The Relentless
In which illusions are cast and traps are laid.
The First Order star destroyer Relentless dropped out of hyperspace, ion and laser cannons hot and TIE squadrons manned and ready. Studying the scene outside the bridge’s forward viewport, his hands clasped behind him, stood Captain Orlen Vach.
Most who met him called him a good-looking man. Not tall, but well-proportioned, square shoulders narrowing to a trim waist. His face was pleasing, too, with a straight nose and full lips framed by honey-colored hair just a shade or two lighter than his dark amber eyes.
But those eyes, those who met him muttered when he was well away. Cold as space and calculating as a targeting system.
The pupils of Captain Vach’s eyes contracted, making them predator-bright when he saw the Raptor drifting alone and undamaged.
“Sensors detect all weapons systems offline, sir,” the sensor officer said from the pit. “Emergency systems only operational.”
“Life signs?” Vach said.
“Yes, sir. The full crew complement, it appears.”
“Damage to the ship?”
“All external structures are intact. No signs of carbon scoring or ion blasts. However, I am detecting drifting debris indicating a starfighter skirmish.”
Vach pressed his lips together. “Have they responded to hails?”
“No, sir,” the communications officer said, light from her screens glowing on her face.
“Hail them again,” Vach said.
He waited as the hail went out. The bridge crew knew to work quietly. Only the murmur of voices, the beep of electronics and chatter of droids reached his ears.
“Still no response, sir,” the communications officer said.
Vach stood with perfect outward calm, no tension in the line of his shoulders or back, his hands still clasped loosely behind him.
A Resurgent-class star destroyer sends out a distress call, an attack by an unknown enemy, he thought. Yet we arrive to find no signs of any such attack.
He assessed and discarded several possibilities, arriving at one that seemed at once highly unlikely, yet also the most likely.
Rakata. A near-mythical race that had, tens of thousands of years ago, supposedly dominated the entire galaxy. Brutal. Merciless. Reputed to use technologies far beyond the understanding of any modern scientist. Only primitive, barbaric remnants of the ancient race remained, but there were rumors that some strove to restore their lost technology—and lost glory.
And Hux, with his insatiable appetite for new toys, had sent them on this fool’s errand in search of that technology.
Or so Orlen Vach had thought before responding to the Raptor’s distress call.
One thumb and forefinger tapped together slowly, the only sign of his agitation.
“Dispatch a company of stormtroopers with fighter escort to the Raptor,” he said at last. “Let’s see what’s going on over there.”
* * *
Five assault landers, each carrying two squadrons of stormtroopers, glided into the Raptor’s bow hangar. Company Captain LS-0097 stood in the cockpit, observing the approach as the TIE squadron swept around the ship, ready to intercept any possible attack.
The magnetic field generator was dark—the hangar would be unpressurized. The transport bumped and shuddered as the magnets in the landing gear engaged, locking it to the deck in the zero-G conditions. The whine and grind and clunk of machinery sounded as they coupled to an airlock, then the hiss of rushing air as the airlock was pressurized. Small objects floated by outside the viewport—a hydrospanner, a welder’s shield, a TIE pilot’s helmet. LS-0098 repressed an instinctive shudder. The helmet looked disturbingly like a severed head.
He checked his blaster, stepped aft and moved between the ranks of his men to the airlock, his magnetic boots holding him to the deck in place of artificial gravity. The hatch hummed open. His held his breath, tensed and aimed his blaster at the hatch at the other end of the airlock. It opened…
The corridor beyond was empty. Emergency lighting painted the bulkheads and deck a dim red.
The comlink in his helmet crackled to life. “Sensors show life signs approximately one hundred meters ahead, sir.”
“Weapons ready,” LS-0097 ordered his team. “Any sign of hostility, fire. Anyone who isn’t crew, fire at will.”
He stepped through the airlock, into the bloody dimness. There was only the clash of magnetic boots as they met the deck and released again, the harsh sound of his breaths in his helmet. Information streamed across his helmet’s visual display—distance to life signs on the ship, environmental conditions, positions of the other squadrons.
