MORE STORMTROOPERS ran past as Kanan pushed the hovercart down the last tunnel to Zone Forty-Two. No doubt they were still looking for the idiot who had flipped out and attacked them in Zone Thirty-Nine. Lal Grallik had popped into the work area long enough to confirm the rumor that it was, indeed, Skelly on the loose. Kanan wasn’t in the least surprised—or upset. At least Skelly was out of his hair.
It wasn’t unusual to see stormtroopers in the Empire. But while he had hopped around some, Kanan’s travels through the galaxy had tended toward a spiraling path, moving outward from the galactic center. Core Worlds, Colony worlds, Inner Rim: Each represented a new frontier for him. And each had turned out the same, with Imperial presence starting at nil and gradually growing. Kanan sometimes wondered how the stormtrooper uniform suppliers kept up with the demand. When the Imperials reached the fringe of the galaxy, what would they be wearing?
Not that the sight of stormtroopers alarmed him. No, like the woman who had spoken to him from the Star Destroyer, they were all functionaries. Organic droids, trained to react a certain way and seek out certain targets. Vidian was maybe the most literal expression that he’d seen: all their robotic efficiency and general nastiness bound up in a mass of metal, with a little skin on top. The best way to avoid being hassled by them was simply to fit perfectly into the stereotypes they were expecting to find.
On worlds like Gorse, the Empire expected to find workers of the sort drawn to low-skill, high-risk jobs. Rowdy and rambunctious characters—just not rebellious. Threats to their own sobriety and to one another, but never to the Empire. Not politically active, or even conscious.
It happened that those were the planets Kanan found the most fun. The role of roughneck suited him. He traveled the galaxy, looking at the sights—and sometimes the ceiling, after the odd fight or drunken binge. He’d visited more places than he could remember, and, beyond Okadiah, he’d never learned the names of most of the people around him. Why bother, when you were just going to leave?
Kanan pushed the cart into Zone Forty-Two. Deep beneath Cynda’s surface, it was the largest chamber yet opened—and more important, sensors had found large recesses hiding behind its walls: other areas sure to be thick with minable thorilide. For weeks, various teams had triggered controlled blasts—barely audible over Skelly’s objections—trying to get at the rich deposits. In a newly hollowed alcove, Moonglow’s techs were working on their own attempt.
Kanan parked his cart outside the opening and pounded on the outside wall. “I’m thirsty. Let’s get this done!”
Yelkin appeared from inside the hole, now wearing a white safety vest. He frowned when he saw Kanan. “You again.”
“You bet.”
Aggravated, the Devaronian surveyed the load of explosives. “We’re measuring the length of the borehole for the charge. It should be just a—”
“Wait,” someone called from inside the carved-out area. “There’s a problem.”
Kanan sighed as Yelkin hustled back inside. Kanan was about to start off-loading the crates himself when he glanced back into the recess. Beside Yelkin, he saw another technician sticking a long prod into a hole drilled for explosives. Or trying to. “Something’s already in there!”
Kanan’s eyes widened—and for the first time, he looked down at the ground outside the short tunnel. There was something he’d seen before: small and brown, discarded nearby.
Skelly’s toolbox.
Kanan yelled into the opening. “Get out! Get out!”
He didn’t have to yell a third time. The techs were moving.
“Someone’s wired something already,” Yelkin said in a panic. “There’s a timer! Thirty seconds—”
No disarming that! “Forget it!” Kanan yelled. “Go!”
Moonglow’s demolition techs kept a portable siren in the blast area; it was right in Kanan’s path. He activated it. All across Zone Forty-Two, workers charged for the exit tunnels to the west.
Ahead of him, Yelkin stumbled across the craggy surface and fell. Kanan, on a headlong run, slowed as he approached the miner—the only other soul left in the enormous crystal atrium. But Yelkin wasn’t asking for help. He was pointing, instead, to something Kanan had forgotten about.
“Kanan! Your cart!”
Kanan looked back at the hovercart with its full load of baradium bisulfate—a hundred times more material than Skelly would have been carrying in his kit—and remembered the demolition guys’ adage: It’s the secondary that does the damage. His cart could bring down half the cave network.
Kanan bounded back toward the opening—and its ticking bomb inside—and seized the hovercart. Turning with it, he ran, pushing it as fast as he could across the long clearing.
Yelkin wasn’t moving, he saw—he’d twisted his ankle. Kanan pointed the cart toward him as his boots pounded the surface. His voice echoed across the chamber: “Yelkin! Grab for it!”
It wasn’t easy to see or hear much after that.
