فصل 30

Chapter Thirty

Elphrona.

Porter Engle bent low over the neck of his steelee, whispering to it, even as he calmed its shaking muscles with the Force.

“You are a luminous being,” he said. “There is no pain, there is no fatigue, there is no fear. You are light and speed and there is nothing in this world more beautiful. I am here with you. We are together. We will do great things. We will save this family.”

The blade of his lightsaber hummed as he rode, chasing the bastards who had kidnapped four innocent people from their very home. What had Loden called them? The Nihil.

Porter Engle was not angry. He had been a Jedi for almost three centuries. He knew all too well where anger could lead. He had found a better way to express his emotions when faced with situations like this.

He was not angry.

He was certain.

Certain that a great injustice had been done.

Certain that he could set it right.

And, most of all…

…he was utterly certain these…Nihil…would never do anything like it again.

One way or another.

He had taken the point position, riding a little ahead of Loden Greatstorm and Bell Zettifar. He liked them both. Loden had a sense of humor about things that was very welcome among the Jedi. Porter had met many in their Order who took things far too seriously. Life was long, and they had the gift of the Force. Why be stoic? The vows didn’t mean they were dead.

And Bell…Bell was a wonderful young man. Still figuring himself out, but he was only eighteen years old. He shouldn’t know very much about himself at that age anyway. But someday, he would be the kind of Jedi held up as an example to future generations.

Assuming Loden didn’t kill him in training first.

Porter brought his focus back to the task at hand. Jagged ironstone slopes scraped up to either side, and the way ahead narrowed. The Jedi didn’t slow, but they brought their steelees into line, moving through the canyon single-file.

The Nihil with their captives were still some distance ahead, but the Jedi were gaining. Wouldn’t be long now. He recalled battles long past, pulled up strategies for hostage situations. The Nihil clearly thought the family was valuable, and wouldn’t want to hurt them unnecessarily. That gave Porter and his team an advantage. Still, they would need to move fast. The best would be for one of them—Loden, probably—to use the Force to yank the family free of the Nihil, while he and Bell moved on the kidnappers.

Odds were these Nihil had never fought Jedi before—most people hadn’t, and even if they’d heard stories, mere words couldn’t do the experience justice. So they might not know how foolish it would be to try to fight using blasterfire. A blaster bolt fired at a Jedi was essentially the same as shooting at yoursel—

The tiniest whiff of danger, whether some signal from the Force or just long instincts honed from many other rides through many other narrow canyons with enemies on the horizon. The sound of a blaster rifle firing. Porter Engle whipped up his lightsaber, moving to deflect the attack—but it was not aimed at him.

His steelee reared up, pain filling its mind and heart and echoing through Porter. He pulled back his link to the animal and leapt free as it crumpled to the ground, digging up furrows in the hard dirt with its metallic hooves. He somersaulted in midair, using his lightsaber to knock back a few more shots. The Nihil had clearly hidden themselves up in the hills, waiting to ambush the Jedi.

Porter landed.

“Cowards,” he spat.

More blasts rained down, from either side, but now he had the angles figured, and the angles and pace of blasterfire told him the story. Only two shooters.

“Keep going!” he called to Loden, who had slowed his mount slightly. “Don’t let the other Nihil get that family to their ship! I’ll take care of these monsters and join you as soon as I can.”

Loden nodded without a word, and he and Bell raced ahead, deflecting a few errant shots as they went.

Porter Engle stood alone in the canyon, the body of his dead mount not far away, a noble animal who had only done her best.

“You think you’re smart, eh?” he called up. “Shot my steelee right out from under me.”

Silence from up in the hills. No shots, no movement. Perhaps they were, in fact, smarter than he gave them credit for. They were undoubtedly circling around, trying to get a bead on him from a new spot. Let them.

He shouted up toward the tumbled rocks above.

“Before you killed my steelee, I will admit I had not decided how to deal with you. All possibilities were on the table. But that creature lived in the light, and you stole it away. You had no right. Thank you for showing me exactly what you are. Makes things much simpler for me.”

He rotated slowly, his lightsaber up, scanning the hills. He knew what was going to happen. Anyone who aimed for a man’s mount rather than shooting at him fair and square, anyone who attacked from ambush, was also the sort of man who would—

Blasterfire, three shots, right at his back. Of course.

