The Jedi Purge
Chapter 5
Corona
The Mendez was an impressive sight, seen for the first time. Twenty eight meters of metal and power, tall as a three story building, all weighing two hundred and twenty nine tons with the power to kick it's own weight to the stars.
It was less impressive seen from the inside. Especially after three consecutive days.
Starlight from the magnificent vista of hyperspace painted the flight-deck in a thousand tones of gray and silver and blue. It gave the cramped compartment the illusion of being a wide open space. Petri, sitting in the co-pilot's seat, looked like a titan.
He had taken to coming here at night, when he couldn't sleep, or when he needed to get away from his friends. Three days they had been sealed up in this metal can, waiting to get to a major trade route. Waiting to be safe.
Petri took his helmet in one hand. He always wore his armour for a least three hours every day. Usually longer. He worked out slavishly the first day of the journey. Push ups, target practice, unarmed combat, all wearing his armour. The second day he had done his usual exercises, but lounged about afterwards wearing nothing but his body suit.
Today he had put on his armour, walked into the recreation room and found Kelly, Chainy and Vath, arguing over star charts. He'd gone straight there and had no intention of leaving for at least two hours. Until Chainy spoke up, that is.
"We need your vote to decide where we're going." he said. "It's not much of a choice, but you know Kelly and the rest of those drongos. Show them a double headed coin and they'd still call tails."
"Forget it. I'll vote with the majority." If Chainy's nose was out of joint, too bad. Petri was staying well out of it.
"Ah, don't say that." Chainy did something with the navi-station. Harsh primary colours danced in the air.
The galaxy was easily recognizable; the stars flickered in their natural colours. A single wire frame box surrounded two hundred stars, amongst which there were just fifty that someone might call a sun.
The box, representing the Gothstein sector, swelled to take up the space of the galaxy map. The process was repeated until the a mere half dozen suns were displayed in a cube of air the width of a man's chest. It seemed to be ribbed with green pipes, running between inhabited worlds like blood vessels.
In one vain crawled a tiny, red, corpuscle-like dot. That was them. Two yellow dots followed, a little way behind them. These were customs cruisers. They had been followed from Ordian by the local stellar guard.
The guard's duties were normally to stop and search approaching ships, but these had been tenacious. They would be working with the Imperial navy. That meant there would be a couple of navy ships filling in for them, back home. Anyone trying to run the frontier would be lucky not be blasted to ash.
"See? This is where we are, just here." Chainy pointed to a stretch of green, about five centimetres long. It branched onto a larger hyperspace route about a centimeter from where they were.
A centimetre. Petri blinked behind his visor. They had roughly half a light year to go, then. There were three light years between most stars, but only one in five had planets. Those stars were marked with green arrows to warn of the danger they posed to a ship in hyperspace. Inhabited or not, a million, million, million tons of rock can cause a big enough dent in the universe to knock any ship out of hyperspace.
There had been fifteen light years ahead of them at the beginning of their journey; Petri knew, he'd checked. In this tired, old ship they could travel about a light year a day.
In twelve hours they would reach the junction. A tiny spot was there, waiting for them. It was bright purple, which meant it could only be an Imperial Navy ship.
"A mass projector ship?" he asked, knowing the answer already.
"Yeah. Sneaky things those. Nasty. Nothing else like them for snatching a ship out of hyper-space. Nasty." Chainy spoke with all the horror and disgust of a smuggler faced with an unbeatable blockade.
Listening to him filled Petri with concern. If Chainy saw the blockade ship as such a hazard, they could be in trouble.
"So what are our choices?" he prompted.
"Not many. We've got to leave the shipping lanes. Cut across this corner, here, like I told them."
Ah. Here we went. Into I'm not going to be out-voted land.
"What do the others want to do?"
"Well, Mos agrees with me, of course. But Kelly had some wild idea about switching off the marker beacon and turning the ship around."
"Turning off the marker beacon sounds like a good idea."
"It does, until you realise that it can't be done while we're in hyper-space."
Uh-oh.
"That means we'd have to enter real-space." Nobody needed to hear what that meant. Petri knew that while in real-space the pursuing ships would gain on them. "How long would it take?" he asked.
"Vath says two hours. Mos told him thirty minutes, but there aren't any suits in his size and whoever does the job'll have to go outside."
"I meant for them to catch up."
"Oh. That. Hour and a half, Vath reckons. I think a bit longer, myself. Mind you, he's done the work."
Vath would be right then. No matter what Chainy's first impression was. He use to be a good smuggler, Petri thought. If he made a habit of trusting to instinct as much as he seemed to, it was no surprise he'd been forced to retire. It might also explain why he was so nervous all the time.
