by Chuck Wendig
Now it’s all just cleanup.
Wedge still has that bug on him, so Temmin flicks the X-wing back to the right again, looking for Phantom Leader in his scopes—ah, there he is, dead ahead, zipping over a flat plane where the sand looks like waves frozen in space and time. He spies Yarra coming in from the other side, and he thinks, Okay, Yarra, let’s see who blasts this bogey first.
He lines up his shot—
Wham! Something hits his ship hard, and next thing he knows he’s spinning like a corkscrew. His brain forces itself to catch up to his head as he spirals out of control, and past ropes of crackling electricity he sees on his screens that the wings have been sheared off on the one side—they’re gone!
I’m going down.
I’m hit.
Mom—
He pulls up on the stick and levels out, just as the X-wing belly-flops into the dust, kissing the surface of Jakku and sending up a tidal spray of sand behind him. The ship slides along on its belly, grinding and hissing as it does—Temmin’s head snaps hard left and right, cracking into the blast glass of the cockpit viewports, each time rocking his dome dizzy.
The cockpit pops and he paws at the edges of his seat, pulling himself out. Temmin rolls over the edge of the X-wing, landing in the space where the wings should be. His shoulder hits stone. He turns over and dry-heaves.
When he finally looks up again, he sees what took him out.
Two dunes away, pinning a pair of S-foils, is a fist of metal from what looks like a Starhawk. A Starhawk? I thought the Ravager was hit…
And it all starts coming down.
Meteors made of broken starships start plowing into the ground. Each time they hit, Jakku coughs up another geyser of sand. Temmin cries out at the cacophony of sound—the booming drum of the planet being struck, the susurrus of sand rising and falling back to itself, the distant explosions. His ears ring and he clamps his hands over them.
Temmin risks looking up. To see if he can spot the rest of Phantom Squadron. But as he does, the light is blotted out. Day turns to night in the matter of moments.
It’s the Ravager.
The Imperial colossus drifts in front of the light, eclipsing the sun. Another ship precedes it—that’s the Starhawk. Fire comes off the New Republic ship, tornadoes of flame crackling from holes in its side.
He thinks: It’s coming down right on top of me. There’s nowhere to run. Nowhere I can go to get safe. But the panic subsides when he realizes his perspective is off. Yes, the ship is massive, but no, it’s not coming down here. It’ll hit dozens of klicks away. But what will it hit? Who will it destroy? Their own people are that way. So is the enemy. That’s the Imperial line—the fighting is going on right there. Temmin pulls up his wrist comm and starts babbling into it, telling everyone to go, to move, to get out of the way, but the device suddenly fritzes out and spits sparks before going dead.
A sound comes out of him: a small, fearful moan. He’s never seen anything like it before. He wonders if this is how his mother felt flying inside the Death Star—and then escaping, watching it detonate behind her.
The Ravager struggles to stay aloft—he can see, even in the half dark of eclipsed day, how underneath its positioning thrusters fire intermittently, desperately working to keep it from pointing straight at the ground, but failing to stop its fall.
It moves inescapably toward the ground. Leaning hard to the side…
The Starhawk hits first. Whoom. Temmin runs up to the nearest dune and watches as the New Republic capital ship crashes into the sand, crumpling up as if some giant just stepped on it—he sees an AT-AT walker moving away from the impact site as fast as it can, which from here looks dreadfully, painfully slow. And it won’t matter anyway.
With the Starhawk gone, the tractor beam shears and the Ravager’s thrusters must cause it to overcompensate—it begins to invert, turning belly up as it drops.
The Ravager hits next. It hits broadly, not spearing the ground but crashing flat against it, upside down—the AT-AT never has a chance. Nor do the starfighters trapped in the shadow of the dreadnought before it crashes. Nobody does. It’s like watching the ceiling fall down on a child’s playroom of toys. The Ravager plows into the sand, and the impact rocks the whole world—the vibration moves outward in a monstrous ripple, sending sand up along the shock wave, and when it hits where Temmin is standing, it knocks him off his feet. Again his ears ring. Everything vibrates: his teeth, his toes, all his bones. He struggles to stand anew—
And already he can’t see the Ravager anymore.
