Escape from Vodran

by Disney Book Group

  She didn’t get to finish her thought, because out of the fog came the familiar figure of a stormtrooper. Ymmoss gave an angry growl. It was Patch. And behind him, a phalanx of his fellow stormtroopers followed.

  “Going somewhere?” Patch asked. It was impossible to be sure since the trooper had his helmet on, but Mattis was pretty confident Patch was looking directly at him.

  “Run,” Lorica whispered.

  “They’ll shoot us,” Mattis said.

  “Will they shoot Cost?” Cost asked.

  “Yes!” Mattis whisper-yelled. “They’ll shoot any of us!”

  AG gave his head a lazy roll from the troopers to the group then to the perimeter fence.

  “Say, Jo,” AG drawled. He nodded in the direction of the perimeter fence.

  “Get off of that wheel bike, Jerjerrod,” Patch commanded.

  “Gun it,” AG said plainly.

  Jo did. He gunned the engine and spun angry circles around the group of escapees. Mud flew in all directions, spraying up onto the stormtroopers’ armor and splattering their helmets. The troopers scattered and tried to surround the escapees, who were already running for the perimeter fence.

  Jo buzzed jagged circles between his running group of friends and the stormtroopers.

  “Oh, no,” Mattis said, mostly to himself, as they neared the perimeter fence. Blaster bolts kicked up the mud at his feet, but that didn’t matter to him right then. What mattered was what he saw coming out of the thicket just beyond the fence. “Jo!” he screamed. “The fence!”

  Jo looked in Mattis’s direction and to where Mattis was pointing, beyond the fence. Jo saw it, too, then. He jacked the wheel bike into a sharp turn, shooting up more mud, and sped toward the fence. Jo didn’t slow when he got to it. The wheel bike sliced through the perimeter fence like it was made of the softest snow. The charge coursing through the fence crackled all over the bike, and Jo threw himself from it as the vehicle’s electronic engine shut down and the bike crashed into the mud, hurling itself over and over until it came to rest at the feet of two enormous, hungry rancors.

  “Run! Now, run!” Lorica shouted.

  They ran. Gherd clung to Mattis like a backpack. They flung themselves into a tight group and swerved left, like a pack of dalgos fleeing an even greater predator, racing along the perimeter fence. The rancors gave chase but only momentarily, as they saw a much closer meal.

  The rancors turned on the stormtroopers, tearing into their group, unfazed by the plasma-fire that met them. Mattis looked over his shoulder as the larger rancor picked up Patch in a giant claw and gave a mighty roar.

  “Bye-bye, white-shells,” Gherd said, giggling.

  Mattis and his friends kept running.

  THEIR ADRENALINE pushed them farther and harder than they had known they could run. They were outside the perimeter fence now, but they had to return to the detention center if they wanted to steal a ship from the hangar. Mattis panted but stopped when he saw Lorica looking at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  She pointed in the direction from which they’d come. “Company,” she said.

  She hadn’t been looking at him. She’d seen the few stormtroopers who’d survived their encounter with the rancors and persisted in giving chase.

  “How many?” Jo asked.

  “Too many,” AG replied.

  They couldn’t run anymore, either. The stormtroopers were going to catch them and return them to their cells…or worse. It looked like none of the stormtroopers had blasters anymore, so maybe Mattis and his friends could fight their way out? Mattis didn’t like their chances, especially once the lead stormtrooper charged up an electrostaff. Two others followed suit.

  “We gonna fight?” AG asked the lead stormtrooper.

  The stormtrooper wiped mud from his mask and nodded. It was Patch. Patch had somehow survived being attacked by a rancor. Mattis really didn’t like their chances anymore.

  They fought. AG went after Patch. Patch struck AG hard in the chassis with his electrostaff, sending a current through the droid. AG shook it off and stood again.

  Meanwhile, another stormtrooper tackled Mattis. Both of them toppled into the mud, thrashing and punching, each trying to get up or get a hold on the other. Mattis whacked at the trooper’s helmet with his metal cylinder. It was proving to be a good weapon, though he was so covered in mud that he was having trouble finding enough purchase to hit very hard. Beyond them, Ymmoss saw what was happening and threw two stormtroopers off her. They sailed far and landed hard. Then she stalked over to Mattis, lifted the attacking stormtrooper off him, and raised the trooper over her head. She roared mightily and hurled the stormtrooper into the muck. He didn’t get up.

