فصل 20

Chapter Twenty

Hetzal System. The Third Horizon.

The assembly droid moved the bit of wreckage into place, its manipulator arms making minute adjustments to the small metal fragment. How the droid knew where to place the piece in the overall puzzle being assembled, or the original purpose of any given chunk of wreckage—that was a task for an advanced computational motivator circuit, and beyond what Elzar Mann could easily understand. To him, one ragged piece of durasteel looked very much like the next.

The process seemed to be working, though. Inside a large rectangular area of space, illuminated by huge floodlights, the outline of the ship that was once the Legacy Run was clearly visible. About a dozen of the assembly droids were working to pull pieces of wreckage from the open bay doors of a huge cargo freighter parked just outside the range of the lights. One by one, the droids pushed bits of metal and plastoid into place in the reconstruction zone, some as large as full compartments, and some as small as a single wire. It was as if they were trying to rebuild the starship out of pieces of junk they had found here and there.

That was more or less the task, actually. Wreckage from the initial disaster in Hetzal had been collected after it dropped out of hyperspace, tracked by a huge network of satellites and monitoring stations and telescopes. The system had been bashed together during the disaster by an apparently brilliant local named Keven Tarr—a pale, quiet young man who was at this very moment standing a meter or so to Elzar’s left. He wasn’t alone, either. A whole group had gathered to bear witness to the destroyed starship, staring silently at the wreckage through a viewing panel on the Third Horizon’s observation deck.

Not much was left. The assembly droids were doing their best, but many pieces of the Legacy Run were destroyed on their impact with objects in the Hetzal system, or had simply whipped through the system and vanished before they could be collected. Some had appeared in other systems via the Emergences, of which there had been eighteen to date. Those pieces had been brought here as well, when possible. But still more might be in hyperspace, waiting to Emerge in their own right and wreak devastation in some other part of the Outer Rim. That was the point of trying to pull the wreckage together: to estimate how much still remained to be found.

To see how bad it could really get.

Elzar noticed that one of the smaller pieces of wreckage was drifting out of true, possibly disturbed by one of the assembly droids jetting away, or just moved by a gust of stellar wind. He lifted his hand and made a subtle gesture. The piece moved back into place, as if guided by an invisible touch.

He felt eyes on him and glanced to his right, where Jedi Master Avar Kriss was looking at him. Of course she had sensed him using the Force—that was Avar’s gift, one among many. She called it the song, and she heard it always.

Elzar winked at her. Avar rolled her eyes, but the side of her mouth lifted up in a little smile. She couldn’t help it.

He knew Avar thought he used the Force for frivolous purposes from time to time, but he couldn’t understand the viewpoint. If you could use the Force, then you should use the Force. What, you were supposed to save it for special occasions? It wasn’t as if the Force would run out. Avar heard a song, and Elzar saw a sea, of endless depth and breadth. The Force never began or ended, and it was impossible to use it up.

So if Jedi Knight Elzar Mann could help out a struggling assembly droid with a little push from the Force, why not? What was the harm?

He knew Avar agreed, even if she’d never admit it. The little smile told him everything he needed to know.

“How much of the Legacy Run do we have here?” asked Jeffo

Lorillia, the Republic’s Secretary of Transportation. The poor man seemed tense. A muscle in his endlessly long forehead seemed to have developed an involuntary twitch. That was understandable. The man’s entire job was to ensure safe, reliable travel throughout the Republic, and yet the chancellor had just extended her hyperspace blockade for the Outer Rim another fifty parsecs after the eighteenth Emergence near Dantooine.

Keven Tarr consulted a datapad he was holding.

“I’ve got schematics here for the ship’s superstructure,” he said, “and the manifest from the shipping company that lists everything it was carrying. I’d say we’ve got about a third. Your brain takes the outline we’ve built here and fills it in, tells you you’re seeing a full ship…but we really don’t have that much.”

Elzar thought it looked like the ghost of a ship, but decided not to make that observation in a system where so many people had died. Ab Dalis had gotten it worse, of course—twenty million dead on its primary world was an unspeakable tragedy—but Hetzal had suffered plenty of damage. And more to come across the Rim, it sounded like.

“So this won’t be over for ages,” Senator Noor all but moaned. The Outer Rim representative understood the consequences of the hyperspace closures just as much as Secretary Lorillia. These worlds were already considered by some to be backwaters, and if you couldn’t even travel to them…well. The galaxy contained many worlds. Easy to forget a whole sector, if need be.