Light from the blast came first. Emanating into the work area from the blasting tunnel, it reflected dazzlingly off the crystal structures above and to either side of Kanan. The sound came next, a muted boom. Kanan had just reached Yelkin with the crate-topped hovercart when the shock wave hit him in mid-stride. The cart’s repulsors were still working; its front bumper caught Yelkin in the gut—and now both they and the hovercart were carried forward, Kanan’s hands locked onto the handle for dear life.
Searing cracks resounded across the atrium. Kanan, now a passenger hanging on like Yelkin, knew what was next. Like icicles on a summer day, meter-wide stalactites across the chamber began falling across the ground they’d already covered. First the crystal knives—and then the rock and stone suspended above them, all plummeting into the open space.
Seeing the first shard strike nearby, Kanan hit the ground with his heels for the first time in seconds. Without thinking, he leapt.
Leapt, as he hadn’t in nearly a decade, farther than any mortal normally could. Leapt, atop the crates filled with deadly explosives on the careening cart. Leapt, to where he could reach out and grab the shoulder of the unaware Devaronian, clinging for dear life.
The western opening through which the other miners had evacuated was just ahead. Pulling the hapless Yelkin fully onto the hovercart in one motion, Kanan hit the ground off the left side with his next. Guiding the airborne vehicle like a wader moving a raft, he slung the cart toward the exit tunnel. He stumbled, a step shy of safety, as he tried to follow. Twisting faceup as he dropped, Kanan hit the ground. He looked up into the onrushing mass—
—and stopped it, with his mind.
It was an odd feeling, like putting on an old article of clothing. It was like the leap, something he had sworn never to do. Not in front of anyone, to be sure.
But now he had done it. All light was gone, but he could sense the black mass of debris quivering a meter from his head, even as he heard apocalyptic clamor all around. Instinctively, Kanan dug his heels into the tunnel floor and forced himself backward, the tail of his shirt grinding against the surface until he was fully inside the reinforced western tunnel.
And then he let go. Let go with his mind, and listened as a mountain, denied, found the space where he had landed.
Vidian was in an upper chamber addressing the droidmaster and his three terrified aides when the floor fell in.
Everything went dark as Vidian, his audience members, and all their furnishings tumbled downward. The fall was brief, with the remnants of what had been the floor beneath their feet smashing to pieces on the tougher surface below. An immense jolt rocked Vidian.
Up to his hips in stone, he took a moment to regain his bearings. His eyes switched to night-vision mode, and he realized that a sinkhole had opened beneath the droidmaster’s office: The walls of the room, as well as the hallway leading from it, were intact, several meters above.
Disregarding the pained cries of the others struggling in the rubble, Vidian used his cybernetic arms to dig himself out. Then he began climbing for the aperture above.
“We’re trapped down here,” a voice called behind him. “Help us!”
“Someone will arrive before you starve,” Vidian said, reaching for the bottom of the doorway.
“But there may be aftershocks—”
“Aftershocks? Impossible. This moon’s crystal columns are supposed to prevent tremors,” Vidian said. The event couldn’t have been natural. Pulling himself up and into the intact hallway, he began to suspect what had happened.
His anger returned anew.
In the darkness, Hera felt the world rumbling around her. She’d seen Vidian fall through the floor and disappear; she’d lingered for a few moments, hoping he was gone for good.
No luck, she thought, hearing his voice from the recess up ahead. The moon had tasted him and spat him out.
She heard voices in the hallways around her, and spied portable lights flashing this way and that. There was too much activity now—someone had kicked the insect nest. She needed to use the darkness while she could.
Recon’s over, the Twi’lek thought. She turned from Vidian’s chamber and ran back up the hall.
Kanan continued to force himself backward as debris struck the ground behind him. Finally, after what seemed like an eon, stillness came.
And then the work lights.
Okadiah arrived at his side and knelt. “Lad? You all right?”
Kanan coughed up dust and nodded. Blinking particles from his eyes, he vaguely saw his hovercart, its securely fastened crates of explosives still there. Yelkin lay facedown atop it, wheezing.
“What happened?” Okadiah asked.
“I didn’t see,” Yelkin said. He looked back at the rubble-blocked passage. “I guess we caromed into the tunnel! I thought we were goners, for sure!”
“A million-to-one shot,” Okadiah said, scratching his chin. He looked at Kanan. “My boy, you are the lucky one.”
Kanan knew he was anything but lucky. For Kanan Jarrus was Caleb Dume, the Jedi who never was.
And now, he knew, it was time to go.