The Legends of Luke Skywalker

by Ken Liu

  Instantly, glowing cracks appeared in the dark gray hull, and the struck destroyer seemed to groan in pain in the silence of space.

  Like an ancient ocean-going vessel taking on water, the dagger-shaped ship dipped and fell toward the surface of Jakku. Faster and faster it fell, and the gray vessel glowed red, then orange, and finally bright white as it plunged into the thick atmosphere toward its death far below.

  My heart convulsed as I imagined the voices howling for mercy in that doomed ship.

  Like some angry and capricious god, the hologram of the Jedi spun as two more bright streaks seemed to shoot out of him. The bolts crossed the span of bridge windows and struck two more Imperial Star Destroyers. Slowly disintegrating, the ships dove into the roiling ocean of air below like fallen Corosian phoenixes, their TIE squadrons swerving aimlessly in space, as helpless as orphaned hatchlings.

  It was a sign. It was a nightmare. It had to mean something.

  Beams of lightning crisscrossed the windows and ensnared more Imperial Star Destroyers. Like lassoed beasts, the graceful, dark metallic hulks buckled and strained against the tractor beams. But their struggles were useless. One by one, the ships lost their momentum, dipped, and were hurled down toward Jakku.

  I did not see any rebel star cruisers that could have launched the beams. In fact, the shots all seemed to terminate in the steadily spinning hologram of the Jedi, his machine of death, that red-striped X-wing, hovering over him like a trained bird of prey or a magician’s familiar.

  Carelessly, almost lazily, the hologram turned to face me, and stopped moving.

  I gasped. Instead of a face I saw only a bright, featureless oval under the glowing hood. The holographic circuits sputtered and hissed, and an acrid smell filled my nostrils. Interference artifacts appeared in the projection. The hologram’s hands reached toward me, as though intent on grabbing my throat.

  Before I could scream, the holographic projector failed, and the Jedi winked out of existence in a bright electronic explosion.

  Behind where the hologram had been, I saw that the bridge windows were rapidly filling with expanding columns of energy.

  “Shields collapsing,” intoned the computer. “Hull breach imminent. Brace for impact. Brace. Brace—”

  A jolt, as though the entire Star Destroyer had been picked up by a giant hand and slammed against the ground. My teeth and bones rattled. My vision swam. My ears filled with a high-pitched, incessant drone.

  The bridge went dark: the overhead lights, the viewscreens, the blinking lights on the banks of consoles, even the emergency lighting strips in the floor. All around us was the darkness of space; the faint, heartless glow of distant stars; and the dim radiance of heated, thin upper-atmosphere air against the bridge windows.

  My ears popped. Then I heard the inhuman, deafening metallic roar and screech of a ship dying in space.

  The gravity generators failed, and we experienced the sensation of free fall as our bodies lifted off the deck.

  My crewmates and I screamed until we could not catch our breaths. The noise no longer sounded like living screams but an eerie replacement for the throbbing of the engines, which had suddenly been silenced.

  The ship slowed, drifted, stopped, and then the stark, lifeless surface of Jakku swung into view, filling the windows, and we fell.

  We fell.

  Scrambling, shoving, kicking, somehow I made my way to one of the escape pods and strapped myself in. The only thought in my mind before I lost consciousness amid the screeching and groaning of struts and bulkheads strained to their limits was this:

  We couldn’t have lost; we shouldn’t have lost; this was not a fair fight.

  The heat of a thousand suns. Unbearable thirst. Pain like I had never endured.

  My eyes opened to the grimace of a woman wearing the black uniform cap of the Imperial Navy. I didn’t recognize her. I tried to speak but only a croak emerged from my parched throat. I stared into her eyes, willing her to respond.

  I took in her cracked lips, her bloodied chin, her—

  My mind wanted to flee from the sight, but my body would not respond.

  The face belonged to a head that was not attached to a body. It sat on the glittering desert sand like a cactus. The sand under the head was a dark crimson.

