They’re literally sitting down and waiting to die, Nan thought.
The Nihil team considered its work done. Their lives done. Although they’d accompanied Nan and Chancey as they fled the uncomfortably smoky area near the explosion, once the group had reached a clear corridor, any sense of urgency vanished. Werrera and Leyel took seats on the floor, while Cale leaned against a wall with all the contentment of an artisan who’d just finished a momentous creation.
Chancey wiped soot from her face. “I suggest you find another place to relax. They’ll have a team up here within minutes.”
“Doubtful,” Cale replied. “Our preparations lasted for days—and I assure you, we’ve taken care of everything. One way or another, we have compromised every system on this station save for the most obscure—entertainment systems, retrofit backup systems, and the like. We’ve taken over communications. We’ve powered down independent energy cells. We’ve even closed off the lifts. Travel through the station will be difficult, if not impossible, and the Jedi and the Republic will be too busy keeping themselves alive to worry about the cause of the explosion.”
“Not forever,” Nan snapped. “Sooner or later, they’re going to come after us.”
Leyel laughed out loud. Cale shook his head, sly and satisfied, as he said, “Sooner? They have bigger problems. Later? There is no later.”
Nan and Chancey exchanged glances. That swift look was enough to tell Nan that yes, Chancey believed the Nihil team. They might not have actually dealt Starlight Beacon a fatal blow, but they certainly believed that they had.
Which meant it was time to get the hell out of here.
“Thanks for the jailbreak,” Chancey said. “If you don’t mind, I think it’s time we parted company—both with you, and with this station.”
Cale bowed. “Thank you for your assistance. We couldn’t have—well, no. We could’ve done it without you. But you helped us do it faster.”
I sped up a disaster that might kill us, Nan thought. Go, me.
She and Chancey hurried down the hallway, putting distance between themselves and the Nihil as quickly as they could. But she still heard Leyel calling after them, “You won’t be parting company with this station anytime soon—and neither will anyone else.”
The quartermaster’s office—briefly the calm, ordered, “fashionably minimalist” center of Stellan Gios’s authority on Starlight Beacon—now looked like a droidsmith’s workshop.
More and more astromechs had wheeled in to join the group that had been networked together to make up for the loss of the Hub. But this was nothing like the hastily cobbled-together droid lifeline that proved so essential in stemming the Great Hyperspace Disaster fallout; thanks to JJ-5145’s advance efforts, they formed an efficient, well-ordered array. They had nothing like the same level of computational power, as the Hub and their inputs were limited to the few damaged connections that could be established from the quartermaster’s office. Still, it was better than the alternative…which was to say, nothing.
Stellan pored over the data from the linked astromechs, analyzing what they’d been able to collect over the past several hours of station operations. Although this information was scattershot so far, he had finally detected the pattern: shutdowns of various warning systems, followed by disruptions in the areas those systems were meant to protect. Some of these disruptions were so minor that Stellan could hardly believe anybody would take the trouble. But overall, the sabotage efforts added up to a badly injured station that had been robbed of its ability to fully catalog its own damage, much less compensate for it.
One deviation in particular caught his attention. “The holding cell—all systems in that area were switched off some hours ago.” He put one hand to his forehead, as though he could push back the headache that was brewing. “I’d tell you to check on the prisoners, Elzar, but I’m fairly sure they’re not incarcerated any longer.”
Elzar considered that. “Nan, at least, had been connected with the Nihil. She was a former member, and one who’d left their ranks pretty recently. Doesn’t that suggest this is Nihil sabotage we’re dealing with?”
“Probably,” Stellan agreed. It was possible that their saboteur might simply have sprung the prisoners to add to the overall chaos on the station—but who else had such hatred for the Republic? Who else had shown such a pattern of hostility and aggression toward the Jedi?
No, this was Nihil work, and Stellan hadn’t seen it until it was too late. Why hadn’t the Force warned him? Why hadn’t every Jedi aboard Starlight been on alert?
Because of the strange distortion in the Force they’d all sensed. Somehow their ability to foresee danger had been removed just as that danger became most acute. Were the Nihil responsible for that? If so—how?
Orla Jareni chose this moment to interject, “Who did this doesn’t matter as much at the moment as what we’re going to do about it.”
Elzar gestured toward the astromechs doggedly churning out data. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. There’s not much else we can do yet besides help the injured—”
“But we can give the people on board the truth,” Orla said. “They deserve to know their lives are in danger.”
