His master leaned forward, a smile now on his lips as well as in his voice.

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

The guard’s face changed. No longer amused. Now…confused. Concerned.

“Open the gates,” Loden Greatstorm said. “I promise you. It’s the best way forward. For all these people out here, but also for you. And all your friends up there, too.”

The guard looked at Loden, and Loden looked at the guard. Bell knew how this was going to go, and he couldn’t help but relish it, even though he knew relishing moments like this was very un-Jedi-like.

Loden hadn’t even had to draw his weapon. Hadn’t used the mind touch. Loden Greatstorm had just spoken a few well-chosen words, and now…

“Open the gates,” the guard captain said, his tone weary, defeated.

“Thank you,” Loden said.

He turned away, looking at Bell.

“We’ll stay for a bit,” he said. “Make sure this all goes smoothly. Then we’ll head out and see if there’s another place we might make ourselves useful. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Bell said.

Sounds, from behind them, and both Jedi spun. They were not good sounds. Blasters firing, and screams. They could not see what was happening, not through the crowd.

“Up,” Loden said, and he leapt to the top of the wall, landing next to the very surprised captain of the Ranoraki family’s personal guard.

Bell followed, and from the higher vantage point, they could see speeders, two of them, bulky, heavy things, each with deck-mounted blaster cannons, firing directly into the crowd.

Marauders, Bell thought, come to take the ship inside the compound, as desperate as anyone else left on Hetzal Prime, but significantly better armed.

They were attacking the defenseless crowd, clearing them out of the way so they could smash their way into the compound and steal the starship.

“Sabers,” Loden Greatstorm said, giving the command.

The smile in his voice was gone.

Chapter Ten

“We can’t do this. It’s impossible,” said Joss Adren, current commanding officer of the Republic Longbeam designation Aurora III. “Just shooting the blasted thing would have been hard enough.”

He stared at his cockpit display, depicting his own ship, the three Jedi Vectors flying escort, the massive hyperspace anomaly whipping through space that somehow contained living beings, and, of course, the densely inhabited moon that said anomaly was going to impact and probably eradicate in, oh, call it twelve minutes. In other words, the problem they were somehow expected to solve.

When they’d volunteered to take out a Longbeam and help where they could, Joss’s primary motivation had just been that he wanted to try out one of the fancy new Republic ships. He’d never flown this model before, and it had supposedly had some nice little tweaks on the last design.