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  “Alarm generated by the navicomp, Captain,” called out her navigator, Cadet Kalwar, a young Quermian. “There’s something in the hyperlane. Dead ahead. Big. Impact in ten seconds.”

  The cadet’s voice held steady, and Hedda was proud of him. He probably wasn’t that much older than Serj.

  She knew this situation was impossible. The hyperlanes were empty. That was the whole point. She couldn’t rattle off all the science involved, but she did know that lightspeed collisions in established lanes simply could not happen. It was “mathematically absurd,” to hear the engineers talk about it.

  Hedda had been flying in deep space long enough to know that impossible things happened all the time, every damn day. She also knew that ten seconds was no time at all at speeds like the Legacy Run was traveling.

  You can’t trust hyperspace, she thought.

  Hedda Casset tapped two buttons on her command console.

  “Brace yourselves,” she said, her voice calm. “I’m taking control.”

  Two piloting sticks snapped up out from the armrests of her captain’s chair, and Hedda grasped them, one in each hand.

  She spared the time for one breath, and then she flew.

  The Legacy Run was not an Incom Z-24 Buzzbug, or even one of the new Republic Longbeams. It had been in service for well over a century. It was a freighter at the end of—if not beyond—its operational life span, loaded to capacity, with engines designed for slow, gradual acceleration and deceleration, and docking with spaceports and orbital loading facilities. It maneuvered like a moon.

  The Legacy Run was no warship. Not even close. But Hedda flew it like one.

  She saw the obstacle in their path with her fighter pilot’s eye and instincts, saw it advancing at incredible velocity, large enough that both her ship and whatever the thing was would be disintegrated into atoms, just dust drifting forever through the hyperlanes. There was no time to avoid it. The ship could not make the turn. There was no room, and there was no time.

  But Captain Hedda Casset was at the helm, and she would not fail her ship.

  The tiniest tweak of the left control stick, and a larger rotation of the right, and the Legacy Run moved. More than it wanted to, but not less than its captain believed it could. The huge freighter slipped past the obstacle in their path, the thing shooting by their hull so close Hedda was sure she felt it ruffle her hair despite the many layers of metal and shielding between them.

  But they were alive. No impact. The ship was alive.

  Turbulence, and Hedda fought it, feeling her way through the jagged bumps and ripples, closing her eyes, not needing to see to fly. The ship groaned, its frame complaining.

  “You can do it, old gal,” she said, out loud. “We’re a couple of cranky old ladies and that’s for sure, but we’ve both got a lot of life to live. I’ve taken damn good care of you, and you know it. I won’t let you down if you won’t let me down.”

  Hedda did not fail her ship.

  It failed her.

  The groan of overstressed metal became a scream. The vibrations of the ship’s passage through space took on a new timbre Hedda had felt too many times before. It was the feeling of a ship that had moved beyond its limits, whether from taking too much damage in a firefight or, as here, just being asked to perform a maneuver that was more than it could give.

  The Legacy Run was tearing itself apart. At most, it had seconds left.

  Hedda opened her eyes. She released the control sticks and tapped out commands on her console, activating the bulkhead shielding that separated each cargo module in the instance of a disaster, thinking that perhaps it might give some of the people aboard a chance. She thought about Serj and his friends, playing in the common area, and how emergency doors had just slammed down at the entrance to each passenger module, possibly trapping them in a zone that was about to become vacuum. She hoped the children had gone to their families when the alarms sounded.

  She didn’t know.

  She just didn’t know.

  Hedda locked eyes with her first officer, who was staring at her, knowing what was about to happen. He saluted.

  “Captain,” Lieutenant Bowman said, “it’s been an—”

  The bridge ripped open.

  Hedda Casset died, not knowing if she had saved anyone at all.

  Scantech (third-class) Merven Getter was ready. Ready to clock out for the day, ready to get the shuttle back to the inner system, ready to hit the cantina a few streets away from the spaceport on the Rooted Moon where Sella worked tending bar, ready to see if today was the day he might find the courage to ask her out. She was Twi’lek, and he was Mirialan, but what difference did that make? We are all the Republic. Chancellor Soh’s big slogan—but people believed it. Actually, Merven thought he did, too. Attitudes were evolving. The possibilities were endless.

  And maybe, one of those possibilities revolved around a scantech (third-class) staffed on a monitoring station far out on the ecliptic of the Hetzal system, itself pretty blasted far out on the Rim, sadly distant from the bright lights and interesting worlds of the Republic Core. Perhaps that scantech (third-class), who spent his days staring at holoscreens, logging starship traffic in and out of the system, could actually catch the eye of the lovely scarlet-skinned woman who served him up a mug of the local ale, three or four nights a week. Sella usually stayed around to chat with him for a while, circling back as other customers drifted in and out of her little tavern. She seemed to find his stories about life on the far edge of the system inexplicably interesting.

  Merven didn’t get why she was so fascinated. Sometimes ships showed up in-system, popping in from hyperspace and appearing on his screens, and other times ships left…at which point their little icons disappeared from his screens. Nothing interesting ever happened—flight plans were logged ahead of time, so he usually knew what was coming or going. Merven was responsible for making sure those flight plans were followed, and not much else. On the off chance something unusual occurred, his job was just to notify people significantly more important than he was.

