by Chuck Wendig
“Yes. Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”
And then Admiral Urian Orlan is gone.
She turns around—
And finds she’s not alone.
Admiral Rax stands there. Silent as a specter. His black-gloved hands are clasped in front of him.
“Everything all right?” he asks.
She might as well tell him. He probably already knows. So Sloane spills the story. His face registers no surprise.
“Call Orlan back,” Rax says. “Tell him we did approve the repairs on the prison.”
“But we did no such thing.”
“No, but we’re doing it now.”
“The two ships? I believe they belong to known New Republic malefactors—the crew of Imperial hunters seems to have joined ranks with one of the Rebellion’s cultural heroes, General Solo. Taking them out—”
“…Is the wrong fight.”
“How is that, exactly?”
He rests a gentle hand on her shoulder—though it feels to her like it weighs a thousand kilograms. A light touch that could crush her. Placating and condescending, to boot. “Admiral Sloane, we do not want to goad them into a fight right now. We are on the cusp of making our attack on Chandrila. We don’t want to give them any sign that it’s coming—no preemptive attacks. We must appear weak. They must be bloated with overconfidence.”
“This is wrong.”
“Trust me. I have it all in hand. Which reminds me, the instruments are nearly all lined up and the music has been written. It is time to perform the song. Chandrila must fall, but first, I need your help.”
She hesitates. It feels like she’s getting into bed with a viper. “How?”
“I have a task.”
He tells her what it is.
And when he does, she cannot help feeling like she’s being ushered toward another test—or worse, a trap.
“I’ll do it,” she says. “And I’ll make sure Admiral Orlan knows that we did, in fact, approve of the work on G5-623.”
“Good,” he says, and reaches forward and kisses her brow. His lips are cold. Her whole body tenses up as he performs the gesture—a gesture made as if he is blessing her, somehow. She wants to vomit.
When he’s gone, she does indeed call Orlan.
But then she makes another call, because someone is going to go to the Kashyyyk system on her behalf. She will not let this opportunity escape her—it is her life preserver, and she will hold on tight.
Jas has a bad feeling about this.
She eases the Halo along, following the path set by the Falcon just ahead. It’s night, but even in the half dark, it’s easy to see:
This planet is sick.
The trees here are some of the biggest she’s ever seen. Bigger than some of the skytowers and complexes of Coruscant. But the trees are dead. Their massive trunks are splintering, and in those fissures shine the kaleidoscopic bioluminescence of spores and fungus, painting the trees in a diseased glow. The branches are skeletal things, reaching for the sky as if to drag the stars down to the ground and bury them in grave-dirt.
The Falcon winds through those dry, decrepit branches. The Halo follows close. It’s Jom who says it:
“There’s nothing here. Nothing and no one.”
He’s right. No other ships. No lights beneath the dead canopies. Just that swimmy, contaminated glow.
The others gather behind her in the cockpit. She grunts at them to back up and back off, but of course, nobody listens to her.
They’re all too busy gaping.
Where are the Wookiees? The Imperials? Anything?
This is just one part of the planet, she knows—and Kashyyyk is a big planet. It has cities. This is as far flung from any of those cities as they’ll get, according to her (admittedly outdated) maps, but just the same—
This is where they’re supposed to be, and it is a lifeless place. What could the rest of the world look like?
“There,” Temmin says, pointing over her shoulder. She swats his hand away but follows his finger regardless.
Jas can barely make it out, but way down on the surface she sees it: a faint shape of something big. A structure. Ashmead’s Lock. It must be. The coordinates Aram gave them are right on, then.
Solo and Norra must see it, too, because the Falcon swoops low. Jas turns the gunship’s engines vertical, bringing it in to hover.
As they descend, they move past crooked, busted platforms and rotten structures barely hanging on to the side of the trees. Jas flips on a narrow-band spotlight so they can see what they’re looking at. Ahead is an old gun emplacement: a massive bolt-thrower hanging loose from its mooring, swinging gently from tangled vines. It’s a Wookiee weapon. Like a bowcaster, but big enough to take down a craft or a small ship.