"Could we interrupt the work and re-enter hyper-space?"
"No. The beacon's wired into the communications antenna and the hyper-drive motivator, plus a whole slew of safety systems. They have to be disengaged, as well."
"So how come the others voted to do it?"
"Who said they did?" Chainy looked genuinely hurt. Petri could see the man's thoughts turning behind his eyes, guessing at Petri's assumptions. The bounty hunter sighed and pulled off his helmet.
"Why bring it up if they didn't?"
"The beacon allows them to see us. It'll still allow them to see us, whether we're following the hyper-space lanes or jay-walking."
"And they'll know they're following a safe path, because we'll have tried it for them." Completed Petri.
"Worse, we'd have to slow down. Only way to make sure the way ahead's clear. They'd know it was."
The bounty hunter's face twisted in disgust. "Sounds like they get us either way."
"We don't have any weapons on board. We could hardly make a fight of it."
Petri's eyes flash furiously at Chainy. They were filled with a dreadful, awful hate and Chainy knew that hate could be fuelled by only one thing. Fear.
"Could we?" pressed Chainy.
"I'm a bounty hunter. I won't be at the mercy of convicts. Ever."
"The only other alternative is to deal with them in real-space."
"Fine. We do that."
"There aren't any weapons."
"We'll wait until they board to arrest us." Petri felt wild now. He thought he was hiding it, but he came across like he had taken the bad news as a personal insult.
"That's no good. Even if we win, their ship'll just blow a hole in our hull."
"Well, we'd better do something; because I'm not going quietly."
*
The Mendez appeared in the night as though it had merely slipped out of a shadow. It's bow was bathed in the blue-white leer of a young and searing sun. The flight deck window was dark to prevent the instant blinding of the pilots.
The troublesome hyper-space beacon had fallen silent, starved of power from the star-drive. That meant the pursuing ships could no longer see their quarry, just a flickering marker on their navigation displays to mark the point where Vath and cut the hyperspace engines.
Chainy was drifting weightless outside the ship within moments. He was tethered by the single silver thread of his safety line, his only anchor to something solid.
Chainy looked into the void that surrounded him, lonely and distant. For three days he had lived on the echoing metal deck of the Mendez. Now the hollow shell beneath him seemed the solid and reassuring, compared to the distant and indifferent stars.
*
"I've got another one." Kelly leant over the sensor panel, it's garish neon colours branding him with their advertising shades.
"No good." Vath told him. "A comet is just so much powdered ice. We need something solid. Substantial. Planet, asteroid, something like that. Anything dense with a lot of metal atoms will do."
"This star's too young for what we need."
"Keep looking."
The door to the flight deck wheezed open, allowing Petri to scowl at them. The bounty hunter had his mask on, but Kelly could scent his fear, even through carbon alloy harder than diamond.
"Seven minutes gone. Why aren't we moving?"
"We haven't found somewhere to move to..." Began Vath.
"I don't care. We should be moving! I don't want to be just sitting here when they show up."
Silence. Kelly winced as Petri clamped down hard on his feelings and his voice. They could hardly start the engines with Chainy on the outside of the ship.
"Why aren't you manning the gunner's chair?" Kelly tried to make it sound casual. If Petri decided his erstwhile prisoner was playing leader again, he might pick a fight. Ordinarily, Kelly would have encouraged Petri to relax, and if that meant swapping punches so be it. But now he had work to do. Petri would have to keep.
"Do you have a position on those customs ships?" Petri demanded. He ignored Kelly's question as though it were background noise.
We're back to that, are we? Kelly thought to himself. He made himself concentrate on the display until he thought his eyes would burn a hole in it.
Kelly leant back from the sensor console. "I've found a protoplanet five hours by C away."
"Too far."
"We could use the hyper-drive?"
Petri slammed his hands against the bulkhead. The blow crashed in the confined space, an ugly sound. "I'm tired of wasting time!" He shouted and with that, he stormed out.
Vath and Kelly looked at each other. Vath seemed unnerved. He had known Petri for only a few days, so Vath couldn't know whether this was normal behaviour.
"He's not going to do anything stupid, is he?" Vath asked.
"I haven't known him that long myself." Excused Kelly. "But he's right, you know. It wasn't like this when we worked together. We just decided what we wanted and did it."
"So what's different?"
"I don't know. Before, I saw every thing so clearly. It was like knowing what everyone else was going to say before they did."
"They said you were a jedi. Is that one of your tricks?"
Kelly didn't answer. He didn't know. The only teacher Kelly had ever known had been executed. It had been Petri who turned him over for execution. That thought sent a wave of resentment through his body like a drug.
