The Force Awakens (Star Wars) (2 page)

Poe had his quadnocs in his hands even before he stopped running. Aiming them toward the general section of sky indicated by BB-8, he let the integrated automatic tracker focus on any targets in the vicinity. The device located four almost immediately. Lowering
it, he spoke without turning, his gaze fixed on the horizon.

“Not to be presumptuous, sir, but you need to hide.”

Tekka didn’t need quadnocs. He had already identified the
incoming ships by the sound they made as they finished their descent. “Not to overstate the obvious, but
you
need to leave.”

Despite the importance of his mission, Poe found himself conflicted. Not only did he respect
Lor San Tekka, he liked him. How could he leave him here? “Sir, if you don’t mind, I—”

The older man cut him off. “But I do mind, Poe Dameron. You spoke of your mission.” Both his gaze and his tone hardened. “Now fulfill it. Compared to what is stirring in the galaxy, you and I are little more than motes of dust.”

Still, Poe demurred. “With all due respect, some motes are of more importance
than others…sir.”

“If you wish to flatter something, flatter my memory. Go. Now! I must see to the defense of the village.” Turning, Tekka headed off, not looking back.

Poe hesitated a moment longer, then whirled and raced toward the far end of the village, BB-8 pacing him effortlessly. As he ran, he was passed by armed, stern-visaged villagers. How the alarm had been raised he did not
know, just as he did not pause to wonder at how or why such seemingly simple folk had come into possession of so many weapons. Doubtless Lor San Tekka would know. Poe resolved to ask him—one day.

The ship that was parked some distance from the village was well hidden beneath a high rock outcropping. That wouldn’t shield the X-wing from sophisticated search gear, Poe knew. He needed to exit
the atmosphere, and fast. Hurrying to the cockpit as BB-8 rolled into the copiloting position, he hurriedly activated the controls. Instrumentation flared to life. In the distance a swarm of bipedal shapes in glistening white armor could be seen approaching the village. Stormtroopers. The weaponry they unleashed confirmed their identification.

Those villagers who had armed themselves attempted
to mount a defense. In this, bravery was a poor match for training and advanced equipment. As more and more of their number went down, the defenders had no choice but to pull back.

It was over almost before it began. Seeing the hopelessness of further resistance, the villagers began to give themselves up, surrendering in twos and threes. As penned animals panicked and broke free, several of
the specially equipped flame troopers began setting chosen structures afire. To an outraged Poe there seemed no reason for it. But then, to those behind the First Order, sowing fear and terror was merely politics by another means.

His angry thoughts were interrupted by a stream of electronic anxiety from the droid. “We’re going, Beebee-Ate, we’re going! Almost there…” He thumbed another control.

Landing lights snapped on as engines whined to life.
Roll clear of the overhang and then punch it
, he told himself.

He was a second from doing just that when the ship was hit.

The pair of stormtroopers had come up on him unseen. Whoever had planned the attack was too smart to rely on a simple frontal assault. Perhaps these two were part of a preceding suit drop or had used a vehicle
to circle around behind the village. If one of their bursts connected with the cockpit, their origin wouldn’t matter.

On the other hand, they were either angling for a commendation or just plain stupid, because their line of approach put them right in front of the X-wing’s weapons. Poe hit the control that deployed the drop-down pivoting gun from the belly of his X-wing, then fired. The resulting
blasts cleared the ground of the enemy and every other living thing that had been unfortunate enough to have been in their immediate vicinity.

Having dealt succinctly with the momentary interruption, Poe returned his attention to the X-wing’s instrumentation. An ascending whine rose from the rear of the ship. Shuddering slightly, it started to move out from beneath the protective rock. Strapped
into the pilot’s seat, Poe flinched in response to the unexpected vibration. There shouldn’t be any shuddering.

The X-wing stopped, but the rising whine did not. After quickly shutting down to prevent any further damage to the engines, Poe popped the canopy and climbed out. Moving to the back of the ship,
he stared hard at the now inert engines. The two stormtroopers might not have been tactically
sophisticated, but they had been good shots. The damage to the engines was severe.

