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

“Captain on the bridge,” he said, and the other officers sat up straighter.

“Thank you, Jary,” Hedda said as her second stepped aside and returned to his post.

Hedda settled into her command chair, automatically checking the displays, scanning for anything out of the ordinary.

All is well, she thought.

KTANG. KTANG. KTANG. KTANG. An alarm, loud and insistent. The bridge lighting flipped into its emergency configuration—bathing everything in red. Through the front viewport, the swirls of hyperspace looked off, somehow. Maybe it was the emergency lighting, but they had a…reddish tinge. They looked…sickly.

Hedda felt her pulse quicken. Her mind snapped into combat mode without thinking.

“Report!” she barked out, her eyes whipping along her own set of screens to find the source of the alarm.

“Alarm generated by the navicomp, Captain,” called out her navigator, Cadet Kalwar, a young Quermian. “There’s something in the hyperlane. Dead ahead. Big. Impact in ten seconds.”

The cadet’s voice held steady, and Hedda was proud of him. He probably wasn’t that much older than Serj.

She knew this situation was impossible. The hyperlanes were empty. That was the whole point. She couldn’t rattle off all the science involved, but she did know that lightspeed collisions in established lanes simply could not happen. It was “mathematically absurd,” to hear the engineers talk about it.

Hedda had been flying in deep space long enough to know that impossible things happened all the time, every damn day. She also knew that ten seconds was no time at all at speeds like the Legacy Run was traveling.

You can’t trust hyperspace, she thought.

Hedda Casset tapped two buttons on her command console.

“Brace yourselves,” she said, her voice calm. “I’m taking control.”

Two piloting sticks snapped up out from the armrests of her captain’s chair, and Hedda grasped them, one in each hand.

She spared the time for one breath, and then she flew.

The Legacy Run was not an Incom Z-24 Buzzbug, or even one of the new Republic Longbeams. It had been in service for well over a century. It was a freighter at the end of—if not beyond—its operational life span, loaded to capacity, with engines designed for slow, gradual acceleration and deceleration, and docking with spaceports and orbital loading facilities. It maneuvered like a moon.

The Legacy Run was no warship. Not even close. But Hedda flew it like one.

She saw the obstacle in their path with her fighter pilot’s eye and instincts, saw it advancing at incredible velocity, large enough that both her ship and whatever the thing was would be disintegrated into atoms, just dust drifting forever through the hyperlanes. There was no time to avoid it. The ship could not make the turn. There was no room, and there was no time.

But Captain Hedda Casset was at the helm, and she would not fail her ship.

The tiniest tweak of the left control stick, and a larger rotation of the right, and the Legacy Run moved. More than it wanted to, but not less than its captain believed it could. The huge freighter slipped past the obstacle in their path, the thing shooting by their hull so close Hedda was sure she felt it ruffle her hair despite the many layers of metal and shielding between them.

But they were alive. No impact. The ship was alive.

Turbulence, and Hedda fought it, feeling her way through the jagged bumps and ripples, closing her eyes, not needing to see to fly. The ship groaned, its frame complaining.

“You can do it, old gal,” she said, out loud. “We’re a couple of cranky old ladies and that’s for sure, but we’ve both got a lot of life to live. I’ve taken damn good care of you, and you know it. I won’t let you down if you won’t let me down.”

Hedda did not fail her ship.

It failed her.

The groan of overstressed metal became a scream. The vibrations of the ship’s passage through space took on a new timbre Hedda had felt too many times before. It was the feeling of a ship that had moved beyond its limits, whether from taking too much damage in a firefight or, as here, just being asked to perform a maneuver that was more than it could give.

The Legacy Run was tearing itself apart. At most, it had seconds left.

Hedda opened her eyes. She released the control sticks and tapped out commands on her console, activating the bulkhead shielding that separated each cargo module in the instance of a disaster, thinking that perhaps it might give some of the people aboard a chance. She thought about Serj and his friends, playing in the common area, and how emergency doors had just slammed down at the entrance to each passenger module, possibly trapping them in a zone that was about to become vacuum. She hoped the children had gone to their families when the alarms sounded.

She didn’t know.

She just didn’t know.

Hedda locked eyes with her first officer, who was staring at her, knowing what was about to happen. He saluted.

“Captain,” Lieutenant Bowman said, “it’s been an—”

The bridge ripped open.

Hedda Casset died, not knowing if she had saved anyone at all.

Scantech (third-class) Merven Getter was ready. Ready to clock out for the day, ready to get the shuttle back to the inner system, ready to hit the cantina a few streets away from the spaceport on the Rooted Moon where Sella worked tending bar, ready to see if today was the day he might find the courage to ask her out. She was Twi’lek, and he was Mirialan, but what difference did that make? We are all the Republic. Chancellor Soh’s big slogan—but people believed it. Actually, Merven thought he did, too. Attitudes were evolving. The possibilities were endless.

And maybe, one of those possibilities revolved around a scantech (third-class) staffed on a monitoring station far out on the ecliptic of the Hetzal system, itself pretty blasted far out on the Rim, sadly distant from the bright lights and interesting worlds of the Republic Core. Perhaps that scantech (third-class), who spent his days staring at holoscreens, logging starship traffic in and out of the system, could actually catch the eye of the lovely scarlet-skinned woman who served him up a mug of the local ale, three or four nights a week. Sella usually stayed around to chat with him for a while, circling back as other customers drifted in and out of her little tavern. She seemed to find his stories about life on the far edge of the system inexplicably interesting.

Merven didn’t get why she was so fascinated. Sometimes ships showed up in-system, popping in from hyperspace and appearing on his screens, and other times ships left…at which point their little icons disappeared from his screens. Nothing interesting ever happened—flight plans were logged ahead of time, so he usually knew what was coming or going. Merven was responsible for making sure those flight plans were followed, and not much else. On the off chance something unusual occurred, his job was just to notify people significantly more important than he was.

Scantech (third-class) Merven Getter spent his days watching people go places. He, in contrast, stayed still.

But maybe not today. He thought about Sella. He thought about her smile, the way she decorated her lekku with those intricate lacings she told him she designed herself, the way she stopped whatever she was doing to pour him his mug of ale the moment he walked in, without him even having to ask for it.

Yeah. He was going to ask her to dinner. Tonight. He’d been saving up, and he knew a place not too far from the cantina. Not so far from his place, either, but that was getting ahead of himself.

He just had to get through his blasted shift.