Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Lost Stars (17 page)

The freighter dropped out of hyperdrive and into hell.

Berisse gasped out loud. Ciena couldn’t even catch her breath. They were on the outskirts of a vast debris field, twisted
metal floating in every direction. Some pieces were
enormous—the size of a light cruiser—but others were fragments even smaller than a human head. Splinters connected with the freighter’s windows and stuck to the transparency in
patterns like frost or cracks.

“I can’t believe it,” Berisse said, voice shaking. “It’s gone. It’s completely gone.”

The Death Star had been destroyed.

Jude’s warning echoed louder in Ciena’s head.
Fatal.
Now she knew Jude was dead.

A few other classmates had been stationed aboard the Death Star; at least a dozen people Ciena knew had been murdered that day. Thousands upon thousands of soldiers, most of them not even roused
to battle stations—they would have been sleeping, eating, getting a drink in one of the cantinas, with no idea that
moment was one of their last. But Jude had known the danger. Was she
frightened? In her last terrible moments, had Jude known it was the end? The idea made Ciena’s throat tighten and her eyes fill with tears.

“Lord Vader’s signal.” Berisse snapped out of her shock to get back to work. “Let’s go.”

Numbly, Ciena steered the freighter around the edge of the debris field. She wanted to cry;
she wanted to scream. The command officers had to have known what happened. Why hadn’t they told
the fleet? The entire galaxy? But maybe they had believed this as impossible as she had. Ciena finally recognized that her mission was not only to retrieve Darth Vader but also to confirm that the
worst had happened. They had sent her to bear witness to another massacre.

Her sorrow for Jude
flooded her mind until she couldn’t feel anything. Ciena went through the motions as they approached Lord Vader’s damaged TIE fighter, grateful for the training
that had taught her how to respond even when she was falling apart.

Vader’s ship slowly took form in the darkness. She first saw the strange rotation of several pieces of debris, as if they were being shoved back by repulsor beams.
Then she saw the form of
a TIE fighter with angled wings. Vader was flying just beyond the ever-expanding debris field.

“Initiating airlock sequence,” Ciena said. She was grateful Berisse didn’t know her very well yet, so she wouldn’t hear how strained and unnatural her voice had become.
“Three—two—one.”

Berisse hit the controls that would release one of a quartet of docking umbilicals
from the ship’s belly. Carefully, they extended the tube to the top of the TIE fighter’s spherical
cockpit.

“Met Lord Vader yet?” Berisse said lightly.

“I—uh, no.” Ciena could hardly focus enough to speak.

“I’m going to let you go back there and greet him.”

Normally, Imperial officers strove to be the first to talk to anyone of higher rank. Those were opportunities to stand out
from the pack. Ciena had never cared less about advancement. And yet
she had the impression Berisse wasn’t doing her a favor.

They say he is a great man,
she reminded herself as she stood at the airlock, waiting for the all clear to enter the bay.
That he has the Emperor’s favor. And they say he can
bend the Force itself to his will.
Though Ciena believed in the Force, she was doubtful
that anyone could control it so completely. She wondered if she would be proven wrong.

Ciena needed a superior officer she could respect. Someone who would take charge, someone in whom she could put her trust. She walked into the airlock corridor just as the pressure door hissed
open. Reassured, she stepped forward—

—then stopped as she saw Vader for the first time.

Black armor sheathed
him entirely. This was no TIE pilot’s gear, however; instead Ciena recognized a life-support suit, one more comprehensive than she’d ever seen or imagined
before. Nothing of Vader’s human skin or face remained visible beneath his gleaming carapace, and a black cape shrouded him from shoulder to floor. As he stepped forward, she realized how
tall he was—taller than any other human she had
ever encountered. In the cramped corridor, his stature was even more intimidating. But worst of all was the sound of his breath. The harsh rasp
of his respirator system echoed until it seemed to fill the space.

What
is
he?
Ciena wondered. Her splintered mind refused to accept Lord Vader as human. He seemed more like a nightmare vision, or a creature from the scary stories Mumma used to
tell around the kindred gathering fires. Evil seemed to ooze from him, to pool within the space until there was no more air. Ciena’s uniform collar felt too tight.

