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ISBN 978-1-4847-0586-5
Designed by Jason Wojtowicz
Visit the official Star Wars website at: www.starwars.com.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgements
About the Authors and Illustrator
This book was begun shortly after we lost Carrie Fisher, and her wit, strength, and humor in dark times loom large over it. Acker & Blacker wish to dedicate this book to Carrie, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Kenny Baker, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, George Lucas, and everyone who created the playground in which we now get to play. As well as to J. J., Rian, and all of the people inspiring us in that playground.
MATTIS WAS THINKING about General Leia.
He’d seen her across the command center, rushing from room to room at the Resistance base or giving orders or listening to intelligence briefings. She embodied determination and the wisdom that comes from integrity as she decided the best course of action for the Resistance. For the galaxy.
Mattis knew the stories of Leia Organa before she was the experienced and judicious military leader of the Resistance against the First Order. Mattis collected stories of the old days in the way that other kids collected grav-ball badges. He was hooked by tales of the fight against the Empire. He found inspiration in those old stories. He found guidance. He also found heroes.
Leia Organa had been a princess, a captive, a senator, and a freedom fighter. She was imprisoned by the Empire and enslaved by a Hutt, had seen the love of her life frozen in carbonite and her home planet destroyed. But that woman, whom Mattis saw calmly command and thoughtfully lead, taught him to never give up.
And somehow, even with all she had endured, even as she fought and strategized and inspired—all very serious business—Leia was funny. When J-Squadron had accidentally shut off the power in the compound just as the pilots returned and it took everything everyone had to bring them in safely, Mattis was convinced he was going to be drummed out. While they had awaited their punishment in Admiral Ackbar’s office, General Leia had come in and looked them over.
“You’re responsible for the power outage?” she asked.
“We’re the screwups, yes, ma’am,” Dec answered with uncharacteristic deference.
“Some of my best friends are screwups,” she said with a smirk. “We need more screwups around here.” She’d left them feeling better for the moment. How easy would it have been for her to become embittered? How sad but understandable for her to lose her fire and grow stern and cruel? Leia never did. Mattis hoped he’d retain his sense of humor through his current perilous circumstances as a prisoner of the First Order, alone in a damp cell on the swamp planet of Vodran. Assuming, of course, he got out alive and had been funny in the first place.
Mattis wasn’t the kind of kid to get discouraged. Even though he had faced a series of calamitous events since he’d joined the Resistance, and even though those events, one after another, had led him to the cell on Vodran, Mattis remained optimistic. He’d joined the Resistance for a reason. This was part of it.
He wanted to make a difference. That was why he’d left the orphan farm on Durkteel. It was Mattis’s destiny, he knew, to bring about change in the galaxy. He would become a hero like Leia Organa or Admiral Ackbar. For what other reason had he been imbued with the Force, the arcane energy that was created by and bound together all living things? The Force was what made Mattis special. It was what made him want to do more than just harvest hemmel on Durkteel. And though the Force hadn’t yet manifested itself in him, he knew it would emerge when the time was right. It was why, even now, sitting alone on the cold hard floor of his cold hard cell, he didn’t overly worry. The Force was within him somewhere.
Of course, the Force hadn’t been much help in keeping him out of this catastrophe and all the catastrophes that led up to this one. There had been plenty of opportunities along the way for the Force to intervene. When Mattis arrived on the Resistance base and befriended AG-90, a droid with a singular personality who looked cobbled together from junkyard components, the Force might have said “Watch out, buddy.” The Force could have cleared its throat in warning when AG introduced Mattis to the droid’s “brother,” Dec Hansen, who was charming enough to talk them all into trouble and only sometimes out of it. Or when Dec suggested that, for a laugh, they hack the base’s mainframe. That the true reason for this transgression was benign made little difference. Admiral Ackbar came down hard on Mattis and his new friends. The Force had nothing to say about any of that before, during, or after. It did nothing to keep Mattis out of hot water at any step. If that wasn’t how the Force worked, it was how it should work, in Mattis’s opinion.
It had been a torpedo to blazes since then. Admiral Ackbar placed Mattis, Dec, AG, and their friends, a bookish behemoth named Sari Nadle and a hyperactive Rodian named Klimo, under the rigid instruction of a human rule book called Jo Jerjerrod and his brusque Zeltron second-in-command, Lorica Demaris. AG caught Jo communicating with the First Order and assumed Jo was spying on the Resistance. The spite between them came to a head when Jo tried to reset AG-90, whose peculiar personality was due to the fact that his memory had never been wiped since the day Dec’s mom built him.
The fracas had culminated in all of J-Squadron being sent to do scrapping work on Vodran, a murky, humid planet on the Outer Rim. Vodran was a monster-beset swampland once occupied by a nasty, imperious Hutt. The atmosphere on Vodran was so muggy and stifling that Mattis felt he could cut it with a dull blade. The humidity irritated everyone, setting them against each other. The Resistance was not the place of harmonious camaraderie Mattis had thought it would be. Until it was.
