Star Wars: Before the Awakening

by Greg Rucka

  For the first time, Poe saw the map and thought it was lying.

  “I don’t blame myself,” Poe said. He looked at Major Deso pointedly. “I’m blaming the First Order.”

  “Commander.” Deso sighed. “We are not having this discussion again.”

  “This isn’t another isolated incident, Lonno. I’m seeing the same intelligence reports that you are.”

  “The Senate Intelligence Committee has reviewed the reports and has found them inconclusive, at best grossly overstated, Poe. This is a non-issue. It’s a big galaxy. The First Order is a remnant born of a war thirty years gone. Yes, they persist, yes, they continue, but by all accounts they do so barely. They are, at best, an ill-organized, poorly equipped, and badly funded group of loyalists who use propaganda and fear to inflate their strength and their importance.”

  “They’re flying state-of-the-art TIEs, they’re using commando boarding parties and latest-generation attack shuttles in clear violation of the Galactic Concordance.” Poe leaned forward, pressing his index finger into the table. Deso raised an eyebrow, looking at the offending digit, then at Poe. Poe went on. “They’re training troops and pilots. We interrupted a military operation, Lonno, not some snatch and grab. They wanted the Yissira Zyde and they got it. They wanted it badly enough they paid for it with eight TIEs, those pilots, and however many people were aboard the shuttle that Muran and Iolo shot down. That’s not a poorly organized force. That’s not a poorly motivated force. That’s a real threat.”

  “An emerging threat, then, Commander Dameron.”

  Poe straightened, returning his hand to his side. “Give it to the Resistance.”

  Deso scowled, as if Poe had just offered him a particularly bitter piece of fruit. “Don’t be absurd. The Resistance is as overstated as the First Order.”

  “They’re at least doing something about them!”

  “Rumored to be doing something about them,” Deso said.

  “We have to act.”

  Major Deso cleared his throat. “I’ll pass along your concerns to Command.”

  “That’s not enough. We need to know what the Yissira Zyde was hauling. We need to know why they took it and, more importantly, where. I’d like permission to take the Rapiers out, try to track the trajectory, see if we can’t find the freighter.”

  “Denied.”

  “There are questions—”

  “I said denied, Commander. Rapier is assigned Mirrin sector patrol, that’s all. Your orders are to continue as before. Nothing more, and nothing less.” Deso cocked his head as if trying to watch the words enter Poe’s ears. “Am I clear?”

  Poe tried again. “It’s going to happen again, you realize that, don’t you?”

  “If it does, it’ll be dealt with then.”

  “So we do nothing? That’s the solution? An emerging threat, and we do nothing?”

  “That is correct.”

  “That is insane,” Poe said.

  Deso opened his mouth, then thought better of what he was about to say. He sighed and went around the table to stand by Poe’s side. When he spoke next, his tone was much more subdued. “I don’t like it, either, but this is the order from Republic Command, do you understand? We don’t engage the First Order, we don’t provoke the First Order. I don’t like it any more than you do, but those are orders, Commander. You break them, you’ll be up on charges. You’ll lose your commission.”

  “It’s going to happen again,” Poe repeated.

  “Then we’ll respond when the time comes.”

  Poe shook his head. That wasn’t what he’d meant. He was thinking of his father.

  Thinking of what had made his father afraid that day fixing the fence on Yavin 4.

  His X-wing stood unattended in the hangar bay, parked beside Rapier Two’s and Rapier Three’s. The space for Rapier Four’s was painfully empty, just an oblong oil stain on the floor where a coolant leak had stained the permacrete.

  Poe stared at the empty space for several seconds before turning his attention to his own fighter, walking around it slowly, taking his time. BB-8 rolled along behind him, chirping to himself. Beneath the hangar lights, the paint job looked tarnished, in need of a touch-up. The black base over the majority of the fuselage was weathered, scraped by micrometeorite impacts and atmospheric burns, washed out to almost a deep gray. The flight markings, in orange, were similarly distressed. He set a hand against the side of the X-wing’s nose, felt the metal of the hull cool and solid beneath his palm. The ship had made it through combat without a fleck of damage, as solid and ready and sure as ever.

