"I do not consume alcohol," he said.
"You do now," Khedryn said. "Captain's orders."
Relin half smiled and relented with a shrug.
Khedryn held aloft his glass, and the others mirrored his gesture. With nothing better to say, he recited an old spacers' toast he remembered from his adolescence.
"Drink it down, boys, for the black of space is cold. Drink it down, boys, for it's always better to live hard and die young than live not and die old."
Everyone smiled. No one laughed. All drank.
Khedryn slammed his glass down on the table. "We go."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Khedryn took the copilot's swivel seat in Flotsam's tiny cockpit. It had been a while since he'd sat in the Starhawk's cockpit, and the tight confines made him feel like he was sitting in a metal coffin.
Instrumentation was live. He shook off the sense of foreboding and performed a final preflight check. Everything showed green. He stared out the tapering transparisteel window, eyeing the swirl of rock and ice, faintly backlit by the cerulean balloon of the gas giant. They were coming around to the planet's dark side. The deep blue oval of the super storm was nowhere in sight. They would pass unmarked by the planet's giant eye.
"We are go for release," he said.
"Go for release," Jaden said from the pilot's seat. "Warming engines. Disconnecting."
The modified couplings released with a series of deep clicks and Flotsam floated free of Junker, just another piece of debris floating in the gas giant's belt of ice and rock. Repulsors carried them safely away from Junker and the asteroid.
Khedryn felt a moment of intense vertigo as they moved off, and he knew it had nothing to do with motion sickness. Jaden must have noticed his feelings.
"When is the last time you sat in the cockpit of something other than Junker?"
"Been a while," Khedryn acknowledged. Usually Marr flew Flotsam, if it proved necessary on a job. "Marr will take good care of her."
"Of course he will," Jaden said. He activated the comm and raised Junker. "We are clear."
"Copy that," said Relin. "You are clear."
Hearing Relin's disembodied voice struck Khedryn oddly, made him experience the same sense of disconnectedness he sometime did while watching time-lagged events on the vidscreens in The Hole.
Except in Relin's case the lag was five thousand years rather than only a few months. It was as if Relin had already happened, as if he were a foregone conclusion that Khedryn could only watch but not affect.
He cleared his mind, his throat, tasted the after burn of keela in his phlegm.
"Do you find it odd that Relin asked nothing of the current state of the galaxy? I'd be as curious as a spider monkey."
Jaden fiddled with the instruments, and Khedryn imagined him putting a filter around his thoughts. "I am not surprised, no."
"No?"
"He knows he is going to die," Jaden said, his tone matter-of-fact. "Whether he succeeds or not, he is dead. The radiation will kill him."
Khedryn's voice was not matter-of-fact. "What about Marr?" He reached for the comm, not sure what he would say, but Jaden's hand closed over his.
"Relin will ensure Marr's safety as best he can. He is a Jedi."
"Jedi." Khedryn spat the word as if he were trying to rid himself of a foul taste. He recalled stories of C'baoth's betrayal of Outbound Flight, and feelings he had not known he possessed bubbled up from his gut and slipped between his lips. "You Jedi think you know right from wrong, always making life-and-death decisions for others. How can you be so certain about it? These are lives, people."
"I am certain of nothing," Jaden said, and Khedryn heard a surprising resignation in the Jedi's tone. Khedryn's anger floated away with the rocks and ice.
"Why are you really here, Jaden? I mean, why really? The vision, yes, but it's more than that."
Jaden licked his lips, stared out the cockpit glass, then finally turned in his seat to face Khedryn.
"You really want to know?"
Khedryn sensed that Jaden wanted him to really want to know. He nodded.
Jaden stared straight at him, no evasion, and spoke in a tone as flat as a droid's.
"During the civil war, when the Jedi assaulted Centerpoint Station, I led one of the teams."
"I heard of that. The whole station was destroyed."
"My orders were to move fast and leave no one behind us as we advanced. At one point, we met stiff resistance from the Confederation and some Corellian sympathizers. Eventually we forced them back and they fled into a cargo hold and sealed the doors."
Khedryn could see that Jaden was not seeing the present. He was looking at Khedryn, but his eyes had followed his memory back into the past. He was seeing whatever ghosts haunted him.
"You blew the doors? Cut through them?"
Jaden's voice gained volume, as if he feared he would not be heard. "I activated the air lock and spaced all of them."
For a moment, Khedryn thought he might have misheard.
"You spaced them?"
Jaden nodded, his eyes narrowed, fixed on some distant point in his past where his guilt lived.
"Most were Confederation soldiers," Jaden said. "But there were noncombatants there, too. Engineers. Women. But I could not take the time to dig them out or negotiate a surrender. Leave none behind me. Those were my orders. From a fellow Jedi. I followed them."
Khedryn watched Jaden's jaw and fists clench and unclench, his tracheal lump rise and fall in his throat like a heartbeat.
"Stang," Khedryn said, the word pathetically unsuited to the job of articulating the mix of emotions he felt.
Jaden's eyes refocused on the present.
"So, Khedryn, when it comes to knowing right from wrong, I do not profess to knowing anything. Not anymore."
Khedryn searched his mind for some words that might offer solace. "It was war, Jaden. People die in war. What difference does it make if it's by blaster, lightsaber, or the vacuum?"
Jaden inhaled deeply and looked past Khedryn. "It makes a difference."
Khedryn thought about that. Finally he nodded. "I suppose it does."
Jaden wore a pained, self-conscious smile behind his beard. "You have sins you want to confess, Captain? Now seems to be the time. Something about this cockpit, maybe."
Khedryn laughed, and it dispelled some of the mood. "If I started confessing my sins, Jedi, we'd never get this party started. You ready?"
Jaden looked out the glass at the churn of the rings, the gas giant. "Engaging ion engines," he reported to Junker.
"Confirmed," responded Relin.
"At this speed it will take us an hour to get around the planet and be ready to go," Khedryn said over the comm.
"One standard hour, seventeen minutes, and thirty-six seconds," Marr answered, eliciting a smile from Khedryn.
"Mark," he said, and marked the in-ship chrono to count down the timeline.
They would navigate slowly through the rings-an easy task at low velocity-come around the gas giant's dark side, and try to come at the moon from the opposite side, undetected by Harbinger's sensors, while Junker burst out of the rings and flew right down the cruiser's throat.
Relin felt his body failing, his cells popping under the weight of the radiation poisoning. Fatigue and emotional exhaustion made his vision blur from time to time. Sweat dampened the tunic and trousers under his robes, pasted them to his flesh. He sought comfort in his connection to the Force, but it, too, was under assault, popping under the weight of his anger.