  Scantech (third-class) Merven Getter spent his days watching people go places. He, in contrast, stayed still.

  But maybe not today. He thought about Sella. He thought about her smile, the way she decorated her lekku with those intricate lacings she told him she designed herself, the way she stopped whatever she was doing to pour him his mug of ale the moment he walked in, without him even having to ask for it.

  Yeah. He was going to ask her to dinner. Tonight. He’d been saving up, and he knew a place not too far from the cantina. Not so far from his place, either, but that was getting ahead of himself.

  He just had to get through his blasted shift.

  Merven glanced over at his colleague, Scantech (second-class) Vel Carann. He wanted to ask her if he could check out a little early that day, take the shuttle back to the Rooted Moon. She was reading something on a datapad, her eyes rapt. Probably one of the Jedi romances she was always obsessed with. Merven didn’t get it. He’d read a few—they were all set at outposts on the far Republic frontiers, full of unrequited love and longing glances…the only action was the lightsaber battles that were clearly a substitute for what the characters really wanted to do. Vel wasn’t supposed to be reading personal material on company time, but if he called her out on it, she’d just tap the screen and switch it to a technical manual and insist she wasn’t doing anything wrong. The trouble was, she was second-class, and he was third-class, which meant that as long as he did his job, she thought she didn’t have to do hers.

  Nah. Not even worth asking for an early sign-off time. Not from Vel. He could get through the rest of his shift. Not long now, and—

  Something appeared on one of his screens.

  “Huh,” Merven said.

  That was odd. Nothing was scheduled to enter the system for another twenty minutes o
r so.

  Something else appeared. A number of somethings. Ten.

  “What the—?” Merven said.

  “Problem, Getter?” Vel asked, not glancing up from her screen.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Got a bunch of unscheduled entries to the system, and they’re not decelerating.”

  “Wait…what?” Vel said, setting down her datascreen and finally looking at her own monitors. “Oh, that is odd.”

  More icons popped up on Merven’s screens, too many to count at a glance.

  “Is this…do you think it’s…asteroids, maybe?” Vel said, her voice unsteady.

  “At that velocity? From hyperspace? I dunno. Run an analysis,” Merven said. “See if you can figure out what they are.”

  Silence from Vel’s station.

  Merven glanced up.

  “I…don’t know how,” she said. “After the latest upgrade, I never bothered to learn the systems. You seemed to have it all under control, and I’m really here to supervise, you know, and—”

  “Fine,” he said, utterly unsurprised. “Can you track trajectories, at least? That subroutine’s been the same for like two years.”

  “Yeah,” Vel said. “I can do that.”

  Merven turned back to his screens and started typing commands across his keypads.

  There were now forty-two anomalies in-system, all moving at a velocity near lightspeed. Incredibly fast, in other words, much quicker than safety regulations allowed. If they were in fact ships, whoever was piloting them was in for a massive fine. But Merven didn’t think they were ships. They were too small, for one thing, and didn’t have drive signatures.

  Asteroids, maybe? Space rocks, somehow thrown into the system? Some kind of weird space storm, or a comet swarm? It couldn’t be an attack, that much he knew. The Republic was at peace, and looked like it was going to stay that way. Everyone was happy, living their lives. The Republic worked.

  Besides, the Hetzal system didn’t have anything worth attacking. It was just an ordinary set of planets, the primeworld and its two inhabited moons—the Fruited and the Rooted—with a deep focus on agricultural production. It had some gas giants and frozen balls of rock, but really it was just a lot of farmers and all the things they grew. Merven knew it was important, that Hetzal exported food all over the Outer Rim, and some of its output even found its way to the inner systems. There was that bacta stuff he’d been reading about, too, some kind of miracle replacement for juvan they were trying to grow on the primeworld, supposed to revolutionize medicine if they could ever figure out how to farm it in volume…but still, it was all just plants. It was hard to get excited about plants.

  As far as he was concerned, Hetzal’s biggest claim to fame was that it was the homeworld of a famous gill-singer named Illoria Daze, who could vibrate her vocal apparatus in such a way as to sing melodies in six-part harmony. That, in combination with a uniquely appealing wit and rags-to-riches backstory, had made her famous across the Republic. But Illoria wasn’t even here. She lived on Alderaan now, with the fancy people.

  Hetzal had nothing of any real value. None of this made sense.

  Another rash of objects appeared on his screens, so many now that it was overloading his computer’s ability to track them. He zoomed out the resolution, shifting to a system-wide view, making a clearer picture. Merven could see that the things, whatever they might be, were not restricting themselves to entering the system from the safety of the hyperspace access zone. They were popping up everywhere, and some were getting awfully close to—

  “Oh no,” Vel said.

  “I see it, too,” Merven said. He didn’t even have to run a trajectory analysis.

  The anomalies were headed sunward, and many of them were on intercept courses with the inhabited worlds and their orbital stations. The things weren’t slowing down, either. Not at all. At near-lightspeed, it didn’t matter whether they were asteroids, or ships, or frothy bubbles of fizz-candy. Whatever they hit would just…go.

