Escape from Vodran

by Disney Book Group

  Mattis didn’t know what he’d done to deserve being smashed by a vicious Gigoran, but he clenched his eyes closed and waited for his death.

  Instead, he heard a loud thump, followed by a cracking sound and another furious roar.

  Mattis opened his eyes. He wasn’t dead; the sound hadn’t been his skull cracking between two enormous Gigoran paws. So what had made that noise?

  Past his feet, on the ground some meters away, Lorica sat atop Ymmoss, holding the Gigoran down and stroking the side of her face. Ymmoss groaned a high-pitched whine, but allowed Lorica to continue. Mattis shook his head. He had to be hallucinating.

  Propping himself on his elbows for a better look, he caught the Gigoran’s eye and she gave a terrific roar, throwing Lorica off her and rising to go after Mattis again.

  “Hey!” Lorica shouted, pulling herself up from her tumble. “I broke one finger. I don’t have to stop there.”

  Ymmoss cocked her big head at Lorica and bared her teeth. She made a few explanatory growling noises.

  “She says her problem isn’t with you, even though you broke her finger,” Cost told Lorica.

  “I don’t care,” Lorica informed Cost, never taking her eyes from Ymmoss.

  The Gigoran groaned.

  “You should care,” Cost said.

  “I’ve been told that a lot,” Lorica said, and launched herself again at Ymmoss. This time, though, the Gigoran was ready for her. She went to bat Lorica away, but Lorica was fast, so instead of a strong, resolute whack, the best Ymmoss managed was a half swat that, from a Gigoran, was still pretty powerful. It didn’t send Lorica flying back from whence she came, as Ymmoss might have hoped, but it did put her on the ground.

  Mattis panicked, of course. He’d have hoped he’d show more courage in a situation like this, but he’d never been in a situation like this. He’d never really thought of being in a situation like this. Attacked by an enraged Gigoran for no reason at all? Who would think of that? Not Mattis! No one Mattis could think of would think of it! Mattis had always thought his confrontations would be seen from an X-wing cockpit. Hand-to-hand combat was terrifying to him.

  Though not to Lorica, obviously. Once on the ground, she swept with her leg, catching the Gigoran behind her knee. Ymmoss buckled but didn’t fall. Lorica did, however, now have Ymmoss’s full attention.

  “He’s with me,” Lorica hissed. “You attack him, you attack me, and I’m not afraid of an overgrown lint ball.”

  “I am,” Mattis chirped. Lorica silenced him with a look.

  Off to the side, Cost cleared her throat loudly.

  “What?” Lorica said.

  Cost cleared her throat again.

  Rolling her eyes, Lorica added, “She’s with me, too, I guess. So, no hurting either of them.”

  Ymmoss roared.

  “She’s not afraid of you,” Cost translated.

  “Fine,” Lorica retorted. “Like I said, the feeling’s mutual.”

  Another cry came from Ymmoss, and the Gigoran wheeled around and lunged for Lorica. She managed to swat her this time, and Lorica hurled backward into the Snivvian and Gamorrean, who’d paused their game to watch the fracas. The Snivvian lifted Lorica up, and she shook him off abruptly.

  “Don’t help,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” he replied, laughing.

  By now, Ymmoss had turned back to Mattis. Mattis rallied all of his courage, took a deep breath, and charged the Gigoran. He didn’t think he’d actually do her any harm, but maybe he would succeed in not embarrassing himself completely. As he ran, Ymmoss swung at him; through some dumb instinct, Mattis ducked and found himself in her very close personal radius. He could smell the thick odor of her fur. Both Ymmoss and Mattis were surprised to find Mattis in such close proximity, and both paused before Mattis regained his sense and punched the Gigoran as hard as he could in her chest.

  Nothing.

  It was as if an insect had bumped into her midflight, only less annoying. Ymmoss looked down at him from her great height and bellowed an enormous spittle-filled roar, her hot, meaty breath clogging Mattis’s nose and throat until he stumbled backward. She reached out to grab him and was again caught off guard by Lorica, who flew in from behind, landing both of her feet on the Gigoran’s back and taking them all to the ground.

