In one instant, Josh had a clear shot at a pool of shadow that he'd identified as one of the sources of the red blaster bolts that kept threatening to take one of his team members' heads off.
In the next instant the world shattered.
Just as he pulled the trigger to unleash his own deadly fire, Lenka Leannan, Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen Mother of Mendellia and Personal Assistant to His Royal Highness, Dictator Thayer Atner, a man he'd done quite enough harm to already, appeared suspended in the air directly in his line of fire. It was too late to not squeeze the trigger, too late to do anything but watch as his shot blasted through her suddenly fragile body.
"NOOOOOOOOOO!" The scream came from his own throat, but in the flash of terror and white-hot anger he didn't recognize it. Half a dozen more bolts fired too late to be stopped ripped through Lenka, convulsing her body from head to toe. Josh instinctively reached out with the Force to try to bring her back down. Before he could settle his racing mind enough she dropped to the ground with a wet smack in a pool of her own blood.
Heedless of anything but getting to her he leaped over the makeshift barricade of trash cans and debris that had protected the team and landed in a crouch by her side. He pulled her head into his lap and looked into her eyes for a spark of life. Their normal fire was gone as though it never existed. Her gaze was dull and unfocused, and he could feel the force of her agony behind it. The pulse he found in her neck was rapid but weakening by the moment. He tried feverishly to gather the Force to stabilize her but in his panic and dread he couldn't find enough focus.
A dull thud next to him brought him back to the moment. He glanced up to find the Major standing over him, having dropped a medkit by his side. "Lieutenant, you need to do something about them before the rest of us end up like her," he said with a general wave down the alley.
Somewhere between his grief over Lenka's injuries and the Major's patronizing tone, a dam deep inside Josh broke and swept him away in the sudden flood. "Yes sir, Major," he said. He gently laid Lenka's head on the pavement and rose to his feet. From the area around him he drew all the energy, all the anger, all the power he could touch and sent it blasting down the alleyway. The torrent of pure anger slammed into the men who were firing on them and threw them dozens of meters. They slammed into unforgiving stone walls and dropped to lifeless heaps on the ground.
Completely oblivious to the look his friends were giving him, Josh returned his attention to Lenka. Blood poured from charred wounds all over her body. She'd taken three shots directly to the torso and another to the abdomen, but easily the worst of her injuries was her left arm. A blaster bolt had torn it nearly in half above her elbow, leaving a jagged mass of broken bone protruding from the remains of her bicep.
Josh reached out to try again to start healing her with the Force, but the only power he could find there - or within himself - was the power to destroy, and he wanted to use that power to its fullest. He wanted to lash out and tear the buildings around him down with his bare hands. The blast he'd aimed at their attackers had been so satisfying; he wanted to reach out and level the entire block the same way. He longed to return every ounce of matter within his sight to its constituent atoms, be they animal, vegetable, mineral, or human. He couldn't find the power to put Lenka back together, but he knew at that moment he had the power to put everything and everyone else nearby into a much worse condition.
Slowly, deliberately, he rose to his full height. He grasped his unlit lightsaber firmly in his left hand. With his right hand he reached out to nothing and began to make a fist. Again he called all the free energy he could touch to himself, compacting it and focusing it in his clenched fist. He turned slowly around in a circle, his steady gaze taking in every detail of his surroundings.
It was then, as he turned past the opening to the alley, that he noticed a figure slipping away into the darkness. He couldn't see the face, but he knew its essence in the Force only too well. His presence here, right now, was unexpected, but somehow not entirely unwelcome. "Wells," he growled low in his throat as the man slipped around the corner. "Oh no, not this time. This time you're mine."
Josh absently dropped the energy he'd drawn like a handful of forgotten beach sand and sprinted after the American agent. At the end of the alley he found that his quarry had a sizable lead on him. He ran headlong towards a group of young men casually lounging around their motorcycles at the next corner. Wells grabbed the first one he came to, a tall man wearing a bright yellow padded jacket leaning against a bike that matched, and flung him headfirst to the pavement. Before the surprised stranger or his friends even had time to shout a protest Wells was jumping atop the bike as he revved its engine.
Josh reached the corner an instant after Wells zoomed away on his stolen ride. The bike's owner was pushing himself gingerly up off the ground, carefully touching a livid contusion on his forehead. Some of his friends attended to him while the rest turned extremely hostile looks to the newcomer, who was as clearly foreign as the man who'd just assaulted their friend.
