Star Wars: Before the Awakening (13 page)

“Let’s do them in order,” Poe told BB-8.

It was the third stop, and Poe almost skipped it, because there was quite literally
nothing
of interest on the galactic charts for its position. But if his mother had taught him to fly and to love it, his father had taught him that when you commit to doing something, you commit to going all the way or don’t do it at all, and so Poe brought them snapping back into realspace in a system so desolate the scouts who’d discovered it hadn’t bothered to even give it a name, just an alphanumeric
designation: OR-Kappa-2722.

The first thing that happened when the stars returned and the X-wing settled back into proper space-time was that BB-8 screamed. It was a surprising noise, and it made Poe jump in his seat. It wasn’t a scream of pain—Poe had heard those before, found the death cry of an astromech particularly heartrending—and it wasn’t the gleeful, rapid-fire babble of droid triumph
spoken in binary. It was a sound of shock, as if BB-8 had turned a corner expecting to find an empty room and had, instead, run into a rancor den.

Which, Poe reasoned, wasn’t actually a bad analogy for where they now found themselves.

“Well, at least it’s not the
whole
fleet,” he heard himself say. It had sounded funnier in his head.

There were—and this was on the basis of what he could see,
though later he was pleased that the flight computer had almost entirely agreed with his initial assessment—three Star Destroyers, one of them
Imperial
class; four frigates, two of them venerable
Lancer
class; two Maxima-A heavy cruisers; and one
Dissident
-class light cruiser. This did not include the array of smaller vessels that seemed to swarm around the fleet, everything from unmanned repair
drones and droids to what, at first count, Poe took to be seventy-plus TIE fighters.

BB-8 squeaked a question.

“Not yet,” Poe said. “Can you find the
Yissira Zyde
? Do you see it?”

BB-8 beeped and whimpered.

“Well, we’ve come all this way. I think we ought to leave with something.”

A mournful whine. Another question, just a slight, soft chirp.

Ahead of them, somewhere between the nearest
Star Destroyer and the first of the heavy cruisers, roughly two dozen TIE fighters wheeled around at once. There was something oddly beautiful in the maneuver, the sheer number of fighters swinging to their new heading together. Poe remembered watching flocks of whisper birds, the way they would bank and swoop in silent unison over the jungle on Yavin 4.

“Yes, Beebee-Ate,” Poe said. “I think
they’ve seen us.”

The one thing they had going for them, at least at the beginning, was the element of surprise. Not the surprise of an X-wing appearing in the middle of a First Order staging point—though Poe did take a certain amount of pleasure from the thought of the chaos his arrival must’ve caused on the many and varied bridges of the vessels before him—but rather the surprise of what
he and BB-8 did next.

They charged.

BB-8 whirred.

“Yeah, I think boosting the front deflectors is a good idea, too,” Poe told him. “And power down the weapons, divert to engines.”

BB-8 beeped, agreeing that this was a very good idea given a very bad situation.

“Just until we find it,” Poe said. “Just until we have proof.”

Then Commander Poe Dameron didn’t have much more to say, because he
was too busy trying to keep them both alive. He corkscrewed right off the bat, deploying his S-foils as he did before breaking hard to starboard and then, almost immediately, looping into a tight Corellian end-over that brought him nose first into the midst of the onrushing TIEs. They scattered to his sides, twisting in their flight to come around on his tail, and several opened fire.

It was a mistake on their part. They’d been overzealous coming after him, smelling blood in the water, eager to feast on the lone X-wing. But there were too many TIEs in pursuit, and the first salvo of shots proved the point as two of the TIEs were clipped by friendly fire, sending them spinning in out-of-control arcs, while another three or four—it was hard for Poe to keep track and stay alive
at the same time—failed to avoid collisions. The explosions flared behind him as he jinked again, pulling up sharply into a rapid displacement roll that brought him in range of the nearest of the frigates. The enemy ship opened fire at once, and the TIEs at Poe’s back again scattered, desperate to avoid being hit by their own allied vessel. The X-wing rocked, then dipped abruptly as a blast glanced
off the forward deflectors, but the shields dropped out of green only for a second, and Poe still had control.

