Crosscurrent (15 page)

“Yes,” Jaden said. He activated his wrist comm. “Arsix, activate the remote launch sequence and the autopilot. Get her into orbit around Fhost’s largest moon and wait there. If you don’t hear from me in two standard weeks, jump back to Coruscant and alert Grand Master Skywalker.”

Jaden felt Khedryn tense at the name.

“The job will take two standard weeks?” Khedryn asked.

“That’s going to depend on where it is.”

“You don’t know where it is?”

“No,” Jaden answered. “But you do.”

To Marr, Khedryn said, “This is a mysterious man.”

“So it seems, Captain.”

“I know what I said outside The Hole but I don’t consider this a firm deal until I hear more,” Khedryn said to Jaden.

“Understood.”

They watched Jaden’s Z-95 levitate upward on its thrusters, sending swirls of dust into the air before it turned and accelerated into the night sky. Jaden felt odd watching R6 go off without him.

“To whom will I confess?” he said, his voice overwhelmed by the swoop’s engines.

“Droid works fast,” Khedryn said. “Seems we’re not the only ones used to rapid exits.”

“Comes with the work,” Jaden said. “How do you know Master Skywalker?”

Khedryn looked back at him, his lazy eye off to the side. “Let’s talk about that aboard
Junker
, too. There she is now.” Khedryn nodded down at a Corellian freighter visible in wall lights through the open top of one of the field’s many makeshift hangars. He circled, then started to descend.

“A YT-Twenty-four-hundred,” Jaden said. “Sticks out a bit here, doesn’t it?”

“I salvage junk. I don’t fly it.”

Jaden saw. The disk-shaped freighter normally sported a cylindrical escape pod connected to the starboard side of the circular fuselage, but
Junker
featured an attached Starhawk shuttle.

“Must have taken some work to replace that escape pod with a Starhawk. How’d you manage the fittings?”

“By not using droids.”

Junker
’s engines were already venting gas and warming. Jaden noted further modifications to the ship. A pair of universal docking rings—rarely seen outside of military rescue ships—and a complicated assembly on the rear that looked vaguely similar to a laser cannon.

“Is that a tractor array on the rear?”

Khedryn nodded. “Short-range, yeah. Sometimes we dock with a derelict and take what’s worthwhile. Sometimes
we have to tow the whole thing back for disassembly.”

“And you make a living at that? Doesn’t seem like there’d be enough floating free out there.”

“You’d be surprised. You just have to know where to look.”

“Indeed.”

They descended through the open top of the hangar and set down beside
Junker
. Khedryn and Marr bounded off their speeders.

“How are we doing, Marr?” Khedryn asked the Cerean.

“Thrusters are already hot. We lift off in twenty-five minutes, Captain.”

“Get to the cockpit and finalize the launch sequence. Then we see to that arm. Jaden, help me get these speeders aboard.” He stopped. “Wait: Did you catch a shot back in The Hole, too?”

“Trivial,” Jaden said, showing the wound.

Khedryn examined it with a practiced eye while Marr hurried into
Junker
.

“Looks a little more than trivial. But if you say so.”

Khedryn and Jaden muscled the speeders up the landing ramp and into
Junker
’s hold. Jaden’s arm screamed every time he flexed his biceps, but he bore it.

“Hurts, yeah?” Khedryn asked.

Jaden tilted his head to acknowledge as much.

“We’ll see to it when we get aboard. A blaster wound, even a graze, is nothing to take lightly.”

“I’ve had blaster wounds before.”

“Yeah, me, too. That’s how I know they’re not to be taken lightly.” Khedryn chewed his lip, as if gathering his thoughts. “You asked how I knew Luke Skywalker.”

Hearing the Grand Master’s first name rather than his title sounded incongruous to Jaden. He had not heard
anyone other than the Grand Master’s close friends and family refer to him as Luke in many years.

“My parents were children on Outbound Flight. They survived the crash in the Redoubt. I was born there, thirty-five standard years after the crash, give or take.”