  As he watched, one of the objects smashed through an uncrewed communications satellite. Both the anomaly and the satellite vanished from his screen, and the galaxy got itself a little more space dust.

  Hetzal Prime was big enough that it could endure a few impacts like that and survive as a planetary body. Even the two inhabited moons might be able to take a couple of hits. But anything living on them…

  Sella was on the Rooted Moon right now.

  “We have to get out of here,” he said. “We’re right in the target zone, and more of these things are appearing every second. We have to get to the shuttle.”

  “I agree,” Vel said, some semblance of command returning to her voice. “But we need to send a system-wide alert first. We have to.”

  Merven closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again.

  “You’re right. Of course.”

  “The computer needs authorization codes from both of us to activate the system-wide alarm,” Vel said. “We’ll do it on my signal.”

  She tapped a few commands on her keypad. Merven did the same, then waited for her nod. She gave it, and he typed in his code.

  A soft, chiming alarm rang through the operations deck as the message went out. Merven knew that a similar sound was now being heard across the Hetzal system, from the cockpits of garbage scows all the way to the minister’s palace on the primeworld. Forty billion people just looked up in fear. One of them was a lovely scarlet-skinned Twi’lek probably wondering whether her favorite Mirialan was going to come by the tavern that evening.

  Merven stood up.

  “We’ve done our job. Shuttle time. We can send a message explaining what’s happening on the way.”

  Vel nodded and levered herself up out of her seat.

  “Yeah. Let’s get out of—”

  One of the objects leapt out of hyperspace, so near, and moving so fast, that in astronomical terms it was on them the moment it appeared.

  A gout of flame, and the anomaly vanished, along with the monitoring station, its two scantechs, and all their goals, fears, skills, hopes, and dreams; the kinetic energy of the object atomizing everything it touched in less than an instant.

  “Is this real?” Minister Ecka asked as the chimes rang through his office—consistent, insistent, impossible to ignore. Which, he supposed, was the point.

  “Seems so,” Counselor Daan answered, tucking a curl of hair behind his ear. “The alert originated from a monitoring station at the far edge of the system. It came in at the highest priority level, and it hit system-wide. Every computer linked to the main processing core is sounding the same alarm.”

  “But what’s causing it?” the minister asked. “There was no message attached?”

  “No,” Daan replied. “We’ve repeatedly asked for clarification, but there’s been no response. We believe…the monitoring station was destroyed.”

  Minister Ecka thought for a moment. He rotated his chair away from his advisers, the old wood creaking a little beneath his weight. He looked out through the broad picture window that made up the wall behind his desk. As far as he could see: the golden fields of Hetzal, all the way to the horizon. The world—the whole system, really—believed in using every bit of available space to grow, create, to cultivate. Buildings were roofed with cropland, rivers and lakes were used to grow helpful algae and waterweeds, towers were terraced, with fruit vines spilling from their sides. Harvester droids floated among them, plucking ripe fruits—whatever was in season. Right now, that would be honeyfruit, kingberries, and ice melons. In a month, it would be something else. On Hetzal, something was always in season.

  He loved this view. The most peaceful in the galaxy, he believed. Everything just so. Productive and correct.

  Now, with the alarm chimes ringing in his ears, it didn’t look like that anymore. Now it all just looked…fragile.

 
; “Something’s happening out there,” another adviser said, a Devaronian woman named Zaffa.

  Ecka had known her for a long time, and this was the first time he’d ever heard her sound worried. She was staring down at a datascreen, frowning.

  “A mining rig out in midsystem just went down,” Zaffa said. “The satellite network’s starting to show holes, too. It’s like something’s taking out our facilities, one by one.”

  “And we still don’t have any images? This is madness,” Ecka declared.

  He pointed at his security chief, a portly middle-aged human.

  “Borta, why don’t your people know what’s happening?”

  Borta frowned. “Minister, respectfully, you know why. Your recent cuts have reduced Hetzal’s security division to a tenth of its former size. We’re working on it, but we can’t bring much to bear.”

  “Is it some sort of natural anomaly? It can’t be…we’re not under attack, are we?”

  “At this point, we don’t know. What’s happening is consistent with some sort of enemy infiltration, but we’re not seeing drive signatures, and the locations being hit are pretty random. We do still have some orbital defense platforms out there, and they’re all intact. If it’s an attack, they should be targeting our ability to strike back, but they’re not.”

  The chimes sounded again, and Ecka spun his chair and pointed at Counselor Daan, who cringed back.

  “Will you turn off that blasted alarm? I can’t think!”

  Daan pulled himself up, standing a little straighter, and tapped a control on his datascreen. The chimes, blessedly, ceased.

  Another adviser spoke up—a slim young man with red hair and extremely pale skin, Keven Tarr. The Ministry of Technology had sent him over. Ecka didn’t have much use for tech that wasn’t related to agricultural yields. In his heart, he was still a farmer—but he knew Tarr was supposed to be very smart. Probably wouldn’t be long until the boy moved on, found himself a job in some more sophisticated part of the galaxy. It was the way of things on a world like Hetzal. Not everyone stayed.