Leox ran it by the Jedi first. Yeah, people needed to get the hell off this station, but Leox also needed not to have a “destruction of property” charge waiting for him at the next spaceport. To his relief, Stellan Gios did not allow his thinking to be blurred by the ethical quandaries of the situation. “At this point our priorities are saving lives, not preserving property. Get to it!”
So it was that Leox found himself working shoulder-to-shoulder with both Joss and Pikka Adren, removing power cores from the engines of abandoned ships and transporting them to the nearest ring of escape pods. There, Affie had her entire tool kit arrayed around her, working double-speed to attach pods to cores. These were two mechanical elements never meant to be linked, which meant the linkage was pretty clunky, but as Affie herself said, “It only has to work one time.” Once he and the Adrens had removed every core that could be spared, they’d join her in the work, hopefully learning from whatever method she’d devised.
At one point Leox ducked into the Vessel to quickly grab his canteen—disemboweling engine parts was serious physical work—but hesitated at the door of the mess. Geode stood at the far end of the corridor, giving Leox a pointed look.
“Listen,” Leox said, “I want to push Affie into an escape pod as badly as you do. I also know that if we do that, and are nonetheless fortunate enough to survive the current disaster, we will only die slower and more painfully later on, once she catches up with us.”
Geode seemed unconvinced.
“Do you want to order her to get on an escape pod? Are you that sure you wouldn’t be reduced to gravel? Because if so, go right on ahead.” When Geode didn’t move, Leox said, “Yeah, I thought not.”
If it came right down to it, Leox knew he might wrestle Affie into an escape pod yet. But before he’d make that call for her, they’d have to be even closer to the wire than they already were.
The station rattled beneath his feet as he hurried toward the next ship they’d plunder. Eiram’s atmosphere was beginning to show itself.
Elzar Mann was relieved that the pilots had come up with a means of powering the escape pods and had even undertaken the work themselves. That left him free to concentrate on finally reaching the positional thrusters.
“The radiation suits were stored in two primary compartments at the uppermost and lowermost levels of the station, both of which we’ve been cut off from in different ways,” Elzar began, addressing Stellan and the handful of other personnel who remained. “In future I intend to suggest that all Republic space stations have much more decentralized radiation suit storage, but that’s a point to raise with Chancellor Soh later. Without those suits, it had looked like we had no way to reach the Starlight’s positional thrusters without exposing whoever went down there to fatal levels of radiation—so fatal they’d kill within minutes, so even heroic sacrifices weren’t going to do us any good.”
“There must be some more suits somewhere,” protested Stellan. (To Elzar’s great relief, his friend looked focused, active, vital—like himself once more.) “Never in galactic history has every single thing on a station been stored precisely, and only, where it’s supposed to be.”
Elzar pointed at him. “True. But none of our searching has turned up any so far, and we can’t possibly go through every trunk or locker on the remainder of this station in the hope of a radiation suit turning up unexpectedly. We don’t have the time. Which is why we need to do exactly what we did to get people into the cargo bay—we need to collapse more of Starlight’s inner structure. We know now, from the cargo bay escape, that we can activate the retrofitting systems without causing larger-scale internal collapse. That means we can use them one more time to reach the positional thrusters.”
Stellan nodded slowly. “All right, then. How do we do this?”
“I’m going to give them another twenty to thirty minutes to get as many escape pods away as possible,” Elzar said. “Cutting it close, I know, but the lives aboard this station remain our first priority. Once they’ve managed that, the droids will initiate the partial retrofitting collapse downward, and I’ll fly a maintenance pod down to the positional thrusters. There, maybe, finally, I can get them back online.”
He didn’t bother pointing out that collapsing the structure vertically was riskier than collapsing it horizontally, as they had before. Some of the lower sections were far more damaged and weakened than the levels they’d stuck to thus far. A partial collapse stood a greater chance of triggering an even more catastrophic one, which might kill everyone on board before the station’s crash even happened.
But it wasn’t that big a chance, Elzar reasoned, and besides—what did they have to lose?
