“Do you like it?” Gosta asked one of the stormtroopers, pointing at the starry sky. “Up there?”
The man considered her and seemed like he was about to answer, but PT-2445 interrupted them.
“We shouldn’t be talking,” he said. “Not without the general’s permission. We are not at ease.”
With his helmet on, it was impossible to guess what the silenced trooper might be feeling. Still, he must’ve agreed with his compatriot, as he did not answer the question and instead turned away, hand on his blaster. Phasma’s warriors traded looks. Would a good leader prevent his soldiers from speaking their minds? Did these warriors give up their own power, their own personalities, so easily? It was a new way of doing things, and one that didn’t sit well with the free folk of the Scyre.
The sun was coming up as Phasma and Brendol returned from their private conversation. Phasma must’ve used part of their time to prepare the other leader for the next step of their journey, as Brendol now wore Scyre gloves with climbing claws and had a pair of spikes tied tightly around his shining black boots. He was an awkward man, as you know, mostly belly and sneer, and he stumbled as he walked and grew accustomed to the new tools.
Phasma reached into one of her packs and tossed out three more pairs of gloves and boot spikes, all stolen from the Nautilus, which her warriors quickly helped the troopers strap on. They were almost ready to go, and Phasma looked to Siv, who held out the pot of oracle salve. It was a dense greenish-black, and Phasma dipped in two fingers and drew dark lines under her eyes. Siv held out the pot to each of the Scyre members, who did the same. When she held it out to Brendol, he shook his head in disgust.
“We can survive a few days before resorting to such indelicacies,” he said.
“Suit yourself,” Phasma said, pulling on her mask. “Let’s go.”
Again, her warriors traded glances. They were accustomed to knowing Phasma’s secret plans, even when Keldo didn’t. But this time, she revealed nothing. They, too, put on their masks. If they were to die on the mountain, they would die fierce.
The mountain itself represented a new kind of challenge. The Scyre folk had to use all their tools and tricks to navigate the perilous ledges of the jagged tower of rock. It was hundreds of meters to the sandy ground below, and they had to edge around the sheer cliff face using only their boot spikes and hand claws, all while roped to one another, the impossibly maladroit Brendol, and the clumsy troopers. With every slip of a foot or breaking bit of rock, the entire group clung to the mountain, bracing themselves to absorb the weight of a falling body. Phasma and Torben kept Brendol between them, showing him where to plant his spikes and keeping him close so he couldn’t drag them down. Each step took them around the mountain and down, just the smallest bit. The wind whistled past, and curious seabirds rode the air, watching and hoping for the signs of an imminent feast of crushed human down below.
Now, anyone canny and strong enough to grow to adulthood in the Scyre knew that a smart climber never looked down, but everyone later admitted to looking down anyway. It wasn’t often they had the chance to see something totally new for the first time. On the side of the mountain they’d come from, the dark and familiar ocean endlessly bit at the rock, but on the far side, the mountain began as a straight face, then gradually began to slope down to yet another dark sea: endless gray sand. When the morning sun struck the valley below, it sparkled in vibrant reds and oranges, a beautiful sight promising the rare chance to walk without fear of tumbling to one’s death. Siv confessed that this sight was so unexpected and arresting she nearly let go of the mountain. If she had, I suspect we wouldn’t be here talking right now. When everyone is distracted and one person falters, there tends to be a grand tragedy, does there not?
Step by step they edged around the mountain, ever closer to the sandy ground. The sun reached its zenith, and the air began to warm. The Scyre folk began to twitch and shake their heads, sweating underneath their masks; they’d never felt this kind of heat before. Although the sun was harsh back home, they were always cold, thanks to the ocean’s chill, the cutting winds, and the shade from taller rocks. But now sweat began to trickle into their eyes and down their backs. Taking off their masks wasn’t an option: The wind swept sand into every pore, while the sun beat down with more than its usual punishment. Poor Brendol was the only one without any face protection, and nothing could be done for him until they were on the ground and able to access their packs. Every finger and toe was lodged into a crevice in the rock. He was soon traversing the mountain with his eyes squeezed shut, gloves and boot tips probing blindly for cracks, his cheeks red and his lips already blistering.
