The Last Jedi

by Jason Fry

  But Finch Darrow was a capable pilot. He’d do his job, just as she’d do hers.

  Cobalt Hammer gave a little lurch, and Paige couldn’t resist reaching into the collar of her flight suit to touch the medallion around her neck.

  Then there was nothing below her but black and endless space. Every muscle in Paige’s body tensed during the fraction of a second before her brain was able to process that she wasn’t falling. Then she was pressed back in her seat as Cobalt Hammer accelerated to attack speed.

  “Releasing weapons lock,” Finch said in Paige’s ears. “Spennie, Paige, look sharp.”

  Paige rotated her dual laser cannons—left, right, up and down, nodding at the purr of her ball turret’s gimbals.

  “Guns hot, systems green,” Spennie said coolly from the rear turret.

  “I’m good to go,” Paige said. Her eyes slid from the bombers on either side of Cobalt Hammer to the green globe of D’Qar to the X-wings and A-wings beyond them. Rose’s bafflers couldn’t hide the bombers during an attack run, so the equipment had been stripped out, leaving the bombers relying on fighter escorts. Far ahead, Paige could see three brighter stars that she knew were the First Order attackers.

  “My scope’s negative for bandits,” Spennie said. “Where are the enemy fighters?”

  “Feeling lonely, Spen?” asked Nix Jerd, Cobalt Hammer’s bombardier.

  “Cut the chatter,” Finch said. “We’ll have more company than we want any minute now.”

  Paige’s headset crackled and a new voice was in her ear—that of Tallie Lintra, the squadron commander.

  “Bombers, keep that formation tight,” she warned. “Fighters, protect the bombers—don’t get drawn into dogfights. Let me hear you say copy that, Starck.”

  “No fun, copy that,” replied Stomeroni Starck, Tallie’s wingmate.

  “All right then. Let’s do some damage and buy our fleet some time.”

  Paige’s turret was barely big enough for her, let alone a holographic tank like those found on warship bridges and in ready rooms, offering a computer-constructed overview of a battle and its participants. Fortunately, she didn’t need one. She knew the formation the squadron had assumed for their attack run—she’d reviewed it repeatedly during the briefings on Refnu and while traveling through hyperspace to D’Qar.

  The dots of the First Order warships were larger and brighter now. Paige forced herself to breathe in and out, slowly and deeply. For now, the bombers and their escort fighters were flying straight at the enemy, their formation rock-solid and undisturbed by enemy fire.

  The quiet was unnerving—because Paige knew it was about to be shattered.

  * * *

  —

  Aboard the Raddus, Ackbar studied the holotank that Paige Tico was only able to see in her head.

  Once, Ackbar would have rejected a bridge holotank as a crutch for inattentive commanders. But his vision wasn’t what it had once been, and in recent years he’d noticed that he was no longer able to process information with the same speed and precision he’d once taken for granted.

  He didn’t like to admit it, but denying it was folly: He’d grown old.

  In a kinder galaxy, Ackbar supposed, that would have meant it was time for him to retire to a grotto in a warm lagoon on Mon Cala, surrounded by schools of descendants who’d take turns pretending to be interested in his war stories. But he didn’t live in that galaxy. This one was full of surprises, most of them unpleasant of late, and its people still needed him, regardless of the blurriness at the edges of his vision or the details that no longer proved so simple to organize.

  Self-pity is for humans. You can float in your own tide pool later. For now, stiff fins and sharp teeth.

  The Raddus and the three other Resistance capital ships had responded to D’Qar’s distress call at all speed after the Starkiller raid, delivering bombers and starfighters to defend the evacuation Ackbar knew would be a necessity. Now the Raddus was at the rear of the Resistance formation, where it could interpose its augmented shield envelope between the smaller ships and the First Order attackers.

  The bombers and starfighters were beyond the shield envelope’s protection, moving at top speed toward the Siege Dreadnought—the most dangerous enemy ship on the battlefield. As soon as the evacuation was complete, those bombers and fighters would need to be recalled so the fleet could jump to hyperspace.