By this point it was full morning in Barraza, Eiram’s largest coastal city—or what had been its most populated city until a few hours prior. It had become several other things instead: a ghost town, a traffic jam, a far smaller city still populated by several thousand people unable to leave.
Flying craft had already departed if they could, though the frenzied escape had caused several crashes; smoldering aircraft parts lay on the rooftops where they’d fallen. Landspeeders and wheeled vehicles had attempted to follow, but the terrain surrounding Barraza was too rugged and uneven to go far off-road. This meant long, long lines of vehicles creeping forward at a pace too slow to ensure that those within were protected from the horror descending from above.
By now, the fiery death of the top half of Starlight Beacon had been shown on holonews stations across the planet; every screen on every device replayed the disaster, intercut with eyewitness statements and, sometimes, people holding up grisly, charred finds they had made from the zone below the inferno.
None of this was as fearsome to the people of the city as the slowly enlarging dark spot against the sky, directly overhead.
Nor were the people of Eiram the only ones watching in horror.
“This is a disaster.” Chancellor Lina Soh leaned heavily against the targons on either side of her. Holos showing the broadcasts of—and reactions to—Starlight’s descent on a dozen different worlds were projected around her. “The greatest disaster for the Republic in a century, perhaps more.” So far, she thought, but was not morbid enough to add. “We can’t get anyone there faster?”
“It won’t be more than two hours now,” said Norel Quo. But they all knew Starlight Beacon didn’t have that long.
One of her newer aides decided this was a prime opportunity to get noticed. “I’ve taken the liberty, ma’am, of drafting several statements, each with slightly different nuance, for your review. What’s most important at this point, of course, is demonstrating that the Republic remains strong and in control, and that your leadership can’t be linked to this incident in any way—”
“Fool!” Soh shouted. She tried to be a temperate and generous leader, but this was a provocation beyond any restraint. “This is not a moment to worry about how to spin this for my reelection campaign. This great tragedy deserves respect, of which you appear incapable. Leave.”
The aide clearly wanted to ask whether leave meant “now” or “forever.” (It was the latter, as he’d eventually discover.) He managed wisdom enough to simply walk out without another word.
Tragedy can forge unity, thought Lina Soh. Her statement—which she alone would write—was beginning to take shape in her head. But this was not a matter of politics, not any attempt to salvage her own reputation. She looked at it the way a doctor might look at a wound, seeing whether there was any way to heal what could not be undone.
But for the sight of Starlight Beacon beneath, Bell might have been in excellent spirits.
The medical tower, fully docked with the Eiram medical cruiser, bustled with medics and pill droids. Every single injured person had treatment; every one of them was safe. Ember had curled into a contented ball at Bell’s feet as he sat next to the bed of Indeera Stokes. Master Indeera had not yet regained full consciousness, but the medics assured him that her readings were slowly normalizing, and there was some indication that she was perceiving both sound and light. There was every reason to think that she not only would recover, but also might be able to explain exactly what horrific entity had taken Regald Coll and Orla Jareni’s lives.
And Loden Greatstorm’s.
We’re going to get answers at last, Bell thought.
Still, at the edge of the medbay window, he could see the bottom half of Starlight—jagged and ugly at the top—getting smaller and smaller in the distance.
Bell took his comlink and tried once more. “Bell Zettifar to anyone aboard Starlight Beacon who can hear my—”
“Padawan Zettifar.” Stellan Gios’s voice sounded thready and weak, yet better than Bell had last heard it. “Good work with the medical tower.”
“There’s got to be something else I can do to help,” Bell insisted. “There are a few medical shuttles on board. The staffers have offered me—”
“Don’t come back here,” Stellan said. “Enough lives are endangered without adding yours.”
Although Bell could see the sense of this, it was difficult to accept that there might be no more he could do. Casting about for ideas, he said, “Listen, is there any way you could put Burryaga through? He and I are pretty good at putting our heads together. Maybe there are ways to separate other sections of the station, so they could be pulled to safety by tractor—”
“I can’t put him through. I’m afraid—I’m sorry, Bell. We have lost Burryaga.”
