A moment later, another stormtrooper, the one with the scratched lens, grabbed AG and hauled him down a connecting corridor. As he left, he told his cohort, “Put this one on ice in cell four.”
Mattis had little idea what being “put on ice” might entail and didn’t relish finding out, but his escort nodded and continued marching him down the corridor. When they were near the end, the stormtrooper punched some symbols on a keypad and an old-fashioned metal cage door slid open. He shoved Mattis inside. There was nothing in the cell except for a stool.
“Sit,” the stormtrooper said. Mattis sat. “Stay,” the stormtrooper commanded. Mattis stayed. Where else would he go? The stormtrooper had punched the cage door closed, so Mattis was trapped.
It was when so much time had passed that Mattis figured he’d been forgotten that he started thinking about General Leia. What would she do in his position? From the stories, Mattis knew she’d been captured at least once by the Empire. She’d faced more pain, more difficulty, more distress than he was presently. Mattis looked at the ceiling—gray, damp, cracked—he looked at the floor—damp, gray, cracked—and he took in each wall—cracked, damp, gray—just as he’d done mechanically for the past hour. Hours. Who knew how long?
As soon as that first stormtrooper had left, Mattis had inspected the cell. The walls were cracked, yes, but it would have taken a very large tool to bust through them. There were no windows. He was stuck.
Mattis could hear General Leia and Admiral Ackbar talking about him. Their words were indistinct. It sounded like Leia asked if she could open the door, and Admiral Ackbar said no, that Mattis was a trap. Leia disagreed and the door slid open with a screeching complaint, and Mattis woke, startled. He was slumped in the corner of the cell; he’d fallen asleep. Of course General Leia and Admiral Ackbar weren’t there. He’d been alone, captured, trapped. Alone until now, anyway.
A thick-trunked bald man in a First Order uniform stood in the cell doorway, staring with beady blue eyes at Mattis. He appeared to have once been athletic, but now the muscle had turned to fat that hung from his body in fleshy pillows. The man didn’t seem happy about that. He didn’t seem happy about anything. Mattis didn’t feel any need to try to change the man’s feelings.
The man wiped at the wave of sweat that crested on his brow and said, “What’s your name?”
Mattis didn’t speak, just continued to sit in the corner of the room. The pillowy man shook his head as if to say, So this is how it’s going to be? Well, it was, Mattis thought in response. This was exactly how it would be. Mattis and his friends were too new to the Resistance to have been taught capture protocol, but he was smart enough to keep quiet. It wouldn’t help anyone for Mattis to run his mouth, though his every instinct was telling him to do just that. He couldn’t help it. Babbling was his default response to overwhelming fear. But he thought about Lorica and the fierce look she’d have given him if she were there, so he kept his mouth shut.
The man let out a heavy, phlegmy sigh, as if the heat were pressing down on his chest. He pulled the stool closer to him. It screeched against the concrete floor. Mattis worried that if the man sat on it, the stool might break. The man seemed to think of this at the same moment and just rested a beefy hand on it and leaned on that.
“My name is Wanten. This”—he motioned vaguely all around him—“this is my place. It’s a detention center for the First Order of the first order.” The man paused, then added, “Rather, it will be. That’s my joke. When something is ‘of the first order’ it means that it is of a very high quality. As you can see, this detention center is not yet of a very high quality. But it will be.”
“It’s a bad start,” Mattis said. He couldn’t help himself. It made him feel a bit better to be insolent to this First Order chump.
Wanten pursed his lips in a kind of meaty smile. It was more unsettling than the frown. “You have a sense of humor,” Wanten said. “That’s good. A sense of humor will be necessary in this detention center.” He sidestepped the stool so that he could rest his other hand on it. “This room you are in is called the Bad Place. You do not want to be in here.”
Mattis looked around. The room was pretty bad; he already knew that. But if this was the Bad Place, then it stood to reason there might be better places in the detention center. When he sensed Wanten watching him do that calculation, Mattis studied the floor again.
