The countdown started with a bored voice and a buzzing speaker.
“Fifteen minutes to departure,” the intercom crackled. “All crew to launch stations. All passengers secure.”
The words rolled down Silver Gull’s corridors like they’d been said a thousand times before. Maybe they had. To everyone else, it was routine.
To me, it sounded like a door closing.
? ? ?
I was standing in the midship passage when it came, the temporary saber a dull line of weight inside my jumpsuit, the walls around me breathing with recycled air and the restless shifting of three thousand people trying not to think about where they’d just come from.
The miners were all aboard now. No more lines at the ramp. No more arguments over manifests. Just the constant murmur of voices behind bulkheads—soft arguments, quiet crying, the clatter of someone dropping a crate and swearing about it.
Kirana appeared at my side as if she’d grown directly out of the metal.
“Launch in fifteen,” she said. “Captain wants us visible.”
“Because nothing says ‘relax’ like seeing crew look stressed,” I said.
“Then don’t look stressed.”
“Already failing at that.”
She smirked. “Work on it.”
We moved forward, toward the crew cluster around the central status board. The overhead strips hummed with a stable light; the deck vibrated with the slow, heavy pulse of engines warming. Underneath the mechanical noise, the Force vibrated at a different frequency—thick with so many minds pressed together, fear and hope and skepticism all mashed into something you could almost chew.
Captain Reethe stood at the status board with her arms folded, watching the shifting displays like they were cheating at cards. First Officer Sarven hovered beside her with a datapad, his eyes flicking back and forth. The Sullustan comms officer, Pennar, sat at his station with his head tilted, headphones on, posture relaxed.
Too relaxed.
“Systems,” Reethe barked as I approached. “We still good on power routing?”
“Better than good,” I said. “Adequate.”
Her mouth twitched at the corner. “Don’t get poetic, Halvek. Just keep my lights on.”
She turned away, already issuing orders to someone else. I folded myself into the rhythm of the crew: checking readings, making a show of cross-referencing panels, speaking in the shorthand of people who have done the same dance for years.
Only I hadn’t. And I wasn’t here for the power lines.
Pennar felt me glance his way and lifted one side of his headset. “You got something for me, or are you just admiring my posture?” he asked in Basic, his words shaped by the bubbling cadence of Sullustan vowels.
“Comms clear?” I asked.
“Clear enough,” he said. “We’re slotted for third in the departure queue. Control’s grumbling about traffic. They always do.”
“Anything strange on the channels?”
He swiveled in his chair. “Strange like what?”
“Strange like ‘perhaps criminal syndicate deciding to ruin our day,’” I said. “Or strange like ‘control tower drunk again.’”
He laughed. It sounded easy. Too easy. “If anyone’s drunk, they hide it better than I do,” he said. “So no, tech. Just the usual whining about clearances and fuel prices.”
His hands flicked over the board, adjusting dials, toggling switches. The movement was efficient, careless at the edges.
For a moment, his attention slipped. A narrow-band setting lit up on the panel—encrypted. Not ship-to-tower. Something else. It blinked twice before he tapped it away like a nuisance alert.
The Force around him tightened and smoothed, like someone pulling a sheet over a mess.
I filed it in the back of my mind.
? ? ?
A little later, in the auxiliary control junction near engineering, we passed Crewman Fel—the human with the scarred neck and raw knuckles—leaning against a bulkhead that didn’t need leaning on. He jumped when he saw us, straightening so fast it almost looked rehearsed.
“Supervisor,” he said to Kirana, nodding quickly. “Just, ah, double-checking the—uh—temperature variance in this section. Got a funny reading.”
Kirana glanced at the display behind him. It showed nothing but a stable, boring ship interior.
“Funny how?” she asked.
“Just a blip,” he said. “Might have been nothing.”
He was speaking too fast. Sweat beaded at the edge of his hairline. The Force around him buzzed, sharp and jittery, like a thermal line about to overload.
“Next time you see a blip,” Kirana said, voice even, “log it.”
“Yes, Supervisor.”
We walked on. When we turned the next corner, I let out a breath.
“Pennar,” I murmured. “Fel. Sarven’s twitching, too. That’s three.”
“Four,” Kirana said. “Woman by portside hatch. She never walks anywhere without mapping exits. I’d bet you credits she has a weapon tucked somewhere she shouldn’t.”
I frowned. “What do you think? Zann’s people? All of them?”
