The Force Awakens (Star Wars) (5 page)

A voice
answered. Ignoring the newly arrived scavenger who had tentatively approached, Plutt turned away and lowered his voice.

“I have a job for you.” With a free hand he slammed the service portal opening shut, leaving the scavenger holding his bag of goods and staring blankly at the merchant’s back.

Slumped and shackled in the seat, Poe was still breathing. Beyond that, he no longer cared
much what happened to him. It wasn’t his fault, he kept telling himself. For an ordinary person, no matter how
strong they thought themselves, resisting the probing of a creature like Kylo Ren was simply not possible. He had tried. There was no shame in the failure.

He didn’t much care what they might do with him now, though he could guess. Having given up what little of value he had possessed,
he was no longer of any use to them. There was nothing about X-wing weapons systems the First Order did not already know, and as a mere pilot, he would not be expected to know anything about military movements or tactics. He had rendered himself expendable. No, not expendable. Less than that. He was now extraneous. As such, he doubted they would keep him alive. He would not receive food, but
he might become it.

His head came up as the door to the holding cell whooshed open and a stormtrooper entered. At least, Poe mused, it would be over soon. He could look forward to freedom from any further tormenting thoughts. The trooper’s words to the room’s single guard surprised him, however.

“I’m taking the prisoner to Kylo Ren.”

Poe sagged in his seat. What more did they want
from him? Everything, anything of value that he had known was now known to them. Had they overlooked some line of questioning? He could not think of one. But then, at the moment, his mind was not functioning properly.

The guard wondered, too. “I was not told to expect you. Why would Ren wish to question the prisoner outside the cell?”

The new arrival’s voice darkened. “Do you dare to question
Kylo Ren’s motives?”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant! I…” Without another word, the guard proceeded to release the prisoner from his shackles. It took twice as long as it should have, since in his sudden nervousness he kept fumbling the task.

Procedure demanded that the trooper keep his weapon trained on the prisoner at all times as together they made their way down the corridor. Another
time, another place, Poe might have considered making a grab for it. But he was far too weakened to contemplate
such a likely fatal effort. In any case, the trooper seemed as competent as all his kind and gave no indication of relaxing his vigilance.

A rough prod with the weapon’s muzzle caused Poe to stumble and nearly fall. So exhausted was he that he could not even raise an objection or
mutter a curse.

“Turn here,” the trooper commanded sharply.

The passageway they entered seemed unusually narrow and poorly lit. In contrast to the one they had just left, they encountered no personnel. No troopers, no techs, no general crew.

A gloved hand clutching his shoulder brought him to a halt. Poe took in his claustrophobic surroundings. An odd place to carry out an execution,
he thought resignedly. Apparently they were not going to make a show of him.

The trooper’s words came low and fast. “Listen carefully and pay attention. You do exactly as I say, I can get you out of here.”

Within Poe’s wounded brain something like cognizance stirred. He turned and gawked at the trooper’s mask. “If…
what
? Who are you?”

In lieu of reply, the trooper removed his helmet—a
helmet that had been cleaned of the blood that had been smeared across it by the flailing hand of a dying trooper far below, in the course of a minor battle on an obscure corner of the planet Jakku.

“Will you be quiet and just listen to me? This is a
rescue
. I’m helping you
escape
.” When a stunned Poe didn’t respond, the trooper shook his shoulder firmly. “Can you fly a TIE fighter?”

Poe finally stopped gaping at the dark-skinned young man and found his voice. “What’s going on here? Are you—with the Resistance?”

“What?”
The trooper indicated their surroundings. “That’s crazy! How long do you think anyone with Resistance sympathies would last on a ship like this? You’re under continuous observation. You so much as wink the wrong way and before you know it, the psytechs are
all over you. No, I’m just breaking you out.” He cast a nervous glance up and down the narrow, dim corridor. “Can you fly a…”

Having long since surrendered anything resembling hope, it took
Poe more than a moment to begin regaining it. “I can fly anything. Wings, no wings, push-pull echo force, in or out of lightspeed—just show it to me. But why are you helping me?”

