by Jason Fry
Peavey turned an inquiring glance at Hux, hoping the hotheaded young general wouldn’t do something rash.
For once, he didn’t.
“It’s empty,” Hux sneered. “They’re just trying to pull our attention away. Pathetic. Keep your fire on those transports.”
Peavey offered Yago a look of mild surprise—carefully calibrated to be too mild for Hux to notice—and saw that Yago had reacted the same way, matching Peavey’s ever-so-slightly raised eyebrow with a minute cock of the head.
Then, subtle message having been exchanged, they resumed their rigid, unimpeachable posture.
* * *
—
Poe watched in despair as another transport was destroyed. Just six remained—six unarmed, defenseless ships between the First Order and galactic domination. He tried to imagine anything that might change their fate, but there was nothing.
Connix looked from a sensor screen to the Raddus.
“Our cruiser’s priming her hyperspace engines,” she said. “She’s running away!”
“No she isn’t,” Poe said.
There was nowhere to run, and Holdo knew it. Besides, Poe had been on the bridge. There’d been no courses loaded into the navicomputer—until he’d programmed one himself.
He knew what Holdo planned to do.
* * *
—
Ahead of the Supremacy, the Mon Calamari warship was turning, its bulbous nose swinging around, back toward the First Order task force that had harried it for so long.
Peavey waited for the ship to vanish, followed by the telltale twisting of space and burst of Cronau radiation that marked a hyperspace wake. He idly tried to imagine where the heavy cruiser might be heading. It didn’t much matter—Peavey doubted the cruiser had enough fuel for another jump once it arrived. Once these last few transports had been eliminated, the First Order could retrieve the warship at its leisure.
But the cruiser hadn’t jumped. Peavey leaned forward, curious, and realized Yago and the other officers were doing the same—horrified realization etched on their faces.
They knew what the Resistance captain planned to do.
“My God,” Peavey said.
“Fire on that cruiser!” screamed Hux.
* * *
—
In the ruined throne room, Rey regarded Kylo’s gloved hand, held out to her in supplication.
She reached out with her own—and before Kylo realized her aim, she had snatched Luke’s lightsaber out of his grasp with the Force. The weapon tumbled toward her hand—and then froze in midair.
Kylo, his entreaty rejected, had flung up his own hand, harnessing the Force to arrest the lightsaber’s flight.
The weapon hung in the air between them, quivering faintly. Rey stared at it, willing it into her grasp. But Kylo was pulling it toward him with equal determination.
Between them, the lightsaber shivered and danced.
They stared at each other, eyes locked.
Rey could feel the Force heaving like the sea on Ahch-To, whipped into a fury by their attempts to manipulate it. And she could feel the kyber crystal at the heart of the weapon seeking a resonance, trying to find harmony where there was only dissonance. Caught in their tug-of-war, the crystal seemed to keen in the Force, a wail that Rey could feel in her bones.
She and Kylo were sweating now, neither willing to give so much as a millimeter in their standoff.
Until, finally, the crystal sheared apart, its unleashed energy tearing the lightsaber’s housing in half and filling the throne room with a flash of brilliant, blinding white.
* * *
—
The second he heard the tramp of boots, Finn knew what Phasma had ordered for him and Rose.
Every stormtrooper battalion had a small number of soldiers assigned to execution duty. But there was no special executioner unit—rather, the assignment was random, and any trooper could draw it. They did so anonymously—executioners’ armor never transmitted the number of the trooper beneath it. Unquestioning obedience was the duty of every First Order stormtrooper, and so was enforcing that obedience.
The troopers’ ranks parted and the executioners advanced, wearing the armor reserved for them: a helmet with a black stripe, black carbon shoulder bells, and a specialized chest plate with black markings.
Rather than blasters, they carried laser axes. A touch of the activation switch and each ax haft sprouted four pairs of emitter claws. Suspended between each was a monomolecular filament of brilliant cyan energy that could cut through anything.
A stuttering buzz rose from the energy filaments—a noise Finn had always found weird and unsettling. Each time he’d drawn execution duty, he’d devoutly hoped the day would end without his having to carry out such an order. He wondered if the troopers chosen today had hoped the same thing.
“Execute,” Phasma ordered.
The whine of the axes change in pitch as the troopers raised them for the killing stroke.
Before it fell, the world exploded around them.
* * *
—
Under ordinary operations, the presence of a sizable object along the route between the Raddus’s realspace position and its entry point into hyperspace would have caused the heavy cruiser’s fail-safes to cut in and shut down the hyperdrive.
But with the fail-safes offline and the overrides activated, the proximity alerts were ignored. When the heavy cruiser plowed into the Supremacy’s broad flying wing, the force of the impact was at least three orders of magnitude greater than anything the Raddus’s inertial dampeners were rated to handle. The protective field they generated failed immediately, but the heavy cruiser’s augmented experimental shields remained intact for a moment longer before the unimaginable force of the impact converted the Raddus into a column of plasma that consumed itself.
