The astromech in charge of the docking bay beeped in dismay upon reading the cargo ship’s manifest. Even droids didn’t want anything to do with rathtars. But it wasn’t the droid’s job to assess the wisdom of letting this ship dock on Starlight; its job was to see that the cargo hauler had the necessary permit to transport wildlife. Sensors claimed it did, so the astromech obediently opened the bay doors and allowed the ship to land.
While Starlight’s main docking bay was a lively, busy place, the bay designated cargo-storage-only remained quiet most of the time. Werrera, Leyel, and Cale stepped into a vast, ill-lit space large enough for their footsteps to echo. It unsettled them—after all, they didn’t want to be overheard—but they soon realized that nobody was there to hear them in the first place. Only two droids witnessed their arrival, neither of which was programmed to confirm that a ship’s cargo matched its manifest.
So had Marchion Ro said it would be. The Eye never failed them. They had been right to trust him, to volunteer for this mission, to take on this great work.
“Where do we begin?” Leyel asked. Like the others, she had on a generic dark coverall, the sort of thing worn by engineers, mechanics, and maintenance workers on ships and stations throughout the galaxy. “Straight into engineering?”
Cale shook his head at the human woman. “First we start with their communications. Then the escape pods. This must be done step by step, just as Ro has ordered.”
Loyal to Ro and the Nihil as she was, Leyel couldn’t help her impatience to strike a real blow. “And if they catch us before we do anything worth the doing?”
“That is not ours to ask,” Cale insisted. “Believe in the Eye’s plan. It will be many hours before they learn of our presence. By the time they know, it will be far too late for the Jedi to stop us.”
Something nagged at Bell Zettifar’s attention, but he couldn’t put his finger on precisely what it was.
Normally he would have meditated and attempted to identify whatever strange vibration within the Force was signaling him. At that moment, he had other things to do.
He knelt by a wounded Twi’lek who lay on a low cot near the door in the medical tower’s admissions facility. Soot darkened her blue skin and her singed clothing, and her eyes were reddened from either smoke or tears. “Has the pill droid seen to you?” he asked. “Is there anything else I can do to help? Somebody I could contact?”
“The droid’s been here,” she whispered. “I’ll be all right. And there’s…there’s no one for you to contact. But thank you.” Her eyes never focused on Bell. He sensed that she was imagining someone else, someone who had been lost in the Nihil attack. Even these smaller raids caused real damage, Bell reminded himself. To the galaxy at large, this might have seemed no more than a skirmish. But this Twi’lek had lost somebody so precious to her that the galaxy would never seem the same.
A nasty gash marred one of her lekku—cleaned, treated, but still mending. Another few centimeters, and the tip of the head-tail would have been completely severed.
Like Master Loden’s had been…
“I’ll check in on you soon,” Bell said, quickly getting to his feet. He needed to keep his attention on the present moment. Were his late Master able to speak to Bell from beyond the grave, no doubt he would say something like, Pay attention to those who need you. I am beyond any help now. Let me go.
But Bell couldn’t do it. Helping the wounded who’d made their way to Starlight meant seeing reminders of the countless terrible ways Master Loden had been tortured and maimed during his captivity with the Nihil. Every bruise, every cut, every groan of pain: Bell’s mind assigned them all to his late Master, and the worst of it was knowing that the reality as Loden Greatstorm had lived it was probably even worse than Bell’s most heinous imaginings.
Nearby, Burryaga set down a large tray of medical supplies for the droids and medics to swarm over. To judge by the look he gave Bell, the distress Bell felt was obvious. Burryaga stepped away from his Master, Nib Assek (currently assisting another wounded traveler), and came to Bell’s side.
The Wookiee’s inquisitive whine made Bell sigh. “I’m okay. Really.”
The answering growl made it clear Burryaga doubted that.
“Maybe I—it doesn’t matter,” Bell said. “There’s no time to worry about it. We’ve got too much to do.”
They stood in the middle of the receiving room, which was filled with roughly a dozen patients in varying degrees of distress. The air smelled of smoke and coolant spray from the clothes and bodies of those who lay groaning around them. According to the latest reports, even more waves of Nihil attack survivors would be arriving shortly. The medics and healer droids were capable of handling this, but the medical tower was crowded enough that a little extra help was more than welcome. Given all this, Bell figured Burryaga would soon leave him alone in favor of any of the myriad tasks before them.
Instead Burryaga pointed out that providing help meant making sure the helpers were able to do their best. If Bell was having trouble, better to work through it, so that he could serve to his utmost.
“I guess,” Bell admitted. “Still, there are things that need to be taken care of—”
Burryaga interrupted to point out that they could have even more to do in the hours and days to follow, so if Bell needed a break, he should take it immediately. Later, they might have no chance.