The admission surprised Jaden—he imagined there were few survivors still alive. He was not sure what to say. He did the math in his head. “You were an adolescent when Grand Master Skywalker and Mara Jade Skywalker rescued you.”

“I was.” Khedryn’s expression softened, and he leaned against his swoop. “Mara was kind to me, to all of us. I was saddened when the vids reported her death.”

Jaden flashed on his vision, the sound of Mara’s voice in his ear on the windswept surface of the frozen moon.

“As was I. Your parents?”

Khedryn’s expression turned blank, but Jaden saw the pain beneath it.

“They died there, before we were rescued.”

“I’m sorry.”

Khedryn waved a hand to shoo away the memory. “Long time ago. Since then, I’ve been doing a little of this, a little of that, but I’m mostly settled on salvage these days.”

The roar of swoops flying over the hangar drew their eye, and both pulled blasters; Jaden’s free hand went to the hilt of his lightsaber. The running lights from half a dozen swoops and speeders buzzed past, blotting out the stars.

“Reegas’s thugs?” Jaden asked.

“Could be. Let’s get these aboard and get out of here,” Khedryn said.

Junker
’s hold was packed to the crossbeams with storage containers, raw materials, unusable pieces of electronics and vehicles, and two landspeeders.

“Over there,” Khedryn said, nodding at an open space in the hold.

Once they had the speeders in the hold and secured, Khedryn lifted the landing ramp.

“You used the Force to affect that final sabacc hand?”

“I did. I would’ve changed the outcome of the hand when you lost the crystal, but Reegas or one of his lackeys nearby had some kind of handheld electronic cheater. By the time I realized that, you’d already lost.”

Khedryn slammed a fist on the seat of the swoop. “That spawn of a diseased bantha was cheating? And he called
me
a cheater?” He regarded Jaden from under his heavy brow. “I guess I owe you then, eh?”

Jaden did not bother to answer.

“This still isn’t a firm deal, though. Business is business.”

Marr’s voice broke over the ship’s speaker. “Ready for launch.”

Khedryn spoke into his collar comlink. “We are on our way up.”

When they reached the tight confines of the cockpit, Marr was already seated and working the instrumentation.

Jaden took in the consoles, the scanners.
Junker
had an amplified sensor array, probably to allow more thorough reception and scanning at longer distances. Jaden eyed Marr, trying to get a better sense of his Force sensitivity. He determined it was faint. Marr probably had no idea.

Khedryn sat, activated the communicator. “Farpoint Tower, this is
Junker
. We are hot and gone.”

He did not wait for an acknowledgment before flying the freighter out of the lit hangar and into the dark. Thrusters angled the ship skyward, and the night sky and its field of stars filled the transparisteel cockpit window.

“Chewstim?” Khedryn asked Marr.

The Cerean removed a square of chewstim from one of the dozen or so pockets in his jacket, offered it.

“Thanks.” Khedryn unwrapped it, chewed, blew a bubble, popped it. “And we’re off.”

Junker
’s engines fired and the ship pelted toward outer space and, Jaden hoped, toward answers.

K
hedryn and Marr flew
Junker
outside the orbit of Fhost’s moons, clear of gravity wells. The ship and cockpit took on the quiet serenity of a craft moving through the vacuum.

“What is our course?” Marr asked. The Cerean looked first to Khedryn, then to Jaden.

“About time for that talk, eh?” Khedryn said to Jaden, and swallowed his chewstim.

Jaden nodded. “About time.”

“Come into our office,” Khedryn said, and he and Marr led Jaden to the galley in the center of the ship. Neither Khedryn nor Marr had removed his blaster. Jaden understood their caution. He would have to earn their trust.

A large, custom viewport in the galley’s ceiling offered a view of space. The stars blinked down at them. A metal dining table and benches affixed to the floor afforded seating. A bar and built-in cabinets dominated one of the walls.

Khedryn went to the bar, took a caf pot large enough for a restaurant from an overhead storage bin, filled it with water, dropped in three pouches of grounds, and activated it. In moments the red brew light turned green. Khedryn removed the lid, and the smell of caf filled the
galley. He poured two large mugs full and waved a third at Jaden.

