Crash and Burn

The marbled lights of hyperspace flew past the small ship, rendering an image that made Jacen feel like he was being hurled through a kaleidoscoping tunnel if he stared at it too long. The young man had been staring too long by any reasonable measure, of course, trying to find his center in the Force and only finding more uncertainty. His thoughts scattered like the light rays shooting through the ethereal nebula; he had had no time to talk to his parents before departing from Yavin IV, and saw Jaina for only a minute before she left with the Jedi squadron, heading for the refugee asteroids in the Doldur sector. She'd gone on with a purposeful stride, leaving him with a brief embrace and the traditional "may the Force be with you."



She didn't wonder what the right action was, whether or not her talents were being used in the way that would cause the least harm and do the most good. Confidence, lack of forethought, or just very good shielding?



A shadow moved across his line of sight and a humanoid with spindly limbs appeared. Jacen gasped and jumped back in his chair. "To not let a person sneak up on you like that," Tiera Aranta said gently, in her faintly sing-song tones that were a bit weak on voiced consonants. "You must focus. We to not know what we will fint on Tantooine and must be reaty to act quickly."



"But I thought our mission was only to get information and bring it back," Jacen said.



"It is. But that can pose many tangers, as you surely know. Is there a plague? A siege? A natural tisaster? These are only some of many possibilities." She turned towards the control panel, as if the conversation was over, before waiting for a response.



Jacen nodded and shrugged his shoulders, agreeing that much was unknown. His discomfort seemed to be invisible or ignored by her; he couldn't begin to guess. The translucent-skinned Tachrani were known for a relative lack of emotion, and it was unlikely that Tiera would notice his without probing through the Force. He didn't feel such an intrusion.



Anakin, dressed in a baggy orange jumpsuit, ducked slightly and passed through the low doorway to the cockpit. He carried two plastic cups with lids and clear straws through the center of each lid. The brown-furred Vurif Meg followed behind, also with two cups, and he cleared the top of the doorway by a good two decimeters.



Jacen and Tiera each took a cup. Tiera drank a long sip of the pale orange liquid inside and swallowed it quickly. "Careful - it's hot," Anakin warned her.



"I noticet. Thank you anyway." Once again she studied the numbers and letters on the display screens, as though studying them and looking for anomalies, even though they were still five hours away from Dantooine.



Anakin frowned and sat down hard. Jacen reached over and put his hand on his brother's shoulder. "She doesn't mean any harm," he said quietly.



Anakin bobbed his head in agreement, making a few stray locks of dark brown hair fall over his forehead, but he didn't change his expression. He concentrated on drinking his "dinner" - the nutritionally balanced liquid meal that was supposed to taste like vegetable broth, but managed something closer to rancid copper. Finally he said, "When we get to the Dantooine system... then what?"



"Tepends on the reception we get, if there is any," Tiera said without facing them.



"I suggest that we exit hyperspace before reaching the system," Vurif said. His beady black eyes bounced from Anakin to Tiera and then to Jacen, where they settled. "It will buy time for us to see what we are facing before we commit to an action."



"The cloaking tevice offers some protection against tetection, but also leaves us partly blint," Tiera said. "It will be activatet before we enter realspace again."



Jacen added, "We should be able to sense unusual distress as we get closer to the planet, if there is widespread trouble."



"That is your skill," Tiera agreed. "Use it. A skill might as well not be hat if it is never uset."



Perhaps she was more perceptive than he had originally thought; that, or he was broadcasting his emotions too strongly. Jacen tried to tell himself that it wasn't his fault that he was sensitive to the idea of using the Force when it wasn't needed, and that he thought such a thing was of the Dark Side; he'd been taught as much, and his innate ability to pick up on what others felt made him unwilling to disturb them if there was any way to avoid it. Passively receiving information about the environment surely was preferably to extracting information through imposition.



"It can't be too dangerous," Anakin said, after a long lull. "Uncle Luke wouldn't send both Jacen and me if he thought we were flying into a trap."



Jacen shot him a warning glance, but Anakin was already quickly continuing: "And he wouldn't send two of the best Jedi Knights on a wasted trip, either."



"We've got a shortage of good Knights, kid," Vurif said. "Too many still beginning their training; too many lost. If I were you, I'd think that four Jedi Knights on one mission means that it could be very dangerous. I think that already, and I am not you." He chuckled, but nobody else seemed to think it was particularly amusing.



The viewport windows suddenly went to dotted black and the ship shuddered. Jacen almost dropped his cup, and fumbled with it as the inertial compensators kicked in to ensure a smoother return to realspace.