  If Ymmoss had been playing an aggressive Gigoran game earlier, now she was truly incensed. She thrashed at Mattis and Lorica wildly, clawing huge scratches in Mattis’s chest. She tried to rise, but Lorica wrapped her arms around Ymmoss tightly and struggled to keep her in the mud where, perhaps, the chaos would give the Gigoran the disadvantage.

  “Her—legs—” Lorica managed to grunt before Ymmoss belted her across the jaw. But to Lorica’s credit, she held fast.

  Mattis managed to follow directions and wrap himself around Ymmoss’s thrashing legs. Her knee pounded against his scratched chest, sending a blaze of pain throughout his torso that he could feel in the tips of his fingers, but he held on as Lorica again pressed herself into the Gigoran’s matted fur and stroked Ymmoss’s head. It was a strange way to fight, but it seemed to calm the Gigoran at least a little, though she did still kick out every few seconds, sending fresh bursts of pain through Mattis. Lorica’s lips were moving, but Mattis couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  Then the shock came.

  A bolt of electricity coursed through the Gigoran’s body and then through Mattis’s and Lorica’s, too, rending them apart from each other. They landed heavily in the dirt, panting to catch their breaths. Ymmoss tried to stand against the purple current that danced about her, singeing her fur, and the guard holding the electrostaff pulsed her again. This time, the Gigoran fell face-first into the mud, then rolled onto her side, purring softly in pain, clutching her stomach against the diminishing current.

  Lorica pulled herself to her knees. Her jaw was bruised from the Gigoran’s punch. Her hair was caked to her face with mud, and her arms, where they weren’t covered, were scraped. Mattis held his head just high enough from the ground to take her in, feeling a tiny whirlwind of anger and sorrow, of gratitude and remorse, before rolling himself over to a sitting position.

  Once there, when he had caught his breath and the Fold around him came back into focus, only then did he recognize the guard who’d broken up their fight: it was AG-90, polished to a new sheen, his chest plate baring the unmistakable insignia of the First Order.

  “WE NEED TO GO somewhere!” Sari yelled in Dec’s ear. Dec wasn’t as strong a pilot as AG-90, but he’d done enough hunting and trapping from his modified speeder bike back on Ques to deal with distractions while he piloted.

  “We are going somewhere!” he hollered back.

  It was unlike Sari to shout. It was unlike Dec to reply unkindly. They weren’t acting like themselves. But in fairness, they were being pursued by First Order shuttles through a ring of detritus that circled the swamp planet below.

  “Where? You’re just dodging space junk,” Sari reasoned. She was back to her usual low tone and volume.

  “You have to stop yelling at me,” Dec said, unable to resist making the joke. He banked their shuttle hard to avoid some rather mean-looking debris.

  “Dec.” Sari rested her hand on his shoulder. “We have to get away from here.”

  Was she telling him to save their own lives, to leave the others on Vodran with the First Order? Dec wouldn’t. And Sari ought to know that he wouldn’t.

  “I won’t leave ’em, Sari,” he said. “I’m not leaving our friends. My brother,” Dec said with what he hoped was finality.

  “Great. Perfect. All we need to do is evade the First Order on our tails and avoid the space junk all around us,” Sari complained. “And conserve enough fuel to get us back to Vodran to save them from who knows what. This would be easier if we had artillery.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Dec told her. “The First Order shuttles must not have artillery, either, or we wouldn’t even be in this jam.” Dec smiled and banked the
shuttle again, just avoiding half a discarded skiff floating along inconveniently.

  “Dec, do something,” Sari said.

  Dec nodded. He could outmaneuver these wing-dings. He’d dodged drift bark on the swamps of Ques since he was five years old. Dec flew the shuttle over and through the debris, which stretched into a long belt of metal and other refuse across the curve of the planet below.

  “I’m gonna get closer to some of this stuff,” Dec told Sari. “Hold on to something.”

  Sari already looked pretty green. She fell back into one of the passenger seats and strapped herself in, tugging the flimsy belt across her massive body.

