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

Explanation was limited, which caused speculation. What was happening? Some kind of accident? What disaster could be so huge in scope that an entire system needed to be evacuated?

Some people ignored the warning. False alarms had happened before, and sometimes slicers pulled pranks or showed off by breaking into emergency alert computer systems. True, nothing had ever happened on this scale, but really, that made it easier to dismiss the whole thing. After all, the entire system in danger? It just wasn’t possible.

Those people stayed in their homes, at their workplaces. They turned off their screens and got back to their lives, because it was better than the alternative. And if they glanced to the skies from time to time, and saw starships heading up and out…well, they told themselves the people in those ships were fools, easily spooked.

Others, elsewhere, froze. They wanted to find safety but had no idea how. Not everyone had access to a way offworld. In fact, most did not. Hetzal was a system of farmers, people who lived close to the land. If they traveled anywhere else in the Republic, it was for a special occasion, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Now, being told to find a way to space on a moment’s notice…how? How could they possibly do such a thing?

But some people in Hetzal did have starships, or lived in the cities where space travel was more common. They found their children, gathered their treasures, and raced to the spaceports, hoping they would be the first to arrive, the first to book passage. They, inevitably, were not. They were greeted by crowds, queues, ticket prices spiking to unattainable levels for all but the wealthiest, thanks to unscrupulous opportunists. Tension rose. Fights broke out, and while Hetzal did have a security force to calm these squabbles, these officers also eyed the skies and wondered if they would spend their last moments alive trying to help other people to safety. A noble end, if so…but a desirable one? The security officers were people, too, with families of their own.

Order began to break down.

On the Rooted Moon, a kind trader decided to open the doors of the starship he used to transport the exceedingly fresh produce of the moon to the voracious worlds of the Outer Rim. He offered space to all who could possibly fit, and though his pilot told him the vessel was old, and the engines were a bit past their prime, the trader did not care. This was a moment for magnanimity and hope, and by the light he would save as many as he could.

The ship, holding 582 people, including the trader and his own family, managed to take off from its landing pad, once the pilot pushed its engines to maximum. It just needed to escape the moon’s gravity well. Once they were in space, everything would get easier. They could get away, to safety.

The vessel achieved most of a kilometer before the overtaxed engines exploded. The fireball rained down over those left behind, and they were not sure whether they were lucky or not, considering they still had no idea what was coming for them. Minister Ecka’s message did not say.

A variant on that message was sent out from Hetzal to any other systems or ships that might hear it: We are in desperate trouble. Send aid if you can.

It was picked up by receivers in the other worlds of the Outer Rim—Ab Dalis, Mon Cala, Eriadu, and many more, spreading outward via the Republic’s relay system, and then inward to the planets of the Mid and Inner Rims, the Colonies region, and even the shining Core. Virtually everyone who heard it wanted to do something to help—but what? It was clear that whatever was happening in Hetzal would be over well before they could arrive.

But ships were sent anyway—mostly medical aid vessels, in the hope they might be able to offer treatment to injured citizens of Hetzal.

If any survived.

“Get to your nearest offworld transport facility,” Minister Ecka said to a cam droid recording his words and image and broadcasting them across the system. “We will send ships to pick up people who don’t have other ways to leave the planet. It might take time, but stay calm and peaceful. You have my word, we will come for you. We are all of the same crop. Hearty stock. We will survive this the way we have survived harsh winters and dry summers, by pulling together.

“We are all Hetzal. We are all the Republic,” he said.

He raised a hand, and the cam droid ceased transmitting. This was the fourth message he had sent since the emergency began, and he hoped his communications were doing some good. Reports suggested they were not—riots were beginning at spaceports on all three inhabited worlds—but what else could he do? He broadcast his messages from his office in Aguirre City, demonstrating that he had not abandoned his people even though he surely could. A show of solidarity. Not much, but something.

Around him, the rest of his staff coordinated their own attempts to assist in whatever way they could. General Borta worked with his meager security fleet to both keep order and ferry people offplanet. With the help of Counselor Daan, they had organized a number of the huge crop freighters currently in transit to act as relay points, ordering them to dump their cargo and clear all space for incoming refugees. Each could hold tens of thousands of people. Not comfortably, of course, but this was not a situation where comfort mattered.

Smaller ships were ferrying Hetzalians up to the cargo vessels, off-loading their people then rushing back to pick up more. It was an imperfect system, but it was what they had been able to arrange on no notice. There was no plan for something like this.

Minister Ecka blamed himself for that—but how could he have known? This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was impossible, whatever it was. He was just a farmer, after all, and—

No, he thought, suddenly ashamed of himself. He was Minister Zeffren Ecka, leader of the whole blasted system. It didn’t matter if he couldn’t have anticipated this disaster—it was happening, and he needed to do everything he could.

As he considered that thought, he looked over at Keven Tarr, who had never stopped running his little network, trying to keep information flowing. The young man was now working with three separate datapads and a number of comms droids projecting various displays on the walls, pulling in as much data as he could about the scope of the disaster that continued to wreak havoc in the system. He still had no real answers, other than to continually confirm that Hetzal was being savaged by whatever was afflicting the system. Satellites, arrays, stations…smashed apart by the storm of death that had come calling. It was like the seasonal chewfly swarms that used to plague the Fruited Moon until they had been genetically modified out of existence.

If the swarm came, there was nothing you could do. You hunkered down, survived, and sowed your fields again once it was all done.

Ecka watched as Keven Tarr wiped sweat from his eyes, then looked back at his main datapad, the one he had propped up on the little side table he was using as a desk.

Tarr’s eyes widened, and his fingers froze, hovering over the screen.

“Minister,” he said. “I’m…I’m getting a signal.”

“What signal?” Ecka said.

“I’ll just…I’ll just put it through,” Tarr said, and there was an odd note in his voice, of surprise, or just something unexpected.

Words crackled into the air, one of the technician’s comms droids broadcasting the message out into Minister Ecka’s office. A woman’s voice. Just a few words, but they brought with them, yes…the one thing most needed at that moment.

“This is Jedi Master Avar Kriss. Help is on the way.”

That one thing.

Hope.

A vessel appeared in the Hetzal system, leaping out of hyperspace and rapidly slowing as it returned to conventional speeds. It was deeply sunward, and the gravity wells it needed to navigate would rip a lesser ship apart, or even this one, if its bridge crew did not represent the best the Republic had to offer.