyperspace, a cargo vessel, with compartments dedicated to all sorts of cargo—raw materials, fuel…and passengers, probably settlers bound for new lives on the barely inhabited Outer Rim worlds. Something happens to that ship in the hyperlane, and it cracks apart. All of those bits and pieces reappear from hyperspace at once, and that event has the bad luck to occur at the transit point just outside Hetzal.

Most of the wreckage would be inert, just chunks of metal. But some, if properly shielded, could be those passenger compartments, the people inside still alive, but with no way to stop their tumbling flight through space, filled with the fear and panic Burryaga had sensed, waiting to die. Waiting for help that would not come.

But help had arrived, despite everything. The Jedi and the Republic were here, and they would save the lives of every last one of those people, and everyone on the Fruited Moon, too.

“Now,” Te’Ami said, the command transmitted simultaneously to

Nib, Mikkel, and Burryaga, as well as Joss and his copilot Pikka. It was time for everyone to do their part.

The Jedi had discussed their approach, but only briefly. Their task was, on the face of it, simple. They reached out with the Force, touched the passenger compartment on all sides, embraced it in all the power and energy they could command, and understood its nature as best they could. Every surface, every beam, strut, and cable, and most important—the lives inside it, the beings they were trying to save.

They looped the Force around the speeding fragment. Te’Ami had once seen a rodeo, on a world called Chandar’s Folly. The point was to subdue enraged animals using only long lengths of rope or cable. The brave fools who participated looped the lassos around each creature’s neck, leaping on its back and riding it until either they were thrown free or the beast eventually calmed.

Mostly, the would-be riders were tossed four or five meters into the air before crashing to the dirt. Sometimes the landing was hard, sometimes soft.

This was like that—they were lassoing the passenger compartment with the Force—but the chances of a soft landing seemed unlikely. The Jedi closed their loops around the racing chunk of wreckage and pulled back. Te’Ami’s breath left her with a whoosh, her lungs emptying. Nothing had changed about her physical location—she was still seated in the cockpit of her Vector, speeding at the same velocity she had a moment before—but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like she had been yanked out into open space and was being dragged along, utterly out of control.

It seemed impossible that anything the four Jedi could do would influence the speed of this thing in any way, but they had to try. Joss Adren had been clear—even a one percent change could be significant.

“Slow…it down…” she managed, speaking through gritted teeth.

She could feel oil gathering in the sacs along her ribs, her body’s involuntary response to great strain. The acrid stink of the stuff filled her cockpit, an evolutionary throwback and defense mechanism from the days when the Duros were liable to be eaten by any number of things prowling their world.

“Trying…” Mikkel spat back, strain in his natural voice slipping past the translator’s efforts to subdue it. Te’Ami wondered how Ithorians responded to stress. Probably not by producing large amounts of horrible-tasting oil.

“Captain Adren,” Te’Ami said, “we’ve done what we can. If you’re going to do something, now is the moment.”

“Acknowledged, Master Jedi,” Joss replied. He sounded tense, too.

“Remember, if you can try to hold the module together once we lock on, it’d be appreciated. This might get a little bumpy.”

“We’ll do our best.”

“All right. Firing magclamps in three…two…”

Four metal disks shot out into space ahead of their formation, angling toward the passenger compartment. The thing was venting vapor from either a coolant or a life-support system, creating a thick fog into which the disks vanished. Thick, silvery lines unspooled—the cabling attached to the Longbeam’s winches, with which they would attempt to slow the wreckage down. Three of the lines went taut, the other looping and coiling in space.

“We hit it with three out of four. As good as we can hope. We’re gonna apply reverse thrusters. Get ready.”

Through the Force, Te’Ami could feel new strains and stressors on the system, all its complex linkages and connections. Longbeam to wreckage, Force to Jedi, wreckage to Force, and now a new note of confusion from the poor survivors inside the compartment, who must have heard the thumps as the clamps engaged, probably sounding like kicks from a giant, with no idea what was about to happen to them.

Honestly, Te’Ami didn’t know, either. The Longbeam activated its thrusters and dropped out of formation, the long, thick cabling stretching, growing thin, then impossibly thin, then vanishing to the naked eye. Captain Adren had told her this would happen, the silk that composed the cables was able to stretch almost to the molecular level and retain its strength. The cables were holding. The compartment to which they were attached…perhaps not so much.

“It’s going to break apart,” Nib Assek said. Burryaga whined mournfully in the background.

“No, it won’t,” Mikkel grunted. “We won’t let it. Just…hold it together.”

“Stop talking and do it,” Te’Ami said.

The overstressed box of metal, plastoid, and wiring did not want to continue to exist in its current form. It had been through too much, and knew it. It wanted to disintegrate, escape from the weight and heat and become a swarm of much tinier bits, all free to head off on their own trajectories.

If not for the Jedi, it would have done exactly that. They used the Force to keep the container in one piece, the loops of resistance they had used to slow it now used to maintain its integrity.

It didn’t seem like it would work. It was too much all at once—on top of everything else, the exhausted Jedi had to keep their Vectors flying at top speed, close enough to the passenger compartment that they could maintain their links.

And in the back of their minds, distraction, as some new crisis burgeoned elsewhere in the system. An increasing sense of alarm swelling along Avar Kriss’s network—but they had no time for that.

They had their own crisis right here.

The wreckage ahead of them shifted, like a pile of stones about to tumble after one is removed, and Te’Ami opened her mouth and groaned, a sound of intense strain, as physical as internal. She could still feel the compartment pulling on her, and now she knew that if she let go, if she released her hold even a little, her Vector could be torn apart around her. Now it wasn’t just the lives of the people aboard the compartment, or even on the moon, now so close she could see its disk looming in space, growing larger every second.

Te’Ami stopped thinking about any of those things. She closed her eyes and let the Force guide her. For long seconds, nothing but chaos, strain, stress. And then…a lessening. The slightest release in tension— but it made everything simpler. As Captain Adren had said, even a one percent reduction was meaningful.

Then one became two, and more, and the objects working against one another became a single system.

The compartment slowed. More, and more, until it came to a slow stop, the Longbeam reeling it in on its cables.

“Whoa,” came Captain Adren’s voice over the comm. “I really didn’t think that would work.”

“You certainly waited long enough to tell us,” came Mikkel’s reply.

Even through his translator, he sounded utterly exhausted.

“Almost out of fuel,” said Joss, ignoring the remark, “couple more seconds and we’d have had to shut off our thrusters. We couldn’t have done that alone. Thank you, Jedi.”

“We couldn’t have done it by ourselves, either,” Te’Ami said. “And the idea was yours. Whether you thought it would work or not, it did.” Pikka Adren spoke. “We can suit up and go over there, see if there’s some way to extract the passengers. If not, we can tow it to a station, dock it there. At the very least, we can get them some medical attention. I’m sure they’re banged up.”

“All right,” Te’Ami replied. “Thank you. We’ll pass along how we achieved this—I’m sure other rescue teams will find the information useful.”

She maneuvered her Vector up and alongside the passenger compartment, moving close. The module had portholes along its length, and in them, she could see faces. Beings of all types, all ages, all alive. She sensed their fear beginning to lessen, replaced with— A huge flash of alarm shot through the system-wide net of awareness being maintained by Avar Kriss. Again, no words, but if the sensation could be translated, it would be just these words: “Jedi. You are needed. Now.”

Something was very, very wrong.