  He’d seen his mother doing the same thing, he remembered. Long after she’d given up the flight stick, her A-wing parked between the storage units on the ranch, she’d still walk around that fighter, occasionally touching the ship here or there, as if to reassure it, or to reassure herself. Remembering what she had done to stop the Empire, maybe. Remembering what she had been willing to sacrifice.

  “We finishing this?” Karé’s voice carried through the near-empty hangar.

  Poe turned and saw her standing with Iolo, just inside the doors from the pilot’s prep room. Both were wearing their flight suits, their helmets in hand. Their respective astromechs waited patiently at their sides, an old R4 unit that Karé had trusted her life to for as long as Poe had known her and an R5 model that Iolo had only acquired in the last six weeks.

  Poe shook his head.

  “They took that freighter somewhere, Commander.” Iolo looked down at his R5 unit and nudged it with the toe of his boot. The droid rolled a couple of centimeters, then rolled back, emitting a sound that Poe took for the binary equivalent of a confirmation. They were in this together. Iolo looked at him with his oddly colored eyes. He was Keshian, in almost all appearances identical to human, but for whatever reason of nature his people perceived through a broader visual spectrum, from the ultraviolet into the infrared. It made him deadly in a dogfight, able to pick out ships or objects that Poe couldn’t see with his naked eyes.

  Karé was human, her hair pleated and bound in an elaborate series of braids. Another colonist, like Poe, she was what was referred to as a “victory kid,” one of the hundreds of millions—if not billions—of sentients who had been conceived in response to the Empire’s fall. Poe wondered sometimes how many beings had chosen not to have children while Palpatine lived, how many had thought bringing a child into the Emperor’s galaxy would be not a blessing but a curse.

  “Figure we need to find out where,” Karé said. “We owe it to Muran, right?”

  “No go,” Poe said. “By Major Deso’s order.”

  “What?” Iolo said.

  Karé turned. “Let’s just see about that.”

  “Karé, don’t,” Poe said. “It’s not his call. It’s coming down from on high.”

  She faced him again, suspicious. “‘On high’ who?”

  “He won’t say, other than Command. It could be Senate level. We go up on anything other than a routine patrol, we’re all looking at charges.”

  Iolo’s mouth tightened, corners edging down in a frown. He glanced at Karé, then back to Poe.

  “So what’re we doing, Poe? We’re just sitting on our hands?”

  “No,” Poe said. “We’re going on patrol.”

  He waited until they were out of Mirrin Prime and beyond the edge of the system before he keyed his comm.

  “Rapier Two, Rapier Three,” he said. “Comlink your astromechs to Rapier One and upload all telemetry from the Suraz engagement to Beebee-Ate, please.”

  He heard Karé laugh softly. “Oh, you are slick, Poe.”

  Iolo needed a second longer, then said, “We’re doing this?”

  “I’m doing this,” Poe said. “Not going to let you both flush your careers on a disobedience charge. If someone is going to take a fall for this, let it be me. I’m not planning to be gone long, anyway. This is just recon. Everything goes well, I’ll be back before Deso knows we ever split up.”

  BB-8
beeped, then launched into a long song of chirps and beeps.

  “Your droid sounds happy,” Karé said.

  “He’s got a trajectory on the Yissira Zyde’s hyperspace jump.” Poe checked the map and frowned. There was nothing on the jump path that made sense to him, nothing habitable or even remotely so. It was more than possible that the First Order troops who had stolen the freighter had plotted multiple jumps, he realized, altering their direction and flight path, conceivably even doubling back on it. “This may be a wild mynock hunt.”

  “But it may not be,” Iolo said.

  “Don’t sound so somber, Rapier Three.”

  “We’re already down one good pilot,” Iolo said. “And I don’t think Karé is particularly looking for a field promotion to Rapier One.”

  “Copy that,” Karé agreed. “Be smart, Poe, and hurry back, okay?”