  With any luck that would be soon—those eight StarFortresses were the only bombers the Resistance had left. They’d been unavailable for the Starkiller raid, forcing Ackbar and the other Resistance leaders to improvise an attack by commandos and starfighters to crack the First Order’s defenses. The plan had worked, but it had been a near thing—and Ackbar didn’t want to be left hoping for favorable currents again in the future.

  Still, galactic history was filled with commanders who’d lost today’s battle by worrying about tomorrow’s. The transports were carrying essential Resistance equipment and personnel, and they’d needed the bombers to buy time to get them off D’Qar. It was that simple; there was no point complicating it with anxiety about a future that might never arrive.

  So how much more time did they need to buy? Ackbar reached out and tapped the tank’s controls, accessing PZ-4CO’s data banks. He tugged at his chin barbels, trying to derive a time estimate from the droid’s data. Bollie Prindel could have made sense of it much more quickly, but the quartermaster was busy directing the stowage of supplies brought up from D’Qar.

  As he pondered PZ-4CO’s information, Ackbar overheard some of the younger officers—he often called them the fry, to General Organa’s amusement—speculating about why the First Order hadn’t launched fighter squadrons and seemed content to let its battlewagons trundle into position above D’Qar.

  It was the right question to ask, but Ackbar knew the fry would come up with the wrong answer. As the young so often did, they were arguing about tactics but failing to consider personalities. Hux’s principal concern wasn’t winning an engagement, but demonstrating the First Order capabilities and might for a galactic audience. He envisioned his massive Dreadnought coolly incinerating the Resistance from orbit, a spectacle he imagined would cow those worlds not already stunned into submission by the destruction of Hosnian Prime.

  Ackbar inflated his gular sac in disapproval, the gurgle drawing a startled glance from one of the young humans. Hux was a vicious little squig, but yet to grow into his teeth—he had the ruthlessness of age but none of its wisdom. A veteran commander worried about winning, not playing to an audience. Narratives were far easier to shape than battles, and they could be composed in safety and at leisure.

  Hux was a fool—but a fool with vastly superior forces at his command.

  The data window from D’Qar began blinking. Ackbar accessed it and looked up from the tank, allowing himself a fingerling’s pride at being the first to deliver good news.

  “The last transports are in the air,” he said.

  Leia Organa’s eyes—tiny, pathetically inadequate for use in low light, and ignorant of other, richer wavelengths—jumped to his. She spoke into her comm: “Poe, the evacuation’s almost complete. Just keep them busy a little longer.”

  As she spoke, dots winked into existence around the First Order ships.

  “One cannon left,” Poe said. “And here comes the parade.”

  The Dreadnought had finally launched its fighters.

  * * *

  —

  Dozens of TIEs swarmed around the Siege Dreadnought, but only three of them veered off from their initial vector to pursue Poe across the warship’s topside. His instinctive surge of relief quickly turned to alarm—the other TIEs were headed for the approaching bombers, which were far more vulnerable than his X-wing.

  Stay on target, Poe reminded himself. The best way to support the bombers was to destroy that final cannon, rather than
run off chasing TIEs and leave it free to wreak havoc. And the cannon would be in his sights in another moment.

  Poe rolled Black One slightly for a better angle, but the lead TIE pilot had anticipated that, and the three fighters swooped up from below, blasting away at the X-wing’s undercarriage. Red lights flared on his console.

  “Damn! Beebee-Ate, my weapons systems are down. We need to take out that last cannon or our bombers are toast. Work your magic!”

  Behind Poe in the starfighter’s droid socket, BB-8 was already dealing with a lengthy list of mostly irrelevant alerts from the X-wing’s central computer. That was nothing new: Every astromech in the Resistance droid pool could tell you that Black One was a prickly, vainglorious machine.

