Chapter Text
I felt the danger before the alarms began, though danger was too blunt a word for what the Force so often offered. Fear belonged to men and beasts. The Force had no need of such simple language. What came to me first was only a subtle disturbance, so slight another man might have mistaken it for fatigue, or memory, or some unease born of too many campaigns and too little sleep. It moved along the edge of my awareness like a ripple spreading across still water in the dark, delicate enough that I might have ignored it if I had not spent half my life learning how rarely instinct announced itself with anything so courteous as certainty. I lifted my head and looked through the forward viewport, saying nothing at first, because there are moments when silence is the better instrument. The stars beyond the transparisteel burned with their usual cold indifference, pale points scattered across a black so deep it seemed less like emptiness and more like the visible face of eternity. The navigation displays cast their wan blue glow across the cockpit, lines of hyperspace coordinates and predictive routes threading across the console like veins of frost. Everything wore the appearance of order. The ship held steady beneath my boots. The engines thrummed with the familiar patient power of a vessel preparing to flee one patch of darkness for another. Had I trusted only my eyes, I would have seen nothing wrong at all. That, perhaps, was what troubled me most.
“Master?”
Oltiss had noticed. He usually did. The boy possessed a sharpness that would have become wisdom with age, provided the war did not kill him before age had the chance to do its work. He leaned over the navigation console beside the pilots, one clawed finger resting against the glow of the panel as he reviewed the jump calculations yet again, though whether from diligence or the simple need to keep his hands occupied I could not say. The cockpit light gathered along the short crown of horns about his brow and left the planes of his face in alternating bands of shadow and copper-red illumination. He had the quick attentiveness of youth, that restless alertness which had not yet learned that some things reveal themselves only when one stops clawing at them.
“You felt something,” he said.
It was not a question. There was no point pretending otherwise.
“Yes,” I said.
I let my awareness stretch through the ship again, lightly, without forcing it. The Force answered as it always had, flowing around us in those subtle currents one comes to know as intimately as breath: the pilots at the controls, their concentration narrowed to neat clean lines; the muttered anxiety of the crew farther aft; the thin, constant agitation of Artosis pacing in the corridor behind us like a man who hoped movement might somehow outrun mortality. All of it was familiar. All of it fit cleanly into the shape of the world as I understood it. Yet beneath those ordinary currents there had been something else, something faint but wrong, a tremor moving under the surface of things as though another depth had briefly opened beneath the first.
Oltiss studied me for another moment, searching my face perhaps for some clearer answer than I could offer, before turning back to the console. “Coordinates are locked,” he said. “Jump vector confirmed.”
He sounded pleased with himself, and he had earned that much. Plotting a clean hyperspace route through the outer lanes was not simple work, particularly not when one had a Jedi standing over one’s shoulder demanding corrections for errors so minor most navigators would have ignored them out of pride or laziness. I had made him recalculate the vector twice already and nearly a third time besides, partly because the route mattered and partly because a Padawan who could be made to resent repetition was a Padawan who needed more of it.
“You are improving,” I told him.
Oltiss gave a soft snort, his mouth twitching with that familiar irreverence he seemed unable to beat out of himself. “I should hope so. You’ve had me running nav drills since we left the Core.”
“Practice teaches patience.”
“Practice teaches boredom.”
A faint smile touched my mouth before I could stop it. “Only to those who are bored by survival.”
That earned me the look I expected, half long-suffering and half amused. He was still young enough to believe my lessons overly severe and old enough to know there was usually a corpse somewhere in my memory attached to each one.
Footsteps approached from the corridor. I heard them before the door hissed wide enough to admit Artosis, though hearing him coming was rarely difficult. The Neimoidian moved with the careful offended gait of a man who had never reconciled himself to military ships, military company, or military necessity, and who found all three equally vulgar. He appeared in the cockpit doorway draped in layered diplomatic robes that had likely been worth more than the yearly earnings of some Outer Rim settlements, his long fingers clasped behind his back with an effort at composure that did not quite hide the nervous energy in him. His narrow eyes went at once to the stars beyond the viewport.
“Are we departing soon?” he asked.
“Yes,” Oltiss said before I could answer, with a touch more civility than I might have managed.
Artosis remained at the threshold, staring out into the black. The pale light from the navigation displays picked out the slick planes of his face and made his expression look almost corpse-like. “I must confess,” he murmured after a moment, “these outer regions feel… unsettling.”
I could feel the truth of that in him. Not panic, not yet, but the brittle unease of a man who senses himself removed from the shelter of systems he understands. There are beings who find comfort in the open dark. Neimoidians are not among them. Artosis liked distance only when he could charge interest upon it.
“You will be safe,” I said.
He inclined his head quickly at that, as if grateful to hear the expected words even if he lacked the faith to believe them fully. “Of course. With Jedi aboard the vessel there is little to fear.”
That was the sort of thing civilians said when they had never watched a Jedi fail.
Before I could decide whether to let the remark pass unchallenged, the pilot spoke from the control chair. “Hyperspace window opening.”
The hum beneath the deck changed as the hyperdrive prepared itself. It was a sound I had known for years, low and resonant, felt as much through the bones as heard through the ear, the ship gathering itself for translation. Power moved through the vessel in a steady pulse that rose from the engines and spread through the deck plates beneath my boots. Even after all these campaigns there remained something uncanny in that moment before a jump, when the world seemed to draw one breath and hold it, reality itself pausing on the threshold of becoming something stranger.
Oltiss leaned a little farther over the console. “All systems green.”
Five seconds, perhaps. Less.
The disturbance returned.
Not with violence. That would have been easier. It came stronger than before, but still with that dreadful subtlety, as though some unseen hand had touched the surface of the Force and set it trembling. My head turned toward the viewport before thought had time to become language.