"I need your bike!" he shouted at one of the group sitting very protectively atop a sleek black bike that looked fast sitting still. Despite the slight hand wave that accompanied his words, the rider looked utterly unconvinced. He shouted angrily at Josh in a language the Jedi assumed to be Arabic. "No, listen! I want to go after- Oh, forget it!" Josh threw his right palm out in front of him and the belligerent rider - and most of his friends and their bikes - was thrown casually to the ground. Josh jumped on the black bike and shot off after Wells.
Seconds later, with just a little help from the Force, he was racing alongside his quarry. He made a fast grab for the other bike's handlebar, but Wells smashed his fist down on his forearm. Pain shot through it and he quickly yanked it away. As he wasn't an experienced motorcycle rider the sudden motion upset his delicate balance, and he wobbled back and forth threatening to topple over. He drifted away from Wells as he struggled to regain control of the bike.
Just as he managed to settle in again Wells swooped wildly at him, trying to sideswipe his momentary imbalance into a permanent wreck. Josh caught sight of it just in time to slide away and decelerate enough to make Wells overshoot him. He yanked the throttle back open as far as it would go.
This time as he approached the yellow bike he ignited his lightsaber and raised it high for a slash through the rear tire and wheel. Just as he was about to let it fall his danger sense flared and he jerked the saber down in front of him just as Wells raised a pistol at him and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked and the muzzle flared, but the bullet bounced harmlessly off the blade. Wells fired again and Josh deflected the second shot, too, before yanking the gun from Wells' hand with the Force at hurling it into a storm drain.
Josh pulled alongside Wells again. Barely six inches separated the two riders, and for the first time their eyes met. They shared a look of mutual hatred, of disgust so strong it could almost have knocked them from their mounts. "Not again, Wells!" Josh shouted. "You're not getting away this time!"
"Whatever happened to her had nothing to do with me!" Wells replied. "I didn't do it!"
"You've got enough to answer for already!"
And with that, Josh leaped off his bike straight at Wells.
The cool March air burned in his lungs and his legs ached, but Josh kept running. His flashlight swung in a crazy pattern that did very little to light the thick woods between flashes of lightning, but grasping it gave him a physical connection that kept him from slipping into pure panic. His eyes darted back and forth between the ground and the trees, hoping to avoid clotheslining himself on another low hanging branch. Warm blood dripped down his cheek from the first time it happened.
The entire week had passed without incident. Not a single one of the 150 junior cadets had needed to go to the hospital, been sick, or even gotten a sunburn. In his years of experience as both a trainee and a leader in these schools he'd never seen a perfect record before. Someone always passed out because they didn't drink enough water, or slipped and twisted an ankle, had a seriously adverse stress reaction, ate something they shouldn't have, or got arrested by the security police. Yet this week had been perfect, until now. Until the end of Warrior Day, the last night of the school.
Now he had a single cadet missing in hundreds of acres of woods, at night, and nobody had even seen which way she'd gone. A girl he'd known for years, whose family counted on him to take care of her. So far he'd never let her, or them, down. Despite a lingering attraction he tried his best to hide, she was like a younger sister to him. It had been like that since he was a high school senior and she a new freshman, full of enough energy and enthusiasm to annoy most upper-classmen. Even now that she was a junior and he was in his second year of college they were still close friends.
Thunder rumbled long and loud as he crashed through a thick stand of brush. Ahead of him a light appeared between the trees. Without any place to start looking, he and some of the school's cadre set out to check the sites they'd used in the Warrior Day activities while the others stayed in camp with the rest of the trainees. The first two sites he visited were deserted, but the light was about where he expected to reach the third site.
Josh reached the light moments later and emerged from the woods into a small clearing. A battery powered lantern in the middle of the clearing lit the space and sent long, sharp shadows back into the woods all around. A backpack lay open on the ground beside the lantern with beer cans spilling out of it onto the grass.
"Wells . . . unh! What are you doing?" he heard a familiar voice to say. "Where's everybody else?" His missing cadet leaned back against a fallen log, a can of beer about to fall out of her hand. Her head rolled around lazily on her shoulders. Next to her, so close he couldn't even see bark between them, was John Wells. He had one arm around her shoulders while the other disappeared beneath her gray sweatshirt, and his hand was roaming around under the words 'Naval Academy.'
"Sydney? Wells? What the hell are you doing?" Josh asked. He took in the empty beer cans strewn around them - more than half a dozen in all - and the unfocused gaze Sydney turned to him. The he caught a flash of cold, clear anger from Wells before his attention returned to Sydney with a leering smile.
"See? I told you other people would show up for the party. Here's your buddy Cochran now." Wells glared up at Josh again. He didn't seem to notice Sydney pushing weakly at the elbow of his busy arm. "You come to join the party, Cochran?"
"Get your hands off of her."