  “Thanks,” Mattis said. The Gigoran purred in response. Then she was sidelined by two stormtroopers, who tackled her to the ground. One hit her with an electrostaff, sending thousands of bolts through Ymmoss, who roared and whined in pain. Mattis didn’t think. He just went after the stormtrooper with his metal rod. As he approached the trooper, Mattis raised the rod over his head, ready to strike. He felt a soft warmth from above him, saw a faint blue light, and heard a low buzz. He lowered the rod to look at what had happened to it.

  It had turned on.

  He had turned it on.

  Mattis held a lightsaber. The rod with which he’d been digging was the hilt of a lightsaber. Mattis realized, fleetingly, that he might have sliced through the cell walls at any time, if he’d known what he’d had.

  Well, he knew now. He held the weapon of the Jedi, and he was going to use it.

  “Hey,” he said to the two stormtroopers attacking Ymmoss.

  They stopped and looked over to him.

  “Whoa,” one of them said.

  “Yeah,” Mattis agreed. He swung the lightsaber wide, making to strike the stormtrooper, maybe slice him in two. Instead, the lightsaber slipped from his hand, sailed through the air, and—thunk—landed in the mud. Its plasma-blade fizzled and disappeared back into the hilt.

  “Oh,” Mattis said. “That’s bad.”

  The stormtroopers nodded and both made for Mattis, leaving Ymmoss on the ground.

  Then, from the dark, almost too quickly for Mattis to comprehend, the lightsaber danced through the air, slashing at the two stormtroopers. Both fell back, unable to rise. Mattis adjusted his eyes and looked beyond the weapon’s soft glow to see its bearer: Lorica.

  She gave him a devious smile. She’d turned the tide of the fight.

  Lorica charged the other stormtroopers. She was a natural with the lightsaber, and she showed the stormtroopers just how much. The others stopped fighting as the stormtroopers fell, one by one, until only Patch remained. He and Lorica faced each other.

  “Lorica,” Mattis said, breaking the tension of the moment. He couldn’t help himself. “Are you a Jedi?”

  “No such thing,” Lorica replied. “Let’s go get a shuttle.”

  “You don’t need one,” Patch said. “One’s coming for you.”

  He was right. A small shuttle approached from the detention center, skimming the ground. It was flanked by All Terrain Recon Transport walkers stomping through the mud, a couple of stormtroopers on rusted BARC speeders, and even a piloted spider walker, picking its way over the fence.

  Lorica switched off the lightsaber. She couldn’t take on Wanten’s whole company. None of them were in any shape to fight any longer. They’d lost. They’d be prisoners again. If they were lucky.

  The shuttle hummed to a halt and hovered near them. Its bay door opened, ejecting a ramp. Wanten took a few wobbly steps down the ramp, called for a stormtrooper to accompany him, then leaned on the trooper’s shoulder as he walked the rest of the way down. He stopped short of stepping into the mud.

  “I want the Jerjerrod boy,” Wanten declared.

  “You’ll let my friends go?” Jo asked.

  Wanten looked confused for a moment, then said, “No, we’re going to kill them. Was that—you didn’t understand me. We want
you, and we’re going to blast the rest of them to so many pieces. You’re going to the First Order. Did you not understand? We talked about it earlier? I don’t think the First Order would like if I had you killed, boy, even though I would really relish doing that. I’d be great at it, too.”

  Mattis put his hands on his head. He didn’t want to be blasted, of course, but he didn’t see any way out of this.

  “Take your hands off of your head,” Lorica said. “Don’t surrender.”

  Mattis lowered his hands.

  They were standing close to one another, almost touching. AG stood on Mattis’s other side with a hand on Mattis’s shoulder. Gherd still clung to his back. Ymmoss was behind them. Cost stood beside Lorica. Jo planted himself in front of them, as if to shield them. They were still, waiting.

  “We can’t fight them,” Mattis said in a hushed tone. He took in the company of stormtroopers with blasters pointed at them, Wanten on his shuttle with his hands folded across his belly, and the bright detention center, formerly a Hutt’s palace, visible through the fog in the near distance.

