CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

Written with input from director Rian Johnson, this thrilling adaptation of Star Wars: The Last Jedi expands on the film to include scenes from alternate versions of the script and other additional content.

From the ashes of the Empire has arisen another threat to the galaxy’s freedom: the ruthless First Order. Fortunately, new heroes have emerged to take up arms – and perhaps lay down their lives – for the cause. Rey, the orphan strong in the Force; Finn, the ex-stormtrooper who stands against his former masters; and Poe Dameron, the fearless X-wing pilot, have been drawn together to fight side-by-side with General Leia Organa and the Resistance. But the First Order’s Supreme Leader Snoke and his merciless enforcer Kylo Ren are adversaries with superior numbers and devastating firepower at their command. Against this enemy, the champions of light may finally be facing their extinction. Their only hope rests with a lost legend: Jedi Master Luke Skywalker.

Where the action of Star Wars: The Force Awakens ended, Star Wars: The Last Jedi begins, as the battle between light and dark climbs to astonishing new heights.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JASON FRY has written or co-written more than forty novels, short stories, and other works set in the galaxy far, far away. His other books include the Servants of the Empire quartet and the young-adult space-fantasy series The Jupiter Pirates. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, son, and about a metric ton of Star Wars stuff.

Also by Jason Fry

STAR WARS

The Essential Atlas

The Clone Wars: Episode Guide

The Essential Guide to Warfare

Star Wars in 100 Scenes

Moving Target: A Princess Leia Adventure

The Weapon of a Jedi: A Luke Skywalker Adventure

The Force Awakens: Rey’s Survival Guide

The Force Awakens Incredible Cross-Sections

The Servants of the Empire Series

THE JUPITER PIRATES

Hunt for the Hydra

Curse of the Iris

The Rise of Earth

PROLOGUE

Luke Skywalker stood in the cooling sands of Tatooine, his wife by his side.

The strip of sky at the horizon was still painted with the last orange of sunset, but the first stars had emerged. Luke peered at them, searching for something he knew was already gone.

“What did you think you saw?” Camie asked.

He could hear the affection in her voice—but if he listened harder, he could hear the weariness as well.

“Star Destroyer,” he said. “At least I thought so.”

“Then I believe you,” she said, one hand on his shoulder. “You could always recognize one—even at high noon.”

Luke smiled, thinking back to the long-ago day at Tosche Station when he’d burst in to tell his friends about the two ships sitting in orbit right above their heads. Camie hadn’t believed him—she’d peered through his old macrobinoculars before dismissively tossing them back to him and seeking refuge from the relentless twin suns. Fixer hadn’t believed him, either. Nor had Biggs.

But he’d been right.

His smile faded at the thought of Biggs Darklighter, who’d left Tatooine and died somewhere unimaginably far away. Biggs, who’d been his first friend. His only friend, he supposed.

His mind retreated from the thought, as quickly as if his bare hand had strayed to a vaporator casing at midday.

“I wonder what the Empire wanted out here,” he said, searching the sky again. Resupplying the garrison at Mos Eisley hardly required a warship the size of a Star Destroyer. These days, with the galaxy at peace, it hardly required a warship at all.

“Whatever it is, it’s got nothing to do with us,” Camie said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is,” Luke said, his eyes reflexively scanning the lights that marked the homestead’s perimeter. Such caution wasn’t necessary—no Tusken Raider had been seen this side of Anchorhead in two decades—but old habits died hard.

The Tuskens are gone—nothing left of them but bones in the sand.

For some reason that made him sad.

“We’ve hit our Imperial quota for five years running,” Camie said. “And we’ve paid our water tax to Jabba. We don’t owe anybody anything. We haven’t done anything.”

“We haven’t done anything,” Luke agreed, though he knew that was no guarantee of safety. Plenty of things happened to people who hadn’t done anything—things that were never discussed again, or at least not by anyone with any sense.

His mind went back to the long-ago days he kept telling himself not to think about. The droids, and the message—a holographic fragment in which a regal young woman pleaded for Obi-Wan Kenobi to help her.

Let the past go. That’s what Camie always told him. But staring into the darkness, Luke found that once again, he couldn’t take her advice.

The astromech droid had fled into the night while Luke was at dinner with his aunt and uncle. Fearing Uncle Owen’s fury, Luke had taken a risk, slipping away from the farm despite the threat of Tuskens.

But no Sand People had been on the prowl that night. Luke had found the runaway astromech and brought it back to the farm, pushing the landspeeder the last twenty meters to avoid waking Owen and Beru.

Luke smiled ruefully, thinking—as he so often did—about everything that could have gone wrong. He could easily have died, becoming one more foolhardy moisture farmer claimed by the Tatooine night and what lurked in it.

But he’d been lucky—and then lucky again the next day.

The stormtroopers had arrived just after Luke returned from working on the south ridge’s balky condensers—Owen and Beru’s source of aggravation then, his and Camie’s now. The sergeant was making demands even before he swung down from his dewback.

A band of scavengers sold two droids to you. Bring them. Now.

Luke had almost needed to drag the droids out of the garage. The astromech hooted wildly, while the protocol droid kept babbling that he was surrendering. They’d stood in the relentless heat for more than an hour while the Imperials picked through the droids’ memory banks, with the stormtroopers curtly refusing Owen’s request to at least let Beru sit in the shade.

