With the Starhawk gone, the tractor beam shears and the Ravager’s thrusters must cause it to overcompensate—it begins to invert, turning belly up as it drops.
The Ravager hits next. It hits broadly, not spearing the ground but crashing flat against it, upside down—the AT-AT never has a chance. Nor do the starfighters trapped in the shadow of the dreadnought before it crashes. Nobody does. It’s like watching the ceiling fall down on a child’s playroom of toys. The Ravager plows into the sand, and the impact rocks the whole world—the vibration moves outward in a monstrous ripple, sending sand up along the shock wave, and when it hits where Temmin is standing, it knocks him off his feet. Again his ears ring. Everything vibrates: his teeth, his toes, all his bones. He struggles to stand anew—
And already he can’t see the Ravager anymore.
A dust cloud of titanic proportions has been thrown into the sky. An anvil of black smoke goes up. Rolling outward is a cloud of dark dust.
It’s coming this way. The blood-red dust cloud bulges and roils, tumbling forward like a wave of death and despair. Temmin scrambles back to his downed X-wing, sliding into the cockpit and slamming it shut just as the dust and the sand wash over him. It brings the white sound of a thousand angry whispers all around him, against the glass, against his ship.
And it goes on for what seems like forever.
—
“Move over!” Norra barks. “Let me fly it.”
“I know how to fly,” Sloane snarls from the pilot’s seat, her fingers gone bloodless from holding the shuttle’s flight stick. She weaves the ship in and out of a rain of falling debris as each piece plunges to the ground like a comet. “I’m a damn good pilot. I got away from you, remember.”
Norra remembers. She grits her teeth and holds on to a handle above her head as Sloane whips the craft through the raining debris. Brentin sits in the copilot’s seat, his face gone white, his eyes closed. He never was much of a flier. Part of her wants to comfort him; another part wants to take the blaster and knock some sense into his head with the butt of it.
Bones stands behind her, stabilized without holding on to anything.
She’s about to say something else—
The day goes to night. Sloane’s gaze drifts upward. She gasps: a ragged, despairing sound. “No. My ship.” Those three words transmit such grief, Norra can’t help but feel drawn in by them. It’s absurd, maybe, to be so enamored with and connected to a ship, but Norra understands it. She didn’t have a long career in that Y-wing, but in the short time that she did, she came to love it like Temmin loves that droid.
Norra’s eyes drift away from the Ravager to what precedes it—it’s one of the Starhawks. She can’t tell which one, but fear eats at her like an acid. It’s the Concord, isn’t it? Norra doesn’t know Kyrsta Agate very well, but the woman was kind to her when she didn’t need to be. Her reputation was that she was hard, but had empathy—not just for her own people, but for the enemy, too. Norra hopes she’ll see Agate again.
The Starhawk hits the surface of Jakku, and moments later the Ravager follows. It drops hard. A concussive wave kicks up, rocks the ship. Norra has a distant, disconnected thought that she cannot dwell on for long lest it destroy her: How many died? How many died on that ship? Or underneath it as it fell? That, coupled with the feeling of victory in her heart, the one that tells her the New Republic may just have finished this war. It is a crass dichotomy, that feeling; she’s felt it before and she’ll feel it again. The triumphant heart warring with the grief born of war.
Norra composes herself. Her fight isn’t over. None of this is. Sloane seems to pull herself together, too. The ex-admiral sets her jaw and her flight course, pulling away from the direction of the Ravager. “Dust cloud coming in,” she warns. It’s out there, a fast-moving storm spilling toward them. The cloud lights up in places with bilious lightning. Thunder tumbles.
Sloane pulls the shuttle away from it, but still it encompasses them. When it does, the shuttle rocks back and forth, hitting tides of air turbulence that nearly have Norra losing her footing. Through the dust storm she sees black clouds rising up above as pillars of fire and lightning brighten the air. And then it’s gone again, washing over them and thinning out. The air is still gauzy with particulate matter, but once more the horizon can be seen.
Bones suddenly stiffens. His antenna glows green, beeping.
“MASTER TEMMIN IS NEAR.”
“What? Where?”
“BELOW. MAY I GO?”
Norra knows that him leaving makes her vulnerable. If her husband is still in thrall to the control chip and sides with Sloane against her, she’s not sure she can survive. But if Temmin really is near…and maybe in danger…
Then the choice is no choice at all.
“Go.”
Bones flees, his claw-feet clanking as he opens the ramp in the belly of the shuttle. She watches him collapse downward, tucking his narrow beaked head to his chest and wrapping his many-jointed arms around his knees before rolling out of the ship and down to Jakku.