Porter spun, blocking the first, the second, and sending the third right back from where it had come. Movement from up in the rocks, and he leapt, higher than he was sure these Nihil cowards would have thought possible. Straight up, and he saw the man who had shot at him. Porter threw his lightsaber, and it sliced out, a spinning disk, inescapable.

The Nihil sniper ducked behind an ironstone outcropping, thinking it would shelter him. It did not. The blade sliced through the rock, and then it sliced through the man, and Porter regretted that a living, thinking being, a child of the Force, had made choices that brought him to such an end.

The second ambusher shot at Porter before he had landed from his great leap, and before he could retrieve his lightsaber. He was in midair, without his primary form of protection, making the situation a bit complex to handle—but Jedi lost their weapons from time to time, and any Jedi Knight worth the title put in the hours developing strategies for unarmed defense.

Porter Engle reached out with both the Force and his hand, palm out, and deflected the bolt back, sending it caroming back off toward the hills. Not strictly necessary. He could have pushed it away with his mind, or frozen it in place. But flicking a blaster bolt away like an insect…it made a certain statement.

“I saw you, friend,” he shouted up, calling his lightsaber back to him. “Saw right where you’re hiding.”

The hilt smacked into his hand with a whap he always found utterly satisfying, his thick fingers slipping into grooves worn into the metal cylinder from tens of thousands of hours of practice and combat.

“And soon I’ll see you again,” he called.

Porter Engle sprinted toward the hill, moving faster than the Nihil could probably see, leaping up and over and from side to side. No more blaster bolts. He had a feeling the surviving Nihil had thought better of this whole ambush and was making a run for it.

When he made it to the top of the rise, he learned that he was right.

The Nihil was sitting on another steelee, trying to get the beast to move, digging his heels into its sides. He wasn’t shouting at the poor creature, its head down and hooves dug in hard—he knew better than to make that kind of noise—but Porter knew that under ordinary circumstances he’d be cursing at it, using every horrible oath he could dream up.

“I bet you’re the one that shot my animal,” Porter said.

The Nihil whipped around, his blaster firing, and the conflict ended the only way it could.

Porter was utterly certain.

The Nihil toppled off the steelee, a smoking hole through his mask.

Porter Engle wasted no more time on him. He deactivated his

lightsaber and slapped it into his holster, then approached the traumatized steelee, his hand outstretched.

“Hey there, fella…” he said. “You are a luminous being. Whaddya say you and me go do some good?”

The steelee looked at him, its eyes wide. He touched its flank, and it calmed. He wrapped his hands in its bridle, preparing to heave himself up into its saddle.

And then the Nihil with the hole through his mask sat up. He lifted his blaster to fire—and Porter Engle realized the raider was probably of some species that kept its brain elsewhere in its body, meaning he could survive a headshot, meaning that Porter Engle, whose hands were occupied with the steelee, was about to die.

These thoughts ran through his head, along with an odd moment of sadness about a refinement to one of his pie recipes he would now never get to try, and he prepared his spirit to join the Force.

A black, gray, and red-orange blur leapt off the rocks, directly at the injured Nihil.

Ember, Porter Engle thought in astonishment. He’d forgotten all about her.

The charhound opened her jaws and a huge gout of yellow flame spat out, enveloping the Nihil before he could bring his blaster to bear.

A strange, hollow scream emanated from the raider’s mask, and he rolled on the ground, trying to put out the fire that had consumed his body. Ember did not stop, just continued torching the Nihil until at first he stopped screaming, and then he stopped moving.

Then she closed her mouth and padded up to Porter Engle, who gingerly bent down and scratched her behind one ear. She felt hot, like his oven back at the outpost. He supposed that made perfect sense.

She must have followed them all the way from the wrecked homestead, he and his fellow Jedi so focused on pursuing the Nihil they hadn’t thought to consider who might be pursuing them.

“Good girl,” he said. “Very good girl.”

Porter climbed aboard the steelee, and he was off, headed down the slope at a ready pace with Ember loping alongside, racing after Bell and Loden and the family they were trying to save.

Loden Greatstorm and Bell Zettifar had steadily gained ground on the Nihil they were chasing, but had not completely closed the distance.

Now the kidnappers’ ships were visible, parked on the rust-colored sand just outside the no-fly zone. Two, looking like welded-together piles of cubes and spikes, and both marked with the three lines they’d seen on the door of the Blythe homestead. The Nihil had almost reached the vessels, along with their prisoners, still being pulled along in the little cart.

“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 deadon.

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.”