Leia grabbed a rifle and joined Poe, who blasted open the shuttle’s canopy. “Don’t shoot!” cried someone in the shuttle. “It’s us!”
Finn and Rose emerged from the shattered cockpit.
“Finn!” Poe shouted. “You’re not dead! Where’s my droid?”
Leia lowered her rifle while Poe dropped his and hurried over to his friends. To his delight, BB-8 zoomed down the shuttle’s boarding ramp, beeping excitedly. Their reunion was a rare moment of happiness that Leia would’ve loved to prolong, if there weren’t other life-and-death factors involved.
They had to prepare for war. And she had a message to send.
A SUCCESSFUL escape from a disintegrating Mega-Destroyer and a squadron of TIE fighters would normally be cause to celebrate. But not now. As Finn squinted through the periscope for a glimpse outside the shield door, he knew he had fled one battle zone only to enter another.
First Order gunships and troop transports were landing by the dozens on the salt flats outside. Gorilla walkers unfolded from their moorings on the sides of gunships, each step causing the ground to quake. Hovertanks floated down cargo ramps. What worried Finn the most was the appearance of a gargantuan superlaser barrel on rotating treads.
“A battering ram cannon,” he told Rose and Poe, who stood around him. “It’ll crack this door open like an egg.”
Rose looked around the mine’s entry chamber. Some of the crystal foxes had returned to watch them with tiny red eyes. “There has to be a back way out of here, right?”
BB-8 zipped up to them, with C-3PO doing his best to keep up. “Beebee-Ate has analyzed the mine schematics. This is the only way in or out, I’m afraid,” the droid said.
Finn tried to game out the situation. They were safe from orbital bombardment at the present, since the fort’s deflector shield still worked. General Organa had also transmitted her distress message to potential allies, but it would take time for them to respond and send reinforcements.
The walls shook. The army outside was advancing. Finn knew the band of Resistance soldiers who manned the fort’s outer trenches would put up a good fight, but they didn’t have the numbers or firepower to repel the attackers. Once those defenses were sufficiently weakened, the cannon would be charged and fired. The seismic force of its blast would blow a hole through the shield door, and then stormtroopers would enter and slaughter them all.
Finn saw only one way they could buy time for potential reinforcements. “We have to take out that cannon.”
Rey saw stars. And lights. And more stars.
But the stars in the viewport began to fade away, as did the lights on the console. Everything was fading—even the sound of her breathing—into a quiet, dark nothingness.
Stay here. I’ll come back for you, sweetheart. I promise.
Jarred by the voice, she sat bolt upright in the cockpit of Snoke’s private shuttle. Of course there was no one else in the ship. Those words were just an echo in her mind. Something she had repeated to herself to stay alive on Jakku. A truth about herself with which she had reconciled.
Those words had just saved her, drawing her from what could have been a deadly slumber.
All the cells in Rey’s body seemed to pulse in pain. The fight with Snoke and Ben had taken everything she had. When Ben had fallen, she’d managed to retrieve the pieces of Luke’s lightsaber and drag herself onto Snoke’s shuttle. She had worked up just enough energy to set the autopilot and send a message to R2-D2 before crashing into the pilot’s chair.
Alert now, Rey saw the shuttle had navigated through the smash-up of Destroyers. Yet instead of an open starfield, another starship filled the viewport, one familiar to Rey.
The Millennium Falcon.
The console buzzed from an incoming signal. Rey opened a channel. Chewbacca’s arfs broke through the subspace static. Was she okay?
Rey slipped out of the chair. “I’m alive, if that counts for something. But I’m going to need a medpac.”
A tube extended from the Falcon and docked with the shuttle. Rey staggered through it onto the freighter. R2-D2 retracted the tube and closed the hatch.
Rey opened a first-aid locker and promptly jumped back. Four porgs tumbled out. They landed on top of each other, then righted themselves and waddled to another clutch. Rey looked around and noticed the stumpy avians were everywhere. They peeked out of the ventilation ducks, nibbled on coolant casings, and even hung upside down from the ceiling conduits. The Millennium Falcon had become a circus of porgs!
