by Jason Fry
He nodded and smiled back at her, then hurried for the trench.
“We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?” he said.
He reached the trench and half fell into it, then slid the travois over the lip as gently as he could. Rose was peering out at the shield door, puzzled.
“Who is that?” she asked.
Finn looked and saw a man in robes walking across the salt plain. He was making his way toward the line of walkers, looking for all the world like he’d decided this battlefield was the best place in the galaxy for a stroll.
* * *
—
Hux saw the lone figure on the plain and peered down in disbelief as the man walked, seemingly unconcerned, into the teeth of enough firepower to level a good-sized city. Was the man blind, and about to be revealed as spectacularly unlucky? Had some member of the Resistance opted to commit suicide in dramatic fashion?
Amused, he glanced over at Ren—and whatever he had been going to say died on his lips. Because the new Supreme Leader looked like he was staring down at a ghost.
“Stop,” Kylo said.
His order was swiftly relayed, and the mighty line of First Order walkers came to an obedient halt. They were barely four hundred meters from the shattered door and the Resistance soldiers huddled within.
The man stopped. He looked up, into the sky, and suddenly the hair on the back of Hux’s neck rose. Somehow he knew that the man down there on the scarred landscape was looking straight at them, his gaze fixed unerringly not just on the shuttle but on one person inside.
Hux looked at Ren’s face and saw terror—naked and undisguised.
That fear meant weakness—and opportunity.
“Supreme Leader?” Hux asked, careful to ensure his tone was that of a solicitous underling. “Shall we advance?”
“I want every gun we have to fire on that man,” Ren said. “Do it!”
The first walker to receive the order opened fire, its chin guns hammering away in succession. As flames engulfed the lone man on the battlefield, the other walkers began to fire.
As Ren stared wide-eyed at the tumult of fire below, Hux watched him, his mind calculating.
His father, Brendol, had told him how the Jedi had maintained their power by seizing Force-sensitive infants and training them as warriors. The Jedi had agreed to lead the Republic’s clone armies, but turned on Chancellor Palpatine and tried to seize control of the Senate. The clones—ironically, another order of soldiers trained from infancy—had prevented this betrayal, turning their guns on their former generals.
The Jedi had deserved their fate, Brendol said—but there was much to learn from their methods. As there was from the training regimens of the Republic’s clones. The elder Hux had forged elements of both orders to create an army of soldiers trained as soon as they left the cradle—an army that had originated under the Empire but achieved its full glory under the First Order and the younger Hux.
So, in a sense, the First Order’s stormtroopers were the Jedi’s legacy.
Hux smiled at that. It would be the sorcerers’ final legacy, then. The First Order had thrived despite Snoke’s weakness for mystical nonsense, but that was because Snoke had kept himself largely shrouded from view, letting his directives speak for him.
Ren had never been so wise. He was incapable of it—a slave to his emotions. That wouldn’t do in a Supreme Leader. It would endanger all Hux and his technologists had created.
Well, Hux wouldn’t allow that. And the more delusions Ren suffered, the easier it would be to arrange for him to be sidelined and eliminated.
* * *
—
As the Falcon raced back toward the battlefield, Rey hurried up the ladder from the gun turret and joined Chewbacca in the cockpit. Dread knotted her stomach as she saw the massive crack in the shield door and the lines of First Order war machines so close to it. Then all the walkers’ guns began firing at once, focused on one precise point.
Rey and Chewbacca exchanged a bewildered glance.
“Better go around the back,” Rey suggested.
The Wookiee barked his agreement.
* * *
—
There was no sign of the man who’d begun his walk across the ruined plain—just a massive pillar of roiling fire and smoke, a conflagration renewed by the energy poured into it amid the continuous thunder of the First Order guns.
In the command shuttle, Kylo Ren had gotten to his feet and was staring down at the strange spectacle below. His fists were clenched and there were tears in his eyes.
“More!” he yelled.
Hux looked at him uneasily.
“We’ve surely—” he began, but Kylo cut him off.
“More!” he howled.
The firing continued, the fusillade of energy tinting the white salt around the blast point orange and red.
“Enough,” Hux said. “Enough!”
The First Order commanders looked at one another uncertainly. Kylo said nothing, collapsing into his chair. After a moment, Hux’s order was obeyed and the firing stopped.
“You think you got him?” Hux asked acidly, not bothering to hide his scorn.
Far below the shuttle, the column of smoke and flame continued to whirl and churn. Kylo stared down at the salt plains, but his gaze couldn’t penetrate the aftermath of the destruction.
Hux eyed Ren with disdain. “Now, if we’re ready to get moving, we can finish this.”
“Sir…” the shuttle’s commander said tentatively.
Beside him, Kylo raised his eyes almost unwillingly. As if what was happening below them wouldn’t become real if he didn’t look.
But that only worked in ancient myths, the kind of stories told to entertain children.
Out of the fiery column below stepped Luke Skywalker, his robes not so much as singed, his gaze still locked on the shuttle. He brushed invisible dust from his shoulders, his face radiating contempt.
Kylo got to his feet, eyes riveted on his uncle.