“Wait—”
The impact struck before the word had fully left my mouth.
The ship lurched beneath us with such force that the deck seemed to leap sideways. Oltiss slammed hard against the edge of the navigation console. The first alarms began at once, shrill and mechanical, joined almost immediately by the wash of red emergency lighting that flooded the cockpit in pulses like arterial blood.
“Impact!” one of the pilots shouted.
Then another blast tore through the hull, heavier than the first, a concussive violence that ran through the ship like a blow through flesh. The vessel shuddered around us, not like a machine now but like an injured thing trying and failing not to die. Behind me Artosis screamed, a high tearing sound stripped of dignity.
“What is happening?”
“We’re under attack!” the co-pilot yelled back.
“From where?” Oltiss demanded, dragging himself upright, one hand still on the console for balance.
The pilot’s hands moved across the controls with desperate speed. “Nothing on scanners!”
The ship rolled. The stars beyond the viewport tilted and spun in a sickening sweep of white across black. My body moved on instinct, one hand bracing against the back of the pilot’s chair while I reached inward, outward, through the chaos to the Force. Danger burned bright around us now, no longer subtle: the fear of the crew, the mounting violence of failing systems, the sudden fraying of order into panic and fire. Yet for all that intensity I could not find the source. I could feel the wound but not the blade that had made it.
Another explosion struck us somewhere aft. I heard metal scream deep within the hull, a long tortured shriek that ended in a shower of sparks bursting from the console at Oltiss’s side. The smell of scorched insulation rushed into the cockpit, hot and bitter.
“Hyperdrive malfunction!” the pilot shouted.
The stars stretched then, white points smearing into lines across the viewport. For a single bewildering instant I thought we had entered the jump in spite of everything, that some damaged system had forced the transition through. But the lines did not lengthen into the familiar clean geometry of hyperspace. They bent. Twisted. Dipped downward.
Blue filled the viewport.
Not the false blue of a display.
A world.
Clouds boiling upward beneath us, ocean or sky or both, impossible in their suddenness. We were no longer suspended in the patient void between stars. We were falling.
The stars vanished all at once, and in their place there was only blue—blue vast and terrible and alive with motion, the upper reaches of an atmosphere rushing to meet us with all the calm inevitability of an executioner drawing near. For one disorienting moment the sight seemed unreal, a trick of damaged systems or a fever dream conjured by impact, but the ship answered the truth of it immediately. The first touch of atmosphere came upon the hull like claws across a shield. The entire vessel began to shake, not in the heavy measured way of blaster impacts, but in a finer more relentless violence, every plate and seam and spar protesting at once as air seized hold of what had no right to be moving through it so quickly.
Alarms screamed from every console. Red light pulsed over metal, skin, robes, blood. The cockpit, moments ago merely tense, had become a chamber of noise and heat and shuddering light.
“Stabilizers are gone!” the pilot shouted.
The deck lurched beneath me so sharply my shoulder struck the bulkhead with enough force to numb the arm for a heartbeat. I caught the back of the pilot’s chair before the next roll could throw me harder. Behind us Artosis had begun to wail in earnest, all pretense gone now, all diplomatic restraint burned away by the simple proximity of death.
“We are burning! We are burning!”
He was not wrong. Thin veins of orange flame had begun to creep across the edges of the viewport, the first reflection of atmospheric fire licking over the outer plating as the hull heated under the punishment of our descent. We were entering too fast, far too fast. Any ship could kiss an atmosphere if handled properly. We were not kissing this one. We were being dragged into it by the throat.
“Shields collapsing!” the co-pilot barked.
A burst of sparks erupted from the panel beside Oltiss, bright enough to illuminate the sharp silhouette of his horns for an instant before the cockpit was swallowed again in red light and smoke. He flinched back, coughing as the bitter tang of scorched circuitry spread thicker through the air.
“Navigation’s gone!” he shouted.
Another jolt slammed through us, more vertical than lateral this time, and I felt the sensation with a veteran’s exactness: the deck dropping beneath my feet, the brief queasy lightness in the gut, the unmistakable truth that the ship was losing the argument against gravity. One of the pilots was fighting the controls with both hands, every line of his body taut.
“I can’t level her!”
The horizon whirled across the viewport in a dizzying blur—blue sky, white cloud, a glimpse of darker land impossibly far below and not far enough. The ship had begun to roll in earnest. I knew what that meant. Once a descent turned into a spin, recovery ceased being piloting and became prayer.
I closed my eyes.
In battle, the Force had always been clarity. That was the simplest way to say it, though even that word was smaller than the truth. In its current, panic lost its power, noise thinned, the world arranged itself into motion and consequence. One saw not because sight improved, but because confusion ceased to matter. I reached for that stillness now with the practiced certainty of a man reaching for his own hand in the dark.
For a moment it answered.
I felt the ship as if it were alive, not in some mystical childish sense, but in the clean pattern of stress and velocity and motion made legible through the Force. Wind battered the hull in savage bursts. Gravity hauled at us without malice and without mercy. The pilot’s fear burned bright and disciplined. Oltiss’s fear burned brighter, younger, edged with disbelief. Their thoughts flickered through the Force like torchlight in a storm.
“Now,” I said.
The pilot moved at once, trusting the instruction because there was nothing else left to trust. He pulled against the controls. The ship rolled sharply the other way, fighting its own fall. For one brief, impossible heartbeat the spin slowed. A thin fragile hope entered the cockpit, so delicate it was almost shameful to feel it.
Then the Force vanished.
