Crosscurrent

THE PRESENT:41.5 YEARS AFTER THE BATTLE OF YAVIN

Jaden awoke to the metallic shriek of a thrown hatch lever. The door opened to reveal Marr's lined face and smooth gray hair. The Cerean's goatee was so precisely groomed that Jaden imagined Marr gave its angles and length as much attention as he did jump solutions.

"We will be there soon," Marr said.

"How long was I out?"

"Six standard hours and eleven minutes. There is caf in the galley."

Jaden stood, chuckling at the Cerean's precision. Marr turned to go, but Jaden halted him with a question.

"How did you and Khedryn meet, Marr? With your gifts, it seems as if… you might have done something else."

"My gifts," Marr said softly, and trailed off. He looked up. "Perhaps I did do something else."

"Of course. I meant no offense."

"I took none." He turned once more as if to go, but stopped himself and faced Jaden. "When I was young, I once spent a week calculating the probabilities that my life would take this or that turn." He smiled, and Jaden noticed for the first time that one of his front teeth was badly chipped. "I even deduced a small possibility that I would become a Jedi. Amusing, isn't it?"

Jaden chose his words carefully. "Perhaps you could have been."

Marr seemed not to hear him. His deep-set eyes floated in some sea of memory where he had experienced a loss. "I was wrong about all of it, of course. It was a silly exercise. Life does not follow a predictable path. There is no way to capture the infinite variables involved. I think it reflected more my view of myself, or maybe my hopes back then, than anything else."

"Life is not predictable," Jaden agreed, thinking of the course of his own life, thinking of an air lock activation switch he wished he'd never seen.

"Later I decided that I needed to live life, not think about living it, not mathematically model living it. Not long after that I met Captain Faal. He's a good man, you know."

"I see that. And so are you. Where did you receive your training in mathematics?"

Marr frowned. "Not at a university. I had a series of private tutors, but I am mostly self-taught. Born to it, I guess."

"It's intuitive," Jaden said, unsurprised.

"Yes."

Jaden nodded, considered the idea of telling Marr that he was Force-sensitive, but decided against it. Why burden him? Jaden had been happier using the Force in ignorance. "Come on, let's get to the cockpit. I need to see this moon."

They found Khedryn already in the cockpit, his feet up, relaxed in his chair. He nodded at the cerulean swirl visible through the window.

"Beautiful, isn't it? I've heard it can drive you mad to stare at it. I've been doing it for years, though."

"That may not support the claim you suppose it does," Marr said, smiling, and took his seat.

Khedryn grinned. "Six years I've put up with this, Jaden. Six years."

"Six standard years, four months, and nineteen days," Marr corrected.

"You see?" Khedryn said to Jaden, and Jaden could not help but smile. The camaraderie between the two was infectious. Long ago Jaden had felt similarly in the company of his fellow Jedi, but those feelings had vanished. In the company of two rogues on the fringe of space, he found himself feeling as light as he had in months.

"Coming out of hyperspace," Marr said. "In three, two, one."

"Disengaging," Khedryn said, and disengaged the hyperdrive.

Blue gave way to black. Stars appeared in the dark blanket of space. The day side of a blue gas giant filled half the viewport. Clouds of gas swirled in its atmosphere, echoing the swirl of hyperspace. A midnight-blue oval, a storm hundreds of kilometers wide, stared out of the planet's equatorial region, an eye that would bear witness to Jaden's fate. Thick, churning rings of ice and rock, the largest ring system Jaden had ever seen, whirled around the planet at an angle fifteen degrees off the equator.

"Nothing on the scanners," Marr said. "We're alone."

"No way Reegas gets someone out here this fast," Khedryn said. "We're on the chrono, though."

Jaden tried to speak, found his throat dry, tried again. "The moon?"

"Coming around now," Marr said, and they watched an icy moon, as pale and translucent as an opal, come into view, under the scrutiny of the planet's dark eye.

