فصل 29

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Hetzal System. The Rooted Moon.

Keven Tarr looked out across the plateau. The sight was breathtaking.

Fifty-seven thousand, eight hundred and seventeen navidroids,

linked together into one massive array. All different models, all different sizes—from the latest compact, self-powered units equipped with legs or other mobility attachments allowing them to move from ship to ship, to processor units ripped from the vessels in which they had been originally installed. The computing power varied greatly from droid to droid, but all in all, it was an impressive arrangement.

If just getting the droids had been a challenge (aided by the heroic efforts of Secretary Lorillia, it had to be said—he had requisitioned navidroids from all over the galaxy), then assembling them into the array was nearly as hard. The idea was to set up a number of processors running in parallel, so various sections could address different parts of the problem at the same time. Keven had designed the system from top to bottom, but linking it all up by himself would have taken months, time they didn’t have. Beyond conceptualizing the thing in the first place and getting the droid components, he’d also needed to assemble a team of engineers trained in positronic architecture and network structuring, a lot of them.

Hetzal had a few people with the necessary skills, but nowhere near enough. The San Tekkas had sent a dozen of their navulators, people who wore strange implants that wrapped around their shaven heads, allowing them to run calculations with droidlike precision that also retained the conceptual leaps organic minds could achieve. Incredibly useful, but still not enough to get the array built in any reasonable amount of time. Once again, pulling together the required resources had been about using connections available through Senator Noor, Secretary Lorillia, and their own various allies, and they had come through and then some. Keven had systems engineers on-site from as far away as Byss and Kuat. We are all the Republic had never seemed more true.

Keven had no idea how much it cost in influence and actual capital to get this thing built, and he didn’t really care, either.

He just wanted to turn it on.

The system had three primary nodes, each with its own subnodes.

All three main elements were assigned a different part of the overall calculation. The first was designed to create a computer simulation of the original disaster using all available data. The second modeled all the known Emergences thus far, and the third, by far the biggest and most complex, ran a particular algorithm designed to figure out where the next Emergences would happen.

That third node was the tricky one. The other two were just describing things that had already happened. The third one had to predict the future.

And if I can do that, Keven thought, I’m basically a Jedi.

But of course he wasn’t. A few actual Jedi were standing just a little distance away—the pair he’d met a few times before, who had helped with the San Tekkas. Avar Kriss and Elzar Mann. They seemed like nice people, but honestly, he was nothing like them. Avar was all quiet confidence and utter competence, and Elzar looked like someone out of a holodrama, with his olive skin and dark, wavy hair—just a beautiful man.

Keven Tarr was probably closer to a droid, or one of the navulators (though he didn’t have to wear those weird implants, thankfully). He liked systems, and rules, and the systems and rules behind those rules and systems. That’s what everything was, really. Systems and rules.

That statement was true of people, and it was true of droids, and it was true of the entire galaxy and everything in it. The deeper the systems you learned to access, or the rules you understood, the greater the change you could create. That was what had helped him rise so quickly on Hetzal, all the way to a prime posting in the Ministry of Technology before he was twenty-five. When he was still a kid, he figured out that four different crops were interacting in a complex sort of relationship, and that a routinely exterminated pest wasn’t a pest at all but in fact a symbiotic partner to the crops. If the plants were just allowed to occupy the same fields at the same time rather than being kept separate, and the so-called vermin were allowed to live, not only would overall yields be higher but the seeds and grain the crops produced would be of better quality. Beyond even that, a sort of hybrid fruit would emerge twice a year that couldn’t happen without the contributions of all four plants.

That little project had gotten him all he really wanted: access to bigger and better systems he could spend his time trying to understand. The Hetzalian authorities gave him increasingly important assignments, from developing crop rotation algorithms to modeling weather, all of which he found deeply engaging and rewarding. The only thing he found frustrating was how slow it could seem. He couldn’t just dig into anything he wanted, even with his high-level role in the system’s Ministry of Technology—there were still many things he could not access without permission.