“Yes,” Wanten continued, “there are better places. We have knocked down walls so that there are rooms larger than this, with beds and even blankets and sinks. You’ll see. You’ll be taken to one”—Mattis allowed himself a moment of hope before Wanten swept it away by saying—“if you cooperate.”
“Cooperate how?” Mattis asked, not intending to cooperate in the least.
“You’ll find that cooperation will afford you any number of perks and luxuries. Not just beds and blankets but time to exercise your skinny legs in the Fold.”
It took Mattis a moment to realize that the Fold was a place—a penned-in outdoor area where the mud had been scraped away or layered over with dirty, scratchy turf. He’d seen it as he was led from the palace gates to these barracks. It didn’t seem like a place he’d want to exercise or even spend much time at all, but it was, Mattis supposed, preferable to these dank, do-nothing cells.
“I would like to send you to the Fold. I would. But you need to give me a reason.”
Mattis stared at the floor.
“You’ll tell us everything you know about the terrorist group calling itself the Resistance,” Wanten said. “In return”—he made that unnerving grimace-smile again and opened his hands as if welcoming Mattis to his new home, which, in a way, he was—“you’ll have so many comforts. You won’t believe how many. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
Mattis shrugged.
Wanten sighed in a show of great false patience. “You’re young and don’t seem very able. Your knowledge, I suspect, is limited.” Wanten folded his hands together like a priest. “I don’t mean this as an insult. I mean to say that you don’t need to be afraid to divulge anything you know, because the breadth of what you know is really so narrow. I suspect that anything you tell me will only be so helpful.” On the word so, Wanten held his finger and thumb a few centimeters apart. “So you should feel agreeable to declare anything you know. Do you feel agreeable?”
Wanten then rested both of his loaf-sized hands on the stool, which buckled but didn’t break. He waited for Mattis to respond. Sweat glistened on the man’s thick scalp.
That was when Mattis felt what General Leia must have felt when she was captured by the Empire so long ago. Inadvertently, Wanten had shown Mattis a way to stay alive on Vodran, as well as Mattis’s own worth. This man, Wanten, was desperate for information, which made sense. A half-constructed detention center on a swamp planet was hardly the place for the First Order’s most elite officer. Wanten was, at best, a person with a small sphere of power who wanted more. It stood to reason that Wanten wouldn’t do anything too drastic to Mattis until Mattis gave him information that would put Wanten in his superiors’ charitable regard. And while he strung Wanten along, Mattis would catalogue details about this place, this place that the Resistance knew nothing about; if they had, certainly Admiral Ackbar wouldn’t have sent Mattis and his friends there. Mattis would endure whatever pain and torture Wanten brought upon him because, like Leia before him, Mattis now possessed that which the First Order could never extinguish.
Mattis had hope.
Wanten was quiet for a long time but for his mucousy breathing. When it became clear to him that Mattis wasn’t going to share any information, he stood up straight. Wanten was surprisingly tall.
“Fine, fine,” he said, still in that falsely friendly yet heartless tone. “You don’t need to tell me anything. After all, you weren’t taken alone, were you?”
Mattis went lightheaded.
“Your friend, the girl, maybe she’ll talk. Alternatively, it’s easy to make a droid tell his master things. And I c
ould easily become his master. And of course, there’s always the Jerjerrod boy,” Wanten said. “He’s already told me all about his time in the Resistance. Did you know your friend has been a spy for the First Order all of this time? Probably not. He’s a good boy, trustworthy. I’m sure you trusted him. I’m sure that everyone in the Resistance did. And he will tell us everything.”
Barely able to catch his breath, aghast at Jo’s treachery, Mattis reeled.
“But you’re a locked door, no, an impenetrable fortress. Your secrets are your own and you are teaching me how closely you guard them. I must give a lot to get even a little, is that right?” Wanten asked. Mattis tried not to react and mostly succeeded.
Wanten turned on his heel and took two steps out of the cell. He spoke to the stormtrooper at the door. “If the boy tells us his name, right now, see to it that he’s taken to a shared cell and given a clean blanket and mattress. But only if, right now, he tells us his name.” Mattis didn’t care about the blanket and the mattress—he’d grown up in a Durkteel orphanage—but he hoped with all the Force he could muster that they might put him in a cell with Lorica. And Lorica would know what to do. She always knew what to do.