"But I've only got one hand on her. And it's having such a good time." Seeing that Josh wasn't sharing in his sense of humor, Wells sighed and pulled his hand out from under Sydney's sweatshirt. "Still giving orders, Cochran? Better be careful about that. When we leave here tomorrow your rank evaporates and you won't be the Deputy Commander of jack shit."
Josh ignored him and turned his attention to Sydney. "Are you okay, Syd?"
She looked generally in his direction and nodded very slowly. "I . . . m'okay. You mad at me?"
"No, I'm not mad at you," he said after a short pause, "but we've got to go now."
She reached out for him and he started towards her as she made a wobbly effort to stand. Before she got far Wells yanked her back down to the ground next to him. "C'mon, baby, don't leave yet. We're just gettin' started!" he said.
"What the hell do you think you're doing here, John?" Josh demanded as the clouds broke and rain poured down on them.
"I think I was having a little fun, until you came along. You are such a Cub Scout, Cochran. You've got to learn to lighten up and get that stick out of your-"
"She's in high school, Wells! Do you know how much shit you can get yourself into for this?" Josh shouted over the steady roar of the rain pelting the trees.
"She's seventeen," Wells said with a shrug. "That's legal here in the great state of Texas. That's one of the things that makes it so great." He flashed his most annoyingly smug smile at Josh as he pulled her even closer to him with the arm that was still around her.
Josh took a step towards. "She's a subordinate, you idiot. You know better than that shit! How many lect-"
"Lectures! Yes, I know how many damn lectures we've heard! And you're about to start on another one!" Wells shouted. The flash of anger seemed to pass and the completely reasonable tone returned. "I'm not in her chain of command. Not even here at your cute little leadership school, where somebody put you in charge of people that are rightly your superiors."
"You know why I got the temporary promotion, Wells. I'm the only one who's even been to one of these schools before this week. I'm the one with the experience to do the job."
"You wouldn't even be here if it weren't for me, you little shit!" Wells exploded, his eyes flashing with anger. "You would've flunked out the first semester last year if I hadn't helped you with your PT!"
"That's why you're the Athletics Officer you dumbass! And that doesn't have jack to do with what you're doing right now!"
"What? We're just having a little party to celebrate the end of the week," Wells said more calmly.
"Yeah, well, fun's over. Get away from her," Josh said as he advanced another step to stand directly over them.
"I don't think so." Wells gave Josh another cocky smile as pulled Sydney closer again. She tried to squirm away but his firm grip on her made it the effort futile. "You know, you were right about her. She really is beautiful. So hot. I mean, this is just the perfect body. So warm." His hand slipped beneath her sweatshirt again and rose steadily up across her stomach and beyond. "So nice and firm." He started to give Josh a devious smile when Sydney started pushing frantically against his arm. "Will you stop that!?" he bellowed. He pinched as hard as he could with his thumb and forefinger, and Sydney's face contorted in agony as a strangled gasp escaped her throat.
Josh punched him as hard as he could across the face. Wells' head snapped back with the impact and blood flew from his mouth. Forgetting Sydney, he dove at Josh's knees and knocked him to the ground in a puddle of mud. Josh brought his knee up between Wells' legs. In the moment that Wells was able to think of little but the pain, Josh shoved him off and rolled away. Both rose to their feet, Josh a little more steadily than his opponent. They circled each other slowly as the rain beat down on them.
With the next searing flash of lightning, Wells charged Josh.
Josh slammed into Wells and carried him clear off the yellow motorcycle as it toppled over. They spun as they fell, and Josh hit the ground flat on his back an instant before Wells landed on top of him. His head bounced off the pavement and stars exploded in his vision. Further down the street Wells' bike skidded hard into the one Josh had abandoned, and both exploded in a double fireball that lit up three blocks.
As Josh lay on the ground stunned, Wells rose unsteadily, favoring his right knee. There was an intersection a short distance away, and he hobbled toward it with all the speed he could manage.
Josh eyes popped open and he rolled over onto his hands and knees just in time to vomit in the street. He blinked his eyes rapidly to clear them. Looking around he spotted Wells heading for the street corner. Unsteadily he stood up and once again started after him. Pain shot through his head as the blood pounded in his ears, and he found he couldn't feel the Force.
Wells reached the corner and turned down the other street, disappearing from Josh's view. Ignoring the pain urging him to lie back down, Josh quickened his pace. He pulled his blaster from its concealed holster and checked the power levels just as he reached the corner.
His pulse quickening at the thought of catching Wells, he eagerly turned the corner where his quarry had vanished. He barely had time to register the fact that Wells was nowhere in sight before something solid and heavy smashed into the back of his head, sending him back into darkness.