The Last Jedi

by Jason Fry

  But Holdo wasn’t finished. Her eyes bored into his.

  “Of course you do. I understand—I’ve dealt with plenty of trigger-happy flyboys like you. You’re impulsive. Dangerous. And the last thing we need right now. So stick to your post, and follow my orders.”

  And with that the new commander of the Resistance stalked off, leaving a stunned starfighter ace in her wake.

  Chewbacca sat by the fire, the dark shadow of the Millennium Falcon behind him.

  Building a fire had taken longer than he’d expected—the island had few trees, just stubborn shrubs kept stunted by the ceaseless wind. At least the pudgy native birds—Luke had said they were called porgs—were easy to catch. Eager for a change from shipboard rations, Chewbacca had scooped one up to roast on a spit.

  The Wookiee gave the spit another turn and took a sniff.

  Done. Nicely charred, with a hint of spiciness from the firewood.

  That was good. Even better, there was no shortage of porgs for future meals—the island was overrun with them, and they seemed to have no fear of bipeds.

  Chewie was about to take the first bite when something caught his eye. It was a porg, standing at the edge of the firelight as if mesmerized.

  A particularly plump and juicy-looking porg, the Wookiee thought, wondering if it was worth delaying his meal a few more minutes to snatch this one up, too.

  The porg stared up at him with big, glassy eyes. Chewie reluctantly decided it would be wrong to eat that one. His belly rumbled and he turned away from the porg, annoyed by its seemingly sorrowful gaze.

  On the other side of the fire a whole family of porgs was huddled together, staring up at him.

  The Wookiee roared and the porgs fled into the darkness. Checking to make sure he hadn’t missed any stragglers, he turned back to his dinner—only to find he’d lost his appetite. Something about the way the porgs had looked at him made him feel like he’d done a bad thing. But he’d only been hungry.

  He was too busy feeling sorry for himself to notice the dark figure that slipped through the moonlight and up the ramp of the freighter behind him.

  * * *

  —

  Luke walked slowly through the corridors of the Falcon, feeling like a ghost. The ring of his heels on the decking was achingly familiar. So was the smell—a distinctive blend of fuel and coolant, with a faint undertone of burning circuitry from whatever was malfunctioning at the moment.

  Since the moment Rey had chattered excitedly about flying it, Luke’s thoughts had been straying to Han Solo’s ship, sitting on the ancient stone at the foot of the island, until finally he’d been unable to resist a visit. The Falcon had taken him away from Tatooine decades ago—a shell-shocked farm boy hurled into the middle of a galactic civil war he’d wrongly assumed would never touch him, his step-parents, or his friends.

  He wondered what that Luke Skywalker would think of what he’d become.

  Luke stepped into the cockpit, standing behind the pilot’s chair that had been the closest thing to home for Han. The moonlight gleamed on the pair of dice hanging overhead and he gently removed them, turning them this way and that with his mechanical fingers.

  The main hold was dim and quiet. Luke gazed at the holochess table, his eyes lingering on a familiar helmet and blast shield. He’d worn that for his very first lesson with a lightsaber, tormented by the hiss of a training remote that he couldn’t see and trying to figure out what Ben Kenobi meant by stretching out with his feelings.

  He sat at the game table, overwhelmed. This was where he’d wound up after Ben vanished, seemingly bisected by Darth Vader’s lightsaber blade. Where Leia had sought to console him as he sat in shock. He’d simultaneously seen Ben as his last link to his past on Tatooine and as the teacher who’d help him navigate the future. Without him, he’d been unmoored and adrift.

  A string of familiar interrogative beeps came from the shadows.

  “Artoo?” he asked, brightening, and a moment later the blue-and-white astromech rolled into view, chirping and whistling at length.

  “Yes,” Luke said. Decades of missions with R2-D2 had left him reasonably fluent in droidspeak, but the astromech’s list of accusations was both lengthy and highly specific. “No, I—yeah, it’s true.”

