by Jason Fry
“That’s the Force.”
“Really?” Rey asked. She couldn’t help feeling pleased with herself—after all, she’d only been reaching out for a few seconds at most.
“Wow, it must be really strong with you.”
Rey was wondering why her early breakthrough amused Luke when pain flared in her outstretched hand. She yelped, eyes snapping open, and realized Luke had whipped her hand with the reed—just as he’d been tickling her with it earlier.
Hoping her face wasn’t red, she put one hand over her heart.
“You meant reach out like…Okay. Got it. I’ll try again.”
She closed her eyes and felt Luke take her hands with his rough, calloused ones, directing them to the rock on either side of her.
“Breathe,” he said. “Just breathe. Now reach out with your feelings. What do you see?”
The image came to her almost immediately, and was reassuringly familiar: the island, seen as if she were one of the seabirds overhead, just as it had looked in her dreams back on Jakku.
But almost immediately, there was more. The images were vivid, almost hallucinatory, but later she couldn’t be sure if she’d seen them in her mind’s eye or somehow actually experienced them as her awareness expanded out from her body to encompass the island and the sea around it.
Her first impression was life—life all around her. She could sense herself, and the Caretakers pottering about near the huts, but there was so much more than that. She felt the presence of flowers and grasses and shrubs. Birds and insects and fish, and creatures too tiny for the eye to see. Her awareness of all of it seemed to crowd her senses, plunging her into something so deep and intense that for a moment she thought she might drown in it, only to realize that was impossible, because she was a part of that life.
But there was death, too—and decay. Dead flesh and vegetable matter, sinking into soil that hid bones and dry sticks from bygone seasons of the island. She shrank from this new awareness, but sensed almost immediately that there was nothing to fear. From the death and decay sprang new life, nourished by what had come before.
She could feel the warmth of the suns—not just on her face but on the rocks and the surface of the ceaseless tumble of the water. And cold, too, which surrounded the dark places where the roots of the island and the seafloor were revealed as one and the same. There was peace—mother porgs with their eggs, sheltered and safe in warm hollows—but also violence that left behind broken nests and shattered shells.
And all that her senses showed her had been but a moment. That moment was but one of trillions, part of a never-ending cycle that had begun eons before she was born and would go on for eons after she was dead. And it was itself part of something vastly larger, so enormous that her mind couldn’t grasp it, an immensity even the stars were but the tiniest portion of.
Rey, her eyes still closed, tried to tell Luke what she had experienced, frustrated that her words were so small and inadequate.
“And between it all?” she heard him ask.
“A balance—an energy,” she said, wanting to laugh. “A Force.”
“And inside you?”
“Inside me, that same Force.”
She opened her eyes and was faintly surprised to find Luke unchanged—a weather-beaten, gray-bearded man in workaday clothes designed for sun and salt and wind.
“And this is the lesson—that Force does not belong to the Jedi,” Luke said. “It’s so much bigger. To say that if the Jedi die the light dies is vanity. Can you feel that? Can you understand that?”
She could. But a new presence was calling to her awakened senses.
“There’s something here,” she said. “Right here. A powerful light—blinding.”
“This is the first Jedi temple,” Luke said. “A concentration of light.”
Rey wondered how they’d found it so long ago, those first Jedi explorers, and thought she knew. They’d followed a whisper in the Force, plunging into the trackless churn of the galaxy’s stars and trusting the Force to find pathways through them. She tried to imagine the bravery and faith they’d needed to do that.
“But there’s something else,” she said, realizing. “Beneath the island. A place—a dark place.”
She could see it now, in her mind’s eye. Rocky flats by the sea, ominous and cold. With a dark hole in the rock…
“Balance,” Luke said, and there was a twinge of concern in his voice. “Powerful light, powerful darkness.”
“It’s cold. It’s calling me.”
The ledge trembled beneath her, and dust and rocks fell from the cliffs around them.
“Resist it,” Luke urged her. “Rey, fight it!”
Dimly, Rey heard his voice calling her name. But it faded away to nothing, until all Rey could hear was the roaring of water. She was standing on the cold, rocky shore from her vision, moving as if hypnotized toward a black hole before her—the source of that roar. The sound built, reaching a crescendo as water shot out of the rock.
With a start, Rey found herself on the ledge. Luke was drawing back his hand. He had slapped her. She gasped for breath, feeling like she’d been dragged out of deep water.
Her face was wet. At first she thought it was her imagination, but her hair was dripping, and she could taste salt on her tongue.
The Jedi Master’s eyes were wary—and fixed on her.
“That place can show me something,” Rey managed to explain. “It was trying to.”
“You went straight to the dark,” Luke said. “It offered you something you needed and you didn’t even try to stop yourself.”
He turned his back on her, but she reached out a shaky hand to stop him. Because she had realized something else—something she knew immediately that Luke would have wanted to keep from her.
“I saw everything,” she said. “The island, and past it I felt the stars singing. I thought my heart would explode. But I didn’t see you. Nothing from you. No light, no dark. You’ve closed yourself off from the Force.”
Luke stared at her, his face pale and drawn.