“We don’t know that, Senator,” Avar said. “The investigation has barely begun.”

Senator Noor shot a glare at Avar. “And meanwhile, Madam Jedi,” he spat, “the poor, beleaguered people of the Outer Rim, who depend on the shipping lanes for their very existence, creep closer to chaos with every moment. I am already hearing reports of hoarding on a number of worlds, and the economic impact mounts with every passing day.”

Noor pointed out the viewport at the remains of the Legacy Run, spotlit and floating in space.

“Why are we even here? It’s a wrecked cargo ship. What does it matter? You need to get out there, find out what happened. Find out who did this!”

“You believe the disaster was deliberate, Senator?” Elzar asked. “An attack?”

Noor threw up his hands.

“What other conclusion should I draw? Hetzal is the agricultural heart of the Outer Rim. Perhaps some planet farther Coreward became jealous of the credits flowing here and wanted to wreck our food supply. Maybe it was the Selkath, angry about the prospect of bacta putting them out of business. All I know is neither the Republic nor the Jedi are doing anything to find the culprit. You’re just staring out into space! What are you even doing here? You’re not part of the chancellor’s committee!”

“I assure you, Senator, this man is never just staring at anything,” Avar said. “Let me introduce you to Elzar Mann, a Jedi Knight of my long acquaintance. He was present here in the system during the disaster. He was instrumental in helping the Jedi prevent the Tibanna fragment from impacting the sun. Without his strength, Hetzal would no longer exist.”

“We all did our part,” Elzar murmured. Somewhere inside, though, he was pleased Avar had noticed. Dozens of Jedi working together in that final moment—no, thousands, really, if what Avar had told him was accurate—and despite all that, she knew what he, specifically, had done.

“Of course,” Senator Noor said. “We appreciate your efforts. But my point remains. We’re running out of time. After all, the chancellor’s precious Starlight Beacon languishes out in space, waiting to be brought online. What if an Emergence hits that, eh? I bet then you people would finally get moving.”

Elzar Mann reached out and placed his hand over the senator’s mouth. Above his fingers, he could see the man’s eyes go wide with shock.

“Shh,” Elzar said. “We’re moving, I promise. Just not in ways you can see. The Force doesn’t feel the need to announce its actions. It just acts.”

He removed his hand. The senator was stunned into silence, which was the idea all along. In fact, everyone present seemed pretty surprised as well.

Sometimes, Elzar believed, it was important to remind people that, no matter how important they thought they were, they were, in fact, just people.

He could probably have accomplished the same goal via the mind trick—Noor’s mind seemed weak, like most politicians’—but Avar absolutely would not approve, and Elzar knew it. Normally, that wouldn’t matter so much. Avar Kriss was an old, close friend, which meant they could disagree, even squabble like nesting screerats, and come out the other side just fine. But now, here…things were different.

The Council had put Avar in charge of the Jedi’s response to the Emergences, due to her actions during the Legacy Run disaster. It was a huge assignment, and who had she chosen as her partner for the investigation? Oh, none other than Jedi Knight Elzar Mann.

Now, why had she done that? Elzar thought he knew. He and Avar had a history, sure, and worked well together, and he was good with many Force techniques, including some pretty obscure ones—but he didn’t believe any of those were the reason. Plenty of other Jedi were just as qualified as he was. Elzar figured Avar picked him because doing well on this mission could help him attain the only real achievement he cared about within the Jedi—making Master. When you were a Master, you could pursue your own studies, move forward through the Force on your own terms. In fact, the Council expected Masters to do exactly that. It sounded like paradise, but a paradise that had thus far remained elusive. Doing well with the Legacy Run investigation, showing the Council that he could help the Order with its goals just as much as his own: It could make a huge difference.

In other words, Avar Kriss had chosen him as her partner because she was trying to help him…and Elzar didn’t want to give her any reason to regret the choice.

So, no mind trick. Well, not unless there was no other way.

“I’m good at anticipating problems, Senator,” said Avar. “My colleague here, Elzar Mann, is good at solutions. He tends to find a unique way through most issues, paths others can’t see. I promise we’ll figure this out. As you said, we’re running out of time.”

She turned to look out once again at what remained of the Legacy Run.