There is no graceful way to describe that moment. It did not weaken by degrees, did not recede like a tide or thin like smoke. It was simply there one instant and not there the next, cut away so completely that the absence struck harder than any physical blow. All my life the Force had been the one constant beneath every surface, present in waking and sleep alike, in battle and meditation, in triumph and shame, in every breath I had ever drawn. Even in the deadest silence of space it had always existed beneath silence. To have it suddenly absent was not like losing a weapon. It was like losing the shape of the world.
I opened my eyes at once, as if sight might somehow explain what spirit could not.
Nothing answered.
I reached again, harder, deeper, almost violently, and found only emptiness.
Cold crept into my chest then, a sensation so unfamiliar I recognized it for what it was only after a second’s delay: not fear of dying, but fear of severance. A Jedi lives in constant awareness of being one thread in a greater weave. In that instant I felt as though the weave itself had been torn away and I had been left clutching air where meaning ought to have been.
Another explosion tore through the hull before I could dwell on it. The ship pitched forward. The pilot cursed, the sound raw and unguarded.
“I’ve lost the maneuvering thrusters!”
The nose dropped. Through the broken veil of cloud beneath us, the ground came surging closer. Mountains thrust up through the white like black teeth breaking through flesh. Their slopes were dark with forest, ridgelines of stone and pine and shadow arranged below us with the patient certainty of a trap that has no need to hurry.
“Oltiss!” I said.
“Hyperdrive containment failing!” he shouted back.
I could hear it now beneath the other noises, the engine below the deck no longer humming like power in readiness but howling like something alive and in agony, a sound too deep for comfort and too ragged for machinery. If the containment failed entirely there would be little left of us to bury. I reached once more for the Force, out of training, desperation, refusal—perhaps all three—and found that same sterile silence waiting for me. No current. No whisper. No answer. The void in that silence pressed against my thoughts like a wall of winter stone.
“Master—” Oltiss began.
“I know,” I said.
The words came out flatter than I intended. There was nothing else to give him. No lesson. No reassurance. Only the truth that I knew, and that knowing changed nothing.
Another tremor ran through the ship from stern to nose, hard enough to rattle every panel in the cockpit. The air filled with the sharp hot smell of burning insulation and hot metal. Somewhere behind us something large tore loose and crashed through the interior with the violence of a dropped gun emplacement.
“Brace!” the pilot shouted.
Then came the crack.
Not an impact. Not a blast from outside. A rupture from within, deep and total, like the spine of the ship had snapped.
The hyperdrive gave way.
The force of it hurled us forward. The co-pilot struck the console with a wet, sickening sound I felt in my own teeth. Blood sprayed across the instrument displays in a bright arterial sheet, obscenely vivid against the red emergency light and pale holo-glow. He slid bonelessly from the chair to the deck and did not move again. Smoke poured from the shattered panels. Half the cockpit died, plunging one side into shadow broken only by sparks and intermittent warning glyphs. Somewhere behind me Artosis shrieked the sort of helpless truth men save for the edge of death.
“We are finished!”
The ship began to spin again, faster now, with a kind of dreadful commitment. Through the viewport the mountains wheeled and rushed. They were no longer distant features of landscape but imminent facts. I could make out the dark packed texture of forests carpeting the slopes, the pale thread of a river flashing between trees, the hard jut of exposed stone where the mountain’s bones pushed through the earth. We had fallen low enough now for detail to become its own cruelty.
The surviving pilot gripped the controls with both hands so hard the tendons stood out stark along his wrists. “I can’t hold her!”
No, I thought. Of course you can’t. Nothing should hold under this.
The hull screamed around us as the air flayed it open layer by layer. Fire raced brighter across the viewport, reflected from the ship’s own skin as though we had become a torch dropped from heaven. The valley below rose to meet us with dreamlike speed, too swift and yet somehow still slow enough for the mind to register every part of it—the black-green pines crowding the lower slopes, the ragged outcroppings of stone, the white water breaking over rock, the narrow clearings where trees had yielded to earth and weather. Impact no longer belonged to the future. It waited only a handful of breaths away, patient and certain.
I tightened my hand around the back of the pilot’s chair until my knuckles ached beneath the glove.
And in the terrible silence where the Force should have been, I waited for the world to break us.
The mountains rose to meet us with a terrible serenity. Seen from above, in those last instants before violence laid its claim upon us, they possessed the stillness of something ancient enough to be indifferent to catastrophe. Dark forests clothed their flanks in long green sweeps, like old kings buried beneath moss and pine, and a narrow river flashed through the valley below in ribbons of cold silver, winding between the trees as if it had all the time in the world. There was a cruel peace in that sight, the sort the universe sometimes offers a man just before it breaks him, as though beauty and ruin were merely two hands of the same god. Then the ship began to come apart around us, and peace ceased to matter.
The first true impact came from beneath, not as a single blow but as a long grinding assault that ran the length of the hull with a roar so deep it seemed to rise through my bones rather than strike my ears. The underside of the Resolute Dawn scraped against the mountain’s rocky shoulder, and the ship lurched sideways with such force that the cockpit seemed to twist out from under us. Metal shrieked. Somewhere beside me the surviving pilot cried out, though whether in pain or fury I could not say. The vessel bounded against the slope again, and then again, skipping and slamming like a thrown stone across water if water had been made of rock and trees and spite. I was hurled hard into the bulkhead, the breath driven out of me so completely that for an instant I could neither curse nor pray, which under the circumstances was just as well. The viewport spiderwebbed before my eyes, jagged white fractures racing across the transparisteel like lightning trapped in glass. The pilot shouted hoarsely, some desperate command to hold the ship together, but by then such instructions belonged in the same category as diplomacy and optimism—technically possible, and of no immediate use.