  Poe guided the X-wing out of formation as BB-8 continued to plot the coordinates for the hyperspace jump. “You know it.”

  “Hey, Rapier One?”

  “Go ahead, Rapier Two.”

  “May the Force be with you.”

  Poe grinned, and then realspace vanished and he was in the tunnel.

  The Yissira Zyde was an NK-Witell-class freighter, BB-8 informed Poe. Built by Sanhar-Witell, the ship required a minimum crew of two, but had accommodations for a total of twelve passengers. Properly configured, the ship could haul seventy-five metric tons of cargo, though it more commonly maxed out at fifty metric tons. Faster-than-light travel was achieved through the use of the Sanhar model 67 hyperdrive, rated at class three, with sublight travel provided by the venerable Hoersch-Kessel model alpha. The class, BB-8 went on to tell him, entered common service some seventeen years before, and at present there were estimated to be 137,417 still in use throughout the trade lanes that ran from—

  “Thank you, Beebee-Ate, think I’ve got it,” Poe said.

  The droid beeped, unperturbed. Without Poe’s asking, a new flow of data much more pertinent to his interests scrolled across the console. The Yissira Zyde’s last stop prior to the hijacking had been at the commerce center on Mennar-Daye, where it had been subjected to a thorough screening by Republic authorities before taking on new cargo. That cargo consisted of forty-six high-capacity charging arrays, the kind used for energy discharge augmentation and easily adaptable to military use in, say, shipboard turbolasers. The ship’s next port of call would have been in the corporate sector, and presumably the transaction was aboveboard, though Poe wondered if the whole thing hadn’t been a setup by the First Order from the start. Comparing the flight range of the NK-Witell class and further tracking back the Yissira Zyde’s logged itinerary, BB-8 was able to estimate its remaining fuel at the time of the First Order hijacking. This produced a maximum range on its hyperspace route, provided—of course, that the freighter hadn’t dropped back into realspace to alter direction, in which case…

  “In which case we’re shot, yes, I get it.”

  Given all this, BB-8 told Poe, there were seven possible systems where the freighter could have exited hyperspace—again presuming direct line of travel—before exhausting its fuel supply. The X-wing itself had enough range to hit five of these destinations before reaching the point of no return.

  “Let’s do them in order,” Poe told BB-8.

  It was the third stop, and Poe almost skipped it, because there was quite literally nothing of interest on the galactic charts for its position. But if his mother had taught him to fly and to love it, his father had taught him that when you commit to doing something, you commit to going all the way or don’t do it at all, and so Poe brought them snapping back into realspace in a system so desolate the scouts who’d discovered it hadn’t bothered to even give it a name, just an alphanumeric designation: OR-Kappa-2722.

  The first thing that happened when the stars returned and the X-wing settled back into proper space-time was that BB-8 screamed. It was a surprising noise, and it made Poe jump in his seat. It wasn’t a scream of pain—Poe had heard those before, found the death cry of an astromech particularly heartrending—and it wasn’t the gleeful, rapid-fire babble of droid triumph spoken in binary. It was a sound of shock, as if BB-8 had turned a corner expecting to find an empty room and had, instead, run into a rancor den.

  Which, Poe reasoned, wasn’t actually a bad analogy for where they now found themselves.

  “Well, at least it’s not the whole fleet,” he heard himself say. It had sounded funnier in his head.

  There were—and this was on the basis of what he could see, though later he was pleased that the flight computer had almost entirely agreed with his initial assessment—three Star Destroyers, one of them Imperial class; four frigates, two of them venerable Lancer class; two Maxima-A heavy cruisers; and one Dissident-class light cruiser. This did not include the array of smaller vessels that seemed to swarm around the fleet, everything from unmanned repair drones and droids to what, at first count, Poe took to be seventy-plus TIE fighters.

  BB-8 squeaked a question.

  “Not yet,” Poe said. “Can you find the Yissira Zyde? Do you see it?”

  BB-8 beeped and whimpered.

  “Well, we’ve come all this way. I think we ought to leave with something.”

  A mournful whine. Another question, just a slight, soft chirp.