That was when old Ben Kenobi had appeared, shuffling out of the desert in his dusty brown robes. He’d spoken to the stormtroopers with a smile, like they were old friends running into each other at the Anchorhead swap meet. He’d told them, with a slight wave of one hand, that Luke’s identification was wrong—the boy’s last name wasn’t Skywalker, but Lars.

“That’s right,” Owen had said, his eyes jumping to Beru. “Luke Lars.”

Ben had lingered, telling the stormtroopers that there was no need to take Owen in for questioning. But they’d refused that request, and forced Luke’s uncle into the belly of a troop transport alongside the droids, with the astromech letting out a last, desperate screech before the hatch slammed.

They released Owen three days later, and he’d remained pale and silent during the long ride back from Mos Eisley. It was weeks before Luke got up his courage to ask if the Empire would compensate them. Owen snarled at him to forget it, then tucked his hands under his elbows—but not before Luke saw that they were trembling.

A meteor burned up overhead, shaking Luke out of his reverie.

“What are you thinking about now?” Camie asked, and her voice was wary.

“That somehow I got old,” he said, tugging at his beard. “Old and gray.”

“You’re not the only one,” she said, hand going to her own hair. He offered her a smile, but she was looking off into the night.

No one had ever seen old Ben again. But there’d been rumors— whispers about a gunship flying low over the Jundland Wastes, and fire in the night. In Anchorhead they dismissed that as cantina talk, but Luke wondered. The troops at the farm had been real. So were the ones who’d come to the Darklighter farm and taken Biggs’s family away. The Darklighters had never returned—the farm had been stripped by Jawas and Sand People, then left for the sand to bury.

Weeks had turned into months, months into years, years into decades. Luke turned out to have a knack for machinery, a feel for the maddening complexity of Tatooine growing conditions, and a talent for good outcomes, whether it was bargaining with Jawas or choosing sites for new vaporators. In Anchorhead, the boy once teased as Wormie was more often called Lucky Luke.

Camie had seen that, too—just as she’d noticed that Fixer talked a lot while doing little. She’d married Luke and they’d become partners with Owen and Beru before inheriting the farm. There’d never been children—a pain that had dulled to an ache they no longer admitted feeling—but they’d worked hard and done well, building as comfortable a life as one could on Tatooine.

But Luke had never stopped dreaming about the girl who’d called out for Obi-Wan. Just last week he’d woken with a start, certain that the astromech was waiting for him in the garage, finally willing to play the full message for him. It was important that Luke hear it— there was something he needed to do. Something he was meant to do.

After the stormtroopers took the droids, Luke assumed he’d never learn the mysterious young woman’s identity. But he’d been wrong. It had been blasted out over the HoloNet for weeks, ending with a final report that before her execution, Princess Leia Organa had apologized for her treasonous past and called for galactic unity.

Curiously, the Empire had never shared footage of those remarks, leaving Luke to remember his brief glimpse of the princess—and to wonder what desperate mission had caused her to seek out an old hermit on Tatooine.

Whatever it was, it had failed. Alderaan was a debris field now, along with Mon Cala and Chandrila—all destroyed by the battle station that had burned out the infections of Separatism and rebellion, leaving the galaxy at peace.

Or at least free of conflict. That was the same thing, or near enough.

He realized Camie was saying his name, and not for the first time.

“I hate it when you look like that,” she said.

“Look like what?”

“You know what I mean. Like you think something went wrong. Like you got cheated, and this is all a big mistake. Like you should have followed Tank and Biggs, and gone to the Academy like you wanted to. Like you were meant to be far away from here.”

“Camie— ”

“Far away from me,” she said in a smaller voice, turning away with her arms across her chest.

“You know I don’t feel that way,” he said, placing his hands on his wife’s shoulders and trying to ignore the way she stiffened at his touch. “We’ve made a good life, and this is where I was meant to be. Now come on—let’s go inside. It’s getting cold.”

Camie said nothing, but she let Luke lead her back toward the dome that marked the entrance to the homestead. Standing on the threshold, Luke lingered for a last look up into the night. But the Star Destroyer—if that was indeed what it had been—hadn’t returned.

After a moment, he turned away from the empty sky.

Luke woke with a start, instinctively scooting up to a seated position. His mechanical hand whirred in protest, echoing the thrum of the insects that lived in the hardy grasses of Ahch-To.

He tried to shake away the dream as he dressed, donning his woolens and waterproof jacket. He opened the metal door of his hut, then shut it quietly behind him. It was nearly dawn, with the pale coming day a glimmer like a pearl on the horizon, above the black void of the sea.

The oceans of Ahch-To still astonished him—an infinity of water that could transform from blank and placid to roiling chaos. All that water still seemed impossible—at least in that way, he supposed, he was still a child of the Tatooine deserts.

Farther down the slopes, he knew, the Caretakers would soon rise to begin another day, as they had for eons. They had work to do, and so did he—they because of their ancient bargain, and he because of his own choice.

He’d spent his youth resenting chores on Tatooine; now they gave structure to his days on Ahch-To. There was milk to harvest, fish to catch, and a loose stone step to be put right.

