Light of the Jedi(22)
Bright was becoming increasingly sure that everyone on the station was dead when he heard a weak voice call out from behind a collapsed control console.
“Please, I’m here…please…”
He moved toward the sound and saw a dark-skinned human sitting with her back against a bulkhead. Blood ran down the side of her face from a wound on her scalp. Another crewmember lay beside her, unconscious. She had taken his head in her lap but didn’t seem to be able to offer anything else by way of assistance to the man.
“I’m from the Republic,” Bright said to the woman. “My name is Captain Bright. Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ll get you both out of here. What’s your name?”
“Sheree,” she said, her voice weak. “This is Venn. I’m…not sure if he’s…He might be dead. He hasn’t moved in a while.”
“Don’t worry about that now, Sheree. Are the other members of your crew still alive?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We lost contact with one another when…everything caught fire. The station’s comms are down.”
As I expected, Bright thought.
He pulled a comlink from his belt and lifted it to his mouth.
“Innamin. Peeples. I have two survivors. One is too injured to move. I’m going to call the pill droid and get them back to the Longbeam. Have either of you had any luck?”
As he spoke, he tapped a remote clipped to his belt that would summon the rescue droid to his location. Hopefully the machine would be able to do something for the unconscious man—Venn. And if not, the medical bay on the Aurora IX was equipped to handle a number of different emergencies.
Bright’s comlink crackled to life.
“No other survivors yet, Captain,” Innamin said, his voice clouded by static—evidently the damage to the station was causing interference. “But we have another problem.”
“Talk to me,” Bright said, watching the rescue droid glide silently into the room.
He signaled to Sheree that he was going to keep moving, continue his search. She nodded, her expression pained but grateful.
“I started on the lowest level,” Innamin continued. “It’s where they stuck the operational stuff for the station—power, life support, all that. I had a hunch and wanted to check the main reactor. I’m glad I did. It took some serious damage. It’s unstable. If it’s not repaired, it’ll blow for sure.”
Blast it, Bright thought. Not that he’d expected this to be easy, but this was an entirely different level of challenge.
“How long do we have?” he said.
“Honestly, sir, if it were up to me, I’d pull us out right now. It could go at any second.”
“Can you do anything? Stabilize it, even just long enough for us to continue our search? I found two survivors—there are bound to be more.”
Innamin was an engineer by training. Of the three crewmembers of the Aurora IX, he was the only one with the skill set to even consider fixing a damaged reactor. That also meant he was the only one who would be able to accurately assess whether he could do anything about it. Innamin could easily just say, Sorry, nope, can’t do anything, we need to leave now, we did our best, and who would know the difference? The kid was young, had a lot to live for. Bright almost wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d said it was time to go.
“I can try,” Innamin said. “Might be able to buy us a few minutes.”
Bright felt a surge of pride wash over him.
“We’re all the Republic,” he said.
“We’re all the Republic,” Innamin replied.
“We’re all dead if we don’t finish searching the station,” Ensign Peeples chimed in from another deck. “I have another survivor. Badly injured. Send me the pill.”
A tremor struck the station at just that moment, a quick tight snap, as if someone outside had whacked it with a durasteel rod a hundred meters long. It knocked Bright off his feet, and he barely caught himself before what could have been a nasty fall. He was sure this was it. They would all be blasted to vapor, three would-be heroes gone in an instant along with the people they were trying to save. But the shaking eased, and he still had a deck beneath his feet and walls to either side. The station was still intact. Bright decided to consider the incident a valuable reminder that they had to get the hell out of there.
“Buy us time, Petty Officer,” he said, pulling himself to his feet. “And Ensign Peeples, I’ll send the droid to you as soon as it’s done handling my two survivors. I’ll keep looking.”
Bright began to run, sweeping his eyes from side to side, scanning the haze for person-shaped outlines.
“But by the light…both of you…hurry.”
The two Jedi, Bell Zettifar and Loden Greatstorm, apprentice and master, sprinted toward the marauders’ speeders. The blades of their lightsabers buzzed and snapped through the air as they ran. The weapons sounded like nothing else in the galaxy. To Bell, it was the sound of skill, and training, and focus, and the choice of last resort, and the art of the Jedi.
Lightsabers were designed to end conflicts. They were designed to injure no more than necessary, and in the horrible circumstance where death was the only possible outcome, they would kill quickly. No more damage would be done by a lightsaber than its wielder chose. There was no collateral damage with the lightsaber.