“Caf? The ship and her crew run on it.”

“Yes, thank you,” Jaden said, and composed his thoughts.

Khedryn returned to the table with three steaming mugs of caf. Jaden took a sip and tried not to recoil at its bitterness.

“We prefer it strong,” Marr said.

“Any stronger and you’d have to eat it with a fork,” Jaden said.

Khedryn put his hands on the table and interlaced his fingers. Jaden noted the scars, the calluses. Marr put his hands under the table, near his blaster.

“Before we start,” Khedryn said. “Let me ask you something. Back in The Hole, when you stopped me in the common room, did you use the mind trick on me?”

Jaden saw no point in lying. “I did.”

Khedryn stared into his face, his eyes askew. “Don’t do it again.”

“All right.”

“Now, what’s your proposal?”

Jaden dived in. “The coordinates Reegas wanted. I want those, too.”

Both Khedryn and Marr tensed.

“I figured,” Khedryn said. He leaned back in his chair and threw an arm over its back, striking a casual pose. “You a salvager, Jedi? Or is there something else there?”

Jaden did not answer the question. “The rumors in Farpoint said the signal was an automated distress signal.”

“We think,” Khedryn said. “But there’s no life down there. Nobody for a Jedi to save.”

Except myself
, Jaden thought.

“We don’t know that,” Marr said. “There could be life. I did not perform a thorough scan.”

Khedryn stared at Marr as if the Cerean had just admitted to being a Sith. “Right. Thanks, Marr.”

Jaden said, “I understand it originated on a moon at the far end of the system.”

“And?” Khedryn asked.

Jaden tried to hold his calm even while he flashed back on his Force vision. He realized with alarm that he could be wrong, that Khedryn and Marr might have found a moon, but not the moon from the vision. He tried to read their faces as he said, “It’s a frozen moon orbiting a blue, ringed gas giant.”

Khedryn and Marr shared a glance.

“You have been there?” Marr said.

Jaden exhaled, relieved. “No. But I’ve seen it.”

“What?” Khedryn asked.

“Tell me about it,” Jaden said. “What drew your attention to it? How’d you pick up the signal?”

Marr took a long draw on his caf cup. His short, graying hair formed a ruff around the mountain of his skull. He furrowed his brow as he thought back, the lines forming cryptic characters on his forehead. “We were returning from another … situation and had to take a roundabout course back.”

Jaden understood the Cerean to mean that they had been involved in something illicit, that it had gone wrong, and that they’d had to run. He gestured for Marr to continue.

“We stopped in a remote system so I could recalculate our course and we caught a signal of the kind you described.”

Jaden’s skin turned to gooseflesh. “Did you record it?”

“Of course,” Marr said. “But I haven’t yet been able to break its encryption.”

Khedryn drained his cup, set it down on the table. “Let’s slow down here.” He ran a hand through his dark hair, sniffed the air. “Stang but I need a shower. I smell like The Hole.”

Jaden ignored the conversational detour. “You want to get back to the
why.
”

“No,” Khedryn said. “I want to get to the
how much
. That’ll tell me what I need to know about the why.”

Jaden cleared his throat, studied his hands, finally said, “I can offer you two thousand credits now and another seven thousand after I confirm the moon is what I’m after and we return.”

“Two thousand credits up front?” Khedryn leaned back in his chair, the hint of derision in the curl of his lip. “Marr?”

“Two thousand credits would barely cover operating costs.”

“Barely covers operating costs,” Khedryn echoed.

Jaden, in no mood for haggling, leaned forward in his chair. “I do not have time for this, Captain. Much may depend on this.”

“For whom?”

Jaden stared into Khedryn’s tanned, lined face. “For me.”

Khedryn held his gaze for a time. “Didn’t I say he had those eyes, Marr?”

“You did.”

“And doesn’t he?”

“He does.”

“What eyes?” Jaden asked, but Khedryn ignored him.

“How do you suppose he’ll look when he and his haunted eyes get out in the deep black and what he’s looking for out there ain’t there, after all.”