Paul Kemp: Crosscurrent

They showed nothing nearby but the spinning chaos of the asteroid belt, and Phaegon III and its many moons.

Relin took a moment to clear his head, then drew on the Force to shield them from the ambient dark side energy. With his defenses in place, he felt the energy as only a soft, unpleasant pressure in his mind, incessant raindrops thumping against his skull, but it no longer affected his senses.

"All right?" he asked Drev.

Drev cleared his throat, eyed his flight suit and robes in embarrassment. "I am all right. Apologies, Master."

Relin waved away the apology. He had been unprepared, too.

"My meal tasted better the first time," Drev said, smiling, his cheeks bright red.

"Smelled better, too," Relin said, chuckling as he pored over the scanner's output.

"So, it's vomit that looses your sense of humor," Drev said. He stripped off his robe, balled it up, and retook his seat. He took a gulp of a flavored protein drink in a plastic pouch, swished it around his mouth. "I will keep that in mind. Maybe scatological humor will amuse you also?"

Relin only half smiled. His mind was on their situation. What had they stumbled onto? He had never before experienced such a wash of pure dark side energy. Whatever Saes had been searching for, he must have found it in the Phaegon system. Drev must have sensed his seriousness.

"What do you make of it?" Drev asked. "A dark side weapon? A Sith artifact maybe?"

Relin shook his head. The energy was not intense, simply widespread. "We will soon know."

He engaged the ion drive and started to take them into the asteroid belt, but thought better of it. He took his hands from the controls.

"Take us in, Drev," he said.

He felt his Padawan's eyes on him. "Into the belt?"

Relin nodded. The Infiltrator's sensor scrambler and the churn of the asteroid belt would foil any Sith scanners.

"Are you certain, Master?"

"Still your mind," he said to his Padawan. "Feel the Force, trust it."

Drev was one of the best raw pilots in the Order. With time and training in the use of the Force, he would become one of the Jedi's finest.

"Take us in," Relin repeated.

Drev stared out of the cockpit, at the ocean of whirling rocks. He paused for a long, calming breath, then took the controls and piloted the Infiltrator into the asteroid belt.

He accelerated without hesitation and the ship darted through the field of slowly spinning rock, diving, ascending, rolling. Pitted stones flashed on the viewscreen for a moment, vanished as Drev cruised under them, over them, around them. One of the Infiltrator's wings caught an oblong asteroid and the ship lurched, started to spin.

"Master-"

"Calm, Drev," Relin said, and his Padawan zagged out of the way of another asteroid as he righted the starfighter.

"Well done, Padawan," Relin said. "Well done."

A smile split Drev's face as he continued through the belt.

Relin monitored the sensors. "There is an asteroid on the edge of the belt, more than ten kilometers in diameter, in a very slow spin."

"I see it."

"Set us down there but stay powered up. Let us see what we see."

Drev maneuvered them over the asteroid and set down the Infiltrator. Phaegon III loomed large in their viewscreen against a backdrop of stars.

Drev was still smiling. Relin chose to ignore his Padawan's emotional high.

"Give me a heads-up display and magnify."

A HUD appeared off center in the cockpit window. Drev input a few commands and magnified the image.

Plumes of smoke spiraled from the charred surface of one of Phaegon III's small moons. Saes's dreadnought and its sister ship hung like carrion birds in low orbit over the moon's corpse. A steady stream of transports moved between the moon's surface and the belly-slung landing bays of the two Sith ships.

Drev lost his smile as he worked the scanners. "That is not-how can-? Master, that moon should be covered in vegetation." He looked up from his scan. "And life."

Relin felt his Padawan's anger over the destruction. He knew where anger led. The young man moved from joy to rage as if his emotions were on a pendulum.

"Stay focused on our task, Drev. The scope of the matter cannot affect your thinking. Do not let anger cloud your mind."

Drev stared at him as if he were something appalling he'd found on the bottom of his boot. "The matter? It is not a mere matter. They incinerated an entire moon! It is an atrocity."

Relin nodded. "The word fits. But you are a Jedi. Master your emotions. Especially now. Especially now, Padawan."

Drev stared at him a moment longer before turning back to the scanners. When he spoke, his voice was stiff. "There are hundreds of mining droids on the moon."

More to himself than Drev, Relin said, "Saes incinerated the crust, then loosed the mining droids." He focused his Force sense on the transports and their cargo. Though he had been ready, the dark side backlash elicited a gasp and set him backward in his chair.

"It is the cargo."

"The cargo? What did he pull out of that moon?"

Relin shook his head as he took the controls. "I do not know. An ore of some kind, something attuned to the dark side." Relin knew of such things. "Whatever it is, it is powerful. Maybe powerful enough to determine the outcome of the assault on Kirrek. That's what Saes has been searching for, and that is why Sadow delayed his assault. We cannot allow it to get out of the system."

"You have a plan, I trust," Drev said, not so much a question as an assertion.

"We take those dreadnoughts out of the sky. Or at least keep them here."

Drev licked his lips, no doubt pondering the relative sizes of the Infiltrator and the dreadnoughts, not unlike the relative difference between a bloodfly and a rancor. "How?"

Relin lifted the Infiltrator off the asteroid and flew it into open space. "I'm going aboard. Saes and I should get reacquainted."

He expected at least a chuckle from his Padawan, but Drev did not so much as smile. He stared out the viewscreen at the dead moon, at the Sith ships, his lips fixed in a hard line.

Relin put a hand on his Padawan's shoulder and unharnessed himself from his seat.

"You have the controls. The scrambler and baffles will not keep us invisible for long. I just need a little time."

Drev nodded as the Infiltrator sped toward the dreadnoughts. "You will have it. You'll try to board a transport?"

"That is what I am thinking," Relin answered as he moved to the cramped rear compartment of the Infiltrator. Rapidly he peeled off his robes and donned a vac-ready flexsuit, formulating the details of a plan as he went.

The ryon shell of the suit, lined with a flexible, titanium mesh as fine as hair, felt like a second skin. He checked the oxygen supply and the batteries and found them both full. He slipped the power pack harness over his shoulders, around his abdomen, and clipped it in place. The power umbilical fed into the suit's abdominal jack with a satisfying click, and the suit hummed to life. The energy running through the mesh hardened the suit slightly and caused Relin's skin to tingle. He put the hinged helmet in place over his head and an electromagnetic seal fixed it to the neck ring, rendering the zipper and power jack airtight.

The suit ran a diagnostic, and Relin watched the results in the helmet's HUD. His breathing sounded loud in the drum of the transparisteel and plastic helmet. He activated the comlink.

"Testing."

"Clear," said Drev, his voice like a concert inside the helmet.

The diagnostic came back clean.

"Suit is live and sealed," Relin said.

"We remain unnoticed," Drev said, his tone sharp, serious. "For now."

While Relin had been trying to encourage seriousness in his Padawan for months, at the moment he regretted the turn of Drev's mood. He missed his Padawan's mirth in the face of danger. To craft Drev into a Jedi, it seemed that Relin would have to turn him into something other than Drev.