“Some of them,” Kirana said. “Some might just be paranoid. Hard to tell. But the pattern is too neat to be coincidence.”
“Manageable number, though.”
“For now,” she said.
“On Toran’s ship?” I asked.
Her eyes unfocused slightly, just for a second, as if she were listening to a song only she could hear.
“Toran feels…” she hesitated, “irritated. Which means Kyle is probably lecturing him. Meral’s steady. Kyp’s pretending not to be nervous. They’re sensing similar things. Loose threads in the crew. Not many.”
“Three to six,” I said. “That was Luke’s best guess too.”
She shrugged. “Then maybe for once, the galaxy is kind enough to stick to the odds.”
It sounded nice when she said it. It even felt possible.
? ? ?
Under our feet, the deck vibrated a little harder as power shifted. Over the intercom, Reethe’s voice cut through again. “Final checks. Ten minutes.”
Time shrank.
We moved faster.
Kirana drifted toward the forward sections to “supervise” the last of the hatch seals, which was her excuse to pass by every crew cluster and watch them the way a hawk watches a field. I peeled off toward the midship passage, where miners were being herded into their assigned sections and strapped into acceleration chairs that had seen better years.
The corridor felt even narrower now, packed with bodies. Voices tangled—languages I knew and ones I didn’t. Somewhere, someone was chanting under their breath. Somewhere else, someone laughed at nothing at all.
I edged between two small groups, checking the overhead readouts: pressure stable, gravity at baseline. Boring, which was perfect. A woman grabbed my sleeve as I passed.
“Excuse me,” she said, her Basic thick with an outer rim accent. “They put my son in the other section. They say it’s ‘balanced distribution.’ I say it’s foolishness.”
Her son couldn’t have been more than ten, clutching a small, battered bundle. His eyes were too old.
“Section assignments came from Kessel administration,” I said. “Not the ship.”
But that wasn’t what she needed to hear. The Force wrapped around her like a frayed rope, all fear and determination.
“Let me see,” I said.
I checked her manifest against the panel. Whoever had done the allocations had done it purely by numbers: age, weight, species. Efficient. Cruel in all the stupid, thoughtless ways bureaucracies excel at.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
I swapped two names between adjacent sections. The computer didn’t argue.
“There,” I said. “You’re together now.”
She stared at the display, then at me, then at her boy, then back at me. “You weren’t supposed to do that,” she said quietly.
“Good thing I’m terrible at doing what I’m supposed to do,” I said.
Her eyes filled for a second, but she blinked it away and gripped my hand hard. “Thank you,” she said.
I moved on before anyone could complain.
? ? ?
Further down, raised voices rolled out of one of the bunk clusters like heat. I sped up.
Two men stood nearly chest to chest in the center of the passage, miners by the look of them—muscles strung thin, faces like carved stone, clothes still holding the dust color of Kessel. People had gathered around them in a loose, tense ring.
“You stole my shift,” one shouted. “You and your little friends, always volunteering for surface work while we rotted in the deep tunnels—”
“You think I wanted to be on the surface?” the other snapped back. “You think the storms were a holiday? We all suffered. You don’t own the pain!”
Someone in the crowd yelled, “Break it up!”
Someone else muttered, “Let them sort it out.”
The Force surged between the two men, thick with old resentment. They’d carried it with them out of the tunnels, up the ramps, onto the ship. It had nowhere else to go.
By the time I reached them, fists were half-raised.
“Hey,” I said, stepping into the circle. “Save it for when the ship’s at least in orbit. That way, when one of you breaks the other’s nose, the blood makes nicer patterns in low gravity.”
The men faltered, caught off guard by the wrongness of the line.
“This isn’t your business, crew,” the angrier one snarled.
“If you put a dent in my ship before we even leave the system, it absolutely is my business,” I said. “Also, if you knock each other out, who’s going to keep your friends from getting crushed by cargo crates or lost in the corridors? Seems selfish to me.”
Murmurs rippled through the crowd.
“We worked the blast shafts,” the second man said, bitter. “We hauled rock until our bones screamed. They—” he jerked his chin at the other “—got light duty. Surface walks. Sky. Fresh air.”
The first man’s jaw tightened. “You think that was a gift? You weren’t there when the storms hit. When the roofs tore loose. When—”
Their gaze locked again. The Force flashed, a hot spike of memory between them. It wasn’t about who had it worse. It was about being seen, being acknowledged.
