Journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

by Kevin Shinick

  Karr and RZ-7 met Maize and her father at the landing pad where the Avadora was parked. It was right where they’d found it the first time, docked alongside similar ships—some of them belonging to the First Order and some of them merely fancy and expensive. His own parents had said their goodbyes at home. It was all too much for Karr’s mother, who spent the day in bed with a cool rag over her eyes. It was too much for his father, too—but he holed up at the shop and performed the smallest, most tedious alterations by way of distracting himself from the doom at hand.

  Karr tried to keep his own nervousness in check, but the stern version of Maize’s father—whom he thought they had said goodbye to for good the previous night—was back.

  “Hello, sir,” Karr said hesitantly.

  The greeting got him a lifted eyebrow and a nod of the man’s head, and that was all. Karr was a little taken aback, until Vroc slipped him a quick wink.

  After inspecting the ship and testing all the functions, checking fuel levels, and running diagnostics, Maize’s father pronounced the craft space-worthy for another jaunt around the galaxy. He gave Karr and his cobbled-together droid companion a once-over, too, and concluded aloud that they were mostly harmless.

  “Thank you, sir?” Karr replied.

  “You’re welcome. I’d tell you to take care of my daughter and be sure to bring her back safely, but I think we all know that the odds are better that she’s going to take care of you. Did you really fly this thing back home? Unaided?”

  Since RZ-7 didn’t claim credit or responsibility, Karr said, “Yes, sir. Maize is a good teacher.”

  He murmured, “Quite a trick, considering.”

  “I’m sorry, sir? What do you mean?” Karr asked.

  “Only that I’ve taken her flying a few times, but she’s never had any formal training or instruction. She must have a real knack for it.”

  “You’ll find out for yourself pretty soon,” Karr said, leaning in. “And it won’t hurt if you call her Captain.” Vroc tried but failed to hide his smile.

  “I don’t know what he’s telling you,” Maize declared, appearing at his side. “But it was a joint effort. Look at this thing!” She slapped the side of the craft. “We brought it home without so much as a dent!”

  “Yes, yes. I’m very impressed. Please do so again, darling.”

  She gave him a massive hug that he accepted uncharacteristically, responding with one of equal proportion.

  With that, he wished her luck, then climbed back aboard the family landspeeder and drove away from the spaceport, leaving them alone with the expensive ship.

  It hardly felt real at all.

  “Are we really doing this?” he asked.

  RZ-7 added, “Again?”

  “We sure are!” Maize said proudly.

  Karr was incredibly excited. And again he felt his grandmother’s presence.

  “Wait!” he said with alarm. “Your dad has this ship loaded with surveillance bugs, but my grandma asked that we keep Naq Med’s location a secret. I can’t just ignore her wishes.”

  Maize thought for a moment. “You certainly can’t,” she said. “And I know what I told my parents, but this is more important. Maybe one more tiny rebellious act is in order.”

  “Yeah,” Karr replied. “Historians will say the great pilot Maize Raynshi was just getting it out of her system before committing to the straight and narrow.”

  Maize liked that. “First we have to sweep the ship,” she said. “I overheard my dad’s call to the tech support team. He ordered three surveillance bugs, one of which will be installed under the console—and I can’t move that one, so we’ll have to fool it. But that’s no big deal.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Not if you know what you’re doing.”

  He asked, “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “Do you really have to ask? As for the other two bugs, I’ve got a plan.”

  “You do, Captain?” asked RZ-7.

  “I do. You see that ship right there?” She pointed out a craft that was about the same size and shape of the one they were about to climb aboard. “It belongs to a friend of my mom’s. She’s going to the Chommell sector to visit her daughter. My mom spoke to her this morning. She’ll be back around the same time we are. We’ll just stick the trackers on her ship, go about our journey, and then, provided we time it right, stick them back on our ship when we both get home—and no one will ever be the wiser.”

  “What about the one under the console?”