Seeing it stole Jaden's breath. He stared in silence for a time before he finally managed, "That is it. Marr, put it on the speakers."

"Put what on the speakers?" Khedryn asked, but Marr understood. The Cerean flicked a few switches, tapped a few keys, and the repeating signal of the Imperial distress call fell over the cockpit, not a recording but the real thing, as faint and regular as an infant's heartbeat.

Help us. Help us.

"You all right?" Khedryn asked Jaden, taking him by the arm. "It's just a distress beacon, right?"

It was more than that to Jaden. "I need to get down to the surface of the moon."

"What is down there?" Marr asked.

"I do not know," Jaden said. "I only know that I am supposed to find it."

Khedryn and Marr shared a look before Khedryn shrugged.

"We'll take Flotsam," Khedryn said, Jaden assuming he meant the attached Starhawk. "I'm not landing Junker down there."

"We'll need to break out the envirosuits-" Marr said.

The rhythmic beep of the proximity alarm cut short their conversation, joining its clarion to the distress signal coming from the moon. Marr spun in his seat to the scanner console. Khedryn leaned over his shoulder.

"What do we have?"

Marr bent over the sensor screen, his brow lined with concern. "Unknown, but coming in fast. Very fast."

"From where?"

"From out of the system," Marr said.

Harbinger was still moving under its own power, blazing through the star system at full speed but no longer lost in the nether region between hyperspace and realspace. It was damaged, but repairable.

Pleased, Saes turned and found himself facing not only the Massassi but also many of those of the crew who had fled when he had drawn on the Lignan.

As one, they stood to attention and saluted. Saes returned the gesture and activated his communicator to the channel that would carry his voice across the entire ship.

"This is the captain. All members of the night-watch bridge crew assemble on the secondary bridge."

He assumed Los Dor and his bridge crew had died when Harbinger had lost its primary bridge. He needed to figure out where the ship was, then figure out how to get his wounded dreadnought and its remaining ore to Primus Goluud.

Without warning, the pod ceased shaking and Relin, his equilibrium still off, struggled to right the spinning craft. A planet flashed in and out of the viewport, a blue gas giant with thick, busy rings of rock and ice, and a large, ice-covered moon that hung against the black of space like a shimmering gemstone. Relin did not recognize the planet or the system.

Gripping the controls with his remaining hand, wincing at the pain in his ribs, he activated the reverse thrusters to slow the pod and gradually righted it. Using the pod's rudimentary sensor array, he scanned the area around him. He picked up Harbinger, apparently intact and slowing, and another ship near the moon. He did not recognize its signature and turned the pod so that he could see it out of the viewport.

"Who are you?" he murmured.

He'd never seen a ship like it-disk-shaped, with an attached boat off the starboard side and what looked like some kind of docking rings aft. He wondered where in the universe the jump had stranded him.

Wheeling the pod around, he brought Harbinger into view and almost collided with the dreadnought. The Sith ship filled the viewport as it passed under the pod, the charred scar of its destroyed bridge the hole into which Drev had fallen, into which Relin had poured his rage.

He stared at the ship a long while, the need for revenge a fire in his gut. He knew Harbinger would be blind until Saes got a secondary bridge up and running, so he had a short window of time to operate out of view. He would get back aboard, finish what he had started. He owed Drev that much.

But he could not do it with a damaged escape pod. It would never survive the jolt through the deflectors.

His mind made up, he turned and accelerated toward the unknown ship, hoping the pod's small size would allow it to get lost in Harbinger's sensor shadow as he approached.

He came at the ship from aft, somewhat below its ecliptic plane, and piloted for the docking ring. At best he would get an awkward mating with the pod's universal docking port, but he hoped he could make it last long enough to board the ship. He secured the helmet on his flexsuit, oriented the pod, and piloted it toward the ring.