Stellan fixed her in a hard stare. “If we tell them that before we’ve figured out how to help them escape, all we’ll do is start a panic.” Koley Linn flashed through his mind, argumentative and angry. “If I knew more of these pilots—if I could predict their reactions, know that they would remain reasonable and calm—yes, I’d agree, we should tell them. But I don’t know them all, and some of those I’ve met have already proved to be difficult at best. It only takes one short fuse in the group to make the whole situation blow up, and I guarantee you, we have at least one on board.”
Orla didn’t seem convinced. “If those short fuses figure out the danger on their own, the panic will be ten times worse.”
“If it took us all this to get the data,” Stellan pointed out, meaning the dozen astromechs blinking and beeping all around them, “nobody out there has a chance of figuring it out.”
Leox Gyasi stood at one of the docking bay’s few windows, a small rectangular space just at his eye level. He gazed through the viewer of the wood-and-metal device he held in his hands, carefully adjusting the small mirrors on its frame.
“What is that thing?” Affie asked. She stood by his shoulder, mostly for lack of anything else to do.
“It’s an astrometrical sextant.”
“It looks like something out of a museum.”
“You’d be more likely to find one in a museum than in most spacecraft these days,” Leox agreed. “Me, I prefer to do things the old-fashioned way sometimes. Mostly to connect with the ancestors—to understand how they found their way in a vast and chaotic galaxy—but on the rare occasions all of our present-day technological marvels fail, as indeed they have today, old tools can be damn useful.”
He hoped this might distract Affie for a little while, get her started on some of her teasing about his “antiques.” Instead she said, “But what exactly is it you’re doing the old-fashioned way?”
Shoulda known Little Bit wouldn’t let me off that easily, Leox thought. “I’m measuring the relative distances between the stars and Eiram’s horizon.”
“The only reason to do that would be if you think our location is changing. Shifting relative to Eiram.”
“You got it in one.”
“But what does it matter?” Affie asked. “The explosion could only have thrown Starlight off by so much, and we couldn’t be moving very fast from the force of that alone.”
Leox double-checked his fourth reading of the past ten minutes, accepted the truth, and lowered the sextant so he could look her in the eyes. “Other forces are coming into play, namely, Eiram’s gravity.”
It was horrible to see the realization setting in, the dread on her young face. “You mean, the station’s falling.”
“We’ve got a long way to go yet,” Leox said quickly. “And I’m sure they’re getting Starlight back under control as we speak.”
“Of course they are. Of course.” Affie ran a hand through her dark-brown hair, which was one way she calmed herself. “But—have you figured out how long we do have?”
“Not yet.” Which was the truth, though he already realized they were looking at hours, not days…and not that many hours, either. “Look. The Republic’s got the best people, the best equipment. No doubt they’re already calling for help halfway across the galaxy. Any minute now, some Longbeams are going to show up and pull us out of harm’s way. Hell, we might get to see a hyperspace tow for ourselves.”
Affie half smiled. “That’d be cool.”
Leox patted her shoulder, but he was looking past her at the rest of the docking bay. People were, for the most part, working on their ships (the better to launch once the bay doors could finally be pried open) or huddled in groups, talking, killing time. Leox wasn’t the only one who expected the Republic to take care of the situation pretty soon.
He just hoped the situation got taken care of before more people figured out the danger, because the one thing that could make this situation worse would be panic.
In the medical tower, Bell felt like order had been restored—more or less.
More, in that people had calmed down, everything and everyone had been put back in place, and no other explosions or disturbances seemed to be forthcoming. Less, in that they still had only emergency light to go by, communications remained down, and they continued to be cut off from the rest of the station, both top and bottom.
“We’ve done everything we can do,” Bell said to Burryaga as they walked slowly through the ward. Ember trotted beside him, wagging her tail; as far as she was concerned, all was well. Bell wished he could be as easily reassured. “Is it crazy, to wish we still had more to do? Because at least then we’d be busy?”
Burryaga said it wasn’t, because it was difficult to face a problem when there was no way to fix that problem. But, he added with a soft growl, the galaxy contained many problems that could not be easily fixed, and sometimes those had to be faced. So they would be wise to learn how to handle such moments.
“I know,” Bell said. “I just wish we didn’t have to learn it today.”