The corridor stretched ahead. Red lights at the base of bulkheads converged with distance, dim even with his helmet’s light enhancement. A red-edged door came up on their right. He motioned to his men. Three men, three blasters leveled, faced the door. LS-0097’s heart sped. The door hissed open.
Nothing. An empty control room, screens dark and glassy like dead eyes. LS-0097 let go the breath he’d been holding and motioned his squad on. A trooper stayed behind to secure the door.
His display counted down the meters to the life signs they’d detected. The skin of his spine crawled. The squadron clattered along the corridor. Ten meters to life signs. Five. Two.
Another red-lit door to the left stood closed. LS-0097 raised an arm to halt his squad. Troopers spread out to cover the corridor and door.
LS-0097 tightened his finger on his blaster’s trigger, raised his hand and touched the door controls. The door slid open.
He had an instant to register a huge man dressed all in black wielding an unstable plasma weapon. Even as his shocked brain supplied Kylo Ren and lightsaber, he was already firing. The lightsaber spun in a blurred circle of red, sending blaster bolts ricocheting wildly, then a tide of three-eyed, four-armed creatures spilled through the door.
Blinding terror gripped LS-0097, banded his chest, stopped his breath, quivered through his bowels. Every horror he’d ever seen boiled up behind his eyes. Running men and women mowed down by blaster fire in a city street. The screams of children in burning houses. The smell of blood and spilled guts and charred flesh. The twisting agony of convulsing muscles as a shock-prod hit him again and again after he’d kissed another cadet. The dread of one day becoming one of the men too old for active duty, put down like a sick animal—
He was dying, drowning. There was nothing, no hope, no use, nothing but pain and misery and despair. Please, please, make it stop! He turned his blaster on himself, fumbling awkwardly for the trigger, the plastoid fingers of his gauntlets slipping and slipping again.
His anguish suddenly ebbed. He gasped a breath that burned down a throat raw from screaming. Something deep within him grew like a light glimmering upward through dark water. Frantic, he grasped for it.
Running, laughing children surrounded him. He carried a little boy on his shoulders as the child squealed in delight. He picked up a crying little girl and handed her to her mother.
He looked around, astonished, trying to grasp what had happened, where he was, what this strange, buoyant, swelling feeling in his chest was. A tall, slim young woman stood beside him, dressed like a beggar—sleeveless tunic over loose, knee-length trousers, her arms and torso wrapped in bindings of dirty, tattered gauze. She looked over and smiled at him.
In that instant, anything was possible. Everything. The laughing children. The grateful mother. The feeling of happiness rising like a long-forgotten dream.
LS-0097 blinked back into the corridor aboard the Raptor. The members of his squad were scattered around him, some prone on the deck, others huddled against the bulkheads. TN-3476, curled in a moaning, rocking ball, slowly pushed herself up.
Kylo Ren stood over them all, lightsaber blazing in his black-gloved hand. The woman LS-0097 had seen in his dream stood just behind him. He stared at her, confused. She didn’t wear dirty rags now, but a First Order captain’s uniform.
LS-0097 caught his breath. “You,” he whispered. “How…?”
Kylo Ren spoke, snatching his attention back. “Are you ready to make a change?”
After the horrors of his life, after the crushing despair of his future, LS-0097 knew he’d do anything to escape them, anything to make the bright hope he’d seen possible.
* * *
“Blaster fire detected onboard the Raptor, sir,” the sensor officer said from the pit at Captain Vach’s feet.
“Status of the ship,” Vach said with his usual cool.
“All but emergency systems still offline.” The sensor officer paused, intently studying his screens. “All firing ceased, sir.”
“Communications,” Vach barked.
The communications officer tapped at her panels, switching between frequencies. “Sir, I can’t get a response—” she began, touching her earpiece.
Suddenly, a voice came clear over the bridge speakers. “Relentless, this is company captain LS-0097. Situation contained.”
“Report,” Vach said. “What happened over there?”
“Pirates, sir,” the company captain said. “A species I’ve never seen before. They attacked with an unknown type of weaponry that incapacitated the Raptor’s crew. We caught them by surprise. What are your orders, sir?”