That was his choice, though. Keven knew he could be one hell of a slicer, breaking into computer cores of all types, but he didn’t hold with that. He believed in law, and he believed in the Republic. He had decided long ago that the only way he would ever work with the really significant systems was if he could earn those privileges through his skill and dedication.

Well, now that moment seemed to have arrived. It didn’t get much bigger than what he was about to try to do.

He, Keven Tarr, was going to slice hyperspace.

A soft, cool breeze touched his face, drifting across the plateau overlooking the array. A good sign.

Keven glanced at the other observers standing not far away, chatting quietly among themselves. If he’d had his preference, the first test of his machine would have happened in private in case something went wrong, but it was all too important, time was too short, and too much had been invested in creating the array. Many people, powerful people, had chosen to back Keven’s idea, and they all wanted to be present to see whether that idea was worth a damn.

Senator Noor and his aide, Jeni Wataro. Secretary Lorillia. Minister Ecka. The two Jedi, of course, who were chatting with Marlowe and Vellis San Tekka, who had, honestly, been incredibly helpful. Beyond supplying the twelve navulators, they had also provided hyperspace modeling tools far beyond anything Keven would have been able to access on his own. He’d signed all sorts of agreements with their company’s legal department saying that he’d never use the tech for anything else, but that was no problem. Actually, he thought he might see if the San Tekkas wanted to work with him after this was all over.

Hetzal was his homeworld, but he was ready to move on. The planet was a system, too, and he’d sliced it about as well as he could. Onward, to bigger and deeper.

Of course, if he couldn’t make the array work, none of those exciting possibilities would happen. If you said you would try to do something, people heard that as you would do something, and if you didn’t achieve the goal then they thought you had failed. And blamed you for trying at all. It wasn’t exactly fair, especially because predicting the future with a massive computer array made from wired-up droid brains was basically impossible. But that was how the system called society worked, and Keven Tarr would never be powerful enough to change that set of rules.

His situation was binary. Succeed or fail. He’d done everything he could to make sure it was the former, and that was all.

He lifted a comlink and spoke. “You guys got that last batch of droids linked up?”

A crackle—this many droids in one spot was causing interference.

You could taste it in the air, like touching your tongue to new metal.

“One more left,” came the response from Chief Innamin of the

Republic Defense Coalition—Petty Officer Innamin until recently, promoted based on his heroic efforts during the Legacy Run disaster.

He and his shipmate, Peeples, then an ensign now a lieutenant, had decided to stay in-system after the disaster to help however they could, as a way of honoring the sacrifice of their captain, Bright, who had died during a rescue attempt on a solar array.

Keven liked that the two officers were contributing their skills— thought it was noble and good. More important, Innamin had the necessary engineering training to be particularly useful here on the Rooted Moon, and to supervise Peeples, even though the lieutenant was technically his superior officer. Peeples didn’t seem to mind, and had even offered to swap ranks with Innamin. The chief declined, after letting out a heavy sigh. In any case, the duo was currently completing the wiring for the subnode tasked to model the fifth Emergence.

Privately, in a way he would never, ever voice, Keven wished there had been a few more Emergences. Every single one was a data point, and so far there had been twenty-nine. Not bad—a pretty good set— but the more information his machine had to draw on, the better. He wouldn’t get a second chance at this, for many reasons.

Mostly for one reason, in fact, something he had purposely decided not to tell the kind people who had helped him gather all these rare and valuable machines for his array.

Keven sent a furtive glance at Jeffo Lorillia, the Republic’s transportation secretary, not far away on the plateau and deep in conversation with Senator Izzet Noor, his long face uncharacteristically animated. Lorillia had pulled in incredible favors to bring so many navidroids together, and on such short notice. The Outer Rim was still in its hyperspace quarantine, much to Senator Noor’s intense frustration, but Secretary Lorillia’s requisition had taken so many navidroids out of circulation that it wasn’t just the Outer Rim experiencing shortages. Shipping all over the Republic was beginning to be affected.

