Free Crosscurrent by Paul Kemp Page B

his stomach that he often felt when a ship was about to enter hyperspace.
    Staring at Saes, he decided that he would not bother with escape. He had accomplished his mission. Now he would right a wrong before he died.
    He fell into the Force, let its energy course through his body, enhance his reflexes, his strength, his endurance. Saes answered Relin’s stare with his own, his eyes blackholes in the white mask, and lightning sizzled on his fingertips, tracing a spiral path up the red blade of his lightsaber.
    “We end it,” Relin said.
    Former Master and Padawan strode across the chamber toward each other, lethal purpose in both their minds.
    Relin’s comlink crackled. “I am hit! Master!”
    Drev’s alarmed voice eroded Relin’s resolve, carried away the anger that had been driving his thinking. Strength went out of him.
    Saes, sensing the hesitation, bounded forward, lightsaber raised in a killing stroke. Relin parried but too slowly. Saes’s blade severed Relin’s left arm at the elbow.
    Blinding pain exploded in Relin’s mind; a scream broke through the wall of his gritted teeth. He felt himself fall, but as if from a distance. The world seemed to slow. His senses felt attenuated, all except for the throbbing, acute agony of his arm. His heart kept time with the pulse of the hyperdrive, and each beat sent a knife stab of pain up his bicep.
    Saes loomed over him, his lightsaber sizzling, the masked embodiment of Relin’s failure.
    “No right, no wrong,” his former Padawan said, and raised his weapon. “Only power.”
    Relin’s chrono beeped a warning, and Relin smiled through his pain.
    The expression caused Saes a moment’s hesitation and in that moment the charges in the hyperdrive chamber exploded. A column of flame and a concussive wave burst from the chamber’s doors and rolled over Saes and Relin. The blast flattened Relin to the floor—he felt his ribs crack, adding that agony to that of his arm and seared face—and blew Saes across the room, slamming him against the wall with the force of a battering ram.Shrapnel rained down. The entire ship lurched from the explosion.
    Saes and
Harbinger
fled from his mind. Relin sat up, still half dazed, but able to think of only one thing.
    “Drev!”
    “It is … all right, Master. I believe I have matters righted. Though I now admit to being wrong. The Sith appear willing to fire pre-jump.” Drev laughed and Relin thought he heard the hint of hysteria in it. “What just happened aboard
Harbinger?
”
    Relin could hear the continuous thrum of laserfire through the comlink, could hear the stressed grunts and rapid breathing of his Padawan. He glanced at Saes, unmoving on the floor of the chamber, and fought down his need for revenge. He could not fix himself through murder, and anger had already caused him to exercise poor judgment.
    He deactivated his lightsaber, and left his arm and his former Padawan behind him on the deck of the Sith dreadnought.
    “I’m coming. Stay out of the way of those guns.”
    “The dreadnoughts are near the end of the jump sequence. I’ve got to stay in their jump field until the last moment or those guns will get a clear shot.”
    “
Harbinger
isn’t jumping,” Relin said as a secondary explosion ripped through the hyperdrive chamber. Smoke poured through the double doors, and he lifted his cloak to his mouth to prevent a coughing fit that would feel like a knife stab to his broken ribs. Alarms sang their song of dismay while he sped as best he could from the chamber. Even if his charges had not completely destroyed the hyperdrive,
Harbinger
would not risk a jump with a damaged drive. He and Drev had done something to help Kirrek. Not everything. But something.
    *  *  *
    Klaxons blared on the bridge. Tension animated the faces of the bridge crew, hung in a pall over the quiet. Dor stalked over to the helmsman’s station.
    “Abort the jump sequence!” he ordered, his claws sinking into the helmsman’s shoulder