  The X-wing had used its very first processor cycle after BB-8 jacked into the droid slot to flag taking off without having completed the preflight checklist as a mission-critical risk. BB-8 had deleted that alert, only to discover Black One had elevated twenty-eight maintenance alerts to the top of its priority queue. BB-8 patiently reslotted them below action items such as engine ignition and shield generator start, only to see the maintenance items reappear atop the list one by one. The astromech had solved that through brute force, locking Black One out of the maintenance subroutine entirely—which had generated an entirely new round of complaints.

  With an electronic sigh, BB-8 extended various tools from his six swappable tool-bay disks, using everything from magnetometers to ion pulse tracers to seek out the source of the malfunction while fielding a new alert from Black One: The starfighter thought it was important to warn BB-8 about possible danger to its gyroscope from solar flares.

  Solar flares? Really?

  The Resistance astromechs classified Black One as a high-communications-volume interface. BB-8 searched his memory for an organic equivalent of that classification, and found a high-confidence answer almost immediately.

  Black One was a pain in the ass.

  Poe, of course, knew none of this—BB-8 would have been a sorry astromech indeed if he had. The pilot was corkscrewing the X-wing through increasingly dizzy spins, trying to throw off his pursuers while leaving himself in position to whip around and target that last First Order cannon.

  “Tallie, heads-up!” he called.

  In her A-wing, Tallie saw the TIEs rocketing toward her in skirmish formation and grimaced.

  “Here they come!” she yelled. “Gunners! Look alive!”

  Then the black-hulled starfighters were hurtling through the formation, like dire hounds loose among the whellays back home on Pippip 3. An X-wing in Kaiden Scorbo’s flight was stitched by laserfire and sheared in two, the pilot’s scream mercifully cut short. Zanyo Arak’s pilots doubled back to fire at the First Order hunters, while the bombers’ rear and belly turrets opened up, filling the emptiness around them with crisscrossing fire.

  “They’re everywhere!” yelled Jaycris Tubbs, panic cresting in his voice. “I can’t—”

  Tubbs’s transmission vanished into static. A TIE dropped onto the tail of C’ai Threnalli’s X-wing, forcing the Abednedo pilot to break formation and leave Cobalt Squadron’s portside flank unprotected. Tallie cut that way, noting approvingly that Starck had matched the maneuver perfectly. Her A-wing’s cannons severed a TIE fighter’s solar panel and sent it careening away from the bombers, out of control and doomed.

  “We’re not gonna get old out here, Poe!” she warned. “Gimme good news!”

  “Negative,” Poe replied. “Hold tight. Beebee-Ate, we’ve got to kill that last cannon! I need my guns!”

  He shed altitude, dropping his X-wing to just a few meters above the Dreadnought’s hull, ignoring a new set of flashing red warnings and hoping the TIE pilots wouldn’t have the nerve to follow him.

  BB-8 squawked in frustration, deleted six new proximity alerts from Black One, and swung his head into a nook in the X-wing’s fuselage. There was the problem—a smoking junction box in the narrow space below the reactant fusion and ionization chamber. Fortunately, repairing the short would take a couple of seconds at most. BB-8 extended a welding arm, but other circuits began to spark. BB-8 extended several more arms from his chassis, but the malfunctions were cascading faster than he could repair them.

  The astromech squalled in frustration.

  * * *

  —

  On the Fulminatrix’s bridge, Canady stood with his hands behind his back and his feet half a meter apart, watching the tiny figures of bombers and starfighters pirouetting in the holotank. As always, he found himself struck by the beauty of a battle reduced to a ballet of angles and vectors. At such a remove it looked bloodless, an ever-changing exercise in geometries and probabilities.

  Commanders could get hypnotized by what Canady knew was an illusion. Pilots were dying out there—pilots under his command. The less time they spent out there, the more of them would come home.

  “Are the auto cannons primed?” he asked.

  “Primed and ready, sir,” Goneril said.

  “What are we waiting for? Fire on the base.”

