by Ben Acker
MATTIS AWOKE IN the dark, thrumming. It was nearly dawn and he was ready for a real first day. After the day before, he felt he had something to prove, and he was ready to prove it. He knew he could make a difference to the Resistance. If he had to follow Jo’s orders to the letter, then that’s what he’d do, and he’d make Lorica like him while he did it.
Mattis slid out of his bunk quietly, eager to head down to the Yard. No sooner had he put his feet to the floor, though, than the light snapped on and Klimo rolled out of his bunk in a pile of limbs and noise.
“Today is our first day!” he shouted.
Mattis nodded. “Yep, that’s right,” he said, demonstrating acceptable volume.
“Should we go to the Yard? Should we be early to first-day training, Mattis? Do you want to race there?”
Mattis lit up with an idea. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll race you.” He slipped into his boots, then said, “Ready-set-go.”
Klimo bounded from the bunk, a nasal shriek like a disappearing siren following him out into the base. Mattis laughed to himself and followed, walking. Klimo would win the race. And Mattis would have a few moments to himself before training began.
When Mattis arrived at the Yard, Klimo was waiting for him, hands on his knobby knees, panting. “Hoo-boy, best friend! You gave me a run for my credits!”
Lorica Demaris was already there, and laughed at Klimo’s jovial chumminess with Mattis. Some of the other squad members laughed, too.
The Yard wasn’t bare as it had been the night before. Someone, probably Jo, had woken early to set up what looked like an elaborate obstacle course. The room was divided into corridors via sturdy-looking barricades. Every few meters, a large metal door was affixed between them. Two sentry droids methodically monitored the makeshift corridors.
The squad that fell under Jo’s command was a varied crew. Besides Lorica and Klimo, there was a pair of round-headed, tusked Aqualish boys. One was tall and gangly, and the other was short and pudgy. There was a human girl who wore an insignia from the planet Ganthel. Mattis would have to be wary of her; Core planet natives were usually aristocratic snobs. Mattis suspected Jo was also from the Core, what with his superior attitude and fanatical rule-following. A brown-and-white-furred, stick-thin alien girl with a dog snout hung around Lorica, who paid her little mind. Another kid Mattis took for a human around his age removed his cap, and Mattis saw two blunt horns sticking out of his shaggy black hair.
Mattis had been right: everyone had heard of Lorica. Everyone on the squad was looking at her, though nobody was making eye contact. Her name bubbled to the surface of every quiet conversation. She pointedly ignored it.
Jo cleared his throat and addressed them all. “My name is Jo Jerjerrod. I am your squad leader. My contempt for the First Order is absolute. You want to be fighter pilots. Some of you will be. It’s important, for the next days and weeks and months, that you learn your part in the Resistance. Every one of you, everyone on this base has a role to fulfill. With my help you will fulfill yours to the fullest.”
A positive energy overtook the group, and they all drew a bit closer to one another.
“Where’s Hansen?” Jo asked, looking directly at Mattis.
“I don’t know. Why would I know?”
“You were the last to have eyes on me, Banz. That’s why!” Dec hailed him as he, AG, and Sari walked in. “Jerjerrod, I know you’re a stickler for time, but this session isn’t supposed to start until the crack of dawn and dawn hasn’t cracked yet. How long till the dawn cracks, Aygee?”
“Couple seconds after I finish saying…this.”
“So about now, then?” Dec asked, smirking as if it were his job.
AG made a sound like he was sucking teeth he didn’t have with air he didn’t breathe. “No, you missed it.”
“We’re on time,” Sari said, winking at Mattis.
Dec approached with the other two flanking him, like a formation of X-wing fighters attacking an enemy base. “Everyone ready to get started?” he asked. He grinned openly at Mattis. Mattis looked away.
“Fall in with the squad,” Jo said sharply.
Dec bobbed his head coolly and stood by the Aqualish boys, who grunted. Mattis didn’t know what the grunts meant—nice to meet you or go away—but Dec didn’t seem to mind them either way. He laughed like they’d told a joke. Then, noticing Lorica, Dec exclaimed, “Hey, you’re Lorica Demaris!”