It took an animal attack—really, multiple attacks by many animals—before J-Squadron pulled together. It was the incident with the sarlacc pit that started it. Each squadron member—Mattis, Dec, AG, Sari, Jo, Lorica, and Klimo—had a hand in rescuing someone from that pit. After the harrowing incident with the sarlacc, Mattis felt he’d found the fellowship he’d expected from the Resistance. It was then that Dec confronted Jo about his presumed treachery. Jo revealed he had secretly joined the Resistance under the noses of his First Order officer parents. He wasn’t a traitor to his squad mates, but to his family. Mattis felt they understood one another, or at least they were starting to. Then their group was torn apart.
First by a rolling pack of snarling, stupid tawds, followed by a cadre of vicious rancors. Dec and Sari escaped in one of their short-range shuttles. Klimo commandeered the other one, and he was poised to rescue the rest of them, but he never made it. The last image Mattis had of his Rodian friend was of Klimo in the cockpit of the shuttle, struggling to maintain its lift against rancor after rancor, unti
l finally the struggle ended tragically. Mattis felt horrible, and worse, he felt responsible.
Klimo was the first recruit Mattis had met on the transport to the Resistance base. He was wiry and sunny, always fidgeting, and restless for adventure. Mattis could only wonder what might have become of Klimo if they hadn’t befriended one another. Klimo might have been warm and safe now, bouncing like a rathtar after three cups of caf back in his bunk on the base. Mattis knew it was unhelpful to his present situation to think that way—a guilty conscience wouldn’t free him from this mess—but it was difficult not to. So, again, he thought of General Leia. Mattis was certain the general felt guilt about the death and chaos she’d had a hand in, but he was equally sure that she didn’t dwell upon it for too long. Based on the stories, he figured she would use that guilt, that anger, that sense of justice to fuel her crusade. She could transform those negative feelings into positive action; that was what made her a hero. He would do the same, and that would make him the hero he knew he was. Maybe that’d wake the Force within him.
When that happened, Mattis was confident it would feel like the rush of riding the speeder bike that had zoomed him away from the creatures on Vodran. He was confident it would not feel like he felt now, after escaping the deadly fauna but ending up surrounded by First Order stormtroopers.
The moment before J-Squadron was surrounded, they’d dismounted the speeder bikes on tall, wet grass. Mattis and Lorica stretched and caught their breaths. Jo had his back turned, measuring how far they’d ridden. AG checked his speeder’s gauge, flicking it back and forth, making a sharp clack-clack sound.
“All of you, freeze where you are.”
Mattis didn’t know which of the stormtroopers, suddenly all around them, had spoken. Mattis neither fainted (which he nearly did) nor came unglued (which is what he wanted to do). Maybe he was too physically and mentally spent, or maybe his brain just refused to believe that he had fought against and hid and fled in the muck and mud and brush from wild animals and his own friends only to fall into the hands of a real evil enemy who wanted to do much worse than eat him or annoy him.
The First Order had emerged shortly after General Leia had left the New Republic to start the Resistance, and was increasingly a threat to the galaxy. At least, it was according to General Leia and those who believed her. Mattis believed her. The First Order could not be trusted, and recently, there had been murmurs that the group was planning something terrible.
The stormtroopers closed the circle around them.
“What do we do?” Mattis whispered.
Lorica, rigid and still, hissed, “Freeze.” Jo had his hands up, palms facing outward. He was frozen, too. AG scratched his chin as if he were capable of itching. He leaned in to get a good look at the speeder bike gauge as it continued to clack defiantly.
“Stop doing that,” one of the stormtroopers said. Then, to Jo, “Tell your droid to stop doing that.”
“What am I doing?” AG asked.
Mattis tried to catch AG’s attention. “Aygee, don’t.”
“I gotta check this gauge, though, man,” AG drawled to the stormtrooper nearest him.
“Don’t call the stormtroopers ‘man,’ Aygee,” Jo sneered.
“That’s on me,” AG replied, raising a hand in innocence, continuing to flip the gauge with a hypnotic click. “I can be thoughtless sometimes. Too casual, I’m told.” As he spoke, AG climbed back astride the speeder bike, clacking the gauge.
“Stop what you’re doing!” a stormtrooper barked.
Mattis whispered sharply to Lorica, “He’s going to get killed.”
“Evasive. Maneuvers. On my signal,” Lorica whispered carefully.
AG nodded, but it looked like a shudder if you didn’t know AG.
“Don’t,” Jo whispered even more carefully than Lorica had.
Mattis couldn’t believe any of this. There were about a dozen stormtroopers, all armed, and AG and Lorica wanted to make a run for it? They were crazier than a pair of wampas vacationing on Tatooine!
“Move off that speeder,” the same stormtrooper commanded AG. The angry stormtrooper had one violently scratched lens, as if a small clawed creature had tried to enter his right eye.
“Okay, let me just…” AG trailed off. Then he gunned the engine!
“Now!” Lorica growled, and took off running.