“I’ve seen this raw strength only once before, in Ben Solo,” he said. “It didn’t scare me enough then. It does now.”
Rey shrank back from what she saw in his gaze, and was relieved when Luke walked away from her, into the darkness of the ancient temple.
From his vantage point on the periphery of the Raddus’s secondary bridge, Poe kept a wary eye on Holdo and suppressed the urge to find a reason to march back down to the hangar where he’d left Rose and Finn.
All was ready, or should be. He had friends all over the ship, many of whom shared his unease about their new commander. It had been trivial to authorize a flight in a light shuttle, delete that flight from the hourly schedule, and override the resulting error message. Every logistics tech with a rudimentary sense of self-preservation had a backdoor passcode or two in case the system got finicky and locked down normal operations.
Poe shifted from foot to foot. He’d have felt better if he were behind the stick, of course, but Rose and Finn knew how to fly. Well, okay, Finn didn’t. But Rose was rated for a light shuttle. Heck, even C-3PO could probably handle a light shuttle.
Besides, if something had gone truly wrong, BB-8 would tell him. Though come to think of it, Poe wasn’t sure where BB-8 had gotten to.
Come on, you guys. Get that bird off the deck before the Rancor Lady calls an inspection or something.
Still, when the alert finally sounded on an operations monitor’s console, Poe nearly jumped through the viewport.
“What was that?” Holdo demanded, looking up.
“Nothing, Admiral,” Connix said. “Passing debris.”
Holdo, satisfied, returned to her work. Connix looked up and shared a conspiratorial nod with Poe. The shuttle had launched.
“The smaller ships will run out of
fuel first,” Holdo said. “We need to begin evacuating their crews to the flagship. Staring with the medical frigate.”
Poe surveyed the bridge. Connix wasn’t the only one who had her doubts. He saw rigid backs, and eyes fixed on monitors. It was a commander’s job to sense that, to read her bridge and her people. Holdo either couldn’t or wouldn’t.
And it made Poe angry. Leia had built the Resistance, despite the New Republic’s apathy and First Order sabotage and a chronic lack of credits, equipment, and personnel. And now Holdo—someone Leia had trusted—seemed determined to undo all her work.
“So we abandon the Anodyne,” Poe said. “What changes after that, Admiral? What happens when there are no ships left to abandon?”
Holdo fixed Poe with her gaze.
“You want a daring plan,” she said. “Dashing hero, derring-do, single-handed day-saving. That’s what you want?”
“I just want to know the plan,” Poe said helplessly. “I think we all do.”
“And at the appropriate time, you will,” Holdo said. “But just so we’re clear: There will be no idiot heroics, daring plans, or showy bombing runs on my watch.”
Poe’s frustrations boiled over. “You’re going to destroy everything Leia has built.”
“Captain Dameron. If you’re here to serve a princess, I’ll assign you to bedpan duty,” Holdo replied. “If you’re here to serve the Resistance, follow my orders. Somebody has to save this fleet from its heroes.”
And with that she turned back to her monitor, dismissing him. Poe, stunned, looked around the auxiliary bridge and found no other officer would meet his gaze.
* * *
—
Rose and Finn’s shuttle emerged from hyperspace above the desert planet of Cantonica, an almost featureless globe broken by a single blue sea that reminded Rose unsettlingly of an eye, staring into the void.
“So this place is fancy?” Finn asked. “Doesn’t look fancy. Looks beige.”
“The beige part doesn’t matter—nobody lives there,” said Rose, wishing she could concentrate on her flying and not his fretting. “The town’s by the blue part.”
“You know this town, Canto Bight?”
“From stories,” she said. “It’s a terrible place filled with the vilest people in the galaxy.”
Paige probably would have said that was unfair—that Rose shouldn’t begrudge people a little fun. But the idea of wearing fancy clothes and gambling while the galaxy burned struck her as obscene.
“Why doesn’t anyone ever hide out someplace nice?” Finn asked. “The fleet doesn’t have much fuel left—we’d better hurry.”
Rose unstrapped herself from the pilot’s seat.
“I’m going to douse the landing runners,” she said. “Don’t touch anything.”
Finn looked mildly offended. “I’m not gonna touch anything.”
But no sooner had Rose left the cockpit than he leaned his arm on a panel—a panel that, to be fair, looked like it had nothing to do with sticks or yokes or whatever that thing Rose used to fly was—and the shuttle violently banked to port.
He lifted his arm and the shuttle swung back to the proper course—but there was a crash from the cabin behind him.
“I touched something,” Finn confessed. “That was me.”
Rose thrust her head into the cockpit, looking exasperated. “Without a little practice you’re going to get us both killed. Let’s teach you how to land a shuttle.”
“I’m not a pilot,” Finn objected.
“Well, time to learn. By the way, the ball droid’s in the toilet.”
Finn, surprised, pushed past her and peered into the tiny space. BB-8 had indeed jammed himself inside, and greeted Finn with a cheerful string of beeps. Was it his imagination, or did the astromech look a bit smug?
“Quit stalling and get back here,” Rose called from the cockpit.
