The Wrong Side of Right 12

According to the data Parck had given me, Thrawn and his fleet were at least thirty-six hours away from Nirauan at the shuttle’s top hyper-speed. With the co-ordinates for the beacon drop punched into the nav computer and the automated pilot there wasn’t much else for me to do. Falling back on old patterns I spent a lot of time in the engine room. I was nervous about being on a ship I was unfamiliar with and the only way I knew how to deal with that was to get to know her from top to bottom. It also kept me busy and being busy kept me from thinking too much about what had happened.

The worse moments came when I found myself idle, when I was making something to eat or trying to sleep. Most of the time, when the memories would flood back, my hunger would vanish and the sight of what ever I had cooked made me sick. I found it odd that I couldn’t cry. There was a giant knot in my gut waiting for some trigger, some escape but there was no release. There was just felt a terrible emptiness that gnawed at my soul the way hunger ate at my belly. Sleep, when it came, was fitful and filled with dreams of things I couldn’t decipher. Gone was the gentle guiding voice of Qui Gon Jinn, almost as if he had never existed. All I remembered when I woke up frightened and sweat soaked, were vague images of things I did not understand and the Emperor’s dreadful laughter.

Time seemed to move the same way the hyperspace field did, strangely in whorls of light and shifting matter. I lost track of it. I lost track of myself and spent a lot of time just sitting in the cockpit staring out into hyperspace. It was terrible loneliness here to be but I didn’t care.

Many people could not travel in space alone. It made them go crazy. All that empty blackness, some people just couldn’t handle it. There were stories about ghost ships and haunted moons, dead zones where, if you flew in, you would never come out. I had heard them all as a kid at the docking bay, listening with rapt attention to the stories the spacers told, sometimes paying the price with terrible dreams of lost souls and scary monsters. As with most childhood demons these passed when I grew older but the fascination with space did not.

I had never flown out beyond the Outer Rim before; the furthest away from the Core I had ever been was to Hjal and then Nirauan. This was different. I was in uncharted territory now. There were no official maps of this part of space only what Thrawn and his people had charted and those maps were basic and sparse because, while Thrawn liked to do a thorough job, his fleet was not large enough or set up to do a proper surveillance and cartography. Still I studied the charts Parck had given me carefully. So much uncharted territory, a few planets dotted here and there along with an occasional marked anomaly.

I wished I had brought Thrawn’s letters with me. I desperately needed his voice, his words but instead, at his insistence, I had left them behind as I now felt I had left my life behind. I didn’t know what to do. The minutes passed like hours and hours moved like months. The space around me was endless and empty, even in the swirls of hyperspace I knew there was nothing out there except more space and for the first time in my life I was afraid of it. So, I sat in the pilot’s chair of a ship that I didn’t feel at home in and stared out of the cockpit window, unable to cry, unable to mourn, unable to let go.

When I finally dropped out of hyperspace into the area Parck had given me as the designated communication zone, I was beyond tired and I couldn’t recall the last time I had actually eaten something solid. Despite the good store of provisions Parck’s quartermaster had laid in I had no appetite. I slowed down the impulse engines and came to an idling stop in the specified coordinates.

It was vast, this area of space. The pin pricks of light indicating stars and maybe solar systems were very far and few between. It almost seemed as though someone had spilled a giant bottle of black ink but it had not quite covered everything. I shivered. I checked the long ranger sensor but there was nothing else out there, at least nothing that could be picked up. I was utterly alone. I set the long range transmitter to the frequency Parck has given me and put it on repeat. There wasn’t much else to do except deploy the booster beacon and to do that I had to get it ready to drop from the cargo bay which was a manual job.

The beacon booster was small and unlike anything I had ever seen before. Different technology, Parck has explained, which Thrawn had ‘borrowed’ and tinkered with. Parck had shown me how to activate and deploy it, not a difficult procedure but fiddly. I was just setting it in the drop cradle when the proximity alarm stated beeping loudly. It scared the sand jiggers out of me, but I figured, I hoped it was actually Thrawn’s fleet. Despite Parck’s warning it never occurred to me to think other wise. I set the beacon in the cradle and closed it up. Maybe if I had been less tired, less self absorbed, thinking more clearly I would have sensed what was coming next but as It was I didn’t and it took me utterly by surprise.

I was half way back to the cockpit when the first blast struck. I was flung hard into the bulkhead, smashing my head violently against the durasteel. For a moment I saw blackness and a burst of stars, accompanied by a shard of pain so sharp it sucked my breath away. I stood trying to find my balance, one hand braced against the bulkhead the other holding my head. I could feel blood ooze between my fingers.

