The Rise of Skywalker Junior Novel, page 14
One of the soldiers boarding the lander surprised him.
“Rose?”
Rose Tico turned to him, holding an electro-shock prod in her hand. He went over to her, standing between her and the ramp. “You doing a checkup on the ship?”
“Volunteering,” she said, tapping the blaster pistol holstered on her other hip.
“Oh, no, no, no.” Finn didn’t want her risking her life on a combat mission for which the chances of survival were slim to none. “Rose—”
“I’m going,” she insisted. “You’ll need an engineer.”
“And a comms officer,” said Lieutenant Connix, walking past them within earshot.
“And a history professor,” said Beaumont Kin, right behind Connix.
The two boarded the lander. Finn sighed. Is this what being a leader was? Trying to tell your friends no and watching them go against your wishes anyway?
“Please move,” Rose said to Finn. Her electro-shock prod hummed with energy.
He stepped back. “You going to stun me with that?”
Rose brought up the prod as if she were, then pulled back. “I only do that to deserters.”
She smiled, and then so did he. On her necklace hung the symbol of her homeworld, a half-crescent of Haysian smelt. Its match had been worn by Rose’s sister, Paige, who had perished during the retreat from D’Qar.
Finn touched Rose’s medallion.
Over the past year, their paths had diverged as General Organa had deployed Rose’s talents to develop new technology and techniques to prevent hyperspace tracking. But wherever life took them, Finn would forever be in debt to Rose for saving him on Crait. She was the best the Resistance had to offer—and more than anything else, one of his closest friends.
He squeezed the medallion and then let it go, stepping aside. She moved toward the ramp. Before she went through the hatch, Finn spoke again. “You know, I am a deserter.”
She glanced back at him. “You are a deserter,” she said, “of the First Order.” She gave him a mischievous grin. “Still . . .” She pressed the trigger on her prod and blue energy danced around its tip.
Finn chuckled and they boarded the Fortitude together.
AGAINST A DARK starscape hung the world of Rey’s nightmares.
Exegol.
As the X-wing dove into the clouds, its sensors picked up massive engine signatures. Those signatures soon materialized into Star Destroyers armored in dark gray hulls, with red striping along the prows. Hundreds of the Destroyers drifted in neat rows while more lifted from giant bay doors on the planet’s surface to join them.
Rey held her breath at the size of the fleet. It was far greater in number than what Finn’s spy report had projected.
Fortunately, Rey landed without incident at the coordinates provided by the wayfinder. But the sight of all those Star Destroyers unnerved her. If they launched out of the Unknown Regions, no army or navy in the galaxy would be able to match the military might of the First Order.
Rey confirmed the details of her journey had been transmitted to the Resistance, then doffed Luke’s old helmet, popped the canopy, and climbed out of the X-wing.
She stood on a darkling plain, staring up at a forbidding citadel that floated above the ground. Lightning flashed around her. A chill wind made her shiver. Everything was cast in a blue-gray haze except the fortress looming before her. Its walls were as black as night. She saw no gate, yet she sensed a presence inviting her inside.
She knew she might never walk out if she entered it. She knew she might be consigning herself to pain and anguish and probably death.
Still she went.
Rey walked under the citadel and felt its immense weight above her, as if the pull of gravity had been partially reversed. Although no one else was there, her hand rested on the lightsaber on her belt, ready to draw.
The symbol of Ochi’s dagger had been carved into the ground under the citadel. She came up to the dagger symbol and stepped lightly on the hilt. The ground beneath her started to move.
Rey found herself on the circular platform of a lift, lowering into the darkness. She sunk past hideous statues of what could only be the ancient Sith, their eyes sculpted in glares of evil. Sparks coursed around their forms. She refused to meet their stony gazes.
The lift landed in a grand hall. She walked off the platform and passed more of the giant Sith statues. She came upon what appeared to be a laboratory of sorts, with bubbling vats and tubes that dangled from the ceiling. She wasted nothing but a glance at the equipment. She had no desire to find out what terrible experiments had been performed there.