A dust cloud of titanic proportions has been thrown into the sky. An anvil of black smoke goes up. Rolling outward is a cloud of dark dust.
It’s coming this way. The blood-red dust cloud bulges and roils, tumbling forward like a wave of death and despair. Temmin scrambles back to his downed X-wing, sliding into the cockpit and slamming it shut just as the dust and the sand wash over him. It brings the white sound of a thousand angry whispers all around him, against the glass, against his ship.
And it goes on for what seems like forever.
—
“Move over!” Norra barks. “Let me fly it.”
“I know how to fly,” Sloane snarls from the pilot’s seat, her fingers gone bloodless from holding the shuttle’s flight stick. She weaves the ship in and out of a rain of falling debris as each piece plunges to the ground like a comet. “I’m a damn good pilot. I got away from you, remember.”
Norra remembers. She grits her teeth and holds on to a handle above her head as Sloane whips the craft through the raining debris. Brentin sits in the copilot’s seat, his face gone white, his eyes closed. He never was much of a flier. Part of her wants to comfort him; another part wants to take the blaster and knock some sense into his head with the butt of it.
Bones stands behind her, stabilized without holding on to anything.
She’s about to say something else—
The day goes to night. Sloane’s gaze drifts upward. She gasps: a ragged, despairing sound. “No. My ship.” Those three words transmit such grief, Norra can’t help but feel drawn in by them. It’s absurd, maybe, to be so enamored with and connected to a ship, but Norra understands it. She didn’t have a long career in that Y-wing, but in the short time that she did, she came to love it like Temmin loves that droid.
Norra’s eyes drift away from the Ravager to what precedes it—it’s one of the Starhawks. She can’t tell which one, but fear eats at her like an acid. It’s the Concord, isn’t it? Norra doesn’t know Kyrsta Agate very well, but the woman was kind to her when she didn’t need to be. Her reputation was that she was hard, but had empathy—not just for her own people, but for the enemy, too. Norra hopes she’ll see Agate again.
The Starhawk hits the surface of Jakku, and moments later the Ravager follows. It drops hard. A concussive wave kicks up, rocks the ship. Norra has a distant, disconnected thought that she cannot dwell on for long lest it destroy her: How many died? How many died on that ship? Or underneath it as it fell? That, coupled with the feeling of victory in her heart, the one that tells her the New Republic may just have finished this war. It is a crass dichotomy, that feeling; she’s felt it before and she’ll feel it again. The triumphant heart warring with the grief born of war.
Norra composes herself. Her fight isn’t over. None of this is. Sloane seems to pull herself together, too. The ex-admiral sets her jaw and her flight course, pulling away from the direction of the Ravager. “Dust cloud coming in,” she warns. It’s out there, a fast-moving storm spilling toward them. The cloud lights up in places with bilious lightning. Thunder tumbles.
Sloane pulls the shuttle away from it, but still it encompasses them. When it does, the shuttle rocks back and forth, hitting tides of air turbulence that nearly have Norra losing her footing. Through the dust storm she sees black clouds rising up above as pillars of fire and lightning brighten the air. And then it’s gone again, washing over them and thinning out. The air is still gauzy with particulat
e matter, but once more the horizon can be seen.
Bones suddenly stiffens. His antenna glows green, beeping.
“MASTER TEMMIN IS NEAR.”
“What? Where?”
“BELOW. MAY I GO?”
Norra knows that him leaving makes her vulnerable. If her husband is still in thrall to the control chip and sides with Sloane against her, she’s not sure she can survive. But if Temmin really is near…and maybe in danger…
Then the choice is no choice at all.
“Go.”
Bones flees, his claw-feet clanking as he opens the ramp in the belly of the shuttle. She watches him collapse downward, tucking his narrow beaked head to his chest and wrapping his many-jointed arms around his knees before rolling out of the ship and down to Jakku.
—
When the storm has passed, Temmin once again reopens the cockpit and emerges—though the wave has dissipated, dust still hangs gauzy in the air, and he coughs and blinks it away as he drops to the ground and staggers through the sand. What passes next are a few moments of almost eerie silence: the world gone still in the aftermath of the impact.