  “We’re not going to fight them,” Lorica replied. Jo took a step forward. She reached her hand out and touched his shoulder, and he stopped moving. “None of us are fighting. None of us are going anywhere. But we’re going to face them, here, like this, now.”

  Lorica was calm, tranquil even. It didn’t make sense to Mattis until it did. Or maybe it didn’t matter. Her tranquility radiated out from her like a fog of its own making. It enveloped them and sedated them. Mattis wasn’t afraid to die anymore. He didn’t embrace it, but he didn’t fear it. He just accepted that death was his fate. He was glad he was surrounded by his friends. Maybe he would see Dec and Sari and Klimo in the next life, if there was one.

  When Mattis joined the Resistance, he knew there was every chance he might die. Even so, he’d expected that might happen while piloting an X-wing on some heroic mission and not on some humid swamp planet, standing unarmed against a full deployment of stormtroopers. And yet, he didn’t let fear overwhelm him. He couldn’t. Mattis had something that he’d never expected to find: his friends. They were a motley bunch—a son of the First Order, an ornery Zeltron, a monster droid with a backwoods drawl, a scary Gigoran, a mischievous nanak, a perplexed refugee from Genhu, and Mattis himself, an in-over-his head orphan who crawled out of a hemmel field on Durkteel to join the Resistance. The journey he’d been on those past months, the events that led up to this collection of oddballs standing in the mud, staring down a First Order brigade, were fraught with danger, fear, hate, misunderstanding, and anger. But they were also full of forgiveness, friendship, heroism, and love. If this was to be his final moment, Mattis possessed no regrets. He wouldn’t change a second of his life, not if it meant never having met these people he called his friends.

  He felt as one with the Force. Maybe he was, and maybe he wasn’t. But Mattis believed, and it gave him comfort in this, his final moment, and that was what mattered.

  Then everything went completely crazy.

  It began with a rain of plasma-fire from above. It exploded the ground around them. Mud burst into the air, splattering Mattis and his friends. The hail of plasma-fire created a wall of muck that separated them from the stormtroopers. Where was it coming from?

  “There!” Lorica shouted, shoving Mattis away from an incoming blast. She pointed to the sky. A small, boxy short-range fighter swooped in and out of view, blasting and tearing up the earth beneath them. It bore down on the phalanx of stormtroopers and fired, blasting them into the air and, some, into pieces.

  Gherd was screaming in his ear. Mattis couldn’t find AG, but he grabbed Cost by the hand and they ran away from the action, toward the thicket that surrounded the palace grounds. They didn’t get far before the boxy fighter ship touched down in the mud. It turned its guns on the gathered First Order troop.

  The ship’s bay door slid open, and an enormous Hutt was revealed, silhouetted against the golden light inside.

  “Give me back my pets!” the Hutt bellowed.

  Gherd shrieked and leaped from Mattis’s back.

  “Gherd, wait!” Mattis shouted.

  Gherd yelled back over his thin shoulder to Mattis, “It’s my Harra! It’s Harra the Hutt!”

  Gherd scampered up to his master and leaped into her arms. “Good boy,” Harra told her pet. “You’re a good boy. I missed you.”

  “You would dare return here?” Wanten blustered from the safety of his shuttle. “That’s crazy! That’s suicidal! We drove you out once, and we’ll do it again!”

  Stormtroopers fired at the Hutt’s ship.

  “No, you won’t!” Harra the Hutt roared back. “I have reinforcements this time!”

  “What reinforcements?” Wanten yelled.

  “I finally have friends!”

  They appeared from the sky like archaic winged creatures, four fighter ships of different shapes and sizes, as if pieced together from older, worn-out ships. They spit fire at the stormtroopers and mud splattered everywhere. The stormtroopers returned fire from their blasters, from the AT-RTs, and from the BARC speeders. The First Order fired upon those ships that swooped in and out of view; they fired at Mattis and his friends, who hunkered down and ran through the smoke and mud and tried to avoid being hit.

  “Mattis!” Lorica yelled at him from far away. She held her lightsaber up to a speeder that bore down on her. She was trusting that just holding her ground would split the speeder in two. She had no technique. She had something else: bravery.

