“Tell me what happened.”
Mattis told her about Wanten and how the facility’s commander didn’t seem to care what Mattis told him because Jo was spilling everything he knew about the Resistance. “He was pretending the whole time,” Mattis said. “We shouldn’t have trusted him.”
“He explained himself to us!” Lorica yelled, startling Cost, who bellowed incoherently as her pacing around the cell grew furious.
“He told us his parents are in the First Order,” Mattis said. Lorica shook her head. She couldn’t hear him clearly over Cost’s wailing. “The First Order,” Mattis said louder. “His parents are in it. That’s what he told us!”
“That doesn’t mean he is! Besides, he saved our lives!”
“We saved his!” Mattis yelled. It wasn’t a good argument, but for some reason he felt it needed saying. “Besides—” He was too loud now, as Cost had quieted and was busying herself in the corner of the cell. “Sorry. Besides, wouldn’t saving us be the best thing for a traitor to do? Then we’d really think he was on our side. Which we did.”
“We did because he was. He is.” Lorica was certain of Jo’s loyalty. She had to be. She’d served him in the squadron, and she wouldn’t serve a traitor. “People aren’t just what other people say they are.”
“He tried to wipe Aygee’s memory,” Mattis reminded her.
“I was there. He wasn’t going to do it. Probably.”
Mattis shrugged. “I don’t want it to be true, either,” he said. “But even if he wasn’t spying, even if he isn’t a traitor, he is now. He’s not in here with us, is he?” Mattis motioned around the cell. Cost started wailing again and kicking at the walls.
“Can you stop that?” Lorica snapped, but Cost didn’t notice.
“He’s saving himself by selling us out,” Mattis said, disappointed. He rubbed his head and stared at the ground.
“You don’t know that’s true.”
“But for our own sakes, shouldn’t we assume it is? Aygee is gone, probably scrapped or worse. Wanten told me that Jo is talking. I don’t want it to be true, not after we lost Dec and Sari, and after what happened to Klimo…but…” Mattis lifted his head to see her face.
Lorica looked at Mattis through angry half-closed eyes. She shook her head slowly, only just understanding how much she had liked Klimo. She realized their last hope was Dec, the least reliable person she had ever known, and his friend Sari, who had never liked her.
“Lorica, we only have each other here,” Mattis said. “No one is coming for us.”
PING…PING…
Where was that other shuttle? The plan had been that when they were finished on Vodran, they were to signal the cargo ship that had brought them to the Si’Klaata Cluster to meet their shuttles and return J-Squadron to the Resistance base. But now Dec couldn’t raise the cargo ship. And worse, he couldn’t find the second shuttle.
During the terror of the rancor attack, Dec and Sari had managed to fly one shuttle to safety. As they were leaving, they saw Klimo commandeer the second shuttle. Klimo wasn’t the best pilot among them—Dec wagered that was his brother, AG-90—but the rest of them, AG, Mattis, Jo, and Lorica, were near enough that Klimo could pick them up quickly and one of them could maneuver the shuttle into the atmosphere and away from the rancor pack. Only—that should have happened immediately. They were, Dec had thought, right behind him.
He’d already talked Sari out of returning to the planet’s surface to make sure the others weren’t still there. He didn’t want to risk landing in the midst of another rancor scrap, and anyway, he trusted his own eyes. Klimo was in the shuttle. The others were nearby. There was no way they’d have missed the chance to escape.
So where was that other shuttle?
Ping…ping…
In J-Squadron, Jo had taught them to use a ping scanner on the comms to probe nearby space for objects. Sari, who had been anxious ever since the other shuttle hadn’t shown up behind them right away, hadn’t left the communications bank in what had to be a full day. She just sat there, still caked in the dried muck of Vodran, sending tiny signals into outer space. Thus far, the only contact made was with some large hunks of debris. Vodran didn’t even have a moon where Dec might land their shuttle to rest and recuperate. They just spun around and around the small planet, hoping for word from their friends.
They weren’t talking much to each other, either, not after the initial panic had subsided. Sari was mad at Dec for refusing to return to Vodran. She was tired and worried and itchy from the mud. He was, too. It was easier not to talk.