But not quite yet.

Luke walked slowly up the steps until he reached the meadow overlooking the sea. He shivered—the summer was almost gone, and the dream still had him in its grip.

That was no ordinary dream, and you know it.

Luke raised the hood of his jacket with his mechanical hand, stroking his beard with the flesh-and-blood one. He wanted to argue with himself, but he knew better. The Force was at work here—it had cloaked itself in a dream, to slip through the defenses he’d thrown up against it.

But was the dream a promise? A warning? Or both?

Things are about to change. Something’s coming.

CHAPTER 1

Leia Organa, once princess of Alderaan and now general of the Resistance, stood in a jungle clearing on D’Qar, a throng of officers and crewers on either side.

Their heads were down and their hands clasped. But Leia could see them stealing looks at her, and one another. Just as she could see the way they shifted uneasily from foot to foot.

War was coming, and they knew it. And they were worried that in her grief she’d forgotten.

The idea offended her. Leia knew all too much about war and grief—she’d lived with both for longer than some of these fretful officers had been alive. Over the five decades of her life, in fact, war and grief had been her only truly faithful companions. But she had never let either stop her from doing what had to be done.

The anger felt hot and sharp, and came as a relief after the hours of rudderless sorrow that had left her feeling empty, like she’d been hollowed out.

She didn’t want to be standing here in the steaming jungle—she hadn’t wanted to hold this ceremony at all. She’d stared balefully at Admiral Ackbar when the veteran Mon Calamari officer had taken her aside in D’Qar’s war room to deliver his message.

Han is dead, at the hands of our son—and you want me to give a speech?

But Ackbar had faced down even worse things than an angry Leia Organa. Her old friend had held his ground, apologetic but insistent, and she’d understood what he was thinking. The Resistance had so little in terms of resources, whether one was talking about soldiers, ships, or credits. It had just won an enormous victory at Starkiller Base by destroying the First Order’s superweapon. But the euphoria had been short-lived. The New Republic was all but destroyed, and the First Order was now free to unleash its fury on the Resistance.

Whether Leia liked it or not, the Resistance’s greatest strength— its one indispensable asset—was her. Her leadership, her legacy of sacrifice, her legend were what held this fragile movement together. Without them, the Resistance would disintegrate before the First Order’s guns.

Her people—and they were her people—were facing the greatest test in their history. To stand firm, they needed to see her and hear from her. And they needed her to look and sound strong and determined. They couldn’t suspect that she felt broken and alone. If they did, they would break, too.

If that struck her as cruel, well, the galaxy was often cruel. Leia didn’t need anyone to explain that to her.

So she had returned to the landing field where she’d said farewell to the Millennium Falcon—and what was the battered, saucer-shaped freighter but another piercing reminder of what she’d lost? Slowly and somberly, she’d read the names of the pilots who’d never returned from Starkiller Base. And then, trailed by her entourage, she’d walked slowly to the edge of the jungle for the second part of the ceremony Ackbar had insisted on.

One member of that entourage—a slim protocol droid with a gleaming golden finish—was more agitated than the others, or perhaps just doing a worse job of hiding it. Leia stepped forward and nodded at C-3PO, who signaled in turn to an old cam droid.

The hovering droid accompanied Leia as she stepped forward and looked down at the object she’d placed among the roots of one of D’Qar’s sprawling trees. The droid’s sensors tracked her gaze, and its lens focused on a crude wooden figurine, whittled by an inexperienced hand.

Han had carved the figurine while she lay against his shoulder in an Ewok hut, the night before the Battle of Endor. He’d meant it to be her, wearing a primitive dress and holding a spear. But he hadn’t told her that, and she’d asked innocently if it was one of their Ewok hosts. Han had tossed the carving aside in embarrassment, but she’d quietly retrieved it and had it in her pocket when the second Death Star exploded in the sky overhead.

It made for a pretty sorry memorial. But then Han had always traveled as if determined to avoid making much of a footprint. She’d first slipped inside his cabin on the Falcon during the journey to Yavin 4, hoping a look around would give her some understanding of how someone could be at once so charming and infuriating, and found a chaotic mess: worn spacer gear, stacked flight manuals, and bits of equipment shed by the Falcon during innumerable malfunctions. The only personal touch she’d found aboard the whole ship was the pair of golden dice hanging in the cockpit.

Leia turned to face the Resistance members, automatically waiting for the whir of the cam droid as it repositioned itself in front of her. She stared into its lens, her gaze steady.

“Han would hate this ceremony,” she said, knowing her voice was clear and firm, as it had been during countless Senate sessions. “He had no patience for speeches or memorials. Which was to be expected from a man who was allergic to politics and suspicious of causes.”

She saw a smile creep onto General Ematt’s face. That was something. But then Ematt had fought alongside Han during the days of the Rebellion. So had Admiral Ackbar and Nien Nunb. Others, such as Commander D’Acy and Lieutenant Connix, knew of Han only through his connection to her, which had been severed years earlier. They were there for her, and waiting stone-faced.

“I once told Han that it was tiresome watching him do the right thing only after he’d exhausted every alternative,” she said. “But sooner or later, he’d get there. Because Han hated bullies, and injustice, and cruelty—and when confronted with them, he could never stand down. Not in his youth on Corellia, not above Yavin, not on Endor, and not at Starkiller Base.”