He had been holding back for days and now that vital emotional energy set him free from all concerns. When he forced himself to return to the sensor sweep, his anger fuelled him, drove him; until his stare threatened to burn through the display.
A memory came to him.
His teacher, Avilard, close to the beginning of their association. Kelly had come to him, sick with anger at the un-fairness of the world. Dan had told him: "Don't look for fairness in the world. Look for it in yourself and apply it to those around you."
As he worked on the sensors, looking for a place to hide, more and more gradually came back to him.
The first time Dan Avilard had mentioned the force they had been sitting under a dead tree. It had been alive the first time Kelly had climbed it, as a child, but pollution from the nearby factory had withered it. Over the preceding months the old man had weaned Kelly of his simmering hate and resentment.
"The universe is a living thing, Kelly." The old man told his student. "The force is it's spirit, it's life energy. It grows when it is used in the name of good, to protect life. We have it in ourselves to reach out and touch this force. To shape it how we chose, to do what we will."
Kelly smiled. The time he had spent with the old man had been the turning point in his life and he would always be grateful for it.
*
Chainy waited for the airlock door to open. He hated that. He was the impatient type, and he always worried that something would short out and leave him stuck in there.
The door opened with an alarming stutter. Mos was sitting cross legged on the other side, waiting to talk to him. He stared at his former captain with tiny glowing eyes, a look of quiet contemplation on his withered, ancient face.
"We must talk." the engineer said.
"Oh? We've already tried a lot of that and it didn't get us anywhere." Chainy observed, bitterly.
"We must talk about the future."
"Got a little crystal ball, have you? Oh well, at least someone's sure we've got a future."
Petri's boots rang against the metal deck gratings. He passed between the two of them without appearing to notice either, but behind his carbonite death-mask it was hard to tell.
"I'm getting morbid." Chainy told the engineer.
"That is what pessimism does for you." Mos replied.
"And you have something optimistic to tell me." Chainy stepped out of the airlock and began to remove the space-suit.
"Things are no longer as they were on Ordia."
"Going to pieces, you mean? I noticed that." Going to pieces. That was what it felt like; as if they were separate, broken pieces from a single thing. "I just can't figure it out. Back then everything was going perfectly. Now it's like we can't agree which room to argue in."
"It was the jedi. We were spokes in his wheel."
"Oh. Pulling our strings, you mean? Yeah, reckon that fits. I never could see me and Petri working together and me going to Karo-Than, that was taking a real chance."
"You no longer work together, yet we are all taking a greater chance than before."
"There's nothing I can do about it. If Kelly was forcing us to work together, how come he's stopped? He's in as much danger as the rest of us. And why didn't he make Petri let him go? Let them both go, before the old man was executed."
Mos twisted the hem of his robe in his hands. He didn't know.
"I'll go and talk to him." Chainy told his engineer. "Take care of my space suit."
The bridge door slid open faster and smoother than the airlock door. It left Chainy standing there, speechless. When he collected his thoughts he voiced, gently: "I was wondering if I might have a word, Kelly; in private, like."
Kelly glanced at the captain of the Mendez. Then he rose and followed Chainy into the corridor.
Outside, Chainy turned and stared piercingly at Kelly. "Did you use your powers to manipulate us on Ordia?" the ex-smuggler demanded with all his will. As he had hoped, the change of speed threw Kelly off balance.
"Not directly."
"That means yes."
Kelly hung on the edge of saying the wrong thing and he knew it. His dismay showed on his face.
"Don't get the wrong idea." Chainy told him. "I mean, you got us out of there, so your alright in my book." His voice cringed in apprehension. It was a stinging reminder. Kelly had seen people look at his teacher with terror, fear, mistrust; none of which his master had earned. For twenty millennia the Jedi had been the backbone of all that was good, now that was forgotten for the atrocities committed by a handful of renegades.
"I meant no harm." Kelly confessed, turning away. When he spoke it was hesitatingly, as though he doubted his own word. "I didn't manipulate you; not in the way you mean. It was so easy to - imagine a safe path through the argument."
"Well, what difference could that have made? You must have done something, other than that, I mean."
"Normally people are saying the wrong thing, or ignoring something important. They never get on as well as they might. I helped us to understand each other."
Chainy thought about it, planting his fists against a bulkhead and trying to shut the world out until he had figured everything out. Even Kelly's composure had been broken. Instead of serene he seemed helpless; despairing.
Eventually Chainy spoke. "You know, thinking back it does seem odd, how I could suddenly understand Mos's body language. I can't do that normally." he took a deep breath. "Look, friend, we need a way out of this and we need it fast. If you've got something up your sleeve you've got to pull it out, no two ways about it."
"I know. Look, you're a smuggler. Aren't there any dodges we could use?"
