Star Wars: Before the Awakening

by Greg Rucka

  In that moment he understood it had never been a game.

  He understood that he was never going to be one of them.

  Captain Phasma watched FN-2187 on the monitor in her quarters. He’d stopped firing, stopped even moving, and was just standing amid the ever-changing field of moving figures.

  She sighed. She’d had such hope for FN-2187. He had shown such remarkable promise. He had shown the capacity to be special.

  She picked up the orders on her desk and reviewed them once more. They’d already made the jump to hyperspace, and she knew it would be less than an hour before they reached their rendezvous point to take on their new passenger. Kylo Ren had already transmitted the coordinates for where they would be headed next.

  On the monitor, FN-2187 had turned away from the still-running simulation. Harmless blaster bolts from Republic enemies peppered his back, hit after hit. Over the speakers, she could hear the computer in the simulation room declaring the scenario a failure. FN-2187 didn’t seem to notice, didn’t seem to care. She watched as the holographic images faded, as the room emptied to one lone stormtrooper, and then as FN-2187 walked out.

  She switched off the monitor. He’d be part of the detail when they reached the landing point on Jakku, she decided. Perhaps when someone was shooting back at him, he would understand what it meant to be a real stormtrooper, what it meant to serve the First Order, body and soul.

  She would give him one more chance, Phasma decided.

  One last chance for FN-2187 to decide his fate.

  THE TEEDOS called the storm X’us’R’iia. It had a name because the Teedos believed there was only the one, the same one that returned again and again. It was the breath of the god R’iia, the Teedos said.

  R’iia was not a benevolent god, and thus the storm was blamed for a great many things. It was the source of the famine that had plagued that part of Jakku for years. It was the reason the water had gone away. It was why their luggabeasts turned unruly. It was responsible for the interlopers who plagued their lands. It was, significantly, what had brought the great shards of metal filled with many, many soft beings crashing to the sands so many years before. The ship graveyards were a monument to R’iia’s anger, the Teedos said. They were a warning, one that the interlopers in Niima consistently failed to heed, much to the Teedos’ annoyance. Most of the Teedos were harmless, scavengers in their own way, much like Rey and the others. There were orthodox Teedos, though, zealots who were known to attack both their brethren and the salvagers, claiming what they did was a blasphemy to R’iia. R’iia would punish them all for their sins. The X’us’R’iia would punish them all.

  Rey didn’t believe a word of it, but she didn’t believe in much outside of herself.

  She’d been high on the superstructure of one of the old battle cruisers half-buried in the sands, hoping to find something to salvage that the other scavengers had missed. She looked out and saw the storm forming on the horizon. She knew immediately that it would be a big one. It was time to go.

  She’d been free-climbing the wreck, and it was—perhaps paradoxically—always quicker going up than it was going down. Going down, you had to worry about gravity in a whole different way, and hurrying was a good plan to get yourself hurt. She knew that from experience. She took it fast, anyway—almost too fast—then risked jumping the last three meters to the ground. The sand could be soft if you were close enough, but she wasn’t. From that height, it was like landing on metal. The shock of impact jarred her ankles and ran a sharp pain up her calves and into her knees. She used her staff to right herself and sprinted for her speeder.

  Then it was a race for home, Rey and the speeder shooting as fast as she could push it across the desert, the rising wind chasing her. With one hand she tugged the end of her long, looped scarf from beneath her belt and wrapped it around her nose and mouth. Not for the first time, she wished she owned a pair of goggles, cursed herself for not having jury-rigged some months before. The last pair she’d found, she’d traded to Unkar in Niima for two portions, barely enough food to silence her stomach for a day. It had been a bad trade when she made it, and she’d known it. She’d been hungry, told herself she’d find another pair soon enough, made the trade anyway.

  That had been almost three months before.

  The storm had almost caught her by the time she reached the wreckage of the walker. It came in surges, strong enough to buffet the speeder from behind, and Rey had to fight to keep the vehicle steady on its repulsors. Sand was swirling when she slid to a stop and dismounted. She shoved the speeder between two of the broken, bent legs of the giant machine and into the shelter. The sound of the storm was growing deafening, the wind a near-constant shriek, mixed with the rasping, cruel noise of sand scraping the hull of the walker. Thunder exploded above Rey, making her flinch, and she squinted skyward in time to see the last of the sunlight being eaten away by the swirling dust clouds. Dry lightning arced and lit the sky as if daylight had returned at once, just for a second. When she closed her eyes, she could still see the lightning flash. Her skin stung with biting sand, the wind trying to take her by the feet and lift her, and she had to fight her way to the side of the hull using handholds. She barely managed to wrench the makeshift door open enough to stumble inside, and then, just as quickly, slammed it shut again.

  For a moment, Rey stood in the darkness of her home, catching her breath, listening to R’iia’s rage outside. The noise was diminished but still sunk through the walker’s armored hull. She reached out, fumbled for a second, then found one of her lamps and triggered the key. The light flickered weakly at first, then stabilized into a warmer glow.

  Rey sighed, took off her boots, and emptied sand from them. She shook off her clothes. She shook out her hair. When she was finished, there was a substantial pile of Jakku’s desert at her feet, and she felt easily ten kilos lighter.