“I see two problems here to be solved. They encompass everything else. First, the Emergences. We need to ensure nothing like what happened in Hetzal and Ab Dalis happens again.

“Second, we need to figure out whatever is causing the Emergences —which may be what also caused the original disaster. I believe this wreckage could help us with that, but that’s just a hunch. I’m not a forensic scientist. Still, I know amazing things can be learned from even tiny bits of material, if the right kind of analysis is applied. Are we doing that?”

“Yes. I have technicians from my department going over the data, and we learn more with every new piece we find,” Secretary Lorillia replied. “So far, nothing conclusive, but there may be an easy way to get a much clearer picture.”

He gestured to a vidscreen in the chamber, displaying a detailed schematic of the Legacy Run in its original, pre-destruction form.

“This class of cargo carrier has a dedicated flight recorder system.

Extremely durable, specifically hardened to survive catastrophic disasters. It could tell us more about what transpired in the final moments before the Legacy Run disintegrated.”

“I thought of that, too, Secretary, but the assembly droids haven’t found it yet,” said Keven Tarr, reviewing his notes. “It could already have Emerged somewhere else, or it might still be in hyperspace.” “Impossible to tell,” said Lorillia. “We’ll just have to wait and hope it gets found.”

“Well,” Keven said, “I had an idea about that. The surveillance network I engineered during the disaster was designed to monitor the entire solar system in real time, and track the debris as closely as possible. Pick up new fragments as they emerged from hyperspace and follow their paths. This is what it looked like while it was happening.” He held up his datapad, triggering its projection function to display a larger image of the system. Long, thin lines wove through Hetzal, all headed on gently curving arcs toward the three suns at its center.

“There’s a lot of data here,” Keven said. “And when I link it with the other eighteen Emergences…”

He tapped his datapad a few times, and the image changed, now expanding out to encompass a good section of the Outer Rim. More thin lines appeared here and there—eighteen sets beyond the original deadly bloom in Hetzal.

“…it sort of makes a picture. I don’t really have it yet. I don’t have the processing power. But if I could get enough droids, probably navidroids because they’re good at calculating hyperspace routes, I might be able to figure out where Emergences would happen. And if I could do that, then we could get ahead of them, and maybe find the flight recorder, if it’s still out there.”

Everyone was silent.

“That’s…very impressive,” Elzar said. “You should do that.”

Keven shrugged.

“I’d like to—but I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just said. I need droids.”

“There are droids everywhere. Take those,” Senator Noor said, gesturing out the viewing panel at the assembly droids.

“I need a lot.”

“How many?”

“If it’s navidroids, the very newest models, then…twenty or thirty thousand, maybe. Like I said, they’re good at this kind of thing. If it’s regular droids, or older navvys, a lot more. Like a hundred thousand.

And whichever kind we use, they’d all have to be linked together to make it work. Pretty big problem to solve.”

More silence.

“The chancellor said we could use every resource, didn’t she?” Avar said.

“Yes, but tens of thousands of navidroids…that’s…hmm,” Secretary Lorillia said, pursing his lips, thinking through the problem. “Many of those models are built directly into the ships they work with. Those could get here fairly quickly, but some would have to be…hmm. The Republic doesn’t have that many, but perhaps we could acquire them from manufacturers…hmm.”

“You should get started,” Elzar said. “The sooner we begin, the sooner we might be able to get ahead of these Emergences. We can save lives and, ideally, find the flight recorder.”

Avar spoke.

“I’ve been thinking about something the chancellor said, too.

There’s at least some chance this isn’t a onetime problem—that there’s something wrong with hyperspace on a larger scale. Do we have any idea how we might approach that? I’m not sure I even know where to begin.”

“If you want to know about hyperspace, I have the people you should talk to,” Senator Noor said. “They don’t live out here anymore —they moved to the Mid Rim when the family struck it rich—but I can make the introduction.”

“Who?” Elzar said.

“The San Tekka clan.”

“I know that name…the prospectors?”

“They prefer the term explorers. They’re an odd bunch, but no one knows more about hyperspace than they do. If there’s something wrong, they’ll probably be able to help.”

“All right,” Avar said. “Secretary Lorillia, will you work on the navidroid issue with Keven Tarr? Elzar and I will meet with the San Tekkas to see if we can learn anything. Let’s all stay in touch. As the senator pointed out…”

She looked again at what was once the Legacy Run.

“…we’re running out of time.”