  Dec bore toward a spinning piece of metal just ahead of them. His brother would’ve slipped over and around that hunk of debris with ease and flair. Dec knew he could do it, but the best he could hope for was minor damage to their own shuttle and the chance that one of their pursuers would hit it. When he should have slowed down, Dec gunned the shuttle’s engines and flew within meters of the spinning wreckage. A jagged edge came up and ground against his ship. Dec pulled abruptly upward, turning and spinning the shuttle as smaller debris buffeted the cockpit, sparking and chafing the glass.

  Behind and below, their closest pursuer wasn’t so lucky. The First Order shuttle didn’t pull up as Dec had done, and the spiked metal junk sliced raggedly through it. Its pilot floated off into space, and what remained of his ship joined the rest of the wreckage in dangerous orbit.

  “Dec, what’s that?” Sari leaned forward in her seat, squinting through the viewport.

  “More junk, probably,” Dec said, flipping switches and turning dials on his flight controls while attempting to avoid any more close calls but still keep the two remaining shuttles off his back.

  “No, look,” she demanded.

  “Kinda busy right now, pal,” Dec replied.

  “Dec! Look out!”

  Dec was so busy staring down at his flight screens that he barely noticed the small moon into whose orbit they were flying. Their shuttle juddered and banked as they flew into the moon’s gravitational sphere, and Dec pulled hard on his controls. They shot down into the moon’s clouded atmosphere. Behind them, one of their pursuing ships lost control and, unable to compensate for the moon’s gravity or its sudden entry, spun front to back over and over, then plummeted to the surface. No one could have survived the crash.

  The other First Order ship lost them in the clouds. For the moment.

  It was another minute before Dec fully regained control and they could take in their surroundings.

  “What is this?” Dec asked.

  “It’s a moon,” Sari told him.

  “Not one of Vodran’s,” he said. “This moon, if it is one, didn’t show up on scans.” Dec took in the heavy, low cloud cover and the empty green swathes of land below. “Why didn’t it show up on scans, Sari?”

  Sari shrugged. “Could be any number of things,” she said. “Could be a naturally occurring phenomenon. Like some mineral deposits below its crust make it invisible to scans. Could be that someone is cloaking it somehow. I mean, I guess that technology is possible.” She sounded more curious than fearful, though Dec thought it ought to be the other way around. But Sari had a scientific mind, and this invisible moon had piqued her interest.

  The comm had stopped squawking since they had entered the moon’s orbit. Sari studied it, intrigued, then turned back to Dec.

  “Look,” she said, sensing his apprehension, “we ditched two of those First Order scouts, but that other one knows we’re here. He followed us down here. Whatever is masking the moon from outside scans also makes communication from its orbit impossible. Comm channel is quiet, right? That’s a good thing. He can’t signal Vodran that we’re here.”

  “Unless he turns around and leaves the moon.”

  “But then he risks losing us altogether. Scans don’t work here due to whatever is blocking the moon itself.”

  “What’re you getting at, Sari?”

  “I’m saying this invisible moon is a good place to hide. Even if the First Order sends a whole squadron, they won’t be able to find us until they literally fall into our laps.”

  Dec considered it. He didn’t like the idea of cooling their heels on some ghost moon while his brother and their friends were down on Vodran.

  “It’s as good a plan as we have right now,” Sari said. “We can stay here and regroup, at least. We won’t be able to send out communications, but no one—First Order or Resistance—will be able to find us, either. And that’s okay for now, isn’t it?”

  “We can’t just fly in circles,” Dec said, surveying the visible stretches of land in front of him. What he could see through the low fog, anyway.

  “No, we’ll have to find somewhere to set down,” Sari agreed. “Like there.” She pointed to where a small gray bunker appeared, as if it had been dropped into a green pasture.

  “What is it?”

  “Only one way to find out. At least it isn’t a First Order stronghold,” Sari reasoned. “They’d never hole up in something so ugly.”

  Dec knew he was supposed to laugh, but he couldn’t. He piloted the shuttle toward the bunker, knowing even as he did that it was a dangerous idea.

  “I’M HUNGRY.” It was the first thing Lorica had said to Mattis in hours.