In the distance she could hear the whine of speeders moving heavy equipment—she had agreed to speak if Ackbar, in turn, agreed that her speech wouldn’t halt the evacuation preparations. They’d both known the First Order had somehow tracked the Resistance to D’Qar—which meant its warships would be coming.

“Han fancied himself a scoundrel,” Leia said, smiling at that last word. “But he wasn’t. He loved freedom—for himself, certainly, but for everybody else in the galaxy, too. And time after time, he was willing to fight for that freedom. He didn’t want to know the odds in that fight—because he’d already made up his mind that he’d prevail. And time after time, somehow, he did.”

C-3PO turned his golden face toward her, and for a moment she worried that the droid might chime in with some anecdote about Captain Solo being particularly reckless—despite being programmed for etiquette and protocol, C-3PO had a singularly awful sense of diplomacy. So she pressed on before the droid could activate his vocabulator.

“Han didn’t want to know the odds when he and Chewbacca flew back to the Death Star in time to save my brother Luke—and the last hope for our Alliance,” she said. “He didn’t ask about them when he accepted a general’s rank for the ground assault at Endor. He didn’t want them calculated when he fought for freedom at Kashyyyk. And he refused to think about them when he saw a way to fly through the First Order’s shields and infiltrate Starkiller Base.”

And when he agreed to reach out to our son, she might have added. To reach out and try to draw him back out of the darkness.

But she didn’t say that. Leia had given everything she had to Alderaan, and then to the Alliance, the New Republic, and now the Resistance. But that was hers alone.

Leia saw Ematt’s eyes on her and realized she was blinking hard, her lower lip trembling. She forced herself to breathe in, then out, until she knew from years of practice that she once again looked calm and composed.

Almost there.

A transport lifted into the sky above the Resistance base, its ion exhaust riffling the tops of the trees and sending a flight of sonar swallows skyward, warbling in protest. The faces around her watched the starship shrink into the distance before turning back in her direction, and she felt the anger return. They all knew how little time they had and everything that needed to be done. And yet she knew not one of them would dare to stop her if she talked all day, undone by grief and loss, until finally a First Order barrage silenced her forever.

Leia had been horrified to hear the Resistance called a cult of personality—that had been her New Republic critics’ choice of words when they sought to dismiss her as a warmonger and a relic. They’d been wrong about most everything, but the criticism had a grain of truth: Leia and her fellow leaders had struggled to find the time or resources to make the Resistance anything else.

Well, no time to fix that one right now. And anyway, all my critics are dead.

“So many of you have offered me your sympathy, and I thank you for your kindness,” Leia said. “But now I ask you to focus once again on the cause we all serve.”

They were nodding now. Good. It was past time to finish this, and release them. The sooner she did, the sooner she could escape their endless parade of questions and demands, if only for a little while, and be alone with her private grief.

“We face long odds,” Leia said. “The New Republic is leaderless, and the First Order is on the march. I can’t tell you what those odds are—and I don’t want to know. Because nothing could change my mind about what we have to do now.”

She said nothing for a moment, letting her words hang there for the audience to consider.

“We must return to the fight,” she said. “We do so because, like Han, we believe in justice and freedom. And because we will not accept a galaxy ruled by cruelty. We’ll fight for those ideals. We’ll fight for each other, and the sacred bonds we’ve forged serving side by side. And we’ll fight for all the people in the galaxy who want to fight but can’t—who need a champion. They’re calling to us, in terror and grief. And it is our duty to answer that call.”

Leia nodded at the officers around her, then at the cam droid and all those watching.

“We all have our sorrows,” she said. “And we will never forget them, or those we have lost. In time, we will honor them more fully and properly. But we must save our sorrow for after the fight. Because right now, we have work to do.”

CHAPTER 2

On a chilly planet in the galaxy’s Outer Rim, two sisters huddled in a space designed for one.

Refnu’s wharves were thronged with Resistance crewers trundling carts of black spherical magno-charges, directing plodding power droids to charge ports, and running diagnostics on the eight StarFortress bombers that would soon leave their berths.

Crammed inside the ball turret of the bomber Cobalt Hammer, Paige and Rose Tico had an excellent view of the activity around them. But the transparent ball shut out all sound, turning the Resistance’s preparations for war into a pantomime. At least for these last few precious minutes, the sisters could pretend they were alone.

“I hate to think of you flying without me,” Rose said, looking up at Paige. “What if you forget how the guns work?”

Paige laughed and patted the gunsight mount.

“You just checked them,” she pointed out, then yawned and stretched as much as the turret’s cramped confines allowed. “I pump these triggers, and the bad guys go away.”

The twin cannons attached to the ball turret were locked down and didn’t so much as twitch. But a gold, teardrop-shaped medallion wrapped around the gunsight mount did. Rose heard the tink the medallion made against the shaft and reached into the top of her jumpsuit to touch the similar medallion she wore on a cord around her neck. They represented the emblem of the Otomok system—the sisters’ home.

Paige looked over and twitched her shoulder to bump her little sister out of her reverie.