BB-8 rolled up beside him. Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be said. Both man and droid could see that they were in big trouble.

In the village the fight continued as a die-hard group of its inhabitants, perhaps knowing all too well what the representatives of the First Order had in mind for them
if they surrendered, refused to give up their weapons. While the battle was a mismatch, it was not a slaughter, and those villagers who continued to resist gave as good as they got.

Shot straight on, a trooper went down in a mass of shattered armor, shredded flesh, and blood. One of his companions immediately rushed to his side and knelt to render assistance. A torn, bloody glove lifted toward
the would-be rescuer, shockingly bare fingers protruding from the torn protective covering.

Faces behind helmets stared at one another. With a shock, the trooper who had arrived to render aid to his fallen comrade recognized the one whose life was now bleeding out inside his armor. They had trained together. Shared meals, stories, experiences together. Now they were sharing death together.

Combat was not at all like the would-be rescuer had envisioned it.

A brief, final flailing by the downed trooper splattered the newcomer’s face mask with blood. Then hand and arm fell, and movement ceased.

There was no assistance to be rendered here, the second trooper realized. Straightening, he surveyed the hell in which he found himself. His weapon hung at his side—unfired. He stumbled
off, away from his dead comrade and that exposed, pale, pleading hand.

As madness ebbed and surged around him, he wandered through the village, feeling himself more a participant in a historical drama than in an actual battle. The horrific and all too common red stains
on the ground contradicted his denial. This wasn’t like his training at all, he told himself numbly. Unlike in simulations,
reality bled.

Smoke and dust rose from the devastated buildings around him. His helmet’s aural receptors picked up the sounds of distant explosions as well as those close at hand. Crackling flames did not rise from burning sand; they rose from homes, small workshops, storage buildings.

As he turned the still-standing corner of a building, movement caused him to raise his weapon reflexively.
Frightened and unarmed, the woman he found himself confronting inhaled sharply and froze. The expression on her face was one the trooper would never forget: It was the look of someone still alive who realizes she’s already dead. For an instant they remained like that: predator and prey, each fully cognizant of their respective status. When he finally lowered the blaster’s muzzle, she clearly
couldn’t believe it; she continued to stare at him for a long moment.

What could only be described as a thunderous
hiss
caused them to turn away from each other. When the trooper turned in the direction of the sound, his movement broke the woman’s terrified paralysis. She whirled and fled.

The shuttle that was descending was far more imposing than those with which the trooper was familiar,
boasting exceptionally high folding wings and a raptorish silhouette. When the bay door opened, it was to allow a single figure to exit. Tall, dark, cloaked, with its face hidden behind a metal mask, it ignored the still-swirling chaos of the battle to head unerringly in the direction of Lor San Tekka.

Struck by the new arrival’s apparent indifference to the enveloping fray, the trooper was
startled when a sharp nudge from behind momentarily threw him off balance. A glance found him locking gazes with a superior. The noncom’s voice was curt.

“Back to your team. This isn’t over yet.”

The subject of his ire nodded in recognition and hurried off, wondering what the arrival of that singular figure might portend but not daring to inquire.

For an ordinary trooper like him,
ignorance was not simply an abstract value. It was in the manual.

At least for now, Poe realized, the X-wing was not flyable. If he could scrounge certain critical components, find a machine-grade cutter, then maybe, just maybe…But first there was a far more important matter to attend to.

From within the leather bag he had received from Tekka, he removed an artifact. Its significance
far exceeded its size. After a moment of fumbling with BB-8’s exterior, the pilot inserted the artifact into the droid. A confirming beep indicated that it was securely lodged. Satisfied, he stood to eye the glow of the burning village.

“Get as far away from here as you can,” he ordered his mechanical companion. “Any direction, so long as it’s away from this place.” When the droid’s anxious
electronic response indicated it was hesitant to comply with the command, Poe added emphasis to his voice.

“Yeah, I’m gonna take out as many of those bucketheads as I can. Beebee-Ate, I’ll come back for you.
Go!
Don’t worry—it’ll be all right. Wherever you end up, I’ll find you.”