Vach’s brows drew together ever so slightly. What weaponry? he thought. How did ten squadrons of stormtroopers overcome it when the entire troop complement of a star destroyer—eight thousand stormtroopers—was unable to?
“Ensure the situation is secure, then return,” Vach said. “How many pirates survived?”
“Eleven, sir.”
“I want them for interrogation. And I want appropriate command personnel from the Raptor brought in for debriefing.”
“Yes, sir,” the company captain said.
“That will be all.” Vach motioned to the communications officer to end the communication. “I’ll be in my office,” he said to the bridge at large. “Notify me when those transports return. Have a full security detail on deck to meet them. I want every member of that team debriefed.”
“Yes, sir,” Commander Belan said. “Return to normal status?”
As he was walking away, Vach paused and cocked his head. “No, Commander. Weapons remain charged and ready. Any sign of aggression from the Raptor, you have permission to fire.”
“Yes, sir.”
Vach nodded once and continued to his office, mentally composing his report to the Grand Admiral. He would flag it as a preliminary report, to be finalized after the debriefings.
Pirates. He stepped into his office, crossed to the viewport to gaze out at the Raptor, drifting dark and helpless against the starfield. His eyes narrowed and his thumb and forefinger slowly tapped together. Perhaps he ought to consider a change of plans.
He tapped the comlink in his desk. “Lieutenant Evran, contact Company Captain LS-0097. Tell him to hold aboard the Raptor. Debriefing and interrogations will take place there.”
The lieutenant acknowledged and Vach switched off.
Something didn’t make sense here, and he intended to find out first-hand what it was.
* * *
Red emergency lighting illuminated the Raptor’s bridge, making bloody-edged shadows of the men on the command deck. From their stations in the pit, the deck officers craned their necks to watch them, as silent as their darkened electronics. The Relentless hung beyond the viewport, a menacing triangle that blotted out the stars behind it.
The Raptor’s Captain Arkady didn’t show any outward alarm after the Relentless’ communication, but Kylo could sense it.
LS-0097, the company captain from the Relentless, stood by them, his helmet tucked under his arm. His gaze kept flicking to Rey where she stood beside him. Kylo narrowed his eyes.
“Captain Vach knows something is off,” the man said. “You won’t get your people aboard the Relentless.”
Kylo just stared at him, wrestling with a hostility he hadn’t quite managed to place yet. The other man didn’t drop his gaze, but he shifted uneasily.
“With the Relentless’ captain coming here,” Kylo finally said, “he’s just made the task easier.”
* * *
Once, when he’d had a little too much to drink, Kylo’s father had made a joke about the first time he met his father-in-law.
“It was on Bespin, in Cloud City,” Han had said, leaning back on the sofa and crooking that scoundrel’s grin of his. “Ol’ Lando invited us, me ‘n Chewie and Leia, to this fancy dinner.”
Ben had watched his mother tense, her hand tightening on her knee. She’d shot Han a warning look, one he’d been too drunk to notice.
“The doors open…” Han made a dramatic gesture of opening. “…and there, at the head of the table, framed by the wide, blue sky through the windows behind him, he sat in all his black-cloaked glory—Darth Vader!”
“Han,” Leia said quietly. Too quietly.
Ben knew very well what that quiet meant. It meant the wrath of twenty star destroyers was about to be unleashed.
His father finally heard it, too, and glanced at Leia. Giving one of his disarming chuckles, he made a joke, everyone laughed, and he turned the conversation.
Ben had heard stories (mostly from his father) of the exciting, adventurous lives his parents had led before he came along. That Darth Vader had frozen his father in carbonite and when she tried to rescue him, his mother had been taken as a slave by some Hutt gangster on Tatooine. Uncle Luke had to come rescue everyone, but his mother had strangled the Hutt with her slave’s chains. That was always his favorite part of the story.
Knowing Han Solo the way he did, even as a child Ben was inclined to treat the stories as just stories. But this one puzzled him, because he never could figure out what Darth Vader had to do with fathers-in-law. His mother’s father had been Bail Organa, Senator and husband of Queen Breha of Alderaan.
