Light of the Jedi(27)
Honestly, Te’Ami didn’t know, either. The Longbeam activated its thrusters and dropped out of formation, the long, thick cabling stretching, growing thin, then impossibly thin, then vanishing to the naked eye. Captain Adren had told her this would happen, the silk that composed the cables was able to stretch almost to the molecular level and retain its strength. The cables were holding. The compartment to which they were attached…perhaps not so much.
“It’s going to break apart,” Nib Assek said. Burryaga whined mournfully in the background.
“No, it won’t,” Mikkel grunted. “We won’t let it. Just…hold it together.”
“Stop talking and do it,” Te’Ami said.
The overstressed box of metal, plastoid, and wiring did not want to continue to exist in its current form. It had been through too much, and knew it. It wanted to disintegrate, escape from the weight and heat and become a swarm of much tinier bits, all free to head off on their own trajectories.
If not for the Jedi, it would have done exactly that. They used the Force to keep the container in one piece, the loops of resistance they had used to slow it now used to maintain its integrity.
It didn’t seem like it would work. It was too much all at once—on top of everything else, the exhausted Jedi had to keep their Vectors flying at top speed, close enough to the passenger compartment that they could maintain their links.
And in the back of their minds, distraction, as some new crisis burgeoned elsewhere in the system. An increasing sense of alarm swelling along Avar Kriss’s network—but they had no time for that. They had their own crisis right here.
The wreckage ahead of them shifted, like a pile of stones about to tumble after one is removed, and Te’Ami opened her mouth and groaned, a sound of intense strain, as physical as internal. She could still feel the compartment pulling on her, and now she knew that if she let go, if she released her hold even a little, her Vector could be torn apart around her. Now it wasn’t just the lives of the people aboard the compartment, or even on the moon, now so close she could see its disk looming in space, growing larger every second.
Te’Ami stopped thinking about any of those things. She closed her eyes and let the Force guide her. For long seconds, nothing but chaos, strain, stress. And then…a lessening. The slightest release in tension—but it made everything simpler. As Captain Adren had said, even a one percent reduction was meaningful.
Then one became two, and more, and the objects working against one another became a single system.
The compartment slowed. More, and more, until it came to a slow stop, the Longbeam reeling it in on its cables.
“Whoa,” came Captain Adren’s voice over the comm. “I really didn’t think that would work.”
“You certainly waited long enough to tell us,” came Mikkel’s reply. Even through his translator, he sounded utterly exhausted.
“Almost out of fuel,” said Joss, ignoring the remark, “couple more seconds and we’d have had to shut off our thrusters. We couldn’t have done that alone. Thank you, Jedi.”
“We couldn’t have done it by ourselves, either,” Te’Ami said. “And the idea was yours. Whether you thought it would work or not, it did.”
Pikka Adren spoke. “We can suit up and go over there, see if there’s some way to extract the passengers. If not, we can tow it to a station, dock it there. At the very least, we can get them some medical attention. I’m sure they’re banged up.”
“All right,” Te’Ami replied. “Thank you. We’ll pass along how we achieved this—I’m sure other rescue teams will find the information useful.”
She maneuvered her Vector up and alongside the passenger compartment, moving close. The module had portholes along its length, and in them, she could see faces. Beings of all types, all ages, all alive. She sensed their fear beginning to lessen, replaced with—
A huge flash of alarm shot through the system-wide net of awareness being maintained by Avar Kriss. Again, no words, but if the sensation could be translated, it would be just these words: “Jedi. You are needed. Now.”
Something was very, very wrong.
The station heaved, throwing Captain Bright off his feet and into a wall. He hit hard, barely catching himself on a stanchion before an impact that would surely have cracked his skull.
The pill droid floating just a few meters ahead of him in the burning corridor didn’t seem to notice the jolt at all—but then it wasn’t in contact with the deck. It was floating, serene as ever, its stretcher attachment unfolded from its carapace, currently occupied by an unconscious, tiny Anzellan, purple drops of blood leaving a trail behind the droid.
They weren’t far from the Aurora IX, and the Anzellan made seven rescued crewmembers from the solar array—the full complement. The job was done, and so far, they’d all survived, miracle of miracles. It was just a matter of whether they could get far enough away from the station before it blew. Which was imminent, as the series of increasingly urgent messages he’d received from the engineering deck suggested.
Bright lifted his comlink.
“Petty Officer Innamin,” he growled. “What in blazes was that? I thought you told me you could keep this station stabilized?”
“What I told you, Captain, is that I explicitly could not do that,” Innamin replied, his voice wavering between annoyance and utter panic. “The reactor will blow. There is nothing I can do about it. We just need to be gone when it does.”