Finn returned, BB-8 rolling along behind him, and watched as Rose pointed at various things.
“Control yoke, throttle, brake.”
“Why does everything have to be so complicated?” Finn muttered.
“It’s no more complicated than your average escape pod,” Rose said with a smirk. “And you were ready to fly that.”
“That hurt,” Finn said, feeling his face flush.
Rose raised an eyebrow, and he sighed, throwing up his hands.
“Okay. Control thing, throttle, brake. Got it. Now show me the rest.”
* * *
—
Sirens and shouts filled the corridors of the Anodyne.
Poe helped two young medics push a portable bacta tank containing a wounded Resistance fighter down the corridor, the man trying to brace himself inside the tank as the bacta sloshed back and forth.
They had almost reached the medical frigate’s hangar—but the evacuation was taking too long.
The Anodyne was already down to its last fuel reserves, if it hadn’t exhausted them already. It had fallen behind the other ships in the Resistance fleet, leaving it unprotected by the Raddus’s powerful shield envelope. When the medical frigate’s fuel was gone, it would lose headway—and almost immediately come within range of the guns of their First Order pursuers.
Poe turned back, waving for the next party of medics to hurry.
The Anodyne trembled and an explosion filled the corridor behind Poe with fire.
There was nothing to be done. He tried to go faster without toppling the tank over.
Ahead, in the hangar, the starfighter pilot C’ai Threnalli stood at the bottom of a transport’s ramp. Like many of the fleet’s pilots—including Poe himself—the Abednedo had been pressed into service flying transports and shuttles and figuring out how to move crewers out of harm’s way.
The Anodyne shuddered again as First Order turbolasers continued chewing through its shields.
C’ai waved for Poe to hurry.
* * *
—
On the bridge of the Supremacy, Hux gazed into the holotank, a rapt expression on his face. The First Order’s task force filled the left side of the display; on the right, the Raddus trailed the two smaller Resistance ships.
“The main cruiser is still out of range, but their medical frigate is out of fuel and falling behind,” Captain Peavey reported.
“The beginning of their end,” Hux said. “Destroy it.”
The order went out and the Supremacy’s prow turbolasers opened up. Peavy watched as the Anodyne’s already weakened shields flared, then died. A barrage of laserfire broke the frigate’s back, snapping it in two; a moment after that the Resistance craft had been reduced to gas and superheated globules of metal.
“Target destroyed,” said Captain Yago, a bit stiffly.
“Acknowledged,” said Peavey, aiming a slightly apologetic nod in Yago’s direction. The Supremacy had been Yago’s command until Hux had unexpectedly been granted permission to transfer his flag from the Finalizer to his flagship—and brusquely informed Peavey that he was transferring as well.
Peavey had to give Hux credit for this much: The callow general knew he would be exposed without an experienced captain to lean on, and that—having been robbed of his command—Yago would give his help grudgingly at best.
Like Peavey, Yago was a veteran of the Imperial Starfleet. He’d greeted the interloper on his bridge with stiff formality, his bearing frosty but impossible to find fault with, and his dealings with Peavey had been businesslike and correct. That was the product of years of training and decades of service, the kind of thing Hux’s father—mad though he had been—would have understood even as the son disdained it.
Yago would endure Hux just as Peavey had—because both men knew the general wouldn’t last. He would undoubtedly succeed at destroying the remnants of the Resistance, and bask in the glory of that accomplishment for a time. But t
hen the real challenges would begin. The First Order would have a restive galaxy to tame, one that had been plunged into chaos. And sooner or later, Hux would be undone, revealed as an incompetent officer and an intemperate leader.
Peavey smiled privately. Hux was a revolutionary, full of fire and fervor, but revolutionaries’ seasons were fleeting.
Peavey looked out through the viewports, hands behind his back. The surviving Resistance ships remained just out of range of the First Order guns. If there had been any chance that those fleeing ships would be reinforced, Peavey would have recommended trying to cripple them with waves of starfighter attacks, but all the First Order’s intel indicated no support was coming.
That meant there was no reason to send pilots into danger—not with the Resistance fleet unable to flee and beyond help. Hux was right about one thing—this was the beginning of their end.
Which meant Hux’s own end was growing closer, too.
* * *
—
Far below the Supremacy’s bridge, Captain Phasma stood in the middle of a vast hangar. While impossibly cavernous, larger than some capital ships, it was just one of many staging areas on the enormous First Order flagship.
Phasma eyed the lines of TIEs and attack ships, the walkers being tethered to their landing craft, the stormtrooper legions, the black-clad pilots waiting in formation. They were ready—ready to be unleashed on whatever remained of the Resistance once its leaders accepted their plight and went to ground, hoping to find safety.
They wouldn’t. Her troops would see to that.
Most of the galaxy’s beings were soft—they grew up sheltered and spent the rest of their lives trying to make sure they stayed ignorant and indolent. Phasma was anything but soft—and by the time she could walk, she had understood there was no such thing as safety. There was only survival, which was the product of ceaseless struggle.
She inclined her chrome helmet to address her second in command.
“High alert, Commander,” she said. “Their ships are dropping like flies. Our time approaches.”
