by Jason Fry
Rose made a mental note—make that another mental note—to take Poe aside, should they manage to actually rescue the Resistance fleet without dying in any of a dozen ways she decided it would be too depressing to catalog. Having already proven amenable to disobeying orders, assuming false identities, and committing simple assault, the pilot’s astromech was now developing a taste for larceny.
Speaking of larceny, where was DJ anyway?
She extracted herself from the pilot’s seat, grimacing at the ache in her legs and back, and peeked out of the cockpit to discover that their grungy rescuer was rifling the lounge’s cabinets, humming while he appraised a necklace’s delicate web of diamonds.
Rose scoffed. He’d already stolen the ship—why toss its interior like an Otomok wharf rat who had to stay one step ahead of the security droids?
DJ heard her snort and looked up, eyes bright and merry. He showed her the necklace and cocked his head to one side, offering her a floppy grin.
She just shook her head and returned to the cockpit, where Finn was staring out at the tumbling tunnel of hyperspace.
“Four parsecs to go,” Finn said. “This thing cooks! He must do all right as a thief if he owns a ship like this.”
Rose looked at him pityingly. “Say that one more time, slowly.”
“I’m saying he must be a good thief if…oh right, he stole it.”
A moment later, still embarrassed, Finn came up with an excuse to flee the cockpit. Rose had steeled herself not to laugh at him so he could escape with at least some shreds of his dignity; once he was gone she finally let herself smile at the ridiculousness of it all.
When they were kids on Hays Minor, Paige had become briefly obsessed with the curious fact that avians on a number of worlds would imprint on the first creature they saw once they emerged from their eggs—so you’d sometimes find, say, an eager convor chick following around a very confused tooka-cat.
Rose wondered if that was how Finn’s mysterious Rey felt to have this bumbling goof follow her around, mystified by everything in the galaxy that wasn’t her. If nothing else, Rose hoped she appreciated Finn’s wide-eyed, seemingly unconditional devotion.
In the meantime, Rose didn’t know what to think about the fact that a man trained to be a First Order stormtrooper could be innocent enough to assume a feral, unapologetic thief actually owned a fancy yacht. She supposed it made her feel simultaneously better and worse about the galaxy.
On the one hand, maybe there were painfully naïve young men behind many more of those expressionless, skull-like helmets—lost boys who’d never been allowed to have so much as their own name.
On the other hand, battalions made up of those lost boys had destroyed Rose’s homeworld and so many others. How much more ruin and misery would they inflict on the galaxy? How many more people would they rob of loved ones?
Rose had never heard of another First Order stormtrooper shaking off his brainwashing and refusing to carry out the murderous orders he’d been given. Maybe Finn was the only one.
Well, if that’s the case, Paige would have said I should give him a break.
She heard Finn clomping around in the lounge—if he’d ever been trained in stealth, the lessons hadn’t taken—and ran a finger down the almost imperceptible seams in the yacht’s perfectly milled dashboard.
You would have loved him, Pae-Pae. You would have said he has a good heart.
Rose smiled at the thought.
And you would have been right.
* * *
—
Finn felt a bit dizzy watching DJ systematically rifle the storage compartments in the yacht’s lounge.
The thief looked so mangy and sleepy that it seemed like a minor miracle he stayed upright. But his hands moved with an easy, fluid grace over the cabinets, alighting on locking mechanisms and security measures that were invisible to Finn’s eye. After the briefest pause, one of DJ’s hands would dart into his jacket, emerging with a computer spike or some mysterious implement Finn didn’t recognize. A moment later, the compartment would be open, leaving DJ free to pillage.
BB-8, apparently, was less impressed—or maybe jealous. Like Finn, the astromech watched DJ at work, but just squawked unpleasantly.
“Your droid’s a good judge of character,” DJ said offhandedly, settling himself at a data console and getting to work on its anti-intrusion measures.