The trooper spoke while
staring nervously down the corridor. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

Poe shook his head, not buying it for a second. “Buddy, if we’re gonna do this, we have to be honest with each other.”

The trooper stared at him for a long moment. “I need a pilot.”

Poe nodded. A wide grin broke across his face. “Well, you just got me.”

FN-2187 was taken aback by Poe’s quick agreement. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Poe insisted. “We’re gonna do this. If you can get me into something that flies, that is.”

The trooper slipped his helmet back over his head. For an instant, the whole enterprise teetered on the edge of believability. Was he being set up? Poe wondered. No longer needed, was he being made the subject of some cruel psychological trial, only to be thrown away at the conclusion? Yet
there was something about the trooper that made Poe feel he could trust him. His manner, his look: There was something that said “throw in your lot with this one and you won’t be sorry that you did.”

The trooper pointed back in the direction they had come. “This way. And stop looking so positive. Optimism doesn’t fit a prisoner’s profile.”

Poe obediently lowered his head and adopted as
morose an expression as possible. Once, as they re-entered the main corridor, a hint of a smile broke through, to be quickly quashed.

The longer no one intercepted them and no one questioned their passage, the more Poe dared to allow himself to hope. What they were attempting bordered on the insane. Escaping from the custody of the First Order, much less from inside a Star Destroyer, was nearly
impossible.

Nearly.

The very unfeasibility of it worked in their favor. He could not be
a prisoner trying to escape, because prisoners simply did not escape. Just as stormtroopers did not desert their posts to facilitate such flight.

Ordinary troopers were one thing; the group of officers coming toward them as they entered the hangar was quite something else. Face still resolutely
aimed downward, Poe tensed and fought not to meet their eyes. Beside him, the trooper nudged him gently with the end of his blaster and muttered tightly.

“Stay calm, stay calm.”

Poe swallowed as the officers drew near—and walked on by.

“I am calm,” Poe whispered.

“I was talking to myself,” the trooper explained as they maintained their methodical tread toward the far side of the
enclosure.

“Oh, boy,” Poe whispered, this time to himself.

“Act nervous,” the trooper advised him. “As if you’re being sent to your doom.”

Poe swallowed. “Thanks for the tip.”

The craft they were approaching was a Special Forces TIE fighter. Poe couldn’t help it—raising his gaze, he raked the ship with his eyes. If one discounted its origins, its dark angles took on a deadly beauty.
No one stood near it: no techs, no maintenance workers, and no guards. What reason could there be to have to post a guard beside a ship inside a Star Destroyer? The entry hatch was open. Open and inviting: He had to will himself not to break into a run. There was no telling if the fighter was functional, or if it was being monitored by automated hangar security. The hangar’s atmosphere was contained,
of course. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to speculate about such things, since he would be a cold, dead protein crisp floating in space. How to get the massive access portal open?

One thing at a time
, he told himself. Get to the ship first. Then get on board. Find out if it was operational.

A tech droid came toward them, trundling along the open floor. He could sense the trooper at his
side tightening up. They maintained their pace and direction. So did the droid. It was very close now, its
optics easily able to resolve the fine details of prisoner and escort. What would they do if it started to ask questions?

Questioning a prisoner and guard not being a part of the tech droid’s protocol, it continued on past without beeping so much as a casual query.

T
HE INTERIOR OF
the TIE fighter was spotless. Droids and techs had done their work well, leaving it ready for pilot and gunner. It was a true pilot who now settled himself into the cockpit command seat. As to the other missing crew member, that remained to be seen.

Slipping free of his bloody, confining jacket, Poe examined the controls laid out before him. Some were familiar
from his professional studies of First Order ships, others from perusing details of Old Imperial craft. What he didn’t recognize immediately, he felt sure he could work around. A modern fighter like this one would be naturally forgiving, its computational components engineered to compensate for pilot miscues and oversights. He was relying on the likelihood that the ship itself would automatically
correct for any minor mistakes in judgment.