The troopers were surprisingly tenacious, for all that their armor made them bulky. Siv noted that whatever training they’d had was well done. The three troopers were physically fit, strong, and able to quickly master the art of climbing. No one complained, not even Brendol, who was clearly having problems. Even Phasma’s warriors suffered, as their usual terrain involved leaping and rappelling from spire to spire, not clinging to a rock face for hours on end. Their arms began to ache and burn, their curled toes going numb in their boots. Each time someone found a ledge, they took turns standing there for just a moment, swinging their arms and bending their knees, urging feeling back into their bones. If not for those small moments of mercy, someone would’ve made a misstep.
But by some miracle, no one did.
Phasma’s boots were the first to hit sand sometime after noon. She gave a cry of triumph that drew every eye. For the first time in living history, a Scyre stood on the actual planet. Not high above on a rock, not in a cave, but on solid enough ground with nowhere to fall. Next Brendol hopped down, and Phasma had to help catch and steady him. When Torben jumped down, the sand puffed around him like gray smoke, and he laughed his booming laugh, making Siv smile.
One by one, the warriors and troopers landed on the sand. The Scyre folk couldn’t help flipping back their masks to look down and marvel at the feel of actual land beneath their feet, and they undid their ropes and knelt or sat in the sand, amazed at the sensation. For all of their lives until that moment, they’d been aware that they were high above the land, and that falling from such great heights meant death. Here, there was nowhere to fall. Siv had never felt so safe, for all that they were in entirely new territory. She learned later that the sand was half mineral and half volcanic ash, which accounted for its feathery softness and tendency to billow up and irritate eyes and mucous membranes.
As for Carr, he removed a glove and ran sand through his fingers, laughing.
His laughter stopped abruptly.
“Ouch!”
Phasma leapt to his side. “What’s wrong?”
Carr held up a hand to show a raised red bump. “Something bit me, I think. There it is!”
He pointed to a tiny, shiny creature burrowing swiftly back into the gray sand, and Phasma dug for it and pinned it between two fingers of her glove. It was a beetle with a gold carapace, horns, and a sharply pointed proboscis. Held in the sun, it glittered gold and green with an entire iridescent rainbow in between. Of course, I can describe it to you because I’ve been to Parnassos and studied one, but none of Phasma’s people had ever seen anything like it before.
“It’s pretty,” Gosta said.
Phasma held it up to the light, and a single drop of blood fell from the insect’s proboscis and plopped in the sand, where it was immediately soaked up. All around the drop of blood, more beetles exploded out of little hills of sand, furiously sweeping the area with their own proboscises and sucking up the blood-covered grains.
Crushing the beetle between her fingers, Phasma threw the wet gold-and-black carcass into the mess of beetles fighting over the drop of blood. The beetles fell upon their fellow, devouring every drop of viscous fluid within until there was nothing left but sparkling shards of exoskeleton. As soon as the moisture was gone, the beetles burrowed back underground, leaving the once smooth sand pebbled with peculiar, con
e-shaped mounds. Phasma stood.
“Gloves stay on, and don’t remove them without my say-so. Does it feel infected?”
Carr looked at the throbbing red wound and slipped his glove back on with a wry grin. “It feels silly. And a bit embarrassing. To think: I lost a fight with a bug.”
Phasma sighed, but no one could be angry with Carr for long. “Be serious, for once.”
“It itches, but I don’t feel the fever.”
“Let me know if you do. General Hux, are you familiar with this creature?”
Brendol shrugged. “Not this particular species. Every desert has insects that hunger for moisture. Still, I agree—better to stay away and avoid giving them what they want.”
He was still squinting through the blowing sand, his eyes gone red and puffy. Now that they were on the ground, Phasma was able to pull a length of cloth from her pack and help him wind it around his face, leaving only his watery blue eyes exposed. Gosta stepped forward to offer him a pair of ragged old goggles, which he accepted matter-of-factly. When Siv again held out the pot of oracle salve, he considered it more carefully but still did not accept the gift.
When Brendol was outfitted to withstand the sands, Phasma looked to his troopers and said, “It would be best if we could further stain your armor. The clean parts stand out in this gray desert.”