However, the Raddus had also accelerated to nearly the speed of light at the point of that catastrophic impact—and the column of plasma it became was hotter than a sun and intensely magnetized. This plasma was then hurled into hyperspace along a tunnel opened by the null quantum-field generator—a tunnel that collapsed as quickly as it had been opened.
Both the column of plasma and the hyperspace tunnel were gone in far less than an eyeblink, but that was long enough to rip through the Supremacy’s hull from bow to stern, tear a ragged hole in a string of Star Destroyers flying in formation with it, and finally wink out of existence in empty space thousands of kilometers beyond the First Order task force.
* * *
—
From his post at the port viewports of one of the six remaining Resistance transports, Poe saw the Raddus elongate into a streak of light that shot through the First Order flagship, shearing it in two and leaving a fiery trail to mark its ruinous passage through the fleet.
Soldiers and crewers cheered and hugged, but Poe and Leia remained silent and solemn, weighed down by Holdo’s sacrifice.
Though ripped in two, the Mega-Destroyer continued to hurtle through space along its last heading—the Raddus had passed through it with such astonishing speed that what was left intact barely slowed.
The transports, now unhindered, flew on.
* * *
—
When Finn’s eyes snapped open he discovered that Rose was struggling to drag him across the starship’s deck.
Finn shook away the cobwebs and scrambled to his feet next to her, blaster raised. Around them, all was chaos—thick smoke filled the hangar, the bodies of stormtroopers littered the floor, and sirens blared. BB-8 inclined his head at Finn, obviously whistling and beeping in concern, but he couldn’t hear the astromech.
He tried to figure out what had happened. He’d been tensing for whatever followed having one’s head removed from one’s body, and hoping the old barracks tales of severed heads studying their surro
undings and trying to speak weren’t true. Then the hangar had shook, hard enough that all the stormtroopers crashed to the deck around them. An enormous sound had filled his ears, the hangar, everything.
And then darkness.
“Finn! Come on!”
Rose yanked on his hand, pulling him toward a First Order light shuttle that looked intact. That was a good idea, he decided—he’d never heard of a journey aboard half a ship ending well.
An explosion rocked the hangar, sending BB-8 flying and forcing them to duck. Finn spotted a flash of reflected fire and his heart sank. A moment later Phasma emerged from the smoke, two dozen stormtroopers arrayed behind her. The troops fanned out, blocking their route to the shuttle, and raised their rifles.
Well, that hardly seemed fair.
Then Finn was stumbling backward from an eruption of heat and light that sent stormtroopers hurtling in all directions. Amid a thunderclap of sound, Finn looked over to see a two-legged scout walker struggling to free itself from its moorings. As it fired another barrage of shots, the cables holding it in place ripped away the walker’s cabin, revealing BB-8 at the controls.
The headless scout walker stomped across the hangar, looking like it was going to topple over with every step—and opening up on the stormtroopers with its chin guns. Every blast sent white-armored troops flying.
“That crazy droid’s given us a chance—let’s go!” Rose yelled.
Finn looked at the walker in shock—BB-8 was driving that? Then he ducked a laser blast, seeking cover with Rose behind the hunks of debris littering the hangar.
As her stormtroopers hurried to set up a repeating blaster that could take out the scout walker, Phasma strode across the hangar with her rifle raised. Rose sent a hasty volley of shots her way, but they went wide as Phasma rushed their position.
One of the executioners’ axes lay on the deck where its wielder had abandoned it. Finn scooped it up, slashing down at Phasma’s head as she raised her rifle. She saw the blow coming and raised her blaster to intercept it.
The ax cut her rifle in two. Finn grinned as his former commander tossed the useless halves of her weapon away. But before he could press his advantage, Phasma yanked a short steel baton off her utility belt. A quick whiplike motion extended it into a double-ended spear as long as she was tall.
“You were never anything more than a bug in the system,” she told him, voice dripping with contempt.
“Let’s go, Chrome Dome!” Finn yelled back, taking a wild swing with the ax. She blocked it and nearly ran him through, forcing him to give ground. Behind her, the scout walker was taking apart the hangar piece by piece, the stormtroopers forced to flee from its murderous fire.
Growling, Phasma whipped her spear at Finn, alternating vicious jabs with slashes aimed at his head, chest, and legs. He parried with the haft of the ax, sparks leaping with each impact, and looked for an opening in her defenses.
But there wasn’t one—she was both faster and stronger than he was. It was all he could do to keep the ax between the two of them as she rained blows on him from every direction, driving him steadily backward and forcing him to dodge to avoid tripping over the bodies of stormtroopers killed by the blast that had knocked him unconscious.
She was maneuvering him toward a shaft in the hangar floor, he realized—probably a lift for bringing heavy equipment up from a lower level. Flames were licking out of the opening.
Finn tried to dodge sideways, but Phasma intercepted him and it was all he could do to raise the ax at the last possible second before she split his skull open. But his weapon shivered and then broke.
“You were always disobedient,” Phasma said, the staff in her mailed fists. “Disrespectful. Your emotions make you weak.”
He tried to grab the spear as she brought it back down on him, but she knocked him backward, into the heat and wind boiling up from the Supremacy’s depths.