"We have to find something to hide behind and disable the hyper-space beacon. Preferably group of somethings, because it gives the people looking for us more choice."
Shrieking alarms cut the air between them. Their flesh crawled as if their nerves were being grated. It could only mean the worst. Together they hurled through the cockpit door, expecting to see disaster bearing down.
Vath heard them coming. "Customs ships. Bearing down at us, nine point four oh." he yelled.
"Range?" Kelly yelled as he flew at his control chair.
"Point oh-seven eight seconds by C."
Roughly a hundred and fifty thousand miles. Like most star-ships, the customs cruisers were absurdly dependent on their hyper-space drive. If the crew of the Mendez were lucky they might have time to say a prayer...
"One minute seventeen seconds. Less if they decide to pull a micro-jump."
Micro-jumps. Now they were risky. Close things are always hard to navigate, and as far as a hyper-space navigation's concerned there isn't much difference between one mile and a million. Often times it was faster just to wait for the ship to get there on it's own, real-space style...
Chainy read the screen without sitting. "Oh no. No, no, no." his words running together from his panic.
"They weren't going fast enough. They can't be here." Vath yelled over his shoulder. His eyes were wide and pleading. He hadn't asked for this.
Chainy pulled the last few hours from the computer log. His lips thinned. "I knew I should have checked things out myself. You thought they were following us at their best speed. They weren't. They were just tracking."
"Sixty seconds. They won't pull a micro-jump. Unless their navigator's something else, it'd take half an hour to do the maths."
"They're closing. We've no where to go."
Vath had reached the limits of his experience. He looked back at Chainy with something approaching desperation on his face. "Is there anything we can do? I'm open to suggestions."
The ex-smuggler pulled himself into the co-pilot seat. The controls were like strangers to him; for a moment he remembered his own star-ship, the "Stag party". That part of himself was dead now, captured and destroyed.
Sacrificed to throw the police off the trail.
Chainy ran his gaze across the controls, feeling unfaithful as he did. It was like betraying a lover; or the memory of one.
They were in a bad situation and he knew it. No reason not to let the others know it as well. He slapped the intercom button.
"There are two cruisers coming in, we're going to try and keep some distance between them and us. Hold tight, everybody."
Reaching out like he was about to touch a woman, Chainy took the controls in hand. The Mendez was a working ship and it's controls were all sturdy metal limbs, like you might find in something that belonged in an iron foundry. Gently, he eased two of them forward. Despite their heavy appearance they moved smoothly.
Chainy didn't know what the Mendez could do but he guessed it would be about half the acceleration of the customs ships, which gave them thirty seconds in which to surrender, fight or do something that would save their hides.
*
Petri's grip on the gunner's joystick was tight enough to make the plastic creak. Vath had grafted the new system into the bare ribs of the craft with little or no skill and less respect for the technology that preserved his life. There was no strong protecting metal here, just cheap plastic and bad wiring.
The bounty hunter was in the gunner's chair, facing the transparent alloy that stood between him and the hard vacuum of space. It was called the gunner's punch-bowl, a dome through which you could see enemy ships even with your sensors gone and your tracking computer on fire. It's view was incredible, one of the most written about things in space.
But Petri wasn't admiring the stars. His body canned and hidden in armour plating, lit up by the sharp light of the nearby star; he stared into that furnace, taking it for granted that the filters in the gunner's canopy and his helmet's visor would take care of all the harmful rays.
His memory had turned to his father and the days when the old man had slouched in his chair after a hard day's casual labour. In the evenings, Petri's mother would go out to work in the hospital, and his father would choke back a couple of beers with his son at his feet. And sometimes he would tell stories. They were hard stories, meant to make the boy hard, so he could take care of himself in a bad world. At least, that was what his father said when mother came home and started shouting.
As Petri grew up the stories seemed all the harder because, occasionally, he learned that they were true. He remembered the stories about prison, especially.
He hadn't believed they were true. When he was little.
But the last time he had seen his father had been between two huge policemen and the look on his suddenly shrunken, deflated parent was enough to convince him.
Life in any ghetto is hard. Without both parents it is often impossible. Petri and his mother had got by, until someone found out that drugs were going missing from the hospital. That someone had been Rennie, who swiftly became mother's new boyfriend. He had moved in and a brittle tension had moved him with him.
It hadn't lasted long.
Rennie had been found in a stairwell with a hole in one lung and story about Petri's mother on his lips. The black market slug-thrower was found in their apartment. That was all it took.
When Chainy's voice crackled over the speakers the message it brought sent a sick tidal wave of fear through him. Petri controlled the fear, as he had all his life. He reached for the super-clarity of a professional, someone who spent their life getting ready for the next battle, but all that came to him was the battle rage he had felt facing the government enforcers on Ordia.
