Light of the Jedi(12)

The missiles fired, six quick whmphs transmitted through the ship’s hull, and the Aurora IX was down to lasers only. The weapons shot away, leaving thin trails of smoke behind to mark their path. They were out of visual range in an instant, accelerating to their max velocity in seconds.

“Missiles away,” Innamin said.

Now it was up to that fancy distributed processor, and whether it had successfully transmitted effective firing solutions to the missiles. Maybe all six would hit. It wasn’t impossible.

The deck crew looked as one at the display screen tracking the six missiles, the fast-moving anomaly, their own ship, and the solar array that was rapidly becoming the collision point for all nine objects.

The first of the missiles blinked out on the screen. Nothing else changed.

“Missile one is a miss,” Innamin said, unnecessarily.

Two more missiles vanished. Bright held up a hand before Innamin could speak again.



“We can all see, Petty Officer,” he said.

Two more misses. Leaving one. All else remained unchanged.

The last missile vanished from the display, nowhere near the incoming anomaly. A communal sigh of despair washed across the bridge.

“Blasters?” Bright asked, knowing the answer.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Ensign Peeples said, his voice a high-pitched, reedy whine. “Even the best gunner in the universe couldn’t make that shot, and I would guess I’m barely in the top ten.”

Bright sighed. Peeples’s species had a radically unique understanding of humor—not the jokes themselves, which were often decent enough, but the appropriate moment to deploy them.

“Thank you, Ensign,” Bright said.

The solar array was now visible in the viewscreen—a large, spindly structure, like one of the feather corals back in Bright’s homesea. Hundreds of long arms arranged in a spiral spinning out from a central sphere in which the crew lived and worked. Each of those arms fitted with collection eyes along its length, blinking and rotating slowly as they drank in the light of the three suns that gave Hetzal Prime and its satellite worlds their uniquely long growing seasons. The array fed the sunlight back to the cropworlds, storing and beaming it down through proprietary technology that was the pride of the system.

The array was beautiful. Bright had never seen anything quite like it. It looked grown—and maybe it was. Supposedly every crop in the galaxy could grow somewhere on the worlds of Hetzal. Perhaps that extended to space stations.

Then, a bright streak, too fast to process even with eyes as capable as Bright’s large, dark orbs, designed by evolution to pick out details in the lightless depths of the seas of Glee Anselm. In an instant the solar array was destroyed. One moment it was intact, performing its function. The next, it was ablaze, half the collection arms shattered, drifting slowly away into space.



The central sphere remained, though flames washed across its outer hull, the muted dance of fire in zero gravity. As Bright watched, the array’s exterior lighting blinked, flickered, and went out.

Bright put a hand to his forehead. He blinked, too. Once, slowly.

Then he turned to his crew.



“We don’t know for sure that the people aboard that station are dead,” he said, looking at his crew’s solemn faces.

“I would like to try to attempt a rescue, but that”—here he pointed out the viewscreen at the wrecked, burning array, getting larger as the Aurora IX approached—“could collapse at any moment. Or explode. Or implode. I don’t know. The point is, if we’re docked when it goes, we’re dead, too.”

Bright tapped one of his tentacles with a fingertip.

“I’m Nautolan, a fact of which I’m sure you’re both aware. Green skin, big black eyes, what else would I be? What you might not know is that these tentacles of mine let me pick up pheromones from other beings, which I translate into an understanding of their emotional states. That’s how I know you two…are terrified.”



Peeples opened his mouth, then, somehow, miraculously, thought better of making a joke and closed it again.

“I get that you’re scared,” Bright went on, “but we have a duty. I know it, and you both know it, too. We need to do this.”

Innamin and Peeples looked at each other, then back at their captain.

“We’re all the Republic, right?” Innamin said.

Bright nodded. He smiled, showing his teeth.

“Indeed we are, Petty Officer.”

He pointed at Peeples.

“Ensign, take us in.”





Three Jedi Vectors and a Republic Longbeam whipped through space, slingshotting around the orange-and-green sphere that was the Fruited Moon of Hetzal, legendary throughout the galaxy for its bounty. Four billion people resided there, farming and growing and living their lives. All would be dead in less than thirty minutes if the four Jedi and two Republic officers could not destroy or somehow divert the object headed directly for the moon.

The anomaly was on the larger side, bigger than the Longbeam, and on a collision course with the moon’s primary landmass. Due to its velocity, a significant portion of the moon’s outer layer would be instantly vaporized on impact, surging into the atmosphere. Then would come the heat, the flames, scouring the surface clean of all life, plant and animal and sentient alike.