“Why do you say that?” Finn asked.
DJ offered him a crooked grin by way of reply.
“Doesn’t like me,” he said, extracting a small, gleaming tin from his jacket. “Icindric caviar?”
Finn, unsure what that was, shook his head.
“So you just steal whatever you need?” he asked.
“Whatever I want. Don’t sell me short. Now, let’s see who I liberated this gorgeous hunka from.”
The air shimmered and a holographic diagram hovered over the console. DJ glanced at it and his hands danced over the keys, causing diagrams to wink in and out of existence in rapid succession.
“Well, I guess at least you’re stealing from the bad guys and helping the good,” Finn said.
DJ gave him much the same look Rose had aimed at him a minute ago in the cockpit.
“Help the…you can’t…look,” DJ began, then stopped to put his thoughts in order.
“The Resistance? The First Order? They’re both the same machine—and that machine’s a meat grinder. Do you help a meat grinder by jumping into it? Well, in a way you do but that’s semantics, I guess. Look. Good guys, bad guys, them’s made-up words to keep everyone fighting. Keep the money spinning around. That’s what I steal from…A-ha!”
DJ grinned at something he saw on the console, then thumbed a key. A schematic of a TIE fighter appeared, followed by diagrams of a scout walker, TIE bomber, and a TIE interceptor.
“This guy’s an arms dealer,” DJ said. “Bought this beauty selling ships to the bad guys.”
But the next diagram that appeared was a New Republic T-70 X-wing.
“And the good,” DJ said, eyes twinkling.
Finn’s face fell—and DJ saw the confusion on his face replaced by dismay.
“Finn, let me learn you something big,” he said. “It’s all a machine, partner. Live free. Don’t join.”
And DJ tapped the plate on his hat bearing his motto.
“Finn, get up here!”
That was Rose, and it sounded urgent. Finn bounded up the short flight of steps to the cockpit, so intent on whatever news she had that he failed to notice DJ’s attention remained fixed on him as he departed.
“I got through to the fleet,” Rose said. “Poe’s on the line.”
Finn leaned over the comm.
“Finn! Holdo’s loading the crew into shuttles—she’s going to abandon ship. Where are you?”
“That’s what they wanted my bafflers for,” Rose said, her hand reaching for her medallion. “To hide the transports from detection.”
Finn tried to find the readout showing the Libertine’s progress, but couldn’t pick it out amid the welter of screens and controls.
“We’re so close,” he told Finn.
“Did you find the Master Codebreaker?”
Rose and Finn exchanged a look.
“We found…a codebreaker,” Finn said. “But I promise you I can shut the tracker down. Just buy us a little more time.”
“All right,” Poe said. “Hurry.”
Poe broke the transmission. Finn could tell Rose was thinking the same thing he was thinking—and that neither of them wanted to be the first to ask.
Rose gave in first.
“How much do we trust this guy?”
“How much choice have we got?” Finn replied.
* * *
—
Poe shut down his comlink, breaking the conne
ction with Rose and Finn, and looked up at Connix, C’ai Threnalli and the five other pilots in the utility room off the hangar.
“Now we have a chance,” Poe said.
Some of the other pilots still looked uncertain. Poe could hardly blame them, given what he’d asked them to do. But C’ai was nodding, his eyes steely.
Poe knew them all—he wouldn’t have summoned them to this meeting if he hadn’t—though he’d only flown with a couple of them. He wished he had pilots he knew better, the ones with whom he’d flown wingtip-to-wingtip and could trust to keep him alive: Snap Wexley, say, or Jess Pava. But Snap and Jess had their own mission, and most of the other pilots he knew best were dead.
But then every pilot wanted to go into battle in a cloaked, invulnerable starfighter boasting enough armaments to crack open a planetary core. Since that never happened, you took what the ground crew could give you, relied on your wingmates, tried to get the angle, and took your shot. And you hoped it was enough.
