Journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

by Kevin Shinick

  “Like where? Like how?”

  An alarm went off. It wasn’t a loud, scary alarm—it was a quiet series of beeps that meant someone was in trouble and teachers were being summoned. Maize’s maniacal grin grew wider with every chime. “Like, anywhere. Like, my dad’s ship—that’s how.”

  “What? No way.”

  “They picked him up with a shuttle; he won’t need the personal ship the First Order gave him until he gets back, and that won’t be for months—at least. Unless I get into trouble bad enough.” A bright, wicked smile spread across her face.

  “Do you even know how to fly?”

  “Yeah, I can fly,” she said with confidence that wasn’t quite contagious. Karr wasn’t sure he believed her, but he really wanted to. “My dad’s been teaching me, and anyway, you can bring your droid. He can fly, right? Isn’t that one of the things you said he could do?”

  He was pretty sure that he’d never said any such thing, but he was too caught up in the moment to correct her. “Sure, he can fly. Sure, we can…we can do this,” he said, warming up to the idea. “I’ll call Arzee—he can get here in a few minutes. Before my parents can even make it home, probably.”

  “Do it. Call him, but…” The alarm was picking up, its frequency rising. Footsteps pattered in the hall outside. “Have him meet us at my place. I’ll give you the coordinates. And lock that door,” she commanded.

  Karr punched the appropriate button.

  Maize ran to the nearest window and jacked it open. She held it up for Karr, who scrambled to her side.

  “Are we really doing this?” he asked, one leg already over the ledge and one leg still clinging to the windowsill.

  She pushed him the rest of the way, and as he toppled into the bushes, she said, “Yeah, we are, so come on. Let’s go find someplace exciting.”

  Maize lived near the school in a neighborhood of nicer housing that was usually occupied by government officials, so Karr thought her dad must be somebody pretty interesting. When he asked, she told him, “He’s a diplomat who specializes in technology systems. He helps big First Order engineering projects stay safe, and he negotiates fallout from security breaches.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  She shrugged. “When our spies get caught, he helps them hide what they found. When their spies get caught, he finds out what they learned and keeps them from sharing it.”

  “He plugs holes in security walls. Got it.”

  “Close enough, yeah.” She entered a combination on a keypad, and the front door opened. “Let’s make this fast. My mom will be back around midday, so we don’t have long to grab what we want and get out of here.”

  Karr wanted to follow her to her room, but he stood awkwardly in the middle of the living area instead—looking around at the tasteful art and furnishings that suggested more money than he’d ever had. Or seen. Or heard about. It wasn’t that the place was fancy. It was all the clean lines and smooth surfaces, all the missing dust, the absent dirty dishes and sewing scraps. This was a house with a cleaning staff.

  When Maize returned with a bag slung over her shoulder, he asked, “Do you have any credits? We should probably have some, right?”

  “Way ahead of you.” She patted the bag. “Now where’s your droid?”

  “He’ll be here any second.”

  It was more like thirty seconds, but Karr’s family landspeeder chugged up to the house, looking a little tragic next to the nicer homes and vehicles. “Hello, sir. I brought the things you asked for,” the droid announced as the kids climbed aboard.

  “Great, thanks, Arzee.”

  “And where are we going now?”

  “To the spaceport,” Maize told him. “And hurry it up.”

  “Are you taking a trip, madam?”

  Karr answered that one. “We all are, buddy. I’ll explain on the way.”

  By the time they reached the lot where Maize’s dad had parked his company ship, the droid was all caught up and mostly on board. “But, sir,” he said at a volume that could be considered a whisper, “I am not programmed with the necessary—”

  Karr stopped him and responded in an equally hushed tone, “You can pick it up as we go. Maize knows how to fly, and she can teach us.” He hoped.

  The ship was a smallish First Order yacht called the Avadora, and it looked rather like a silver kitchen utensil whose function Karr could only guess at. It was pretty and shiny, and probably cost more than the town he’d grown up in, but, hey—he needed a ride off Merokia and he could certainly do worse.