“Besides, you’ve got work to do,” Paige said. “If your bafflers can keep our other ships safe from detection, it could be a big advantage against the First Order.”

Rose looked down, embarrassed. “All the bafflers do is hide engine emissions. Anybody could have done what I did. And probably better, too.”

“Not this again. You know that isn’t true.”

“Fine, maybe it isn’t. But I want to go with you.”

“You’ll be with me,” Paige said with a smile, reaching up and tap-ping her medallion.

Rose looked up, her hand on her own medallion. “It’s not the same.”

“Maybe not. But it won’t be long. I’ll see you aboard the Raddus once the D’Qar evacuation is finished.”

“Right,” Rose said, clutching her medallion hard now. She could feel tears pooling in the corners of her eyes and threatening to spill down her cheeks.

“Rose,” Paige said, one hand reaching for hers. “I’ll be fine.”

“I know, Pae-Pae,” Rose said quietly, using her pet name for her sister, the one left over from their childhoods. “You’re the best gunner in the whole Resistance, after all.”

Paige just smiled and Rose closed her eyes, trying to lose herself in the familiar warmth and weight of her sister’s body against hers. Their breathing had fallen into the same rhythm, their shoulders gently rising and falling together.

On their first mission aboard Cobalt Hammer, Rose had left her flight engineer’s station once the bomber had entered hyperspace, clambering down the ladder from the flight deck and squeezing herself into the ball turret beside Paige. They’d spent hours staring out at the tumbling blue-white infinity around them and talking about everything they’d do once the galaxy was at peace—the planets they’d visit; the animals they’d raise; the homestead they’d build on some world with a kind warm sun, gentle breezes, and good grass.

If the rest of Cobalt Hammer’s crew thought that odd, they soon accepted that the Ticos had a bond that would have been extraordinary even between twins. Since Rose’s birth the sisters had rarely been apart for more than a couple of days—not growing up on Hays Minor in the Otomok system, and not while serving in the Resistance after fleeing their homeworld and its First Order occupiers.

That was about to change.

Refnu had no berths large enough for the Ninka. The frigate waited in low orbit, a glimmering star in the deep violet of the gloomy planet’s perpetual twilight. Rose was scheduled for the transport after the next. The bombers would launch not long after that, fueled and stocked and armed, and coordinate hyperspace jumps with the Ninka. Paige would spend the journey to D’Qar in the ball turret, suspended in a little bubble surrounded by unimaginable cosmic forces. Rose ached to make the journey with her, but it was too late— she had agreed to stay aboard the Ninka, showing the techs how her baffler technology worked in the hope it could be adapted for other craft.

“What made you decide to say yes?” Paige asked, sensing her sister brooding.

“I wanted a new flight suit,” Rose said.

That got a little laugh from her sister, as Rose had hoped. But then that was Paige—she’d be calm even with one engine offline, an unresponsive rudder, and space around her filled with turbolaser fire, coolly sizing up the situation and figuring out what needed to be done. Whatever genetic lottery had bestowed Paige with such poise had passed Rose over, leaving her empty-handed. Battle terrified her, and the hours waiting for it made her stomach clench and heave.

That’s why you’re a Resistance hero and I’m a maintenance tech, Rose thought about telling Paige, but it wouldn’t help and there wasn’t time. So she talked instead of bravery and responsibility—at least until she heard herself and admitted the real reason she’d agreed to take on her new assignment.

“I thought you wanted me to,” Rose said. “I thought you were ready to let me take responsibility for myself.”

“I want you to be yourself,” Paige replied. “But of course that means being my sister, too.”

She reached up, the motion precise and efficient as always, and freed her Otomok medallion from the cannon’s gunsight mount, slipping it over her head.

“Nothing can change that,” Paige said. “We’re connected to each other, and to home. We don’t have to be in the same place for that to be true.”

The sisters hugged—it was time to go, and they both knew it. “See you after the evacuation,” Rose said, begging whatever power governed the universe to turn that bland prediction into an ironclad guarantee.

“See you then, Rose,” Paige replied. It was what she always said before a mission—a deliberately casual farewell that Rose had come to believe was their good-luck charm.

Then Rose was levering herself out of the ball turret, careful not to step on her sister or knock the gunsight mount out of alignment. She emerged at the bottom of the bomber’s ventral stalk—what crews called the Clip. The bomb bay doors at her feet were open, while a ladder led to the flight deck above her, climbing past racks of magno-charges. There were more than a thousand in all, enough to crack the crust of a planet or batter down the shields and blast open the hull armor of a capital ship. Many of the magno-charges had been decorated with cartoons or hastily scrawled words—gallant invocations of the Resistance cause were racked next to obscene suggestions for the First Order’s leaders.

Rose counted six rows up from the bottom, then five magno-charges in from the edge until she found the black sphere she and Paige had marked with a stylus. The message they’d chosen was simple: justice for otomok.

Rose heard the whine of a shuttle lifting off. That meant hers would be inbound. She lowered herself through the bomb bay doors, dropping to the deck, and glanced up at her sister in the ball turret. Paige was going over her preflight checklist, her datapad’s screen bathing her face in pale white light. As she studied it, she reached up and tucked a stray lock of black hair under her padded cowl.