Jo continued to stand calmly with his hands raised. Mattis tensed, unsure if Jo was about to run, too. Mattis felt the stormtroopers’ eyes on him as if it were his turn to decide, which terrified him enough that he took off after Lorica as best he could. She had a big lead and had always been better than he was at running and pretty much everything else. Blaster fire pelted the ground around them. The stormtroopers chasing them through the muck were lousy shots and needed the practice they were getting from shooting at Mattis and Lorica. But the practice was working, as some of them were getting pretty close. Mattis dove face-first into the mud as a shot stung his heel. Smoke came off his boot.
Before he could push himself up again, he was grabbed and lifted fiercely to his feet. His left heel, where the shot had fried his boot, burned. He howled in pain.
“Stop that racket,” the stormtrooper said.
“You’re hurting me,” Mattis replied.
“You’ll get more once we get to the detention center.”
Mattis tried to think of something cutting he might say to deflate the stormtrooper’s venom, but he was too afraid. The other stormtroopers watched Lorica run away through the swamp. The terrain was too dangerous to keep up the chase. If only Mattis had made it a little farther.
The stormtrooper who’d spoken before motioned to Lorica’s shrinking figure in the near distance. “Can you take her out?” he asked his nearby cohort.
“I got her,” the other stormtrooper said, lifting his blaster rifle to his eye.
Mattis struggled and screamed as loud as he could, “Lorica!” Without turning, she dropped into some reeds and disappeared.
The trooper holding Mattis tossed him into the mud. “You,” he said to the stormtrooper who still had his rifle poised to shoot. “Keep watch. That grass moves, shoot it. She shows her pink head, shoot it.”
Lorica’s bright skin would be hard to miss against the green and brown of the wet meadow. “Come back in!” Mattis shouted, standing unsteadily. “They’ll kill you if you don’t!” He hoped that they wouldn’t kill her either way. The stormtroopers hadn’t killed him yet, so he held out hope.
Everyone waited and nothing happened.
“We’ll kill you if she doesn’t,” the mean trooper said. “Tell her that.”
Words died in Mattis’s throat.
“They’re threatening me,” he croaked.
The stormtroopers pointed their guns at where Lorica had been. Thoughts churned in Mattis’s mind. He thought faster than he ever had before.
“If you come back now, they won’t shoot,” he yelled. “Look, they’re lowering their guns.” He looked pleadingly at the stormtroopers, who made a great sarcastic show of lowering their guns.
Slowly, Lorica’s head rose from the reeds. He could tell, even at this distance, that she was furious at having to surrender.
The stormtroopers were rougher with Lorica than they’d been with Mattis, probably galled that she’d made them trudge through so much muck. Their nice white armor was splattered. A small victory, but Mattis would take it. The stormtroopers escorted Mattis and Lorica back to where Jo remained, with his hands now touching the top of his head. He still wore that smug, mild expression. The troopers tossed Lorica and Mattis into the mud beside Jo. Two others dragged AG-90, whose head was cocked at an upsetting, disjointed angle, into their circle.
“My name is Jo Jerjerrod,” Jo told them in a tone that informed Mattis this wasn’t his first time repeating the words in order to command respect and curry favor. “I am the son of Jul and Jax Jerjerrod of the First Order Security Bureau. I demand to speak to your commanding officer.”
The lead stormtrooper—the one who’d roughed up Mattis, then Lorica—sighed through his helmet comlink. It sounded like static, but his or her impatience was clear.
“You’re all going to see Commander Wanten. Just get marching.”
With that, the stormtroopers herded Mattis, Lorica, Jo, and AG into a small cluster, and they shuffled along through the mud in silence. Because of his skewed head, AG kept straying carelessly from the group, but their minders would curb the droid’s wandering, shoving him roughly back into the pack.
As they crested a spongy hummock, a palace was revealed beyond and below it. Wood-and-metal fencing surrounded a good portion of the land around the palace, which must have belonged to Harra the Hutt, the galactic gangster who’d claimed Vodran before the First Order ran her out. The palace wasn’t large, though a turret reached crookedly into the sky, giving it height. There was a blown-out section of the palace’s far wall, where the First Order stormtroopers must have made their initial advance. Two rows of smaller structures framed the near side of the palace. Every structure was slick with condensation. Black moss invaded the buildings in ugly splotches.
Mattis’s knees gave out, and he dipped into the muddy hummock. Lorica grabbed him and pulled him upright again.
“Thanks.”
“Welcome to our new home,” she said dryly.
Mattis didn’t know how much time had passed since then. It felt like days, but it was probably only hours. The stormtroopers had separated them upon arrival at the palace gates. The last thing Mattis saw of his friends was Jo being led into the palace proper while the rest of them were hustled toward the row of structures alongside.
Those complexes were divided into small cells. As the stormtroopers ushered him down the corridor, Mattis saw that some of the cells had bunks built into them, while others contained just nests of patchy blankets on the floor. One of their escorts peeled off from the group and took Lorica roughly with him. She didn’t speak to Mattis as he jerked his head back to watch her go; she nodded, though, and he thought that was a good sign. He suspected she was already planning an escape. Hopefully, she wouldn’t do anything too impulsive. Hopefully, she would take him with her.
Escape from Vodran Page 1