BB-8 continued to hesitate. But when the pilot remained indifferent to repeated queries, the droid finally
turned and rolled off, accelerating across the sand and away from the village. It looked back only once, its head swiveling around to regard the X-wing and pilot rapidly fading from view even as it increased its speed in the opposite direction. Much to BB-8’s regret, it could only protest a direct order, not reject it.

The tall, hooded figure whose arrival had so transfixed the shell-shocked
trooper made his way directly to Lor San Tekka. He did not waver in his course or objective, ignoring startled stormtroopers and armed villagers alike. Seeing him approach, Tekka halted and waited: The village elder recognized who was coming toward him and knew there was no point in running. Resignation slid over him like a cloud.

The passenger from the shuttle stared at Tekka, examining him
from head to foot much as one would a relic in a museum. Tekka gazed back evenly. The black mask, with its slitted forehead and thick, snoutlike breathing apparatus, covered the face of the man he knew as Kylo Ren. Once, he had known the face behind the mask. Once, he had known the man himself. Now, to San Tekka, only the mask was left. Metal instead of man.

Ren spoke first, without hesitation,
as if he had anticipated this meeting for some time. “The great soldier of fortune. Captured at last.” Though emanating from a human throat, the voice that was distorted by the mask had the sick flavor of the disembodied.

Tekka had expected no less. “Whereas something far worse has happened to you.”

Words had no effect on the mask or, so far as Tekka could tell, what lay behind it. There
was no reaction, no outrage. Only impatience.

“You know what I’ve come for.”

“I know where you come
from
.” For all the concern he displayed, Lor San Tekka might as well have been sitting atop a mountain ridge, meditating on the sunset over the Sko’rraq Mountains. “From a time before you called yourself Kylo Ren.”

From behind the mask, a growl: feral, but still human. “Careful. The
map to Skywalker. We understand you’ve acquired it. And now you’re going to give it to the First Order.”

At the point where he had entered the village, moving cautiously and keeping to what cover was available, Poe could now observe the confrontation. Tekka he recognized even from behind and in bad light. The tall, masked visitor was unknown to him. He strained to overhear what they were talking
about, but without edging closer and exposing himself to wandering stormtroopers, he could only look on.

“You don’t belong with them.” Tekka spoke calmly, in matter-of-fact tones, and without any fear. Speaking truth to the lie that stood before him, striving to bring light to darkness. The hope was a faint
one, but he had to try. “The First Order arose from the dark side. You did not.”

Impatience on the part of the visitor gave way to exasperation. “How is it possible that a conversation becomes so tedious, so quickly?” A sweep of one long arm encompassed the boundaries of the village. “Don’t turn a simple transaction into a tragedy for these people.” A tincture of undiluted sadism stained the voice behind the mask. “Hasn’t your presence here done enough for them already?”

“I made my peace with these folk and this place long ago. As to the other, to turn away from your heritage is the true tragedy.”

Ren stiffened ever so slightly as he leaned forward. “Enough witless banter.” He held out a hand. “Old man, give it to me.”

From his vantage point nearby, analyzing the movements and gestures of both men, Poe could divine enough to guess what was being discussed.
And to envision the eventual, inevitable conclusion.

“No,” he muttered under his breath. “No, no, no…” Foregoing any further effort at concealment and disregarding his own safety, he broke from cover and started toward the pair.

“You may try,” Tekka responded with quiet defiance, “but you cannot deny the truth that is your family.”

Kylo Ren seemed to grow before him. Rage flared behind
the mask as reason gave way to fury. A lightsaber appeared in one hand, flaring to life, a barely stable crimson shaft notable for two smaller projections at the hilt: a killer’s weapon, an executioner’s fetish of choice. “So true.”

Light, refulgent and cutting, ripped across and through the figure of Lor San Tekka.

P
OE SAW THE
saber come to life. Saw it start to describe its lethal arc. Time seemed to slow as he watched it descend. Thoughts raced through his mind, half crazed, wholly powerless. He heard himself yelling, sensed himself raising his blaster and firing. Too late, too slow, he told himself despondently even as he continued to fire.