  R2-D2 squawked derisively.

  “Hey, sacred island,” Luke said. “Watch the language.”

  The droid replied with a plaintive whine.

  “Old friend, I wish I could make you understand. I’m not coming back. Nothing can change my mind.”

  Luke rested his hand on R2-D2’s dome, but the droid responded by activating his holographic projector.

  Luke’s breath caught at the sight of his sister as he’d first seen her—robed in white, pleading for Obi-Wan Kenobi’s help.

  “That’s a cheap move,” he chided the droid, who beeped smugly.

  The recording vanished, leaving Luke and R2-D2 alone. The little astromech remained still as his former master stared into nothingness. And he stayed silent as Luke rose and made his way into the corridor and down the ramp, his footsteps slow and deliberate.

  * * *

  —

  Rey woke with a start. Luke stood over the stone bench where she’d chosen to sleep, the better to intercept him before his morning rounds. Above her, his face was drawn and pale in the moonlight.

  “Tomorrow, at dawn,” he said. “Three lesssons. I will teach you the ways of the Jedi—and why they need to end.”

  Apparently Finn’s new thing was waking up completely confused.

  This time he found himself lying on his back—but for some reason the world was sliding by around him.

  He lifted his head, which caused pain to flare at his temples, and saw the back of Rose’s jumpsuit. She had found a cart and was dragging it and him down a corridor on the Raddus.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Finn said, his mouth and tongue struggling to form the words properly. “I can’t move! What happened?”

  Then realization flooded in.

  “You stunned me!” he yelped accusingly. “With a…stun thing! Oh my God, you’re totally insane. Help!”

  Rose gave him a look that suggested the stun thing might be part of his future, too.

  “I’m taking you to the brig and turning you in for desertion,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you were deserting.”

  “No!” Finn protested.

  She stopped guiding the cart and got in his face. They were nose-to-nose.

  “My sister just died protecting the fleet,” she said. “I heard what you did on the Starkiller Base. Everyone was talking about you. You were a hero for the Resistance! And you were running away?”

  “Sorry,” Finn said. “But I did what I did to help my friend, not to join another army.”

  He knew that was a mistake even as he said it. Rose’s disappointment in him was palpable, and so was her anger. Finn realized he had to talk fast—or his next foggy awakening would come in the Raddus’s brig, and then it would be too late.

  “I don’t know what you know, but this fleet is doomed,” he explained. “If my friend comes back to it, she’s doomed, too. I’m going to get this beacon far away from here. Then she’ll find me and be safe.”

  “You’re a selfish traitor,” Rose snapped.

  “Look,” Finn said pleadingly. “If I could save Rey by saving the Resistance fleet I would, but I can’t. Nobody can.”

  “Yuh-huh,” Rose said dismissively.

  “We can’t outrun the First Order fleet,” Finn said.

  “We can jump to lightspeed.”

  “They can track us through lightspeed.”

  That stopped Rose. “They can track us through lightspeed?”

  She hadn’t known. But then of course she hadn’t known. Finn knew what it was like to
spend shift after shift belowdecks on a warship, doing droidwork and being told nothing.

  Hey, at least Rose hadn’t been sweating herself half to death in a body glove and armor.

  “They’ll just show up thirty seconds later and we’d have blown a ton of fuel—which, by the way, we’re dangerously short on,” Finn said.

  Rose was still grappling with this latest bit of information.

  “They can track us through lightspeed,” she said again, her mind far away.

  “See? Yes! I can’t feel my teeth. What did you shoot me with?”

  “Active tracking,” Rose said.

  Finn looked up from checking that all his teeth were where he’d left them. “What now?”

  “Hyperspace tracking is new tech, but the principle must be the same as any active tracker,” Rose mused. “I’ve done maintenance on active trackers—they’re single-source to avoid interference. So—”

  Finn realized the implication and finished her sentence along with her.

  “—they’re only tracking us from the lead ship.”