  She waved her hand. “When I get the other bugs back, I’ll copy their data to that one so everything matches. I’m telling you, I’ve got this. Now help me look for the two bugs. I know they’re in here someplace. We’ll deal with those first, and we need to hurry. The other ship will launch within an hour. We might be cutting this close.”

  They did cut it close, but they got it done.

  The surveillance bugs were each the size of Karr’s thumb; one was stashed inside the back of a cabinet, stuck to the ceiling, and the other was spotted by RZ-7, who found it inside the docking gear. Maize collected them both and went to see her mother’s friend on a pretend mission of “Fancy seeing you here.”

  When she returned, blushing and giggling and ready to go, she said, “I stuck one of them under one of the ramp steps and one underneath the emergency med pack. She’ll never know about them, and probably wouldn’t know what they are if she found them.”

  “But…” Karr broached, always the more anxious of the pair, “what if she does find them? What if she destroys them? What will we do?”

  She shrugged as she stomped up the ramp and into the ship. “It won’t come to that, but if it does? We have options. We’ll figure something out.”

  “Something like…?”

  From inside the craft she said, “Don’t worry so much. This is going to be fun.”

  Karr looked at RZ-7, his entire face a mask of uncertainty. “What do you think she’ll do?” he asked the droid.

  “If I were forced to guess, I’d say she plans to blow up the ship or claim it was stolen by pirates, sir. Failing that, I’m confident that she’ll pull some other plan out of thin air. She’s quite good at that.”

  Karr trudged up the ramp behind her, RZ-7 at his side. “She’s scary good at that. I’m just glad she’s on our team and not somebody else’s.”

  “Me too, sir. Me too.”

  They settled into the cockpit, Karr taking up the copilot’s seat and the droid strapping in behind them. He told her, “I’ve been doing some digging, and I found out more about the planet my grandmother mentioned. It was mined for phosphates for a few decades, but it was such a miserable place to live and work that the mines eventually closed and mostly everybody left.”

  She frowned. “You can find phosphates in marshland?”

  “In the area around them, maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, it has a large continent with marshy grasslands near the equator. It’s mostly hot scrubland and wet forests around the rest of it, plus a couple of big oceans.”

  Maize pulled up the nav maps, located the planet in question, and looked over the schematics. “It’s kind of the far end of no place, isn’t it? Not exactly Wild Space, but you can see it from there.”

  “All the more reason to pick it for a hiding spot,” he said, with more confidence than he felt. He was desperately afraid that he was screwing this up, and if it didn’t work out…then he’d sold his soul to the trade school for absolutely nothing.

  He couldn’t let it come to that. He had to believe in the balance. He had to trust the Force.

  Everything was riding on it.

  “Are we ready?” Maize asked him, her hands gripping the throttle.

  Karr knew it didn’t matter what he said. She was about to launch anyway. “Sure. Let’s go.”

  Up they went, into high atmosphere—and then into hyperspace, to a strange corner of the galaxy with a planet no one liked, no one needed, and no one would ever want to live on.

 
Except maybe a very old man who didn’t want to be found.

  When they emerged from hyperspace, the planet Pam’ba was large and round before them. Its oceans were few and far between—dots of blue scattered among sandy savannas and dirty-green swaths of what must have been marshes. A brighter green around the equator probably meant jungles or rainforests, and here and there, patches of white speckled the lands between cold gray mountains.

  Karr’s head felt light, but it sometimes did when they emerged from hyperspace. He didn’t know if he’d ever get used to it. But was that all it was? A little bit of disorientation from the travel?

  He blinked hard and shook his head in an effort to clear it.

  It wasn’t that he could hear something, exactly. It wasn’t that he could see it. It was more like he knew it, from the bottom of his soul—a sharp and distant warmth that felt like certainty. “This is it,” he whispered.

  “Do you sense something? Is the Force telling you anything? I don’t know how this works.”

  “Neither do I,” he said. “But we’re in the right place. I feel like something is finally right. Does that make sense?”