Another impact struck us broadside and the ship answered with a sound I will remember until I die, a deep structural groan followed by a violent wrenching sensation that passed through the hull like a body dislocating a limb. The left engine tore free. I felt it go before I understood it, the sudden imbalance so severe it might as well have been a hand closing around the ship and yanking us out of alignment with the world. The spin worsened at once. Forest rushed up beneath us in a blur of black trunks and dark green needles. Then the cracked viewport gave way entirely. It burst inward in a storm of glittering fragments as the nose plowed through the treetops, branches slamming against the cockpit with explosive force. One thick limb whipped through the broken opening and struck my shoulder hard enough to turn me halfway around. The pilot was thrown forward at the same moment, his skull meeting the ruined console with a dull final crack that left no room for hope. He collapsed without ceremony. War, I have often thought, kills many men dramatically and even more with contemptuous efficiency.
The ship carved its path through the forest like a falling blade. Trees snapped beneath us. Branches hammered the shattered cockpit, scraping and lashing through the open frame with a violence that felt almost personal, as if the wood itself objected to our intrusion. I caught the frame of the pilot’s chair with one hand and held on because there was nothing else to do. Then came the last impact, heavier than all the rest, the moment when descent ceased to be descent and became collision. The Resolute Dawn slammed into the ground with a thunderous force that stripped thought from me. The cockpit rolled end over end. Metal screamed as the hull tore itself apart around us. For a few disjointed seconds the world contained nothing but motion, smoke, fire, shattered light, and the vast unanswering brutality of matter in revolt. My head struck something hard. White light exploded behind my eyes.
Then darkness took me.
I do not know how long I lay insensible. Time, when one is knocked senseless in a wreck half-buried into a mountainside, loses much of its dignity. It may have been seconds. It may have been an hour. When I opened my eyes again the first thing that struck me was not pain, though pain followed soon enough, but quiet. Not complete silence—wreckage is never silent so long as it continues dying—but a stillness so stark after the chaos of the crash that it felt unnatural. The ship no longer moved. No alarms screamed. No engines howled. I lay half-sprawled amid the ruin of the cockpit with one arm trapped beneath the twisted remains of the pilot’s chair, and for a moment I simply stared upward through the jagged opening where the viewport had been.
Blue sky.
Real sky.
Not the black of vacuum, not the strange false brilliance of hyperspace, but a sky broad and living and almost offensively serene above the wreckage. Thin white clouds drifted overhead with the indolent grace of things untouched by catastrophe. It took my mind a moment to accept the evidence of my eyes. Then pain arrived, spreading through my ribs and shoulder in deliberate waves as I tried to move. The taste of blood filled my mouth. My left side throbbed with a depth I did not care to investigate immediately. I forced myself to breathe through it, slow and measured, and the air that entered my lungs tasted of smoke, scorched metal, and something resinous from outside—the sharp green scent of split timber and burning sap.
The cockpit was a grave lit by daylight. Smoke drifted through the open frame in pale grey veils, and sunlight spilled over torn metal and shattered instruments with a brightness that felt almost cruel after the red gloom of the emergency lights. The dead pilot lay slumped over what remained of the controls, his neck bent at an angle no surgeon or miracle would ever correct. I looked away after only a moment. There are sights a soldier grows accustomed to, but familiarity is not the same as respect. Somewhere deeper in the wreckage a low groan echoed through the hull, followed by the shifting complaint of metal settling under its own new shape. Fire crackled outside now in a slower, more patient way, licking at the torn hull plating in orange tongues. The ship had plowed halfway into the mountainside and come to rest broken open among shattered trees. We had not landed so much as been hammered into the earth until motion gave up.
I tested the arm trapped beneath the chair and pain flared sharply through the shoulder, bright enough to make my vision narrow for an instant. Good, I thought. If it hurts, it probably still belongs to me. I braced my boots against the canted floor and pushed. The twisted metal groaned but held. I tried again, harder, feeling the damaged frame shift by degrees, each inch purchased with a sharp protest from muscle and bone. Somewhere behind me, faint through the wreckage, a voice called out.
“Master…”
Oltiss.
Relief cut cleanly through the pain, unwelcome in its intensity. One tries not to become too fond of those one may have to bury, but the war had made hypocrisy of many fine teachings.
“I’m here,” I said, though my throat came out raw from smoke and blood. “I’m… occupied.”
His answer came thin and strained from somewhere aft. “That sounds inconvenient.”
Alive then, and sarcastic. There were worse signs.
I shoved once more with everything I could bring to bear. The ruined chair shrieked against the deck, shifted just far enough, and I wrenched my arm free with a hiss of pain that did little for my dignity. I forced myself upright. The cockpit swayed around me for a moment, the world tilting and then slowly settling back into place as my vision cleared. Outside the broken hull the forest lay in ruin, trees snapped and splintered where our descent had cut through them, black smoke rising in coils above the wreck. The air smelled of hot metal, earth, pine resin, and fresh destruction.
I climbed carefully over the dead pilot and through the jagged frame where the viewport had once been. When my boots struck the ground outside, damp soil gave slightly beneath them. The mountain had a smell I did not know, deep and green and old, full of wet bark and cold stone and the torn-open scent of roots dragged into daylight. Around us the ship had carved a long scar through the hillside. Broken trunks lay at drunken angles amid splintered branches, and the exposed metal of the hull smoldered where friction and fire had blackened it. It looked less like a vessel now than the carcass of some huge beast split open in the hunt.
“Oltiss,” I called.
A weak groan answered from within the torn ship. “I’m here, Master.”
I took a step toward the wreck and, without thinking, reached for the Force.
Nothing answered.