Then they pass another structure—not big enough to be a house. A guard station, maybe. It clings to the side of the tree, lashed there with fraying rope. A corpse hangs out of the doorway. A desiccated carcass, the hair on it gone dry as broom bristles. Mostly it’s just a pelt stuck to bones. A dead Wookiee, she thinks. A gun still dangling from its shoulder strap.
The ground is a long way down. They see more dilapidated structures. More bodies. More rot and more ruin.
And then the ground eases up to meet them. The Falcon finds a proper landing platform—a concrete abutment jutting up out of a tangle of twisting thorn. Jas finds a clear spot of ground and settles the Halo into it. The engines burn and blast away some of that unruly underbrush.
Ahead, by a quarter kilometer, is the prison.
Or, rather, prison ship.
It looks like what Aram told them is true: Ashmead’s Lock is not a prison he built. It’s a prison ship from the Old Republic days. A ship run by some rogue empire—an enemy of the Republic, he said. The Predori, he called them. Whoever they were, they’re gone now.
The ship once held captives of the Old Republic and sat in the center of some massive gravity well—how better to keep prisoners from escaping than by sticking them into a ship capable of resisting the crushing, implosive force of a gravitational hollow? Easy to get in. Impossible to escape. But one day, everything fell apart. Aram said that well must’ve fallen in onto itself, sending the ship plunging to the world below—
And it crashed into the surface of Kashyyyk, where it sat for hundreds, even thousands of years. The Wookiees believed it cursed: a place haunted by bad spirits. They made it forbidden to come here. They stood vigil in case anything ever came out of it.
And then, one day, the Empire came.
The Imperials found no such fear of the artifact, and were instead more than happy to refurbish the old ship into performing its task once more—and who better to turn it into a black-site prison than Golas Aram?
The prison ship sits in the distance illuminated with but a single light atop it: a shimmering blue crystal, bathing everything in an eerie radiance. It matches the creepy fungal glow from above, and serves well to further stir the septic feeling roiling around in Jas’s stomach.
They all exit the Halo. Beneath them, the ground is hard and dry and cracked—the undergrowth is brittle, snapping like little bones as they walk.
They gather together behind the trunks of one of the gargantuan trees.
“This is it,” Solo says.
“Doesn’t look like anybody’s home,” Norra says. “You’re sure Chewbacca is in this place?”
He scowls. “He has to be. All the records pointed me here.”
“Can we all reach the uncomfortable agreement that this is very likely a trap?” Sinjir says. “I mean, the records ‘pointed you’ here—some old derelict ghost ship in an obliterated bit of forest—which says to me that we’re about to stick our foot into an ill-concealed snare. Yes? Hello?”
“It’s not a trap,” Solo growls. “Can’t be. Chewie’s in there. I can feel it. The Empire doesn’t have it together enough to put a…a trick together like that anymore. And if they wanted us dead or in shackles, they coulda done it before we ever got do
wn here to the surface. We’re doing this.”
Jas hesitates. “I don’t think we should.”
“Then stay out here. I don’t care. I’m going in.”
With that, Solo steps out from behind the tree and begins his march toward the prison. He ducks his head low and darts forward, blaster in hand.
“Norra,” Jas says. “Something’s up, and he’s blind to it.”
“I know. But he needs our help.” Norra sighs. “Tem, you and Bones stay out here—”
“Whoa, c’mon, we want in on the action.”
“No, you don’t. And the action might come up on our tails while we’re in there, and if it does? You’re our rear guard.”
He rolls his eyes. “Fine.”
“The rest of us? We’re with Solo. But stay frosty. I don’t know what we’re expecting to find in here. Aram said the prison was automated—but that it had defense mechanisms. Thankfully, his codes are supposed to get us past those mechanisms. Cross your fingers, toes, and tentacles.” Norra draws her own blaster. “We’re going in.”
—
It’s Bones who opens the door. One of the talon-tipped claws on his hand flips back, and a datalink adapter emerges. He hums to himself as he jams it into the port—the interface mechanism spins right, then left, then buzzes all the way around as the modded B1 battle droid uploads the code.