  Thunder detonated overhead again, vibrating through the metal shell of the walker. Bits and pieces of various salvage jumped. One of the old helmets fell from where it hung on a makeshift hook. She lived in what had once been the main troop compartment of the walking tank, but that had been when the thing was upright. The interior had long before been stripped of anything salvageable and now resembled a cluttered workshop more than anything else. Rey had traded for a generator a couple of years before, so she had power when she needed it, mostly for the workbench where she would take apart and reassemble and, more often than not, rebuild from scratch those pieces of usable junk she recovered.

  Unkar always paid more for things that still worked.

  Through a hairline crack in the hull, Rey saw a sudden flare of light, more dry lightning. She picked up one of the blankets on the floor and used it to cover the crack. She secured it using three of the rare magnets she’d recovered from a shattered gyro-stabilizer. She went to her stash, hidden beneath one of the side panels, unscrewed the plate, and removed one of the three bottles of water she’d left there. She took a drink to wash the desert out of her mouth, swallowed with a grimace, carefully recapped the bottle, and just as carefully restored it to its hiding place before securing the panel.

  She sat on the pile of remaining blankets and rested her head against the back of the hull, listening to the storm beat furiously against her home.

  She closed her eyes, feeling, for the first time in a very long time, very much alone.

  The X’us’R’iia lasted three and a half days.

  Rey finished one bottle of water and half of another, guarding her thirst, because she didn’t know how long it would be until she’d be able to get into Niima for more. She was out of food by the second day, and by the time the storm was over her headache was so intense she was lightheaded and had to go slowly when she moved around her little home.

  She’d jury-rigged a computer using pieces scavenged from several crashed fighters over the years, including a cracked but still-usable display from an old BTL-A4 Y-wing. There were no radio communications to speak of—no way to transmit o
r receive and, frankly, nobody she wanted to talk to anyway. On the wreckage of a Zephra-series hauler, though, she’d once found a stash of data chips, and after painstakingly going through each and every one of them, she’d discovered three with their programs intact; one of them, to her delight, had been a flight simulator.

  So when she wasn’t sleeping or just sitting and listening to the storm or tinkering at her workbench, she flew. It was a good program, or at least she imagined it was. She could select any number of ships to fly, from small repulsor-driven atmospheric craft to a wide variety of fighters, all the way up to an array of stock freighters. She could set destinations, worlds she’d never visited and never imagined she would, and scenarios, from speed runs to obstacle courses to system failures.

  At first, she’d been truly horrible at it, quite literally crashing a few seconds after takeoff every time. With nothing else to do, and with a perverse sense of determination that she would not allow herself to be beaten by a machine that she herself had put together with her own hands, she learned. She learned so much that there was little the program could throw her way that would challenge her now. She’d gotten to the point where she would, quite deliberately, do everything she could think of to make things hard on herself, just to see if she could get out of it. Full-throttle atmospheric reentry with repulsor-engine failure? No sweat. Multiple hull breach deep-space engine flameout? A walk in the park.

  It was, if nothing else, a way to pass the time.

  When Rey finally ventured out, it took her an hour to get her door open. The sand was piled so high and packed so hard against it that she could move it only by centimeters at first. With each push, more of the desert rushed into her home. When she finally did have the door open, she had to spend another hour cleaning up, but that was mostly because she was working very slowly. Every time she bent and straightened up again, the lightheadedness would return and she would have to stop and steady herself with a hand on the wall.

  The sun was hot and mean when she finally emerged. Miraculously, her speeder had been spared the worst of the storm. She dusted it off, checked the power, started the engine, and was pleasantly surprised when it responded without hesitation. She went back inside long enough to get her staff and a few pieces from her workbench to offer Unkar. She then closed up, mounted her speeder, and took the drive into Niima. She went slowly, mindful that she wasn’t at her best.

  The little town—if you could call it a town, and she wasn’t certain you could, but she didn’t have much to compare it with—was still nearly deserted. The tarps over the washing station had been shredded by the X’us’R’iia, and there were two sentries out working on repairs. Rey parked between the station and Unkar’s place and looked over at the little airfield out of habit, counting the ships. There were the same three ships parked there, the same three as ever. All of them looked like they’d survived the storm without damage.

  She trudged over to Unkar’s window, feeling the sun pummeling her. He was already there, watching with swollen eyes in a bloated face.

  “First one in,” he said.

  Rey dug in her satchel, pulled out the three pieces of salvage she’d taken from her bench, and set them on the counter between them. “What’ll you give me?”

  One of Unkar’s thick hands reached out, palming the pieces one at a time and pulling them through the opening so he could examine them more closely. Rey waited, glancing about. More people were arriving, venturing out after the storm. A couple of other salvagers apparently had gone out hunting first and were making their way to the washing station to clean up their finds. Rey cursed herself quietly for not having done the same. The storm would’ve shifted the sands in the graveyard. Who knew what it might’ve uncovered? By the time she got out there, there’d be nothing left.

  “What’s this supposed to be?” Unkar asked.

