Darkest Knight

3

The sleek Shadow Chaser, with its Imperial design and oily-looking quantum armor, glistened in the early-morning sun as Chewbacca piloted it slowly out of the sheltered hangar bay beneath the Great Temple.

Jacen stood next to his sister and Tenel Ka, watching the vessel move under silent power. Considering Lowie’s recent distress, Jacen was glad his uncle Luke had let them take the Shadow Chaser—just the kind of fast, stealthy ship needed for an urgent mission. He was proud that Lowie wanted them along, that he and his sister and Tenel Ka could be of some help to their Wookiee friend.

Lowie stood at the far end of the clearing, motioning with his shaggy arms to direct Chewbacca’s piloting. When the Shadow Chaser came to a halt, its entry ramp extended. Chewbacca stood at the top, gesturing with his cinnamon-furred arms and bellowing.

“Master Chewbacca cordially requests that we all come aboard,” Em Teedee translated, speaking in a wobbly voice as he bounced with each running step Lowie took.

Jacen slung his satchel of belongings over one shoulder. He turned to see if he could offer any assistance to Tenel Ka, but when he saw the determined look in the warrior girl’s gray eyes, he decided he’d be better off if he didn’t ask.

They climbed aboard the Shadow Chaser and waved a brief goodbye to the other students and Tionne, who held up a hand in farewell. Even before the ship was completely sealed and ready to take off, Tionne had ushered the trainees back to their studies. With the threat of the Second Imperium loose in the galaxy, the new Jedi Knights had no time to relax.

With a smooth surge of acceleration, so powerful yet gentle it seemed almost to glide against gravity, the Shadow Chaser aimed its nose upward and arrowed straight into the mist-shrouded skies of the jungle moon.

En route to Kashyyyk, Jacen watched Lowie and Chewbacca in the two front seats of the narrow cockpit as the Shadow Chaser lurched into hyperspace. When the pair spoke rapidly in the Wookiee language, they sounded like two ferocious beasts challenging each other—but Jacen knew it was just a conversation, though he could make out only a few words. Em Teedee had been instructed not to bother translating, so that Lowie and Chewie could have some uninterrupted words in relative privacy.

While his sister tinkered with her multi-tool, disassembling a tiny mechanical gadget she had brought from her workshop on Yavin 4, Jacen took the opportunity to amuse Tenel Ka. He decided that, rather than telling jokes this time, he would explain to the gruff girl why certain things were funny, why she should be laughing at his punch lines—well, some of them, anyway. Jacen had begun to wonder if perhaps the girl simply didn’t understand, and that was why she didn’t laugh.

After all, it couldn’t be that every one of his jokes was bad.

He explained how ridiculous answers to straightforward-sounding questions were supposed to be funny. He showed her how doing unexpected things with food or simple items of clothing might be considered amusing.

Tenel Ka watched him gravely, with full and unwavering attention. But she never cracked a smile.

With a sigh, Jacen told a few of his best jokes, then gave her some of his worst, trying to explain the difference by way of example. Tenel Ka didn’t laugh at either.

In desperation, he considered going to the food-prep unit, ordering a pan of chilled Deneelian fizz-pudding, and then comically tripping so that the entire mess splatted in his face—but by this time, Jacen figured that even such a spectacular pratfall would have no effect on the young warrior woman.

Shaking his head in surrender, Jacen decided to leave Tenel Ka alone. He would occupy himself with something less discouraging for the time being. His spirits instantly perked up as he reached out with Jedi senses and detected something interesting in the back of the Shadow Chaser … the faint glow of a life-form, some creature out of place by the engine compartments. Jacen decided to go snoop. Nobody else was likely to be interested, anyway.

In the shielded rear compartment beyond the sleeping bunks and the food-prep area, Jacen heard the pulsing, pounding thump of engines as the Shadow Chaser sped along through hyperspace. He looked at the intricate control panels and access grids, the weapons batteries charged with spin-sealed Tibanna gas, and the shield generators that projected a canopy of protection around the sleek ship. But through all the din and the vibrating power of the engines, Jacen could still detect the faint emanations of some small creature, lost and frightened.

“Don’t be scared,” Jacen said, speaking with his voice and at the same time thinking the words through the Force. “I’m your friend. I can help you. Let me see you. It’s okay.”

He lowered his voice to a whisper as he bent down, looking in crannies between the control grids. He followed his senses. “I won’t hurt you. I just want to see you. I know you’re afraid. You can trust me.” He touched his fingers lightly to one of the cool metal access panels, gently brushing the ion shield generators with his mind.

He sensed the creature hiding back there, trembling, guarding something. A little nest?

“It’s just me,” Jacen said. “Relax. I’ll take care of you.”

He popped the metal covering off the access panel to the ion shield generator. Inside, in a comfortable little pocket of colorful debris, cowered a furry eight-legged rodent, a mouselike creature with puffy frost-gray fur. It looked up at him with tiny black eyes that glittered in the dim light. It wiggled its damp nose. Judging by the pair of long teeth that protruded from the center of its snout, this rodent was a gnawer, not a flesh eater.

“Come here,” Jacen said. “That’s not a safe place for you to be.” He reached in and calmly drew the rodent out. Its eight legs trembled and tickled against his palm like a plump furry spider, but a friendly and gentle one.

Jacen stroked its back, then bent to peer at the nest again. The rodent had chewed tiny strips of insulation from the power cables, yanked threads and wires and fabrics and plastics from the shield generator to create a soft pocket in which squirmed four smooth cylindrical grubs, the creature’s young.

“Oh, what a nice nest you have,” Jacen said soothingly. “But I don’t think you were supposed to use those components. We need this ion shield generator, you know. It protects the whole ship.”