Before I had time to consider the consequences of what had just happened, a second blast hit and the shuttle rocked violently again, more alarms began to scream at me. Without thinking about it, I ran then because I hadn’t put the ship’s shields up. Shields drew a lot of power and I hadn’t thought I needed them here, the sensors had said I was alone. I had not been thinking at all and now, through a haze of pain, I was cursing my stupidity. I had truly thought there was nothing out here, just me and a whole lot of space. Rebels, I whispered to myself but in truth I wasn’t so sure. Parck’s words about pirates and scavengers were coming back to haunt me.

By the time I was seated in the cockpit who ever had been firing had done so again. I didn’t think they wanted to blow this ship up because they were targeting mostly non essential areas but I wasn’t used to being fired on. I had never been trained as a combat pilot and my heart was racing. My anxiety changed to fear when I tried to activate the shields but couldn’t, the second blast had been well aimed and the shield generator had gone down. The Aeolian didn’t have a back up. I flipped switches and revved the sublight engine up to full power because my attacker was two steps ahead. The targeting computer showed me where the enemy was and I strapped myself in bringing the weapons on line. I could not recall ever being so afraid or feeling so alone before. In that single moment I knew despair.

Use the force...

The voice suddenly washed over me so clear, so close that I thought for a second someone else was standing in the cockpit behind me, whispering in my ear. I must have banged my head harder than I though. I was hearing voices now. The voice sounded similar and I gasped at its touch, which was both reassuring and painful. I looked around me to make certain but there was no one else, other than me here along with an awful lot of empty space and someone trying to blow me up. I was over tired and jumped up on adrenaline plus I had more pressing things to worry about than hearing voices or seeing ghosts.

I swung the Shuttle about, following the blip on the targeting computer to try and face my opponent. When it came into view, I was breathless. It was a design unlike anything I had ever seen and I understood then that this was a species I had never come across before; they were not part of the Emperor’s galaxy. I targeted the ship and fired. Parck had not been kidding when he had said the weapons had been upgraded and who ever had been firing at me was not expecting my ship to have teeth. But they still had a shield and mine was down.

We danced, a waltz done with ships against a backdrop of darkness with silence without music. We swung around each other, firing our weapons, hitting and missing, only to back off and then reengage. At some point I stopped being scared, there was no time to be scared, no time to consider what might happen there was only the now. I stopped trying and simply did. The sensation of being watched was stronger than ever and for the second time I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

Merlyn, use the force….

I felt a subtle nudge and I stopped thinking.

The shuttle took hard hit to the portside and I knew before the dash board began to light up that something vital had been damaged, I could hear it in the sound of the engines. Alarms screamed at me but I didn’t hear them. I drew a very deep breath and found the stillness. In the last weeks that I had spent training with Lord Vader, reaching that core and finding that part of me connected to the force had become easier. Everything I had ever been taught was coming into play, right here, right now. I saw in my mind’s eye the ship that was attacking me swing around to disable the engines and I knew they wanted my ship more or less whole, they didn’t care about the beings inside, they were trying to disable the shuttle not blow her up. Pirates or scavengers, I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I was beyond tired.

Merlyn…

I closed my eyes just as the ship fired at me again, sparks exploded from the consol. The Aeolian shuddered terribly and spun out of control. I battled with her and brought her back into line just as another shot hit me. The main engines began to fail. There was a back up hyperdrive but I couldn’t access it, something on the main consol had shorted out in the last volley of fire. I swore violently as the ship that was after me began to swing around to make its final move.

Now girl, now…!

Whose voice whispered in my ear I didn’t know but it held an urgency I couldn’t ignore. I didn’t think, I didn’t breathe I just fired. I had hit the unknown ship many times during this skirmish, and because the Aeolian’s guns were just better I had weakened my opponent’s shields. The voice in my head guided me even as I fought to keep my ship steady, the terrible scream of engines about to blow sounding louder to me than anything else I had ever heard. Just a little more, old girl, I whispered, just hang on a few seconds more… Without looking I knew I was dead on target and I fired again. Guided by an unseen hand, my aim was true. I hit the one weak spot my enemy had. The explosion was huge and momentarily blinded me.

The Aeolian was tossed about, a grain of sand in a storm. I just gritted my teeth and shut my eyes tightly, holding on to the steering control for dear life. I felt it as the main engine failed and the ship spun aimlessly, uselessly. I felt the momentary lurch as the gravity plating lost power then reversed as the back up generator kicked in but even from the cock pit I could tell it wasn’t functioning right either. The screaming of alarms, the stench of burning cables and wires brought me back to reality sharply. When I shook off the shock of what had just happened I realised that my troubles were only just beginning.