  The Fulminatrix quivered beneath Canady’s feet as the enormous turbolasers roared. Those weapons dwarfed anything he’d had available to him in the Imperial Starfleet, and had been built to scour planets of life. A single shot could obliterate planetary shields as if they were an afterthought and turn a hundred cubic meters of crust into vapor and slag.

  “Bring up the orbital imagers,” Canady ordered.

  A controller routed the feed onto a viewscreen. A fiery cloud roiled and churned above the planet’s surface, a miniature hurricane of destruction. Around the storm, the jungle was in flames, with new conflagrations erupting in chains extending for kilometers away from the blast zone. The Resistance base on D’Qar had been erased.

  Goneril stood frozen, staring at the screen in adoration.

  * * *

  —

  Aboard the Raddus, Ackbar ignored the worried outcry from the fry as the First Order opened fire on D’Qar. The base had served the Resistance well, but it no longer mattered—Ackbar only had eyes for the bulbous loadlifters on final approach to the Raddus’s main hangar. Four remained to be brought to safety, then two, and then—at long last—none.

  “The last transports are aboard,” he announced. “Evacuation is complete.”

  “Poe, you did it,” Leia said into her headset. “Now get your squad back here.”

  “No! General, we can do this! We have a chance to take out a Dreadnought!”

  Ackbar gurgled in disapproval. That was just like Dameron—for all his skill as a pilot and his promise as a leader, he remained an impulsive youth, with too many impulsive-youth mistakes left to make. Such as thinking of himself as the predator when he was actually the prey.

  Ackbar’s old friend Leia Organa, on the other hand, had been stripped of her youth by burdens almost too painful to bear.

  “We need to get the fleet out of here,” Leia told the rebellious pilot.

  “These things are fleet-killers! We can’t let it get away!” Poe shot back.

  “Disengage now. That’s an order.”

  A blinking light indicated that Dameron had disconnected the transmission. In the holotank, his tiny X-wing swerved around for yet another pass at the Siege Dreadnought’s last remaining cannon.

  Ackbar swiveled one eye at Leia. Every officer on the bridge seemed transfixed by the cold fury on her face.

  Leia, suddenly conscious of their attention, stared down the gold-plated protocol droid standing next to her.

  “Threepio, wipe that nervous look off your face,” she ordered.

  That order, at least, was obeyed.

  * * *

  —

  Poe and Tallie saw the second wave of incoming TIEs at the same time. Another X-wing was blasted apart, and laserfire tore a bomber in two. There was real fear in Tallie’
s voice now—even if the bombers escaped the prowling TIEs, they were too slow and sluggish to avoid point-defense fire from the Dreadnought. Even one cannon would be enough to pick them off one by one.

  Which meant that cannon had to go. Poe aimed Black One’s nose directly at it.

  “Beebee-Ate! Now or never!”

  With inventiveness born of desperation, BB-8 had lowered the elevator he used to assume his station in the droid socket halfway, which required that he delete three improper-operation alerts from Black One, and rolled into the cavity of the fuselage, as close to the short in the junction box as possible.

  Ignoring an improper-operation alert from his own systems, the astromech retracted his welding arm, depolarized the magnetic casters that kept his head attached to his spherical body, and used the welding arm to swing the head out and down, like a man doffing his hat. It smashed into the sparking junction box, primary photoreceptor swirling with electronic feedback.

  Poe saw the trigger lights come to life and mashed his finger down, his X-wing’s S-foils opening up at full power. The Siege Dreadnought’s cannon emplacement vanished in a pillar of flame, and Poe yanked on the X-wing’s control yoke, feet jammed against the pedals, grimacing as g-forces slammed him into his seat.

  The maneuver ended with three TIEs in front of Black One’s nose. A moment later all three were glittering motes of space dust.

  “Yeaaah! All clear! Bring the bombs!”

  “Happy to,” Tallie said in his ear. “Here we go!”

  * * *

  —

  To Canady’s disgust, Bascus was still monitoring the destruction on D’Qar—admittedly impressive but now thoroughly irrelevant—even as the Resistance bombers closed on the Fulminatrix and her now-defenseless topside.