Ping…ping…
An echoing beacon sent out to nowhere. As he listened to each signal, Dec grew sadder. His brother was out there somewhere. His friends, too. After all they’d been through together, Dec thought of them all as friends. Even Jo, with whom he’d sparred so relentlessly. He hoped they were all right. He needed them to be all right.
Ping…ping…
“Dec.”
He was so lulled by the gentle pinging from the adjacent bay, and so lost in reflection, that Dec didn’t register Sari’s voice until she spoke again more forcefully.
“Dec!”
“You got something?” Dec asked, swinging around in the pilot’s chair to face the communications bay. The shuttle could fly itself for a few minutes.
“Yeah, but I don’t know what.”
Dec made his way to the comms bay to join her. Sari was hunched in the small space as she had been for the past day. She was a large girl, thick-trunked, and muscular. She looked, thanks to the sludge, like a small hill. Her hair fell in a heavy dirty-blond lock over her bulbous forehead.
“Listen,” she said, and twiddled some dials on the communicators.
Ping…ping…
Dec was hopeful for a few seconds, but that feeling quickly faded when Sari’s fiddling produced nothing but the silence and rhythmic pinging to which they’d been listening for the past several hours. He shook his head but stopped before she could look up to see him do it. He chalked up her excitement to her optimism, her hope. But that was all it was. Hope. Nothing real.
Until.
Ping…p—
She moved another dial and the pinging stopped. Static stuttered over the communicator.
“What’s—” Dec started to say, but Sari shushed him, holding up a finger for him to wait.
She returned to the board and again moved dials and pressed buttons.
“Read us…unknown…please…” The words came over the communicator choppy and indistinct. It was a man’s voice, that much was evident, but all the technology it passed through rendered it robotic and unfamiliar. It could be Jo or Mattis, for sure. It might even be AG.
Dec grabbed the communicator. “Aygee? Is that you, Brother?”
Sari grabbed it back from him. “Wait!” she said. “What if it isn’t—”
The comms squealed with static, and Sari dropped the communicator.
“It’s them, it’s gotta be,” Dec said. His voice came out more desperate-sounding than he wanted. He hadn’t realized until that moment how deeply worried he was about his brother.
The voice returned. “Identify yourself…” It came in more clearly now. It wasn’t AG. It wasn’t Jo or Mattis or Lorica, either. “Unknown shuttle, identify yourself.”
Dec and Sari locked eyes. What should they do? Dec put a finger to his lips. Stay quiet for now.
“Unknown shuttle, you are encroaching on private airspace. Please identify yourself.”
Dec grabbed Sari’s shoulder. He hadn’t meant to, but he was scared. He needed something solid to hold on to. She patted his hand.
“Unknown vessel, we will give you one chance to reply. After that, you will be considered hostile and sentry shuttles will be deployed to intercept.”
Dec swallowed hard. They had to do something. He grabbed the communicator. “Uh…” he said. Not a great start. “We are…we’re real lost, man,” he said. Sari looked at him and slapped her forehead. “We must
a taken a wrong turn around Corson Prime, got turned around….” He wasn’t sure what else to say, but the voice on the other end of the comm was quiet, so maybe Dec’s ruse had worked?
“Deploying three sentry shuttles,” the voice came back. “Remain where you are.”
Dec and Sari immediately leaped to their feet. Sari hit her head on the bay’s ceiling, then slammed a hand on the communications bank, shutting it down.
“Let’s definitely not remain where we are,” she said.
“Definitely not,” Dec agreed. He scrambled to the pilot’s chair. “We gotta get out of here,” he said.
“Fast, please,” Sari said.
Already, through the viewport, they saw three tiny shuttles taking off from Vodran and climbing into the atmosphere. They grew larger quickly. They were First Order sentries, and they were coming fast!
“First Order?” Dec cried out.
“First Order! Punch it!” Sari yelled.
Dec punched it. Their shuttle juddered then spun off into space. He didn’t know where they would go; he just knew they needed to fly away from there.
