Star Wars: Before the Awakening (5 page)

“Have you considered our requests?” the human asked.

“I have given your request the thought it deserves.” Phasma looked
at FN-2187 and the rest of the fire-team. “Kill them.”

Nothing happened for a moment, no movement, not a word, as if everyone—the negotiators and cadets alike—was unsure of what he’d heard.

Then Slip opened fire.

Then Zeroes, then Nines. FN-2187 raised his rifle to his shoulder, his finger on the trigger, and saw the Abednedo in his sights. He saw his wide eyes and all his fear, and in that
instant he saw a life full of suffering that was about to end, and he told himself that perhaps what he was about to do was a mercy. Still he couldn’t pull the trigger.

In the end he didn’t need to.

Slip did it for him.

There was a simple simulation room aboard the Star Destroyer, and FN-2187 booked time in it almost as soon as they were back aboard. He punched up a basic escalation program,
a low-level combat scenario in an urban environment that would gradually increase in difficulty. He checked his weapon and entered the simulation.

At first, it was as easy as it had ever been. The enemy appeared—Republic soldiers in that scenario—the rifle kicked softly in his hands, and then the enemy was no more. Another emerged from around a corner, and FN-2187 fired again. There was a rhythm
to it, and his shots were going where he wanted them. A new target appeared, and he tracked it, fired while moving, scored the hit. The targets started coming faster, and he thought maybe that would take his mind off what had happened, but instead it was just the opposite and he couldn’t stop thinking about the miners.

He couldn’t stop thinking about how Phasma had spoken to his fire-team even
as the negotiators’ bodies were cooling on the floor. How she’d moved to stand directly in front of Slip.

“I was concerned about you, FN-2003,” she said. “I am glad you’ve proven me wrong.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“You’re now stormtroopers,” she said. Her helmet had turned, moving from Slip to Zeroes to Nines, then finally to FN-2187. It seemed she’d held her gaze on him longer than the others.
Then she’d addressed them all, tapping her breastplate to emphasize her words. “You’re now one of us.”

Zeroes and Nines and especially Slip, they’d felt it, they
believed
her. All the way back up to the docking bay, into the shuttle, on the flight back to the Star Destroyer, they had been barely able to contain themselves, their excitement, their relief, their pride. Even the veterans had sensed
it, had invited them to share a meal in the galley to celebrate.

FN-2187 had begged off. He had training to do, he said. He needed to put in some range time.

And because they’d already labeled him an outsider, nobody argued with him and asked him to come along. Not even Slip.

The problem had to be with him, FN-2187 thought. That was the only explanation. It was what everyone had been saying
all along, after all. He was different. Maybe he was so different he was broken. So he would work to fix it, to be a real stormtrooper, to be one of them. That was, he thought, what he wanted most of all. Not to be alone.

So he worked through the simulation, and it grew harder and harder, and still his shots were unerring. It wasn’t until the civilians began to enter the scenario that he ran
into trouble. At first they appeared only as random bystanders, obstacles to be avoided. Then there were more of them, and more, and more. Men and women and children, and suddenly FN-2187 could see only them and not the enemy hiding among them. He could see only those innocents, and in that moment he could no longer pull the trigger.

In that moment he understood it had never been a game.

He
understood that he was never going to be one of them.

Captain Phasma watched FN-2187 on the monitor in her quarters. He’d stopped firing, stopped even moving, and was just standing amid the ever-changing field of moving figures.

She sighed. She’d had such hope for FN-2187. He had shown such remarkable promise. He had shown the capacity to be special.

She picked up the orders on her desk and
reviewed them once more. They’d already made the jump to hyperspace, and she knew it would be less than an hour before they reached their rendezvous point to take on their new passenger. Kylo Ren had already transmitted the coordinates for where they would be headed next.

On the monitor, FN-2187 had turned away from the still-running simulation. Harmless blaster bolts from Republic enemies peppered
his back, hit after hit. Over the speakers, she could hear the computer in the simulation room declaring the scenario a failure. FN-2187 didn’t seem to notice, didn’t seem to care. She watched as the holographic images faded, as the room emptied to one lone stormtrooper, and then as FN-2187 walked out.

She switched off the monitor. He’d be part of the detail when they reached the landing point
on Jakku, she decided. Perhaps when someone was shooting back at him, he would understand what it meant to be a real stormtrooper, what it meant to serve the First Order, body and soul.

She would give him one more chance, Phasma decided.

One last chance for FN-2187 to decide his fate.

T
HE TEEDOS called the storm
X’us’R’iia
. It had a name because the Teedos believed there was only the one, the same one that returned again and again. It was the breath of the god R’iia, the Teedos said.

