The hum of his blade made Bell think of all these things at once. He suspected the marauders they were rapidly nearing assigned an entirely different meaning to the sound. He thought it probably sounded like…consequences.

The marauders saw them coming—how could they not? Bell thought that was part of the point of a lightsaber, too. It was bright, it glowed, it was impossible to ignore. Between the sound and the light, an enemy was given warning, every possible chance to simply not fight, and wasn’t that always the best outcome?

These evil people did not seem to think so. Evil…that was the right word. Anyone who would fire into a crowd of helpless people in an effort to blast their way into a compound and steal a starship…that was evil in its purest definition.

About twenty of the marauders waited, spread evenly between their two speeders. Both vehicles had large cannons mounted on the rear deck, and they swung to point at the Jedi, a loud hum splitting the air as the huge weapons powered up.

“Why has the Force called us to fight today?” Loden said.

“For life and the light,” Bell replied.

The speeder’s cannons fired, sending out a dense stream of blaster bolts, an overwhelming, ratcheting, spearing chaos, the sound of death.

Bell was not expert yet at many of the Jedi arts. Loden was right to push him, to take every opportunity to train him, to solidify his skills. He was a Padawan, and probably would be for some time to come. But the lightsaber…that had come naturally to him from the very start.

Loden and Bell deflected the blaster bolts, every last one. The shots were deadly, thick cores of high-powered energy racing at incredible speed—and all of that meant nothing to the Jedi’s lightsabers. Nothing to the Force. The majority of the bolts were deflected skyward, away from the crowd, but both Jedi sent a few carefully aimed bolts back toward the speeders. They didn’t need to coordinate—Bell took the speeder on the left, Loden on the right, each Jedi’s choice obvious to the other through the Force. The bolts twanged off their blades with a sizzle of power.

The deck cannons exploded, becoming twisted, smoking, melted wreckage. The marauders operating those guns died—Bell sensed it happen, even shrouded as he was in the focus he brought to protecting himself and those around him, and through the connection he felt to the other Jedi in the system through Master Kriss’s efforts on the Third Horizon.

The cannons were gone, but they were not the only weapons the marauders possessed. Small-arms fire shot out from the smoking speeders—rifles and scatterguns and blaster pistols. It didn’t matter. Loden and Bell moved forward, inexorable, their blades flashing.