Only a few moments before, she’d been determined to greet her superior officer with dignity. Now she only hoped not to faint.

As Darth Vader stepped away from the airlock door, she heard his deep metallic voice for the first
time. “Are you here by the Emperor’s command?”

“We received our orders from the command staff of the
Devastator
, sir,” Ciena managed to respond. She had to fight the instinctive need to draw away from Vader. “I have
no information regarding their contact with the Emperor.”

Vader took this in for what seemed to be a very long time. Ciena’s nervousness continued to grow until he ordered,
“You and your fellow pilot will remain in the hold for the
remainder of the voyage. I will take command of this freighter until we have returned to the
Devastator
.”

“Yes, sir.”

She didn’t care about being hauled back to her Star Destroyer like so much cargo. Ciena was grateful to sink down to the floor, put her head on her knees, and take deep breaths. At least
now she didn’t have
to act. Even to think. She tried to forget she’d ever seen Darth Vader, and almost succeeded. Her battered mind could hold on to nothing but the scene of devastation
she’d witnessed, and her grief for Jude.

A thousand memories of her friend shone in Ciena’s memory like candles: the times they’d laughed and talked in their bunks late at night, how Jude had rushed to defend Ciena when
she’d
been accused of sabotaging Thane’s laser cannon and then comforted her after the argument that followed, even how unexpectedly glamorous Jude had looked at the reception. One of
the best friends she’d ever had, or would have, had been annihilated. Blasted to atoms.

Berisse was apologetic when she joined Ciena. “Lord Vader can be a little—overpowering when you first see him.”

“Yeah,”
Ciena said faintly.

“I didn’t feel like I could take it. Doesn’t mean it was any easier for you. Sorry.” Berisse leaned back against the wall like a puppet freed from its strings. “I
know he’s just wearing a life-support suit, and it’s stupid to be frightened of someone who has different needs, right? But that respirator—”

“He could be monitoring us right now,” Ciena pointed out. Berisse
fell silent.

When they returned to the
Devastator
, Ciena was grateful to finally be off duty. She went to the deck where her crew quarters were located. She freshened up. She spent a
few minutes crying into a towel for Jude. Then she pulled herself together and walked back toward her bunk—only to pause as she saw another junior officer in the corridor heading to the
auxiliary bridge. “Nash?”

Nash Windrider nodded. He still moved slowly, a bit like a man sleepwalking, but his uniform was regulation neat and his voice calm. “All hands are needed.”

“You’re sure you’re ready?”

“I have to be,” he said simply.

She put one hand on his arm. “Are you positive? You’ve been through a lot.” How inadequate. His entire planet had been destroyed in the hopes that it would end a war,
and those
hopes had proved futile. Nash had to be profoundly devastated.

His voice low, he said, “The Empire is all I have left. I need to be of use. I want to serve.”

Ciena still wondered whether Nash could handle it, but she decided to stop fighting him. He deserved the chance to try. “Okay. I’ll walk you up there.”

Nash nodded, his silence perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that he
remained on the emotional brink.

She noticed then that he’d cut his hair; the long braids he’d worn tied at the nape of his neck throughout his academy years had been shorn completely. Maybe the braids had carried
meaning on Alderaan, or maybe the change was symbolic for Nash—something he’d done as a kind of farewell. Regardless, Ciena knew better than to ask.

The corridors of the
Devastator
were eerily silent; only a few courier droids and a handful of guards walked along the metal-mesh floors. Without the usual bustle of activity, the few
sounds remaining were amplified to strange effect: the echoing of their footsteps, even the faint hiss of the ship’s ventilation system. Despite her misery and fury, she realized that deep
within her was a small sense of—reassurance.

The
Death Star will never destroy another world
.

She would always mourn Jude and the others who had died aboard the Death Star, would always recognize its explosion as the act of terrorism it was. Yet Ciena took some comfort from the fact that
no other planet would suffer Alderaan’s fate. Its destruction had been the Emperor’s last-ditch effort to end a bloody war before it began; that effort
had failed. War had come. The
devastation to follow would no doubt be terrible; Ciena expected to see constant combat and war readiness for a long time to come. She would have to kill and risk being killed.