It wasn’t much of a joke, but they were both tired, and nothing felt quite as good as letting the tension break. Burryaga chuckled; Bell snickered; Burryaga guffawed; and then they were both covering their mouths, trying not to disturb the patients by bursting out in laughter.
Bell’s eyes were teary by the time they’d pulled themselves together. “So. How are we for supplies?”
Medical supplies were thin but would hold for another day or more, assuming no further injuries, Burryaga reported. Food rations, unfortunately, would only cover about one more meal for everyone in the tower.
“We shouldn’t need more than that.” Although the fact that they’d received no communication so far was worrisome, Bell felt certain Masters Stellan, Maru, and the rest would get on top of the situation soon. And hadn’t the Ataraxia just arrived? That meant Avar Kriss was on it, too. Bell leaned down to scratch Ember behind her ears. “Don’t worry, girl. I’ll split my ration with you.”
Burryaga said he’d counted Ember all along, and Bell smiled.
Orla Jareni wished violently that she’d brought the Lightseeker with her on this journey. Even though the docking bay doors would have remained as stubbornly closed to her ship as they did to everyone else’s, she’d have liked to know that it was there waiting for her once this crisis had passed.
Not that she had any intention of abandoning any persons aboard Starlight Beacon. No, Orla’s desire to leave had less to do with the current emergency than it did with the crisis before that—the one that both Stellan and Elzar seemed to have put out of their minds in the wake of the Nihil blast.
The ghostly husk left behind by Regald Coll wasn’t something she could as easily forget.
Nor would the others be able to ignore it much longer, Orla suspected. As the immediate aftermath of the explosion settled, she was becoming more and more aware that the disturbance in the Force had not vanished. It remained present—more diffuse, somehow?—but she sensed that the source might be even closer than before.
What can that source be? Orla paced along the corridor outside Stellan Gios’s office; motion sometimes helped her think. What could have the power to disturb a Jedi’s connection to the Force? And what could do that to poor Regald? Although she had heard of the fates that had nearly befallen the Jedi twins Terec and Ceret, and the grotesque end of Loden Greatstorm, she hadn’t seen the results—and what had happened to Regald had been even more horrific than that.
She was no closer to those answers than she had ever been, but a new realization struck her then, one that stopped her in her tracks: Whatever the source of the disturbance was, it must have been brought to Starlight from the Nihil.
And if the Nihil had found a way to attack the Jedi by attacking the Force itself, they were a far more dangerous enemy than anybody from the Republic had ever guessed.
Chancey and Nan had found a small operational array that remained functional—sort of. It wasn’t good for much beyond telling them how screwed they were.
“We can tap into their communications,” Nan suggested. “Hear whether they’ve got rescue vessels coming that the Nihil could attack. Or piggyback a signal within one of their own, get word to the Gaze Electric that we need help.”
“For one, neither Marchion Ro nor anyone else on his ship gives a damn that we need help.” Chancey frowned at the latest scans coming up on the array’s tiny screen. “For two, those zealots may be crazy, but they knew what they were doing when they went after Starlight’s comms.”
Nan felt a queasy flutter in her gut. “Are all the communications systems down?”
“None of them are down. However, all of them are currently broadcasting blank signal.” At Nan’s confused expression, Chancey elaborated, “Blank signal is made up of copied loops of data that give the illusion everything’s fine, nothing’s changed. So not only can Starlight not call the Republic for help, but if the Republic happens to check on them for any reason, the comms will also make it look like there’s no problem here whatsoever. Granted, that won’t stand up to any direct attempts at contact—but delaying communication by even a few hours makes it a lot less likely that help from the Republic can reach this station in time.”
As much as Nan hated counting on the Republic to do something, she hated the knowledge that they weren’t coming even more. “The blockers on individual power sources mean none of the bay doors will open, so even if we could steal a ship, we couldn’t fly it out of here.” That left only one option. “Can you pull up the location of the station’s escape pods?”
Chancey nodded, but she hesitated. “The Nihil team sounded confident they’d trapped everybody on board. They wouldn’t say that if they hadn’t dealt with the escape pods, too.”
“They can’t have had time to interfere with everything on this station, no matter what they say,” Nan insisted.
“Hope not,” Chancey said as she began searching for the escape pods. “Because that’s looking like our last chance—and everybody else on this station is about to figure out the exact same thing.”