Perceiving the threat, Kylo Ren reacted immediately.
A hand rose sharply, palm facing toward the unknown assailant. The gesture was merely the physical manifestation of something infinitely more powerful and entirely unseen. It intercepted the discharge from the pilot’s weapon, freezing it in midair as effectively as any solid barrier. From behind the mask, eyes of preternatural intensity tracked the attack to its source.

Initially driven by
pure rage, Poe now found that he could not
move. His heart pounded, his lungs heaved, but his voluntary muscles refused to respond. He was paralyzed as effectively as the blast from his blaster.

A pair of stormtroopers took hold of him and dragged him forward until he stood helpless before the impassive Ren. Had they not held on to him, Poe would simply have fallen over. He attempted bravado
even so. “Who talks first?” Poe asked, making his voice light. “Do you talk first? Do I talk first?”

Having deactivated his lightsaber and returned it to his belt, Lor San Tekka’s murderer casually scrutinized the prisoner. Poe’s nerves twanged as feeling slowly began to return to his arms and legs. Ren’s gaze settled on the details of the pilot’s clothing.

“A Resistance pilot, by the
looks of him.” He nodded curtly. “Search him. Thoroughly.”

One of the troopers who had dragged Poe forward commenced a detailed and none too gentle pat down. Pulling a small device from his service belt, the other trooper slowly passed it the length of the prisoner’s body, beginning at the pilot’s head and ending at his feet. The examination did not take long.

“Nothing,” declared the first
stormtrooper, standing at attention.

Poe winked up at the trooper who had used his hands. “Good job.”

Forgetting himself for a moment, the goaded trooper kicked the prisoner’s legs out from under him. Poe went down hard on his knees, still defiant.

The other trooper gestured with the handheld instrument. “Same here, sir. Internally, this one is clean. Nothing but the expected food
residue.” He didn’t hesitate. “Terminate him?”

Kylo Ren did not let his disappointment show. At such times momentary delays were not unexpected. All would be satisfactorily resolved, in good time.

“No. Keep him.” A brief pause, then, “Intact and functioning.”

Plainly disappointed, the two troopers dragged Poe away. Ren watched them for a moment, contemplating possibilities.
Later
,
he told himself. For now, there were other details to attend to. He
allowed his thoughts to be briefly diverted, regretting the time that had been wasting in dealing with necessary inconsequentialities.

Awaiting his pleasure, the senior officer in overall charge of the special squadrons drew herself up at his approach, her black cape of rank hanging loose around her. It stood in startling
contrast to her armor, which even in the poor light shone like polished silver.

“Your orders, sir?” she murmured.

Kylo Ren surveyed his blazing surroundings. He had already spent too much time here, to only partial satisfaction. He disliked such delays. “Kill them all, Captain Phasma, and search the village. Every building, every possible storage facility and place of concealment. When
your troops have razed it to the ground, search the ground. Scanners, perceptors. You know what to look for.”

A single nod and she turned. A line of troopers stood before the assembled surviving villagers. “On my command!” Weapons were raised. The reactions of the villagers were typical. Some stepped forward, insolent to the last. Others fell to their knees. There was whimpering and crying
and shouts of defiance. None of it lasted very long.

“Fire!”

It wasn’t a massacre. In the lexicon of the First Order it was nothing more than a prescribed chastisement. Appropriate retribution for harboring a fugitive of note. It was the nature of the tutorial that was important, not the numbers involved. It took less than a minute.

When it was over, and the only sounds were methodical
chatter among the troopers mixed with a variety of unholy crackling, they dispersed to carry out a final survey and scan of the debris—inorganic and otherwise. Standing by himself, one trooper with a bloody face mask was startled when a hand came down on his shoulder. Though the hand belonged to a comrade, the first trooper did not relax.

“Notice you didn’t fire. Blaster jam?”