Bell stared down at the comlink, as though that could somehow change the words he’d heard. “You mean…Burryaga’s dead?”
“Believed dead,” Stellan replied. “Apparently he gave his life protecting Elzar Mann from the rathtars, so that the ships from the cargo bay could escape in time.”
Believed dead. That meant they didn’t have a body.
After what had happened to Loden Greatstorm, Bell would never give up on anyone who was missing again.
Climbing down ladders wasn’t much less tiring than climbing up them, and Nan had done a lot of both during this one impossibly long day. Her leg muscles seemed to have gone nearly gelatinous by the time she finally clambered onto the lower level of the station that housed the positional thrusters and closed the hatch that stood between them and deadly radiation.
Chancey Yarrow, though nearly as wobbly, righted herself first, pulling off her helmet with a sigh of relief. “After this is over—by which I mean, all of this—I’m going to find the nearest vacation planet with hot mineral springs and settle in for a long soak. I’m talking days. Droids are going to have to fly out and bring me my food. Plus at least two bottles of Toniray wine. After that, maybe—” Chancey’s expression softened. “—Maybe I can catch up with my daughter, try to talk with her again. It’ll go better, next time. Not that it could go much worse.”
At this point, Nan’s ambitions topped out at “not dying today.” If she managed to achieve that, she certainly didn’t intend to waste time on frivolous pursuits. But she was too exhausted to start that discussion. “What next?”
“Next we find the localized engineering array and boost the power to that thing.”
“Do we need to find power cells, or—”
“There ought to be plenty hardwired in, for emergencies like this. Starlight just needs someone to flip the right switches, which is what we’re here to do.” Chancey grinned as she flipped open an equipment kit mounted on the nearest wall. “It’s not too complicated. So perk up. The hard part is over.”
“That’s what you think,” said a third voice—a familiar one.
Chancey and Nan turned as one to see the Nihil team standing there staring at them: Cale, Leyel, and Werrera, ragged and dirty, their radiation suits almost black with soot, but still very much alive. They were also very much armed, not with blasters but with lengths of pipe that could do plenty of damage.
Nan said, “What are you doing here?”
Cale’s wintry Pau’an face had never looked more forbidding. “Our work didn’t end with the blast. We ran analytics both following the blast and after the station split in two. It wasn’t hard to see that the only way to save the station was by using the positional thrusters.”
“So we put on some radiation suits we’d stashed, just to make sure we didn’t wind up melting before we could finish our work,” Leyel added. “Got down here and waited to make sure no one had the bright idea of undoing our hard work. But here you are. Unless you’ve come all this way to say goodbye?”
Chancey grabbed a tool from the equipment kit: a fusion laser, which could not only seal difficult-to-reach connections from a distance but also operate a lot like a blaster in a pinch. Nan had used them like that before herself. “I’ve come all this way to save my neck and fry anybody who gets in my way,” Chancey said.
“You would snatch away the Nihil’s greatest victory?” Cale’s voice rose in pitch.
When he put it that way, Nan could see his point. But she also thought the Nihil victory was already undeniable. What did it matter if there were a handful of survivors? Did it really take away from what Marchion Ro had accomplished here?
Not much, she decided, as long as she was among those who lived.
More ships continued to arrive, spacecraft from all over. Nobody was cataloging them, not even droids.
Which was why one particular ship could dart into the system unheralded and unnoticed, but still get close enough for a wonderful view of Starlight’s end.
The Gaze Electric.
All the rest would spread the tale among the Nihil until it was another of Ro’s legends—the greatest yet.
But not the greatest ever, he thought. That is yet to come.
Ro spared a thought for the beings he had sacrificed aboard Starlight Beacon. He had sent seven—enough to be sure that they would have an effect, but also enough for him to feel their lack. They were not easily replaced.
Still, no one else had them at all. Ro alone held the advantage.