The Last Jedi_Expanded Edition [Star Wars]

by Jason Fry

  “Approximately ninety minutes,” PZ-4CO said.

  “We don’t have ninety minutes. We may not have nine.”

  Slow down and think. Panic doesn’t solve problems; it just creates new ones.

  General Organa had taught her that—and so much else.

  “Forget the cannon shells and the remaining maintenance stocks,” Connix said. “Anything still down below is staying.”

  “Quartermaster Prindel will be extremely agitated by this decision,” PZ-4CO said.

  “Bollie will have to take it up with Snoke. Give the order, Peazy.”

  PZ-4CO’s head swiveled and Connix knew the droid was transmitting the new instructions. She bit her lip, unable to resist another peek skyward, and considered the remaining tasks.

  The Resistance ships that had answered General Organa’s plea for assistance were low on fuel—every drop in that reservoir might prove critical. Yet siphoning it out was an agonizingly slow process.

  No easy answer there.

  Then there were the computers, and the information in them that might be recoverable after an incomplete purge. The First Order might bombard the base from orbit, finishing the Resistance’s job for it. But it might also send down slicers and data retrieval droids to scour the databanks. What they found could endanger everyone from Resistance allies elsewhere in the galaxy to the families of those who’d pledged themselves to the cause.

  No easy answer there, either.

  So what would General Organa do? Fortunately, Connix knew.

  She’d say perfect information is a luxury you can rarely afford. All you can do is make the best decision with whatever imperfect information you do have.

  “Jones, tell the scuttle team to use the computers for target practice and get out of there,” Connix said. “Peazy, prioritize the fuel transfer. But I want that tanker and all remaining transports airborne in ten minutes.”

  “Given our fuel levels, ten minutes may not be—” PZ-4CO objected.

  “We have to get the fleet into hyperspace,” Connix said. “Once we make the jump, the First Order won’t be able to track us and will have to begin hunting all over again. That’ll give us time to figure out how to replenish our fuel stocks.”

  “This decision—”

  “Has been made,” Connix said firmly. “Give the order, Peazy.”

  * * *

  —

  Named for a long-dead rebel admiral, the Raddus was the Resistance flagship, a bulbous MC85 Mon Calamari star cruiser bristling with guns and augmented shield projectors. Measuring nearly thirty-five hundred meters from its pointed beak to the cluster of engines at the stern, the Raddus would have been a mighty warship even during the years in which Emperor Palpatine had turned the Empire into an unparalleled military-industrial complex.

  But the Raddus was puny compared with the massive First Order Dreadnought cruising slowly through space toward D’Qar, accompanied by three Star Destroyers. Aboard the Resistance warship’s bridge, Admiral Ackbar stroked his barbels and gazed down at a hologram table showing the situation above D’Qar. Beside him stood Leia, the starfighter pilot Poe Dameron, and C-3PO.

  The Resistance’s three other warships—the Anodyne, Ninka, and Vigil—were moving out of low orbit, having taken on most of the transports bearing evacuees up from D’Qar’s surface. But the First Order arrivals were closing quickly.

  “They’ve found us,” said a Resistance monitor.

  “Well, we knew that was coming,” Poe said, his gaze sliding from the holographic table to a viewscreen. “Connix, is the base fully evacuated?”

  “Still loading the last batch of transports,” Connix replied. “We need more time.”

  Poe looked at Leia, but the general had anticipated what he was going to say.

  “You’ve got an idea,” she said with a weary fondness. “But I won’t like it.”

  Poe opened his mouth to make his case, hoping something eloquent would come out. But Leia had anticipated that, too.

  “Go,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  General Armitage Hux stood on the bridge of the First Order Star Destroyer Finalizer, gazing out at the blue-green planet hanging in space.

  Four ships hung in orbit above the planet, below its asteroid rings—a bulbous Mon Calamari cruiser, an angular frigate, a cargo ship with a rounded front and a jagged rear, and a smaller ship with an oversized bow like a broken crescent.

