Star Wars: Before the Awakening (12 page)

Two of the TIEs had picked him up, zigzagging as he tried to shake them. They fired, blasts passing harmlessly, but they didn’t stop and they didn’t relent. BB-8 whimpered,
worried.

“It’s nothing,” Poe assured him.

BB-8 made a noise that, Poe thought, sounded decidedly unconvinced.

He rebalanced power, boosting his forward deflectors, still weaving, dipping, jerking to deny the pursuing fighters their shot. He reached over his shoulder again for the flow regulators, closing both of his starboard engines to a trickle in an instant, then yanked the stick hard to
port. The X-wing wheeled, and the straps holding Poe to his seat dug into his shoulders, but then his nose was toward them. Two of their shots hit and sizzled against his shields, and he was firing again.

Then there were three TIEs left, and then there were two as Rapier Two blasted her second. Poe restored his starboard engines and checked on the position of the shuttles in time to watch as
Rapier Three and Four destroyed one of them. He watched as the second seemed to stand motionless in space for an instant, then stretch before snapping into hyperspace. The remaining TIEs split their formation, each now fleeing, and Poe swept in behind one as Rapier Two crossed overhead pursuing the other. Then there were two more fireballs. Poe looped back around, scanning for any other vessels, and
from the corner of his eye, he saw a glow begin to rise from the stern of
Yissira Zyde
.

“Muran! Iolo! Break port!” he shouted.

Rapier Three banked sharply, high and left, but Muran went left and low, and it wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t in time. The freighter stretched and snapped out of realspace, the wake of its jump to lightspeed buffeting Rapier Four’s X-wing, shearing first the upper, then
the lower of its starboard S-foils from its hull.

“Muran!” Karé shouted. “Muran, eject!”

Rapier Four exploded.

“It’s unfortunate,” Major Lonno Deso said. “It’s never easy to lose one of your squadron, Commander. But I’ve reviewed the flight data, I’ve reviewed the entire engagement up to and including the astromech telemetry, and there’s nothing you could have done. Lieutenant Muran’s death
is tragic, but it’s my considered opinion it was unavoidable.”

“I disagree,” said Poe.

“You can’t blame yourself.”

The sympathy in Deso’s voice and expression were unmistakable, so much so that Poe felt a sharp, almost hot spur of anger in his breast. He clenched his fists, unclenched them, then looked past Deso at the wall of the briefing room behind him. A display showed the galaxy, color
overlays marking realms of political influence. Their position at the Republic base in Mirrin Prime was marked by a gently pulsing gold dot at sea in the royal blue that represented the New Republic’s sphere of influence. It stretched far and wide, from the Inner Core to great swaths of the Outer Rim. A gray band designated the neutral region of the Borderland, and beyond that was a pocket of crimson,
First Order territory.

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.