MATTIS DIDN’T REMEMBER FALLING asleep. He was sitting on the bunk opposite Lorica, both of them trying not to look at each other. She wasn’t giving in, wouldn’t allow for the truth that Jo had betrayed them. She slouched on her bunk taking shallow breaths, her eyelids half-shuttered, her skin a darker shade of pink than usual. For his part, Mattis couldn’t argue anymore, either. He wanted to win the argument; he needed her to understand that he was right. He also needed her on his side for what was to come. Simultaneously, he just didn’t want her angry at him; he wanted Lorica to think warmly of him, for reasons he wasn’t quite ready to explore or understand. He fidgeted on his bunk, both wanting and not wanting to convince her further, until finally he succumbed, at some point, to sleep.
He knew they’d slept because they were woken roughly by their guards. It was the same haughty lead trooper from the day before. Even if he hadn’t had the scarred lens on his helmet, Mattis would have known this trooper by the glee with which he roused the prisoners. He clanged his baton across the bars, back and forth, back and forth, shouting for them to get on their feet. Mattis had started thinking of this stormtrooper as “Patch,” and he feared him more than the others.
Mattis jumped up from Cost’s bed, where he’d fallen asleep, smacking his head on the upper bunk. He cried out in pain. He was sure the breathy line of static he heard was the stormtrooper laughing. Patch told them to stand at attention by their bunks.
Lorica pretended a casual stance, leaning back on her bunk as if she’d woken by choice. She kept her gaze on the ceiling, not acknowledging either the stormtrooper or her cellmates. Mattis did his best to look obedient, but he was sending Lorica signals with his mind: Look at me, look at me, look at me. She didn’t, which made him angry at his nascent Jedi powers. When would they fully develop? Didn’t the Force know he needed it right now?
Cost emerged from the shadowy corner of the cell like a phantom. Had she been down on the concrete floor all night? If she had, she didn’t seem to mind. Taking a place opposite Mattis, she smiled, showing him all her rows of teeth.
“You all good friends now?” the stormtrooper asked.
“The best,” Lorica said dryly. “We picked out each other’s outfits and did each other’s hair all night.”
“Good,” the trooper said, not caring about Lorica’s sarcasm and punching a code into the pad by their cell door. “You’re gonna need friends in the Fold.”
He herded them out of the cell in a tight group and led them through the corridor and outside. Mattis tried again to get Lorica’s attention, brushing her hand lightly as they walked. She shook her head, resolute. She didn’t want to talk, he figured. She didn’t want to plan.
The Fold was a small muddy space between the walls of the palace and the detention cells. Wire fences enclosed either side. Some round stone tables were clustered at one end; slabs of rock meant for sitting upon surrounded each table. An ongeball screen was affixed to the far wall, and a few dodgy-looking prisoners played aggressively beneath it. They seemed more interested in the rough jostling the game allowed than in making plays to toss the ongeball into the screen.
The stormtrooper who’d led them outside stopped a few steps from the door.
“Welcome to the Fold,” he said. “You’ll get mud on your boots. There are no other boots. So clean your boots before you return to your cell. There’s a lather brush hanging there. Don’t take it off of there. If you take it off of there, you’ll be punished.”
Patch motioned to the opposite end of the Fold. “Those are tables. You may sit at them. They’re planted in the ground, so you can’t throw them.”
Mattis didn’t think he could throw a stone table that size, but he appreciated that they probably weren’t so worried about someone like him as they were about prisoners like the tough blue Squamatan woman or the brutish Gigoran from whom she was trying to steal the ongeball.
“Go ahead and make more friends,” the stormtrooper said, turning on his heel and leaving them. The door to the block slammed closed behind him with a metallic echo.
Cost slipped her slender hand into Mattis’s. He shook it loose. Cost looked dejected, though that expression faded quickly as she became distracted by the ongeball game being played. There was nothing playful about it. Prisoners of the First Order, cooped up in their cells for most of their hours, took full advantage of both their time outside and their propensity for violence. Hands, pads, paws, and claws snatched and punched at torsos covered in a leathery hide or thick pelt or solid muscle. Mattis didn’t know what the teams were—there were usually three in ongeball—and it didn’t appear to matter to the players. They seemed to just throw themselves at one another haphazardly, like meteors crashing.
“Fun and games!” Cost yipped, clapping her palms together. She started for the fray, but Mattis pulled her back.