Jerking the guns round to bear on the incoming ships, the bounty hunter felt the inside of his mask pressing against his face. It shocked him. It was the first time the mask had felt like anything other than a part of him. That was the way he had always thought of it; another face, belonging to someone strong, someone invincible. He didn't feel that way now. Cold sweat clung to his skin like ice.
The cruisers were closing on the runaway starship, their sub-light engines chewing up the space between them. The Mendez screamed through the void at half their speed like a woman in high heeled shoes running from a gang of muggers.
The flight deck was choked by a panicked babble of voices. Kelly ran some figures through his computer and came up with an answer that wasn't high enough. The cruisers were accelerating at terrifying rate, in fifty seconds they would be travelling at half the speed of light. Their own starship wouldn't reach such a velocity for another two minutes.
Kelly quickly reviewed what he knew about most starships. Anything capable of hyperspace was powered by a nuclear reactor, which was shielded both by containment fields and high density alloys. Landing on a planet required repulsor lift, because that was the smoothest way to negotiate a powerful gravity well. At the moment the customs ships were running on their sub-light drives, which were capable of about a hundredth of the hyperspace coil's output.
The hyperspace coils got their power from the sub-light drives in the form of a superheated plasma. As soon the hyperspace motivator sent a stream of electrons coursing through the super-conducting metals, a energy field sprung up around the sub-light engines.
As the highly charged ions from the sub-light engine cut across it two things happened. The ions slowed and the hyperspace coils lifted the ship into another dimension called hyperspace, where light travels at C squared. No ship could reach C squared, but even a tenth of that speed could cover a light year in half a day.
Kelly's display screen flickered to the tune of incoming data. He interpreted the diagrams and their multi-coloured labels at a glance and summed up what they told him in one short phrase. "Hull sensors are picking up high density scans." He told the others.
Up front, Chainy rasped a dry tongue across his lips and tried to speak. His nerves were showing. Worse than they had been in ages, it was all too obvious why he had been forced out of the smuggling game. "They must be trying to get a weapons lock. How long before they're in range?"
"They're already in range." Kelly replied.
"They can't be! They'd be firing at us if they were in range!" If anything, Vath's nerves were worse than Chainy's.
"Not if their weapons weren't fully charged. They just dropped out of hyperspace, their power might be running a little low." The ex-smuggler replied.
Vath was not the only one who seemed amazed. "What, they do that? Drop out of hyperspace without protection or anything?"
"That's what they're carrying missiles for."
"Missiles!?" Vath was incoherent now. "Oh, I should've stayed on Ordia. At least I could have been buried if anything happened to me there!"
"If they've got missiles, why aren't they using them?"
"They still need a lock-on. Missiles are slow and clumsy, if you don't show them what they suppose to be chasing real good, they're liable to go looking for something better."
"If they're so slow, can't we out run them?"
"They aren't that slow." Chainy said, darkly.
Kelly had little hope of achieving anything at the sensor station, but the same terminal served the navigation computer. There was just a chance that he could navigate a safe course out of the system, one that would buy them enough time to think of a way out of this.
He began number crunching, hitting keys like unfaithful lovers. His fingers sure and decisive, the computer refused to play the game. Vath had stuck by the tried and true routes since he first took to the stars, he had seen no reason to splash out on a new data base containing alternative routes. Without the data on this system the navigation computer only had the RAM data from Kelly's sensor sweep to go on.
It wasn't enough.
The computer was wasting time and Kelly knew it. It was spending time justifying tenuous deductions where a human would have just made best guesses. He could almost see the numbers before the computer made them appear. And suddenly, quite suddenly, without realising how he was doing it, he knew what the answer would be when it was finished.
He began hitting overrides without questioning it, let the impulse take him like a surfer riding his chosen wave. He reached the conclusion suddenly, starting back from the key board as he realised there was nothing left to type.
Turning to their pilot, he said: "Course computed. Hit it."
Chainy looked round at him, amazed, and the hull rocked like ocean trawler in high seas. The first blaster bolt had reached across ninety thousand miles and touched them like a giant hand slapping a child's face. His options expired, the ex-smuggler turned back to the controls. With one hand he reached out to the lever that could send them through light-years of empty space or into the heart of a sun.
The stars blurred together and ran like melting butter. Hyperspace twisted before them, a receding spiral of light and dark, lasting forever and stretching out as far as they could see. There was the sudden brief shock of entering another universe, just as there always was.
Then, as quickly as it came, the hyperspace tunnel vanished.