“Tell me you see it, Beebee-Ate,” Poe muttered. The droid didn’t answer. Now the X-wing was so close to the frigate that Poe could swear he was seeing stormtroopers and First Order officers staring at him through the portholes as he raced past. The firing from the frigate stopped. Someone
on a command deck somewhere had wisely ordered the capital ships to keep their guns silent for fear of tearing one another to pieces.

Poe brought the X-wing through a wingover, crossed the ventral axis of the frigate, and without needing to ask for it felt as much as saw BB-8 redistributing the fighter’s power, shield balanced again and a new rush to the engines. The fighter rolled, corrected,
and began climbing with its nose to the belly of one of the Star Destroyers.

BB-8 whistled a warning.

“Yes, I know they have tractor beams,” Poe said. “Have you found it?”

There was a pause, long enough for Poe to realize that the TIEs were once more closing in, and closing in quickly if somewhat more judiciously. Laser cannon fire burned through space around him, buffeting the X-wing.

From
behind him, BB-8 emitted a song of triumph, and Poe glanced to the display for a fraction of a second, long enough to see the word
transponder
being translated from the droid’s binary-speak.

“Outstanding,” Poe said. “Get us a jump out of here!”

Two of the TIEs had come in, flanking his X-wing, preparing to sandwich him, and now he saw another three locking on to his tail, covering the angles
of his turn. He was running out of options and time.

“Hurrying would be really good, Beebee-Ate.”

The droid burbled and then advised he change heading to one-zero mark two.

“Hold on,” Poe said, checking his flanks. The TIEs on his tail were firing, almost herding him. He had one maneuver left that he could think of, one his mother had told him she’d seen one other pilot do, only once, and that
in atmosphere. A L’ullo Stand, she’d called it. Doing it in a vacuum, in zero gravity, Poe had no idea if it would work.

He cut thrust to the engines, yanking the stick back a fraction of a second after. The X-wing’s nose snapped up sharply, still racing on its current heading. In atmosphere, wind resistance and gravity would slow the fighter down, theoretically forcing the pursuing attackers
to overshoot. Out of atmosphere, the deceleration would be negligible without the aid of counterthrust.

Nose up, Poe kicked his engines to life again, rolling the fighter in a one-eighty and slamming the X-wing nose-down once more. He was, for the moment, flying backward as quickly as he’d been flying forward, above the attacking TIEs. Another salvo ripped beneath his ship as the enemy tried
to track his move.

“Power,” he told BB-8.

The laser cannons came alive as the main thrust returned, and Poe opened fire immediately. The first of the TIEs had seen the maneuver coming, breaking hard starboard and descending, but that had left the remaining two exposed. The X-wing’s shots cut through the darkness, glowing bolts that hit first one fighter, then the next. The TIEs tumbled, the
lead now bucking up, fins colliding with fins, cockpit balls crushing one another. Debris exploded, and Poe wrenched the stick, pulling into a spiral to avoid the remnants of the collision. BB-8 all but shouted at him that they were now on the proper heading, and Poe Dameron leveled the nose and punched the hyperdrive activator. The last thing he saw as they entered hyperspace was the shots of the
pursuing TIE fighters, left light-years behind them.

Iolo and Karé weren’t on station when he came out of lightspeed on the edge of the Mirrin system and adjusted his heading to Mirrin Prime. BB-8 burbled, pleased with himself; the
Yissira Zyde’s
transponder signal had been clear and strong, and while they’d traveled through hyperspace the droid had been able to review the flight data collected
during the engagement. BB-8 had located the freighter aboard the second of the three Star Destroyers. The mission, as far as Poe was concerned, had been successful.

Any sense of triumph was stifled when Mirrin Control came online during his approach.