Only much later did he understand.
Still, the image from Han’s story stuck with him. Back in his black tunic and cloak (but without his mask—it did seem pretentious and childish now) Kylo seated himself at the head of the table in the Raptor’s debriefing room, framed by the First Order emblem hanging on the wall behind him. Six grey-cloaked and hooded Nightfolk ranged behind him. He folded his gloved hands on the glossy tabletop and waited for Captain Vach’s entrance.
When the door opened, Vach did exactly what Kylo expected—exactly what Han Solo had done. He whipped out his blaster and fired at Kylo.
Kylo snapped up a hand, arrested the blaster bolts in midair. Another flick of the Force, and Vach slammed face-first into the table. His stormtrooper guard blasted backward, smashed into the corridor wall and tumbled to the floor in a clatter of plastoid armor. The Nightfolk poured around the table and descended on their prey.
Vach, bloody-faced, pushing himself up off the table, was the only one who didn’t scream.
* * *
Sudden anger blazed through the bond. Rey whipped around and moved for the door.
“Ma’am, wait,” YT-1365 said, “Where are—”
Rey stepped into the corridor. Everything was still dimly red-lit and silent, the corridor deserted. “Something’s happening with Kylo.”
Her two guards hurried out after her. “Ma’am, you’re to avoid the fighting—”
Rey waved a hand as she strode along. “I can feel there isn’t any fighting.” Yet, she thought, sensing Kylo’s anger grow.
“Our orders are—”
“Unless you plan to tie me up or shoot me, I’m going,” she said.
Her guards’ dismay roiling the Force behind her, Rey followed her sense of Kylo to double doors emblazoned with the First Order emblem. The doors slid open to show Kylo leaning over a table, and facing him, a blond man whose back was to her.
“Rey,” Kylo said sharply.
A strong sense of go away came over the bond. She’d clearly walked in on a tense situation. Rey planted her feet. The blond man turned.
If not for the split lip and cheekbone, he might’ve been good-looking. But his eyes—they reminded her of a ripper-raptor, a creature that would tear you apart if it glimpsed the slightest weakness. Rey raised her chin, wishing for her staff.
He took her in with a brief glance. “Ah. This must be the rebel girl.”
“She’s no rebel,” Kylo growled. “She’s with me.”
“Is that true, girl?” the man said. “Or is that First Order uniform just camouflage?”
She’d only been with the Resistance because Kylo Ren had made himself her enemy. Kylo Ren was First Order, so the First Order was her enemy, too. But Kylo wasn’t her enemy anymore. He wasn’t First Order anymore, either. And what remained of the Resistance had made it perfectly clear they didn’t consider her one of them.
She must’ve hesitated too long—Kylo was gazing at her intently. “I’m not Resistance,” she said.
“It’s no concern of yours what she is or isn’t,” Kylo said, drawing the man’s attention back to him. “What is your concern is whether you’ll be useful to me.”
Those cold raptor-eyes fixed on Kylo. “Tell me why I should bring my ship under the command of a man with a bounty on his head. A bounty set by the Supreme Leader himself.” The blond man clasped his hands behind him. “The greater advantage seems to be redeeming my apostasy by turning you over to him.”
Rey felt the darkness coil in Kylo and remembered Hux splatted against the bulkhead of the command shuttle’s cockpit.
“That’s not what you believe,” Kylo said flatly. “I can see your thoughts, Vach. Hux is your worst nightmare.”
“The damage Hux can do to the First Order with his fanaticism and insatiable ego is my second worst nightmare,” Vach said. “My worst nightmare is seeing the First Order torn apart. Something, I might point out, you’ve already done a great deal to advance when you murdered Supreme Leader Snoke.”
Kylo’s fury boiled up like a sandstorm. He raised a hand, fingers crooked. Rey feigned a loud sneeze. He glanced sharply at her, but his hand lowered.
Rubbing her nose, she gave a convincing sniffle. “These ships are cold,” she said apologetically.
