A gasp of dismay rose on a thousand worlds as the first attempt failed, and it was clear that the Jedi had not succeeded. Perhaps could not succeed. Some looked away, not wanting to see the flare of light as the star exploded, followed closely by the death of billions of sentient beings.

Others could not look away, and these people saw what happened next. The star did not explode. The people did not die.

Across the galaxy, cheers of relief and joy. Yes, scowls from those who lived in darkness, hoping for the Jedi to fail, to be crushed, to die—but they were few.

This was a Republic that valued and celebrated life and those who preserved it.

This was a victory.

For this day, at least, the light had prevailed.

It was over.

Chapter Eighteen

It was not over.

In the Ab Dalis system, farther along the same hyperlane the Legacy Run had been traveling when it met its end, seven fragments of that ship emerged from hyperspace, just past the transfer point.

Not the largest nor the smallest was a chunk of the huge cargo vessel’s superstructure, a durasteel support beam still attached to a large portion of the ship’s hull.

The fragments were moving at just below lightspeed, but all were unpowered, electronically inert, and well inside the normal transfer point from hyperspace where vessels could arrive in the system. The sensor arrays and early warning systems did not pick up the anomalies until it was far too late, and even if they had, there was no Republic Cruiser full of Jedi nearby to save the day.

All seven fragments were traveling along the system’s ecliptic, but Ab Dalis was not as densely populated as Hetzal. Space was immense, and the fragments were, in comparison, tiny.

Six of them hit nothing, passing through the system and out the other side without incident.

The seventh hit a glancing blow on the most densely populated world of the system, a swampy wasteland interrupted only by city-sized factories, slums inhabited by the workers who operated those factories, and, here and there, the towers inhabited by those who profited from both. The fragment was vaporized in the impact, but the concussion flattened one of those cities, and the slums, and the towers.

Approximately twenty million people were killed.

This was the first Emergence.

Interlude

Ab Dalis. Never a lovely world, always shrouded in swirling, brown-tinted clouds as if the swamps on the surface were trying to escape the planet’s gravity. Now, though, it looked even worse than usual. The orbital impact had forced an enormous cloud of vaporized water and mud into the air, and much of that had ionized, causing gigantic lightning storms to flicker across the planet’s atmosphere.

It looked like some form of hell.