"Are we there yet?" Jacen quipped. His attempt at humor also had no noticeable impact, not even on himself. Surely they had not yet reached Dantooine, and coming out of hyperspace five hours ahead of schedule was simply too much.



Before he could ask what the problem was, though, he received the answer; there was no mistaking what the wedge-shaped object far ahead of them, with nothing else close enough to be visible except for the tiny pinprick lights of distant stars.



"That's not a New Republic vessel," Anakin said in a strained voice.



"Get to the turrets, boys, and fire on anything that comes too close," Vurif suddenly commanded. Anakin jumped up and immediately obeyed; Jacen hesitated, but only long enough to hear part of warning about "approaching TIE fighters." Then he let Anakin pull him by the hand, out of the cockpit and to a set of ladders - one up, one down.



"Strap yourselves in!" Tiera called back. Jacen didn't really need to be warned, since the ship jerked back and forth, struggling against a tractor beam, and he could barely climb down to the lower turret without banging his shoulders against the walls of the crawl tunnel.



He jumped down to the tiny turret room, surrounded by six transparisteel windows and a circular band of datascreens. Jacen barely had time to sit down in the gunner's chair and fasten the crash webbing around his lap and chest before two alarms blared and two red X's flashed on adjacnt screens. He took a deep breath and grasped the trigger handles in front of him, then spun around, squeezing the triggers at the exact moment the red X symbols glowed green.



"They're too fast for the targeting computers," Anakin called, over the internal comm system. Two more TIE fighters came in, both blinking ominous crimson for a few seconds before disappearing. "Use the Force to find them!"



"Dad doesn't have to," Jacen protested, and made another series of shots.



"Do as you're told." Vurif's growl crackled over the comm and drowned out Anakin's low groan of frustration. Jacen couldn't reply; the screens exploded with red marks, enough to throw the pale yellow glow of the turret room orange.



There were pilots in those TIEs, though. Living beings, no matter what their alliance was, and Jacen refused to risk drawing upon the Dark Side by using the Force to destroy them. He wasn't a bad gunner in his own right, and he continued to fire on them with the targeting computer and reflexes alone.



"We're getting swarmed!" Anakin cried.



"Fifteen seconts," Tiera said.



Something rocked the ship, feeling like a collision with an asteroid would. The lights went dark, leaving Jacen in pitch blackness, before they shimmered back to half intensity. Then they all shut down again, and the ship was out of realspace.



The situation was a bit worse than Jacen had expected. Once he and Anakin returned to the cockpit, he saw frayed wires, electric crackling across the panels, and a light haze of dust and vapor. "This will be a short jump," Tiera said, as though not bothered by the damage. "It was made blint."



"We're not on the Syrdia route?" Jacen asked.



"No. There was not enough time to realign ourselves with it before the ship woult be within the range of the Star Testroyer's tractor beam. Furthermore, we woult be caught later." Tiera reached over her shoulder and pointed at an empty chair. "Sit there, and once we are a safe tistance away from the ambush at Marstill we will revert and map another route to Tantooine. One that is longer, but not expectet."



"Maybe if you'd hit more of those incoming fighters we wouldn't be on the wrong trail," Anakin snapped.



"The Syrtia route woult be of no benefit," Tiera corrected.



Maybe they were lucky after all. They'd managed to escape, and didn't fly through a star in the next ten minutes. Granted, they had no idea where they were; the navicomputer had failed under the stress of a second hyperspace jump, having sustained some damage from TIE fire, and they were stuck in space. But alive, and whole, and without any enemy ships on their tails.



"The comm system is out," Vurif said, after they all spent a few minutes looking at each other, and Tiera still looked at the screens. "It's shorted out, and we're not going to be able to call for help until it's fixed." He nodded at the boys, then grabbed a tool kit and headed back out of the cockpit.



Tiera, Jacen, and Anakin did page after page of lengthy calculations to try to determine their position and where to go next. Readings of gravitational anomalies suggested there was a star-massed body within a traversible distance by sublight, even with only two weeks of rations on board. Anakin guessed that it would take eight days to get there, while Tiera's numbers showed ten. In either case, there was no better plan, and she flew in the direction of the mass.



"Go into a hibernation trance," she said. "We may neet more than a few tays to get to a safe inhabitet place, even when we reach this star. There are millions of stars in the galaxy and it coult be any of them."



Jacen woke the day that they reached the glowing white ball of gas, which was indeed a star, with three planets ellipsing around it. He sipped at a glass of water to wash out the cottony feeling and stale, sour taste in his mouth, but he couldn't wash out the feeling of dread.