  Hux automatically assessed and cataloged the Resistance warships, drawing on years of training. He knew the Mon Calamari craft: It was the Raddus, which served Leia Organa’s rabble as flagship and mobile command center. The next-largest ship was a Nebulon-C frigate, from a line built for the New Republic after the accords that ended its conflict with the Empire. The ship with the rounded front was some kind of cargo frigate, heavily modified. The ship with the crescent bow was a model Hux didn’t recognize, but it was clearly a warship, bristling with point-defense cannons and ordnance pods.

  Within a few minutes it would be academic: All four would be space dust.

  The Finalizer’s gleaming black bridge was a model of efficiency, with controllers and monitors briskly exchanging information from the Star Destroyer’s targeting computers and sensor suites. Hux smiled at the thought of himself as the center of all that activity—a slim, dignified figure in black, uniform perfect, standing at parade rest.

  “We’ve caught them in the middle of their evacuation,” said Peavey, the Finalizer’s captain. “The entirety of the Resistance, in one fragile basket.”

  Hux suppressed a surge of annoyance. Edrison Peavey was old—a veteran of Imperial service who’d served with Hux’s late father. He and a handful of Imperial loyalists had managed to escape the New Republic’s hunters by venturing into the uncharted stars of the Unknown Regions.

  Those men and women had been useful in their time. But that time was at an end—the First Order had decapitated the New Republic leadership with a single demonstration of its technological might.

  True, Starkiller Base had then been destroyed, but Hux told himself that was merely an unfortunate setback—one that had been less a military defeat than the product of incompetence and treachery within the First Order. Those failures had been dealt with, or near enough. Most of those who had failed Hux and Supreme Leader Snoke had been vaporized with the base; those who’d escaped punishment would get what they deserved soon enough.

  Hux smiled thinly. Truthfully, it didn’t much matter. The New Republic Senate was in ashes, the heart of its fleet was incinerated, and the Resistance vermin who’d had the temerity to assault Starkiller Base had been careless enough to leave a trail back to their nest. Once these few remaining insurgents had been destroyed, no one in the galaxy would dare oppose the First Order’s dominion. Hux would be free to build a dozen new Starkillers—or a hundred.

  And in the meantime, the First Order had no shortage of other weapons—including ones Imperial commanders such as Peavey had only dreamed of.

  That was it right there, Hux thought. Peavey and his generation saw the First Order’s impending triumph as a restoration of the Empire, not realizing how that only proved their obsolescence. They couldn’t or wouldn’t see that the regime they’d served was not merely gone but superseded. The First Order was the fulfillment of what the Empire had struggled to become. It had distilled and perfected its strengths while eliminating its weaknesses.

  Or at least most of its weaknesses, Hux thought, eyeing Peavey. But there would be time for another culling. In the meantime, a reminder of Peavey’s station would have to suffice.

  “Perfect,” he said. “I have my orders from Supreme Leader Snoke himself. This is where we snuff out the Resistance once and for all. Tell Captain Canady to prime his Dreadnought. Incinerate their base, destroy those transports, and obliterate their fleet.”

&
nbsp; The order was transmitted and received by Moden Canady aboard the bridge of the Fulminatrix, the enormous Mandator IV-class Siege Dreadnought at the heart of the First Order formation. On Canady’s command, the two massive cannons slung beneath his ship’s belly began to slowly swivel, reorienting themselves to fire on the hot spot of transmissions and energy emissions that sensor crews had detected on the planet below.

  Canady’s warrant officer, Bascus, was gazing at the holographic screen and tracking the cannons’ progress with something akin to ecstasy on his face. Canady scowled. His crew was half his age, with scant experience outside of battle sims. That they were untested wasn’t their fault; that they were arrogant and undisciplined was.

  “Reorient the topside batteries to target the Resistance fleet,” Canady ordered. “And prep our fighter squadrons for launch.”

