No I didn't drop any references to Solo in this chapter. I don't know what you're talking about.
Jesper had never been so glad to leave a planet behind. Tatooine was a yellow-orange curve in the viewport as he lifted off, and he took a moment to watch Inej's shuttle jump to hyperspace before following, despite the fact that they were no doubt bound for different destinations.
"Where is Inej going?" he wondered aloud, more as a thought than a question, but Nina, sitting behind him in the cockpit, answered anyway.
"She found a lead on some special project the Empire's building," she said. "She's gone off to talk to members of her network to find out more information on it."
"Network?"
"She does work in intelligence." Nina's gaze seemed fixed on the point in realspace where her friend had been not moments before. "She has a network of spies and informants who feed information to her; she doesn't just get her own information by sneaking around and investigating things herself. That wouldn't be nearly as efficient."
"I suppose," Jesper conceded, then starting plotting their own hyperspace jump. The nebula around Starkiller Base did a good job of keeping it hidden, but it also introduced major obstacles which the ship had to manoeuvre around, such as newly forming stars and gravity wells. It wasn't quite as dangerous as the Kessel Run - it didn't have anything like the Maw, or massive creatures with tentacles that lived among the nebulae (at least, as far as Jesper knew) - but it was dangerous nonetheless.
So it was a while before Jesper had finished plotting a safe course through it, and seen them safely into hyperspace. Long enough that although Nina hadn't left the cockpit, the unusual silence she kept made it feel like she had. Long enough that he was startled when she actually spoke.
"Are you really planning on using your crystal to build a new lightsaber?"
He glanced up at that. "Of course. I can't exactly train without one, can I?" A thought struck him, so he inquired, "Unless there are other places you can get kyber crystals?"
Nina thought about it for a moment, and he felt his heart lift up. But then she shook her head. "No. I mean, there were. Like the planet Ilum. I lost my lightsabers a lot when I was younger, so I had to visit regularly. But I did some research on Kuwei's behalf during the weeks after Yavin, and Ilum's been taken over by the Empire. It was stripped of its crystals to fuel the battle station, and now there's nothing left. The surface was stripped away, and you can see the magma bubbling even from orbit." Her eyes were wide; she stared at nothing. "It was awful. The crystals are semi-sentient, and I could feel their agony through the Force."
Jesper swallowed. "Are there other places?"
"Yes," Nina admitted, "but Ilum was always the go-to place for the Jedi. In other places they're sparser, more spread out. But if there's a crystal out there for you, then it's already chosen you, as mine chose me, and Zoya's chose her, and even Alina Starkiller's two crystals chose her. If you close your eyes, meditate deep enough, you can hear its song."
"Song?" Jesper wasn't sure whether to laugh or scoff. Kaz would definitely chose the latter.
This Jedi stuff seemed very. . . nonsensical.
Nina scowled. "Any trained Force wielder would have your head for that. Yes, song. The song of life. When you feel people around you, don't they all feel a little different to each other? Sing slightly different songs?"
Jesper wanted to deny it, but. . . "Yes."
"Crystals are the same way." She drew her lightsaber, but didn't ignite it. Instead, she held it up to the light. "You're probably so used to your crystal's song that it's background noise by now, but listen to mine. It hums a specific tune. Can you feel it?"
He could. It was like white noise, buzzing at the edge of his senses, except more. . . ethereal. Powerful. Real. "Yes."
Nina clipped the saber to her belt again. "Then you know what you're looking for. When you meditate over the next few years, look for them. Try to find them."
He bit his tongue, then said, "I will," softly. But- "That could take years. Finding them, that is."
She tilted her head in thought, then nodded. "You're right. If you build a lightsaber out of your crystal now - I think we may have enough spare parts on board - we can focus on winning the war first, then focus on finding crystals that are right for you. I think I have a few manuals on lightsaber construction on my datapad - I'll go see what pieces I can find, then bring them back here."
She stood up. there was something sad in her eyes, and Jesper felt automatically that she was thinking about Kuwei.
He nodded, before turning back to the view of hyperspace beyond the viewports. The stars, elongated into streaks, were almost the same colour as his old lightsaber.