Minor mistakes. He still had to fly the damn thing.

Movement behind him caused him to glance back over his shoulder. Having shed his helmet, the trooper who had freed him was settling himself into the gunner’s seat and struggling to make sense of his surroundings. Poe tried to project reassurance as he punched instrumentation. A whine began to
rise from the ship’s stern.

“I always wanted to fly one of these things,” Poe said. “Can you shoot?”

“Anything designed for ground troops, I can. Blasters.”

Poe reflected that his companion sounded less than confident. “Same principle! Only the results are a lot more expansive. The toggle on the left should be to switch between cannons, missiles, and pulse. Use the instrumentation
on the right to aim—let the autotargeting help you—and triggers to fire!”

Leaning slightly forward, the trooper tried to absorb what he was seeing as well as what the former prisoner was telling him. There were far more controls than those he was hearing about. Which were the ones he really needed to worry about?

“This is very complicated,” he confessed, “and I’m not sure where to start.
Maybe if we waited a moment or two so you could clarify a few things?”

Freed from his shackles, then freed from captivity, Poe was not in a mood that allowed for a period of leisurely instruction. For one thing, he doubted he was going to have the opportunity. Any second now, someone was going to wonder why the Special Forces fighter was lighting its engines with the hatch closed.

“No
time,” he yelled back. “Consider this on-the-job training!”

Working only semi-familiar controls, he persuaded the ship to lift. Unfortunately, it was still tethered to support lines. Cables twanged as they went taut, holding the TIE fighter to the deck.

Inside the main control room for Hangar Six, a confused tech turned from his console to the officer passing close behind him.

“Sir,
we have an unsanctioned departure from Bay Two.”

The First Order colonel halted, turned, and stared out the sweeping port that overlooked the hangar floor. At the far end, a fighter could be seen struggling to decouple from its support cabling.
Neither the apparent preflight movements nor the fact that cabling was still engaged made any sense. That they were occurring simultaneously suggested
a serious miscarriage of duty—or the inconceivable.

“Get me communications with that vessel. Alert ship command, notify General Hux, and stop that fighter!”

Throughout the
Finalizer
, confusion expanded exponentially. Departments were alerted that normally went unexercised while the ship was in orbit around peaceful planets. Off-duty personnel were roused to the sound of alarms ringing
on their personal communicators. Contradictory commands flew back and forth between bemused sections. A large majority of those alerted responded slowly and reluctantly, confident that what they were responding to was nothing more than a drill.

No such illusions afflicted the hurriedly assembled troopers who were struggling to push the heavy weapons platform into position on the hangar deck.
The musical
spang
of cables snapping away from the TIE fighter pressed them to move even faster. The officer in charge was shouting, but no command could ready the weapon any quicker than its energizing program allowed. It would take another moment or two to fully power up.

Seeing the threat that was being prepared on the other side of the hangar, Poe proffered his companion some urgent advice.
“Okay—now would be a good time to start shooting.”

Behind him, the defecting trooper’s gaze wandered desperately over the plethora of controls laid out before him. “I’ll do my best. I’m not sure I can…”

A massive wave of blasts from the TIE fighter’s primary arsenal filled the hangar. Internal weapons emplacements shattered. Troopers and mobile cannon were obliterated. Parked TIE fighters
were reduced to rubble, fragments of fuselage and wings bouncing off the deck, ceiling, and walls. One collective burst demolished the hangar control room. Where moments before there had been calm, now there was bedlam, alarm, and fire.

The latter was extinguished when the fighter lifted, spun on its
axis, and Poe activated the TIE fighter’s departure mode. It had been locked down by the hangar
controllers, but when FN-2187 imploded the operations center, all electronics that were usually controlled from there had gone neutral. The Special Forces TIE fighter had no trouble resolving the problem, automatically issuing the necessary directives.