  The ramp lowered, and Maize strolled inside like she owned the thing. She practically did, as she reassured him on the way to the cockpit. “Nobody needs or wants this ship until my dad gets back.”

  “And you said that could be…months?”

  “I’d be real surprised if it was any sooner. Sometimes he’s gone as long as a year. Hey, droid,” she said to RZ-7. “Buckle in over here, if you’re my copilot.”

  “Yes, madam, but I may need…time to configure.”

  “Configure away. Karr, there’s room for you over here, too.”

  He squeezed in and latched himself to the seat, exchanging worried looks with RZ-7, who bravely returned his attention to the task at hand.

  “Everybody ready?” she asked

  Karr tried to sound game. “As ready as I’m going to get.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” she mumbled.

  “Are they just going to…let us leave? Without paperwork or…?”

  “Yeah, my dad has priority clearance. No one will bother us. Watch.” She flipped some switches, closed some hatches, and ignited the engines, and the Avadora lifted smoothly off the landing pad—taking to the sky and shooting past it with ease.

  Before long, they were paused in orbit and Karr was silent, staring down at the only world he’d ever known. It was mostly brown and red with desert dust, but streaked with blue where the oceans surged and lakes pooled between the mountains. From up there, it seemed much bigger than it’d ever felt when he was standing on its surface. He’d hardly ever flown anywhere before, much less beyond the atmosphere, but he lied when Maize brought it up.

  “I like the view better up here. Have you ever been to space before?”

  “A couple of times. But it’s been a while,” he added, before she could ask for any specifics. “I forgot how…um…quiet it is, up here.”

  Together they admired the faint glow of the atmosphere beneath them. “Yeah, it can be. So where do we go now?” she asked.

  “Now?”

  “We have to go somewhere, and I’m open to suggestions. What have you got?”

  He scratched at the back of his neck. Now that this whole “running away” plan was really underway, he wasn’t sure where to take it. “We should definitely go looking for Jedi artifacts,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes. “I thought we wanted this to be a successful mission.”

  “Well, where do you want to go?” he snapped defensively.

  She thought for a moment. “I don’t know. Whenever I complain to my dad about the number of times we’ve had to move, he says the same thing: ‘When my job is done, I promise we can move wherever you want. You’ll have the entire galaxy to choose from.’” She said it in a lower register, imitating her father’s droll delivery. “I know it’s just a dopey response meant to shut me up for a while, but I keep thinking I should learn more about what’s out there. That way I can hold him to his word and have an answer the next time he says it.” She leaned back, putting her feet on the console and her arms behind her head. “So if you want to go looking for dead-wizard loot, I guess I’m down with that. I’ll expand my horizons, get out of detention, and definitely get my father’s attention. Lead the way,” she said, gesturing at the vastness of space outside the cockpit window.

  “Hm. Okay. Well…we’re not too far away from Utapau, are we?”

  She thought about it, doing math or consulting maps in her head. “In the grand scheme of th
ings, no—it’s not that far. We can get there fairly fast in this thing. Do you really think you can find any trace of the missing laser-sword goons on Utapau?”

  He wanted to tell her to call them by their rightful name, but she was the pilot, so he kept his protests to himself. “The Jedi,” he said pointedly, “fought alongside the clone troopers on Utapau. It was one of their last known battles. Maybe we can find somebody who remembers something.”

  “What, like leftover clones? Those guys don’t live very long, you know.”

  “Maybe we’ll find somebody else, then. Let’s try it and see. I’ve got a good feeling about this.”

  “You do?” she asked dubiously.

  “Yeah. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it.”

  “And that makes you happy? All right then, let’s do this. My dad is going to be so mad.”

  Karr couldn’t tell if the idea worried her or thrilled her. “What will he do, when he catches you?”

  Maize cocked her head, adjusted her grip on the throttle, and turned to the navicomputer. “Who says he’s going to catch me?”

  Karr smiled. “I bet they wouldn’t make a Jedi go to sewing school.”