  Rey looked at the piece in his hand. “It’s the actuator for a Kuat-7 acceleration compensator.”

  “Not like this it isn’t. And this, this supposed to be part of a data buffer set?”

  “Yeah.”

  Unkar grunted. “This one is good, low-interference regulator for a Z-70, I can move this.” He spread the three pieces out between them. “Give you three portions, one for each of them.”

  “The Z-70 is worth three alone, Unkar.”

  “I’m offering you three, Rey. Take it or leave it.”

  She winced. The sunlight was making her headache worse.

  “Three portions, two bottles of water,” Rey said.

  She was eating the muck that passed for a meal—one portion—in the shade by the vendor stalls when she heard the engines. Everyone looked up, Rey included. They all watched as the ship came in lazily over the airfield, then set down with a whisper. It was an old Hernon-class light freighter, boxy and ugly. Rey had seen it there maybe ten times before, and so had everyone else; just as quickly their attention strayed from the arrival back to the various tasks at hand. Unkar did a lot of repeat business with some traders, people looking to buy his salvage on the cheap and off the books.

  There were a few dregs of the blue slop remaining in the packet in her hand, and Rey brought it to her lips and squeezed what was left into her mouth. She got up and wandered toward the washing station, now with every position filled and another half dozen fellow salvagers waiting their turns. She tossed the package in the trash and looked back at the airfield. The ramp had dropped, and the first figure to emerge was exactly the one she’d expected: the same human she’d seen there every other time. He stopped at the bottom of the ramp and turned back to speak to someone still aboard, and Rey saw another figure descending, a young girl, followed by yet a third, an older woman. Those were new faces to her, and Rey found herself staring.

  The man gestured toward Unkar’s, speaking to the woman and the girl. The girl stuck her hands in her pockets, shoulders dropping, and the woman put her hand on the girl’s head as she spoke to the man. The man lowered his hands and set them both on the girl’s shoulders. She looked up at him and he bent toward her, maybe speaking, and then pointed into the ship. The girl turned and followed the woman back up the ramp and out of sight. The man headed for Unkar’s.

  Rey returned to her speeder, trying to imagine what the exchange had been about—what the girl had said, what the man had said, what the woman had said. She kicked the engine to life and wheeled her speeder back toward the desert, mulling that over.

  She didn’t have the first idea what it had all been about.

  Rey didn’t have much hope for a good find. She’d lost the morning already, and by the time she’d ridden her speeder out to the edges of the graveyard, it was midafternoon. Anything the storm had revealed farther in had already been claimed. As she rode, she could see small groups of scavengers working new wrecks. A lot of people worked in teams, figuring they could cover more ground that way. Rey worked alone and always had. It was easier when she was alone; there were fewer complications, fewer things to worry about. The only person she had to trust was herself.

  She rode out farther, beyond the easy finds and into the harder terrain. She was feeling better, the meal having satisfied the gnawing hunger, at least for the moment, and she opened up the speeder. Rey rode fast and hard, enjoying the thrill of the machine’s power and acceleration. She’d had the speeder for years, built it herself as she had so many other things, and as much as she could allow herself a sense of pride in anything, she was proud of that.

  The graveyard wasn’t, strictly speaking, just one area but a vast expanse, and you could go for kilometers without seeing signs of anything, then crest some high dune and suddenly find yourself looking down at a field of wreckage. The storm had done more than reveal new finds, however; it had changed the terrain, reshaped the desert, and it wasn’t until she hit the Crackle and saw the Spike that Rey realized how far out she’d gone, how long she’d been riding. The Crackle was one of the few constants in the desert, marked by the almost perfectly vertical spine of some massive cap
ital ship—the Spike—half-buried in the ground. Nobody knew what kind of ship it had been, Republic, Imperial, something else from earlier; it was impossible to tell, because all that remained was the keel line, rising out of the ground, and some twisted support beams still clinging to what remained of the frame. Everything else of the ship was simply gone, taken in the explosion of plasma that had erupted on impact. The heat had been so intense it had seared the desert sand, burning so fast and hot it had turned the ground to blackened glass. Over the years, the glass had broken into smaller and smaller chunks, on its way to becoming sand once more, but when you rode or walked over the land, you’d hear it cracking, echoes that seemed to whisper for kilometers.

  Hence the Crackle.

  Rey stopped as she approached the Spike, squinting up at the sun as she pulled a corner of her wrap from her face. Maybe two hours of daylight left, she calculated, and she’d need most of that to get back home. The temperature plummeted at night, got as cold as it could be hot during the day. What little wildlife there was on that part of Jakku emerged in the darkness, as well, and most of it was predatory, as desperate to survive as every other living thing. The swarms of gnaw-jaws came out at night, carnivores that ran on six legs and preyed on warm blood. Getting caught in the dark wouldn’t be good.

  She’d lost the day, Rey concluded, but maybe she could get a head start on the next one. She shut down the speeder, dismounted, and spat out more sand. She drank half of one of the bottles she’d gotten from Unkar, then stowed it back in her satchel. Rey looked at the Spike critically, thinking. It was definitely climbable. Not particularly safe but climbable.