Клаудия Грэй: Into the Dark

“If we had to get hit, I wish it would’ve been by anything else. Any damn rock out there in space,” Leox said. “No offense.”

Geode’s amiable silence indicated that none was taken.

Affie hurried back into the cockpit, breathless. “Are we all right?”

“We are for now. Good job on the repairs, by the way.”

“The kid monk helped me. But, that freighter—Leox, that looked like a fragment of a passenger craft.”

Leox sighed. So much for breaking it to her gently. “Yeah, it was.”

“There would’ve been hundreds of people aboard. Maybe even thousands.” Her face was stricken; moments like these reminded him how young Affie really was.

“Horrible way to die,” Leox agreed. Might as well hit her with all of it up front—even if she was still a kid, she could handle the truth better than she would any lie. “Listen, I can’t be sure, but going over the readouts…that looked a hell of a lot like wreckage of the Legacy Run to me.”

Affie’s dark eyes widened. “But—the Legacy Run is a Byne Guild ship. Scover travels on it sometimes.”

“I didn’t say it was the Legacy Run . They’re similar. Maybe not the same. Just—you oughta brace yourself. All right?”

She nodded, already attempting to focus herself back on the matters at hand despite the febrile reddish light of disturbed hyperspace all around them. His heart went out to her. Not every girl could throw herself into her work when she’d just found out her momma might’ve died.

Scover is fine. Scover is absolutely fine.

Affie repeated this to herself as she settled back into the copilot’s seat. Scover Byne rarely traveled on Guild runs; she preferred to remain on their hub planets, overseeing their fleet in its entirety. She hadn’t mentioned any recent plans to do otherwise. So Affie refused to panic.

Even if Scover wasn’t on board (and she wasn’t ), the destruction of the Legacy Run was bad enough. The Republic’s arrival in their sector had driven shipping to feverish levels of activity; everyone wanted to move cargo before it could be taxed, tariffed, or outlawed. Settlers wanted to reach the frontier badly and paid for transport by the thousands every day. Every single ship went out packed with as much living and inert freight as it could possibly contain. Even the Vessel had traveled to Coruscant with so many crates of denta beans that Geode hadn’t been able to get through the corridors. Any loss would be a major loss. And the Legacy Run …there would’ve been hundreds of families aboard, thousands of people, even small children.…

“The ship’s still acting weird,” she said, both to snap herself out of worrying and because it was true.

“That’s because hyperspace is still acting weird, though now I think it’s got more to do with the freighter wreck throwing absolutely everything outta whack. I mean, look at this.” Leox gestured at the readings. “Debris is flying all over hyperspace. Navicomputer’s shutting down lanes faster than we can count them.” He shook his head. “We’re changing course.”

Affie went cold, as though the coaxium regulator had been dropped back into her arms. “In hyperspace?”

“Yeah, I know—and don’t even start, Geode. Thing is, we gotta drop out of hyperspace as fast as possible. We can’t do that and get where we’re going. So now we’re going someplace else. Hopefully someplace safe.”

She braced herself as preset coordinates began scrolling down the nav screen. Whatever preset would get them into realspace fastest was their new destination. She’d have to trust that the Vessel wouldn’t be preprogrammed with coordinates that led to, say, the center of a dwarf star.

The final preset clicked in. Leox said, “Kid monk back in his jump seat?”

“If not,” Affie said, “it’s on him. By the way, he’s actually a wizard.”

Leox raised his eyebrows as though to say, Not bad . “Hang on!” he called out over the intercom, and then—

They were in realspace. No bounce, no jostling, as sweet a reentry as anybody could hope for. Affie and Leox shared a grin as she called, “Good pick, Geode.”

“Now we can figure out what the hell went wrong out there,” Leox said, “and then we can get on our way.”

Relief washed over Affie as she looked out at the largely empty sector of space surrounding them. They weren’t facing hostile ships, or intruding into a war zone, or anywhere near the heart of a star. They were…pretty much nowhere.

Despite the giddiness of their escape, she couldn’t help wondering, Why would the ship be programmed to take us here?

“What happened?” Orla Jareni whispered. Her white face had gone even paler. “The voices crying out—”

“Many have died,” Master Cohmac said. “You felt it, too, Reath?”

Reath had sensed something was terribly wrong far beyond the Vessel itself—and that it was tied to the disaster—but he felt nothing like the kind of shock reflected in both Orla and Master Cohmac’s expressions. It occurred to him for the first time that there might be certain advantages to not being as acutely Force-sensitive as the average Jedi. “Can you tell what happened exactly?”

Unsurprisingly, Master Cohmac pulled himself together first. “No. We should contact Starlight Beacon immediately. We need more information, and we wouldn’t want our delay to cause alarm.”

Reath agreed. Well, mostly he agreed. A small, unworthy part of him wanted Master Jora to feel a little alarm—just enough to make her say, You know, the frontier’s a needlessly dangerous place for us to be. We should return to Coruscant right away.

Still, he rose and went with Master Cohmac to the Vessel ’s comm station. It was unlikely that Cohmac would need help sending their messages, but it was the role of the Padawan to be prepared to offer assistance to any Jedi, at any moment.

The comm station was a small area with a curved ceiling, hardly big enough for even one adult humanoid. Two were already crammed inside: Leox and Affie, the former of whom was holding an amp unit to his ear. Apparently Geode was alone on the bridge, which Reath didn’t find reassuring. Master Cohmac knelt at the door, as smoothly as though that was what he’d prepared to do all along, and said, “I realize your ship has urgent communications to make, Captain Gyasi, but—”

Leox held up one hand. “Hang on.”

If Master Cohmac felt impatience, he showed no sign, merely nodded. But Reath could sense tension building within Leox and Affie—a tension that was catching. He blurted out, “What’s wrong?”

“Everything, from the sound of it.” Leox put down the amp unit and flipped a switch, projecting into the room instead.

Immediately they were inundated with noise, more than a dozen signals trying to break through at once, overlapping and blurring one another:

“— lost all power, stranded in the Bespin system, signaling any craft within —”

“— at least one thousand souls lost, possibly more —”

“— littered with the stuff, like someone mined hyperspace —”

“— can’t even begin to assess the damage until we can get through to —”

“What sector are these messages coming from?” Master Cohmac asked quietly.

Affie’s expression was grim. “All of them.”

“So many fragments of the truth,” Master Cohmac said. “No complete picture. Which of course is more frightening than the whole truth could ever be.”

“We hope ,” Affie retorted.

Orla Jareni appeared in the doorway behind Reath and murmured, “Any news?”