Energy flashed between a cleft in the rock wall, as if beckoning her. She entered the cleft and heard an eerie crooning from within. The sound increased in volume as she moved down the narrow corridor.
The corridor took her to a dais. She rounded it to see a black throne nestled between giant stone claws. It was the same throne she had seen in her vision, the one she knew to be the throne of the Sith.
No one sat on it.
The crooning became louder and she turned.
Thousands of cloaked and hooded beings filled the stands of a vast amphitheater that circled the chamber. A chasm billowing with energy separated them from her and the throne. The spectators chanted in a language she didn’t understand.
“Long have I waited,” someone whispered, close to her, “for my grandchild to come home.”
She pivoted to see a mechanical arm descend from the darkness. Cables drooped along the armature’s length, and at its end a gaunt ghoul of a man was pinned into a harness that resembled a metal claw. The man was repulsive to behold, yet Rey couldn’t look away. Flashes of energy from the chasm revealed that his body was bent in the harness, hunched from a twisted spine. Under a thick hood, tumors bulged on his brow, and his face was a fold of wrinkles. His eyes were rheumy, with pupils of milky white. Tubes delivered fluids of some kind into his throat. What flesh clung to him had withered to the bone. And the black robes he wore couldn’t hide his festering lesions and open sores. He was a man who was rotting alive—if alive he truly was.
He was her grandfather.
Poe had flown from one end of the galaxy to the other on hundreds of missions. He’d been tossed, shaken, jostled, and jerked, sometimes for hours at a stretch through treacherous tracts of space. But the journey through the Unknown Regions had so many twists and turns that even a veteran pilot like him felt on the verge of nausea.
He managed to keep it together, but he doubted many others in the Resistance fleet would. The important thing was that they lost no one on the way. The Tantive IV, the transport lander Fortitude, and all the starfighters made it through the strange red barrier and arrived at the coordinates Rey had transmitted. A planet enveloped in thick gray gloom rotated before them.
“Welcome to Exegol,” Poe said over his X-wing’s comm. The fighter squadron was under his command, and he’d put Finn in charge of the ground forces on the lander.
Poe plunged his fighter into Exegol’s clouds. Rising toward the stratosphere was a gray-hulled Star Destroyer. Below it were scores more—scores upon scores, it appeared, according to his scopes.
“Great dark seas!” Aftab Ackbar exclaimed over the comm. He flew one of the Y-wings in their motley squadron. “Look at the size of that fleet!”
“No sign of the Falcon or allies,” Tyce added from her A-wing.
“Just find that navigation tower,” Poe said. “Help will be here by the time we take it down!” He said those words with the hope they would come true. The Resistance wouldn’t last long against a fleet of this magnitude. They needed help.
The Resistance ships must have been detected, because the Star Destroyers started to unleash their cannons. A laser storm engulfed the sky, and the sheer torrent caught some starfighters, blowing them into chunks of white-hot metal.
“Stay at their altitude,” Poe ordered. “They can’t fire on us without hitting each other.”
He showed the way, weaving through the blasts and diving toward the Destroyers. The others trailed him, descending to the same level as the massive ships.
Emergency alerts sounded. Enemy icons multiplied on Poe’s tracking scopes. They might be out of reach of the Destroyers’ cannons but not those of a new set of foes.
“Incoming TIEs!” shouted Snap Wexley, rolling his X-wing to the side.
Hordes of TIE fighters launched from what Poe assumed were underground hangars. These appeared to be a new variant, with triangular wings, red solar panels, and wing-mounted cannons and shield generators. They were also fast—faster than any other TIE Poe had encountered—and would overcome his squadron in mere moments.
Poe was about to call for evasive maneuvers when Finn brought some much-needed good news. “I see it!” he commed from the lander. “I’ve got a visual on the nav tower!”
Clouds drifted past, and Poe saw it, too—a giant industrial spire with four broadcast vanes. “Take my lead,” Poe responded. “Lander, prep to unload the ground team at the base of the tower.”
