Чарльз Соул: Star Wars: Light of the Jedi (The High Republic)

…inside, everyone was made of light.

The lightsaber moved through the cramped cockpit. It placed itself against a metal plate on the Vector’s control panel with a soft, very satisfying click, staying in place via a tiny, localized force field. A low hum vibrated through the ship’s hull as its weapons systems activated. A new set of displays and dials went live, glowing with the bright blue of her saber blade. Weapons on a Vector could only be operated with a lightsaber key, a way to ensure they were not used by non-Jedi, and that every time they were used, it was a well-considered action.

An additional advantage—the ship’s laser could be scaled up or down via a toggle on the control sticks. Not every shot had to kill. They could disable, warn…every option was available to them. In this case, though, the settings would be at maximum. They needed to disintegrate the hyperspace anomaly, turn it into vapor, and that would require all three Vectors at full power plus everything the Longbeam had. One huge blast.

It would work. It had to work. Four billion defenseless beings on the Fruited Moon hung in the balance.

Te’Ami reached out again, checking her colleagues’ readiness. There was something…from the thread leading to Nib Assek’s ship. Fear…almost…panic.

“Nib, I’m sensing—” she began, and the reply came before she could finish.

“I know, Te’Ami,” came Nib’s voice. Calm, but perhaps a bit embarrassed. “It’s Burryaga. He’s having a hard time locking down his emotions. I think it’s the stress of what we’re doing. All the lives at stake.”

“It’s all right, little one,” came Mikkel’s gravelly tones, translated across the comm. “You are but a Padawan, and we are asking a great deal of you. Te’Ami, can we free him from the burden of helping us calculate the shot?”

“Yes,” Te’Ami said. “There is no shame in this, Burry. Only an opportunity to learn.”

Te’Ami reached out with the Force, gently curving the connection away from Nib Assek’s Padawan. The Wookiee was silent. She could still feel the roil of emotions from him. Well, no shame, as she had said. Every Jedi found their own path, and some took longer than others.

“Let’s go,” Nib said, perhaps trying to make up for the delay caused by her student. “We’re running out of time.”

“Agreed,” Te’Ami said.

She moved her thumbs up on her control sticks, first rolling them along the toggle wheel to tell the weapons system to fire at full power. Then she settled her hands on the triggers.

The object, speeding toward the moon. Where it had been. Where it was. Where it would be.

The other Jedi were ready. They would fire the moment she did, as would the linked systems in Joss and Pikka’s Longbeam, every blast heading to precisely the same location in space.

Four billion people. It was time. Te’Ami tightened her grip on the triggers.

A squeal from the comm system, loud and insistent. A scream, or a yell—forceful, almost panicked. It startled Te’Ami, and if she were not a Jedi Knight, she might have inadvertently fired her weapons. But she was indeed a Jedi Knight, and did not fire.

It took Te’Ami a moment to understand what she was hearing—not a scream, but words. In Shyriiwook. Burryaga, saying something she could not understand. Loud, insistent, desperate. His emotions strong again through the Force, that same mixture of fear edging on panic.

“Burryaga, I’m sorry, I don’t understand Shyriiwook. Are you all right? We’re running out of time. We have to fire.”

“No,” Nib Assek said, her voice sharp, insistent. In the background, the whines and growls of Burryaga’s voice, coming over her comm. “We can’t attack.”

“What are you talking about?” Mikkel said. “We don’t have a choice.”

“Burryaga is explaining it to me. The emotions we were getting from him—they weren’t his. He was sensing them. He had to tune in a bit, overcome his own fear before he could understand.”

“Please, Nib, just tell us what he means,” Te’Ami said.

A long, whistling, mournful bit of Shyriiwook, and then a pause.

“The object,” Nib said. “The one we have to destroy, to save the moon. It’s not just an object. It’s debris, part of a ship. ”

Te’Ami let her hands fall from the control sticks.

“It’s full of people,” Nib finished. “And they’re alive.”

The Force sang to Jedi Master Avar Kriss, a choir that was the entirety of the Hetzal system, life and death in constant, contrapuntal motion. It was a song she knew well—she heard it all the time, everywhere she went. Here, the melody of the Force was off, a discordant jangle of death and fear and confusion. People were dying, or felt the dread of their imminent demise.

Threaded through that song—the Jedi, and the brave personnel of the Republic, and the heroic citizens of Hetzal itself, using the resources they had to try to save the people of these worlds.

The Third Horizon had landed not far from the Ministerial Residence in Aguirre City, the capital of Hetzal Prime. The Republic was coordinating its efforts with the Hetzalian government to try to stem the tide of the disaster—ensuring the evacuation proceeded in as orderly a fashion as possible, tracking the incoming projectiles, helping as they could.

Avar Kriss was still on the ship’s bridge, still serving as the point of connection for the Jedi in the system, letting them sense one another’s presence and location and emotional states. Sometimes words or images came through unbidden, but only rarely. It was all just a song, and Avar sang and was sung to.

Still, she was able to gather a great deal of information from what it told her. She knew that fifty-three Jedi Vectors were currently active in the Hetzal system. She knew which Jedi were working on the planet—for example, at that moment, Bell Zettifar, Loden Greatstorm’s promising Padawan, was approaching the surface of Hetzal Prime at extraordinary speed.

Elzar Mann, her oldest, closest friend in the Order, was in a Vector of his own, flying a single-person version of the ship near one of the system’s three suns. He was almost always alone. Avar was one of only two Jedi he worked with regularly—it was just her and Stellan Gios. This was mostly because Elzar was…unreliable wasn’t exactly the right word. He was a tinkerer, if that term could apply to Jedi techniques. He never liked to use the Force the same way twice.

Elzar’s instincts were good, and he didn’t try anything too unusual when the stakes were high. Usually, his experiments in Force techniques did expand the Order’s understanding, and occasionally he accomplished incredible things.

But sometimes he failed, and sometimes he failed spectacularly. Again, never when lives were on the line, but even that bit of uncertainty, coupled with Elzar Mann’s general unwillingness to take the time to explain whatever he was trying to do…well, some in the Order found him frustrating to deal with. Avar believed that might explain his continued status as a Jedi Knight rather than a Master. She knew that bothered Elzar. He thought it was unfair. He didn’t care about other Jedi’s paths through the Force—why should they concern themselves with his? He just wanted to follow his road where it led.

Avar didn’t understand Elzar’s explorations any more than most of the Jedi, but the key to their relationship was that she never asked him to explain. Anything, ever. That arrangement had powered their friendship since their days as younglings together in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. That, and she just liked him. He was funny, and clever, and they had come up together through the Order, Stellan and Elzar and her, the three of them inseparable through all their years of training.