It is a peculiar thing to have one’s deepest reflex fail. The hand expects the hilt to be there. The foot expects the stair. The spirit expects the current it has known all its life. What met me instead was absence—clean, flat, and cold. Not resistance. Not confusion. Nothing. The silence of it struck me almost harder than the crash had. But my Padawan was alive and the ship was beginning to burn, and there are moments when astonishment must queue politely behind necessity.
The Resolute Dawn had come to rest on its side, the hull split wide where the impact had sheared it open. Torn plates of dark metal jutted outward like broken ribs, blackened with soot and scored by flame. Smoke poured from the breach in slow thick drifts that climbed into the trees overhead and stained the afternoon light. The forest around us bore the marks of our arrival in savage detail. Trunks split down the grain. Limbs torn free and scattered across the slope. Patches of scorched earth where fire from the wreck had kissed the brush. Everywhere the acrid stink of hot alloy mingled with the raw green smell of mangled woodland. It was the sort of ruin battlefields often wore after artillery passed through them, though here no enemy had fired the last shot. Gravity had done the work with admirable thoroughness.
I climbed through the breach, ducking under a sagging support beam that looked one poor decision away from collapsing altogether. The corridor inside was scarcely recognizable as a corridor now. Wall panels had burst loose and hung at odd angles, exposing tangled bundles of wiring that spat intermittent sparks into the smoky gloom. The deck, canted sharply by the ship’s position, turned every step into an exercise in balance. Somewhere deeper in the hull fire crackled with increasing confidence.
“Oltiss,” I called again, louder this time.
“Cargo hold,” he answered, the word frayed by pain.
I followed the sound, moving carefully but as quickly as the wreck allowed. Each step set a dull ache throbbing through my ribs. My shoulder pulsed in time with my heartbeat where the chair had pinned it. Nothing felt obviously broken, which was either good fortune or a temporary misunderstanding between my nerves and my bones. I had survived worse. One should not confuse survival with comfort.
The cargo hold lay several compartments down, or rather what remained of it did. The crash had folded half the chamber inward. A section of hull plating had torn loose and driven through stacked storage crates, crushing some flat and splitting others open across the slanted deck. Ration packs, tools, field gear, and shards of packing material lay scattered in a disorderly spill. Oltiss was pinned among them. He had been thrown against the far wall during the impact, and a heavy durasteel support beam had come down across his legs, trapping him just above the knees. Blood streaked one side of his face and matted at the base of his horns. He looked up when I entered, and despite the pain there was still enough of him left to be flippant.
“I was beginning to think you died.”
“Disappointing you so soon would be poor form,” I said.
A faint smile touched his mouth. Then he shifted, and the beam moved a fraction. He sucked in a sharp breath.
“Don’t,” I said, kneeling beside him.
I examined the support. It had once been part of the internal frame, thick durasteel bent inward by the collapse. In better circumstances the Force would have made it a nuisance instead of a problem. In better circumstances I would have reached out, pushed, and had him free in seconds. The thought came unbidden and unwelcome.
“You feel anything broken?” I asked.
“My pride,” he said through gritted teeth.
“That was fragile to begin with.”
His breath hitched in something that might have been a laugh. “Comforting.”
“Do try to appreciate the effort.”
He tested one foot carefully, his face tightening. “My legs are trapped, but I can feel them.”
Good. Pain is often preferable to mystery.
I set both hands to the beam and tested its weight. It did not so much as tremble. Outside, somewhere deeper in the hull, something exploded with a muffled boom that ran through the floor and rattled the chamber. Fire was spreading.
“We need to move quickly,” I said.
“Take your time,” Oltiss muttered. “I’m very nearly comfortable.”
I ignored that and, despite myself, reached once more for the Force. The instinct was immediate, automatic, humiliating in how desperately natural it remained. Nothing came. No answer. No stillness. No widening of awareness, no invisible leverage sliding into place. Only my own breath, the smoke-thick air, the ache in my shoulder, the groan of the dying ship. I tried again, harder. The silence remained.
For a moment I wondered whether the crash had injured my mind more than I realized. Concussion can make a liar of the senses. But this was not confusion. Confusion has texture. This emptiness had none.
“Master?” Oltiss said quietly, studying my face with the attentiveness of someone who had spent long enough under my instruction to recognize when something had gone badly wrong. “You look troubled. More troubled than our present condition strictly requires.”
I blinked and looked at him. “Can’t you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
“The Force.” Even saying it aloud sounded absurd, as though I had asked whether he could still feel the sky. “It’s… quiet.”
He frowned. “Shock can do strange things after a crash.”
“No,” I said, more sharply than I intended. I moderated my tone at once. “No. This is different.”
I had stood in battlefields where thousands died screaming under artillery and starfire. I had meditated among the wreckage of temples older than Republic law. I had walked through places where the dark side clung to stone like old oil. Never—not once—had the Force felt absent. Distorted, yes. Violent, yes. Clouded by blood and terror, often. But absent? That was like finding the sea gone from an ocean.
Later, I told myself. If later existed.
I wedged my shoulder against the beam. Pain lit up my side at once, sharp and mean. “Ready?”
Oltiss braced both hands against the wall beside him. “As I’ll ever be.”
I pushed. At first the beam held with stubborn indifference. Then, with a deep protesting groan, it shifted by degrees. Oltiss dragged one leg free, his teeth clenched so hard I thought he might crack one.
“Again,” he said.
I pushed harder. My ribs flared with pain. The support slid another few inches. Oltiss wrenched himself the rest of the way free just as the frame above us gave a loud cracking complaint. We both looked up. The ceiling had begun to sag visibly, plates bowed inward, rivets popping one by one with nasty little metallic snaps.