Lorica winced. Sari looked impressed. AG didn’t. “I thought you’d be redder,” the droid said.
Jo ran his eleven charges through training exercises. Mattis had heard stories of how the Empire used to punish and torture people. None of that sounded so bad compared with the Resistance training. Every part of Mattis burned, tingled, and wanted to fall off. He had never sweated with such purpose. To his credit, Jo joined in on every exercise of the seeming thousands he asked of his squad. Every second set was push-ups. AG did the exercises, as well, for solidarity. The only good thing Mattis could say about the training was that he was pleased to get it all out of the way on the first day. It felt like they had done enough to last each of them an entire lifetime. After the pudgy Aquilish boy fainted, Jo finished the session for the day, promising that it would come to be everyone’s favorite morning ritual in the months that followed. Mattis hated that idea so much.
Mattis cheered right up, though, when Jo told them the next part of training was a war game. “Each of you will be given an assignment designed to accentuate your strengths and your role in this squad. Your goal is this map.” Jo held up a small piece of scrap metal.
“That’s not a map,” Klimo said.
“Pretend it’s a map,” Jo ordered.
“Aye-aye!” Klimo saluted.
Mattis didn’t take his eyes from Jo. He wanted to be a good soldier. He wondered what role Jo would find for him in the training exercise.
Jo dictated positions to some of the others—transport, code breaking on the security-locked doors—and he told Lorica she’d be mission leader. She nodded confidently. Jo told Mattis, “You’re the lookout. Hang back, make sure the sentry droids don’t catch you all in action. Think you can handle that?”
That made Dec laugh. “Banz can handle that all right, chief.”
Jo glared at Dec. “You’ll be Mattis’s cohort. Stay two steps behind him. Aygee-Ninety, your job is to disarm those sentry droids should they discover any of you.”
AG drawled, “Aye-aye.”
“Finally,” Jo said, “some of those security locks aren’t going to be cracked. Which is where you come in, Sari. You’re the muscle. Knock those doors in.”
Sari’s eyes narrowed. “I can slice the codes on those doors.”
Jo shook his head. “You’re the muscle, Sari. Look at you.”
Dec piped up, “Chief, Sari’s a genius. She can slice her way into anything.”
“I’ll second that,” AG said. “Ain’t the point to be clandestine?”
“That’s not the exercise,” Jo said tightly.
“You want muscle? Flex for him, Aygee.” Dec prodded his brother, who put his metal arm up in imitation of a flexing motion.
“You tell a door I’m coming,” AG said, “it starts shaking on its hinges. Let me at a door.”
Mattis felt his neck get hot. “Jo’s the squad leader,” he mumbled. He didn’t mean to mumble it. He meant to say it with confidence. Dec heard him anyway.
“You heard Banz; Jo’s the leader,” Dec chided at the volume Mattis intended.
“Are you really causing discord in my squad?” Jo asked Dec. “So soon after getting on Admiral Ackbar’s bad side and derelicting your duty to that A-wing yesterday?”
“You prefer I wait a few days? So you can see who’s wrapped around your finger, playing their so-called role and takin’ away the stuff that made the Resistance want us on board in the first place?” Dec’s swamp accent came on strong when he was agitated.
“It’s okay, Dec,” Sari said, looking at the floor. “I’m the
muscle. It’s fine.”
“It ain’t fine.”
Sari put a big hand on Dec’s shoulder. “It’s fine.”
Dec bobbed his head a couple of times, rebuilding his wall of laid-back confidence. “Just fine,” he said. “Any further orders, sir, or can we get on with it?”
If Jo was pleased that he’d won the confrontation, he didn’t betray it. He just barked at them to take positions and begin the exercise. So they did, and Mattis didn’t let the sentry droids see them, and Sari knocked down doors, and Lorica called out commands, and Dec dragged himself along behind Mattis, not talking much to anyone. But he was thinking. Mattis could see the turbines rotating.
The weeks passed in that way. J-Squadron, as they were soon called, followed Jo’s orders. He put them through their paces with those horrible exercises and other ones that got them to stretch mentally and practice limited spy craft or combat. They didn’t, however, get to fly.
It was a sore point among most of them.