Mattis told them his name.
WANTEN LEFT THE CELL, pleased. It had taken him too long, but he had at least found the road to breaking the boy. Mattis Banz. The name meant nothing to Wanten, who in any case paid little attention to the details in the briefings he received from the First Order. He was, after all, merely a glorified caretaker for a crude detention facility on a fetid planet in the middle of nowhere.
Wanten’s contemporaries, what few remained of them, were now officers in the First Order. But not Wanten. No, Wanten, for the greater part of his lifetime, skated from do-nothing position to do-less-than-nothing position, never given any real responsibility. He’d made one mistake, early in his career, when he was a stormtrooper for the Empire. He hadn’t even been free of his teenaged years when it happened! And still, all this time later, he was being punished for it. They told him he was irresponsible. That he had no ambition. That he didn’t try.
They were wrong. In those days, in his youth, he’d really tried hard. But the galaxy conspired against him, over and over. His eyesight was poor, so he was placed in an inferior squadron of shiftless stormtroopers. His helmet never fit correctly, and due to his Corellian nose, it was difficult to wear. His better eye was obstructed by the lenses, making him clumsy in the armor.
They sent him to Tatooine. It was hot. Wanten hated the heat. He hated breathing in his own smells in that sweaty helmet. And there was sand. So much sand. His armor wasn’t vacuum-sealed or anything, and even now Wanten could easily conjure the grinding of grit and silt in its joints. It was a constant distraction. So could he really be blamed for not being quite as attentive as perhaps he ought to have been? Nothing interesting ever happened on Tatooine anyway.
Still, he’d been punished for things that weren’t really his fault. He’d been left to make sand castles on Tatooine while he watched as his friends and peers were promoted. He missed all the good battles—Endor, Jakku. Granted, he’d probably have been killed had he been there, but that kind of action was, Wanten often thought, preferable to running border checks on a planet no one cared to visit.
His time on that desert planet had given Wanten a lifetime antipathy for Hutts. Tatooine’s crime lord ran the smuggling of weapons and spices, levied a water tax during drought, and coordinated the buying and selling of slaves, among other illegitimate businesses. There was an uneasy alliance between Jabba the Hutt’s coterie and the occupying Empire forces. The Hutt was really in control of Tatooine. The Empire maintained a presence there only as a show of power. Or maybe they were on a mission? It had been such a long time ago on a planet so far away that Wanten couldn’t remember.
One of the rare tiny pleasures Wanten took from his assignment on Vodran—a duty he’d been given, he knew, because there were no expectations of success, as well as little to bungle—was that it had, upon his arrival, been a Hutt stronghold. Harra the Hutt, another disgusting personage like all of her kind, had built a palace upon the driest land she could find (which was still too swampy), consolidated the holdings of her predecessor by banishing or enslaving the natives of Vodran, and amassed a menagerie from all corners of the galaxy. It had made Wanten smile to order his troops to kill or expel everyone at Harra the Hutt’s palace and to claim the throne room as his quarters. He still liked to look out of the high window to see the odd animal from her collection attempt to return “home.” But there was no home for those creatures. They’d been set loose to live or die in the Vodran swamps, as there was no place there for Hutts any longer. Harra had escaped with her life. The First Order called it a failure of Wanten’s leadership, but Wanten cared little. The Hutt was gone, and the palace was his. What hadn’t fled or been killed—mostly service droids—was shuttled to a nearby moon with anything else Wanten or the First Order found useless.
After that, the drudgery began. Construction was not interesting to Wanten. It was mostly math. Wanten was bored by math. The First Order had contractors who made those plans. Wanten’s responsibilities, which weren’t many, were mainly to keep the younger recruits on task, to keep the perimeter fence erect so that animals didn’t overtake the place, and to send weekly reports to the First Order. Those reports became so tedious, however, that Wanten’s superiors at first began rescheduling their holo-calls and then canceled them altogether. All of which suited Wanten. He was prepared to live out the remainder of his days—which he suspected would also not be many—moist, warm, annoyed, and bored on this squishy planet. And then arrived Mattis Banz and his friends.