“Move,” I said.
For once he did not argue. He got to his feet with a hitch in his motion, favoring one leg but still capable of standing. Together we made our way back along the corridor toward the breach in the hull. The heat thickened with every step. Smoke hung lower now, crawling along the slanted interior in choking layers. By the time we climbed out into the open air my lungs burned from what I had already taken in.
Fresh air struck like mercy. Oltiss leaned against the hull for a moment, breathing hard, one hand braced on the scorched plating beside him. “Well,” he said after a few breaths, “that could have gone worse.”
“It still might,” I said, looking back toward the burning wreck.
His expression suggested he had expected no less.
“I need to check for the others.”
Smoke climbed in black columns above the torn ship. Fire moved through the interior with patient hunger now, and the longer I watched it the more I could hear the structure failing in scattered groans and cracks. Time was narrowing. I reached automatically for my lightsaber as I gathered my robe in one hand to use against the smoke.
My hand found nothing.
I stopped. Searched again, more sharply, as if the hilt might merely have moved out of respect for the occasion.
Nothing.
Oltiss, still leaning against the hull, turned his head. “What’s wrong, Master?”
I looked at my empty belt and felt, absurdly, a fresh species of irritation rise through the exhaustion. “I lost my lightsaber.”
For a heartbeat he stared at me. Then, to my mingled annoyance and relief, he laughed outright, wincing at the pain it cost him. “When I lost mine in training, you made me run laps until I was sick. I trust you intend to lead by example.”
I grimaced despite myself. “It is encouraging that your sense of humor survived the crash even if your judgment did not.”
“It’s all I have left,” he said. Then his expression sobered. “You do see the problem.”
“Yes.” I looked at him. “I am devastated that you’ve finally become observant.”
His laugh this time was softer. Beneath it lay the truth neither of us needed to state. His lightsaber had been destroyed during the extraction on Veshkar Minor. Mine was now gone somewhere between orbit and this mountainside. Whatever world this was, whatever waited in its forests and valleys, we stood upon it as Jedi without blades and without the Force. It was difficult not to admire the thoroughness of our misfortune.
None of that altered what needed doing. I wrapped part of my robe over my mouth and nose against the worst of the smoke and climbed back into the breach. The corridor beyond had grown darker and hotter, smoke collecting in heavy layers beneath the sagging panels. The smell was thicker now too: burned wiring, fuel, scorched fabric, and beneath it all the unmistakable warmth of blood. Death has a scent. Soldiers learn it quickly and never entirely forget.
The forward passage had become a narrow throat of warped metal and shattered fittings. I stepped over a fallen support beam and nearly slipped on a slickness I chose not to examine too closely. A body lay half-crushed beneath the beam, one of the engineers by the look of the torn uniform. I did not remember his name, which felt like an indictment even if it was also the ordinary arithmetic of war. His chest had been opened by the collapse. What remained of him looked less like a man than meat left badly on a butcher’s block. I moved on because pity does not reverse structural failure.
Farther forward the damage worsened. Two crewmen had been thrown into the bulkhead with such violence the metal seemed to have folded around them in a parody of embrace. One had been nearly torn in half. The other still hung suspended in the remains of a harness chair, head turned impossibly to the side, the dead console in front of him washed red. I called out once, more from duty than hope. No one answered.
The diplomatic cabin had fared little better. Half its wall had collapsed inward, the frame crushed and twisted into a jagged arch. I stepped through, ducking a panel that hissed and spat sparks overhead.
“Artosis,” I called.
At first there was only smoke and the low crackle of advancing fire. Then a thin sound came through the haze.
“J… Jedi…”
I found him pinned against the far bulkhead. A jagged length of durasteel, torn free in the crash, had punched clean through his chest and fixed him upright to the wall in a posture of grotesque ceremony. Blood soaked the front of his robes and ran down the metal behind him in dark sticky lines. His long fingers twitched when he saw me. Relief touched his narrow features with almost childish clarity.
“You… came.”
I moved closer, though I already knew there was nothing in the galaxy I could do for him. “Stay still,” I said, because men say foolish things to dying beings when the truth has become too large to hold politely.
Artosis let out a weak, bubbling breath that might have been a laugh. “I think… that problem… solved itself.”
The ship groaned around us. Somewhere behind, a compartment gave way with a crunch of collapsing metal. His eyes drifted upward toward the broken ceiling where daylight showed through cracks and smoke. “That light,” he whispered. “I thought… hyperspace would be… quieter.”
Blood touched the corner of his mouth. He blinked slowly and looked back at me, his pupils already losing focus. “The Republic… will want… a report.”
His hand twitched once more, then slackened. For a moment I thought he meant to say something else, some final confession or plea or accusation. Instead his head bowed forward by degrees and the last of him went out softly. The metal spike held him upright in death just as it had in dying.
I stood there a moment longer than necessary. Artosis had not been brave. He had not been especially likable. He had complained through half our journey, nearly collapsed during extraction, and treated blaster fire as a personal discourtesy. Yet he had betrayed men more powerful than himself to hand the Republic information worth killing for. Courage and weakness so often inhabit the same body. The galaxy enjoys making mockery of simple categories.
Outside the cabin I heard Oltiss call my name, muffled through smoke and distance. There was nothing left to do for the dead. I turned back toward the cargo hold, moving more quickly now as the heat mounted.
Salvage became a matter of grim efficiency. The cargo hold had suffered badly, but not everything within it had been destroyed. I pried loose what remained accessible from the collapsed crates and stuffed it into a field satchel: two ration packs, a medkit, a compact water purifier. Pitiful stores, but better than empty hands. The armory was worse. The weapons rack had been completely crushed beneath a section of fallen frame. All I recovered from that ruin were two intact power cells, useful only if one wished to improvise an explosive or start a fire in a world that, from the look of it, had mastered that art centuries ago. It would have been funny under better circumstances.
