Star Wars: Heir to the Sith (Part 1) (#Wattys2018 shortlist)

Chapter 20: There was a predator on the loose.

The herd knew there was a predator on the loose. The hydrobloats had begun their journey to higher altitudes as they fled the fields of Marle on which they spent twenty hours of each twenty six hour Farsalt day grazing. It was their standard response to the creatures that hunted them.

From their position, twenty miles away on a Karst clifftop, Ella lowered her rangefinder. She pulled a strand of dark hair away from her face and handed the electronic sensor to her friend, who sat alongside her on her own speeder.

"Something's definitely panicked them," Ella said. "They're racing to the safety of the open sky. Is it skarns do you think?"

"Maybe. I can't raise any wardens on my comm," her companion said. Princess Tayre's face wrinkled in concern. "Perhaps the Reaver is interfering with the signal?"

"Or perhaps the wardens are ignoring us?" Ella grinned at her friend.

"It's your fault if they are. How many times have you trespassed onto the reserves? A dozen?"

"Only a dozen? Then let's make it lucky thirteen, shall we?"

Ella revved the engine on her speeder. The small vehicle shuddered to life, eager to be given free run.

"You seem to have recovered from your sickness quickly," Tayre noted. "You could barely stand an hour ago. Or was it a ruse to persuade me to let you leave the palace?"

Ella grinned. "Must be the fresh air. But I wasn't lying Tayre. I did feel odd."

"We were told to remain at the palace, Ella. If you're not back for Jish's lessons then–"

"Jish! That settles it! I'm not going back to take another beating from her and her antique electrostaffs! It's because of her I keep escaping." She tapped the needle blaster at her belt and charged the herding cannon on the speeder's front. "Now, let's go see what's scaring the bloaters. If the wardens haven't seen it then it's up to us. Last one there has to take the blame."

Ella kicked her throttle and the speeder bike leapt forward. She shot over the edge of the white limestone cliff and dropped, leaving Tayre wth only the sound of her joyful cry.

"That's not fair!" Tayre shouted in the emptiness. "You always win," she added as an afterthought. "And you know it."

The young princess revved her own speeder and made her own way over the cliff edge. Unlike Ella, she was more cautious, unwilling to make the jump over the thousand foot precipice and let the antigrav engines readjust themselves to the sudden lack of ground to repel off. At best it made for a bumpy ride, at worse it could mean a fatal accident . . .

Still, she thought, she didn't need to be as fast as Ella. Not if she knew where Ella was. She doubted Ella even suspected that she had commanded Colonel Arnaud's security team to plant a transponder on Ella's speeder. That small victory gave her a powerful satisfaction.

Tayre refreshed her sensor readout to see how ahead Ella was, before instantly realising it was pointless. Her sensor system was jammed, just as her signal to the wardens had been, and her signal to the palace security team a few minutes before which she had sent without Ella realising. Even if Ella's secret transponder was signalling, it wasn't making it through the jamming.

She gained speed as she made her descent down a line of limestone ridges that levelled out on the plain below. Ahead of her stood the Marle fields, each stalk growing out of the shallow brine waters, towering a hundred metres overhead where they burst into a canopy of large purple fronds. These were the favourite food of the hydrobloats, who each day ingested enough of them to inflate their huge balloon stomachs to immense proportions.

They were majestic creatures. Immense, slow moving, that spent their entire lives afloat. Ella had once described them as 'floating giant fish' when she had first arrived on Farsalt, years before. To Tayre, it seemed an apt description: the creatures possessed fine wings that they used to climb, and voluminous tails they used to steer themselves amongst the thermals.

Tayre concentrated as her speeder left the land and crossed over the water of the swamp. She followed a wide channel that ran between the towering Marle. Salty spray kicked up from the speeder's engine, most of it falling behind her but a fine moist cloud tickled her cheeks and dried on her exposed lips. Her goggles fogged, and when she risked taking her right hand off the handle to wipe the moisture away the speeder made a sudden, gut-wrenching twist to the right.

Quickly, she regained control and increased the speed, eager to finish her journey as soon as possible.

Her fear angered her too. Ella never got scared. Her friend had an impossible zest which imbued her with an invulnerability.

Knowing her, she would probably have finished her journey already!

Tayre navigated out of the channel to where the sea widened. Some miles before her the hydrobloats continued their panicked ascent, the bigger males watching out for any predators. A bank emerged as she carried on, with Marle reaching skyward across the entire horizon. Above the crop, a fast moving metallic surface winked at her as the sun caught it at an angle.

Ella! She must have flown through the tops of the Marle to get there so quickly! Did she have no fear?

The princess accelerated, eager to go as fast as she could over the safest part of her route. To compensate for the extra spray given off the water's surface, she gained several feet of height.

She tried her commlink again, reaching out to Ella.

But still it was jammed. The actions of the Empire unnerved her. Why would they jam the whole of Farsalt?

Her thoughts died when she noted several winged shapes flocking up into the sky, following the hydrobloats. She recognised them for what they were and felt a sense of sudden dread.

The predators were revealed.

Skarns. Lots of them.

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When I write novels with more than one character point of view in them, I don't tend to leave it so long before introducing new characters as I have done in Heir to the Sith. But in this case Captain Pina was an ideal candidate to see the current state of the galaxy and to help world build for the readers. Now we see Farsalt from a different angle: in this case through the eyes of Princess Tayre. Do you think this works? Or would you rather I had changed from Pina's eye view earlier on?