by Jason Fry
DJ eyed her appraisingly. “What you got deposit-wise?”
“Are you kidding me?” Finn asked. “Look at us.”
DJ did—and Rose noticed that her medallion had drawn his attention.
“Is that Haysian smelt?” DJ asked. “That’s something.”
Rose put her hand over her medal, instinctively hiding it from his covetous gaze.
“No,” Finn said angrily. “We gave you our word. You’re going to get paid. That should be enough.”
“Guys, I want to keep helping,” DJ said. “But no something, no doing.”
Finn started to argue, but Rose knew whatever he said wouldn’t be enough—and they had nothing else of value. Eyes cold, she tugged her medallion free and tossed it to DJ.
“Do it,” she said.
“Now I can help,” DJ said.
The feral gleam in DJ’s eye as his hand closed around the medallion made her want to hurl herself at him. She stormed out of the cockpit instead, ignoring Finn’s worried look.
After a silent moment in the cockpit, DJ extracted one of his mysterious machines from his pockets and wired it into an exposed panel on the yacht’s console.
“Cloaking our approach,” he said. “We should be off their scopes. Now we slice a slit in their shield and slip through. ‘Slice a slit in…’—hm. Say that five times fast.”
Finn was in no mood. “Just do it.”
“Done,” DJ said.
As the yacht approached, the First Order ships grew from points of light to recognizable shapes, their details perfectly sharp in the vacuum of space. DJ accelerated and Finn looked at him in surprise, but the thief just shrugged.
“We’ve got the cloak,” he said. “It works? Nobody sees us, we live, the doing gets done. If not? I figure just skip to the big boom.”
And with that DJ grinned and wiggled his fingers, miming an explosion.
Finn glared at him, still angry about Rose’s medallion. He was sure there was a reason DJ’s strategy was a bad idea, but he couldn’t articulate what it was—and arguing with an amoral thief seemed like a lousy way to spend his last minute or two of existence.
The Supremacy was a wall ahead of them that expanded until its blunt prow filled the viewports. Finn wondered what he would experience if one of the Dreadnought’s turbolaser clusters fired on them. Would he see the beam, and feel the Libertine come apart around him? Or would he and Rose simply cease to exist—there one moment and gone the next?
He realized he was holding his breath and forced himself to breathe, studying the endless underside of the ship as it passed over them, covering them in shadow. His duty rotation had included assignments aboard Snoke’s flagship, but he’d never seen its exterior—he’d come and gone from it aboard a transport, sealed inside a stormtrooper’s helmet.
Finn tried to match up what he knew of the warship’s interior with the hull overhead. Above them, he knew, there were assembly lines and foundries and assembly halls and training centers for cadets, like he had been. As well as more than a million crewers—the Supremacy was more a mobile capital than a ship.
Finn realized he felt guilty. He’d known what the Resistance hadn’t: that the Supremacy was out there somewhere, lurking in the Unknown Regions of the galaxy. Just as he’d known about so many other things he’d seen in his years of First Order service.
He knew it was ridiculous to blame himself—when he’d arrived on D’Qar there’d been no time for a thorough debriefing. There’d barely been time for him to tell General Organa and her officers about Starkiller Base before he’d left with Han and Chewbacca aboard the Falcon. And afterward…well, there hadn’t been an afterward. He’d woken up in a bacta suit, stashed in a storeroom aboard a ship that was being hunted.
Still, somehow it seemed wrong that he’d been the only one aboard the Raddus who hadn’t been surprised to see the massive warship come out of hyperspace.
And if things had been different, would it have occurred to him to warn the Resistance of everything arrayed against them? Finn liked to think he would have done so, but he wasn’t sure that was true. It was as likely, he had to admit, that he would have insisted on accompanying Rey on her Jedi hunt, or tried to convince her to join him somewhere in the Outer Rim.