  All around me were scattered pieces from the wreckage of the escape pod and bodies twisted into impossible positions. Acrid smoke. Waves of heat from still burning debris. Corpses and more corpses.

  I tried to scream but could not catch my breath. I blacked out again.

  We couldn’t have lost; we shouldn’t have lost.

  I was back in space, a disembodied consciousness observing the battle from somewhere in high orbit, the all-powerful Imperial fleet drifting beneath me, an army of giants being nipped at by underpowered rebel star cruisers and their swarming fighters.

  And the hologram Jedi was there, too.

  No, not a hologram. He was real, a glowing figure of sorcery and magic. He floated in space, his feet astride the stars, his cape billowing with an arcane power that could not be understood by mere mortals.

  He leapt from rebel star cruiser to rebel star cruiser, his flaming sword at the ready. A Star Destroyer focused all its cannons on him, and carelessly, he deflected the shots with graceful swings. He launched himself from a cruiser, tucked his legs under him, and tumbled through space, shooting bolts of energy from his sword in every direction. Star Destroyer after Star Destroyer disintegrated under this unnatural assault.

  It was impossible. It was unbelievable. Yet it was true. The Jedi was dispatching capital ships with his sword of magic alone.

  Tired of his game, the Jedi suddenly put away his shining sword. He swung his arms and reached for the Imperial fleet with his bare hands, and thin strands of crackling energy emerged from his palms like a fishing net cast into the ocean that was the galaxy. The glowing strands reached the ships and ensnared them, and the Jedi laughed like a child playing by the sea. Hauling the ships in like so many flopping fish, he cast them down toward Jakku. He was a god playing with toys, except that the toys were city-sized structures of steel and held tens of thousands of lives.

  This is why we lost.

  He has come, the avenging Jedi who can cast starships down from the heavens with a sword of light.

  I opened my eyes and shivered. I was lying down, and it was cold, very cold.

  And dark.

  Overhead the stars twinkled mercilessly, like the eyes of a universe that didn’t care that hundreds of thousands had just died. The galaxy had been there long before we were born, and it would be there long after we were gone.

  I realized that I was moving, drifting through the sea of stars.

  Have I died? Is this the afterlife?

  Against the dim moonlight and starglow, a massive edifice loomed into my view on the left. It was lit here and there, offices or suites occupied by those who had not gone to sleep.

  What city am I in? On what planet?

  I noticed that the lights didn’t hold the steady glow of electricity, but flickered and sparked. Fire. Parts of the building were on fire. A passing breeze brought the odor of burning plastoid and insulation. The shape of the building grew more familiar….

  The edifice was the wreck of a fallen Star Destroyer, now resembling some giant’s sword left behind, plunged into the sands of an abandoned battlefield.

  I struggled to lift my head, to look around.

  Three or four more Star Destroyers and star cruisers filled the view, mountains of steel and despair, a graveyard of Imperial glory. Pieces of smaller broken spacecraft and ground vehicles littered the landscape. It was a nightmarish vision drawn from fairy tales, a dark, burning forest through which I crawled like a tiny ant.

  No, not crawled. I’m being dragged.

  I was lying on a litter made from the thin terminal struts and broken partitions of a starship, lashed together. Cushions from an escape pod, still smelling of melted plastoid and smoke, provided
a bit of padding. My legs were tied to splints, and the waves of pain as the litter jerked unevenly across the desert sand told me that they were broken. Heavy bandages wrapped around my thighs and waist hid injuries I did not want to see. My arms were tied to the sides of the litter, and more strips of cloth secured my waist against the frame. Near my feet lay a few sacks, and I could see broken circuit boards, sensor heads, computer modules sticking out of the openings. Also lashed to the litter next to my thighs were a few water canteens and bundles of rations.

  Ahead of me, a human figure wrapped in flowing robes strained to pull me forward with the cables looped over his shoulders.

  “Who are you?” I croaked.

  He stopped and turned around. There wasn’t enough light for me to see his face. His hair was cut in a short, efficient style, and I could tell that he was quite thin under those billowing robes.