  She didn’t flinch as the speeder struck the lightsaber and burst into two parts, each one flinging into the air and exploding. Lorica turned back to Mattis and pointed across the chaos. Wanten had rushed from his shuttle and grabbed Jo, who, after the beating he’d taken and the terrors of the attempted escape, was in no shape to fight. Wanten dragged Jo back to his shuttle.

  Mattis rushed for them. He wasn’t going to make it. He was going to lose his friend. The fighters returned and blasted the ground around Wanten, stopping the First Order commander momentarily. Mattis slogged ever closer.

  The Hutt was firing from her fighter, too. Mattis lost and regained sight of his friends until, finally, he couldn’t find anyone at all. He was alone. He watched as the bay doors to Wanten’s shuttle slid closed, Jo inside, captive again. Wanten would take him back to the First Order. Mattis watched sadly as the shuttle took off.

  The battle was ending. Most of the stormtroopers had fallen and the ones that hadn’t were fleeing back to the palace. The fighters gave chase, gunning down a few, then circling back and landing in the mud beside Mattis.

  Mattis, Lorica, AG-90, Cost, and Ymmoss had survived the battle. They picked up the troopers’ weapons. Lorica wielded the lightsaber; it hummed and crackled in the ever-present Vodran fog. Mattis clenched, ready to fight some more. He’d lost Jo already. He wouldn’t lose another friend.

  One of the fighter ship’s cockpits opened to reveal a scrappy-looking navigation droid. She jumped out of her ship with her hands raised.

  “Don’t shoot,” she said. “We serve Mistress Harra the Hutt. We shall regain her rightful throne.”

  Mattis shook his head. He had no idea what was going on.

  “Shoot them,” he told AG. He didn’t want to be fooled again.

  The hatches of the other two fighters hissed open.

  “I can’t shoot these folks,” AG told Mattis, stepping closer to his friend. “After all, that guy there’s my brother.”

  AG pointed to the figure emerging from the ship nearest to them. It was Dec. It really was Dec! He was alive! This time, Mattis did rush up and hug his friend. Dec was a hugger.

  “Sari!” Lorica yelled. Sari emerged from the other fighter.

  “You guys are covered in mud,” Sari said.

  “You’re welcome for saving your hides again,” Dec told Mattis, slapping him on the back. “Howdy, brother.”

  “What took you so long?” AG asked, with a smirk in his voice
.

  “Aw, you know me,” Dec said. “I met a bunch of droids and they introduced me to their Hutt pal, and next thing you know, we’re playing cards, swappin’ stories. I woulda been here sooner, but I was down about two hundred credits.”

  The brothers laughed. Mattis knew Dec was joking; it was his way. He knew Dec and Sari had returned to them as quickly as they could. Just in time, it turned out.

  Dec looked seriously at Mattis and asked, “Klimo?”

  Mattis just shook his head. Dec understood.

  “Where’s Jo?” Sari asked.

  “Wanten got him,” Mattis said sadly. “The commander of this detention center. He’s taking Jo to his parents.”

  “Well, we can’t let that happen, can we?” Dec asked. “Let’s skedaddle outta here, huh, before they’ve gone too far.”

  “Take my ship,” Harra the Hutt interjected. “You all have much to talk about, and this ugly beast will fit all of you. Plus, her guns are good.”

  “How can we thank you, Harra?” Mattis asked. He was glad the Hutt had returned for Gherd, whom she cradled and pet with her moist fingers. Gherd looked content.

  “Give me that,” Harra the Hutt said, pointing to Lorica.

  “Now, Harra, we had a deal,” Dec said. “You can’t have any of my friends.”

  Lorica looked sideways at Dec. “We’re not really friends,” she said in a friendly way. She approached Harra and powered down her lightsaber. “Here you go,” Lorica said. “This is what you want, right?”

  Harra the Hutt smiled and her tongue lolled out of her mouth. “Hmmmm, yes,” she said happily. “Wonderful, wonderful. Now,” she added, turning away from the group, “I must go and exterminate some pests from my palace.”

  “Hey, Hutt,” Dec called after her. Harra the Hutt stopped her jaunty hustle toward her palace and turned to Dec. He held up his hand, and she reached out and placed her chubby hand to his, palm to palm. “Be careful, okay?” he said.

  Mattis wondered what had happened between them, how they had met. It was odd to think that Dec had befriended a Hutt, but if anyone could, it was Dec.