They were already somewhat dingy from their earlier trek, but the troopers must’ve concurred. One of the soldiers took up a handful of the sand and rubbed it into his armor, where it left a dark-gray sheen. Soon all three troopers were staining their armor with help from the Scyre folks, all of whom were careful to keep on their gloves and check every handful of sand for more of the blood beetles. When the white armor and helmets had been more uniformly stained a messy gray, Phasma nodded her approval and began walking. The Scyre folk had already wound up their climbing ropes and removed their boot claws, and they followed their leader into the great unknown.
THE GRAY SAND STRETCHED IN EVERY direction beyond the mountains, as far as the eye could see. It rose up in great dunes patterned in windy waves, and plummeted into deep valleys. To the Scyre folk, it resembled the sea they’d so often watched from their stone perches, a dark, unforgiving, roiling thing—and yet uncomfortably, unnaturally still. There were no plants or animals anywhere to be seen. The farther they walked from the mountain and stone towers of the borderlands, the more agitated everyone became. They’d never spent a day of their lives without clinging to a tall spire, and it was disorienting to be mired in shifting sand, each step sinking and sliding. There were no landmarks, no clear goals, no place to hide.
Brendol and his troops somehow seemed more stolid, traversing the desert as if comfortable there, and it happened that Gosta grew brave or perhaps terrified enough to ask them about it.
“We’ve visited planets all over the galaxy,” Brendol said, not slowing in his slog forward, although his lack of athletic conditioning kept him breathing heavily. “Desert planets, water planets, ice planets, and ruined planets like yours, with all sorts of topographies and environments. Every environment has its own unique mercies and horrors. Even in the harshest conditions, like these…” He looked around, and although no one could see him frown through his wrappings, it was clear he was uneasy. “You’re never as alone as you think you are.”
“But if we don’t find water soon, we’ll be in trouble, won’t we?” the girl asked.
“We continue,” Phasma said, her voice hard. “We move forward. We’ll find what we need or we won’t. But we’ll get there.”
Her words made the Scyre folk nervous. What did Phasma have planned, and why was she suddenly so very determined? They’d seen her fight against all odds and take great risks for her people, but the way she marched through the sand without pause struck them as almost suicidal.
Carr was the last one in line, and as the day wore on it became apparent that he was slowing down. Siv fell back with him to inquire about his health, but he just shook his head.
“I feel dizzy and feverish,” he said. “And not in the good way.”
“The fever?”
He gave a sad laugh, a pathetic echo of his usual good humor. “When your skin feels like it’s on fire and your skull feels like it’s going to burst, one fever is the same as the next, I suppose.”
When she pulled up his mask and put a hand to his forehead, he was almost cold. There was a strange color mottling his usually tan face, a worrisome paleness. She could see a blue vein, just under the skin of his temple, beating rapidly with his heart.
“Phasma, come look at this,” Siv called, and Phasma left Torben and Brendol to lead the pack as she hurried to the end of the line.
“What’s wrong?”
“Carr feels light-headed and hot, but his skin is cold.”
Phasma lifted her own mask for a better look and frowned at what she saw. “Show me your wound from earlier.”
When Carr slipped off his glove, they were surprised to see that the beetle’s wound was nearly gone. It had been swollen, red, and hard right after the bite, but it appeared to be healing nicely, leaving just a light pink rash around the pinprick puncture wound. Phasma put her hand to his forehead and checked the whites of his eyes, but in the end she only shook her head.
“We must keep walking. Let me know if anything changes. If this is an infection, it’s different from the dangers we face in our territory. It’s not the fever, at least. Stay vigilant. Apply more salve. And put your mask on. If you’re contagious, we need to take precautions.”
“I’ll try not to kiss anyone,” Carr murmured.
Still, he obeyed, drawing on a second set of stripes with Siv’s salve and pulling down his mask, as Siv did hers. Phasma jogged to the head of the line, and everyone continued walking. The Scyre folk could hear Phasma consulting with Brendol in a hushed voice, and they thought they heard talk of his promised medicines. That was good, then—their leader was making plans to help their injured friend. They were a close-knit folk, and they would all pitch in to make sure Carr reached Brendol’s ship, even if they had to take turns carrying him.