“He’ll let us take a fighter out when we’re ready,” Lorica said whenever they would complain.
None of them wanted to get into a cockpit as badly as AG did. “I was ready before we got here,” he’d counter. Their arguments would end in a stalemate, because, really, it was up to Jo. If he didn’t want them flying, then they were grounded.
They were, however, ordered to use the flight simulator. They’d each climb into what looked like half a giant shell. It was soft and a little viscous inside and out. The top looked like an open, four-petaled flower. The “pilot” sat in the middle. It was a little tight for everyone but Klimo. A small screen projected from a control panel; that was a simulation of their cockpit module.
“It ain’t flyin’” was all AG would say about it.
Mattis liked the simulation. He felt himself becoming a better, more confident pilot. He listened to Jo and Lorica as they shouted commands and did his best to react swiftly. He liked sim-flying in formation with J-Squadron. He liked when they all bore down on a target and destroyed it together as a team. He felt a fellowship with them then, even if the squad still felt tenuous in the nonsimulated world.
It was maybe their fifth time in the flight simulator when Dec ruined that feeling. They were running a scenario in which the flanking attackers would defend the lead ship as war droids fired at them from the ground of a desert planet. Green Leader, which was Lorica, would fire on the war droids. It was a tight-formation attack, a scenario J-Squadron had struggled with in previous sims. They tended to fly either too far apart, thus rendering themselves unable to properly defend Green Leader, or too close together, knocking one or another of them off course.
This time, they were flying right. Lorica was telling them when to lay down suppressing fire so she could swoop in low and sweep the war droids. On the fourth pass, Dec broke formation and sped ahead of the rest of them. As he deployed his proton torpedoes while simultaneously gunning the war droids with his blaster cannon, he threw up so much smoke and sand that they lost him on their tracking computers. One of the Aqualish boys—the gangly one, whose name was Haal—tottered his fighter and clipped Mattis’s wing; it was all Mattis could do to regain control and stay in the sloppy formation in which they found themselves as they emerged from Dec’s chaos cloud.
Mattis hadn’t realized that both Jo and Lorica were shouting at Dec, as all he’d heard were the sounds of simulated explosions and squawking war droids.
“What in the forest moon of Endor was that?” Jo had his finger in Dec’s face. Dec wore a huge smile.
“Yee-haw,” said Dec. “We finished off those war droids, and we’re all safe as a landing. Mission achieved, chief.”
“Mission not achieved!” Jo was never so focused as when he was furious. “The mission was to execute Lorica’s commands! Your squadron could be dead right now because of you, Hansen!”
Dec looked around at J-Squadron. “Is everyone fine?” Only AG responded with a yep. “Everyone’s fine,” Dec insisted.
“You couldn’t know they would be!” Lorica threw her helmet aside and charged Dec, shoving him in the chest. He fell back into his pod.
“What was that for?”
“Stand down, Lorica,” Jo said.
She was fuming. Her skin turned a deeper red. “You didn’t follow orders. Haal was knocking around formation because you threw up smoke and sand and whatever else. You do that in the field, and we’re dead.”
“We’re not dead!” Dec said defensively. “I had Aygee on my tail, and we’ve run this kind of scenario for real hundreds of times down in the swamp.”
AG tilted his head. “Well, to be honest, it was on speeder bikes and we were taking shots at slime crabs for dinner, but it worked out the same.”
“You don’t even eat dinner,” Jo seethed.
“You don’t know what meals I don’t eat!” AG shot back.
Jo turned his attention back to Dec. “You never fly out of formation. Ever.”
“Yeah, I do, chief! I do all the time. Always have. Especially when formation is slowin’ me down.”
“That’s nutsen,” Jo said, leaning into the Gungan word for crazy.
“You can try eggin’ me on like that, but you’re the angry fella here, not me.” Dec all but tweaked his nose. “I’m cool as a dead star, and all you got to show for it is you’re wrong and you sound dumb as a Gungan.”
Jo got even madder. “My best friend is a Gungan, and he’s worth a hundred of you and two hundred of your ‘brother.’” Jo’s Gungan button didn’t work on Dec, but in that moment, he saw one that might. “Your brother, who I shouldn’t even let in the sim, because droids aren’t pilots.”