Automatically,
the trooper being questioned nodded in response. His comrade gestured knowingly and clapped him on the shoulder. “Turn it in when we get back to base. Let the tech boys deal with it and get yourself a new one.”

“Thanks. I will.”

No sooner had his helpful colleague departed to rejoin his own unit than the trooper found himself gaping at the tall, dark-clad figure striding purposefully toward
the singular shuttle that had set down in the midst of battle. Though he willed himself to move, to turn away, he found he could not. He remained rooted in place, clutching his unfired weapon, staring despite himself.

And in response, the figure of Kylo Ren turned and looked sideways, directly at the soldier. The trooper saw only light reflecting off a mask, and his own fear.

He knows.
He must know. And I’m…dead
.

But he wasn’t. The glance lasted barely a second. Then Ren resumed his pace, deep in thought as he strode toward the shuttle. In the course of returning to his ship he passed a blaster lying on the ground. It was Poe’s, the one that had come within an arm’s length of killing him. Once he was beyond its reach he touched it—but not with his hands. It rose, seemingly
of its own accord, and flew free, smashing into a nearby structure and scaring the wits out of an idling stormtrooper unfortunate enough to be standing nearby.

The purification of the village extended to its outskirts, where a clutch of troopers had just finished searching the damaged X-wing that had been abandoned there. Having done all they could with the tools and equipment at hand, they
prepared to return to their units. Specialized gear could have reduced the Resistance fighter to its component parts, but that was not how they had been ordered to proceed.

“Nothing there,” declared the last of the quartet as he descended from the fighter’s cockpit. “The usual Resistance trash; that’s all. Deep scan shows nothing in the fuselage or elsewhere.”

As soon as he was safely
out of range, his companions activated the pair of heavy weapons they had brought to bear on the hiding place. A couple of bursts was all it took to reduce both ship and outcropping to rubble.

The sound of the exploding X-wing reverberated across the gravel flats and dunes. Far away now, a solitary spherical droid looked back even as it continued to flee. The fireball that rose into the sky
suggested the detonation of something far more volatile than primitive buildings and scrapped mechanicals. If he could have rolled faster, the frightened droid would have done so.

Contrary to much popular thought, desert worlds are not quiet at night. In the absence of light, an entirely different ecology springs to life. Moving with greater caution, BB-8 tried not to pause at each howl, every
meep
, the sounds of clawed feet scraping against bare rock. There were things in the vacant, wild regions of underdeveloped planets that would gladly take apart a solitary droid just to see what made it tick. Or roll, he knew. His internal gyros threatened to send him tumbling wildly at the very thought of such an encounter.

Droids such as him were not meant for unpopulated places, and he
desperately desired to find others like himself. Or, failing that, even people.

The shackles that Poe had worn on the troop transport were removed as soon as he and his captors disembarked. Aboard the Star Destroyer, there was no reason to physically restrain the prisoner. Apparently enjoying themselves, or perhaps merely impatient to get out of their armor, his escort chivvied him along
with what he considered to be unnecessary roughness. Not that stormtroopers of any ilk were noted for their individual diplomacy. Considering whom he had tried to shoot, he knew he ought to consider himself fortunate that they had brought him aboard still attached to all his important appendages.

A physical state of being, he knew, that could be altered at any moment.

On the other side
of the enormous and impressive receiving bay, other troopers were filing out, grateful that more of their number had not been lost on the expedition and looking forward to some rest and food. Intent on reliving the battle below, they paid no attention to one of their own who fell behind. When he was convinced no one was looking at him, the trooper turned and raced back into the open transport. He
removed his helmet and proceeded to void the
contents of his stomach into the nearest refuse receptacle. The terror in his expression was palpable. Fortunately, there was no one there to witness his disgrace.

There was, however, now someone behind him.

Terror gave way to cold fear as he found himself gazing back at Captain Phasma. How much had the senior officer seen? How much did she
know? Too much, as it turned out.

Aloof yet commanding, she indicated the rifle he still carried. “FN-2187. I understand you experienced some difficulty with your weapon. Please be so good as to submit it for inspection by your division’s technical team.”