  She shrugged. “Not really. But I’m not stuck in my room surrounded by homework—so as long we aren’t actually, literally violently murdered down there on the ground…I’m game to go check it out.”

  He frowned at her. “You don’t think we’re going to get murdered, do you?”

  “Not if you’re right and the planet is abandoned. If there’s nobody down there to murder us, we’re all good.

  “Did you bring any weapons?” she asked.

  “No! Of course not.”

  “That’s a shame.” She pulled up a scanner and started checking the planet’s surface. “I tried to find something before we left, but Dad keeps everything locked up. I guess we’re on our own.”

  “We’ll be fine. What are you doing?”

  She pointed at a set of coordinates that meant nothing to Karr. The numbers scrolled, rolled, and changed faster than he could read them. “I’m looking for someplace to set the ship down that’s near the equator, near some marshy grasslands, and not likely to let the Avadora sink like a rock in a puddle.”

  “Oh. Good idea.”

  She said, “I know. Now pay attention. Let me know if anything jumps out at you. This is a big planet, and there’s a lot of marshland to scroll through.”

  He thought about it hard and tried to be logical. “Look for signs of civilization.”

  “Why? Your grandmother said he lived alone in a house in the middle of nowhere.”

  “That’s not exactly what she said.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Karr rolled his eyes. That was usually Maize’s signature move, but she was rubbing off on him. “He was a hermit, yes—but this planet has been abandoned for almost a hundred and fifty years. If he came here to live, he might’ve started out scavenging from what was left behind.”

  “Okay, I get it. If he lived in the marsh grass, he might’ve needed a boat. It’s easier to find one that nobody’s using than to build your own.”

  “Exactly!” he said, pleased with his own deduction. “So we should look for small mining towns, or even mining equipment. Anything that a lone human might find useful, if he plans to live here for a while.”

  This was their hardest search yet. When they’d visited other planets before, they’d had an idea of a town, or a person, or a distinct geographical landmark. Finding a single dwelling on a large empty planet would be trickier.

  Much trickier.

  They spent an entire day scanning the planet, squinting at tiny landmarks, overgrown roads, and the scant remains of small communities that had been left to the elements generations before. Here and there, they spotted a large building or a set of silos to hold whatever the miners were dredging up from under the ground. Sulfates, phosphates, whatever-fates. Karr didn’t know what they were for, or why anybody had ever wanted them.

  Now nobody wanted them, not anymore. Not badly enough to live on Pam’ba.

  Finally, Karr felt it: the twinge. The warmth, the certainty. The sharp knowing that felt like a revelation. He held up his hand. “Wait. Hold on.”

  Maize paused the scan display. “What am I looking at? I don’t see anything.”

  He closed his eyes and let his hand hover over the image. He pictured it in his mind—a squared-off map of dull green and brown, streaked with black water. Currents swirling. Local animals with thick skin and long faces, snaking among the reeds. Odd birds with very long legs and very small bodies. The collapsing remains of a pier and a brick-shaped building that might’ve been a store or might have been an office.

  Beyond all that, a platform on stilts, raised above the wet grass.

  On top of it, a featureless brown box. A door. A window.

  A house.

  The Avadora set down on a mostly firm bit of damp land, as close to the old pier and mining offices as they could get. The ship settled and squished into turf that was spongey and thick with long flat grass the color of dry moss. It was the best they were going to get, because beyond that little patch of land, the world of Pam’ba was very wet indeed. The mining office was lifted up on pillars so it stood above the murky water below—but when Karr and Maize tried to get inside, they found that the floor had rotted and fallen away. The building was only a shell, and anything useful that it might once have held had surely collapsed into the water years before.

  RZ-7 waited for them by the pier, where he snooped around in search of boats or rafts. “Do you see anything, sir?” he called out.

  “No!” Karr hollered back as he stomped and sloshed back and forth among various remains of the camp. Or town? No, a camp. There were only a few small buildings, and none of them looked like they’d ever been anyone’s home.