R’iia was not a benevolent god, and thus the storm was blamed for a great many things. It was the source of the famine that had plagued that part of Jakku for years. It was the reason the water
had gone away. It was why their luggabeasts turned unruly. It was responsible for the interlopers who plagued their lands. It was, significantly, what had brought the great shards of metal filled with many, many soft beings crashing to the sands so many years before. The ship graveyards were a monument to R’iia’s anger, the Teedos said. They were a warning, one that the interlopers in Niima consistently
failed to heed, much to the Teedos’ annoyance. Most of the Teedos were harmless, scavengers in their own way, much like Rey and the others. There were orthodox Teedos, though, zealots who were known to attack both their brethren and the salvagers, claiming what they did was a blasphemy to R’iia. R’iia would punish them all for their sins. The
X’us’R’iia
would punish them all.

Rey didn’t believe
a word of it, but she didn’t believe in much outside of herself.

She’d been high on the superstructure of one of the old battle cruisers half-buried in the sands, hoping to find something to salvage that the other scavengers had missed. She looked out and saw the storm forming on the horizon. She knew immediately that it would be a big one. It was time to go.

She’d been free-climbing the wreck,
and it was—perhaps paradoxically—always quicker going up than it was going down. Going down, you had to worry about gravity in a whole different way, and hurrying was a good plan to get yourself hurt. She knew that from experience. She took it fast, anyway—almost too fast—then risked jumping the last three meters to the ground. The sand could be soft if you were close enough, but she wasn’t. From
that height, it was like landing on metal. The shock of impact jarred her ankles and ran a sharp pain up her calves and into her knees. She used her staff to right herself and sprinted for her speeder.

Then it was a race for home, Rey and the speeder shooting as fast as she could push it across the desert, the rising wind chasing her. With one hand she tugged the end of her long, looped scarf
from beneath her belt and wrapped it around her nose and mouth. Not for the first time, she wished she owned a pair of goggles, cursed herself for not having jury-rigged some months before. The last pair she’d found, she’d traded to Unkar in Niima for two portions, barely enough food to silence her stomach for a day. It had been a bad trade when she made it, and she’d known it. She’d been hungry,
told herself she’d find another pair soon enough, made the trade anyway.

That had been almost three months before.

The storm had almost caught her by the time she reached the wreckage of the walker. It came in surges, strong enough to buffet the speeder from behind, and Rey had to fight to keep the vehicle steady on its repulsors. Sand was swirling when she slid to a stop and dismounted. She
shoved the speeder between two of the broken, bent legs of the giant machine and into the shelter. The sound of the storm was growing deafening, the wind a near-constant shriek, mixed with the rasping, cruel noise of sand scraping the hull of the walker. Thunder exploded above Rey, making her flinch, and she squinted skyward in time to see the last of the sunlight being eaten away by the swirling
dust clouds. Dry lightning arced and lit the sky as if daylight had returned at once, just for a second. When she closed her eyes, she could still see the lightning flash. Her skin stung with biting sand, the wind trying to take her by the feet and lift her, and she had to fight her way to the side of the hull using handholds. She barely managed to wrench the makeshift door open enough to stumble
inside, and then, just as quickly, slammed it shut again.

For a moment, Rey stood in the darkness of her home, catching her breath, listening to R’iia’s rage outside. The noise was diminished but still sunk through the walker’s armored hull. She reached out, fumbled for a second, then found one of her lamps and triggered the key. The light flickered weakly at first, then stabilized into a warmer
glow.

Rey sighed, took off her boots, and emptied sand from them. She shook off her clothes. She shook out her hair. When she was finished, there was a substantial pile of Jakku’s desert at her feet, and she felt easily ten kilos lighter.

Thunder detonated overhead again, vibrating through the metal shell of the walker. Bits and pieces of various salvage jumped. One of the old helmets fell from
where it hung on a makeshift hook. She lived in what had once been the main troop compartment of the walking tank, but that had been when the thing was upright. The interior had long before been stripped of anything salvageable and now resembled a cluttered workshop more than anything else. Rey had traded for a generator a couple of years before, so she had power when she needed it, mostly for
the workbench where she would take apart and reassemble and, more often than not, rebuild from scratch those pieces of usable junk she recovered.

Unkar always paid more for things that still worked.

Through a hairline crack in the hull, Rey saw a sudden flare of light, more dry lightning. She picked up one of the blankets on the floor and used it to cover the crack. She secured it using three
of the rare magnets she’d recovered from a shattered gyro-stabilizer. She went to her stash, hidden beneath one of the side panels, unscrewed the plate, and removed one of the three bottles of water she’d left there. She took a drink to wash the desert out of her mouth, swallowed with a grimace, carefully recapped the bottle, and just as carefully restored it to its hiding place before securing
the panel.

She sat on the pile of remaining blankets and rested her head against the back of the hull, listening to the storm beat furiously against her home.