Yes, if Keven’s algorithm performed correctly, they would know where the Emergences would happen next, and could end the blockade —but that was a big if. He only had fifty-seven thousand droids, when the number he actually needed was more like twice that. The calculations he had to run would now take at least double the time, even pushing his system to the limit. That much stress on the machine for that long would generate…well. He had his doubts about how many of these hugely precious electronic brains would make it through the process. That was the essential fact he had chosen not to share with Secretary Lorillia. The array, once powered on, would be hungry, and what it ate…was navidroids.

But this was the solution he had. He had to try—even though he knew what would happen to him if he failed. That’s what good people did.

“Peeples! Get your toe out of there! What do you think you’re—oh, that’s actually a pretty good idea, I guess,” Chief Innamin said over the comlink, his voice a little distant, as if he had turned to yell at someone on his side of the transmission. Then he came back, strong and loud.

“We’re good here, Mr. Tarr. Linkage complete.”

“Thank you, Chief—and you can call me Keven. Clear the area, and pull out any other teams you see out there. Get off the plateau, back up here on the observation platform.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Just pull everyone back, all right?”

Keven lifted a datapad, the central control unit for the entire array.

He shot off a quick prayer to the Vine Matron, patron saint of the area on Hetzal Prime where he had been raised, then tapped the single button that turned the whole blasted thing on.

Farther along the plateau, Senator Izzet Noor fanned his face as the huge networked array of navidroids hummed into life. It sounded like a hive of insects—not even a sound, really, more like a sensation, just below the level of true perception. He was also praying, but not to the Vine Matron, more of an unfocused “please, please, please” muttered under his breath.

All over the Outer Rim, worlds were on the verge of revolt. While the chancellor had authorized aid shipments to worlds suffering from lack of hyperspace transit, it was still far from life as usual, and the occasional shipment of emergency rations wasn’t the way to quell unrest.

If this Keven Tarr’s insane droid scheme didn’t work, he’d have to go to Chancellor Soh and beg her to reopen the hyperlanes, regardless of the danger. At a certain point, she would have to see that the damage being done to the people of the Rim outweighed the risk of another Legacy Run–style crisis.

“Can you believe all this?” Noor said to Jeni Wataro, his closest aide going on ten years. She was Chagrian, with blue skin and thick, horntipped tentacles curling out from the sides of her head and draping down across her chest. Wataro was essential to his work in endless ways. Every politician could use a Chagrian aide, Noor believed.

“What do you mean, Senator?” Wataro said.

Noor gestured vaguely out at the gigantic droid array spread out on the plateau before them.

“All this, Wataro. Use your eyes. We’re going to such massive expense, and there’s no guarantee that this will even work. I don’t see any reason why we can’t just reopen the hyperlanes.

“And you know what?” he continued, turning to her. “Someone else out there clearly already has the ability to predict Emergences, based on what happened at Eriadu.”

Wataro nodded.

“Why are we doing this stupid droid thing when Admiral Kronara and the RDC should just be hunting down whoever tried to extort the Eriaduans?” Noor went on. “That Kissav person—I think that was the name Governor Veen said. We find them, we ask them where the next Emergences will be! Done. Easy.”

Noor frowned out at the array again. The initial hum had deepened into an unpleasant buzz—not a sound, but a feeling, deep in his bones.

“I respect the chancellor’s choices, but I wish she would consider a different approach,” he said.

“Perhaps you should run, Senator,” Jeni said.

She always said this, and he knew it was a sort of passive-aggressive thing, like she was pointing out his hypocrisy in criticizing the chancellor when he never actually ran for the office.

“Maybe I will, Wataro—maybe I just will,” he said. “Wait and see.” A large screen was set up on the observation deck above the array, currently displaying a rough approximation of the Legacy Run disaster, accelerated to ten times the actual speed at which it had occurred. Keven Tarr, the Jedi, the senator, and the other Republic and local officials watched solemnly as the events played out. Many of them had been there while it happened—people had died. Not as many as could have, but still—this was a tragedy, and no one spoke as they watched.

Keven looked down at his datapad, which provided him with another essential information set—the status of the navidroid array.