* * *
—
The chrome-armored stormtrooper had advanced on Finn with murderous single-mindedness, heedless of the scout walker or the other hazards around them. Rose had squeezed off a few shots in her direction but could do little more—she wasn’t a trained sharpshooter, and the slightest mistake could mean a blaster bolt found Finn instead of his enemy.
Besides, Rose knew all was lost if the stormtroopers took out BB-8’s walker. It was a miracle that the warship around them had held together as long as it had, and they couldn’t push their luck any further. They had to get out, and the shuttle was the only ticket available.
Rose kept up a steady stream of fire at the stormtroopers, taking advantage of their preoccupation with BB-8 and leaving several motionless on the deck. She tried to line up a shot at the leader’s caped back, but she dodged a blow from Finn and the opportunity was lost.
Finn, she saw, was being driven back toward a flaming pit in the deck. Rose yelled for him to be careful, but there was nothing she could do. As she watched in horror, the chrome-armored trooper knocked him into the inferno.
But a moment later he emerged from the flames, riding atop the turbolift platform he’d landed on and aiming a vicious uppercut with his broken ax at his attacker. The blow knocked Phasma down and split her mask open. Through the shattered chrome Rose could see a pale blue eye in a pale face.
“You were always scum,” she spat.
“Rebel scum,” Finn replied coolly, and a moment later the floor collapsed around his former commander. Phasma fell, vanishing into the fire.
The hangar shook, an ominous vibration rolling through it.
BB-8 had maneuvered the scout walker near Rose. She scrambled atop it.
“Hey, need a lift?” she yelled at Finn, praying he’d hear her.
Fortunately, he did.
He leapt atop the walker, which stomped across the hangar. Flames rose from vents and conduits around them.
“We need to go and we need to go now!” Finn yelled as they abandoned the walker and hurried for the ramp of the bat-winged shuttle.
“Working on it!” Rose yelled back.
“Can you fly this thing?”
“It’ll be okay.”
Finn looked alarmed.
“Would you rather stay here?” Rose asked.
The hangar shuddered and a gantry came loose from its moorings above, slamming to the deck behind them. BB-8 whistled urgently.
“It’ll be okay,” Finn said hastily.
“That’s the spirit.”
She hurried into the cockpit and was relieved to discover the controls were straightforward—and even more relieved when the shuttle powered up immediately. Back on D’Qar it would have been no surprise to discover that important components had been cannibalized or the fuel siphoned off.
Rose yanked back on the controls and the shuttle jerked off the deck. It shuddered as one wing scraped the wall of the hangar. Finn put his hands over his eyes.
“You’re not helping! I’ve got it now!”
“Then punch it!” Finn said.
Rose hit the accelerator and the shuttle leapt forward, flames rising around it. It quivered as it passed through the magnetic field that kept the hangar’s atmosphere contained, then steadied. Rose dipped its nose, leaving the doomed First Order warship in their wake.
After the chaos of the hangar, the silence in the cockpit was somehow unnerving—all three of them simply sat for several moments, the only sound Rose’s and Finn’s ragged breathing.
“So where are we going?” Rose asked.
Finn’s eyes turned to the white expanse of Crait.
“Where we belong,” he said.
The decks of the Supremacy that had been in the path of the Raddus’s jump to hyperspace no longer existed—they had been excised as if with a surgeon’s knife. Elsewhere, whether crewers lived or died depended on quirks of the mighty warship’s construction as s
ystems failed in cascades up and down the severed halves of the flying wings. Clouds of escape pods surrounded the remnants of the mighty ship, and all channels were jammed with frantic calls for assistance.
The Raddus had hit left of center, sparing the section of the Mega-Destroyer that housed the overbridge and the throne room. Which was fortunate for Hux—as the bridge descended into chaos, he had hurried to the turbolift connecting it with the Supreme Leader’s sanctum. It wasn’t until after he’d stepped into the lift and used his code cylinder to access the throne room that he realized it might not work.
He looked around frantically, gripped by the fear that he’d consigned himself to an ignominious end—the architect of the First Order’s military domination spending his last moments trapped in a turbolift. But the lift descended so smoothly, Hux had no idea anything was wrong.
Then the doors opened and that illusion was snuffed out. The throne room was a scene of unfathomable carnage. Snoke’s alien navigators had fled, his fearsome guards were dead, and the Supreme Leader himself lay crumpled in a heap in front of his throne. Kylo Ren, motionless, was sprawled nearby.
A single glance was enough to tell Hux that Snoke was dead. But Ren was merely unconscious, his chest rising and falling.
Hux stood over the Supreme Leader’s body in shock for a moment, trying to process everything that had happened and calculate everything that could happen next.
The First Order’s flagship—which was also its mobile capital, its greatest shipyard, its best research-and-development facility, and so much more besides—was doomed. Yet the Resistance had been reduced to a pathetic handful of ships trapped on a backwater world. And the New Republic was no closer to resurrection. The imminent end of the Supremacy would change surprisingly little about the balance of power in the galaxy.
But one thing was certain: The First Order would need a new Supreme Leader.