Of all the places she had informants planted, the Ring of Kafrene had to be the place Inej felt like she most fitted in. It was a dusty old waystation build into an asteroid that barely had an atmosphere, and the only people there were smugglers, lowlifes, people who would be anywhere else, in any other life, if they could be.
It was the place she was most likely to run into her parents.
So it was easy for her to act like she belonged, pace slow and eyes downcast, yet still reach the rendezvous point as fast as possible in plenty of time to meet her informant.
They stood in the shadow of some twisted metal structure; all Inej could make out was a humanoid figure with a cowl hiding the shape of their head.
That was fair. It wasn't like her face wasn't swathed in wrappings as well to keep from being recognised.
So she glanced from left to right without moving her head - with her face covered, the stormtroopers milling about could barely tell she'd looked anywhere but straight ahead at all - then ducked into a back alley after the figure.
"It's a long way to Alderaan," they said to her without turning around. The prearranged code phrase.
"Especially since the Disaster," she finished, the words dry in her throat, stomach roiling.
The agent nodded once, then turned to face her. "Sankta Marya," he said. It was the code name she used when dealing with him and a few others spies - all of whom were named after members of Alderaanian royalty which had been granted sainthood on the planet after their deaths.
The idea had been Tamar's actually: apparently in the days and weeks after Alderaan's destruction, its Princess had gone gallivanting on a mission across the galaxy to gather up survivors with Alderaanian ancestry, since the Empire had suddenly been targeting them for fear that they would join the Rebellion. Lizabeta - the only surviving member of the Royal Family, and well on her way to earning the title of Sankta for herself - had instead offered them a new home, which many took. The rest did exactly what the Empire had feared they would do: become Rebels.
And quite of a few of those had gone into Rebel intelligence.
"Sankt Petyr," she replied. "What information have you got that you couldn't transmit over the channels?"
He wasted no time in pulling out an information chip slightly larger than the one Inej had pilfered from Dunyasha. "Here," he said. "It's all on there - everything that I and the other Bothan spies could find about the project you inquired about."
"So it was real," she heard herself say. She knew it was unprofessional, but she was too focused to clutching the datachip tightly in her hand and trying not to hyperventilate to properly police her words right now. "They're going to do it again."
For a survivor of the Disaster, as the planet's destruction had been dubbed, Petyr seemed. . . confident. Unworried.
"Everything is on that disc," he assured her. "Everything. The only reason it succeeded before was because we didn't know what we were up against. Now we know all there is to know."
Inej fervently wished she could believe him.
And she wished it even more fervently when she was flying out of the system and jumped to hyperspace, before immediately inserting the chip into her ship's computer and browsing the information it contained. She wished it even as she stared at diagram of another (albeit half-finished) Death Star, and felt like her stomach had been left behind on Kafrene.
Matthias watched the reel of him taking down the rancor for perhaps the fifth time that hour.
He didn't know if the Rebellion had somehow. . . sliced the footage or something, because there was no way this was real. There was no way he'd actually looked that powerful when fighting the rancor - he'd been terrified and sweaty and resolute and his strikes had not been this graceful, this. . . impressive. There was no way this was real.
He said it aloud into the silence of the Barrel's main seating area, the dejarik table dark under his hand. "This can't be real."
"It's not."
Matthias started at the sound: he'd thought that everyone was either in the cockpit or their individual bunk rooms. But no. Kaz had just strolled in and leaned against the wall, arms crossed, as arrogant and put together as ever despite whatever ordeal he'd experienced at Pekka's hands.
"It's not?"
"No." Kaz uncrossed his arms and wandered closer as the footage automatically started again. His eyes tracked the swing of the darksaber - with the grainy quality of the holo, its blade was a streak of darkness with every slash. "Inej asked me to slice the footage and edit it to make it more effective as propaganda the moment we got back to the homestead. I don't think she intended me to do it so immediately - she was fussing about injuries and such - but the more people see the unaltered version, the less credible the sliced version becomes." He shrugged. "So I did it immediately.