By the time I emerged from the wreck again my lungs burned and my eyes stung from smoke. Oltiss straightened a little from where he sat against a fallen log near the edge of the clearing the crash had made.
“Well?” he asked.
“Enough to survive for a few days,” I said, dropping the salvaged gear beside him. “Assuming we become considerably more disciplined than either of us prefers.”
“That’s encouraging,” he said, though his face suggested he understood the arithmetic.
“It should not be.”
He studied me for a moment. “You are in a bright mood today, Master.”
“The ship is gone,” I said. “The hyperdrive is gone. The comms are gone. The attaché is dead. The crew is dead.” I looked back at the burning wreck, where fire had begun to spread in earnest along the split hull. “This is worse than Mygeeto.”
That won a brief silence from him. He glanced toward the wreckage, his expression darkening as whatever optimism had survived the crash adjusted itself to the scale of the loss. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I noticed.”
For a time we watched the fire together. There was little else to do and too much to think about. The flames moved through the torn ship with increasing confidence, orange light licking through rents in the metal while black smoke climbed steadily into the afternoon sky. Every so often some internal support failed with a cracking boom that echoed through the trees. The forest itself remained unnervingly quiet. No birds wheeled above the smoke. No curious scavengers ventured near. Perhaps our arrival had frightened every living thing for a league around. Perhaps this place simply kept its own counsel.
“Well,” Oltiss said at last, leaning his head back against the log, “at least we survived.”
“That remains to be seen.”
He snorted softly. “I have missed your optimism.”
I ignored that and looked out across the valley below. The mountains rolled away in dark green folds beneath the afternoon sun, forest upon forest stretching in every direction. No towers pierced the horizon. No roads shone pale through the trees. No traffic moved overhead. No distant pulse of civilization marked itself by light or sound. Only wilderness. Only old growth and stone and river and the profound unsettling absence of anything I would have called modern. Then, far off through a break in the trees, I saw a thin grey line lifting above the canopy.
Smoke.
Oltiss followed my gaze a heartbeat later. “Someone else crashed?”
“No,” I said.
He squinted into the distance. “A settlement, then.”
“Perhaps.”
His expression brightened, because youth will treat uncertainty as hope whenever possible. “That solves one problem.”
“It may create several others.”
He looked at me, one brow ridge lifting. “You think they’ll be hostile?”
“I think they’ll be afraid.”
“Of us?”
“Yes.”
His hand rose unconsciously to one of the horns above his brow. “That hardly seems fair.”
“Most things are not.”
I pushed myself to my feet and gathered the salvaged gear. My body complained from a variety of directions. My shoulder pulsed. My ribs felt like a personal grievance. None of that mattered enough to discuss. “Can you walk?”
He was quiet for a moment as he tested his weight on the injured leg. His jaw tightened, then eased. “I can,” he said. “Mostly.”
“That will have to be enough.”
Behind us the wreck let out another deep groan as a fresh section collapsed inward, sparks blowing briefly up through the smoke. Soon there would be nothing left worth taking. Oltiss looked back at it, and when he spoke again the humor had gone from him.
“I can’t believe none of them made it.”
Neither could I, though disbelief was a luxury generally denied by corpses. I stepped close enough to rest a hand briefly on his shoulder. “Their trials are ended,” I said. “May they find peace in the Force.”
His eyes followed the black smoke curling upward. “May the Force guide them home,” he murmured.
The words landed strangely in me now. Prayer offered into silence. Still, I let them stand.
We left the wreck before the fire could consume it entirely. The smoke column rose behind us through the trees, dark enough to be seen from far down the valley, which I judged either fortunate or disastrous depending on what sort of men lived in these mountains. I walked ahead, following the slope downward through the forest with the salvaged pack over one shoulder. Oltiss limped beside me, careful but stubborn, favoring his left leg without reducing our pace enough to insult himself. The trees closed around us quickly, swallowing the wreck from sight. Tall trunks crowded the hillside, their bark dark and furrowed, thick with moss where the light failed. Fallen needles softened the ground underfoot, damp earth giving slightly beneath each step. Roots twisted up through the soil like the knuckles of buried giants. Stones crouched in the undergrowth wrapped in green lichen and old moisture. The air was cool here despite the sun, and rich with the scent of sap, leaf-mold, wet bark, and the long slow rot by which forests build themselves over centuries.
It was quiet, but not the dead quiet of space. This silence breathed. Wind moved through the canopy high above in slow whispers. Somewhere deeper in the woods a bird called once, thin and cautious, then was still. There was a weight to the place that made me think of age, though I had walked on worlds older than this one by measures human minds cannot comfortably hold. Age, I have found, is not only a matter of years. Some places gather it into themselves more visibly than others. This forest felt old in the way old temples do—less because of what had happened there than because of how long they had stood watching.
We found a narrow trail winding down the slope, little more than a strip of flattened earth between trees. Whether made by animals or men I could not tell at first. It bent in a practical way rather than a graceful one, choosing the easier grade where it could. That suggested human caution or very intelligent goats.
“Primitive,” Oltiss muttered after a time, his gaze moving over the path, the trees, the complete lack of any visible infrastructure.
I glanced at him. “Your powers of observation remain one of your more tolerable qualities.”
He grinned faintly despite the dried blood on his brow. “I’m serious. Look at this place. No power lines. No roads. No sensors. No traffic overhead. Not even machinery.”