“Aygee is a pilot,” Dec said quietly, some of his confident swagger gone. That button worked.
“Don’t worry about it,” AG said to Dec.
“I said to you, chief, that my brother is a pilot.” Dec stood nose to nose with the squad leader.
“He’s a robot.” Jo was cool now. “He might make a serviceable astromech if his memory were wiped.”
Dec glared, and AG reached out to put a hand on him. Dec shook him off.
“Then he could be programmed for flight and discipline,” Jo continued. “Too bad we can’t reprogram you, too.”
“No one. Is gettin’. Reprogrammed,” Dec said. His hands balled into fists, and Mattis was afraid he would take a swing at Jo.
“Is he going to hit him?” asked Klimo.
Lorica pushed Dec and Jo apart. “Insubordination. Fifty push-ups, Dec,” she said sharply.
Dec just kept glowering at Jo, who liked the sound of push-ups. “All right. If Dec won’t do his own push-ups,” he said, “everyone else will. Fifty push-ups, everyone.”
Dec looked at Sari, grimacing as she got into push-up position. He looked at AG, then at Mattis, his people, and he dropped to the ground. “Don’t bother, everyone. I do my own push-ups. You want fifty? I can give you a hundred.”
Jo shook his head. “Everyone give me a hundred, except Dec. Dec, you go ahead and do whatever you want. That’s what you’re best at.”
Dec ignored that and started his hundred push-ups.
“Keep at it,” Jo said, looking down at them all. “I’ll see you in the morning.” For once, Jo did not do the exercise with everyone else.
Once Jo had gone, a couple of J-Squadron members tapered off their push-ups, but Lorica reminded them that, while it was Dec’s fault, they did all have to follow orders. “Why can’t you just do the same?” she asked Dec between puffs.
“Because,” Dec said, panting hard himself. “That’s no way to win a war.”
“Jo is—hff—training us to win a war,” she said.
“No,” Dec said. “Jo doesn’t see us, not really. AG is the best pilot we got, and Jo’s not letting him be Green Leader. No offense.”
“All kinds of offense taken,” Lorica said.
“He’s making Sari knock down walls. That ain’t what Sari does. And Banz is a go-getter….Lookit him. All
you need to do is point him. Who would waste Banz’s time by making him keep watch?”
“You did,” Lorica reminded him.
“Yeah, but that was before I knew him. That was foolin’ around. My point is, Jo takes away what’s—hff—unique about each of us, we’re for sure gonna lose any battle we’re in.” He doubled the pace of his push-ups, then abruptly hopped to his feet. “That’s two hundred,” he said. He was breathing heavily and wiping the sweat from his face. “What’re you at?”
Lorica hopped up, too. “Two hundred,” she said dryly.
“Fine,” he said, and sauntered out. AG followed. Lorica watched the rest of them, then she left, too. Five more members of J-Squadron finished in turn, leaving Klimo, Mattis, and Sari—the worst at push-ups—to complete their punishment. Klimo screamed and collapsed. In seconds, he was lightly snoring, completely exhausted by the workout.
Mattis finished his set and rolled onto his side. “I’m done,” he said. “I hate both of them.”
Sari sat down beside Mattis. “Don’t hate Dec,” she said. “Dec likes you a lot.”
“He could’ve gotten us all killed. That’s not why I came here. I prefer being alive. He doesn’t care about anyone.”
Sari’s big eyes got bigger. She bit her lip, considering whether or not to say something.
“What?” Mattis asked.
“Dec needs friends who’ll watch his back. He doesn’t take to people easily. He likes me, but—” She laughed quietly. “Everybody likes me, once they’re not afraid of me.”
“Why would I watch his back?”
She sighed deeply. It had the sound of a low motor dying down. “You know why Dec broke into General Organa’s rooms that first day you were here?”
Mattis shrugged. “To make some trouble.”
“No,” Sari said. “It was to get Aygee assigned to a bunk.”
“Aygee didn’t have a bunk?”
“He didn’t. The Resistance didn’t give him one. They think he’s just a droid. And anyway, they’ve got their hands full with more important stuff than figuring out where the recruits are supposed to lay their heads.”