  “General Hux ordered no fighter deployment,” objected Bascus. “He feels a demonstration—”

  “Do I need to explain the difference between ‘prep for launch’ and ‘launch’?” Canaday asked Bascus.

  “Captain!” called a scope monitor from the bridge pit, his surroundings lit red for ideal visibility during battlefield conditions. “We have a single Resistance X-wing fighter approaching. It’s moving to attack formation.”

  * * *

  —

  The X-wing’s call sign was Black One, befitting its black fuselage and eye-catching orange flares. Those colors were more muted than Poe would have liked—his beloved fighter had returned from Starkiller Base with a bad case of carbon scoring, frayed fire-control linkages, and a host of other minor maladies. Goss Toowers, the perpetually dismayed starfighter maintenance chief, had looked over the fighter and offered Poe a choice: His overburdened techs could repair the battle damage, or they could install the piece of experimental equipment Poe had asked for, the one that hadn’t quite been ready for the Starkiller raid.

  Poe had opted for the experimental equipment, and stuck with that choice even after the sad-eyed Goss reminded him that it was somewhere between possible and likely that it would kill him the first time it was engaged.

  After all, everybody knew the only thing that made Goss more miserable than pilots was pilots having fun.

  Not that Poe was having fun, exactly—in fact, hurtling alone through space toward three First Order capital ships struck him as an aggressively bad idea.

  Even as part of a squadron, flying a starfighter was both physically and mentally exhausting: Stress, g-forces, and changing gravity beat up your body, while the constant need for situational awareness, multitasking, and improvisation taxed your brain. It was simultaneously an ever-shifting puzzle and an endurance test, with fatal consequences if you flunked.

  But at least behind the control yoke Poe had something to do. And that was preferable to being stuck on the bridge of the Raddus, fidgeting uselessly and getting in the way. Poe would never admit this, not even to Leia, but with a starfighter around him, the galaxy made sense in a way that it too often didn’t otherwise.

  Judging from the mournful beeping of BB-8 in the droid socket behind the X-wing’s cockpit, his astromech felt differently.

  “Happy beeps here, buddy,” Poe said. “Come on—we’ve pulled crazier stunts than this.”

  BB-8 didn’t dignify that with a response.

  “Happy beeps,” Poe said again, this time more to himself.

  “For the record, I’m with the droid on this one,” Leia said over his comm channel.

  Poe almost laughed. “Thanks for your support, General.”

  * * *

  —

  “A single light fighter?” asked an incredulous Hux, peering into deep space. “What is this?”

  The bridge crew said nothing. Hux looked from one side to the other, exasperated by the impassive faces around him.

  “Well…shoot him!”

  Before the gunners could carry out this order, a ship-to-ship transmission crackled over the Finalizer’s audio pickups.

  “Attention, this is Commander Poe Dameron of the Republic fleet,” the voice said. “I have an urgent communiqué for General Hugs.”

  Hux felt all eyes turning his way, and red threatening to bloom in his cheeks. He knew that pilot’s name all too well—Dameron had fired the shot that destroyed Starkiller Base, and he’d been an irritant long before that. Hux had sworn he’d see the pilot back on a First Order torture rack one day soon—and that this time he’d oversee the interrogation personally. Where Kylo Ren and his sorcery had failed, Hux and his technological prowess would triumph.

  “Patch him through,” he snapped. “This is General Hux of the First Order. The Republic is no more. Your fleet are rebel scum and war criminals. Tell your precious princess there will be no terms. There will be no surrender.”

  He was proud of that last part and made a note to revisit it during the tribunals that would be carried live over the HoloNet to the entire galaxy. But Dameron, to his bafflement, didn’t reply.

  “Hi, I’m holding for General Hugs?” the pilot asked after a moment.

  “This is Hux. You and your friends are doomed! We will wipe your filth from the galaxy!”

  Another moment, and then the reply: “Okay, I’ll hold.”

  “What?” Hux looked around in consternation. “Hello?”

  “Hello? I’m still here.”

  Hux glowered at a communications officer. “Can he hear me?”