  “Is that where they’re sending you? I thought you said it was a trade school.”

  “Sewing is a trade. It’s the family trade, actually. They want me to skip the final terms and go straight to making clothes for fun and profit,” he said, putting a lot of sarcasm on the last part.

  “Like your gloves?”

  “Like my gloves.”

  She programmed the coordinates for Utapau and sat back in the pilot’s seat. “You really hate the idea of being a tailor?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you any good at it?”

  He nodded grudgingly. “Yeah.”

  “Maybe someday you can make clothes for me.”

  He blushed all the way down to his shoulders. “Aw…you could afford something nicer than I could make.”

  “So what? I’d rather have something from a friend than from a store. Anyway, hold on—we’re ready for hyperspace. Next stop: Utapau.”

  She submitted the course, pulled the throttle, and the stars stretched long and thin across the blue, cold ocean of hyperspace.

  On the way, Maize figured out that she wasn’t dealing with two of the galaxy’s most gifted, experienced pilots—not that she was one, either. She mainly knew the basics, but she taught Karr and RZ-7 what she could. The droid, for his part, found the cruiser’s programming tutorials and busied himself with the finer points of space travel.

  “Once I have all the schematics uploaded, I ought to be able to manage this craft without any difficulty. In case you were to become incapacitated, Captain.”

  She nodded. “Captain. I like it.”

  “What does that make me?” asked Karr.

  The droid answered, “Excess baggage?”

  Karr laughed. “Okay, hotshot. Don’t get too comfy in that seat.”

  When they finally emerged from hyperspace, the planet Utapau loomed before them—a sphere of light green spaces and pale brown swaths, with little blue to break it up. Here and there, lights flickered beyond the sharp shadow of light, but there wasn’t much to see from so far away. Caught in orbit were nine moons—dancing gracefully around the planet and one another.

  Maize announced triumphantly, “We’re here! Now where do we go? It’s not a huge planet, but it’s still…I mean, it’s a planet. If your headaches are tingling or whatever, give me some further direction.” She pulled up a data stream with general facts about what could be found on the surface, plus cities, towns, settlements, and outposts.

  “That’s not how my abilities work, exactly, but I’m not against going with a strong gut feeling, either.” Karr watched the information scroll and concentrated. This was the planet where General Grievous was killed, effectively ending the war. He’d learned about it in school and considered himself a bit of a history buff as far as the Jedi were concerned. Did any one location call out to him? It looked like a list of place names and dry facts, and he couldn’t tell what was important and what wasn’t.

  Then he saw Pau City roll up in the stream. “Wait! Stop, right there.”

  She paused the screen. “What? What am I looking at?”

  “Pau City—that’s where it all began. The Battle of Utapau. Let’s start there.”

  “It says here that it’s just a big hole in the ground.” Maize picked up the location anyway. “Are you sure about this?”

  “One hundred percent,” he lied through his teeth.

  “Fine, then that’s where we’re headed. I hope you’re happy.”

  “So happy.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  He laughed. “Oh, admit it. You’re having fun, too.”

  “I admit nothing!” she declared, but she did it with a smile.

  When they reached their destination, they were both overwhelmed. Up close and personal, the city was both more and less than what they’d expected, and wind whipped across the planet’s surface. It was all they could do to stand upright, bracing themselves against the gusts, blinking until their eyes watered.

  “Boy, you weren’t kidding. When you said ‘hole in the ground’ I thought you meant it as an expression.”

  “Nope,” she said. “It’s a literal sinkhole. All the cities here are, I think.”

  Karr stood between Maize and RZ-7 beside the Avadora, which they’d parked beside the gaping circle that disappeared toward the planet’s core. “Why’d you set us down here?”

  “Because it’s one thing to leave your home spaceport with your dad’s ship, and another thing entirely to show up on a distant planet with a First Order yacht that doesn’t have a flight plan.” Maize busily read up on the place, her fingers swiping down a ribbon of information on a datapad. “It’s definitely a sinkhole, and there’s a whole city down there. Wow. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Karr squinted down into the dark. “It goes on forever.”