“Sorry, boys!” the trooper seated in the gunner’s chair yelled, even though there was no one save Poe to hear him. Accelerating, the Special
Forces craft blasted clear of the Star Destroyer’s flank, leaving in its wake a splay of smashed TIE fighters, dead troopers, and an assortment of ruined accessory material.

Poe was becoming more and more comfortable with the vessel’s instrumentation. In a very short period of time, his mood had swung from fatalistic to exalting. Not only was he alive, not only was he free—he had a ship! And
what a ship: a Special Forces TIE fighter. He was certain of one thing as he maneuvered around the immense destroyer: Nobody was going to make him a prisoner of the First Order ever again.

“This thing really moves.” He shook his head in admiration. Fine engineering knew no politics. “I’m not going to waste this chance: I owe some people in that ship a little payback. We’ll take out as many
weapons systems as we can.”

The trooper had expected to run as far and as fast as the TIE fighter would take them. “Shouldn’t we go for lightspeed as soon as we can?”

A tight, humorless grin crossed Poe’s face. “Someone on that ship called me the best pilot in the Resistance. I wouldn’t want to disappoint him. Don’t you worry. I’ll get us in position. Just stay sharp and follow my lead.”
He paused only briefly. “How about this? Every time you see the destroyer, you shoot at it.”

Still unhappy with the direction their escape had taken, FN-2187 relaxed ever so slightly. “I can do that.”

It wasn’t a ship, Poe told himself as he gleefully manipulated the manual instrumentation. It was a part of him, an extension of his own body. As fire began to lance out toward them from
the immense starship, he whirled and spun the TIE fighter, utilizing predictors as
well as his own skills to avoid the blasts. Taking them underneath the mother ship, he danced back and through gaps and openings, executing maneuvers beyond the abilities of all but the best pilots. Several skirted the edge of believability. Poe didn’t care. He was free and he was flying.

Behind him, the renegade
trooper unleashed blast after blast, triggering explosions in a frenzy of random damage that could only panic and confuse those on the vast vessel above them. A brace of cannons loomed ahead—but the trooper seemed content to fire indiscriminately at their surroundings. That needed to change, Poe knew, or they would never get the chance to jump to lightspeed.

“Dammit, a target is coming to
you. My right, your left. You see it?”

Targeting controls brought the major weapons emplacement into bold view on one of the trooper’s screens. “Hold on. I see it.” He readied himself, then unleashed fire at the precise moment when aptitude interlocked with instrumentation.

The whole gun emplacement erupted in a rapidly shrinking fireball. Debris spun around them as Poe took them through
the devastation, the fighter’s shields warding off whatever he could not directly avoid.

Unable to restrain himself, the trooper let out a yell that echoed around the cockpit. “
Yes
!
Did you see that?”

Poe whipped the TIE fighter around to the side of the
Finalizer
. “Told ya you could do it! What’s your name?”

“FN-2187.”

“FN-whaa?”

“That’s the only name they ever gave me.”

The longing in the trooper’s voice was all too human. That, and something more. Something that had driven him, among his hundreds, his thousands of colleagues, to step outside the comfort zone of training and regimentation, something that had ignited some exceptional spark of individualism within him. Poe knew that spark was present in the man behind him, and he now made it his task to see
that it did not fade away. But where to start?

“If that’s the name they gave you, then I ain’t using it. ‘FN,’ huh? I’m calling you Finn. That all right with you?”

Behind him, the trooper considered. A delighted smile spread slowly across his face. “Yeah, ‘Finn.’ I like that! But now you’re one up on me.”

“Sorry?”

“I don’t know your name. If you tell me it’s RS-736 or something
like that, I’m going to be seriously confused.”

The pilot had to laugh. “I’m Poe. Poe Dameron.”

“Good to meet you, Poe!”

“Good to meet you, Finn!” Settling on a line of attack, he prepared to dive once more into the heart of the Star Destroyer, a bug attacking a bantha.