"Chances are," he added, "that since only Imperial officials were watching - hoping to get a clear holo of the Wraith's face - none of the actual public saw it before then." He stood up to his full height again; sitting down, Matthias had to tilt his head back to meet his eye. "And the actual public is who propaganda's targeted at, anyway."
A moment passed, then he added, "It's working, too. I heard there was an uprising on Mandalore a few days after it was leaked. The Imperials crushed it, but. . . There's a rebellion there, waiting to step up and be killed with the rest of you fools."
Like Inej? Matthias almost wanted to say, but he didn't, if only because somehow he knew that Kaz didn't truly mean it - not anymore.
He didn't understand Kaz Brekker. Nor did he understand the fact that:
"You did this?" He waved his hand at the image, where his face had been tidied up to look more heroic, his actions had been edited to look smoother and more purposeful, the damage done to the rancor had been emphasised - not that much work was needed on the last part. The darksaber was a debilitating weapon.
Kaz didn't bother nodding - just raised his eyebrows. "Yeah." At Matthias's shock (and scepticism) he scoffed. "I'm the most infamous smuggler in the Outer Rim but I can't fly my own ship. Sometimes I'm with partners like Inej and Jesper to get through those blockades, but often I have droids flying it, and if you think droids would last five minutes as pilots against a horde of TIEs, think again. I'm as infamous as I am because of my slicing skills."
"And what does slicing entail?" Kaz had a way of making everyone who spoke to him feel stupid; Matthias was no exception.
"Changing the ship's transponder so it's not flagged as illegal, cloaking the movements of ships, hacking Imperial communications channels to find the gaps in their blockades," Kaz checked them off on his fingers, then looked up at Matthias. "Why do you think Inej asked me on this mission in the first place? You think you'd have reached anywhere close to the Eadu and Jedha systems without me?"
"Perhaps not," Matthias admitted, then fixed Kaz with a sharp look. "But that was hardly this mission. It's over and done with. The Death Star's gone. We're moving on to other things, now."
"I wouldn't be so sure," Wylan said.
Startled, Matthias glanced up to see the boy - he knew he was over eighteen standard years, but he could never make himself think of him as older than boy - standing silhouetted in the doorway, the shadows resting on his slim shoulders like some sort of cape. His expression was serious, his chin held high. He looked older, Matthias noted with some sadness. Older, and infinitely more responsible, now that he'd risen in the Rebellion's ranks so quickly.
And apparently he'd risen high enough as the communications and inventory officer in Inej's team to be privy to the secret data that she transmitted, because he pursed his lips, and said, "We've got a loose end to tie up."
Jesper was Corellian; he'd been brought up in the ship-building yards trying to keep out of the grasp of Lady Proxima and her foul criminal underworld, before he'd stolen a ship one day after his dad died to try and get out of that cesspit. He'd succeeded, and now. . .
Now he was here.
Now he was free.
He wouldn't go back for the galaxy, but he was glad that living among the ship yards had taught him a thing or two about blueprints and their subsequent mechanics - even if on Corellia he'd worked with actual paper prints, not holos in which the diagrams were literally blue.
So he knew exactly what the manual on lightsaber construction was telling him - even had some personal criticisms for it. Surely having the energy gate turned that way limited the amount of energy produced?
"It's supposed to," Nina had explained when he brought it up (having noticed the problem after fifteen seconds of studying it). "It's why you get a lightsaber and not a-" She'd cut herself off before she finished, going peculiarly pale.
He knew what she'd been about to say - a Death Star - but didn't quite see why she was being so sensitive about it. Was there something going on that he, as a smuggler, wasn't qualified to know?
Probably.
Anyway, it didn't matter. Because he was busy with this, studying the schematics projected in front of him, fitting together the pieces that either he or Nina had scrounged up from miscellaneous devices around the ship.
So, the blade emitter goes here, and the emitter matrix goes there. That can't be right. He frowned at the diagram. Surely that would make the saber explode? Maybe it's meant to be the other way round. . .
He experimented with it and, he didn't know, it just felt right. Like this was the way his lightsaber was supposed to be put together. The crystal hummed under his touch as he tried to insert it into the centre, and for one, delusional moment, he imagined it was humming in support.