I had noticed. More than noticed. The absence of artifice pressed upon me at every turn. No hum of distant reactors. No faint electronic static riding the air. No cut marks of survey drones, no hidden emitters, no sign of orbital presence above us. Even the trail felt ancient, worn by repetition and weather rather than laid by design. It was as though we had not merely crashed onto another world but stepped backward through history.
“Perhaps the inhabitants prefer quiet,” I said.
“Perhaps the inhabitants are still negotiating with the concept of fire.”
“That would at least simplify introductions.”
He laughed softly at that. I let him. A living Padawan who jokes is easier to lead than one who has given himself wholly to fear.
We walked for what I judged to be close to an hour before the forest began to thin. The trail widened, subtly at first, and signs of human labor began to show themselves along its margins. A line of stones stacked into a low wall half-buried by moss. Old axe marks in the bark of certain trees. A leaning fence of split timber where brush had been cut back. Then came fields, small and uneven, carved from the forest with the patient violence of hand tools rather than machines. Grain grew there in irregular rows, and a few goats picked their way between patches of scrub under the watch of a thin girl in rough clothes. She saw us the moment we emerged from the trees.
Her stillness lasted only a heartbeat.
Then she ran.
“Encouraging,” Oltiss said.
The village revealed itself just beyond—a clutch of perhaps twenty huts gathered in a rough clearing beside a narrow stream. Smoke drifted from cooking fires and from holes in thatched roofs. The dwellings were built of timber, mud, and labor, low and weathered and poor in the honest way of places where every nail and board must be justified. Chickens pecked in the dirt between them. A dog barked once and fell silent. It was smaller than I had expected and poorer than most frontier outposts I had seen in the Outer Rim, but not disordered. Poverty often breeds precision where abundance breeds laziness.
It was the women who noticed us first. They stood by the fires, at doorways, with buckets or baskets or children in hand, and one by one they ceased moving. The pause spread through the village like a wind touching wheat. Talk died. A woman let a wooden pail slip from her fingers, and water spilled into the dirt unheeded. A child began to cry. Another was snatched up before he could look too long.
Fear moved through them visibly, even without the Force to name it. I could see it in widened eyes, in the quick tightening of jaws, in the way bodies angled backward even before feet chose whether to flee. Their gaze kept returning to Oltiss. To his horns. To the red-and-black pattern of his face, which to my eyes had long ago become simply his face and nothing stranger. Beside me I felt him stiffen.
“Well,” he murmured, “that explains the welcome.”
The whispers started then, quick and sharp, in a language I did not know. One woman pointed. Another made some sign across her chest or throat, a practiced gesture with the shape of warding. Mothers gathered children close. A few men began to emerge from among the huts with farming tools held in ways that suggested they would happily repurpose them as weapons if encouraged.
I raised my hands slowly, palms open. “We mean no harm,” I said.
The words meant nothing to them. Tone meant enough. Their fear did not lessen.
An old man came forward from one of the central huts, bent nearly double with age and leaning on a polished wooden staff. His hair was thin and white. His face was all lines and weather, the sort carved by years lived under bad conditions without the luxury of complaint. The villagers parted for him with the reflexive respect one grants either the oldest or the most stubborn among them. He stopped a short distance away and studied us in silence. His eyes lingered on Oltiss, and whatever he read there hardened his mouth.
He spoke then, his voice thin but firm. I did not understand the words, but language was unnecessary. He pointed back toward the forest from which we had come. Leave.
More words followed, sharper now. The villagers echoed his tone in frightened murmurs. One woman stepped forward gripping what might once have been a hoe but would work well enough on a skull. Another stooped and picked up a stone. Fear, when given a target, often decides it would rather be anger.
“I think,” Oltiss murmured under his breath, “that we are not invited to supper.”
“Your strategic assessments improve by the hour.”
The old man struck his staff hard against the ground and barked something at us that required no translation. The villagers shouted in ragged support. I inclined my head the barest fraction, the gesture more to preserve dignity than convey understanding.
“Come,” I said to Oltiss.
We backed away slowly. No one pursued us. They held their line at the edge of the clearing, watching with the fixed suspicious intensity of people who believe they have just driven off something unnatural and are not yet certain it will stay gone. Only when the trees took us back did the tension ease from my shoulders.
Oltiss exhaled through his nose. “Well. That went well.”
“They were afraid.”
“Yes,” he said dryly. “I had gathered that.”
His hand rose again to brush one of the horns above his brow. “I do feel I’m being judged before anyone has learned my better qualities.”
“That would require surviving a conversation with you.”
He gave me a wounded look entirely too theatrical for a half-crippled refugee. “Harsh.”
“It is one of my better qualities.”
We walked on in silence for several moments, deeper into the trees, until he spoke again. “You think they’ll come after us?”
“No,” I said, though hope had perhaps more to do with that answer than certainty.
The forest swallowed the village behind us quickly. The trail bent again through moss and root and shadow. I reached once more, almost unconsciously, toward the Force, seeking even the faintest whisper beneath the life around us.
Nothing.
Not quiet. Not distance. Silence, complete and sterile, where there should have been current and motion and the familiar luminous presence of living things. I withdrew from the effort before Oltiss could notice the reflex, though perhaps he already had. The absence unsettled me more with each attempt, not because I feared weakness—I have known weakness before—but because this did not feel like weakness. It felt like exile.
Ahead, through breaks in the trees, I saw another column of smoke lifting somewhere farther on, thinner than the first and perhaps farther away. Another cluster of men and huts. Another chance to be understood badly.
I adjusted the satchel on my shoulder and kept walking. There was little else left to do. The ship burned behind us, the Force had abandoned us or been taken from us, and the neighbors, it seemed, had already formed an opinion. By any reasonable measure, the day was developing character.