They walked all afternoon, stopping once in the shade at a dune to nibble jerky and take careful sips from their water skins. Phasma had distributed multiple skins to each person, taken from the stores of the Nautilus, but Siv ran the numbers and instantly knew it wasn’t enough to get them to Brendol’s ship. This far from their territory and without a living plant or creature in sight, water would be an increasing worry. At home, they had other ways of collecting enough to drink, and although there was rarely more than they needed, they’d never prepared for a spell as dry as this one. Collecting and filtering urine was a regular part of life, but they would eventually run out of that, too. The Scyre folk didn’t speak their worries out loud, though. Phasma would take care of them—they had to believe that.
The desert heated up with the afternoon sun beating down, and although they were tempted to lift up their masks and tug off their wraps to let the wind cool their sweating skin, they knew better. Keeping covered was always a better option: Any slice of exposed flesh would quickly burn and possibly blister without a thick coating of salve. The sun was not as kind as it had once been. When Siv looked back, she saw Carr lagging even farther behind, his mask up on his head. His cheeks were swollen and pale, his eyes bulging somewhat, his lips dry and puffy.
“I know,” he said, catching her watching him. “I look terribly handsome.”
“You need to rest.”
“I can rest later. Help me up the hill.”
Siv hurried to his side and helped drag him up the next dune, feeling him wobble against her as if he’d lost his once solid sense of balance. It would be days yet before they reached Brendol’s ship, and Carr would slow down the entire group if he didn’t shake off this new sickness.
When they crested the dune, they were dismayed to find it was the first in a series of high hills straining into the horizon like a sea of gigantic waves. The wind was high a
long the top, and they jogged down each hill into the cool of the valley before slogging up the next hill. Time stretched out strangely then, Siv told me, as they constantly struggled up and down but didn’t seem to go anywhere, didn’t make any visible progress. It was like battling the same enemy again and again, never gaining a foothold; all too much like their old life in the Scyre, truth be told. Any wonder at the new world was lost to dread and discomfort, plus worry for Carr. The muscles used for walking in sand proved very different from those used for climbing and leaping among rocks. Their arms still ached from clambering down the cliff face. It was, in many ways, an unexpected hell for a people forged in the crucible of struggle.
I’ve seen these dunes, and I can’t imagine what kind of mindset it would take to tackle them without simply lying down to die in a valley. We grow so accustomed to our speeders, our ships, our hyperdrives. To be in a world where only your feet can move you, centimeter by centimeter through infinity…let’s just say there’s a reason Phasma wanted off that rock.
The sun was setting as they tumbled down a dune into the valley below, cold with shadow and whispering with eerie wind. Carr was the last one down, and he slid like deadweight, landing on his back at Siv’s feet.
“We’ll camp here tonight,” Phasma said. “Keep covered. Recycle bodily fluids. Every drop counts. Be careful with your supplies. Sleeping close will conserve body heat.” She sighed heavily and added, “It’s going to be difficult, but I won’t hear any complaints.”
Her warriors nodded listlessly, and the troopers looked to Brendol, who added, “Phasma is correct. Conserve your resources.”
They sat in smaller groups to eat, the Scyre warriors together and Phasma sitting beside Brendol with his troopers. The three armored soldiers took off their helmets for the first time, and Siv was oddly fascinated to see that they were just people like any others, their hair shorn close to their heads and their skin sweaty and red. One of them was a woman, although it was only perceptible through her facial structure and she had her hair cropped the same as the men. Her armor showed no difference in physiognomy, and Siv recalled being pleased that among the First Order, women were considered equals and warriors. Her mother had told her stories, you see, of a different world in which women were considered somehow weaker or lesser. Perhaps that prejudice had died off as it was determined that the women of the Scyre could climb better than the men and began to outnumber them among the warriors. At that time, however, sitting in the dune’s shadow with these strange folk from beyond the stars, Siv considered what it would be like to wear the shining white armor herself, to be faceless and mighty and one of countless others fighting for a worthy cause.
Phasma (Star Wars): Journey to Star Wars Page 10
