The. Whole. Damn. Fleet.
He’s not ready for this. Suddenly his desire to be in the middle of the action seems like a child’s plea—begging to be in on the adventure and then discovering it’s far scarier than he ever imagined. Temmin doesn’t want to be an adult, he doesn’t want to grow up, he damn sure doesn’t want to be a single ship caught in the middle of the entirety of the Imperial remnant.
Someone slams into the back of his chair. Sinjir’s cry of alarm reaches his ears: “What the bloody hell is this? Where are we? Where is Norra?”
“I don’t know!” Temmin bites the inside of his cheek as he desperately tries to point the ship at open space—but Imperial ships are everywhere. So many ships. TIE fighters fill the void. Star Destroyers line the sky like the jagged fangs of a monster’s closing maw. The sensors start blinking faster, and on the screen he sees worse news: The SSD out there just launched a trio of torpedoes. I can’t outfly torpedoes. I’m not that good. I’m not ready. To Sinjir he screams: “I need a gunner! Sit down and start shooting!”
Sinjir drops into the pilot’s seat like a clumsy pile of broken sticks. He stares at the controls as if he’s looking at an instruction manual written in Wookiee claw marks. “I don’t know how to do this!”
“Join the club!” Temmin screams for his mother: “Mom? Mom!” Where did she go? What is happening?
Above his head, a light blinks on. Yellow, then green.
It’s a signal.
One of the escape pods just went active.
Oh, no.
She’s doing it again.
—
There. The clack-and-clatter of someone grabbing a gun off one of the rack mounts along the hallway reaches Jas’s ears—she turns toward the sound, sees Norra moving past. Blaster rifle in hand. Leather go-bag over her shoulder.
“What is going on?” Jas asks—just as the ship takes a hit and she staggers hard into the wall. Pain blooms in her shoulder, but she shakes it off and hurries after Norra.
“The Empire. They’re here.”
“Who? Sloane?”
“All of them.”
Norra jabs her heel into a metal button—a door slides open with a plume of steam. It’s one of the escape pods.
“What are you doing? We’re not abandoning ship. Are we abandoning ship? Norra, hold on—”
Norra starts buckling herself into the escape pod. “Keep them safe. Temmin especially. That’s on you.”
Norra’s leaving. Doesn’t take a scientist to figure that out. The burden of it all has pressed Norra down so far it’s broken her. Now she thinks to go at this all by herself: a rogue element. Like you, Jas.
Jas can handle that life. But the same life will get Norra killed.
As soon as the pod door starts to close, Jas jabs her hand against the button and it reopens. The ship takes another hard hit from laserfire, causing Jas to tumble into the pod itself, crashing bodily into Norra. A tangle of limbs. Scrabbling, struggling. Norra elbows her in the side. “Get out!” she seethes in Jas’s ear. “Get back to the ship. That’s an order.”
“You’re not my mother.”
“I’m your commander! Or whatever!”
Jas’s fingers fumble for Norra’s straps and she furiously starts to undo them. The plan is to haul Norra out by whatever part the bounty hunter can grab: neck, ears, ankle, doesn’t matter.
Problem, though: Norra’s stronger than Jas realizes. She’s lean and she’s tough and she’s not just some soft-around-the-middle pilot content to stay buckled into a flight chair. Norra’s hard like a stone, and she roots herself to the pod, kneeing the other woman in the stomach.
Norra grits her teeth, and Jas sees a grim determination take hold in the woman’s eyes. “I’m going down there. I’m going for Sloane. You can either get out of this pod or you can stay in and take the ride.”
For Jas, the choice is no choice at all. No hesitation marks the moment. She reaches back and slaps the red button to the right of the door.
“I’m with you, Norra.”
The lights dim. The door starts to close. The escape pod rocks free of the Moth, jettisoning itself into space, carrying the two of them through chaos toward the planet’s surface.
—
She’s leaving me behind again, she’s going off by herself and this time she’s going to get herself killed. Temmin frantically works to get himself up out of the chair—even as he sees the hyperspace computer furiously conjuring a navigational path one digit at a time, even as a trio of torpedoes zero in on their position.
The light above his head goes red.
The pod is gone.
It shows on his scopes—a faint blurry line. Just a blip in a screen full of red. He cries out, a wordless sound.