Chainy watched the flight deck canopy go dark, then black, in less time than it took for his heart to lurch into his mouth. A sun raced towards them, gigantic and swollen, and for the first time ever Chainy felt like he was falling instead of slowing down. Behind him Kelly dived for the shield controls.
Vath's voice rose in a drawn out cry of terror. Kelly sensed the intensity of his fear the same way another man might feel a rise in room temperature. Speaking of which, the confines of the cockpit had suddenly become hotter than a dry heat sauna. Kelly's lightning navigation had brought them close to the blue dwarf sun. Closer than anyone had ever been to it, in fact.
From the flight deck it filled half their field of vision, blinding them even through the polarized canopy. Giant ribbons of star-fire arched through the sun's magnetic field towards them. With mounting horror Chainy saw the ribbons soared higher than the ship had climbed. Beautiful and devastating, the slightest touch from one arching coil of plasma would cremate them in a flash.
Chainy knew that even if he pulled the Mendez away from it's suicidal dive and shook off the sun's magnetic field, they would still face the challenge of getting past the two customs ships that had been chasing them; which would very likely end with them stranded on a prison planet for twenty years.
Feeling the controls shiver against his demands, he tried to concentrate on what it would be like spending the next two decades tied to the ground. The grubby soil of some hostile alien planet shrugging off his efforts to eke a living out of it. It felt good.
It took his mind off the solar flares.
A single bridge of golden fire rolled towards them. In a second it would reach them and they would be erased, atomized in the blink of an eye.
Chainy increased the angle of their climb. Multiple Gee-forces settled on the crew like a lead blanket. The internal gravity field began to lose it's grip. Behind him, Chainy heard Vath crash to the floor.
Vath clutched his knee with hands the weight of sledgehammers. He could feel it swelling already, and was suddenly grateful he wouldn't have to live with the injury until it healed.
"We're not going to make it!" Kelly yelled.
Chainy heard him and knew he was right. The solar flare was closing on them like a tidal wave heading for a beach. It was growing larger by the heartbeat and Chainy's heart was beating so fast it was ready to explode.
He had thought solar flares were beautiful, once.
Hyperspace, exploding stars and ion storms, it had all been part of the wild beauty of space back at the academy. Who cared if looking at it gave you radiation poisoning? You were free in the only way that counted.
The plasma stream filled the flight deck windscreen, a river of death a thousand miles wide. Chainy tried to wet his lips with a tongue as dry as sand paper and remembered spending the night in a planetarium, a girl with suntanned legs watching the stars turn beside him.
Looking back, he had preferred it when the solar flares were nothing more than an explosive display of what happened when a gas got too hot to hang on to it's electrons.
"You're going to hit it!" Kelly yelled again. "We can't climb fast enough."
"There's no choice." Chainy rasped, his throat cracked. "We have to get over it."
"We can't! There's only one chance and that's to go under it. You have to dive, Chainy!" Chainy twisted to look back at Kelly, his eyes wide with disbelief. The Jedi's face was strained with tension, but there was no denying the conviction in his eyes.
Chainy twisted the control yoke hard right before he had finished turning back from Kelly. The sun's gravity began working for them, instead of threatening to tear the ship apart. Rolling the Mendez over meant that the flight deck was angled away from the wall of plasma. Even the true surface of the sun a million miles below was dim by comparison.
The solar flare rolled towards them as though they were a speck of dust in a giant eye, waiting to be swept away. Then, in an instant, it was upon them.
*
The customs ship "Leopard" reverted to normal space in a micro-second. It's hull surfaces were a glaring, incandescent gold in the relentless hurricane of light.
Inside, Captain Alverez gave thanks that the livery of the Cassandra Customs Patrol was white and gold. Until it burned off, the paint would reflect most of the energy that was pouring into the ship. Already, the air on the bridge was nearly too hot to breath.
Lieutenant Marks was holding his arm gingerly with a pained expression on his face. He had been leaning against the now black view-shield when the ship came out of hyperspace; the transparent alloy had heated up so quickly he hadn't had time to pull away. Damn him, Alverez scowled, just when he was needed.
"Helm, locator lock on the target ship." the Captain barked. "Someone man Marks' station, find out whether the other ships made it out safely."
There had been three customs ships in the pursuit party, flying in a flat triangle formation and Alverez knew the lead ship would have had less warning than them. He glanced across at Marks who, baring his teeth in pain, returned to the sensor/communications board.
Lieutenant Bix turned in his chair so he could look at the captain. "The target ship re-entered real-space at five mark seven range,... range ten CS, sir. That puts them inside the sun's corona."
Captain Alverez's face grew taut. He had no sympathy for smugglers, but no one who made their living in space could welcome the news that someone had fallen prey to it's hazards. "All stations;" he said gruffly, "status report."