He continued stroking the rodent and retrieved the nest carefully so as not to disturb the young. He held the nest in his hand and placed the mother back on top, snuggled against her little ones. “I’ll keep you safe,” Jacen said, “but we’ll have to tell Jaina and Lowie about this, so they can make repairs.”

Preoccupied with calming his new pet, Jacen returned to the forward compartments. He went to his sister who was still tinkering with an incomprehensible mechanical gadget. “Hey, Jaina? I’ve got some bad news.”

She turned, holding up a small hydrospanner. “What?”

Before he could answer, though, the Shadow Chaser gave a sudden lurch and rocked as if it had slammed into something invisible. The deck tilted sideways, throwing Jacen to his knees. He struggled to protect his new pet.

The colors of hyperspace swirled like a psychedelic flood in all directions out the windowports. When the Shadow Chaser gave another violent lurch, Jacen tumbled backward to the deck; it took all his concentration to guard the precious nest.

“Uh, never mind,” he said. “It can wait.”

Jaina gripped the armrests of her seat while the ship rocked back and forth. Her tools and the electronic di-scanner remote she had just repaired flew like projectiles to the bulkheads, then smashed onto the deck-plates, ruined.

When the ship momentarily stabilized, her brother crawled to his feet, cradling something in one arm, his hair even more tousled than usual. He checked to make sure Tenel Ka was okay. The warrior girl stood up, planting her booted feet wide apart, seeking balance as the Shadow Chaser shuddered and bucked its way through the disturbance.

“What is happening?” Tenel Ka said.

Ahead in the cockpit, Lowie and Chewbacca roared to each other, fighting the controls.

“An ion storm?” Em Teedee chimed in with an electronic wail. “Are you absolutely certain? We’re doomed!”

Jaina’s lips pressed into a tight, grim line. “It’s an ion storm, all right. Just bad luck. Couldn’t predict this. We plotted the shortest path to Kashyyyk using the navicomputer. The on-line catalogs only display stable astronomical hazards—star clusters, black holes, and high-energy nebulas—but ion storms come and go. They don’t have any set position, but they sure ripple up hyperspace when you pass through ’em.”

“Is it serious?” Jacen asked. Droplets of sweat broke out on his brow. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“Just have to wait and see,” Jaina said.

Tenel Ka stood with her hand to her utility belt, ready to fight some tangible foe with a throwing knife, her lightsaber, even her fibercord. But none of those would do any good against an ion storm.

Chewbacca and Lowie grappled with the controls, hairy fingers flying over panels, yanking levers. The Shadow Chaser winked out of hyperspace and lurched back into the fringes of the furious ion storm.

“Uh-oh,” Jacen said. “I forgot to tell you that we might have some damage to our ion shield generator.” He held up the nested bundle of wires and insulation.

Jaina whirled, more worried than ever. “Oh, no! That could—”

As the Shadow Chaser plummeted into the space storm, they were immediately surrounded by a spiderweb of high-energy lightning bolts, powerful discharges that arched across the seething knot of hot gas that formed the unexpected interstellar hurricane. The ship thrashed like a mad bantha, throwing its passengers about.

Jacen braced his shoulder against a control bar, and Tenel Ka fell into him. He held the warrior girl upright, pinning both of them against the wall, still cradling his newfound pet in one hand. Jaina, trying to struggle toward the cockpit, fell flat on her face.

The Shadow Chaser’s rear engines kicked in, and the sublight drive heaved them away from the rippling ion cloud. In the pilot seat Chewbacca groaned, gripping the controls and wrestling to keep them on a straight course, the shortest path out of danger.

Lowie cried out as fingernails of icy blue electricity skittered across the control panels, burning out subsystem after subsystem.

Behind the back bulkheads, the straining ion shield generators squealed loudly in surrender. Then, with a loud bang, they fell silent.

The rippling colors dwindled outside the cockpit window, and the Shadow Chaser careened onward, spiraling out into open space, safe at last from the storm. Still, Jaina shuddered to think of how much damage the stray ion bursts must have caused.

Jacen brushed himself off and forced a lopsided grin. “Now, uh, as I was saying about that damage to the ion shields …” He held out the eight-legged rodent, which cowered in her nest, as if she comprehended the trouble she had caused. “I found this critter’s nest in the machinery. I took her out, but I needed one of you to fix the damage.”

“It would appear that we now have plenty of time to fix it,” Tenel Ka said. “We are capable of fixing it, are we not?”

From the cockpit Lowie and Chewie consulted in growling voices.

“Oh, excellent!” Em Teedee said. “Master Lowbacca says we have been quite lucky. Our propulsion and life-support systems are largely intact and can be repaired quite easily. My, that is wonderful news.”

Em Teedee fell silent as the Wookiees continued, and then the little droid piped up. “Excuse me—what did you say, Master Lowbacca? Oh dear! It seems, however, that our navicomputer has been completely disabled. We have lost all coordinates for getting from here to anywhere else. Oh my. We’re … we’re lost in space.”

Chewbacca and Lowie both roared in outrage at the translating droid, and Em Teedee quickly fell silent. “Well, I suppose I should find it comforting that you both have such confidence in your navigational abilities,” Em Teedee muttered after a moment.

The two Wookiees busily consulted with each other and began punching and programming numerical values into the navigational control panel, double-checking each other’s calculations. Before long, after everyone had helped with temporary repairs, the Shadow Chaser was on its way again.

At first Jaina was surprised that they were back on course—then she realized that she shouldn’t have been. After all, Kashyyyk was the only Wookiee planet, and both Lowie and Chewbacca greatly revered the place.

Why should she find it unusual that they had both memorized the coordinates for their homeworld?