Then, somewhere far away, an explosion goes off—from the Ravager’s wreckage, no less. Above the dreadnought, black specters of smoke rise, and those dark clouds pulse with a flickering fire glow. A stink of burning metal and spent fuel stings his nose. After that, the sounds of war return: Blaster shrieks and fighter engines roaring overhead, concussive pulses and grenade detonations. Soldiers screaming. The silence is over. Again he coughs, wincing. In the distance, he spies a contingent of New Republic commandos dug in behind the sand furrow kicked up by a wrecked transport. Troopers advance on them. Temmin thinks, I should do something. I should help.
From close by come the pneumatic piston sound and pounding footsteps of something all too familiar: an AT-ST walker. He sees its brutal cockpit crest the nearest dune, the cannons tracking in his direction—Temmin knows he can’t take that thing down, so he draws his blaster and runs in the other direction, feet carrying him over one dune and down the other, even as the thing’s cannons surely track his movement—
And then, he’s running full-throttle into a trio of desert troopers, their armor scarred, the grooves and joints caked with dust.
They raise their blasters and he skids to a halt, holding his in the air.
The troopers don’t say anything at first. Already that makes his hackles rise—Imperial soldiers are about protocol. They have a pattern. They warn you. Tell you to drop it. Like they’re on a program.
But this time, they follow no protocol. They remain silent.
Behind him, the AT-ST tromps up the dune toward them. Its shadow falls across Temmin, a shadow so damning it’s as if it has its own weight. Temmin swallows hard, feeling sweat run down his jaw, his neck, his collarbone. “I…”
“Shut your mouth,” the middle trooper says. That one’s helmet has a hard dent in the plastoid surface. He’s got a pauldron over the right shoulder, red and dark as a hot coal. He’s the leader. “Rebel scum.”
“Let’s have some fun with this one,” says the trooper on the right—the face of the helmet painted with finger-streaks of gray ash.
The one on the left takes off his helmet. A jowly, scruff-cheeked man’s face is underneath, lit up with rage. He points the blaster. “We shoot bits off him. One by one. Hands. Ears. Each knee. See how long we keep him alive. Then the AT-ST can finish him off. Scatter his atoms.”
The one in the pauldrons says: “We should do it quickly. Get back to the battle.”
“Battle’s over,” Ash-Streak says. “Might as well have fun.”
Nobody’s listening to the leader.
Nobody’s listening to anybody.
I’m going to die.
Scruff-Cheek looks up. “Hey, what the—”
Whong.
Temmin whirls around to see something land, crablike, on top of the AT-ST’s cockpit skull. That something lifts its head, feral and red, showing off a set of hand-cut sawteeth.
Bones!
The troopers open fire, but Bones is fast. Too fast for them. The droid grabs the rail at the edge of the AT-ST, swinging down like a monkey-lizard before flinging himself to the sand, landing in a crouch. Blasterfire riddles the space where he just was as he pivots, pirouettes, and begins handspringing across the sand—plasma cooking the air as he dances around each lance of searing light. Arms snap back. Blades stick out.
Bones goes to work. He gets under the pauldroned leader, sticking a vibroblade up underneath the chin of the helmet with a dull crunch. The man’s body twitches as his blaster drops. The modified B1 droid whirls around the still-standing corpse like it’s a pole, kicking out with one clawed foot and knocking Ash-Streak back. As that trooper falls to the ground, Bones pounces on his chest and—wham, wham, wham—perforates the armor again and again with the blades. The man’s heels kick the ground.
Scruff-Cheek bellows for the AT-ST to fire, and fire it does—loud blasts from its cannons biff through the sand, just missing Bones but knocking the droid back, limbs akimbo. The scruffy trooper raises his own rifle to fire on Bones, and Temmin launches himself at the man. His attack is clumsy and broadcast a kilometer away, but the helmetless stormtrooper isn’t paying attention—Temmin clubs the soldier in the temple with his own blaster and the man topples like a tree. Unnff.
Bones is up again, cartwheeling away from the AT-ST’s cannons—it tracks him, but its head is too slow, and the droid too fast. Temmin’s mechanical bodyguard returns to the place it landed, scurrying up the side of the walker’s leg, metal clicking on metal, until it reaches the top once more.