It took half a minute to get all the reports in. By that time Lieutenant Marks had regained contact with one of the other ships and a start had been made on hauling the lead ship clear of the sun's lethal radiation. It would be a long slow job using the tractor beams, but the Leopard had enough shield power left to protect it's own crew at least.
*
The Mendez hurtled around the sun in an incredibly tight orbit. Its sensors and its communications systems had blown out almost before Chainy had finished pulling them out of their crash dive. It's shields had been pushed to maximum the moment Kelly realised where they were. Even now they were being stripped away by the searing light and even more deadly radiation that threatened to swamp the ship.
Petri blundered his way out of the access tunnel that led to the ship's ventricle blaster station. The lighting strips that normally guided the gunners to their cramped compartment had been blown out by the first scorching wave of energy that hit the ship. He lay where he was for a moment, on the corridor floor in his blast proof armour, his legs in the access-way dangling over the gunner's cradle. He was exhausted.
On the flight deck the alarms had stopped. When the plasma streamer had passed overhead Chainy had gasped like a man in the last moments of sexual intercourse. Three seconds after he hit the alarm reset button the communications panel on his right exploded. Vath was weeping and cursing at the same time as he broke out the fire extinguisher and turned it on the smoking console.
Kelly was shunting all the power he could get to the shields, buying them another few minutes before the Mendez took the full force of the sun's rage. When the shields failed the ship would swell up and burst like a bubble of spit in a frying pan.
Then the lights went out, plunging the whole ship and the crew who were struggling desperately to save it, into darkness.
*
Captain Alverez looked down at the instrument readings, forcing the young officer manning the station to hunch down in his seat.
"Hm. That shouldn't have happened." Alverez said, as the readings replayed the last moments before the accident.
"Uh, what shouldn't have?" The young officer hated having someone read over his shoulders. "Sir." he added.
"Right there. Where we used our forward tracking array to follow them. Why didn't it pick up the danger before they did? Our system's better."
"Well sir, I'd have to guess, but a starship's hyperspace wake creates allot of distortion. We were so close behind them, we could have missed something further away."
"Like a medium sized star, for example."
"Um, it's not really medium sized, sir. It's a dwarf, at best."
"When I want a lesson in astronomy I'll call you, Ensign Cordo. But since I want a competent hyperspace pilot just now I'll talk to your replacement."
Shock, dismay and embarrassment crossed Cordo's face in quick succession. Before he could give voice to any of them, Alverez had walked away.
"What's the delay?" Alverez demanded of another officer. "We should be getting the Orion's crew off by now."
"It's the Orion's captain, sir. He says his crew's staying with the ship, sir."
"The hell they are. Let me speak to him." Alverez reached past Marks to the communications board. "Bridewell? This is Alverez. What's this nonsense about your crew not abandoning ship?"
"I'll thank you not to call my command decisions 'nonsense', Captain Alverez. Your direction to abandon ship was given without full possession of the facts, and without respect for the chain of command."
Alverez ground his teeth before speaking. "Captain Bridewell, I must remind you of field directive 143, governing the passing of command in emergency conditions. When the lead ship of a pursuit formation is incapacitated command passes to the most experienced ranking officer in the area."
"That hardly justifies discarding a serviceable ship out of panic."
"I wouldn't call your ship serviceable, Bridewell. In fact I'd say it was only barely viable and, as I'm the officer in charge here, I'd say what I would and wouldn't call your ship goes straight to the heart of the matter, wouldn't you?"
"We only require fourteen hours work to achieve acceptable operational levels."
"You don't have fourteen hours, I'm only willing to give you fourteen minutes. We don't have enough shield power to maintain our position here for that long."
"If we maintain our current course and heading for seventy minutes, the radiation will be sufficiently reduced for us to complete our basic repairs before the shield power is exhausted."
"Yes, if we run the shields at low power and except higher levels of neutron bombardment. I'm not prepared to expose my crew to that kind of hazard."
"Not prepared! What about the radiation my crew will soak up while they're transferring to another ship?"
"Captain Bridewell, I am no longer prepared to discuss this. I expect you and all your crew to be on board in thirteen minutes. After that I'll order the Orion turned loose and anyone still on board her can take their chances. Without the protection of our shields I doubt they'll last long." Alverez snapped the channel closed with a vicious twist of his hand and stalked up to the command station.
Bridewell was a stubborn young fool who had been in space for half the time he had, Alverez told himself. It was bad enough he should use his connections to advance his career, but now he'd come close to killing the lot of them. Well, with any luck Bridewell would be stubborn enough to pick up the gauntlet Alverez had thrown him. Let the young fool stay with his command, they'd all be better off that way.