All 57,708 processors, running incredibly high-level calculations at the very limit of their capability. Keven could, with a few taps, expand any of the three main nodes to look at subnodes, smaller groupings, even individual droids. The array was designed to work like a massive brain, with neurons, nerve cells, all of it.

The readouts gave him the speed at which each node, unit, and individual droid was running—useful, but not the primary data points upon which Keven was focused. No, he was concerned with another figure, also displayed at the far end of each long chain of data…the heat.

This many processors running together at full capacity was basically one enormous oven. Keven had planned for it as best he could—that was why the array was outside, in the wind and the relatively cool temperatures of the Rooted Moon. He could have built it in space, but heat didn’t dissipate through vacuum—it would have been even worse out there.

Many of the droids had internal cooling units—that was the source of the hum rising off the plateau, now getting louder, more insistent.

Keven didn’t need to check his datapad to know the temperatures were rising, and fast.

Fortunately, the observers all seemed to be riveted by the events unfolding on the large display screen: every brave rescue of Legacy Run survivors, every tragic death, every hairbreadth escape. Keven, despite the burgeoning issues with the array, took a moment to appreciate the enormity of what the Jedi and the Republic teams had accomplished here.

The Hetzal system should be gone. It was astonishing that he was still standing here, on the surface of the Rooted Moon. He shook his head, watching the simulation as the final fragment sped toward Hetzal’s sun, the tank of liquid Tibanna that had almost destroyed the entire system. He remembered these moments clearly—he had been certain he would be dead in moments, knew it down to his bones…and that hadn’t happened.

The Jedi had come together to move a gigantic piece of metal that did not want to be moved, in precisely the right way, in perfect coordination though millions of kilometers from one another.

It was impossible. Yet somehow, they had done it.

Keven watched it happen again, the fragment skipping away, just missing one of the system’s suns. It seemed so simple, so easy on the screen. He knew it had taken everything the Jedi had. Some of them had even died in the attempt.

They had succeeded. He could not fail now.

The simulation of the Legacy Run disaster was complete, and a second node kicked into life, this one modeling the first Emergence.

The display showed the seven fragments appear in the Ab Dalis system, and the impact of the last on the planet. The watchers stood in silence—another tragedy, but this one not prevented by a miraculous Jedi intervention.

Keven, however, had stopped looking at the screen. He could not take his eyes from his datapad. The temperatures were rising faster than he had anticipated. For his algorithm to work, the systems had to continuously model everything that had happened, every detail, every fragment, every trajectory, all at once. As each new Emergence was added to the simulation, the load grew greater.

It felt like heat was already rising off the plateau. Surely that was his imagination. Keven wiped his sleeve across his forearm—damp.

No. Not his imagination. The array was running hot, and they still had almost thirty Emergences to model.

Senator Noor shifted uncomfortably. He turned to his aide, gesturing out at the air above the droid array, which was shimmering, heat haze rising into the early-morning sky.

“Wataro,” he said. “Is that…how this is supposed to work?”

“I…I’m not sure,” she replied, taking a cloth from her tunic and blotting little green dots of sweat that had appeared on her forehead.

Keven was worried about Node Five. Secretary Lorillia had done his best, but obviously not everyone was willing to give up their best, state-of-the-art navidroids, no matter how noble the cause. A good number of the droids in the array were older models, or even retired from active service. They could still do the job, but not as well or as fast as the others.

He had distributed the older droids throughout the array in an attempt at load balancing, but inevitably, some sections ended up with a few more of the less-capable machines. Node Five was one of those.

The heat was rising quickly, and it was just a matter of time until— A shower of sparks shot up from the array, and Keven didn’t have to look at it to know it was coming from Node Five. One of the older navidroids had blown its circuits, the heat essentially frying its computational matrix to sludge.

“Blast it,” he said.

“What’s happening, Tarr?” he heard Senator Noor call over.

Keven didn’t answer. He didn’t have time. If Node Five went down, then the whole simulation would have to start over, and he knew they probably wouldn’t let him do that. This was most likely his only shot.

Fortunately, he had anticipated the problem—at least to some degree.