Then he shook it off. Semi-sentient crystals or not, that couldn't be right.
Especially since said crystal was adamantly refusing to fit into the right spot.
He grunted aloud in frustrated and leaned back, suddenly aware of his surroundings. His half-complete lightsaber rolled out of his lap and joined the rest of the junk spilled across the floor of the bunkroom he shared with Kaz while the others were on board. He uncrossed his legs, back stiff from meditation, and the crystal rolled away as well, winking in the dim light. He scowled after it.
Then he stretched his back, craned his neck - even more than he already had; Force, it ached - and flicked back through the pages of schematics in the holomanual. Everything back the way he'd read was full of the same diagrams he was sick to death of, each part labelled with unnecessarily complex explanations for what they did. Jesper snorted at some of the more obvious explanations. Apparently, not all Jedi were exactly great mechanics.
He shook his head roughly: he could hear the clash of saber on saber from a few doors down, no doubt Nina following up on her promise to train Matthias how to use the darksaber. He sort of pitied the man - Nina could be a harsh tutor, as he'd already found out. . .
Bored, he flipped forward in the manual. He'd reviewed all of this a thousand times-
Wait.
He turned back a page. There, instead of a diagram - thank the Force, no diagrams on this page - there was an illustration, or an artist's interpretation of a Jedi padawan building their lightsaber. The padawan was a human female, with pale hair cut close to her head except for a long thin braid that snaked over her right shoulder. Her painted expression was focused, lips and brow pinched in concentration as she sat cross-legged, palms upturned upon her knees, eyes closed.
Her lightsaber hovered in front of her, fitting the pieces together not by physical touch, but by using the Force.
Jesper frowned as he considered the drawing, then studied the basic framework he'd set up for his own.
He re-crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and sank into the Force. It felt the same as it always did, the warm folds welcoming him in, giving him the natural-yet-unnatural confidence - no, surety - he always had when he was flying.
He reached out eagerly.
Nothing happened.
He opened his eyes, eyed the parts still lying stationary on the floor, and scoffed at himself. "Come on, Jesper, Nina taught you this. You can do it."
He closed his eyes again, threw his mind back. Remembered how it had felt to summon Kuwei's lightsaber to hand on Hoth, remembered the feeling of kyber crystals' humming, remembered Nina's voice, quiet in reverence, talking him through how to harness his power on the journey to Tatooine. Feel the Force flowing through you. . .
He reached out, in part with his hand, but that was more as a guide for his mind as he found the spirit of his mother's crystal where it was resting on the floor and summoned it to hover a few centimetres above the skin of his palm. He could feel its warmth even without the physical contact - see the faintly lilac light it emitted through his eyelids.
Then he reached out with his other hand and felt the scraps of metal components around him, sifting through them, finding the ones he needed. He couldn't say he'd know for sure which ones those were, if he opened his eyes, but he trusted the Force to know. Trusted himself to just know.
One, two, three, four, components floated into the air, the disturbed and displaced dust swirling around them - one for each digit as he curled his fingers inwards and the components hovered in a horizontal line before him, the crystal sliding into place between them.
Then his thumb: it arched across his left palm and the basic framework he'd constructed floated into the line, the final piece in a thousand-year-old puzzle. He spread both his hands wide, then contracted them. Eyes still closed, he didn't see the pieces falling into place within the framework, but he sensed it anyway - with his ears, at the satisfying click they made; with his touch, by the heavy cylinder that fell into his lap; by the Force, when his metaphysical grip suddenly clutched nothing but air.
He opened his eyes.
The blue light of the holomanual illuminated the scuffs on the curved metal surface, casting the other half into shadow. The same stark contrast was applied to the pommel and hilt, with the ridges that Nina had recommended he put there for grip - apparently his style of combat was too. . . flamboyant. . . to assume that he wouldn't need a little help keeping hold of his saber. He lifted it in his hand, surprised by how heavy it was after he'd lifted it with the Force with little to no effort, even if there was no real weight difference between this saber and Kuwei's. He hit the activation button.
The blade was the perfect shade of purple: no more red than it was blue, nor blue than it was red. Instead, it was directly in between.