That gesture—familiar and unconscious—pierced Rose in a way their conversation hadn’t. She looked wildly around the wharves, hunting for the silver-skinned bulk of Fossil, the squadron’s hulking commanding officer. She’d tell Fossil that this had all been a big mistake and she’d fly aboard Cobalt Hammer as a backup flight engineer, or do anything else that needed doing, but she wasn’t leaving Paige.

And if Fossil said no? Then Rose would wait until she wasn’t looking, climb back into the Clip, and conceal herself in a maintenance locker until they were in hyperspace and it was too late to get rid of her.

But then Paige turned, saw her sister, and smiled and waved. Like nothing was wrong. Like there was no danger whatsoever.

As the shuttle that would bear her away descended, Rose forced herself to wave back.

See you then, Paige.

CHAPTER 3

Even though she was standing on the landing field outside the Resistance base, Kadel Ko Connix knew the moment the First Order warships emerged from hyperspace above the planet.

Every comlink around her begin squawking and squealing—a chorus of urgent calls that struck her as oddly similar to the night-time calls of D’Qar’s brilliantly colored tree-lizards.

Beside her, PZ-4CO’s eyes brightened. The bright-blue protocol droid shuffled her feet and looked down at Connix, the servomotors whirring in her elongated neck.

“Comm/scan reports three Resurgent-class Star Destroyers and a larger capital ship,” PZ-4CO intoned, her voice cool and pleasant as always. “Unknown class, Dreadnought-sized. Preliminary estimated length seven thousand five hundred meters.”

Connix winced. The Resistance had known the First Order was building warships and armies in the Unknown Regions, beyond the galactic frontier. General Organa had sent a steady stream of holographic footage and intelligence data providing evidence for that conclusion to New Republic senators, hoping to batter down the galactic government’s stubborn insistence that reports of a First Order military buildup were at best a figment of the general’s imagination and at worst exaggerations. But a capital ship of that size? That was worse than the darkest imaginings of the Resistance’s intelligence analysts.

So was Starkiller Base. What else has Snoke been hiding out there?

“I am troubled by the apparent limitations of our threat database,” PZ- 4CO said.

Connix had to laugh.

“I’m troubled by a lot of things these days, Peazy. Such as the fact that where we’re standing is going to be a blast crater when the First Order gets here. What’s left on our to-do list?”

PZ-4CO’s eyes brightened again. Connix spotted Flight Officer Jones hurrying across the landing field toward them.

“Approximately thirty percent of the deep fuel reservoir remains to be siphoned,” the droid said as Jones caught his breath. “Scuttle procedure for mission-critical computers is incomplete. And maintenance stocks are still being transferred from lower-level stores.”

“There are still thirty pallets of cannon shells in C bunker,” Jones said.

Great. Add one more thing to the list.

“Time to completion?” Connix asked, her eyes jumping from the transports still on the landing field to the Resistance crewers and droids hurrying in and out of the portals to the subterranean base.

“Approximately ninety minutes,” PZ-4CO said.

“We don’t have ninety minutes. We may not have nine.”

Slow down and think. Panic doesn’t solve problems; it just creates new ones.

General Organa had taught her that—and so much else.

“Forget the cannon shells and the remaining maintenance stocks,” Connix said. “Anything still down below is staying.”

“Quartermaster Prindel will be extremely agitated by this decision,” PZ-4CO said.

“Bollie will have to take it up with Snoke. Give the order, Peazy.”

PZ-4CO’s head swiveled and Connix knew the droid was transmitting the new instructions. She bit her lip, unable to resist another peek skyward, and considered the remaining tasks.

The Resistance ships that had answered General Organa’s plea for assistance were low on fuel—every drop in that reservoir might prove critical. Yet siphoning it out was an agonizingly slow process.

No easy answer there.

Then there were the computers, and the information in them that might be recoverable after an incomplete purge. The First Order might bombard the base from orbit, finishing the Resistance’s job for it. But it might also send down slicers and data retrieval droids to scour the databanks. What they found could endanger everyone from Resistance allies elsewhere in the galaxy to the families of those who’d pledged themselves to the cause.

No easy answer there, either.

So what would General Organa do? Fortunately, Connix knew.

She’d say perfect information is a luxury you can rarely afford. All you can do is make the best decision with whatever imperfect information you do have.

“Jones, tell the scuttle team to use the computers for target practice and get out of there,” Connix said. “Peazy, prioritize the fuel transfer. But I want that tanker and all remaining transports airborne in ten minutes.”

“Given our fuel levels, ten minutes may not be—” PZ-4CO objected.

“We have to get the fleet into hyperspace,” Connix said. “Once we make the jump, the First Order won’t be able to track us and will have to begin hunting all over again. That’ll give us time to figure out how to replenish our fuel stocks.”

“This decision— ”

“Has been made,” Connix said firmly. “Give the order, Peazy.”

Named for a long-dead rebel admiral, the Raddus was the Resistance flagship, a bulbous MC85 Mon Calamari star cruiser bristling with guns and augmented shield projectors. Measuring nearly thirty-five hundred meters from its pointed beak to the cluster of engines at the stern, the Raddus would have been a mighty warship even during the years in which Emperor Palpatine had turned the Empire into an unparalleled military-industrial complex.