The droid struggles, his servos grinding and his pneumos whining as he wrenches the top off the AT-ST, flinging the hatch behind him. Feetfirst, Bones silently slips into the cockpit of the chicken walker.
Thus commences a bang and a rattle. The walker rocks back and forth just slightly. It takes ten seconds, no more, before Bones pops back out wearing one of the drivers’ open-face helmets, a pair of black-lens goggles hanging off in front of the B1’s own ocular lenses.
“HELLO, MASTER TEMMIN.”
Temmin falls to his knees, relieved. “Bones. I missed you, buddy.”
“I MISSED YOU. I PERFORMED VIO—”
Suddenly the top of the walker erupts in fire and shrapnel, exploding. Temmin is knocked backward, the breath knocked from his lungs in a thunderclap of air. He waves smoke out of his face and wipes sand from his eyes, and when it clears he sees the walker standing there—
It’s just two legs, now. The cockpit is peeled back like a blooming metal flower, its durasteel petals burned and charred.
Bones is nowhere to be found.
Bones. No, Bones, no…
He cries out, wondering what happened—did it detonate all on its own? Was there something the droid did to cause it to explode?
But then a pair of A-wings appear overhead, roaring past.
It was them. They shot the walker.
And Bones along with it.
Temmin crawls on his hands and knees, looking for parts of his droid—he finds seared, melted limbs. He finds rivets and scrap. But he sees nothing else. No skull. No program motherboard. He draws sand into his hands, but it slips through his fingers with nothing to show for it. Bones saved his life and now is gone. His best friend is slag.
Temmin presses his forehead to the hot sand and weeps.
“You don’t have to do this,” Conder says.
Sinjir huffs a lamentable sigh. “Apparently I do. Job’s a job and—oh, gods, I just started a new job. What is wrong with me?”
The two of them stand before Senator Tolwar Wartol’s Ganoidian cruiser. Thankfully, it’s here on Chandrila again and didn’t require them to take a quick hop to Blah Blah Boring Farmworld, Nakadia—or, worse, to the asteroid archipelago above Orish that Wartol and his like call home. Sinjir cares little why he’s back on Chandrila; the convenience of it suits him, and he is nothing if not a man who
appreciates ease.
Conder makes that face—a little pouty, a lot dubious. One eyebrow up, a twist to his lips, a cockiness to his hips. “I don’t mean this specifically. I mean the whole package. The job, Chandrila, me.”
“You? I don’t follow.”
“You don’t have to be with me. Fate put us together again and—it’s just, we don’t have to do this.”
“Oh, but we do.” Sinjir cups the man’s beardy cheek first with a gentle caress and then with a sharp tap-tap-slap. “Dearest foolheart, all my time away was spent thinking about how much I hated you, and I hated you because I liked you so much. Too much, really. It’s gross the way I feel about you. It’s like—” Sinjir makes a face as if he just sucked on a dirty thumb. “It’s really not natural to me. But I learned that I don’t know what the precious hell I’m talking about. My mind is an idiot. My heart knows all. I want what I want. What I want is a beach view, a cold glass of something very drunk-making, and you. You, you, you, you noble, fuzzy-faced fool. So, if that means becoming just a hair respectable and entering into the service of our most estimable chancellor, then that is what will be done.”
“You aren’t the ‘settling down’ type.”
Sinjir rolls his eyes so hard he fears they might tumble out of his head. “Bah. Who says I’m ‘settling’? Settling is such a passive affair. Settling is how a Hutt-slug sits down. I’ve been settling since Endor. Settling for whatever comes my way. Usually a barstool, if we’re being honest. You, this job, this life—it’s all a mountain. And I intend quite fully to climb it.”
Conder smirks. Sinjir destroys that smirk with a hard kiss—hands behind the head, drawing the man’s face to his.
“Well, then,” Conder says.
“Well, then.” Sinjir turns back toward the cruiser. “I suppose I should do this.” At his feet sits the basket of pta fruit; looking at it again reminds him how much he admires the chancellor. Not for all her leadership and governance, which is fine, whatever, but for the potent venom she quite plainly conceals inside that boring, white-robed façade. She’s a vicious twig, a veritable whipping branch of a human being, and he thinks they could have a long and fascinating professional relationship.