My head throbbed savagely, all the jerking and spinning about had not helped. As a wave of nausea swept through me I wondered if maybe I had a concussion but there wasn’t much time to do anything about it. I stumbled down to the engine room, bracing myself along the bulkhead because the shuttle was listing badly. My worst fears were confirmed when I began to assess the damage. The main engine was a mess, and the shield generator had been completely fried. Main life support was failing and the back up generator wasn’t in good shape. Who ever it was that had been attacking me had known exactly where to strike. My guess was that they had either attacked lambda class ships before or had scanned me without me knowing about it. Either way, it didn’t matter any more, what mattered now was getting power back on line, without it I was dead in space relying solely on battery back up and that had a very limited life span.

After half an hour I knew. No amount of tinkering or fixing would sort out the main engine and the back up was failing fast. A vital part had been badly damaged and there was no way for me to repair or jury rig a new part. I was so frustrated I screamed out loud. I had spare parts onboard of the Sigiri but I had not thought to bring any with me. I never occurred to me I would need them and I was going to pay for that now. I was well and truly screwed.

I turned my attention from fixing the engine and the generator to seeing how best to conserve what power I did have left so that at the very least I had breathable air and some warmth. Space was very cold and with minimal internal heating the ship would turn into a giant freezer, not something I looked forward to. I didn’t deal well with cold.

I knew the moment the back up generator died. It spluttered spewing sparks all over the place and the gravity plating went offline again until the battery back up kicked in. All I could do was hold on and pray. My head ached and my guts churned but when I tried to throw up there was nothing in my stomach so there was no mess but it didn’t make feel any better. Low gravity came back online, enough to give me weight. I knelt on the engine room floor, my head down to try and stop the dizziness and suddenly remembered I had not deployed the booster beacon. At least I thought ruefully I could still do that and whispered a silent thankful prayer that the manual release still worked.

I shut down as many non essential systems as I could, anything that I did not require I took off-line until the only things left were heat and life support. I turned the heat down as far as I dared and closed off as much of the unused areas of the shuttle that I could. What didn’t need to be heated wasn’t. The batteries had an approximate life span of six or seven hours and I hoped I could increase that to ten. When I had done all I could do in the engine room I made my way back to the cockpit, picking up a bottle of water and some blankets on the way. Already the shuttle was cooling down and I shivered. In a few hours it would be very cold, not enough to kill but more than enough to make me uncomfortable. I grabbed the med kit and scavenged it for pain killers. My head throbbed violently now and it was making me miserable.

Once in the cockpit I settled into the pilot’s chair hoping no more strange ships or pirates showed up, if they did I was dead. I double checked that the signal I was broadcasting on the frequency Parck had given me was still being sent out, noted that the booster beacon was also online and then because there was nothing else I could do I waited.

I flitted in and out of a doze and time passed slowly, oddly. Memories and dreams jumbled together as I sat huddled under the blankets, cold enough to reconsider my decision to drop the heat but I knew I had made the right choice. I could live without heat for longer than I could live without air but I wished I had brought my Dantassi clothes, especially the warm ones Navaari had given me on Hjal.

Thinking about Navaari made me sad. It occurred to me in this moment that I might not actually survive this. I had no idea where Thrawn and his fleet really were, as Parck had said it could take them up to three standard days to reach the signal point if they were on the outer limits of its range. I didn’t have days; I had hours. So I began to record letters. I wanted the people I loved to at least know what had happened. I should have felt fear even anger or sorrow at this but I didn’t, instead I felt nothing. As I spoke my words to my family I wondered how they would take it. It didn’t seem right somehow to die so far away, so alone but it was somehow fitting.

I spoke to my father as though he were with me, telling him how much I truly loved him and how sorry I was for all the fights, all the pain I know I had caused. I addressed Bel and Bedi as well. I left a similar but shorter version for my uncle but it did not seem like enough. What was there to say? I didn’t really know so I babbled a little and then said a quiet goodbye. As the pain in my head grew worse, it became a struggle to concentrate.

With the letter to my family done I began to dictate my letter to Thrawn. I spoke in his native language because what I had to say to him I didn’t want anyone else knowing. I told him what had happened at Endor, everything I could remember from the moment I had been summoned to the Emperor’s chamber on the battle station to escaping the blast from its destruction. I tried to be clear and clinical about it but I wasn’t sure how I came across. I kept forgetting what I had said and had to back track to pick up the thread of it. My mind was having trouble focusing and the cold was starting to get to me. When I had nothing more to report on that incident I started a second letter, a personal one but I didn’t know how to tell him what I felt for him, I couldn’t utter the words I carried in my heart because it seemed to me that if I did, then I really would die and in that moment I knew I didn’t want to. Not like this, all alone in a region of space so far away from my home that I could not even see the planet on the chart. I decided then, that if I could not tell him what I felt in my heart to his face, I would not speak the words at all. Silent unwanted tears pricked my eyes, rolled down my cheeks and splashed on the broken consol. These tears brought no relief and did nothing to ease the terrible pain I still felt inside, they only made it worse.