An alert flashed and Finn spotted the dots of fighters on the Libertine’s scope—but immediately realized their heading would take them nowhere near the yacht. He tried to locate the fighters through the viewports, wondering what their mission could be. There were only three of them—if the First Order were attacking the Resistance fleet, it would have emptied its hangars.
“They’re going after something,” Finn said.
“Something that ain’t us,” DJ said. “Almost there, buddy. And check it—that’s our spot.”
DJ pointed, then guided the yacht to a tiny dot on the underside of the Supremacy. Finn couldn’t see what it was—some kind of port or vent, he supposed—but it grew until the yacht slipped inside it, into darkness.
* * *
—
The three TIE fighters flew in close formation, their pilots’ gloved fingers hovering near the FIRE button on their control yokes.
Every First Order pilot assigned to the fleet wanted to avenge the disaster at Starkiller, pitilessly dissected in after-action reports as a failure of the starfighters corps to contain a numerically inferior enemy. But the all-out blitz against the Resistance that the pilots hoped for kept failing to materialize—instead, there was this strange, sublight pursuit, with most of the pilots stuck watching.
Things had begun promisingly, with a frantic dogfight with the bombers that had destroyed the Fulminatrix (another round of after-action reports no one was looking forward to); and the attack run against the enemy flagship.
But the fleet had been pursuing the Resistance stragglers—now supposedly reduced to a lone ship—for more than twelve hours since then, each minute of which had been spent on high alert.
The pilots were edging beyond tired into exhaustion. Shift rotations had been canceled to guard against the possibility that the Resistance—whose spies and infiltrators were rumored to be within every droid pool and under every trash bin—might know about the switchover and use it to mount a lightning-fast raid. Pilots who should have been in their bunks were still in their ready rooms, overstimulated by bad caf and the weird mix of hope and dread that this next minute would become zero hour, with fighters launched and battle joined. The first wave of pilots’ replacements had arrived after being unable to sleep, hoping that the slow-motion chase would drag on long enough to deliver the chance at glory to them.
The alert that finally did sound had come as a relief, one that had curdled into puzzled disappointment before the TIE flight cleared its hangar: Their orders were to investigate an anomalous sensor contact.
That was it. A lone ship had come out of hyperspace between the two fleets and jumped almost immediately, ejecting something that began flying toward the First Order task force. The sensor profile indicated it was too small to even be a starfighter, so what was it?
The logical conclusion was that it was a bomb—but even a hundred devices of that size would have been incapable of doing more than cosmetic damage to the Supreme Leader’s flagship. That made this the worst kind of hop—one you could only screw up.
So what was the object flying out there?
To the pilots’ bafflement, it turned out to be an escape pod—one with a single life-form. As they escorted it toward the hangar, all three pilots pondered a variation of the same thought: What lunatic would head into a battle before abandoning ship?
* * *
—
Kylo Ren knew who was in the escape pod even before it opened with a hiss of vapor—her presence had been a steady pulse from the Force the moment his father’s junk-heap freighter once again somehow heaved itself out of hyperspace wit
hout disintegrating. The stormtroopers behind him stood ready, but he just smiled at the sight of Rey crammed into the pod’s tight confines.
His smile faded at the sight of his uncle’s lightsaber.
“I’ll take that,” he said. “It belongs to me.”
Rey was tempted to tell him to come and get it, as Finn had—and to remind him that she’d driven him to his knees at Starkiller Base and disarmed him. That he would bear the mark of that duel forever, and lived only because she had chosen not to strike him down.
But that wasn’t why she had come, and they both knew it. Still, she held the lightsaber appraisingly for a moment, to remind Kylo that she was the one who had set this chain of events in motion.
“Strange, then, that it called to me at the castle,” Rey said, studying the ancient weapon almost idly before snapping her gaze back to Kylo. “And not to you.”
The corner of Kylo’s mouth twitched in the beginning of a smile, and he inclined his head at the soldiers filling the hangar. “You’re in no position to dictate.”
