Crosscurrent

THE PAST:5,000 YEARS BEFORE THE BATTLE OF YAVIN

The misjump tore at Harbinger's superstructure, clawed at the durasteel. The scream of stressed metal turned the maddening, flickering tunnel of hyperspace and realspace into a shouting throat without end. The ship was flying down the gullet of the universe.

Harbinger bucked from side to side, shook as pieces of it flew free of the front section and slammed into the trailing end. Escape pods tore free from their berths and hurtled into oblivion.

Saes barely heard the alarms. He held on to the bulkhead, watching the dismemberment of his ship. Panicked, distorted chatter carried through his comlink, voices of the dead from beyond the grave. He seized at the Force to find calm and took comfort in its power. As it filled him, his perception sharpened. He felt the terror in some members of his crew, the fearful resolve in others. He wondered, in passing, what might have happened to Omen. Had Relin sabotaged its hyperdrive as well? In any event, the collision of the two dreadnaughts would surely have disrupted Omen's jump.

Sensation tickled the back of his skull. Realization lingered at the edge of his consciousness. He became aware that the air felt charged, pregnant with potential. At first he attributed it to the twisting of space-time occurring as a result of the misjump, but then he recognized its true source.

The Lignan.

Despite Sadow's prohibition against using the ore, Saes did not hesitate, not for a moment. The Lignan offered salvation.

He attuned himself to the potential offered by the ore, immediately felt it augment his relationship to the Force, sharpen it. The emotional rush felt similar to the flood of feeling he'd experienced after his first kill.

But the increased power was not enough. He could sense that. He was only drawing from its emanations, its penumbrae. He needed to be closer to it to utilize it fully.

He took a final look out the viewport at the chaos outside, then turned and sped through Harbinger's corridors, down its lifts, through its hatches. Time was his enemy. Harbinger was dying.

Along his route he passed crew members working frantically at their stations.

"The bridge is gone, Captain!" someone shouted, but Saes paid the words no heed.

"A third of the landing bay was damaged in the collision, sir!"

A protocol droid appeared before him, tottering on the shifting floor.

"Captain, it appears something has gone wrong with the hyperspace jump. I believe that-"

Saes blew past the droid, sending it clattering against the wall and to the floor.

Before he reached the cargo hold, the ship began to shake violently, its solidity responding to some destructive vibratory frequency created by the velocity and the jump error. He had only moments. With his Lignan-enhanced perception, he felt the rising tide of terror sweep through the crew. He ran into a Massassi security team emerging from a side corridor. Even their sharp ferocity had been dulled by concern over events. Still, they recognized him and bowed their heads as the ship shook under their feet.

"Accompany me to the cargo bay! Quickly!"

Bred and trained to obey, the hulking Massassi asked no questions. They ran before him, their boots thunderous on the deck, lanvaroks bare, gravelly voices shouting.

"Out of the way! Captain coming through! Out of the way!"

Crew hugged the walls as the Massassi and Saes stormed past. Many fell in behind them. By the time Saes descended the lift and reached the double doors that opened onto the cargo hold, he had more than a score of his crew trailing in his wake-engineers, security personnel, even a few Blade pilots still in flight gear.

The cargo bay doors did not respond to his open code, so the Massassi pried them open with their clawed hands and lanvaroks. Power blew out of the hold, enough to cause Saes to rock on his feet.

"Sir?" asked one of the Massassi, wide-eyed, too, from the ambient dark side energies.

The ship lurched, throwing many of the crew against the wall. As one they uttered an alarmed moan.

Saes squeezed through the open doors into the vastness of the cargo hold. Loading droids dotted the deck, several stuck on their sides, wheels and treads spinning helplessly. The stacks of storage containers lay in disordered piles like the ruins of some lost city.

He did not need a droid or crew member to point him to the containers containing the Lignan. It drew him like a lodestone drew iron shavings. With each step he took closer to the ore, his mind and spirit opened further until he could not contain a laugh. It was as though he had been drawing power from a nearly exhausted well, and now drew it from an ocean.

He was vaguely aware of his crew trailing after him as he followed the power back to its source, to the stack of rectangular storage containers that held mounds of the ore. He felt giddy, rapturous from its effects.

He drew on the power the ore offered, filled himself with it, sank ever more deeply into the Force. Power coursed through him. His crew backed away, eyes wide-all except the Massassi, who fell to one knee and bowed their heads.

The ship screamed outrage at the stresses of the misjump. With a minor exercise of will, Saes used his enhanced telekinetic power to throw open several of the storage containers holding the Lignan. Ore spilled out onto the deck, bounced around. Power spilled out into the air, collected around Saes. He reached deeper until he was nested fully in the Force, alight with the Lignan's power.

An impact jarred the ship. The hollow boom of an explosion told of some distant destruction to fore. The buck of the ship sent three of the shipping containers skidding along the deck toward him, toward the crew. The Lignan allowed him to use his telekinetic powers to stop them cold with minor effort.

He reached out with the Force, with his augmented power, until his consciousness encapsulated the entire ship. The task challenged him. Dark energy swirled around him. Force lightning shot in jagged lines from his curled fingers, from his eyes. His crew turned and ran, all except the Massassi. They remained, though uncertainty filled their bestial faces.

Grunting, Saes took mental hold of the dreadnought, the pieces of it floating in its wake. His mental fingers closed over the hull and reinforced it, then righted the ship's course.

As he exerted himself, the loose Lignan ore on the deck flared red, sizzled, and crumbled to dust. Apparently it could offer only so much before burning out. He burned through it like a wildfire through brush, like the mining cruisers through the crust of Phaegon III's moon.

He gritted his teeth, his entire body shaking with the challenge of keeping the ship intact. The effort squeezed more Force lightning from his hands, his eyes, his entire body, and soon he was sheathed in a swirling cyclone of the energy. He roared as his power alone kept the ship from shattering.

More and more Lignan burned out around him until he stood in a field of dull gray rock, miniatures of Phaegon III's moon. His heart pounded against his ribs, gonged in his ears. Corded veins and sinew made a topographic map of the exposed flesh of his forearms. The strain bore down on him, drove him to his knees. He was failing. He had to pull the ship out of its jump or they would all die.

He drew from the last well of his strength. The cargo hold lit up like a pyrotechnic display as more of the Lignan flashed and died. He held Harbinger in his mind's eye and felt the intermittent, flawed tunnel of hyperspace around it, felt the ship as a needle through the fabric of space and time, darning in and out of hyperspace and realspace.

Using the Force to time a moment when the ship moved into realspace, he tried to deactivate the damaged hyperdrive, but failed. The pitch of the damaged drive turned to a scream as it poured radiation into the ship and burned out as completely as the used Lignan.

Saes answered its scream with one of his own, straining to hold the ship together and jerk it back into realspace. With a roar of Force power, he changed its course and tore it from the grips of the misjump.

The ship was steady beneath him. The scream of strained metal was silent.

Exhausted, he sagged fully to the ground, his breath ragged but his mind exultant.

"Sir?" said one of the Massassi.

Saes inhaled and stood on wobbly legs. The Massassi moved to assist him but he waved them off. He gathered himself and walked across the cargo hold to a viewport.

Outside, he saw the calm of realspace, a distant blue planet, an orange sun. The stars in the background of space did not look familiar to him, though. He did not know where in the universe they were, but he knew he had saved the ship. The power of the dark side had saved the ship.