But the Raddus was puny compared with the massive First Order Dreadnought cruising slowly through space toward D’Qar, accompanied by three Star Destroyers. Aboard the Resistance warship’s bridge, Admiral Ackbar stroked his barbels and gazed down at a hologram table showing the situation above D’Qar. Beside him stood Leia, the starfighter pilot Poe Dameron, and C-3PO.

The Resistance’s three other warships—the Anodyne, Ninka, and Vigil—were moving out of low orbit, having taken on most of the transports bearing evacuees up from D’Qar’s surface. But the First Order arrivals were closing quickly.

“They’ve found us,” said a Resistance monitor.

“Well, we knew that was coming,” Poe said, his gaze sliding from the holographic table to a viewscreen. “Connix, is the base fully evacuated?”

“Still loading the last batch of transports,” Connix replied. “We need more time.”

Poe looked at Leia, but the general had anticipated what he was going to say.

“You’ve got an idea,” she said with a weary fondness. “But I won’t like it.”

Poe opened his mouth to make his case, hoping something eloquent would come out. But Leia had anticipated that, too.

“Go,” she said.

General Armitage Hux stood on the bridge of the First Order Star Destroyer Finalizer, gazing out at the blue-green planet hanging in space.

Four ships hung in orbit above the planet, below its asteroid rings—a bulbous Mon Calamari cruiser, an angular frigate, a cargo ship with a rounded front and a jagged rear, and a smaller ship with an oversized bow like a broken crescent.

Hux automatically assessed and cataloged the Resistance war-ships, drawing on years of training. He knew the Mon Calamari craft: It was the Raddus, which served Leia Organa’s rabble as flagship and mobile command center. The next-largest ship was a Nebulon-C frigate, from a line built for the New Republic after the accords that ended its conflict with the Empire. The ship with the rounded front was some kind of cargo frigate, heavily modified. The ship with the crescent bow was a model Hux didn’t recognize, but it was clearly a warship, bristling with point-defense cannons and ordnance pods.

Within a few minutes it would be academic: All four would be space dust.

The Finalizer’s gleaming black bridge was a model of efficiency, with controllers and monitors briskly exchanging information from the Star Destroyer’s targeting computers and sensor suites. Hux smiled at the thought of himself as the center of all that activity—a slim, dignified figure in black, uniform perfect, standing at parade rest.

“We’ve caught them in the middle of their evacuation,” said Peavey, the Finalizer’s captain. “The entirety of the Resistance, in one fragile basket.”

Hux suppressed a surge of annoyance. Edrison Peavey was old—a veteran of Imperial service who’d served with Hux’s late father. He and a handful of Imperial loyalists had managed to escape the New Republic’s hunters by venturing into the uncharted stars of the Unknown Regions.

Those men and women had been useful in their time. But that time was at an end—the First Order had decapitated the New Republic leadership with a single demonstration of its technological might.

True, Starkiller Base had then been destroyed, but Hux told himself that was merely an unfortunate setback—one that had been less a military defeat than the product of incompetence and treachery within the First Order. Those failures had been dealt with, or near enough. Most of those who had failed Hux and Supreme Leader Snoke had been vaporized with the base; those who’d escaped punishment would get what they deserved soon enough.

Hux smiled thinly. Truthfully, it didn’t much matter. The New Republic Senate was in ashes, the heart of its fleet was incinerated, and the Resistance vermin who’d had the temerity to assault Starkiller Base had been careless enough to leave a trail back to their nest. Once these few remaining insurgents had been destroyed, no one in the galaxy would dare oppose the First Order’s dominion. Hux would be free to build a dozen new Starkillers—or a hundred.

And in the meantime, the First Order had no shortage of other weapons—including ones Imperial commanders such as Peavey had only dreamed of.

That was it right there, Hux thought. Peavey and his generation saw the First Order’s impending triumph as a restoration of the Empire, not realizing how that only proved their obsolescence. They couldn’t or wouldn’t see that the regime they’d served was not merely gone but superseded. The First Order was the fulfillment of what the Empire had struggled to become. It had distilled and perfected its strengths while eliminating its weaknesses.

Or at least most of its weaknesses, Hux thought, eyeing Peavey. But there would be time for another culling. In the meantime, a reminder of Peavey’s station would have to suffice.

“Perfect,” he said. “I have my orders from Supreme Leader Snoke himself. This is where we snuff out the Resistance once and for all. Tell Captain Canady to prime his Dreadnought. Incinerate their base, destroy those transports, and obliterate their fleet.”

The order was transmitted and received by Moden Canady aboard the bridge of the Fulminatrix, the enormous Mandator IV-class Siege Dreadnought at the heart of the First Order formation. On Canady’s command, the two massive cannons slung beneath his ship’s belly began to slowly swivel, reorienting themselves to fire on the hot spot of transmissions and energy emissions that sensor crews had detected on the planet below.

Canady’s warrant officer, Bascus, was gazing at the holographic screen and tracking the cannons’ progress with something akin to ecstasy on his face. Canady scowled. His crew was half his age, with scant experience outside of battle sims. That they were untested wasn’t their fault; that they were arrogant and undisciplined was.