  Only one still had all four walls plus a roof and a floor. It was completely empty, with rows of vacant shelves and holes where windows used to be—their glass long since shattered and lost.

  Maize looked over his shoulder, then shrugged and walked away. “There’s nothing here, Arzee. It’s all just old junk that’s falling apart.”

  Karr agreed. “Nothing to scavenge except the wood, and most of that looks like it’s gone moldy. Not sure what you’d do with it, if you took it.”

  “Build other stuff with it,” Maize suggested. When she and Karr had joined the droid at the pier, she pulled out her datapad and checked it for inspiration. “Anyhow, the house we saw on the map is that way.”

  “I don’t see anything, though.”

  “Sure you do. See that real tall grass? Where it’s as tall as we are, at least?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Is it past there?”

  “It’s past there, sorry. And we don’t have a boat, so…we’re gonna get soggy.”

  The droid said, “Wonderful,” in a tone that suggested he didn’t think it was wonderful at all but he was along for the ride regardless. Better to be waterlogged than left behind.

  Together they slogged through the water and grass, which was thigh-deep at worst and ankle-deep at best. Progress was slow and uncomfortable, plagued by mud that ate their boots and socks, and bugs the size of their thumbs that hummed, circled, and buzzed about. One tried to take a bite out of RZ-7. It didn’t work.

  “Now would be a great time to break out some Jedi robes, if I had any,” Karr complained. “Everything on this planet bites!”

  “Or stings.”

  “Or stings,” he agreed.

  “Some of them sting, and some of them bite, sir. I’m not familiar with the species that are common to this particular planet, but they aren’t very pleasant.”

  “Like you care, Arzee. They can’t suck any blood out of you.” He slapped one of the smaller, shinier creatures into mush against his shoulder.

  Maize smacked one against her neck. “Or shoot you up with itchy poison. This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so hot.”

  “Yes, it would. This is miserable. I totally un
derstand why a guy who wants to be left alone forever”—he huffed and puffed and yanked his boot out of some thick, squishy muck—“would pick a place like this. You’d have to be pretty crazy to follow anyone out here.

  “Are we still headed the right direction? It doesn’t feel like we’re making any progress at all.”

  “We’re making progress,” she assured him. “We ought to be able to see the house in a minute. We’ll get there eventually.”

  “Eventually” didn’t arrive for another hour, and by then all three explorers were completely exhausted—but when the little shack came into view, Karr felt a jolt of energy and a second wind.

  “There it is! Come on, we’re almost there!”

  Maize groaned, and RZ-7 creaked, but they picked up the pace. Before long, they reached some sandy ground that wasn’t exactly solid but wasn’t as bad as slogging up to their hips through muddy water. Karr led the charge, breaking into a staggering run.

  He tripped and fell, and caught himself on his hands—then picked himself up again. “Almost there,” he gasped. “Almost there.”

  The house was elevated on thick wood pilings, sitting atop a platform. Against the platform rested a rough wood ladder that was held together with frayed brown ropes.

  The boy stopped in front of it, his heart pounding and his legs burning. They hadn’t come half a kilometer through the marshland, but it felt as if he’d climbed a mountain. Everything ached and nothing was dry, but he’d made it. He’d found the small house where his great-grandfather, a former Jedi Knight, had lived out his last days.

  He steadied himself, forcing the hot, aching pain in his head to the side. With a deep breath or two—in and out, in and out—he grasped the ladder barehanded, for his gloves were stashed in his highest jacket pockets. There was a reaction, but it was only a zap. The wood buzzed beneath his fingers.

  Maize came up behind him, RZ-7 at her side. “Well?” she asked. “Are you getting anything?”

  “I’m getting…everything.” The longer he stood there, holding the wood, the more his pain faded into something calm and understated. It was still present, but it didn’t hurt anymore. It had become a strange sensation but not a miserable one.