  After AG-90, now a First Order guard droid, broke up their fight in the Fold, he’d escorted Mattis, Lorica, and Cost back to their cell and left them to stew. That’s what he’d said. “Stew over what you did.” It was and it wasn’t the kind of thing the old AG might say. There was something different about his voice and the way he carried himself. Not to mention the First Order insignia on his chest plate. But “stew over what you did.” Mattis just didn’t know what to make of that. He wanted to talk to Lorica about it, but upon arriving at their cell, she slumped in her bunk with her arms crossed. A stormtrooper eventually brought in antiseptic wipes and some gauze dressings, the latter of which did not look sterile at all. But they did the job of mopping up the blood that had crusted on their wounds, and though he was still a bit wobbly from the electro-shock AG had given them, Mattis did feel better once he’d cleaned himself up. At least he wasn’t finding Gigoran fur in uncomfortable places.

  “I’m hungry, too,” Mattis said, realizing as he said it that it was true.

  Lorica glared at him.

  “Hey,” Mattis said with more anger in his tone than he’d intended, but then he was hungry, and that was making him cranky. “I didn’t start that fight.”

  “You didn’t finish it, either,” Lorica huffed.

  “Neither did you! Aygee did. Our friend. He electro-shocked us!”

  “Doesn’t look like he’s our friend anymore,” Lorica said with venom.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Mattis agreed angrily. “Don’t you think we should talk about that?”

  “Why? It’s obviously too late. They got him. They got Jo. Who do you think is next?” She raised an eyebrow, implying that it wouldn’t be her.

  “That Gigoran did not like you, for starters!” Cost chirped from her perch above Lorica, then peeled into loud, sharp laughter.

  “Hey, c’mon,” Mattis said. “That’s not fair. I didn’t do anything!”

  “You actually didn’t do anything,” Lorica agreed. “You barely got out of the way.”

  Mattis didn’t think that was true. He thought that, faced with a rampaging Gigoran, he had done just about enough—which was, sure, very little. But he didn’t get his face clawed off, either, so he considered himself successful.

  Mattis let out a long sigh, signaling to Lorica that he didn’t want to say what he was about to say. But that was a show, of course. He was happy that they were talking. “Thanks for saving me,” he said.

  “What else was I gonna do?” she responded. Her cool response was undermined when her stomach rumbled irritably. “I’m so hungry,” she complained.

  “They have to feed us eventually, right?” Mattis reasoned.

&
nbsp; Cost hopped down off her bunk and started her pacing ritual. Back and forth she went, flapping her arms and running them up and down along the back wall. “Do you hear it?” she asked. When they didn’t respond, she repeated, “Do you hear it? Do you hear it?” Her perseverance made Mattis wish he’d had his ears ripped off by the Gigoran.

  “They can do whatever they want, Mattis,” Lorica said sharply. “We’re their prisoners.”

  “But they want information, right?”

  “They probably already have it! They reprogrammed Aygee, so maybe they got whatever he had out of him before they did that. And Jo—like you said, he doesn’t care about us.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “You said he turned. Or that he was never one of us at all. Same thing. I’m sure he told them everything by now.”

  “Do you hear it? Do you hear it?” Cost’s refrain grew louder and faster. “Doyouhearit? Doyouhearit?”

  “Cost, shut up!” Lorica spat, and cursed their cellmate in Zeltron.

  “Well, maybe he didn’t!” Mattis shouted. Somehow he’d wound up in the odd position of defending Jo. Maybe it was the hunger that was making his mind as weak as his body.

  “Let’s pretend he did,” Lorica snapped. “It’s what you were trying to tell me before. So let’s just say they know everything that we know. Which isn’t much, is it?”

  “I know some things,” Mattis countered, annoyed.

  “You don’t know anything. You don’t even know where the Resistance base is.”

  “You don’t, either!”

  “The scritching-scratching! It’s in the walls, friendies. It’s in the walls.” Cost pounded on the walls with her little fists and yelled, “Doyouhearit? Doyouhearit?”

  “I know more than you do!” Lorica stood now, bumping her head on the upper bunk, swearing again. “Cotoogi, Mattis!” she yelled.

  “Don’t get mad at me!” Mattis shouted. If they were going to continue this fight, then yelling was their best option to hear one another over Cost’s carrying on.