A phalanx of pill droids floated off to one side of the array, all equipped with cooling units able to send out blasts of wintry air wherever they might be needed. Keven had kept them in reserve until now, but it was clear that the time had come.

He tapped his datapad, and several of the pill droids zoomed over to Node Five, shooting out cold air from their vent attachments that immediately brought the temperature down. Fine. It was fine.

As long as the pill droids’ coolant held out, and as long as he didn’t lose too many more navidroids. Fifty-seven thousand, seven hundred and twelve, now—and he really shouldn’t have even tried this with less than seventy-five thousand.

Node Seven was starting to run hot, and Keven had learned his lesson. He sent another few pill droids in that direction to cool it down before anything went wrong.

This can work, he thought. I can do this.

Node Fourteen came online, modeling the nineteenth Emergence, and it overloaded immediately, hard, fifty droids at once shooting the same set of sparks Node Five had just produced. Maybe an error in the linkage, maybe that was just a particularly complex part of the simulation.

“No!” Keven shouted.

He was dimly aware of voices in his vicinity, asking questions, offering advice, concern…he couldn’t spare time for them, not even a moment. The array was on the verge of a cascading failure.

Twenty pill droids whipped over to Node Fourteen—half of what he had left, and they were barely two-thirds of the way through the simulation.

They’re going to blame me, he thought. They’re going to say it was my fault. I was just trying to help. I did my best. I did my—

A hand touched his arm, and Keven jumped. He looked—it was the

Jedi, Avar Kriss. A few steps behind her, the other one, Elzar Mann— they always seemed to be together.

“Be calm,” she said, and he was. He felt better, just having her there.

“What’s happening?” Avar asked.

“The array’s producing too much heat, but I can’t stop the simulation now. Either it runs to the end, or there was no point to any of this. We haven’t learned anything new yet, either. If we stop now, it’s all a waste.”

Another rain of sparks—Node Eleven. Three hundred and eightytwo droids gone, all at once. Fifty-seven thousand, two hundred and eighty-five left.

Keven sent the rest of his pill droids to cool down that section, which would work for a bit, but a glance at the datapad showed him at least four more nodes in serious trouble.

Nodes Three and Eight blew. Fifty-three thousand, four hundred and twelve. If they got below fifty thousand, it was over. No amount of reshuffling and load balancing would create processing power where it didn’t exist.

The breeze died, and that little bit of additional cooling it provided vanished. There was nothing more he could do. It was over.

Avar Kriss continued to use the Force to help the young man hold back his panic. It wasn’t easy. Keven Tarr wanted to spiral out of control.

He felt guilt, shame, frustration…none of which were fair or earned, probably, but emotions were rarely logical.

She looked at Elzar. “Any ideas?”

“He needs to cool everything down?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Okay,” Elzar said, his tone thoughtful. “I might have an idea. I’ve never tried it, but the theory is sound. You’ll be able to sense what I’m doing. Anything you can do to help would be appreciated. I can’t imagine I’ll be able to do this alone.”

Elzar seated himself on the ground, folding his legs together, then lifted his arms and closed his eyes. Avar reached out, trying to follow what he was doing. He was calling on the Force…but to do what?

She suspected this was one of his…refinements. Ideas were constantly popping into his head, ways the Force might be used to do new things, new ways the light side might answer his call. He failed, all the time, but she found his commitment to bringing new ideas to the Jedi inspiring. To Elzar Mann, what the Jedi were was nowhere near as interesting as what they could be.

Avar listened to the song of the Force…and suddenly she understood what Elzar was trying to do.

Impossible, she sent to him, a concept basic enough to be conveyed through the very loose emotional linkage the Force could give them.

He smiled, not opening his eyes.

Help me, he sent back.

Elzar Mann was talking to the air. It was hot here at the surface, above the furiously working droids, but much cooler high above. The hot air was rising, as it liked to do, but slowly. Not fast enough.

He asked the Force to help with that, and it responded, though sluggishly. Air was heavier than it looked.