"This star is not on any map I have memorizet," Tiera said. Jacen thought he heard a hint of apology in her voice. "They were but a small fraction of the known galaxy, however, so that may be a reasonable expectation."



"What about the navicomputer? Is it back up?" he asked hopefully.



"Still fried." Vurif shook his brown and gray head. "But our location will be known if it isn't already, and someone of the New Republic may come looking for us here."



"How will they know?" Jacen growned. "We can't communicate by telepathy, not at this distance. I can barely feel Jaina." In the last two years, he had noticed that his powers of communication over long distances seemed to be weakening, not strengthening. He tried to attribute that to the fact that he was putting his energy into practicing other skills, but with others also complaining that the Force seemed as though it was more difficult to draw upon than before, it would seem that the reason was something else entirely. Even without deliberating upon the reasons, he knew what the facts were; that there was no way that he, more empathic than the other three on board, could even give information more detailed than "trouble" to his twin sister.



"The homing beacon."



"This ship toes not have a homing beacon," Tiera said.



"When I went out to check the hull, there was a beacon about four meters from the spot that the TIE hit. A good thing, too, that the shot didn't strike lower, because then we'd really be in trouble."



"Migratory beacons move from the point of impact. And they're an Imperial tesign. Get it off and we'll keep moving."



When Vurif removed the offending device and Anakin pulled himself out of his hibernation trance, the four of them assessed the situation. There were not enough provisions for another sublight journey, even with three of them in trances, and it would be far too risky to make another blind jump into hyperspace. They would have to try their luck on one of the star's three planets. The first and third were barren, except for the possibility of primitive bacteria on the third, and inhospitable to most higher forms of life. The second had plants and small groups of animals, though no sign of civilization.



The next few hours were a frenzy of packing and checking the ship, to see if there was anything salvageable that might be of benefit to them. Jacen checked and double-checked his comlink, lightsaber, and first aid kit, then continued to stuff blankets, water kegs, and other items into both escape pods.



Anakin hauled the last box of ration bars into the second pod and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. "Now what?" he asked.



"We set a detonator to explode this vessel, leave, and hope we're far enough away from the blast that it doesn't hit us," Vurif said. Both escape pods were evenly loaded, and could probably carry another hundred and fifty kilograms each. That meant that Vurif and Tiera would have to share one; Vurif's stocky build made him heavier than the others, and Tiera, like almost all of her race, was hollow-boned.



Anakin stuck a finger-sized detonator into a chunk of plastic explosive in the cockpit, lit the fuse, and said, "Five minutes to detonation." He and Jacen squeezed into the first of the escape pods and closed the door behind them. They heard the click of the second door closing across the hall, and Jacen turned around as quickly as he could. Which still was not very quickly, given that he was wedged tightly between a bedroll, the wall, and Anakin.



He found the emergency release lever and pulled it out. There was a momentary pause, and then it felt like the bottom fell out. The pod ejected from the ship with such force that it threw them and its entire load against the ceiling before the inertial compensators softened the effects of acceleration.



"Help me steer towards the gap between the clouds," he said. "The moons are going to be pulling us a little bit off course."



They worked in tandem, silently, trying to stay away from the pair of rocky moons that blocked the clear path towards the break in the planet's cloud cover. Every few seconds Jacen saw the second pod, when theirs turned around and the small viewport showed a tiny gray speck and bigger gray speck behind it.



Then the Silent Runner exploded. There was a short delay before the expanding ball of gas and debris rolled over the pod, which sent it spinning faster as it corkscrewed towards the surface. A second explosion followed soon after, and Jacen, for a moment, thought that something had struck them; a feeling of fear, heat, and pain all mingled hit him in the gut before evaporating.



"Th-that was T-tiera and-d Vur-rif," Anakin stammered. The pod was spinning too quickly for the inertial compensators to do much about it, and they kept spiraling down, centifugal force pushing them to opposite sides of the pod.



Jacen's back was pressed against the wall, with levers and buttons jamming into his skin. He pried himself away from it and knelt down on top of the mussed blanket, dizzy and slightly disoriented. White clouds shot past them and jostled the pod, bouncing it like a rubberform ball. Jacen grabbed the speed controls and pulled on them, causing the pod to grind and whine, and then decelerate bit by bit.



Anakin crouched down with his head between his knees, retching. "Almost at the end," Jacen gasped.



Treetops thundered by next, and the pod slammed into the hard ground.