It was as if Monagha Schnelle, the fabled gift-giving red she-wolf from the holiday stories Wanten had heard as a youth, had arrived upon Vodran. These were children, yes, but they were also members of the Resistance and therefore might be valuable to Wanten’s superiors. He must be careful not to present his prize to the First Order too soon, or they might claim it from under his nose and deny Wanten the credit he deserved. No, Wanten would press the children for information. He would squeeze them until their vital juices yielded something he could offer to his superiors, and then he would withhold even that! Yes, this was a wonderful plan. He’d make his own bosses bring him to the supreme leaders themselves! They would certainly promote him to a righteous place in the First Order then.
Wanten was still smiling as he made his way through the barracks, across the sodden Fold, and into the main throne room, where the Jerjerrod boy awaited him. The boy stiffened when Wanten entered. Of course the boy would be nervous. His arrival at Wanten’s compound was degrading. The Jerjerrods were among the First Order’s elite. That their progeny would be so coarsely escorted by lowly stormtroopers was an embarrassment. This boy couldn’t know that Wanten respected those old Empire families, those dynasties that had not wavered in their devotion to a better galaxy through any means necessary, from the monarchy that rose from the Old Republic to this new First Order. It would be Wanten’s job to put the boy at ease. Then Jo Jerjerrod would tell Wanten all he needed to know.
“Is Mattis okay?” Jo asked, once Wanten was seated on what used to be Harra the Hutt’s throne. Wanten had ordered the stormtroopers who arrived with him months before to make alterations so that a non-Hutt might be comfortable upon it. They hadn’t done an outstanding job; these First Order stormtroopers didn’t hold a candle to the troops in Wanten’s day, as far as he was concerned, but the addition of some cushions and blocks of wood to approximate something more chair-like was sufficient.
“Is it possible that this boy is your friend?” Wanten asked. The way he said friend made it sound like profanity. “What would your parents say? I’m pretty sure they don’t have friends. People in the Empire”—Wanten corrected himself—“in the First Order don’t have friends.”
“He was in my squadron, sir.”
Wanten nodded. Whether or not Mattis was Jo’s friend made litt
le difference to him. Both Jo and those with whom he’d arrived were a means to an end. Wanten scanned the room and took in the two stormtroopers who flanked him wherever he went. He assumed they weren’t interested in his conversation with his captive.
“He wasn’t helpful to me, if you were wondering,” Wanten said playfully.
“He wouldn’t be,” Jo replied. “He’s too well trained to tell you anything right away.”
Wanten nodded for Jo to continue.
“Mattis, Lorica, and Aygee-Ninety may be new recruits, but the Resistance isn’t so ineffectual that they wouldn’t train their people for this contingency. They’ll keep quiet for a while, sir. They’ll try to figure out a way to escape or to contact the Resistance for rescue.”
“Luckily,” Wanten said, “I have you.”
Jo shook his head and looked disappointed. “I can’t help you,” he said.
“What can you possibly mean?”
“Mattis and the others? They know more than I do.”
“You were in their squadron, weren’t you? You say you were.” Wanten narrowed his eyes.
“I was,” Jo said. “But they didn’t trust me. None of them did, not even the Resistance commanders. So, I know some things—rules of conduct, a few names—but they know more.”
“And they won’t tell me anything today,” Wanten confirmed.
Jo nodded. “Nor tomorrow, sir.”
“Do you recommend a course of action, Mr. Jerjerrod, to circumvent the Resistance’s training?” Wanten asked. He really was curious. Jo came from an Imperial dynasty. Would he possess the same cunning, strategic mind as his parents and grandparents?
Jo said, “Put them in a cell together. All three of them. They’re not good soldiers; though they know some of the protocols, they’re undisciplined. They’ll talk amongst themselves, as long as they’re relatively unguarded.”
Escape from Vodran Page 2