  Rose nodded, but Finn could see her mind was far away again, pondering the problem.

  “But hyperspace tracking takes a lot of computing power,” she said. “The whole fleet would have to be computer banks, which is crazy. Unless…”

  “Unless what?” Finn asked warily.

  “A static hyperspace field generator,” Rose said. “That’s how they’re doing it.”

  “A what now?”

  Rose bit her lip. It looked like she’d forgotten he was there.

  “Instead of adding lots of computers, you add lots of processing cycles,” she said. “You do that by surrounding the computers with a hyperspace field generator. You could speed them up a billionfold…assuming nothing melts or gets accelerated right through the ship’s hull. It’s theoretical stuff—super-advanced tech. But if anyone could make it work, it’s the First Order.”

  “So they’ve made it work. How do we make it not work?”

  Rose looked at him appraisingly. She started to say something, then stopped. Finn cocked his head at her.

  “You’re going to say ‘but.’ I can tell. You’ve got that going-to-say-but look.”

  “But,” Rose said, her brow wrinkling. “We can’t get to the tracker. It’s an A-class process, they’ll control it from the main bridge.”

  “No,” Finn said, and she gave him another one of her looks. “I mean yes, but every A-class process—”

  This time she was the one who followed the thought to its logical conclusion and voiced it along with him: “—has a dedicated power breaker.”

  They looked at each other. Now Finn’s teeth hurt. Did that mean things were getting better, or worse?

  “But who knows where the breaker room would be on a Star Destroyer?” Rose asked.

  Finn tapped his chest. “The guy who used to mop it. Deep in the subengine complex. If I can get us there—”

  Rose tapped her own chest. “I could shut their tracker down.”

  “Yes! Rose! We’ve got to bring this plan to someone we can trust!”

  “Whoa hey whoa,” she objected. “When I said ‘we’ I didn’t mean ‘us.’ ”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me—we could save the fleet!”

  Rose shook her head. “You’re a weirdo traitor. I’m maintenance. I’ll file your plan.”

  “Poe!” Finn said desperately, worried she was about to stun him again.

  “I’m Rose, remember?” she replied, annoyed.

  “No. Rose. Poe. Take me to Poe Dameron and we’ll tell him the plan. Poe. Rose, please.”

  “Poe Dameron? He’ll be busy.”

  “He’ll see me,” Finn said. “Hero of the Resistance, right?”

  That was another mistake. Rose scowled, one hand creeping toward the device holstered on her belt, with its wicked-looking charge prongs.

  “Just let him hear it,” Finn said hastily. “If he says no you can stun me. With the stun thing.”

  “I totally will, you know.”

  Finn didn’t doubt it for a second. He watched Rose making up her mind.

  “I don’t know why I’m trusting you,” she said, disgusted.

  “It’s the baby face,” Finn replied. “Blessing and a curse.”

  * * *

  —

  “Give that to me one more time,” Poe said. “But simpler.”

  Rose and Finn had found him in General Organa’s chambers, which had been converted into a makeshift medcenter. The Resistance leader lay motionless on a gurney, surrounded by instruments and tended to by white-plated MD-15 medical droids. C-3PO hovered nervously nearby, while BB-8 was circling the room, beeping mournfully.

  Rose watched Finn prepare to walk Poe through their hastily conceived plan again, the one she was reluctantly beginning to think might not be such a terrible idea after all.

  She wished Paige could have seen this—her kid sister, the maintenance tech, talking with the best star pilot in the Resistance and the galactic hero that Paige had hoped to meet one day. Paige would have gotten such a kick out of it—well, except for the part where Rose had found her hero sneaking into an escape pod.

  Finn was handsome—Rose had to admit that. It was too bad about the weird traitor thing. And the bizarre crush on the friend of his. Whoever this Rey was, she had to be quite something to make you desert people you’d fought alongside and a cause you’d come to believe in.

