He felt eyes on him and glanced to his right, where Jedi Master Avar Kriss was looking at him. Of course she had sensed him using the Force—that was Avar’s gift, one among many. She called it the song, and she heard it always.

Elzar winked at her. Avar rolled her eyes, but the side of her mouth lifted up in a little smile. She couldn’t help it.

He knew Avar thought he used the Force for frivolous purposes from time to time, but he couldn’t understand the viewpoint. If you could use the Force, then you should use the Force. What, you were supposed to save it for special occasions? It wasn’t as if the Force would run out. Avar heard a song, and Elzar saw a sea, of endless depth and breadth. The Force never began or ended, and it was impossible to use it up.

So if Jedi Knight Elzar Mann could help out a struggling assembly droid with a little push from the Force, why not? What was the harm?

He knew Avar agreed, even if she’d never admit it. The little smile told him everything he needed to know.

“How much of the Legacy Run do we have here?” asked Jeffo Lorillia, the Republic’s Secretary of Transportation. The poor man seemed tense. A muscle in his endlessly long forehead seemed to have developed an involuntary twitch. That was understandable. The man’s entire job was to ensure safe, reliable travel throughout the Republic, and yet the chancellor had just extended her hyperspace blockade for the Outer Rim another fifty parsecs after the eighteenth Emergence near Dantooine.

Keven Tarr consulted a datapad he was holding.

“I’ve got schematics here for the ship’s superstructure,” he said, “and the manifest from the shipping company that lists everything it was carrying. I’d say we’ve got about a third. Your brain takes the outline we’ve built here and fills it in, tells you you’re seeing a full ship…but we really don’t have that much.”

Elzar thought it looked like the ghost of a ship, but decided not to make that observation in a system where so many people had died. Ab Dalis had gotten it worse, of course—twenty million dead on its primary world was an unspeakable tragedy—but Hetzal had suffered plenty of damage. And more to come across the Rim, it sounded like.

“So this won’t be over for ages,” Senator Noor all but moaned. The Outer Rim representative understood the consequences of the hyperspace closures just as much as Secretary Lorillia. These worlds were already considered by some to be backwaters, and if you couldn’t even travel to them…well. The galaxy contained many worlds. Easy to forget a whole sector, if need be.

“We don’t know that, Senator,” Avar said. “The investigation has barely begun.”