"What is he doing?" someone said.

Dor knew exactly what he was doing, and despite the fatalism that had taken hold of him, he would rather die in a jump malfunction than at the hands of a Jedi.

"Blow him from space!" he shouted at the weapons officer.

"I cannot get a lock," the officer said. "I cannot get a lock!"

The ship streaked toward the bridge, twisting, turning, wheeling. Laserfire converged on it at last, struck it once, twice. Flames exploded from one wing, from the nose, but the ship grew larger, larger, until it nearly filled the viewscreen. One of the crew screamed, a defiant snarl. Dor caught a split-second glimpse inside the Infiltrator's bubble cockpit of the Jedi pilot, a young human, or perhaps an Askajian, and he was smiling, his mouth and flabby cheeks wrinkled with mirth, his eyes hard with resolve.

"Brace for impact!"

The smell of smoke and his own seared flesh brought Saes to his senses. He opened his eyes to a wailing alarm and the irregular vibrations of the damaged hyperdrive. It sounded not so much like a healthy heartbeat as one in fibrillation.

For a moment he stared up at a blinking light on the ceiling, still dazed, his thinking slowed by the viscosity of his thoughts. Events replayed in his mind-Relin, the flash of an explosion in the hyperdrive chamber. The pain of his seared flesh sharpened as the muzzy-headedness began to clear. He sat up on his elbow.

Relin was gone. He reached out with the Force but did not feel his former Master on the ship.

Smoke poured from the hyperdrive chamber. A broken power conduit spat sizzling sparks just within the chamber's double doors. Saes climbed to his feet, grunting with pain, and activated his communicator.

"Dor, shut down the jump immediately. The drive is damaged."

The dull boom of an enormous impact shook the ship, nearly knocking Saes to the ground.

"Dor! Status! What just happened?"

The whine of the hyperdrive increased in pitch; the vibrations grew more rapid, more intense, the dissonance nauseating. Saes felt the vibrations under his skin, deep in his bones. Harbinger was going to jump with a damaged drive. If they even made it into hyperspace, the ship would be torn apart. He limped to the hyperdrive chamber, dodging the power conduit, trying to raise Dor as he did.

"Abort the jump! Dor!"

Relin saw the tongue of fire reach out from Harbinger's bridge and lick the black of space. It held there for a moment, frozen, then shrank to nothingness, as did his hope. He stared dumbfounded, the pain in his body forgotten in the wash of pain in his spirit. His Padawan's laughter, even as Drev had died, lingered in his memory, replayed again and again.

He stared out the viewport of the escape pod at the thick black smoke pouring from the scar of the ruined bridge, as if he could will time to reverse itself. But the smoke continued to pour forth and his Padawan was still dead. Bodies floated free in space, the corpses fixed forever by the vacuum into contortions of pain and expressions of surprise.

Relin felt as if he'd been hollowed out, as if he'd become a hole, as scarred as Harbinger by Drev's death.

And moment by moment, anger seeped into the hole and began to fill it. Anger at himself, at Drev, at Saes and all of the Sith. He felt like Harbinger's floating dead, frozen forever in pain. He knew it was dangerous to give play to such feelings, but they felt too close, too real, to deny.

"You laugh too little," he said, and tears fell. He suspected he would never laugh again.

Despite the danger, he had to see the damage up close, to bear witness to his Padawan's grave, to remember. He seized the pod's controls and piloted in close to examine the destruction.

Drev had opened a hole in the dreadnought, a screaming mouth with jagged pieces of charred metal for teeth. Cables squirmed from opened bulkheads, spitting energy. Metal glowed red-hot here and there, but dimly, losing its battle against space to retain heat. He saw nothing recognizable as the Infiltrator. The ship had been vaporized by the impact.

So, too, had Drev.

Secondary explosions tore through the front section of the ship and it began to glide to starboard, toward Omen.

Relin imagined the dreadnoughts smashing into each other, burning like twin comets, and almost smiled. That, too, was an event to which he would bear witness. The Lignan from neither ship would get to Kirrek, and Drev's death would not be in vain.

"Good-bye, Saes."

But Relin realized quickly that neither one was aborting its jump sequence.

He saw his danger, then cursed and turned the escape pod about.

More explosions boomed in the distance, their force communicated to Saes through ominous vibrations in the hull. The ship lurched hard, turned abruptly. The gravitic stabilizers did not compensate fully for the sudden movement, and the ship's momentum sent Saes scrambling. Another alarm sounded and a mechanical female voice proclaimed, "Proximity alert. Danger. Proximity alert."

Saes ran to a viewport and the scene outside the ship pulled his mouth open.

Harbinger had listed to starboard and was accelerating toward Omen. Saes cursed as the Harbinger's sister ship grew larger.

"Move your ship, Korsin!"

He imagined the two crews scrambling to avoid impact. Both were near the end of a jump sequence, and the ion engines were offline.

Omen did start to move at last, but Saes could see that it was too late. He gripped the viewport's frame so tightly that his claws scored the metal.

The dreadnoughts were on slightly different planes, but the bottom of Harbinger's fore section scraped the top of Omen's aft engine section. The scale of the collision gave it an unexpected slowness that looked almost graceful. Harbinger bucked as the two enormous masses fought for positional dominance. Metal strained, screamed, buckled, the sound like the rumbles of angry gods. More explosions boomed. Pillars of flame erupted here and there from the mixed metal of the collision, garlands of orange heat decorating the void of space. Explosive decompressions echoed along Harbinger's length, along Omen's. Here and there, bodies were blown from vented compartments and floated free in space. And through it all, Harbinger's hyperdrive continued to gather energy.

"Jump sequence initiated," said the same mechanical voice that had announced the collision.

Saes turned from the viewport and saw that the air in the hyperspace chamber was distorted by the storm of loose energy. Waves of power pulsed from the chamber.

"No!" he shouted, but the mechanical voice was implacable.

"Hyperdrive activated."

Relin turned the engines to full, tried to accelerate away from Harbinger in time. A quiet, steady beep was the only alarm on the minimally equipped pod, and Relin's heartbeat outpaced it two to one.

He had not cleared enough distance before Harbinger jumped. The pod jerked to a halt, throwing Relin forward. It was stuck in the dreadnought's wake, pulled along in its energy draft. Though he suspected it was futile, he redirected more power to the engines. They whined, fought against the pull, but failed. He slammed himself into a seat and snapped on a restraining harness, fumbling with the latch.

Black turned blue and the churn of his stomach told him that Harbinger had entered hyperspace and dragged the pod along behind it. He could tell immediately that something was wrong, that the hyperspace tunnel was unstable. The pod began to spin, then flip over, again and again, careering wildly, a cork caught in a river's rapids.