  But then, she remembered, Finn had grown up in First Order training halls, one of those luckless orphans who got numbers instead of names. Maybe that was why he’d fallen so hard for his friend. The number of people who’d ever been nice to him must be depressingly small.

  “The First Order is only tracking us from one Destroyer—the lead one,” Finn said.

  “So you blow that one up?” Poe asked eagerly, and Rose fought the urge to roll her eyes. Fighter pilots, even aces, were all alike.

  “I like where your head’s at but no, they would just start tracking us from another Destroyer,” Finn said.

  Rose found the holoprojector built into the Leia’s desk and activated it, displaying a schematic of the Mega-Destroyer that Poe had been studying.

  “But,” Rose said.

  “But if we can sneak on board that lead Destroyer and disable the tracker without getting caught—” Finn said.

  “—they won’t realize it’s off for one systems cycle,” Rose cut in. “About six minutes.”

  “That buys the Resistance fleet a quick window to jump to hyperspace untracked,” Finn said.

  “And escape!” piped up C-3PO. “Brilliant!”

  Finn ticked off the elements of the plan on his fingers. “Sneak on board. Turn off the tracker. Our fleet escapes before they realize.”

  Poe considered that cautiously. Rose could see him trying to calculate the odds. But BB-8 was beeping excitedly.

  “You don’t get a vote,” Poe told him, then turned to Rose. “What do you think?”

  “Somehow the fact that this was all my idea got lost in the telling,” she said. “But if he gets us to the tracker, I can shut it down. I think it would work.”

  Poe considered that, then looked up at them.

  “How did you two meet?” he asked, curious.

  The look of panic on Finn’s face was actually pretty entertaining.

  “Just luck,” Rose said.

  “Good luck?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  Poe chewed it over, his gaze returning to Leia where she lay unconscious.

  “Poe, this will save the fleet and save Rey,” Finn said. “We have to do it.”

  Rey Rey Rey. Rose really wanted to stun him again.

  “If I must be the sole voice of reason, Admiral Holdo will never approve this plan,” said C
-3PO. “In fact, it’s exactly the sort of brash heroics that would particularly infuriate her.”

  Poe smiled broadly. “You’re right, Threepio. The plan is need-to-know. And she doesn’t.”

  “That wasn’t exactly what I—” the protocol droid objected as BB-8 whistled approvingly.

  “All right, you guys shut down that tracker, and I’ll be here to jump us to lightspeed,” Poe said. “How do we sneak the two of you onto Snoke’s Destroyer?”

  “We steal a First Order shuttle,” Rose said.

  Finn’s face fell. “No good, we need clearance codes.”

  Rose scowled, thinking this was the kind of problem someone familiar with First Order security procedures might have brought up earlier.

  “So we steal clearance codes,” she said, but Finn was shaking his head.

  “They’re biohexacrypted and rescramble every hour,” he said. “It’s impossible. Their security shields are airtight. We can’t get through them undetected. Nobody can.”

  Poe and Rose looked at him dolefully. Then Finn thought of someone who just might be able to prove him wrong.

  * * *

  —

  In her more than a millennium of life, Maz Kanata had been wounded sixty-seven times, with twenty-two of those wounds serious enough to nearly kill her. She’d been submerged in liters of bacta, swaddled in meters of medpatches, attached to more than a dozen droids, and spent weeks with no assistance whatsoever, relying on her own stubborn constitution and the will of the Force to avoid becoming one with it.

  Absent some remarkably bad luck she didn’t see coming—which, granted, was the kind that tended to do you in—this present spot of bother wasn’t going to add to her tally. She’d rate the current dustup as something between a misunderstanding and a tantrum, a situation that had gone sufficiently off the rails that one party had to salve its hurt pride by shooting at the other.

  That happened. She knew all the principals and was reasonably sure that within a few weeks the survivors would be in a cantina, having a grand time clanking glasses, comparing pockmarks left by blaster burns, and drinking to the memory of the unlucky departed.