“Bring me down to him,” he ordered the pilot. “And don’t advance our forces until I say.”
“Supreme Leader, don’t be distracted!” Hux urged. “Our goal is to kill the Resistance! They’re helpless in the mine, but every moment we waste—”
Kylo harnessed the Force, used it to seize Hux, and hurled him into the wall of the command shuttle’s cabin. Hard enough to shut him up, certainly, and maybe to kill him. He didn’t particularly care which.
“Right away, sir,” the shuttle commander said hastily.
Finn entered the mine with Rose in his arms, yelling for a medpac. Resistance fighters hurried over and took her gently from him, moving her to a hovering gurney that had been brought up for the battle. Finn watched the soldiers bear her away, head hanging from exhaustion. Around them, the crystal fur of the foxes tinkled in the gloom.
Finn looked out through the great crack in the door, where one man with a laser sword had gone to face down the entire First Order. Between the arrival of the Millennium Falcon and what he’d learned of Rey’s mission, he’d realized who that man must be—a legend come to life, when the Resistance needed one most.
“Was that…?” he asked Poe.
“I think…yeah,” Poe replied.
Poe knew Luke Skywalker wasn’t a figure out of myth, but a real man—his own mother, Shara Bey, had escorted his shuttle away from the second Death Star and accompanied him on a mission after its destruction.
But then Poe had grown up on Yavin 4, playing in the shade of an uneti tree his mother had been given by Skywalker himself, and which he’d told her was a seedling of one that had grown at Coruscant’s Jedi Temple. And Poe had honed his flight skills in Yavin’s debris ring, dodging chunks of scorched and twisted Death Star plating passed over by scavengers.
Still, Skywalker had all but vanishe
d by the time Poe was an adolescent, pursuing ancient Jedi secrets amid strange stars. What was happening on the plains of Crait, Poe sensed, belonged to a vanished era of the galaxy. It might never be witnessed again.
* * *
—
The command shuttle descended, engines grumbling as its huge wings folded upward. It sat silently in front of Luke for a moment, like a massive black raptor studying him. Then, with a hiss of hydraulics, the ramp lowered and Kylo Ren stepped out into the cracked chaos of the salt flats.
Luke had registered nothing beyond his nephew’s presence when he’d found him with Rey, back on Ahch-To. Now he blazed in Luke’s sense of the Force, almost radiant with power. It was the kind of power Luke had foreseen for him—first as near-infinite promise, then later as an equivalent peril.
That power was fed by emotions so strong, they seemed almost to pollute the Force around Kylo. Rage poured out of him, and a near-malignant cruelty—a lust to deform and destroy everything around him, to blot it out and erase it.
But those emotions weren’t the most powerful ones Luke sensed in his nephew. Even stronger than the anger were Kylo’s pain and fear. They filled him, threatening to devour him.
Ben Solo had sought to abandon everything he had been, even casting aside his name. But Luke sensed that Kylo Ren was just a shell around the same broken boy he had tried so hard to reach.
Once, Luke had thought he would be the one who might mend what was broken in Kylo. Later, he had blamed himself for the damage.
Both thoughts had been vanity, he realized now. Whatever had broken in Kylo, it was far beyond Luke’s ability to fix.
Kylo had been studying Luke as well. Now he spoke, his voice thick with venom.
“Old man,” he said. “Did you come back to say you forgive me? To save my soul, like my father?”
“No.”
When he realized that was Luke’s only answer, Kylo snatched up his lightsaber. The crimson blade crackled and growled, flakes of salt hitting it and flowering into sparks.
Luke’s hand went slowly and deliberately to his own lightsaber, a shaft of blue emerging from the hilt. He and Kylo took up their dueling stances, eyes fixed on each other.
* * *
—
Poe watched the confrontation through his quadnocs. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, stretching Kylo’s and Luke’s shadows across the plain.
“Kylo Ren,” Poe told Finn. “Luke’s facing him alone.”
“We should help him!” Finn replied. “Let’s go!”
Poe wanted to smile—was this the same Finn who’d insisted he wasn’t here to join another army? And not so long ago, he would have reacted the same way—looking for anything he could fly and blasting off across the plains. But he’d learned there were other ways to fight—and that those who chose them were no less brave.
Poe studied the two figures standing in front of the command shuttle for a long moment.
“This isn’t just a family reunion,” he told the remaining Resistance fighters. “Skywalker’s doing this for a reason. He’s stalling him so we can escape.”
“Escape?” Finn asked, incredulous. “He’s one man against an army. We have to go help him! We have to fight!”
Leia joined them, trailed as always by C-3PO. She and Poe exchanged glances.
“No,” Poe said. “We are the spark that will light the fire that will burn down the First Order. Luke’s doing this so we can survive. There has to be another way out of the mine. Hell, how’d he get in?”
“Sir, it is possible that a natural, unmapped opening exists,” C-3PO said. “But this facility is such a maze of endless tunnels that the odds of finding an exit are fifteen thousand four hundred twenty-eight—”
As he delivered this grim news, C-3PO’s analysis of Poe’s posture and facial expression indicated the pilot was listening intently. That was a relief—in C-3PO’s experience, most organics were notoriously poor listeners.