“You’re both right,” I said quietly. “And you’re both wrong. There isn’t a scale big enough to measure which kind of suffering is worth more. You survived. That’s what matters now.”
Silence dropped, heavy.
The one who’d worked the deep shafts shook his head. “They don’t even remember our names,” he muttered.
“Then remember them yourselves,” I said. “Tell your stories when you reach wherever you’re going. Tell them ten times if you have to. But don’t spill each other’s blood in a place that is finally trying to carry you away from that rock.”
For a long moment, I thought it wouldn’t work. Their hands clenched and unclenched, their bodies still angled forward. Then one of them cursed under his breath, roughly shoved the other in the shoulder—not hard enough to start it again—and turned away.
The crowd exhaled as a single organism.
As they dispersed, Kirana’s presence brushed the edge of my mind like a hand at my back.
Well done, she sent. Just the shape of the thought, no words. It spread a thin layer of warmth under my skin.
One small fire out, I sent back.
Many more to come, she replied. There was no despair in it. Just recognition.
Time blurred after that.
? ? ?
The day stretched into a collage of small crises. A woman shaking in her bunk, convinced the walls were closing in—I sat with her until her breath matched mine and her fingers unclenched from the blanket. A young Sullustan man sobbing quietly in a storage alcove because he’d never left the mines and the idea of sky terrified him—I talked to him about the jungle canopy of Yavin as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. A group of Weequay getting loudly drunk on contraband they definitely weren’t supposed to have—I tipped off a security officer with just enough warning for him to confiscate the bottles without seeing who had brought them.
All of it had to be done as crew, not Jedi. No obvious Force tricks. No mind pushes. Just words, posture, and the occasional subtle nudge when someone’s fear threatened to spill over into violence.
Through it all, I kept tabs on the crew.
Sarven never quite met my eyes when we crossed paths. Fel kept finding excuses to be near systems panels he didn’t have business with. The hatch woman walked every corridor as if she were mapping it for later use. Pennar’s fingers hovered over his encrypted channel just a little too often.
Somewhere between the third and fourth argument I defused, I found myself leaning against a bulkhead with Kirana in one of the narrow service corridors.
“How many now?” I asked.
“Four definitely,” she said. “Two more… I’d bet my saber on.”
“Six.” I let the number roll around my mouth. It tasted manageable. “Kyle and Toran?”
She breathed out slowly, eyes half-lidded as if she were listening to rain. “Similar. He’s found three. Maybe four. Toran tried to stare one down. Kyle made him stop.”
I could almost see it: Toran’s shoulders squaring, Kyle’s hand landing on his arm.
“Meral?” I asked.
“Meral is busy touching everything that doesn’t move,” Kirana said. “Kyp is complaining about it and secretly grateful.”
I smiled. “Any conspirators in her visions yet?”
“A hidden weapon,” Kirana said. “A man who’s more terrified than malicious. She told him to turn it in before he did something he’d regret. He did.”
“So he’s not Zann’s,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Just scared. Zann’s people are… calmer.”
Calm like Pennar’s almost-laugh. Calm like Fel’s too-quick explanations. Calm like the way Sarven kept his worry wrapped in layers of professional gruffness.
“Three to six per ship,” I said. “Like Luke thought.”
“Maybe we get lucky,” Kirana said. “Maybe this once, the worst case isn’t as bad as it could be.”
“That would be new.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “We’re owed the occasional miracle.”
I wanted to tell her that this didn’t feel like a miracle. It felt like the trickle of sand before a collapse. But we were both tired, and the ship still needed us to pretend we believed in the manageable version of events.
So I nodded instead.
“Three to six,” I said. “We can handle that.”
“We can,” she said.
And for a while, that was the truth we walked around with.
We kept moving. The day circled the same worn track: checks, reassurances, small repairs, quick glances. Outside the hull, Kessel turned slowly below us—a scarred stone that had finally given up most of its prisoners. Above, the stars waited, unaffected.
Every time I closed my eyes for longer than a blink, I felt Toran and Meral through the Force—soft flares of exertion, worry, stubbornness. Once, a spike of near-panic from Toran that melted as quickly as it came, followed by the solid, grounding weight of Kyle’s presence beside him. Once, Meral’s sharp shock at a particularly nasty memory she’d picked up from touching someone’s discarded jacket, followed by her determination to keep going anyway.
We weren’t alone. Even scattered across three ships, the bond held.