A flash of something that felt a little like irritation came through the bond, but there was too much amusement in it to be real irritation.
Kylo’s daunting attention returned to other man. “Snoke made mistakes. Starkiller was one,” he said. “Isn’t that why you’re out here? You thought the same?”
Vach bent his head in agreement. “I’m to believe you killed Snoke because you disagreed with his methods?”
“Murdering billions isn’t good governance,” Kylo snarled. “Nor will the Force allow it for long.”
Rey could feel his revulsion. She’d heard about what had happened to the Hosnian system after she got to D’Qar. She’d felt the horror and outrage, the grief and despair when people whispered about it. It was horrible, that anyone could even consider doing such a thing. Realizing that Kylo felt the same, something in her eased.
Vach barked a laugh. “Your mystical Force holds opinions on galactic politics?”
“Death on that scale creates a disturbance in the Force,” Kylo said. “It will respond by trying to balance itself. If not through me, then by some other means.”
The skin of Rey’s shoulders prickled.
“Yet Snoke, a Force-user as well, seemed undisturbed,” Vach said.
“Snoke’s perception was limited.”
“But yours isn’t, I suppose.”
“No,” Kylo said. “It isn’t.”
Was it because Snoke had been a darksider, and Kylo…wasn’t? Not entirely, anyway.
“You’re running out of time, Captain,” Kylo said. “I know how this works. If your commander doesn’t hear from you soon, he’ll attack the Raptor. I won’t allow that to happen.”
“Ah,” Vach said. “And yet you haven’t managed to persuade me.”
Remembering how Not-Finn—no, Dare—had called Kylo “volatile,” Rey had a guess where this might go. Vach would be lucky if he only got splatted against the wall behind him. Setting her jaw, she reached for the Force.
The table between Kylo and Vach shook, then with a loud crack!, broke loose from the floor and began to rise. The chairs followed, drifting slowly upward. Vach only jerked back, but Rey felt the alarm that burst through him. She splayed her fingers and the chairs smashed into the walls. She kept pushing. With a screech and snap of crushing plastoid and metal, they crumpled flat against the walls. Kylo folded his arms and coolly watched the captain.
Rey still pushed. The walls themselves began to bow outward, groaning. Rivets popped, went pinging across the room like ricochets. Vach ducked and threw up a protective arm. The seams between panels burst open. Sparks sprayed from the torn wiring beneath. The smell of ozone unfurled in the air. The overhead lights flickered, flashing in Vach’s white-rimmed eyes. Rey crooked a finger and the First Order banner behind Kylo began to tear slowly from top to bottom.
Kylo didn’t even glance back. “I’ll tear Hux apart.” His hiss wove with the sound of ripping fabric. “And anyone who gets in my way. Will you be in my way, Captain Vach?”
Rey could feel the captain’s thoughts racing—but surprisingly enough, not in panic. She was impressed in spite of herself.
“I’ve heard of Snoke’s abilities,” Vach said with amazing calm. “How he could touch someone across star systems.”
“Snoke didn’t survive me,” Kylo pointed out.
“Indeed. Yet I wonder if bending bulkheads will be enough to overcome Hux.”
“Depends on which bulkheads,” Rey said. She knew exactly which ones to bend that would cripple a star destroyer.
Vach turned an assessing stare on her. Kylo’s eyes blazed.
She released her grip on the Force. The chairs slid down the walls, the crushed pieces clattering to the floor. The table fell with a thud.
“Hux is proud of his big weapons,” Kylo said. “You see how quickly they were destroyed. He’s proud of his armies filled with stolen children. You see how quickly they turned.”
Vach tucked his chin. “Very well. I propose an agreement, then. We both agree that Hux is a problem. As long as I see you’re capable of removing him without destroying the First Order, I’ll throw in my lot with yours. But if you prove a greater liability, I shan’t hesitate to do my utmost to remove you.”
Kylo gave the man one of his forbidding stares. Vach met it without a flicker of fear. Rey didn’t like it.
“As long as you don’t become a liability to me,” Kylo said, “I accept.”
Image credit: GIF courtesy of Ggycat
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