  “I found you,” he said. “You were the only one who was alive in that pod.”

  “There will be a reward if you bring me back to an Imperial Navy outpost.”

  He chuckled. “I have no love for the Empire.”

  A rebel then. Just my luck.

  “What do you want with me?” I asked.

  “Want with you?” he seemed to find this question funny. “What does one living being want with another in the desert? There are only a few answers. It isn’t hard to figure out.”

  He turned around and leaned into the hauling cables. The litter jerked forward.

  “Let me go,” I whispered hoarsely.

  Either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t care. He simply plodded on. One step. Then another.

  A wave of dizziness and nausea washed over me. I was his prisoner, and there was nothing I could do.

  His robe looks just like the glowing garment worn by that Jedi.

  I stopped straining, fell back, and let myself drift back to sleep.

  When I was a child, my mother told me dark tales of ancient wizards who wielded magic to bring the fire of the stars to sentient species, and of villains who cast spells to twist living worlds into dry husks. In those stories, merely escaping from the clutches of the powerful magicians made you a hero.

  I took a sip from the canteen. My arms were no longer tied to the sides of the litter. I ached all over and some infection had taken hold in my blood, making me feverish and tired. I needed a clinic, or a medical droid. No functioning version of either existed as far as I could see.

  But my legs felt better, or at least numb, and I believed that if I had to I could get up and stumble a few steps.

  “You can grab on to the litter yourself now,” he had said when he first untied my arms, perhaps trying to make me think he had shackled me only so I wouldn’t fall off. Villains, of course, never told you their true intentions.

  At least my captor wasn’t trying to deny me the basic necessities of life, though I had no idea what his plans for me were. “Where are you from?” I asked, as innocuously as I could manage.

  “The same place all of us are from,” he said. He swept his arm across the horizon. I didn’t know what he meant. The sky? The desert? The looming hulks of starships?

  “Where are we going?”

  “The same place all of us are going.” He pointed to the distance, and I didn’t know if he meant some mystical realm or a concrete destination.

  We had been hiking through that valley in the shadows of dead starships for days. From time to time, the man would leave my litter in the shade of some wreck while he went to investigate the metallic mountains, still full of burning craters and holes smoking like active volcanoes. I would watch him, climbing along sheer deck cliffs and traipsing across precariously balanced struts like some flea bouncing on the body of a giant luggabeast.

  I learned to appreciate the beauty of the desert. Contrary to my initial impression, it wasn’t a place devoid of life. Patches of flowering plants stubbornly poked out of the sand dunes, as did twisty, spiny trees. Wild steelpeckers hopped or skimmed across the dunes, their metallic beaks glinting in the sun as they headed for the carcasses of the Star Destroyers, a feast of carrion to them.

  Or maybe these were just hallucinations conjured by my feverish brain. Reality seemed indistinguishable from nightmare in this world.

  After an hour or two, he would return, sometimes empty-handed but often carrying pieces of machinery or electronics he had salvaged.

  “Didn’t see other survivors,” he said. “If there were any, I hope they were as lucky as you.”

  So he was looking for other prisoners.

  What does one living being want with another in the desert?

  To eat them, to use them, to sustain one’s own life at their expense. To take pleasure in their suffering.

  I recalled the words in the training holos we had been shown back on the Star Destroyer. Rebels create chaos and pain. They would torture me even if I was only a lowly gunner who knew nothing about grand Imperial battle plans or any other secrets they wanted.

  He stuffed the latest prizes from his excursion into the bags at my feet.

  “More scavengers will come soon,” he said, surveying the starships. I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the steelpeckers or people like himself.

  “What do you look for?” I asked, trying to draw him into conversation that would lower his guard.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he gazed at the wreckage of an AT-AT some distance to the south, off to the side of our course. Besides the massive mountains formed by the fallen starships, the desert was full of wrecked skiffs, TIE fighters, AT-ATs, bombers, and every other kind of vehicle the Empire or the Rebel Alliance had thrown into the fighting around Jakku. The battle seemed so long before and so far away now that my life had been reduced to pining for the next sip of water or bite of rations in an endless sea of sand.