“You win.” Something like a smile crossed Bell’s face. “Taking a break.”
To Bell’s surprise, Burryaga left the medical tower by his side—not pushing, not asking questions, just providing silent companionship as they walked through the quieter inner corridors of Starlight Beacon. Although a handful of individuals hurried past them, for the most part they were left alone as they made their way onto the observation deck.
The observation deck was deserted. Alone, they looked out at the broad expanse of space and on Eiram just below them, its seas shining sapphire. It looked so peaceful. Was that a lie?
“I know Master Avar says she’s on the trail of the Eye of the Nihil,” he began, “but maybe the Eye is someone else entirely. Surely somebody on the run wouldn’t be ordering more attacks.”
Burryaga growled that he trusted Avar’s judgment. In his opinion, these scattered hostilities were probably just the Nihil striking back in desperation now that their leader was on the run. Terrible, yes, but a sign of how badly they’d been hit.
“That makes sense,” Bell agreed. “But somehow it seems like we never hit the Nihil hard enough. Like it’s impossible.”
After a moment’s pause, Burryaga asked why Bell felt that way.
If a full Jedi Knight had been asking questions like this, Bell might’ve been too intimidated to speak openly. Grief wasn’t an emotion the Jedi were meant to dwell upon. But Burryaga was a fellow apprentice. Sure, he was significantly older, but still, in Wookiee terms, just past adolescence. They were peers. It was possible to admit things to a peer that could never be comfortably said to a Master.
“From the moment I became Loden Greatstorm’s Padawan, he was more than just my teacher.” Bell paced slowly along the observation deck walkway, staring at the stars and the half circle of Eiram’s surface below. “He was the ultimate ideal of a Jedi. At least, he was to me.”
Burryaga agreed. Loden Greatstorm had been among the noblest, most outstanding Jedi Masters of his generation. (Burryaga, aging as a Wookiee did, could assess several human generations with ease.) His death was a loss to the entire Order—but, he gently added, to Bell most of all.
“I thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. Master Loden was alive, in Nihil captivity, suffering—so terribly—” Bell’s voice caught. He swallowed hard. “And it wasn’t like I didn’t sense him! But I told myself it was grief. They told me it was just grief, or a sense of him through his new communion with the Force. Instead it was him calling for help that never came. I could have saved him. I didn’t.”
Burryaga stopped him there with a low growl. There was no way to know what Bell might or might not have been able to do, or even what the Order as a whole could have done to rescue him.
“That’s the whole point,” Bell said. “If I’d failed in an attempt to help—okay, that would be hard, but I could look at what I’d done wrong. I could learn from it. And maybe Master Loden would’ve known that at least we tried. Instead there’s nothing. I did nothing.”
Bell braced himself for Burryaga’s next consoling words, but they never came. Instead Burryaga whined thoughtfully and continued pacing slowly by Bell’s side, simply remaining with him in his distress. That was more comforting than any words could ever have been.
Yes, Bell told himself. Everything you’ve said is true. It’s hard, and it’s awful, and it’s how things happened. The past is no longer in motion. There’s nothing for you to do but accept it.
Only now did Bell realize that, to him, acceptance had meant something too close to “surrender.” That wasn’t it at all. Acceptance was strength. It was being able to carry the weight of what had been, and what had not, through all the many days, months, years, and decades to follow. Bell would bear this burden as long as he cherished the memory of Loden Greatstorm.
That meant he would bear it always.
Central communications for Starlight Beacon were maintained through Ops, a heavily staffed, permanently busy area of the station. Therefore, as Ro had said, the trunk of the tree had to remain standing. Werrera, Leyel, and Cale’s job was to cut each and every one of the branches.
Werrera, the comms expert, had crammed himself into an ill-lit service corridor built with smaller species in mind; his Ithorian head could easily have become wedged in that narrow space. Despite the darkness and discomfort, Werrera’s fingers deftly inserted the timer lock and set it to the precise hour. As soon as he’d clamped it around the correct cables, he gave a grunt of satisfaction.
Cale gave a fanged grin of appreciation. “There’s no chance of them even noticing it before the time comes—”
“Celebrate then,” Leyel insisted, shouldering a bag of their equipment. Nobody ever questioned people dressed for repairs and carrying tools, no matter where those people might go. “Work now.”
On the Gaze Electric, Thaya Ferr had just delivered another batch of transfer orders.