Poe jammed his flight yoke forward for a nosedive and activated his thrusters. It was all or nothing.
In the Fortitude’s cockpit, Finn stared at the navigation tower through quadnoculars. He searched for artillery, an energy shield, a troop garrison, or any defensive weaponry. All he spotted were steady blue-white lights on top of the tower.
Jannah came up to him from the troop compartment. “They ready back there?” Finn asked.
“Never been readier,” she said.
Cockpit alarms halted her smile. Lieutenant Tyce’s voice came over the ship’s intercom. “The navigation tower—it’s been deactivated! They’re not transmitting from it anymore.”
“What?” Finn returned the quadnocs to his eyes. The tower’s lights had gone dark. But the fleet of Star Destroyers kept rising through the atmosphere, as if they were continuing to receive the navigation signal.
Snap Wexley joined the conversation. “The ships need that signal, so it’s got to be coming from somewhere.”
Finn put down his quadnocs. Through the viewport, he spied one Star Destroyer that didn’t resemble the others. It was longer, larger, lacking the dark gray hull, and bristling with all sorts of weaponry.
Kylo Ren’s flagship was there on Exegol. The Steadfast.
“Call off the ground invasion,” Poe ordered over the comm.
“No,” Finn said into his comlink. “The signal’s coming from that command ship. That’s our drop zone.”
“How do you know?” Jannah asked.
Finn didn’t know. And yet something inside him told him he was right. “A feeling,” he said.
Tyce voiced her skepticism at Finn’s notion of a drop zone. “You want to launch a ground invasion on a Star Destroyer?”
Finn rushed to the troop compartment, still speaking into his comlink. “I don’t want to. But that ship’s nav systems will have defenses against an air attack. If you give us cover to land, we can get to it—and take it out. We’ve got to keep that fleet here till help arrives.”
“We hope,” Rose said as she ran by him.
“We hope,” Finn repeated.
Poe endorsed Finn’s plan over the comm. “You heard the general. All wings, cover that lander!”
The lander’s pilot shouted back to the troop compartment. “This’ll be rough!”
Finn, Jannah, and the members of Company 77 from Kef Bir readied their rides. Rough was to be expected. The lander wasn’t called Fortitude for nothing.
The troop lander eluded salvos of TIE laserfire on a fast descent, skidding across the Steadfast’s exterior in a shower of sparks. Before it had come to a complete stop, the hatch opened, the ramp extended, and out galloped shaggy orbacks ridden by ex-stormtroopers. Finn and Jannah led the pack, with BB-8 rolling beside them at his top speed.
“You’re doing great, buddy! The tower’s up ahead!” Finn said to the droid.
Not everyone in the invasion force was mounted. Connix, Rose, Beaumont Kin, and dozens of other soldiers ran out of the lander behind Jannah’s company. They prepared to lay down suppressive fire against the enemy squads Finn fully expected to attack them.
Finn held the reins of his orbak. Unlike the frantic ride through Canto Bight on the fathier, this ride was invigorating. The orbak’s hooves drummed a war beat against the hull. The bandolier of thermo-charges bounced against Finn’s chest. The frigid wind, even on this polluted world, felt good against Finn’s face. Though he’d only been able to practice riding for a short time on Ajan Kloss, he sat with confidence on his orbak.
“See this? After only one lesson!” he shouted to Jannah.
“You had a good teacher,” Jannah said with a wink.
As they charged toward the aft of the Destroyer, the transmission tower came into view. But the conduit coils, generator boxes, turrets, and trenches presented tricky terrain for the orbaks to cross at full speed. Finn slid off his orbak and waited as Jannah and her company members also dismounted. They’d make it the rest of the way on foot.
Transports landed before them, impeding their path. Out of the hatches jumped crimson-armored stormtroopers, a few equipped with jet packs. They immediately engaged the Resistance soldiers in a blaster fight. Finn, BB-8, Jannah, and her company were caught in the crossfire.
The bumpy superstructure had its benefits. Finn ducked behind a generator box and waved the others to follow him. They did, and the group hurried across the Destroyer, bobbing and darting around whatever they could use as cover.