Over their cooing and chirping, she heard R2-D2 beeping uncontrollably.
“What’d you say?” she said.
The droid repeated the beeps at a volume that made Rey wince. But she understood the binary. While scanning the emergency bands, R2-D2 had picked up a distress call from General Organa.
The Resistance had taken refuge on a nearby planet. And they were at death’s door. If they didn’t get help soon, the First Order would wipe them out for good.
Forgetting about her pain, Rey hopped over porgs and ran to the cockpit. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she never saw Finn or her friends again.
Alone on the ledge of her chute, Rose buckled herself in the skimmer. It was a dangerous-looking contraption, more akin to a podracer than a speeder, designed to slalom across flat surfaces with a long mono-ski. From each side of an open cockpit spread a delicate wing that ended in repulsor boosters. Rose had discovered a number of skimmers in the fort’s vehicle garage, and though most of them had been gutted for tech, some were in decent enough shape to operate. At the very least, they would give the team the necessary speed to execute Finn’s plan to take out the battering ram cannon.
Once settled in the skimmer’s seat, Rose slid the goggles over her eyes. The batteries for the internal scopes had long since died, but the tinted lenses would prevent her from being blinded by Crait’s stark white surface.
She took a breath, then leapt into the chute.
The skimmer whipped down the tube, gathering speed. Rose revolved on the seat’s gimbal, her body spinning with the curves. She felt both giddy and dizzy all at once. Paige would have loved this.
The chute opened ahead and she shot out of a hole in the shield door, soaring high in the air. Finn, Poe, C’ai Threnalli, and nine other pilots and soldiers ejected from adjacent tubes on their own skimmers. They all dropped toward the ground as a pack, engaging their mono-skis. When she noticed that Finn hadn’t engaged his, Rose cued him over the comm. He seemed dazed by the plunge, yet right before touching down, he pressed the button and deployed his mono-ski.
The thirteen skimmers landed in a spume of red as the mono-skis dug up crystals that lay beneath the salt. Scarlet clouds of crystal dust trailed them like exhaust fumes as they shot across the surface. Rose brought her skimmer alongside both Finn and Poe, with the others fanning out around them.
A panel popped loose on Poe’s skimmer. He pounded it down, venting his frustration over the comm. “I don’t like these rust buckets and I don’t like our odds. Keep it tight and don’t get pulled too close till they roll that cannon out front.”
The skimmers darted past the rebel fort’s trenches, which were manned by what remained of the Resistance army. TIE fighters crisscrossed above the skimmers while higher in the sky a black folded-wing shuttle circled like a menacing predator. Rose could only guess it contained someone of importance to the First Order.
“Ground forces, lay down some fire!” Poe radioed to the trenches.
The decrepit turbolaser towers and rusted artillery emplacements unloaded on the First Order’s advancing front line. The armor on the walkers and tanks absorbed most of the shots, but the barrage provided cover fire for the skimmers to approach.
Rose draped her necklace over the skimmer’s controls. It reminded her of why she was fighting—and what was worth dying for. If she could have an ounce of her sister’s courage, perhaps she could make an impact.
Her courage was tested immediately. TIEs scr
eamed over them, raining lasers. One of the skimmers fell away in a smear of red.
At Poe’s command, the skimmers dispersed and the TIEs broke formation to follow. Rose skated across the flats, banking to the sides as a TIE chased her. The starfighter’s guns gouged dark red cracks in the ground.
Rose possessed none of her sister’s skill in gunnery, and her potshots went nowhere. Poe and the trench batteries had better luck, and several TIEs went down in flames, including the one chasing her. Yet those losses didn’t put much of a dent in the enemy squadron.
“We can’t match this firepower!” Threnalli yelled over the comm.
“We’ve gotta hold them till they pull out the cannon!” Poe snapped back.
More skimmers met their end, picked off by TIEs in succession. Their crashes gashed the ground as if the land itself bled. Worse yet, the defensive fire from the turbolaser batteries had all but stopped. TIEs swarmed over the trenches, spitting death at the Resistance soldiers and knocking out artillery.