In the end I gave up trying so all that was on the data recorder for him to hear was that I was sorry, my voice a trembling whisper as I spoke. I didn’t know what to say. How could I express the extraordinary grace his gifts of passion, and caring had given to me? All that he was to me could never be spoken in words. In my mind I could see his smile, sense his warmth and remember the power of his touch. His voice was a caress in my soul I would carry with me until the moment I died, I clung to its memory, but it wasn’t enough. I am bound to you… he had said and the memory of his words made me ache with sorrow.

Here, now all alone on this broken ship I could not show him what he meant to me, I could not even speak it. I wished at that moment that the force or what ever this gift was that I had would allow me to pour these sensations into the data chip so that when he touched it he would know, there was only him and no one else but I knew this was useless effort. In the end all I could hope for was that Thrawn would understand because he always understood. When I was done I put the data recorder where it would be found, the messages were protected by an Imperial code which only he would know. I had every faith that he would find me, just not that he would come in time.

I closed my eyes. I was so tired and my head hurt so much that all I wanted to do was get away from the pain. None of the meds I had taken seemed to work and the cold was making me sleepy. In the back of my mind I knew this was wrong, that falling asleep was the very worst thing I could do but I no longer cared. A part of me had died at Endor, when Lord Vader had severed the tie between us something within me had broken.

He had been a terrible ruin of a man who had done unspeakable things in the name of an Emperor, in the name of a master who had twisted his soul. But at one point he had been a person who had loved, who had given freely and cared deeply about those around him. He had not been born evil he had been made that way, betrayed by the one man he had admired and looked up to above all others, betrayed right up until the bitter end. How I hated Palpatine for this. Lord Vader would forever be reviled through out the galaxy, even though it was the Emperor’s evil that had made him what he was. No matter what lay behind it all, Darth Vader was the symbol of all that was terrible.

But I ached for a loss that I couldn’t comprehend. As much as I had feared him, had been frustrated with him and hurt by him I understood that part of me had also loved him and now he was gone. It hurt more deeply than I could have ever imagined. I did not understand the thing that had wound our two lives together and neither had he or anyone else. Not even the Emperor could sever it and he himself had said as much. I remembered his words clearly… I sense that you have formed a bond with him that will be difficult to break…well, now it was broken. And so, it seemed, was I.

I was certain the rest of the galaxy would rejoice Vader’s loss and they had a right to for all that he had been. But I would mourn his passing. I would probably be the only one. I was one of the only people who knew who he had been before the dark times. I had seen when he had been the hero of the galaxy, their beacon of hope in a terrible war. I had seen him love unabashedly, willing to die in order to preserve what he held dearest. As he had hated so he had loved. If he had one true fault it was that he was passionate, too much so and it had ruled and ruined him. No one would remember him as a hero only as a vile demon who had done terrible, terrible things but I had known him better and the pain of it broke my heart. I didn’t try to stop the terrible sob that broke free from my chest. I simply buried my head in my hands and wept.

When the crying stopped, my head ached so fiercely that I wondered briefly, if this was punishment for caring so much about a fallen man. Sick to my stomach, I closed my eyes and began to drift into a deadly sleep. I felt it creep up on me warm and seductive and I welcomed it. As the world of troubles around me began to slip away I could have sworn I heard a voice, a man’s voice whisper in my ear. Telling me to breathe deeply, to concentrate and find my center.

“Meditate and find peace there….” He said gently.

I remembered similar words from a recent lesson. It seemed strange to hear the same advice from an unfamiliar voice, a kind voice. I whimpered, sorrow and fear creeping into my consciousness. I could have sworn I felt the subtle brush of someone’s hand warm and gentle on my cheek but I opened my eyes there was no one there. I was hallucinating or dreaming or both.

“Become the stillness, girl… you are not finished yet…”

I did as I was told. I drew deep steadying breaths and meditated. I found that center, that quiet place deep within and it was there I settled my mind. Nothing else existed, only this place, only this warmth, only this strange sense of calm. If this was death then, unafraid, I was happy to accept it. I no longer felt the throbbing ache of my head, the nausea or the terrible sorrow of my heart. I slowed my breathing right down, as I had been taught, becoming the stillness. Everything around me melted away and as I drifted further into the darkness that called to me I knew only peace and nothing more.






End of book 2.