  “Those things have more independent systems,” he muttered to himself. “Better salvage…Ah, there’s a nice hole blasted in the leg.” He turned to me. “Might as well take a nap. I’ll be gone a little longer than usual.”

  I watched him make his way slowly through the shimmering hot air to the AT-AT. He disappeared from view. I waited a few moments longer.

  This was my chance.

  I grabbed all the canteens and looped the straps around my neck. I stuffed all the remaining ration bars down the waistband of my tattered uniform. After a moment of hesitation, I took out one ration bar and put it back into my captor’s sack, and dropped one canteen back onto the litter.

  I heaved myself off the litter and began to crawl away. No point in putting my weight on my legs unless I had to. I was in very bad shape from the infection. My head throbbed; my body was racked by chills. I wasn’t sure I could stand up without blacking out.

  About four hundred meters away, the hull of an Imperial Interdictor stood up from the desert. If I could get to it and climb inside, I was certain that I could find someplace to hide where my captor would never find me. After all, I was a trained Imperial naval gunner, and I knew where all the access conduits and crawl spaces were on a ship. I practically grew up in the military after my parents died in a rebel raid. An Imperial ship was the closest thing to a home for me.

  After an arduous crawl of a hundred meters or so, I stopped to catch my breath. Normally, I could have covered the distance in less than fifteen seconds at an easy run, but the crawl had taken at least ten minutes and all my strength. I risked a look back. There was still no sign of my captor. A large, dark cloud swirled on the horizon like a living wall. The steelpeckers stopped their feeding and froze on the highest points of the hull like so many sailors standing on the deck of a starship in dock, ready for an admiral’s inspection. They gazed at the dark cloud silently.

  The sight was eerie, but I wasn’t scared. If a storm was coming, that could only help me. Not only would the rain provide me more water, the most precious resource on a desert planet, but it would erase the tracks I’d made in the sand as I crawled to freedom.

  The sun beat down on the ba
ck of my neck. I was already sunburnt, my skin blistering in places. I focused on the Interdictor and forced my arms to pull my body forward, one centimeter at a time. I had to get away from that devious man who spoke in riddles. The Imperial holos had made it clear what happened to loyal soldiers of the Empire in the hands of the merciless rebels. Especially that rebel, if he was who I thought he was. I shuddered at the thought of the kind of mental probes and tortures a Jedi could put me through before he was satisfied that I had no valuable intelligence.

  Only a few meters more now.

  I looked back again. The clouds were bigger, darker, more menacing. The last of the steelpeckers scrambled inside the wrecks like maggots burrowing into carcasses. They avoided the parts of the ships where smoke still billowed. It wasn’t clear how long the fires would continue to burn. The ships were massive.

  A sense of dread seized my throat. I tried to swallow and couldn’t.

  Hurry, hurry! I told myself. I tossed away the heavy, sloshing canteens. They were weighing me down, and the storm would bring me water. The ration bars had been pulverized during my strenuous crawl and the crumbs scattered to the wind and the sand.

  Not the best-planned escape. My Imperial survival trainer would have been ashamed.

  Desperately summoning all my strength, I scrambled across the last few meters between myself and the Imperial cruiser. It loomed over me like one of those magnificent towers on Coruscant, and I longed for the refuge I would find within.

  With my legs basically useless, I couldn’t climb too high. Instead, I made my way to one of the small thruster nozzles midship. It was over five meters across, giving me more than enough room to hide from the coming storm. I pulled myself up inside the cone-shaped nozzle as if crawling into the ear of a giant. I was soaked in sweat. Panting, my tongue parched, I wished I had kept one of the canteens with me.

  But at least I was feeling safe for the first time in days. Relief flooded through me, relaxing my taut nerves and tensed muscles. The security of solitude was as sweet as blue milk, and I wanted nothing more than to fall asleep.