  “No, just eleven levels. Let’s go check it out.”

  “Maybe we should look around first?”

  She shook her head. “No way. It’s too windy up here, and I’ve already got a shirt full of sand. Let’s go.”

  He let her take the lead, not because he felt any personal squeamishness about heading underground into an alien civilization…or exactly because of that, but he wasn’t about to say it out loud.

  The city’s levels were their own neighborhoods, according to Maize, who could read and walk and talk at the same time, much better than Karr ever could. Up top were the government officials, and below that the richest residents—and so forth, and so on. Near the bottom were the produce levels that kept the city fed. Turbolifts connected the levels, moving citizenry up and down as needed.

  “What’s at the very bottom?” he asked.

  “Mines, apparently. They excavate all this stone. No, wait. Not stone. It’s fossilized bone. That’s their main building material. Sounds like quite an operation, and there’s a lot to see and do. You’re the one who’s all plugged in to the telekinetic laser knights. You tell me what happens next.”

  The city pulsed and surged around them, occupied mainly by local Utai with elongated bald heads and bulging eyes, and Pau’ans, lanky gray humanoids. But there were enough off-worlders that nobody looked at the teenagers with too much more than a curious glance. Humans abounded, along with droids from every corner of the galaxy, Weequays, Rodians, Sakiyans, and a number of other species. Below the brightest, cleanest top levels with the most expensive dwellings and shops, the markets and merchants were hopping, and a dozen languages were spoken on each block.

  “Are we going to wander around all day, or…?” Maize hinted.

  RZ-7 tried, “Perhaps I could make some suggestions.”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

  An enormous, sharp-skinned lizard-like creature squawked and dodged a city maintenance droid. The creature wore a saddle and a
rider—who began swearing at the droid in some dialect Karr didn’t understand.

  “Over this way—there’s got to be something.” He hoped he was right. He could feel his heartbeat nervously pounding behind his eyeballs by the time he pointed out a secondhand store wedged between a mechanic’s workshop and grocery that specialized in some indigenous cuisine that smelled like berries and raw seafood. It made him want to puke, but he restrained himself and concentrated on the issue at hand.

  “A junk shop, sir?”

  “Junk shops are gold mines, Arzee. Watch this: I’ll prove it.”

  A big, beefy human was leaning against a wall, smoking some unknown substance from a pipe that was almost as long as his forearm. He snorted in Karr’s general direction and asked, “What are you calling junk?”

  The boy cleared his throat. He backed away. “Um. Nothing. Sir.”

  “You called it a junk shop.” He bobbed his chin toward the little storefront.

  “No, I called it a gold mine. If you heard the bit about the junk shop, you must’ve heard…the part about the gold mine. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to offend anyone. Is it…is it your junk shop? I mean, gold mine?”

  He laughed, and it was a big sound to match the man’s size. “It’s mine, all right. My wife doesn’t like it when I smoke in there, and I wanted a break. The climate control’s not working and it’s hot inside, even with the fans running.”

  “It’s a little warm,” Karr agreed, trying to be pleasant—since his first interaction with a local had turned out to be an accidental insult.

  “It’s too warm. Because of the springs,” he added. “Another level or two down. Sometimes the heat, it comes up and makes everything sticky. Now what do you want from my junk shop, boy?”

  “He doesn’t know,” Maize said.

  “Just looking to browse? I can live with that. Maybe you’ll find some treasure yet.” He finished another long draw from his pipe, then tipped it over and stepped on the coals to snuff them out. “Come inside, and let’s see what you find.”

  Inside was a jumbled, tumbled wonderland of confusion. All the way to the ceiling, rows of shelves were stacked—each one weighed down heavily enough to sag. At a glance, Karr saw books and scrolls and musical instruments, toys and weapons and games, tack and harnesses for work animals, communication devices and screens and computational boards, tins and bins and buttons, lamps and survival gear and bottles of vintage alcohol no one in their right mind should consider sipping.