or frown, apparently deducing something from the sound of metal on metal.
“She’s stressed,” Khedryn said of the ship. “But she hung in there.”
Same was true of all of them, Jaden supposed.
Khedryn patted the bulkhead. “She’ll do what we ask. Won’t you, girl?”
“I have no doubt.”
Khedryn cleared his throat. “So, then, do you have a plan? What do we do about the escaped clones?”
“We find them,” Jaden said.
“Yeah, I figured that. I’m all ears about how.”
“First I need to speak to Grand Master Skywalker.”
Following a Force vision, Jaden had left Coruscant without notifying the Order or filing a flight plan. That had been a mistake. And by now, someone would wonder where he had gone. Besides, he had an obligation to inform the Grand Master about the escaped clones.
“Makes sense,” Khedryn said. He looked down at the floor. “So, uh, Marr tells me that you agreed to train him?”
Jaden felt the sharpness on the edges of Khedryn’s question. He understood it. “I need to discuss that with the Grand Master, too.”
Khedryn ran a hand along Junker’s bulkhead. “If that’s a go, it kinda makes me odd man out, I guess.” He chuckled, but Jaden knew it was forced. Khedryn and Marr had been friends for a long time. “Can’t really be my first mate if he’s training to become a Jedi.”
“It would be difficult,” Jaden acknowledged. “But let’s not go too far down that path just yet.”
“Marr, a Jedi.” Khedryn shook his head. “It’s hard for me to believe it.”
“Things will work out, Khedryn.”
Neither man said anything more as they entered Junker’s galley. The smell of fresh caf, ubiquitous aboard Junker, filled the air. Khedryn refilled his own mug, poured one for Jaden.
“Spike of pulkay?” Khedryn asked.
“No, thanks.”
Khedryn started to spike his caf with a shot of the liquor but reconsidered and took the caf straight. “Kinda takes the fun out of it, drinking alone. Flying’s the same way.”
Jaden took his point but said nothing.
As if by unspoken agreement, they did not sit at the table where the three of them and Relin, a Jedi transported from four thousand years in the past, had sat and planned their assault on a Sith dreadnought. Relin had been killed in the assault, and Jaden, Marr, and Khedryn had nearly been killed. Instead, they sat at the counter.
“To Relin,” Khedryn said, and lifted his mug in a toast.
“To Relin,” Jaden answered.
They sipped their caf in silence for a time before Khedryn said, “I’ve been thinking about something.”
Jaden sipped his caf and waited.
“Those clones flew their ship right through that exploded dreadnought. And Relin told us that ship was full of an ore that augmented the power of the Force.”
“Augmented the dark side,” Jaden said.
“Right, right. Well, they flew right through it.” Khedryn looked at the table where they had sat with Relin, then out the viewport. “Makes you wonder what it might have done to them.”
Jaden had been thinking, and worrying, about much the same thing. “That it does.”
Soldier still felt supercharged, alive with power. The doctors at the facility would have named the power “the dark side” of the Force, but Soldier rejected their labels. To him, it was just power, and labels be damned.
They’d all felt it, even the children, as the stolen cloakshape fighter carrying them had blazed away from the frozen moon and through the aftermath of the exploded starship. Between the surface of the moon and the safety of outer space had hung a cloud of flaming debris, superheated gas, and … something more.
Soldier assumed that the exploded starship had been carrying something related to the Force, something powerful, a Sith artifact maybe, and that the vessel’s destruction had diffused whatever it was through the moon’s thin atmosphere, its essence saturating the sky, filling the air with power, with potential.
They’d felt it more strongly as they ascended, first as a prickling on the skin, then as an upsurge of emotion that sent him alternately through moments of glee, rage, terror, and love. Soldier’s emotions had swung pendulously from one to another. The clones had stood around in the makeshift cargo hold of the cloakshape and murmured questions while the children giggled and squirmed.
“What is that?” Maker had asked, his eyes wide. “Seer?”
But Seer had not answered. She’d seemed lost in one of her trances, eyes closed and swaying, in communion with Mother.
The feeling had intensified with each passing moment, a surge at once terrifying and exhilarating. Force lightning had leaked from Soldier’s fingertips, twined around his hands, crackling. He