Then, an easing, and he knew Avar was with him. That was good.

Everything was easier when she was at his side. Literally, in fact—he opened his eyes briefly to see that she had knelt next to him, her forearms resting loosely on her thighs, her palms facing upward and her eyes closed, her face tilted up toward the sky.

The small patch of heated air rose higher, both Jedi creating currents to waft it into the sky above the plateau. This did very little to cool the navidroid array, though that was not really the idea here.

As the hot air rose, it reached cooler zones higher in the atmosphere. The heated air carried moisture with it, evaporated from the surface. Those tiny molecules of water found one another, touched, connected.

Elzar and Avar did it together, nudging the air, helping it do what it wanted to do anyway, helping the individual bits of water become one.

Elzar felt something like exultation. Not pride—that was not the Jedi way—but joy in a difficult job being done well, by two people connecting on a deep level, without any need to explain to each other what they were doing.

They had always been this way, ever since their Padawan days.

Their connection made many things better—but if he was being honest with himself…it also made some things worse.

The two Jedi worked. Elzar felt exhaustion creeping over him. He and Avar were only working with a small region of the atmosphere, a relatively tiny volume of air. Shaping it, molding it, trying to bring it to a critical mass that would let the moon’s weather systems do the rest of the work—essentially creating a seed—but it was still grueling.Sweat poured from his body, and he knew that was only partially due to the heat rising off the array. Every breath became an effort, and his chest felt like it was being pressed in a vise, as if the air moving above was being sucked directly from his lungs.

But Elzar Mann did not stop, nor did Avar Kriss, and slowly, something began to appear in the sky above the plateau. Huge, gradually darkening as the moments passed.

A cloud.

Fifty-one thousand and eighteen navidroids remained, and while

Keven had managed to keep the simulation intact—the vidscreen was now playing out the thirty-first Emergence, which meant they were just minutes away from being able to move past modeling things that had happened to projecting things that would happen—but there was no way the array would last that long. Every single remaining droid was in the red, even the most advanced models. Keven was maneuvering the pill droids above the entire array in big, sweeping arcs, trying to chill the whole thing at once. It was working, to some extent, buying them additional seconds—but his datapad also displayed their coolant reserves, and most were down to single digits.

At this point, all he could hope for was that they might be able to predict an Emergence or two…even a few might help prevent a future tragedy. They almost certainly wouldn’t be able to find the Legacy Run’s flight recorder system, which was obviously the secondary goal of all this—it would help them understand what had happened here and, hopefully, prevent it from ever occurring again.

But you took the good where you found it, and so Keven kept using the systems he had left, pushing them as far as he could, even as another few hundred navidroids burned out and died.

Something hit the back of his neck, startling him. It was soft, maybe an insect, or—

Another impact, this time on the back of his hand as it moved rapidly across his datapad’s surface, and he realized what was happening.

“It’s…it’s raining,” he heard Senator Noor say.

And suddenly, with a rumble of thunder, it was. Rain, pouring down over the array. Steam hissed up from the overstressed navidroids, and Keven had to swipe the side of his hand across his datapad to clear the water so he could read it. Temperatures were dropping rapidly, across every node. The navidroids were hardened for operation in vacuum—a bit of water wouldn’t hurt them.

Clouds of steam drifted up from the array, and Keven turned to look—first at the Jedi, Avar Kriss and Elzar Mann, who knelt side by side, arms lifted, eyes closed, trembling with sustained effort as the rain soaked their tunics. The Jedi looked as if they were trying to lift a starship with their bare hands. The sun was still bright off the plateau, and the light shone through the rain, causing a glinting spectrum to surround them both.

Beyond the straining Jedi, the vidscreen finally displayed something new: a zone of uninhabited space where the thirty-fourth Emergence would occur.

There had only been thirty-three Emergences to date.

The system worked. It was predicting the location of future

Emergences, and as long as the rain held up, it would remain stable.

Keven realized that he hadn’t failed after all. He, Keven Tarr, a farmer’s son from Hetzal Prime, had sliced hyperspace.

What a strange galaxy this was.