It works. The door slides open.
Norra tells her son: “Stay here. Use the comlink if you need us.”
Temmin wants to go. He’s good at this sort of thing. Staying out here will be boring. (And, though he wouldn’t admit it out loud, creepy.)
But he decides to play nice. He is learning to trust his mother.
He gives a reluctant nod, and then the rest of them go inside as he and Bones wait by the door.
The droid sways back and forth, rocking to some imperceptible tune. He clicks and clacks his talons against his skeletal legs, creating an erratic beat. Temmin shushes him. “We gotta be quiet, Bones.”
“ROGER-ROGER, MASTER TEMMIN.”
“Just…keep an eye out.”
“OKIE-DOKIE.”
“And be ready for anything.”
“READY TO EVISCERATE ANYTHING.”
“That’s not exactly what I said.” He shrugs. “But close enough.”
—
Inside: darkness. Complete and total. Norra can’t see Solo in front of her, can’t see the others behind her. How could a prison like this sit here in the dark for so—
Click. Click. Click.
One by one, the lights come on, cascading down a long hall, fixture by fixture. The brightness washes everything out and Norra winces against it. As her eyes adjust, she can start to make out the layout of the ship. The hall ahead. Two sets of stairs going up on each side. Metal walkways above, each illuminated by lines of red light. Beyond that, above, are porthole windows glowing blue.
Everything is shiny and chrome. Walls like black mirrors.
Han blinks, then cocks an eyebrow. “All right. We’re in.” He keeps his voice low when he says, “We’re going to split up. Me and the bounty hunter are going to stay on this floor. Norra, you take the Imperial and the new guy—”
“Hey,” Jom protests. Jas snickers.
“—and head to the upper floors. We’re looking for…I dunno what. The bridge. A control station. Above all else, we’re looking for Chewie and the other prisoners the Empire took that day. Clear?”
“As a sunny day,” Norra says.
“Let’s do this.” Han and Jas skulk off, sticking to the lower level. Norra has Sinjir and Jom form up behind her as they take to the second floor.
Norra keeps her blaster out—not pointed at anything, and her finger on the guard, not on the trigger. Wedge was fond of giving everyone lectures about trigger discipline, which means not putting your finger on that trigger until you’re just ready to pull it.
Wedge.
She misses him.
She understands his choice not to come along. He’s a pilot for the New Republic. He has his loyalties. And yet she’s angry at him, too. Because he’s a part of this. He should do like she did, and follow her heart—
Oh, that’s just absurd, isn’t it? She chastises herself for the thought. Follow her heart where? To a prison ship on a slave planet?
Maybe Wedge had the right idea after all.
The moment they reach the second floor is when the silence of the ship is suddenly broken.
A voice comes over the comm speakers, filling the whole ship with its booming presence, a voice that vacillates between male and female as it runs through a series of babbled languages. Norra recognizes some, like Ithorese, Gand, and Huttese, but not all. It races through them, almost as if calibrating itself—
Then it begins to speak in a language they all understand.
“Life-forms: eighty percent human, twenty percent Zabrak. Attuning language to Basic. Greetings, trespassers! This is Predori Prison Ship, Ashmead’s Lock. I am the ship’s IPU, or Intellectual Processing Unit, designation SOL-GDA: Synthesized Operating Layer, Grid-Based Drive Array. Welcome to my ship. Please speak the passcode aloud to continue.”
Sinjir almost laughs. “What did it say?”
“ ‘What did it say’ is not an acceptable passcode. One out of three attempts used. Please speak the passcode aloud to continue.”
Norra sticks her finger up against her lips to shush Sinjir and Jom before they say anything else. Whatever this passcode is, Aram never gave it to them. That means he set them up. Because of course he did. Damnit! Why did the system trigger so late? Why not when they first stepped inside? A grim thought enters her mind: All the better to trap us here.
She starts to flag them to turn around and head back down the steps. Best to leave now and reformulate the plan.