The battle was turning into a massacre.
Rose looked at her medallion. She remembered her homeworld of Otomok, her friends in the Resistance, her sister. They were worth fighting for and they were also worth dying for.
She gripped her control sticks and rocketed toward the front lines.
“Rose! Behind you!” Finn cried out.
She glanced back as a trio of TIEs dove at her skimmer. Their laser cannons glowed, about to be triggered. It was over for her.
She flinched as all three TIEs were blasted from behind.
A Corellian freighter, which looked as banged-up as anything else from the fort, soared through the fiery wreckage. Rose gaped at the ship, barely keeping control of her skimmer. Had she just been saved by the Millennium Falcon?
“Yeah!” Finn whooped.
The Falcon looped around and went right back at the TIEs, blowing the wings and cockpits off two more. Like a school of gutterguppies, the TIEs veered away from the skimmers in pursuit of the freighter.
Rose smiled and closed ranks with the other skimmers.
“She drew them all off!” Poe said over the comm. “All of them!”
The Falcon made an abrupt drop into a crevice, a move most of the TIEs failed in spectacular fashion. Some smashed into the surface, others into the sides of the crevice, and all went up in flames.
“Oh, they hate that ship.” Finn’s voice crackled over the comm.
Rose refocused her attention on the front lines, which started to open. “There it is,” she said, feeling the ground rumble.
Two multi-legged tug walkers plodded forward, yoked to the battering ram cannon. Plated in dense armor, the mammoth siege gun that was dragged forward seemed even more imposing than Finn had described—perhaps fifty meters tall, nearly half the height of the shield door.
“Our only shot is right down the throat,” Finn said.
Rose studied the cannon. Its grooved head began to warm up, pulsing with the energy of its superlaser. To aim a shot down the giant barrel, they’d have to fly straight up to the cannon, which was going to be nearly impossible with the First Order forces protecting it.
Poe led the way. “Hold tight!”
The turbolaser towers that had outlasted the TIEs renewed the assault. The walkers and hovertanks responded in kind, peppering the trenches with their guns. But when the black command shuttle dropped lower and started targeting the skimmers, the rest of the First Order’s forces did the same, concentrating their fire.
Rose managed to evade the lasers, but the skimmer beside hers didn’t. After the cloud from its crash cleared, Rose saw that the battering ram cannon held a steady, deadly glow.
“All craft pull away!” Poe said. “The gun’s charged. It’s a suicide run!”
Rose inverted her skimmer, eluding another blast, and steered clear of the lasers, following Poe and the others back to the trenches. But Finn kept speeding toward the cannon. “I’m almost there!” he said over the comm.
“Retreat—that’s an order!” Poe barked. “To the trenches!”
Finn wasn’t listening. He sideslipped his skimmer through the cannon fire, dusting up more crystalline clouds. Though he claimed to be a terrible pilot, the ex-stormtrooper’s deft maneuvering was nothing short of astounding.
Finn’s flying was inspired.
But Rose knew that an errant blaster bolt was all it would take to cause her friend to crash and burn. “Finn, it’s too late!” she screamed into her headset. “Don’t do this!”
“I won’t let them win, Rose,” Finn said.
“No! Finn, listen—”
His comm signature crackled off and he accelerated toward the cannon. Its barrel shone through the lasers, on the cusp of firing. The tremendous heat it generated melted the salt around it, stirring a crimson haze around its treads. With the other skimmers no longer a threat, all the walkers and tanks were targeting Finn. And Rose knew he’d never get through that last stretch alive.
She glanced at her medallion dangling from the controls. If there was anyone in the universe worth fighting for—anyone worth dying for—it was someone like Finn.
Rose tacked away from Poe and rocketed toward her friend.
Enemy fire pummeled Finn’s skimmer, blowing off pieces. Flames licked his cockpit. Somehow his craft continued toward the cannon barrel—until Rose crashed into him from behind.
She hit his boosters, causing his skimmer to bank and roll off its mono-ski. One of his wings bashed into the ground and his cockpit skidded across the salt in a spray of red.