  The officer nodded gravely.

  Peavey, Hux noted, seemed less concerned with whatever was wrong with his ship’s short-range communications than he was with the readouts displaying the distance between the lone X-wing and the First Order battle line—a number that was steadily shrinking.

  “Hugs—with an H?” Dameron asked. “Skinny guy, kind of pasty?”

  “I can hear you, can you hear me?” Hux replied.

  “Look, I can’t hold forever,” Dameron said, sounding exasperated. “If you reach him, tell him Leia has an urgent message for him. About his mother.”

  Hux could faintly hear something else in the transmission—it sounded like an electronic chortle.

  “I believe he’s tooling with you, sir,” Peavey said.

  Hux glared at the Finalizer’s captain and found that the older man’s face was a carefully expressionless mask—as was the face of every other officer on the bridge.

  “Open fire!” he screamed, bringing his fist down on the nearest console. It hurt abominably, but fortunately all eyes on the bridge were fixed ahead as a web of turbolaser fire filled the emptiness of space, searching for the X-wing and its infuriating pilot.

  * * *

  —

  When his energy counter hit full, Poe yelled for BB-8 to punch it. A moment later Black One leapt forward as if kicked, propelled by the experimental booster engine grafted to the starfighter’s stern.

  For a moment Poe feared he’d black out, overcome by g-forces like nothing he’d ever experienced behind the stick. But then the acceleration compensators kicked in and his vision cleared. Ahead of him loomed the First Order’s massive Siege Dreadnought, laserfire arcing up at him from the turbolaser cannons that dotted its upper hull.

  “Whoa—that’s got a kick!” Poe yelled as his fighter skimmed over the warship’s nose, at the apex of the giant wedge.

  The Fulminatrix’s cannons had been designed to be able to target enemy starfighters, but Black One was moving at speeds no First Order point-defense crews had ever experienced, even in the simulator. Poe juked and weaved over the battleship’s hull, getting a sense of how much more lead time he needed to hit his targets. Once he had the timing down, a single pass over the topside reduced several of the cannons to smoking scrap. As Poe wheeled around for another run, he activated his comlink and switched over to the general Resistance channel.

  “Taking out the cannons now—bombers, sta
rt your approach!”

  Aboard the Fulminatrix, Canady watched grimly as the lone X-wing eliminated cannon after cannon, stripping his ship of its dorsal defenses. A hologram of Hux flickered to life.

  “Captain Canady, why aren’t you blasting that puny ship?” the First Order general demanded.

  Canady hadn’t accumulated a lengthy Imperial service record by being ignorant of the chain of command or unaware of the damage a vengeful superior could do to a career. But being lectured by a vicious child—and one who’d favored grand gestures over basic military tactics, at that—was too much for him.

  “That puny ship is too small and at too close range,” he told Hux scornfully. “We need to scramble our fighters.”

  As Hux considered this, Canady turned away from the hologram. “Five bloody minutes ago,” he muttered.

  “He’ll never penetrate our armor,” Goneril said, peering disdainfully at the X-wing closing in on them.

  Canady allowed himself a brief fantasy in which he shoved the adjutant out of a conveniently located air lock.

  “He’s not trying to penetrate our armor—he’s clearing out our surface cannons,” he told Goneril icily.

  In a different situation, the offended incredulity on his adjutant’s face would have been something to treasure. But not today—not when Canady had a pretty good idea what would happen next.

  “Captain!” called Bascus. “Resistance bombers approaching!”

  “Of course they are,” Canady said.

  The bomber crews of Cobalt and Crimson squadrons had spent hours at battle stations, waiting for a launch order from the Raddus’s bridge. It hadn’t come—not when the chatter about transports and supplies became frantic, or when First Order TIEs began harrying the Resistance fleet, or when the sensor officers started yelling about warships closing on their position. Aboard the eight bombers, backs were sore, bladders were full, and tempers were short.

  All of which was forgotten when their communications systems crackled to life and Fossil barked at them to go, go, go.