“Reorient the topside batteries to target the Resistance fleet,” Canady ordered. “And prep our fighter squadrons for launch.”

“General Hux ordered no fighter deployment,” objected Bascus. “He feels a demonstration—”

“Do I need to explain the difference between ‘prep for launch’ and ‘launch’?” Canaday asked Bascus.

“Captain!” called a scope monitor from the bridge pit, his surroundings lit red for ideal visibility during battlefield conditions. “We have a single Resistance X-wing fighter approaching. It’s moving to attack formation.”

The X-wing’s call sign was Black One, befitting its black fuselage and eye-catching orange flares. Those colors were more muted than Poe would have liked—his beloved fighter had returned from Starkiller Base with a bad case of carbon scoring, frayed fire-control linkages, and a host of other minor maladies. Goss Toowers, the perpetually dismayed starfighter maintenance chief, had looked over the fighter and offered Poe a choice: His overburdened techs could repair the battle damage, or they could install the piece of experimental equipment Poe had asked for, the one that hadn’t quite been ready for the Starkiller raid.

Poe had opted for the experimental equipment, and stuck with that choice even after the sad-eyed Goss reminded him that it was somewhere between possible and likely that it would kill him the first time it was engaged.

After all, everybody knew the only thing that made Goss more miserable than pilots was pilots having fun.

Not that Poe was having fun, exactly—in fact, hurtling alone through space toward three First Order capital ships struck him as an aggressively bad idea.

Even as part of a squadron, flying a starfighter was both physically and mentally exhausting: Stress, g-forces, and changing gravity beat up your body, while the constant need for situational awareness, multitasking, and improvisation taxed your brain. It was simultaneously an ever-shifting puzzle and an endurance test, with fatal consequences if you flunked.

But at least behind the control yoke Poe had something to do. And that was preferable to being stuck on the bridge of the Raddus, fidgeting uselessly and getting in the way. Poe would never admit this, not even to Leia, but with a starfighter around him, the galaxy made sense in a way that it too often didn’t otherwise.

Judging from the mournful beeping of BB-8 in the droid socket behind the X-wing’s cockpit, his astromech felt differently.

“Happy beeps here, buddy,” Poe said. “Come on—we’ve pulled crazier stunts than this.”

BB-8 didn’t dignify that with a response.

“Happy beeps,” Poe said again, this time more to himself.

“For the record, I’m with the droid on this one,” Leia said over his comm channel.

Poe almost laughed. “Thanks for your support, General.”

“A single light fighter?” asked an incredulous Hux, peering into deep space. “What is this?”

The bridge crew said nothing. Hux looked from one side to the other, exasperated by the impassive faces around him.

“Well … shoot him!”

Before the gunners could carry out this order, a ship-to-ship transmission crackled over the Finalizer’s audio pickups.

“Attention, this is Commander Poe Dameron of the Republic fleet,” the voice said. “I have an urgent communiqué for General Hugs.”

Hux felt all eyes turning his way, and red threatening to bloom in his cheeks. He knew that pilot’s name all too well—Dameron had fired the shot that destroyed Starkiller Base, and he’d been an irritant long before that. Hux had sworn he’d see the pilot back on a First Order torture rack one day soon—and that this time he’d oversee the interrogation personally. Where Kylo Ren and his sorcery had failed, Hux and his technological prowess would triumph.

“Patch him through,” he snapped. “This is General Hux of the First Order. The Republic is no more. Your fleet are rebel scum and war criminals. Tell your precious princess there will be no terms. There will be no surrender.”

He was proud of that last part and made a note to revisit it during the tribunals that would be carried live over the HoloNet to the entire galaxy. But Dameron, to his bafflement, didn’t reply.

“Hi, I’m holding for General Hugs?” the pilot asked after a moment.

“This is Hux. You and your friends are doomed! We will wipe your filth from the galaxy!”

Another moment, and then the reply: “Okay, I’ll hold.”

“What?” Hux looked around in consternation. “Hello?”

“Hello? I’m still here.”

Hux glowered at a communications officer. “Can he hear me?”

The officer nodded gravely.

Peavey, Hux noted, seemed less concerned with whatever was wrong with his ship’s short-range communications than he was with the readouts displaying the distance between the lone X-wing and the First Order battle line—a number that was steadily shrinking.

“Hugs—with an H?” Dameron asked. “Skinny guy, kind of pasty?”

“I can hear you, can you hear me?” Hux replied.

“Look, I can’t hold forever,” Dameron said, sounding exasperated. “If you reach him, tell him Leia has an urgent message for him. About his mother.”

Hux could faintly hear something else in the transmission—it sounded like an electronic chortle.

“I believe he’s tooling with you, sir,” Peavey said.

Hux glared at the Finalizer’s captain and found that the older man’s face was a carefully expressionless mask—as was the face of every other officer on the bridge.

“Open fire!” he screamed, bringing his fist down on the nearest console. It hurt abominably, but fortunately all eyes on the bridge were fixed ahead as a web of turbolaser fire filled the emptiness of space, searching for the X-wing and its infuriating pilot.

When his energy counter hit full, Poe yelled for BB-8 to punch it. A moment later Black One leapt forward as if kicked, propelled by the experimental booster engine grafted to the starfighter’s stern.