The shot cost Rose control of her craft. She couldn’t see in the cloud of dust, and her skimmer spun on its mono-ski. There was a screech of metal, then her dashboard crumpled and her ribs crunched against the crash buckle.
When she came to her senses, Finn held her in his arms. She realized she was hurt, yet she couldn’t feel any pain. The wreckage of their skimmers smoldered around them.
Tears rimmed Finn’s eyes. “Why did you stop me?”
She found the air to speak. “Saved you, dummy,” she said, coughing. “That’s how we’re going to win. Not fighting what we hate, but saving what we love.”
The cannon’s blast shook the world. Rose didn’t need to see the impact to know the shield door wouldn’t hold.
Nor could she hold back her feelings.
Lifting her head, she kissed Finn.
LEIA had never been so dismayed to see the sun. The light that streamed through the cracked shield door boded only doom. Soon stormtroopers would flood into the fort by the thousands, and there wouldn’t be any reinforcements to save them. No one had replied to her distress signal.
The First Order had won.
“We fought to the end,” Leia told those assembled in the fort’s small command center. “But the galaxy has lost its hope. The spark is out.”
Faces fell, hers with them. Leia’s younger self, that fierce princess, would have berated her for giving such a speech. But she was older now, wiser, not blinded by the passions of youth. And she was tired. The relentlessness of war had worn her down. It seemed like no matter what she did, anything she ever loved the galaxy saw fit to take away. She had fought the good fight, yes, but in the end it hadn’t been enough.
Perhaps that was the ultimate lesson of life. To love is to lose.
Footsteps echoed in the cavern. Were the stormtroopers here so soon? She lifted her head.
A man in tattered black robes stood before her.
Leia blinked a couple of times, fearing she was hallucinating. But if she was, it was a mass hallucination, because the Resistance officers in the command center shared her surprise. The man pulled back his hood, revealing the lined, bearded face of her twin.
“Luke…” she breathed.
“Master Luke!” C-3PO’s excitement nearly fried his vocabulator.
Luke acknowledged the droid with a nod and walked to his sister. He sat down across from her.
“I know what you’re gonna say,” Leia said wi
th a slight smile. “I changed my hair.”
“It looks nice that way,” he said with a smile of his own.
She didn’t comment on his hair. It was shaggy and needed a scrub. But that had little bearing in the grand scheme of things.
“Leia…I’m sorry.”
There had been times over the years when Leia wanted to lash out at him for disappearing when she—and the galaxy—needed him most. But she felt none of that anger now, and she was too exhausted to scold him. Just seeing her brother one last time was enough.
“I know,” she said. “I know you are. I’m just glad you’re here, at the end.”
They had entered life together as twins, and now, as twins, they would leave it. Yet the fact that he had rejoined Leia after so long stirred some embers inside her.
“This is the end…isn’t it?” she asked.
Luke’s eyes had a strange glint. “I came to face him, Leia. And I can’t save him.”
“I held out hope for so long.” Leia shook her head. “My son is gone.”
The glint in Luke’s eyes seemed even stranger. “No one’s ever really gone,” he said.
That was the old Luke talking, the Luke she’d once known who could discern even the dimmest light in the darkest of hearts. He had found a way to redeem a man she never could—their father. If Luke couldn’t save Ben, maybe he believed someone else could.
Leia placed her hand on top of his and her weariness faded away. When at last Luke withdrew his hand, she held in hers a pair of chance cubes—Han’s dice, which he’d hung in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. Luke must have taken them from the Falcon, meaning he must have met Rey. Might he have taught her something? Could the girl from Jakku somehow help them all—even Ben?
Leia smiled. Maybe the Resistance—and the galaxy—still had a chance.
In the cockpit of his command shuttle, Kylo Ren watched the First Order’s army march across the salt flats to the rebel fort. The battering ram cannon had punched through the shield door, where a sunbeam shone on the hole like a celestial spotlight.
Everything had fallen in place. He had destroyed his odious master, and now he would do the same to the vile Resistance.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi Page 13