“Stay with us for a little while,” he said, looking over Cost’s head at Lorica, who watched the ongeball match intently. “Let’s go sit on those…slabs,” he said, guiding Cost toward the tables where sat a depressed Ortolan, a Yarkora with some sort of gloppy crust that had worn away his skin, and a tiny, still Kailynn whose Dathomirian tattoos did little to hide her sadness.
“Don’t talk to anyone,” Lorica told Mattis.
“Don’t talk to anyone,” Mattis told Cost. Cost smiled and continued her slow, uneven walk, weaving precariously close to the ongeball match. “Cost,” Mattis hissed, trying not to draw any attention to himself. “Watch out you don’t—” But he didn’t finish his thought because, even as he reached out to nudge Cost away from the combatants, a sweaty, moss-hued Gamorrean blundered out of the match and crashed into Mattis.
Mattis opened his eyes to find the Gamorrean fully in his face; the creature’s tusks were chipped and yellow. He snorted angrily at Mattis, a series of grunts and snorfs relaying his upset.
“I’m sorry,” Mattis whined. He didn’t mean to whine, but he was scared and the wind was knocked out of him. He put his arms up, trying to look innocent and apologetic, hoping the Gamorrean—most of whom spoke Galactic Basic—understood. Whether or not he did, however, was moot, as the porcine bruiser answered Mattis with a hard shove, sending him back into the mud.
The Gamorrean pulled himself up to his full not-very-impressive height as he was flanked by the beastly Gigoran and a compact snaggletoothed Snivvian.
“He doesn’t like you,” the Snivvian told Mattis.
“That’s okay,” Mattis said, trying to be agreeable. He looked around for Lorica and Cost, who’d made their way to the tables already.
The white-furred Gigoran growled and dipped her head.
“I’m sorry,” Mattis said to her. “I’m not worth the effort.”
This self-deprecating defense made the Snivvian laugh, a sort of moaning wheeze. He clapped the Gamorrean on the back and both of them returned to the ongeball match, grunting and laugh
ing. But the Gigoran didn’t go with them. She took a stride closer to Mattis and patted down some of her fur. It was barely white anymore, caked with mud and filth as it was. She growled again. Mattis didn’t know what she was saying. What Mattis did know was that, like her friends, she didn’t like him.
The Gigoran grumbled.
“Her name is Ymmoss,” said Cost, suddenly standing just outside of the Gigoran’s radius.
“Thanks?” Mattis said, hoping that neither the Gigoran nor the other prisoners could hear his teeth clashing together in fear. “I’m M-Mattis,” he said to the Gigoran.
The Gigoran, Ymmoss, roared, raising her thick arms aggressively.
“Ymmoss says she’s gonna eat you for la-la-lunch!” Cost said in a singsong.
“What?” Mattis yelled, shuffling back across the ground. “Why? What did I do?” He scuttled back even more until he was up against the wall. “I don’t even know her! She doesn’t even know me! I’m really nice! I don’t—”
He was cut off by Ymmoss’s crazed growl and the sight of the Gigoran striding toward him, arms outstretched. “Mrrrooowr!” Ymmoss bellowed and lifted Mattis off his feet. Mattis had a brief flashback to his life on Durkteel, so many months before, when that bully Fikk had lifted him up and spun him around. But this wasn’t like that. Fikk had been a teenaged Saurin and, while strong, he wasn’t an angry full-grown Gigoran. A Gigoran whom, Mattis noted, was a prisoner in this detention center and therefore likely some sort of criminal. Ymmoss might tear Mattis’s limbs off and enjoy them as an appetizer to the lunch she apparently intended to make of him.
She held Mattis aloft, one giant paw under his neck and the other propping up his legs. His view was only of sky, and he wished on the Force for a ship to appear and take him out of there. But none came. Instead, Ymmoss spun and hurled Mattis into the ongeball match, scattering the players. He landed atop the Gamorrean he’d angered earlier, and both of them tumbled into the muck. The Gamorrean snorted but scrambled away when he saw Ymmoss stalking toward them, roaring and thumping a fist into her large open palm.
Escape from Vodran Page 4