Rey held the hilt out to him, as if daring him to take it. The stormtroopers shifted uneasily. Kylo frowned, then reached out, his scarred face momentarily uncertain. The slightest tremor disturbed his black-gloved fingers as he reached out for the weapon sitting motionless in Rey’s steady hand.
He snatched it away and gestured curtly for a First Order officer to approach with binders.
“That isn’t necessary,” Rey said.
“It is,” Kylo said, hustling her into the depths of the massive flagship. “We have an appointment.”
Rey quickened her pace to match his long strides, not wanting to be seen scurrying to keep up. Behind them, the accompanying stormtroopers’ armor rattled. Rey could feel their anxiety about a situation they couldn’t fit into the lockstep of their training regimens. That anxiety was shot through with fear—not of her but of the mercurial, unpredictable Kylo.
She didn’t blame them—Kylo’s turmoil all but filled the Force around them, roiling and churning it. The troopers couldn’t sense it the way she and Kylo could, but that wasn’t the same as saying they couldn’t sense it all—they were part of life and the Force, and couldn’t help but be affected on some level.
Kylo stopped at a lone turbolift ringed by stormtroopers and dismissed the guards. The doors shut and left Rey alone with him. He was still contemplating the lightsaber in his hands.
She nodded upward. “Snoke? You don’t have to do this.”
“I do.”
“I feel the conflict in you growing since you killed Han,” Rey said. “It’s tearing you apart.”
“Is that why you came? To tell me about my conflict?”
There they were again, his usual tactics—deflection and derision. As if he were the master and she was his student, to be kept at bay and off balance by questions. But things had changed. She wasn’t the young woman he’d kidnapped on Takodana or confronted on Starkiller Base. Not anymore.
“No,” Rey said. “Look at me. Ben.”
He turned at the sound of the name he’d been born with, the one he’d abandoned. He looked lost.
“When we touched I saw your future,” she told him. “Just the shape of it, but solid and clear. You will not bow before Snoke. You will turn—I’ll help you. I saw it. It’s your destiny.”
She watched the emotions chase themselves across his face, echoed by jitters and spikes in the Force. Anger. Confusion. Pain. Loneliness. Longing. Sorrow.
Then he lifted his eyes to hers.
“You’re wrong,” Kylo said. “When we touched I saw something, too. Not your future—your past. And because of what I saw, I know that when the moment comes, you’ll be the one to turn. You’ll stand with me. Rey, I saw who your parents are.”
Rey stared at him, but there was no lie in Kylo’s eyes. And a terrifying realization bloomed in her mind: Kylo’s churning emotions weren’t just about himself. They were also about her.
The turbolift doors opened with a hiss and Kylo led Rey into the throne room, where the Supreme Leader of the First Order awaited them on his throne. His faceless, crimson-armored guards stood on either side of the throne, bladed weapons ready. Snoke himself was almost slouching—indolent in his golden robes, secure in the safety of his sanctum.
But his eyes were piercing and hungry. Rey tried to avoid them, but his gaze was like a lodestone, dragging her attention involuntarily to him. Their pull was akin to what she’d felt near the pit on Ahch-To—whispering of secrets that had been reserved for her, that belonged to her. Ancient, hidden knowledge that would destroy the weak but elevate the strong. The worthy.
Snoke grinned hungrily at her and she found she couldn’t look away until the Supreme Leader fixed those dreadful, bottomless eyes on Kylo instead.
“Well done, my good and faithful apprentice,” he said, the voice deep and slow. “My faith in you is restored.”
Then his gaze pinned her once again. “Young Rey. Welcome.”
The Raddus’s hangar was filled with transports—Poe counted thirty of them, enough to evacuate every member of the Resistance who’d survived the evacuation of D’Qar. Crewers scurried around them, preparing them for flight—and sneaking looks at the gathering to the side of the hangar, where a small group of pilots led by Poe Dameron had approached Vice Admiral Holdo and her officers with an urgent message.