"I have never seen a signature like this," Marr said, studying the enhanced readout from Junker's sophisticated sensor array. "I am getting odd readings." He tapped a few keys, then shook his head in frustration.

Khedryn examined the readings. "Big ship. Not Reegas. Cruiser size, but that signature is no cruiser I've ever seen. Look at that. One of yours?" he asked Jaden.

Jaden moved to the scope, looked over Marr's shoulder, and studied the ship's erratic signature. "No. And it's not Chiss or Yuuzhan Vong. What is-"

Sudden nausea cut off Jaden's words, made his stomach squirm. Marr put two fingers to his left temple and winced with pain.

"You all right?" Khedryn asked Jaden. "You look a little green. Here, sit."

Jaden nodded, took the seat Khedryn offered. He realized he was sweating. He felt a tingle in his fingertips, the beginning of a discharge of Force lightning. He fought it down, putting the hand in his pocket as if it were a proclamation of his guilt.

"Marr, you all right?" Khedryn asked.

"I am fine," Marr said, but squinted as if at a bright light.

Khedryn tapped the scanner screen. "What are you doing in my sky, big girl? Especially right here, right now?"

Marr shook his head as if to clear it, inhaled. "No hails. Getting closer, Captain."

"Keep us clear of it, Marr. Get us on the other side of the moon if you have to."

"Copy."

"Have they pinged us?"

"No."

"Odd," Khedryn said.

"Perhaps not," Marr said. "The ship is showing a lot of damage. I see fires and decompressed compartments all over it."

"A derelict?" Khedryn asked, brightening, presumably at the possibility of profit.

"No, sir. Lots of living crew aboard."

Jaden fought the nausea, the muscles gone weak, and tried to understand his feelings. He finally recognized the source-the power of the dark side. Having put a name to the problem, he put up a defensive screen and the ill feeling passed immediately. He felt it as a pressure in his mind, but it no longer affected his body.

"Get the ship clear of that cruiser," he said. "Now!"

"What is it?" Khedryn asked.

"Sith," Jaden answered.

"Sith? Get us clear, Marr!" Khedryn glared at Jaden.

"I thought you said this was not a Jedi grand scheme?"

Relin slowed the pod only at the last instant, slamming on the reverse thrusters and hitting the ship in a crush of booming metal. He activated the magnetic seal on the pod's docking port, hoping that it would hold as he scrambled out of his seat and opened the air lock.

He had a tiny leak in the seal between ships-he could hear its hiss, but not see it-but he had some time before the pod would be depressurized and out of oxygen. He left the pod's inner air lock doors open to increase the amount of oxygen in the linkage. His damaged flexsuit would not protect him from a vacuum-Saes's lightsaber had taken off both arm and suit below his left elbow-but it still functioned enough that it would maintain his body temperature for a time.

He double-checked his gear: his lightsaber, a few more mag-grenades, his overrider, and his blaster. Good enough.

He knelt before the other ship's emergency external air lock control panel-the writing used an odd, stylized version of the Galactic Standard alphabet, but he could make it out-and attached his overrider to it. He had to strip the overrider's tines and improvise a connection because the panel's architecture was nonstandard. He activated it and waited, willing the red light to turn green. He figured he'd blow the inner doors with his remaining grenades.

"I had no idea," Jaden protested.

Marr started to bring Junker around when it shook with an impact, knocking Khedryn to his rump and slamming Marr's head against the console. Alarms sounded.

"What was that?" Jaden asked.

"Unknown," Marr said, dabbing at a bleeding gash in his forehead and tapping keys.

"Something hit us," Khedryn said.

"Debris, maybe," Marr said.

"Not debris," Jaden said, and activated his lightsaber.

"What are you doing?" Khedryn said, backing away from the green line of Jaden's saber.

A second alarm rang out. Marr spun in his seat. "Something has attached to the port docking ring. Someone is trying to board us."

"Stang!" Khedryn cursed, and drew his blaster.