But Poe was also holding up one finger.
“Shh. Shh. Shut up!”
“—to one,” C-3PO concluded, feeling it would be irresponsible to leave so important a calculation incomplete. Strictly speaking, he didn’t need to listen, not even while his vocabulator was active. He simply reorganized his sensory inputs according to perceived importance. Which was easily done.
“Oh,” C-3PO said. “My audio sensors no longer detect—”
“Exactly,” Poe said.
He stepped a few paces away from the group, staring into the dark tunnels leading away from the main chamber. It was quiet—eerily silent.
Finn’s eyes widened in realization. “Where’d the crystal critters go?”
C-3PO thought of reminding Captain Dameron that the creatures were properly referred to as vulptices, but decided this information would be dismissed as of nominal value given current events. Similarly, the Resistance members probably would be deplorably uninterested if told that the proper term of venery was a skulk of vulptices.
Which was most unfortunate. Terms of venery were one of those quirks of organic language that C-3PO found fascinating. He knew of 512 such collective nouns in Basic alone, including the delightful crash of rancors and scold of mynocks.
Captain Dameron was still listening for something. But C-3PO’s auditory sensors recorded no sound similar to the continuous tinkle made by the crystalline fur of the vulptices.
Actually, that wasn’t quite true—he did detect a faint sound, one for which the most likely correlation was the proximity of a lone vulptex. And indeed, there the creature was, its eyes shining in the darkness.
As C-3PO watched, the vulptex turned tail and hurried off down the tunnel, its fur chiming. This information struck C-3PO as highly relevant given Poe’s sudden interest in the creatures, though that interest was decidedly odd.
Still, C-3PO had long ago given up on understanding human behavior.
He started to inform the pilot of the creature’s departure, but he’d noticed it on his own.
“Follow me,” Poe said, and hurried after the fox.
All eyes turned to Leia, who turned from the distant scene on the plain and nodded at them.
“What are you looking at me for? Follow him.”
* * *
—
The ridgeline above the mine had been reshaped over the millennia by salt glaciers, grinding away at the mountains to leave behind a cracked landscape of crags and knobs separated by deep fissures.
The Falcon flew slowly over the ridge; inside, R2-D2 had plugged into a dataport in the cockpit so he could access the freighter’s sensors.
The astromech whined unhappily.
“The beacon’s right beneath us,” Rey said. “They’ve got to be somewhere. Keep scanning for life-forms.”
The droid beeped an acknowledgment and urged the freighter to switch its sensors over to focus mode, probing the rock beneath them for matches with human energy signatures.
The Falcon responded sulkily, then launched into a diatribe about its inadequate sensor rectennae, power feeds to the dish that remained misaligned more than three decades after the incident that had knocked them out of place, and Chewbacca’s obviously deliberate refusal to prioritize repairs the way the freighter thought made sense.
When the Falcon mentioned something about barely being able to detect the back end of a bantha at high noon, R2-D2 suppressed an electronic sigh. The Falcon had always been cantankerous, its three droid brains quarreling endlessly unless forced to work together. Still, R2-D2 usually got along with the ship well enough. For one thing, none of the brains could stand C-3PO; for another, one of them had a fondness for both romantic gossip and dirty jokes, both of which R2-D2 had learned to provide in large quantities.
R2-D2 gently suggested that—merely as an experiment—the Falcon perform a burst scan spatially centered o
n the mate of the beacon on Rey’s wrist. After a show of reluctance, the ship complied.
The astromech beeped to get Rey’s attention—the scan had turned up massive life readings.
Rey peered down at the mountainside, trying to match up what R2-D2 had found with what she was seeing.
“Chewie!” she said, pointing. “There!”
Below them, dozens of crystal foxes were streaming out of a fissure in the mountainside.
* * *
—
The Resistance fighters followed the fox through the warren of tunnels. Poe was worried they’d frighten the creature into hiding, but it seemed to understand that they needed to follow it, going so far as to linger when they struggled to keep pace. Rose was toward the back of the group, unconscious thanks to a cocktail of sedatives and pain medication, with Finn trotting along anxiously next to her gurney. At the very back were BB-8 and C-3PO, the latter warning everyone within range of his voice about the hazards of the cave complex.
Threepio had covered cave-ins, ebb nests, debilitating falls, fatal falls, crystal sickness, and starvation when the group emerged from a narrow tunnel into a natural cave glittering with crystal outcroppings. The crystal fox stood atop a large boulder, eyes bright in the gloom. It studied them for a moment, then hopped down from its perch, loping over to a rockfall that filled the back of the cavern. There, it somehow squeezed itself into a crack less than a third of a meter wide, its fur jangling and tinkling against the stone.
“Oh no,” Poe said, peering into the narrow exit. He could see light, but there was no way any of them could squeeze into the space.
* * *
—
Rey hurried down the Falcon’s ramp and scrambled down a scree of crystal shards and salt chunks into a crevasse. A fox ran past her, its fur chiming and singing, and leapt from outcropping to outcropping to reach the top of the ridge.