But it was a bug with a very nasty bite.

On the main bridge of the
Finalizer
, General Hux peered over
the shoulder of Lieutenant Mitaka. While there could be no single central command station on a vessel as enormous as the Star Destroyer, Mitaka’s console approximated such a position as effectively as anything could.

Hux could hardly believe what he had been told. Not only had the prisoner escaped, he had managed to find his way to an operational hangar, slip aboard an outfitted and ready-to-fly
fighter, and blast his way free. And not just any fighter, but a Special Forces TIE fighter. If the proof had not been right in front of him, making a treacherous nuisance of itself as the ship’s perceptors strove to keep track of the stolen fighter, Hux would not have believed such a thing possible.

A very slight shudder ran through the deck. Mitaka’s voice was even, but Hux could tell that
the dark-haired lieutenant was shaken by what he was seeing. “They’ve taken out an entire bank of defensive weaponry. And they continue to attack. They’re not running.”

Hux didn’t understand. It was beyond comprehension. Prisoners
ran
from prisons, they didn’t stick around to assault their jailers. The
action smacked of an unshakeable wish to commit suicide. What he knew of the escaped prisoner
strongly suggested a desire to live. What had happened to change him? Or, Hux thought, was the profile that had been drawn up by the psytechs simply wrong?

Formal profile or not, of one thing he was now certain: They had badly underestimated what had seemed to be a Resistance pilot on the verge of physical and emotional collapse.

“Engage the ventral cannons,” Hux ordered.

“Bringing
them online,” Mitaka said.

No matter how close a flight path the escaped pilot took, Hux knew that sensors would prevent the guns from firing adjacent to the ship’s structure itself. Exceptional pilot that he was, the escaped prisoner would know that. Probably he was counting on it, which was why he continued to fly so close to the destroyer’s surface instead of bolting for empty space. Now
Hux was counting on the pilot sustaining the same strategy. The longer he remained within the destroyer’s sphere of armed influence, the more forces could be brought against him, and the less chance he would have to make a second, more permanent escape.

A voice sounded behind him: unmistakable, controlled, and plainly displeased. “Is it the Resistance pilot?”

Hux turned to face Kylo Ren.
Unable to see past the metallic mask, unable to perceive eyes or mouth, one had to rely on subtle changes in voice and tone to try to descry the tall man’s mood. Hux knew immediately that mood equaled if not exceeded his own consternation.

“Yes, and he had help.” Though Hux was loath to admit it, he had no choice. “One of our own. We’re checking the registers now to identify which stormtrooper
it was.”

While the all-concealing mask made it difficult to tell the focus of Ren’s attention, it was plainly not on the general. “FN-2187.”

It unnerved Hux that Kylo Ren had managed to ascertain the identity of the rogue trooper before the ship’s own command staff. But then, Ren had access to a great many aspects of knowledge from which ordinary mortals like himself were excluded, Hux
knew. He
would have inquired further, but the taller figure had already turned and headed off. Ren’s indifference was far more unsettling than would have been anything as common as a straightforward insult. Shaking off the encounter, Hux turned his attention back to the lieutenant’s console.

“Ventral cannons hot,” the lieutenant reported.

“Fire,” Hux commanded.

One detonation
followed another as the
Finalizer
’s weapons systems struggled to isolate the darting TIE fighter from the debris among which it danced. Poe was constantly changing his flight path, never doing anything predictable, utilizing the destruction he and his companion had already wrought to confuse the predictors that were an integral part of the big guns’ operating systems. Though more debris provided
more cover, Poe knew he couldn’t keep up such maneuvering forever. Ultimately, the damage he and Finn had caused would be reduced to fragments, and then to powder, by the efforts of the destroyer’s weapons. Bereft of anywhere to hide, the TIE fighter would eventually catch a powerful laser pulse. That would be the end of the game. Before that happened, they had to get clear.