While Jannah’s company held off any attackers, Finn, Jannah, and BB-8 made a mad dash across the final stretch. Finn stopped before a hull panel near the base of the tower. “All right, Beebee-Ate, you’re up!”
A squad of troopers rushed toward them. “I’ll cover you!” Jannah yelled. She grabbed a thermo-charge from her bandolier and threw it. The squad was blown backward.
Finn fired his rifle at other troopers, giving the droid time to do his work. The droid extended his tool arm and unlocked the panel in the hull. Jannah, meanwhile, nocked an arrow in her bow and released. The arrow struck a jet trooper, propelling him back into a TIE fighter. The TIE careened and crashed into the Destroyer.
“Nice shot,” Finn said. “Captain Grummart teach you archery?”
“Phasma,” Jannah said, nocking another arrow.
Finn held back a chuckle. The former stormtrooper commander would have been irate knowing her training could be turned so effectively against her side.
BB-8 having done his job, Finn wrenched open the hull panel. Jannah deposited both of their bandoliers in the hole, then set an activator and dropped it in. “This should do it.”
When the panel slammed close, all three of them hurried away from it.
Despite the intense battle raging around him, Finn had the feeling of an even more consequential battle being waged somewhere down on Exegol.
Rey’s grandfather hovered over the throne in his harness. Cast in the flickering light of the chasm, he looked more like a phantom than a living being. “I never wanted you dead. I wanted you here, Empress Palpatine,” he said to her, gesturing to the dais. “You will take the throne. It is your birthright to rule here. It’s in your blood. Our blood.”
Rey stepped back from the throne, hand near the hilt of her lightsaber. “I haven’t come to lead the Sith. I’ve come to end them.”
“As a Jedi?” He sounded amused.
Rey steeled herself. “Yes.”
“No,” he said, drawing out the word. “I can feel your hatred. Your anger. Your thirst for revenge. You want to kill me. That is what I want. Kill me and my spirit will pass into you. As the Sith live in me, you will be Empress. We will be one.”
Her grandfather had read her correctly. Rey was angry. She couldn’t help it. But her anger was directed at one person—her grandfather. She was angry at what he had said. Angry at all the evil he had done. Angry about being related to him.
And he could sense it.
“The time has come,” he said, opening his arms to his audience. His acolytes cried out one shrill note in unison, then prostrated themselves. “With your hatred, you will take my life, and you will ascend as I did when I killed my master Darth Plagueis.” He lifted a rotting hand toward Rey. “Now raise your saber and strike me down.”
Rey was perplexed. Her own grandfather wanted her to kill him? Was this what Luke had been talking about, when he’d said she would be tempted and even deceived? She locked her feet in place, recalling her failures. She would fight her anger this time; she would not let it motivate her. “All you want is for me to hate. But I won’t. Not even you.”
He tilted his head toward her, but his cloudy eyes couldn’t focus and he seemed to look beyond her. “Weak,” he said. “Like your parents.”
Though she knew little about her parents, the fact that they had hid her away from her grandfather spoke volumes about them. “My parents were strong. They saved me from you.”
“Your master Luke Skywalker was saved by his father,” he said. “The only family you have here is me.”
The chamber rumbled. Dirt rained down as the ceiling split open, revealing a firefight in the sky. Lasers and explosions lit up the clouds. X-wings and other Resistance fighters engaged with the massive fleet of Star Destroyers and TIE fighters—and against such numbers, it was not a battle the Resistance would ever win.
“They don’t have long,” he said. “No one is coming to help them. And you are the one who led them here.”
Rey didn’t need him to provoke her guilt. She felt it already, watching an X-wing and then a pair of Y-wing bombers become fireballs.
“Strike me down,” he continued. “Take the throne. Reign over the New Empire and the fleet will be yours. Only you have the power to save them all.” As she stared at the battle, she felt the touch of the Force. It was so fast, so fleeting that she almost didn’t recognize it.
“Refuse,” her grandfather said, “and your new family dies.”