“We tell the admiral about Rose and Finn’s mission, and that we need to buy them time,” Poe said. “And we hope she agrees.”
“And if she doesn’t?” asked one of the pilots.
“Then the conversation’s over,” Connix said.
“We’ll do what needs to be done,” Poe said. “But nobody dies. If we have to shoot, it’s to stun. There are enough people trying to destroy the Resistance as it is—we’re trying to save it.”
* * *
—
Luke Skywalker walked across the meadow beneath the stars. The grass had been soaked by the recent downpour, and his Jedi ceremonial robes were getting wet—soon they’d be filthy with mud.
The Caretakers wouldn’t like that, he knew. They were there to help him, as they had generations of Jedi dating back to when history became legend, but they weren’t above sidelong looks and clicks of the tongue when they thought he’d been careless or performed some task haphazardly.
It couldn’t be helped—it took more than a soggy field to stop a Jedi rite whose time had finally arrived.
And anyway, the Caretakers would have things to be a lot angrier about.
Luke activated the torch in his hand, igniting a hissing flame that guttered in the night. Ahead of him loomed the ancient uneti tree that held the primordial Jedi texts.
He’d donned the robes and taken up the torch before, only to falter and lose his resolve. Luke wasn’t sure why, exactly. He supposed it was because he had spent so many years crossing the galaxy with R2-D2 as his companion, searching obsessively for ancient lore and a current purpose, at the cost of everything else. When he consigned the library to the flames, he would be consigning everything he had done since Endor with it. Vanity, again—but time after time, it had prevented him from taking that final step. In fact, Rey had arrived on the island after a failed attempt had left him brooding in the meadow, trying to summon the will to try again.
But Rey was gone. And this time, Luke vowed, he would not falter.
As he lifted his eyes to the tree, Luke sensed something behind him. He turned and beheld a shimmering presence from another time—the era he was about to declare extinct.
“Master Yoda,” Luke said, feeling an instinctive surge of joy at the sight of him.
It had been many years since he had seen a manifestation of the great Jedi teacher, and Yoda appeared almost corporeal, much the same as Luke remembered from his fractious training on Dagobah, which he had cut short to confront Darth Vader. The little Jedi Master was wizened and stooped, his green scalp wreathed by a frizzy halo of delicate white hair, but now as then his eyes were penetrating, seeming to look through Luke and into his innermost thoughts.
“Young Skywalker,” Yoda said.
But Luke realized his old teacher could only have appeared for one reason, and his happiness slipped away.
“I’m ending all of this,” Luke warned the vision. “I’m going to burn it down. Don’t try to stop me.”
Yoda just looked amused.
Luke advanced on the remnant of the ancient tree, the torch blazing in his hand. He stopped less than an arm’s length away from the pale, twisted bark. As soon as he stretched out his arm, the wood would begin to burn—and minutes after that the founding texts of the Jedi Order would be drifting ash.
Time is a circle. The beginning is the end.
But as had happened so many times before, Luke found he couldn’t bring himself to lift his hand.
Yoda looked to the sky and raised a gnarled finger. A bolt of lightning lanced out of the night, momentarily painting the island in black and white and leaving Luke blinking frantically. When he chased away the spots on his vision the tree was ablaze.
Luke hurriedly doused the torch, nearly burning himself in the process, and looked for a way to beat out the rapidly spreading flames.
Behind him, he could hear Yoda guffawing. “ ‘Ending all this I am.’ Oh, Skywalker. Missed you have I.”
Luke steeled himself to rush into the tree and grab the books from their nook, but it was impossible—the tree had become an inferno. He slumped, turned, and stared at Yoda’s shimmering form, standing placidly here, at the top of a tiny island on a forgotten planet in a nameless sector of the galaxy.
“So it is time for the Jedi Order to end,” Luke said.
“Decide we do not, where our place in this story begins or ends. But time it is for you to look past a shelf of old books.”