But that was war. The combatants would be soldiers prepared for battle. That Ciena could accept.

Shortly before they reached the auxiliary bridge, Nash said, “Ciena?”

“Do you
need out of this duty shift?” Exhausted though Ciena was, she would volunteer to work the next few hours in Nash’s stead if it would help.

“No. It’s just—before I left my cabin, I was thinking of Thane. I wanted to talk with him. So I searched for information about the Dantooine transport.” Nash hesitated
before finishing. “They’d received orders to return to the Death Star.”

The blood
in her veins froze. Ciena stood stock-still in the corridor, unable to take another step. She swallowed hard. “And Thane?”

“He would’ve been aboard. Do you know if the transport docked before the explosion?”

“No.”

All that time, Ciena had kept going by promising herself that she’d be able to talk about everything with Thane soon—by reminding herself that at least her best friend in
the world
had escaped.

But what if he hadn’t? What if Thane had been killed, too?

It took almost a week—the longest and most agonizing of his life—for Thane’s ship to receive new, definite orders. His vessel, a short-haul transport,
hadn’t been stocked with nearly enough provisions, so they’d had to commandeer foodstuffs from the nearest town. Although the ship had bunks, they were
intended more for emergency use
by the injured than for actual sleep. Rather than lie on those, Thane and several others had moved into the bunks the rebels left behind.

How strange it felt to lie on the enemy’s bed, to see where someone had drawn a crude figure of an X-wing fighter on the wall, and to know an X-wing like that had been the weapon that
destroyed the Death Star—and maybe
Ciena with it.

So Thane should have been relieved to be back aboard his own ship, fully armored and with his blaster at his side. Nothing was worse than not knowing, he’d told himself. Once they’d
rendezvoused with the Imperial fleet, he would finally find out for certain what had happened to all his friends.

But when he tried to imagine what he’d do if they told him Ciena was dead,
his mind went blank. It was as if his brain refused to show him anything beyond that point.

“Kyrell,” his commander said as they prepared for lightspeed. “Did you not send family messages confirming your survival? I show you as a yes, but we’ve got no
responses.”

“You wouldn’t,” Thane said, without much emotion. He didn’t think his family actually wanted him dead—though maybe Dalven
wouldn’t have minded—but
writing back was apparently beyond their interests.

What did I ever do to them, besides being born?
he thought for the thousandth time.

Yet thinking of that made him want to talk to Ciena, the only person who’d ever really understood how screwed up his family was. The pit of fear in his belly grew heavier, and he spoke
hardly one word on their way to rendezvous
with the fleet.

When the transport came out of lightspeed, a few people muttered and one person emitted a low whistle of surprise. Outside hovered more ships than Thane had ever seen in one place, even over
Coruscant. TIE fighters swarmed like gnats scurrying over the surface of every larger vessel. Countless transports and smaller ships had been pulled into rough formation around the dozen
or so Star
Destroyers that obviously formed the new core of the Imperial Starfleet.

Was one of those Star Destroyers the
Devastator
? From the outside the ships were as identical as slices of the same pie.

Even as their transport rose into the main docking bay, their commander was shouting their new orders. “N-O-Seven-One-Eight, you’re to report to the Star Destroyer
Eliminator
immediately,
to Lieutenant Commander Cherik. N-Y-One-One-Two, same orders. A-V-Five-Four-Seven—”

Thane lifted his head.

“You transfer to the troop ship
Watchtower
for transport and deployment to Kerev Doi.”

He was being sent to a spice-mining world? The order sounded absurd to Thane for the instant it took him to put the pieces together. Wherever spice was a commodity, finances became shady. If
you
wanted to hide money—vast sums of it, the kind of funds that could support an entire rebel army—Kerev Doi was one of the very few places in the galaxy to which you could turn. They were
being sent to shake the place down, maybe to cut the Rebellion off at the source. That made sense. Yet he found himself thinking of Kerev Doi in a very different light. Spice worlds were heavily
trafficked
by ships both legitimate and criminal. Even many of the legitimate vessels didn’t keep careful records about their trips there. Every storybook or holo about running away from home
featured one of the spice worlds and colorful images of the exotic ships and traders who might whisk anyone away from the life they had known before.