*
Mos Eisley's tiny body seemed inconsequential, surrounded by huge machines on every side. Yet in reality he made those machines more than just a tired collection of spaceship parts. To him they were work of art, living beings to be coaxed, nursed and encouraged through every trial.
The entire ship was shaking like a fever victim. Mos had been in space long enough to know the effects a hyperspace jump gone wrong had in an engine room. Most engineers with that kind of knowledge would have been running for the door about now, but Mos had weathered enough to know that after that, there would be no where else to go.
When the cooling duct to the hyperdrive coils blew out, the room filled with sub-zero gas in an instant. Mos choked and pressed the fabric of his robes to his mouth and nose. With luck, the coolant would reach a breathable temperature before it hit his lungs.
A gesture brought his repulsor-lift droid sailing out the gas clouds, a layer of frost plastered over its metallic casing. The droid gracefully sank to the ground where its master sprang onto the machine's back.
"Up, up." Mos commanded, rapping his toes on the droid's bug like head.
The droid hesitated, as though steeling itself for the task. Then laboriously it rose into the air, its repulsor lift engines wheezing under the strain. Quickly, Mos reached out for the cut-off valve and silenced the screaming jet of coolant.
The ship was soundless. Mos feared that the abrupt cold had burst his eardrums. Then, gradually, the cries of his precious engines became audible.
They were keening like tortured birds of prey and on the side of the room where the drives could be accessed the frost from the escaping gases had already evaporated. Without an efficient heat exchanger the hyperdrive coils would reach melting point in seconds.
As they turned to liquid they would loose conductivity and the power flooding in from the reactor would find it had no where to go. That would drive their temperature up to the flash point, where they would vaporize, taking most of the ship with them.
There was an automatic fail-safe designed to shut the engines down before that happened, but Mos had spent the last two days going over the ship's systems and he had his doubts about whether it would work. Even if it did, the full throttle roar of the engines and the roll and heave of the deck told him they needed every ounce of thrust the sub-light drives could put out.
Mos bit his lip in thought. Outwardly he appeared quite calm, but another of his own kind would had detected the subtle shifts in posture that signalled intense pressure.
Giving a decisive nod, Mos crouched down and rapped the droid on the top of the head to get its attention. "Engineering station." he ordered. The droid swiftly obeyed, gliding across the turbulent engine room.
"Down, down." the engineer commanded, reaching for the controls.
Mos's stubby fingers whirred over the work station, moving feverishly as he tried to finish what he was doing before the fail-safe was triggered. That the drives' howls hadn't already gurgled to nothing was a sign of how badly maintained the Mendez was.
Mos hit the last key in the sequence and the engine room was filled with the sound of the heat exchanger going into reverse. That meant the room would soon be filled with superheated gas, but the engines would keep functioning for another few precious seconds.
Before he had started working on the keyboard, Mos had begun going over the blue-prints of the ship's engines in his mind. He only had a few moments to think of a solution to the problem. If he wasn't smart enough to jury-rig his way out of it, his lack of insight would kill him.
The robe's fabric fell away from the jawa's face and he realised that the air had gone from painfully cold to almost scortching to breath. How long had passed since the hyperdrive cooling system blew? Two, perhaps three seconds? For Mos, a jawa born and bred between the hammer of twin suns and the anvil of the Tatooine desert, this level of heat was not a problem. But how long had passed since the hyperdrive cooling system blew? Two, perhaps three seconds? That gave him perhaps a minute before his flesh started to cook on his bones. The realisation brought a sudden awareness that the metal droid casing was burning his feet.
Hitting the controls on the engineering station with out even looking at them, Mos Isley, exile, jawa, engineer and last hope for a dying spaceship, began to give his droid instructions for the last time.
*
Kelly reached out with the force, picturing it as a cool, peaceful, blue aroura that billowed around him like an ocean wind. As he struggled to hold his focus a second image came to mind, an image of boiling mud and magma welling up inside him. He knew instantly that it represented the terror and the shame he felt for bringing them to this terrible, futile, anihalation.
The writhing black and red spread out from Kelly and threatened to fill the blue and white like a cancer overwhelming a healthy organ. The blue and white seemed to withdraw from the red and black, thinning as it did so. Then it constricted around like a fist, crushing the dark side into a tightly compressed ball of emotion that seemed, for a moment, to be on the brink of dissappearing.
Kelly seemed removed from the noise, smoke and heat of the flight deck. The frantic babble of his comrades had become a remote white noise that seemed no more important than the sound of a river on a stroll through the countryside. Then the ship shuddered around them, the babble suddenly ceased and Kelly felt his body become very, very light. Wieghtless, in fact.
They were free falling.
Into a sun.
*