Despite what he had come to do, despite all he had brooded upon, Luke found himself offended.
“The sacred Jedi texts,” he said.
“Read them have you? Page-turners they were not. Wisdom they held, but that library contained nothing the girl Rey does not already possess.”
Yoda shook his head, and Luke felt very much like the Padawan he had been, so many years ago in the bogs of Dagobah. His master was disappointed, and he was embarrassed.
“Skywalker,” Yoda said. “Still looking to the horizon. Never here, now. The need in front of your nose.”
The little Jedi Master reached out with his cane, to rap Luke’s nose with it.
“I was weak, unwise,” Luke said.
“Lost Ben Solo, you did,” Yoda said, gently but firmly. “Lose Rey, we must not.”
“I can’t be what she needs me to be.”
“Heeded my words not did you,” Yoda said. “ ‘Pass on what you have learned.’ Wisdom, yes. But folly also. Strength in mastery, hmm. But weakness and failure, yes. Failure most of all. The greatest teacher failure is.”
And then he sounded faintly regretful: “We are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all Masters.”
Luke stared into the fire, its filaments reaching for the distant stars. He stood beside his old teacher as the blaze raged on, consuming the ancient past.
Aboard the Millennium Falcon, Rey finished closing a storage compartment beneath the relief pilot’s bunk in the main hold and took a deep breath. None of her lengthy debates with herself during the journey from Ahch-To had led her to any other conclusion.
The Force had shown her what to do; now it was up to her to actually do it.
Chewbacca was waiting for her in the freighter’s cramped escape pod bay, crouched by one of the single-person pods. R2-D2 stood nearby, lights blinking on his dome.
Rey saw that the pod was emblazoned with stenciled letters:
ESCAPE POD CLASS A9-40
MILLENNIUM FALCON
And below that was added, in poorly handwritten Clynese:
PROPERTY OF HAN SOLO PLEASE RETURN
She allowed herself a smile. She wished she could ask Han if that had ever worked.
Maybe it had—and if so, maybe that was good luck.
In which case, better not to think about the pod’s unsettling resemblance to a coffin.
Chewbacca helpe
d her into the pod, his hands surprisingly gentle despite—or perhaps because of—his great strength. His eyes—startlingly blue in his fierce face—regarded hers uncertainly.
“As soon as I launch, you jump back out of range and stay there until you get my signal,” she said.
The Wookiee rumbled, but she wasn’t interested in being talked out of it.
“If you see Finn before I do, tell him…” she began.
Chewbacca yowled.
“Yeah. Perfect. Tell him that.”
She climbed into the pod, arranged the lightsaber at her side, and gave the droid and the Wookiee a thumbs-up, crossing her arms across her chest as Chewbacca sealed her in.
* * *
—
Rose had known the First Order fleet would be waiting for them, but she still felt her chest tighten when the Libertine emerged from hyperspace and she spotted the task force on the outer edge of the yacht’s sensor cone.
“Whose brilliant idea was this again?” Finn asked.
“Don’t look at me, man,” said DJ, who’d joined them in the cockpit. “I just work here. Which Destroyer do you want on?”
Rose studied the image of the flagship as the yacht’s sensors constructed a diagram of the massive ship from their scan. She still found the warship’s size almost incomprehensible—the credits necessary to finance it would have made beggars out of entire sectors, and she’d never heard of a shipyard large enough to build it.
She wondered if any ore stripped from the ruins of Hays Minor had gone into that hull, or if her homeworld’s minerals were part of some conduit connecting its turbolasers to its reactor. Or if the ship had been built from the wreckage of other worlds ravaged by the First Order.
And if the First Order had built this, what else had it secretly created?
“Which one do you think?” she snapped at DJ. “Do it. You can actually do this, right?”
DJ studied his grimy fingernails.
“Yeah, about that. Guys, I can do it. But there exists a pre-Do It conversation about price.”