As the artificial “evening” cycle dimmed the common lights and shifted some sections to night-mode, Captain Reethe called for final departure clearance. The routine was long and tedious: traffic control checks, engine status confirmations, hyperdrive readiness. Kessel didn’t let ships go easily, even when it was ready to.
At last, the overhead system chimed three times, sharp and clear.
“Attention all passengers and crew,” Reethe said, her voice carrying through every speaker with no room left for argument. “We are now departing Kessel system. Secure yourselves. Travel time to first waypoint: six standard hours.”
The corridor around me settled. People shifted in their seats, tightened straps, adjusted children. The ship’s vibration changed pitch as the engines poured more power into forward motion. Kessel’s gravity well fell behind us, meter by meter.
I took a seat on a fold-down chair near the intersection, clipping in with one hand while I watched the faces around me. A few smiled—small, bewildered things. A few cried. Most just stared, braced for something they couldn’t name.
The Force pulsed with nervous anticipation.
? ? ?
It would have been so easy to mistake it for a normal jump.
The first sign wasn’t dramatic. The lights dimmed for half a heartbeat, then returned, a fraction too bright. Gravity hiccuped just enough to make people shift.
“Don’t like that,” a miner muttered.
“Regulators balancing,” I said automatically. “Happens all the time.”
Kirana, standing a little way down the hall, met my eyes. She didn’t look reassured.
“Hyperdrive primed,” an unseen technician reported over the intercom. “Ready on your mark, Captain.”
“Mark,” Reethe said.
Stars stretched.
The world went blue.
The ship elongated in my senses, every line and rivet and conduit vibrating with the unreal tension of hyperspace transition. It was always a strange moment—the feeling of being smeared across a dimension and snapped back into a new kind of stillness.
We made it through the tunnel cleanly.
But we didn’t stay clean for long.
Lights flickered again. Not a glitch this time. A deliberate stutter.
The air recyclers coughed and then maintained a slightly higher pitch. The faint hum of bridge traffic over the speakers broke off mid-sentence, replaced by static for a full two seconds before reconnecting. Behind the walls, I felt doors lock that shouldn’t have been closed and hatches cycle that weren’t supposed to move.
The Force contracted in my chest.
This wasn’t regulators.
This was hands.
This was will.
I unclipped my harness.
“Kae’rin,” Kirana said softly. “Feel.”
I closed my eyes and reached.
The ship lit up inside my mind. Not physically, not with detail. Emotionally. I felt pockets of sharp focus bloom in scattered places: near the engineering deck, in a cargo hold, in a crew lounge, outside the infirmary. Concentrations of intent, moving in patterns.
Not crew. Not exactly.
There were too many.
And their emotional signature wasn’t the jagged fear of people reacting to a malfunction. It was the blood-slick calm of people following a plan.
I felt Toran through the bond at the same moment. His awareness flared, jolted by something happening on his own ship. Meral’s presence sharpened like a blade. Kyp’s anger-and-thrill mix spiked before he dragged it down.
We all saw it at once.
Not just crew, Kirana sent, without words. Miners.
Cold slid down my back.
? ? ?
We’d been looking at the wrong layer.
We’d watched the officers, the deckhands, the obvious systems. We’d counted six suspicious crew and called it manageable.
We hadn’t counted the men who sat too straight in their chairs, the women whose hands never shook even when everyone else trembled, the clusters of miners who never asked questions, who always seemed to drift to the same places together. They’d walked aboard wrapped in exhaustion and dust and the perfect camouflage of collective trauma.
And we’d let them.
The alarm klaxon didn’t start blaring. I almost wished it would. Instead, the corridor stayed steady, humming with the illusion of normalcy.
Until the miner three seats down from me unbuckled his restraints in one smooth motion and stood.
He’d been quiet since boarding—average height, hollow cheeks, a faded gray jacket with a rip at the elbow. Nothing about him had particularly stood out. I’d brushed his presence before, catalogued it as tired, angry, contained.
Now it snapped into focus.
He stepped into the aisle.
His hand slid into his jacket.
I felt the decision before I saw the blade.
He moved toward the nearest deck officer—a woman with stiff shoulders and a shock of dark hair—his expression flattening into something almost peaceful.
“Hey,” the officer began.
He lunged.
The knife came out in a short, brutal arc, catching the overhead light. Someone screamed.
And in that heartbeat, everything we’d misjudged stopped being theory and became a blade heading for a throat.
This is going to get very interesting, very fast.
Who of the main trio is your favorite?
