AN: This is a reboot of my story A Knight's Redemption, rewritten as my writing skills have significantly improved.
"I know, R3, I know! I'm working on it!"
Jedi Knight Kyra Katobi grit her teeth hard enough against each other to ache as she yanked the controls of her Eta-2 interceptor to the port side, putting the craft into a barrel roll as flashes of green light arced past the spot she had occupied just a moment before. Her astromech droid, R3-K7, shrieked and whistled over her headset as it frantically attempted to repair the connection between the starfighter and its hyperdrive ring as Kyra focused all of her concentration on dodging the hail of laser fire coming from behind her. Jedi pilots were renowned throughout the galaxy as some of the best that had ever flown amongst the stars, and Kyra was no exception, but she was exhausted. Six months. Six months on the run, never stopping for more than a few hours at a time, fighting, fleeing, flying, learning that the galaxy she had known was forever gone and replaced with a terrifying shadowy monster she had never dreamed possible. Six months without proper rest, surviving off of what she could steal or mind trick away, without properly maintaining her equipment or starship.
It was no way for a Jedi to conduct herself, but it was the life she had now been forced into.
Another burst of laser fire sailed past her cockpit, close enough that it left scorch marks and Kyra put the vessel into a tailspin in her continued efforts to evade her attackers. Hunters, more accurately. There was no other way to describe those that had chased her across the galaxy from Kashyyyk to the Unknown Regions in an unrelenting quest to end her life and the legacy of the Jedi Order. The Mirialan Jedi had grown far too used to the droid ships the CIS had used throughout the Clone Wars, the way they always approached every battle the exact same way according to their programming. These ships were piloted by organics, organics that specialized in tactics specifically for killing Jedi like her. Even after six months, Kyra was astonished by just how effective they were.
R3 screamed at her again, the pressure of her teeth grinding against each other became so intense that she began to fear they might crack. Ahead of them was a nebula, one so thick that her instruments couldn't penetrate the dust and so vast it resembled a multicolored ocean within the dark abyss of deep space. The Unknown Regions were called that for a reason, and if anyone had been stupid enough to fly straight into the nebula, they hadn't written about it or mapped it. Most likely they hadn't come back. But her hyperdrive ring was still on the fritz, she was low on fuel, her ship needed repairs, she was wounded from her last ground battle, and the hunters behind her were absolutely relentless. Despite R3's warnings, Kyra knew she had but one choice if she wanted to live.
"R3, I'm going in."
She ignored her astromech's protests as she barreled directly for the space clouds, flying erratically to avoid more barrages of laser blasts, pushing her interceptor to its very limits and just a bit beyond. Trust in the Force, trust in the Force, trust in the Force, she repeated to herself again and again, allowing the mystical energy of life and the universe to flow through her and guide her actions. It was the only thing keeping her alive, now. Her whole life, all twenty one years of it, the Masters had impressed upon her the need to trust in the Force above all. Dead they may be, but their wisdom still rang true.
Closer. Closer. Closer. Her starship rattled the closer it shot towards the nebula, and Kyra became aware of something as she glanced at her instruments. The hunters were beginning to slow, shift their formation, preparing to peel away. They weren't equipped to go diving into something unknown and dangerous, but unlike her they had the available resources to regroup and re-equip. Their Star Destroyer wasn't far behind them, and reinforcements with it. They could comb the nebula for her, or even just wait for her to come out and vaporize her. It wasn't like there was anywhere to go within it, after all. That thought plagued her mind as she braced herself physically and mentally to hit the cloud.
The moment she did, all hell seemed to break loose. If she wasn't already tightly strapped in she likely would have been thrown about with even more violence than was currently being inflicted upon her, the particles shaking her ship to and fro at these high speeds. She was flying completely blind, visually and technologically. R3 whistled and beeped as dust got into every crevice it had on its body, and Kyra forced herself to ignore the droid as she kept her throttle shoved all the way forward into the unknown and certain death. Better to die of her own desperate stupidity than at the hands of the clones she had once called friends.
Though it must have only been a few minutes, it felt like hours that she dived into the nebula staring at the same shifting shade of particles. It truly was similar to diving into an ocean and watching the water part before her, Kyra noted, and even now she could recognize its beauty. The same beauty the deep ocean and deep space both held, a terrifying and deadly beauty full of mystifying secrets and the allure of exploration. Once, Kyra might have loved nothing more than to explore every inch of this strange and alien place to learn those secrets and bring back to the other Jedi at the temple. But that was another life, before the clones and the Republic itself had turned on her. Now, she was just terrified.
And then something changed. In this place where normality had become unceasing dust an object began to appear, looming in its enormity. Kyra's eyes widened as it took shape, its profile truly massive. "R3? What am I looking at?" The astromech had absolutely nothing to contribute, too worried about the impossibility of on the fly repairs in the depths of a nebula, leaving Kyra on her own. Not for the first time in her life, the Mirialan cursed her lack of interest in the wealth of information that the temple archives had held within it, preferring to spend time sparring with her Master and the other Padawans or getting into trouble and misadventures and mischief. Perhaps if she had paid more attention to Master Nu's lectures she might know what she was looking at, but she did not. It somewhat resembled a tuning fork, made of rather plain metal and something in the center where a circular hollow had been designed. A large swirling ball of energy and rings, constantly rotating and shifting around each other, glowing with a deep and vibrant blue light.
Kyra had thought the Clone Wars would have prepared her for just about anything, but once more she was proven wrong by the evidence in front of her. She began to slow her thrusters to get a better look, trying to decipher what it might be. A space station, perhaps? She could think of little else that would be that big, but she saw no places to dock, no hangars, not even any defenses. It was so strange. It resembled no design that Kyra knew of, unable to place a species or manufacturer of any kind. There was no activity surrounding it, no ships of any kind and her ship detected no transmissions coming from it. Whoever had built it, they seemed to be long, long gone.
Before Kyra could properly begin to formulate some sort of plan regarding her desperate situation or the strange object, those balls began to move faster and faster, spinning violently. An arc of lighting reached out, grabbing hold of her interceptor. "Sithspit!" She swore loudly as she did her best to get the starship away from whatever was happening, but it was like being locked into a tractor beam. There was just no escaping it. "Brace yourself, R3!" She loudly warned her astromech as more lightning engulfed the pair and their ship, and Kyra closed her eyes as she prepared for what she was certain would be her death at last.
Only it wasn't. An instant later, the lightning stopped and Kyra opened her eyes to find herself floating in the nebula, perfectly fine. Wait. The dust was different. It was a different color, more of a blue than hues of pink and purple. Confused, she glanced behind her to see the object, only for it to be facing a different direction, the rings and ball of energy in the center rotating the opposite way, and angled differently. Was it the same object? What had happened?
Kyra laid back against her seat, dumbfounded, her mind racing as fast as her heart, a moment to herself unfolding for the first time in six months. All of the exhaustion, all of the pain, all of the fear, it was all coming back to her as her adrenaline began to drain away, and she hissed as she held a hand over the blaster wound on her side. The plasteel body armor she wore underneath her dark Jedi robes had deflected most of the shot, but enough had burned through that she needed medical attention and she was too exhausted to heal herself. She needed to rest, to meditate, to eat and recuperate her strength. Once she had done that, she could figure out where she was and what had happened and what her next move might be.
Nodding to herself, Kyra sucked in a deep breath and furrowed her brow as she concentrated on ignoring the pain in her side and throughout her aching body and pushed her throttle forward, thrusters igniting to life and her scorched and battered interceptor moving forward into whatever might lay ahead.