But then the computer—now settling on a female voice—says:
“ ‘What the hell is this?’ is not an acceptable passcode. Two out of three attempts used. Please speak the passcode aloud to continue.”
Who the? What the?
Solo.
Damnit! She mouths the word move three times over, and they start heading back down the steps—
A voice bellows from somewhere below. Solo again.
“Gimme the damn Wookiee, you crazy computer!”
And of course, SOL-GDA’s response is:
“ ‘Give me the damn Wookiee, you crazy computer’ is not an acceptable passcode. Three out of three attempts used. Passcode failed. System moving to lockdown. Please remain still for incorporation.”
Lockdown? Incorporation?
That doesn’t sound good at all, does it? Norra waves her arms, urging the others forward—
The ship begins to rumble: a low, mechanized growl accompanied by a high-pitched whine that drills deep into her ear.
Above them and alongside them, the black mirrors begin to slide back with a whir. Out of each newly exposed chamber steps a pair of droids. Their faces are polished mirrors—not black like the walls but rather, a burnished gunmetal. The arms of the droids are configured like skeletal spines: countless joints allowing the hyperflexible limbs to drag behind them like tentacles. They lean forward with the predatory gait of a hungry beast, feet clicking as they begin to lope toward Norra and the others. Already she hears Solo’s blaster and the bounty hunter’s slugthrower—she fires her own. “Run!” she screams.
But down below, more droids are rushing up to meet them.
—
The way out is locked and blocked. So the bounty hunter and the smuggler go the only direction they can: They hard-charge it deeper into the bowels of the prison ship. Solo’s just ahead, bolting forward, his blaster spitting lasers. Jas fires her slugthrower from the hip as she follows. Ahead, droids lurch and lunge, their whiplike arms lancing the air—
But they go down, one by one. Solo’s lasers take their legs out from under them. Her slugs punch holes through those mirrored masks as they fall—droid heads whipping back and vomiting spa
rks, the machine-beings clattering hard against the floor and skidding.
One comes out of the wall at the smuggler—
The tip of its segmented arm glistens.
A needle, she thinks. It stabs toward Solo’s neck.
No time to do anything else. She fires. The slug shears off the end of the attacker’s limb, sending up a spray of hot metal chips. Solo cries out, clapping his free hand against his neck as he staggers against the wall.
“Keep moving,” she hisses in his ear as she comes up behind him, shouldering him forward.
“You shot me!”
“I shot near you.”
His hand comes away wet with red.
Ahead, more droids—he sneers and draws the second blaster at his hip and peppers the hallway ahead with searing light. Droids spin and spark.
They pass an adjoining passageway, and she catches his elbow with her hand. “There!” Down that way: an open space and what looks to be some kind of command center.
Han Solo fires off a few more shots and follows after her.
Jas hopes the others have found somewhere safe, too.
—
They’re everywhere.
Norra’s on the ground—her back against the metal, her blaster up and firing at a droid diving toward her. Her shot tears the thing’s faceless mask off, exposing a sizzling circuit board. It collapses against her, limbs flailing uselessly against the metal—she rolls it off her and fires two more shots into its open skull. It stops moving.
Jom is just ahead, thrashing about as two of them crawl up on him, pinning him to the wall even as he bashes one in the skull with the butt of his rifle and kicks the other away. Two more swiftly replace those that fell—a segmented arm coils around his blaster and twists it from his grip.
He head-butts the thing in return.
It bloodies his nose. His skull cracks the thing’s mask in two.
Norra stands steady and lines up a shot—
She hears the click-clack behind her just as something—a lashlike limb—curls around her neck and tightens. A sound comes out of her—gkkk!—and instantly her head starts to pulse and throb as the blood pools and her airway closes. Everything seems to go oozing and slow; Jom goes down as one of the droids sticks a needle in his neck; she can’t even see Sinjir, but then when her head is wrenched back, she spies the ex-Imperial up, up, up above her as the droid crawls up the walls, carrying him with it toward an open portal glowing blue; then a needle sticks into her neck with a stabbing prick. She tries to cry out, but can’t…