“I’ve sent Roborhyan to the Spectre—he’s had bad blood with that captain in the past. The infighting should begin shortly.” She tapped on her datapad, bringing up images to remind Marchion Ro of whom she spoke. (He remembered everyone—she knew this and was too smart to forget it—but it gave some vitality to an otherwise flat presentation. She wished to serve the Eye, not to bore him.) “As for the Janikki clan, they’ve been ordered to coordinate efforts in the Ishbix system…where several of them are wanted for crimes that significantly predate their time with the Nihil. They’ll be nervous.”
“And nervous people make mistakes,” Ro said. The Janikki clan remained formidably loyal to one another, so much so that they had been on the verge of claiming the right to run a Tempest together. To allow such a group to share power would be tantamount to splitting the Nihil in two and handing half of it away. But once they’d screwed up a few times, they’d lose whatever alliances they had outside the clan and—if Thaya’s plan came to fruition—would soon be divided against themselves. “Well done, Thaya. You’ve chosen these assignments wisely.”
As much as Thaya wished to bask in the praise, she would not waste the Eye’s time. “Tonight we’ll ship out the rest of the strategic transfers. Tomorrow we can begin the mass reassignments. They’ll talk, of course—”
“By that point there’s no way around it.” Ro understood, of course. “It doesn’t matter. They won’t have time to spread any sedition before the Gaze Electric is once again fully staffed…and more formidable than ever. As for their replacements—”
“The receiving orders will arrive within twenty hours.” Then Thaya tensed. She had interrupted the Eye. Would he be angry?
Luckily for her, he seemed to be in an excellent mood—so much so he didn’t even notice her tactlessness. And his mood would only improve once the new crew arrived.
Affie Hollow strapped herself into the copilot’s seat as Leox and Geode checked their readings. From the passenger area nearby came the sounds of Orla Jareni and Elzar Mann preparing themselves for takeoff. Usually, the Vessel hauled cargo rather than people; so far, every exception they’d made had been for the Jedi.
“We’re developing a specialty in Jedi transport,” she said to Leox, who was chewing on a mint stick. “Maybe we should own it. Even advertise. ‘For the monk-wizard on the go.’ ”
“Up to you, boss lady,” Leox said.
Affie felt like that ought to make her grin; it was rare to be a shipowner at her age, and both Leox and Geode had made the switch from her teachers to her employees with good-humored grace. But reminders that she owned the Vessel still made her remember that she’d only gotten it by turning her adoptive mother in to the authorities, which had led to the collapse of the Byne Guild.
Scover Byne had, of course, been guilty of the crimes charged, which involved endangering the lives of indentured workers and costing the lives of others…including Affie’s birth parents. Very, very, very guilty. Affie’s actions had been wholly motivated by the chance to save people working under terrible conditions. Inheriting a ship had been an unexpected benefit, the only thing that allowed her to escape the mess with anything to her name. She knew she ought to have been satisfied.
Sometimes she was. Other times, she remembered what it had been like to know Scover would always be there for her. Affie suspected her mom would never speak to her again.
Leox and Geode were her only family now. At least they were a good one.
“Attention, all and sundry.” Leox spoke into the intercom, even though their only passengers sat less than two meters away. “We’ll be taking a hyperspace lane to the Echerta system, dropping out for a swift switchover to a jump point that our navigator says will get us to Starlight in half the time of a direct trip.” Affie threw Geode an appreciative glance, which made him look adorably smug. “Shouldn’t be out there too long, so relax, appreciate the unique circumstances that have brought you into being at this moment in history, and enjoy the ride.”
As Leox reached for the hyperdrive, Affie murmured, “I love this part.”
Leox grinned. “So does any pilot worth a damn.” With that, he pulled downward, and black space turned electric blue.
The first leg of the jump lasted only a few minutes, barely time enough for Affie to do more than double-check comms. As she did so, however, she saw an alert pop up. That one line of red told her everything she needed to know: “The Nihil are up to something again.”
Leox never looked away from the brilliant-blue light beyond the cockpit. “I wish they were easier to discourage.”
“So does half the galaxy, by now,” Affie replied.
“The most pertinent fact here,” Leox said, “is whether these Nihil shenanigans are taking place at Starlight Beacon, or the Echerta system.”
Affie searched through the warnings—difficult, as they were updating constantly, but not impossible. “Looks like Starlight Beacon checks out so far.”
“That’s a relief,” called Orla Jareni from the back. “And Echerta—”
“We’re about to find that out for ourselves.” Leox squared his shoulders in his seat. “Dropping out of hyperspace in three—two—one—now.”
He pushed the craft back to realspace. Electric blue faded into the blackness of space—
—Or should have. Instead space beyond the cockpit was lit up with weapons fire and flame. Nihil ships were tormenting a nearby hauler, and already, some of them had changed course to target the Vessel.
Fear froze Affie’s veins as she said, “They’re here.”