“So a stormtrooper and a who-now are doing what?” Holdo exclaimed.
“Trying to save us. This is our best hope of escape. You have to give Finn and Rose all the time you can!”
While Holdo tried to process what she’d been told—a missing light shuttle, a rendezvous on a distant gambling world, a codebreaker of uncertain repute, the nature of hyperspace tracking, the location of First Order circuit breakers—Poe looked over her shoulder at her officers, studying their faces in mute appeal. Some he knew—D’Acy, for one—while others were unfamiliar to him, Ninkas who’d arrived on the Raddus with their commander.
But known or unknown, their expressions told him the same thing: They’d stand with Holdo. It was her decision.
“You have bet the survival of the Resistance on bad odds and put us all at risk,” Holdo fumed. “There’s no time now.”
She turned to her officers. “We need to get clear of this cruiser—load the transports.”
As the transports’ doors hissed open, Poe and C’ai exchanged a look.
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Poe said, and drew his blaster. He was relieved to hear the other pilots unholstering their own weapons.
“Admiral Holdo, I’m relieving you of your duty for the survival of this ship, its crew, and the Resistance,” he said, hoping his voice sounded cool and steady.
The officers behind Holdo looked shocked and angry, but the admiral simply gave Poe one of her appraising glances.
Poe tensed, knowing this could go either way.
Then Holdo raised her hands. After a moment, her officers did the same.
“I hope you understand what you’re doing, Dameron,” she said.
In different circumstances he might have explained that he did understand—trying, one last time, to make her see how she had lost sight of Leia’s vision and how she might restore it. But he had to seize the little time that remained to them—seize it and use it to improve the odds for Rose and Finn as best he could.
“I’m going to the bridge,” Poe told C’ai. “If they move, stun ’em.”
* * *
—
The aperture DJ located led to a laundry room, of all things.
Finn had endured his share of drudgery as a stormtrooper cadet—his trainers had routinely stuck those who failed an exercise with demeaning duty shifts spent doing droidwork—but he’d never seen a First Order laundry from the inside.
The laundry, in fact, had no organic workers at all—j
ust several auto-valet droids hard at work at their ironing stations. The multi-armed droids swiveled and turned ceaselessly: one arm grabbed a freshly washed uniform out of a bin, another ran a sensor over it to verify the fabric type, and a third manipulated a built-in steam-iron attachment.
To Finn’s relief, none of the droids seemed to care—or even notice—when three humans and an astromech emerged from the moist, lint-filled vent that wended its way to a heat sink on the exterior of the Supremacy in which the Libertine had been stashed.
Nor did they object when those same humans grabbed three washed and pressed uniforms slated to be returned to their owners; or picked out shined and polished boots, belts, and caps to go with them.
There were no mirrors, but Finn had seen enough First Order uniforms to know his looked right—tunic straight, pants flaring above the high boots, visor of his cap neither too high nor too low. The only uniform small enough to fit Rose had been a major’s blue-green outfit, but it looked passable.
As for DJ…well, DJ’s uniform was fine, but the man himself looked like he’d just crawled back into his quarters after three days’ shore leave on Nar Shaddaa.
Finn scowled, but it couldn’t be helped. Fortunately, hierarchy outweighed everything else in the First Order—unquestioning obedience was rewarded and independent thought punished.
“Will this really work?” Rose asked, and it was obvious she didn’t think it would.
“Of course it will,” Finn said with a jauntiness he knew wouldn’t fool her. “Just look out for the guys in white.”
“Stormtroopers?” she asked, trying to arrange her hair so her hat would sit properly atop it.
“No—white tunics,” Finn said. “Those guys are First Order Security Bureau. Loyalty officers. It’s their job to be suspicious. Everyone else will be looking at your rank insignia, not your face.”
DJ looked dubious. So did Rose. BB-8 whistled anxiously.
“Chin up, shoulders back,” Finn said. “Stand up tall, don’t be slack.”