“Yes, Captain.” How he managed to reply without stammering he did not know. Instinct as opposed to training, he decided. Self-preservation.

“And who gave you permission to remove that helmet?”

He swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, Captain.”

He could feel her disgust as he struggled to put the helmet back over his head. “Report to my division at once,” Phasma said.

Worse, he knew miserably, was likely to come later.

It was where technology went to die.

Mountains of metal, cliffs of plasticene derivatives, oceans
of splayed ceramics were jumbled together in a phantasmagoric industrial badlands that none dared enter, for fear of being poisoned, cut, or lost forever. None except a very few, for whom daring was as much a sense as sight or hearing.

One such individual clung insectlike to a dark metal wall pimpled with protruding sensors, manipulators, and other decaying mechanisms. Clad in light protective
goggles with green lenses, face mask, gloves, and gray desert clothing, the busy figure was burdened with a substantial backpack. A multifunction staff strapped to her back made precision work in such tight and dangerous quarters difficult. Wielding an assortment of tools, the scavenger was excising an assortment of small devices from one metal wall. One after another,
bits of booty found their
way into the satchel that hung below the slender figure.

When the satchel was full, the scavenger secured it shut and commenced a perilous descent, avoiding sharp projections and threatening gaps in the wall. Arriving at the bottom of the metallic canyon, the figure hefted a piece of larger salvage recovered earlier and then, laboring under the double load, headed toward a distant slit of
sunlight.

Outside the metal caverns and at last clear of danger, the scavenger shoved the goggles up on her forehead and squinted at the blasted surroundings. She was nearly twenty, with dark hair, darker eyes, and a hint of something deeper within. There was a freshness about her that the surrounding harsh landscape had failed to eliminate. Anyone glancing at her would have thought her soft:
a serious error of judgment.

It had been a respectable day’s work, enough to ensure she would eat tonight. Pulling a canteen from her belt, she wiped sweat from her face and shook the remaining contents of the container into her upturned mouth.
There should be more
, she told herself as she began tapping the side of the canteen. The last few drops sometimes clung stubbornly to the insulated
interior.

Concluding that she had drained the container of all its contents, she reattached it to her belt facing inward. The satchel and the larger piece of salvage were secured to a piece of sheet metal, which she sent sliding down the mountain of sand in front of her. Off to one side, shade was provided by one engine of a decomposing, old-model Star Destroyer. Too big to cut up, its technology
obsolete, it had been left to molder on the hillside. In the desert climate, decay would take thousands of years. Being something less than portable, the great hulk of a shell was ignored while opportunistic scavengers such as Rey plundered its interior for saleable components.

A second shard of sheet metal served as a sled for the girl to follow the results of the day’s labor down the dune
slope. Practice allowed her to manipulate the metal skillfully enough so that she
neither fell off nor crashed into any of the scattered debris that littered the dune face.

At the bottom she stood and dusted herself off. Her dun-hued garb was desert basic, designed to protect the wearer from the sun and preserve body moisture. It was inexpensive, easily repaired, and unlovely. The same could
be said for the clunky, boxy, beat-up speeder parked nearby. If the battered, rusty vehicle had a redeeming feature, it was the over-and-under twin engines. Since one or another tended to flare out and die at any given moment, their utility stemmed more from their redundancy than from any ability to supply speed or maneuverability.

After fastening her acquisitions to the transport, she climbed
into the driver’s seat. For an anxious moment it seemed as if neither engine would ignite. Then one, and finally the other, roared to life. That was her life, Rey reflected: a succession of anxious moments, interrupted only by the novelty of occasional panic. All part and parcel of trying to survive on a backwater world as harsh and unforgiving as Jakku.

Racing along the flat desert floor,
she allowed the speeder’s perceptors to guide her between endless rows and piles of ruined starcraft, obsolete or fatally damaged military equipment, civilian mechanicals that had outlived their prescribed lifetime, and even long-downed Imperial vessels. No one visited here. No one came to take inventory or write history. In these times there was no nostalgia for death: especially not for that of
machines.