  Ahead of them, somewhere between the nearest Star Destroyer and the first of the heavy cruisers, roughly two dozen TIE fighters wheeled around at once. There was something oddly beautiful in the maneuver, the sheer number of fighters swinging to their new heading together. Poe remembered watching flocks of whisper birds, the way they would bank and swoop in silent unison over the jungle on Yavin 4.

  “Yes, Beebee-Ate,” Poe said. “I think they’ve seen us.”

  The one thing they had going for them, at least at the beginning, was the element of surprise. Not the surprise of an X-wing appearing in the middle of a First Order staging point—though Poe did take a certain amount of pleasure from the thought of the chaos his arrival must’ve caused on the many and varied bridges of the vessels before him—but rather the surprise of what he and BB-8 did next.

  They charged.

  BB-8 whirred.

  “Yeah, I think boosting the front deflectors is a good idea, too,” Poe told him. “And power down the weapons, divert to engines.”

  BB-8 beeped, agreeing that this was a very good idea given a very bad situation.

  “Just until we find it,” Poe said. “Just until we have proof.”

  Then Commander Poe Dameron didn’t have much more to say, because he was too busy trying to keep them both alive. He corkscrewed right off the bat, deploying his S-foils as he did before breaking hard to starboard and then, almost immediately, looping into a tight Corellian end-over that brought him nose first into the midst of the onrushing TIEs. They scattered to his sides, twisting in their flight to come around on his tail, and several opened fire.

  It was a mistake on their part. They’d been overzealous coming after him, smelling blood in the water, eager to feast on the lone X-wing. But there were too many TIEs in pursuit, and the first salvo of shots proved the point as two of the TIEs were clipped by friendly fire, sending them spinning in out-of-control arcs, while another three or four—it was hard for Poe to keep track and stay alive at the same time—failed to avoid collisions. The explosions flared behind him as he jinked again, pulling up sharply into a rapid displacement roll that brought him in range of the nearest of the frigates. The enemy ship opened fire at once, and the TIEs at Poe’s back again scattered, desperate to avoid being hit by their own allied vessel. The X-wing rocked, then dipped abruptly as a blast glanced off the forward deflectors, but the shields dropped out of green only for a second, and Poe still had control.

  “Tell me you see it, Beebee-Ate,” Poe muttered. The droid didn’t answer. Now the X-wing was so close to the frigate that Poe could swear he was seeing stormtroopers and First Order officers staring at him through the portholes as he ra
ced past. The firing from the frigate stopped. Someone on a command deck somewhere had wisely ordered the capital ships to keep their guns silent for fear of tearing one another to pieces.

  Poe brought the X-wing through a wingover, crossed the ventral axis of the frigate, and without needing to ask for it felt as much as saw BB-8 redistributing the fighter’s power, shield balanced again and a new rush to the engines. The fighter rolled, corrected, and began climbing with its nose to the belly of one of the Star Destroyers.

  BB-8 whistled a warning.

  “Yes, I know they have tractor beams,” Poe said. “Have you found it?”

  There was a pause, long enough for Poe to realize that the TIEs were once more closing in, and closing in quickly if somewhat more judiciously. Laser cannon fire burned through space around him, buffeting the X-wing.

  From behind him, BB-8 emitted a song of triumph, and Poe glanced to the display for a fraction of a second, long enough to see the word transponder being translated from the droid’s binary-speak.

  “Outstanding,” Poe said. “Get us a jump out of here!”

  Two of the TIEs had come in, flanking his X-wing, preparing to sandwich him, and now he saw another three locking on to his tail, covering the angles of his turn. He was running out of options and time.

  “Hurrying would be really good, Beebee-Ate.”

  The droid burbled and then advised he change heading to one-zero mark two.

  “Hold on,” Poe said, checking his flanks. The TIEs on his tail were firing, almost herding him. He had one maneuver left that he could think of, one his mother had told him she’d seen one other pilot do, only once, and that in atmosphere. A L’ullo Stand, she’d called it. Doing it in a vacuum, in zero gravity, Poe had no idea if it would work.