Light of the Jedi(39)
Her gaze shifted from the mountain to the night sky beyond. Coruscant was a city-world, radiating light at all hours, making it impossible to see many stars even in the depths of night. Just a few points of light were visible, shining faintly, separated by great swaths of emptiness.
“Just worlds, alone in the dark.”
The assembly droid moved the bit of wreckage into place, its manipulator arms making minute adjustments to the small metal fragment. How the droid knew where to place the piece in the overall puzzle being assembled, or the original purpose of any given chunk of wreckage—that was a task for an advanced computational motivator circuit, and beyond what Elzar Mann could easily understand. To him, one ragged piece of durasteel looked very much like the next.
The process seemed to be working, though. Inside a large rectangular area of space, illuminated by huge floodlights, the outline of the ship that was once the Legacy Run was clearly visible. About a dozen of the assembly droids were working to pull pieces of wreckage from the open bay doors of a huge cargo freighter parked just outside the range of the lights. One by one, the droids pushed bits of metal and plastoid into place in the reconstruction zone, some as large as full compartments, and some as small as a single wire. It was as if they were trying to rebuild the starship out of pieces of junk they had found here and there.
That was more or less the task, actually. Wreckage from the initial disaster in Hetzal had been collected after it dropped out of hyperspace, tracked by a huge network of satellites and monitoring stations and telescopes. The system had been bashed together during the disaster by an apparently brilliant local named Keven Tarr—a pale, quiet young man who was at this very moment standing a meter or so to Elzar’s left. He wasn’t alone, either. A whole group had gathered to bear witness to the destroyed starship, staring silently at the wreckage through a viewing panel on the Third Horizon’s observation deck.
Not much was left. The assembly droids were doing their best, but many pieces of the Legacy Run were destroyed on their impact with objects in the Hetzal system, or had simply whipped through the system and vanished before they could be collected. Some had appeared in other systems via the Emergences, of which there had been eighteen to date. Those pieces had been brought here as well, when possible. But still more might be in hyperspace, waiting to Emerge in their own right and wreak devastation in some other part of the Outer Rim. That was the point of trying to pull the wreckage together: to estimate how much still remained to be found.
To see how bad it could really get.
Elzar noticed that one of the smaller pieces of wreckage was drifting out of true, possibly disturbed by one of the assembly droids jetting away, or just moved by a gust of stellar wind. He lifted his hand and made a subtle gesture. The piece moved back into place, as if guided by an invisible touch.
He felt eyes on him and glanced to his right, where Jedi Master Avar Kriss was looking at him. Of course she had sensed him using the Force—that was Avar’s gift, one among many. She called it the song, and she heard it always.
Elzar winked at her. Avar rolled her eyes, but the side of her mouth lifted up in a little smile. She couldn’t help it.
He knew Avar thought he used the Force for frivolous purposes from time to time, but he couldn’t understand the viewpoint. If you could use the Force, then you should use the Force. What, you were supposed to save it for special occasions? It wasn’t as if the Force would run out. Avar heard a song, and Elzar saw a sea, of endless depth and breadth. The Force never began or ended, and it was impossible to use it up.
So if Jedi Knight Elzar Mann could help out a struggling assembly droid with a little push from the Force, why not? What was the harm?
He knew Avar agreed, even if she’d never admit it. The little smile told him everything he needed to know.
“How much of the Legacy Run do we have here?” asked Jeffo Lorillia, the Republic’s Secretary of Transportation. The poor man seemed tense. A muscle in his endlessly long forehead seemed to have developed an involuntary twitch. That was understandable. The man’s entire job was to ensure safe, reliable travel throughout the Republic, and yet the chancellor had just extended her hyperspace blockade for the Outer Rim another fifty parsecs after the eighteenth Emergence near Dantooine.
Keven Tarr consulted a datapad he was holding.
“I’ve got schematics here for the ship’s superstructure,” he said, “and the manifest from the shipping company that lists everything it was carrying. I’d say we’ve got about a third. Your brain takes the outline we’ve built here and fills it in, tells you you’re seeing a full ship…but we really don’t have that much.”
Elzar thought it looked like the ghost of a ship, but decided not to make that observation in a system where so many people had died. Ab Dalis had gotten it worse, of course—twenty million dead on its primary world was an unspeakable tragedy—but Hetzal had suffered plenty of damage. And more to come across the Rim, it sounded like.
“So this won’t be over for ages,” Senator Noor all but moaned. The Outer Rim representative understood the consequences of the hyperspace closures just as much as Secretary Lorillia. These worlds were already considered by some to be backwaters, and if you couldn’t even travel to them…well. The galaxy contained many worlds. Easy to forget a whole sector, if need be.