“
Rapier One, this is Mirrin Flight, respond.
”

The voice was male, older, and Poe didn’t recognize it. “Rapier One.”

“
Approach landing bay twenty-two,
you are cleared for landing.
”

“Mirrin Flight, Rapier Squadron berths bay seven, confirm please.”

“
Commander Poe Dameron?
”

“That’s correct,” Poe said.

“
You are directed to bay twenty-two. Do not deviate your approach. Mirrin Flight out.
”

The comm went silent. Behind Poe, BB-8 tweeted mournfully.

“Yeah,” Poe agreed. “We’re in trouble.”

Bay twenty-two was empty when Poe brought the X-wing
in to land, shutting down the repulsors as the fighter settled on its landing gear. He powered down the ship’s systems, considered letting the engines remain on low-power standby for a moment, and then decided there wasn’t any point. If he was about to be arrested, if he was looking at a court-martial, he wasn’t going to try to run. He’d face the consequences of his actions, and he’d defend them
as the right ones. He popped the cockpit and tried to enjoy the first breath of nonrecycled air that he’d had in hours. The cockpit always developed a funk after a long flight, worse after combat, with the combination of electrics and heated metals and his own sweat. There’d been times when he would emerge from his cockpit to find his flight suit soaked with his own perspiration, feeling as wrung
out and exhausted as if he’d been running a footrace for hours. The physical and mental stress of fighter combat always took a toll.

He keyed the release for BB-8, freeing the droid from his socket, then unfastened his helmet and removed his gloves. The bay remained empty, peculiarly so, the doors into it closed. It was very odd. Even in a disused landing bay, you could always find something—power
couplings left along a wall, or cabling coiled in a corner, or bits and pieces of replacement parts or spare ordnance. Something.

There was nothing there, as if the bay had been swept clean, as if it had been sterilized.

Poe hit the quick release on his harness, then vaulted over the lip of the cockpit, dropping straight to the floor without bothering to use the handholds. The sound of his boots
hitting the ground echoed in the empty space. He felt BB-8 pressing against the back of his calf, heard him whistle softly.

The doors to the bay opened and three figures entered, striding toward him. The one in the middle, in the lead, looked to be in his late fifties, perhaps older, a human male wearing a Republic military uniform. The other two were unmistakably shore police, a short-horned
Devaronian and a human female. They had their sidearms holstered, but they had the look, too, that they were expecting trouble and that they wouldn’t put up with it if they found it.

The man in the lead stopped some two meters from Poe and BB-8, then looked him up and down quickly. He had a rank cluster at his collar marking him as a major. Poe had never seen him before.

“Commander Dameron?”

“You are?”

“Major Ematt. You’ll come with us, please.”

“I’ve got a report I need to file with Major Deso. We located the
Yissira Zyde
.”

“Major Deso is occupied.” The man, Ematt, turned back to the door and began walking at once, fully expecting Poe to follow him. The two shore police waited.

Poe followed, BB-8 rolling along behind him.

There was a speeder, a low-slung standard military ride,
waiting for them outside. The human shore police officer drove, Major Ematt seated beside her. The Devaronian sat with Poe in the back, BB-8 on the floor between them. The droid was oddly silent, but the central black lens on his half-domed head rotated between Poe and the Devaronian several times, as if trying to understand what was going on there. Poe could sympathize. He leaned forward.

“Am
I under arrest?” he asked Ematt.

“Do you want to be?”

“Where’s the rest of my squadron? Lieutenant Kun and Lieutenant Arana?”

“They’re being dealt with.”

Poe didn’t like the sound of that.

The speeder slowed at a corner, then accelerated out of the turn, and they were out of the airfield portion of the Mirrin base, skimming across the tarmac that separated the fighter groups from the main
buildings. The sky above was gray, warning of a storm, and beyond the edges of the base Poe could see the mountains and the shimmer of rainfall in the distance. The weather could change fast, and he wondered if they’d be under cover before the storm reached them. The wind was already picking up.