Saturday, April 25, 2020

Star Wars, Duel of the Fates: Chapter One- The Raid


               Breathe. Just breathe.
               As it had so often the past few months, the thought cutting through Rey's mind came in the voice of Luke Skywalker. It somehow broke through the tension and nerves bound up in her emotions and strained muscles, reminding her of the core of her Jedi training, of her need to balance herself before taking on the world around her. She needed that reminding more and more every day, as the First Order's grip on the galaxy grew tighter and tighter and her hopes ever dimmer.
               She also particularly needed it for herself, right now, cramped as she was in a storage room with Rose and the several packs of explosives they had stacked alongside them. Their uniforms were stretches thin by all the compact weapons and equipment stashed into every pocket and lining. The double-pronged ends of her newly-forged lightsaber dug an especially painful groove in her back, where it sat tucked into a special lining in the back of her suit. By her count they had about two minutes to go before the latest guard check would leave the repair deck, leaving the whole place empty for what should, in theory, be enough time for their mission.
               Their mission had been long in setting up and even longer in planning; Rey, Rose, Finn, and Poe, along with R2-D2 and BB8, had arrived at their destination a week earlier, the massive ring of shipyards surrounding the planet Kuat, known as the Kuat Drive Yards. For generations upon generations, these legendary facilities had produced the biggest and best ships of the line for the Galactic Republic, then the Empire, then the New Republic, and now the First Order. Its production capacity made holding it nearly as essential to any galactic government as holding Coruscant itself. Sadly, the Rebellion was still in no position to contest control of even the smallest Outer Rim world, much less a Core Planet like Kuat.
               They were, however, hoping to cause enough damage to significantly hinder whatever the First Order's commanders were planning next. While the shipyards ran all the way around the entire planet, the most important and centralmost segment of the Ring was the Prime Yard; sporting the largest landing platform in the entire facility, providing gravity and air held in by a special force field, the Prime Yard featured a series of movable, retractable "arms" reaching out into space. These "arms" were effectively long hallways with rail lines for transport that allowed the fast movement of workers and materials across the entire length of some of the grandest behemoths of space travel, like the feared Imperial Star Destroyer. These arms could be sifted around, lengthened, and shortened as needed from a grand control center sitting over the landing platform.
The longest and largest of the arms was currently devoted to the production of a new Dreadnought, one even larger than most. With this ship situated to the right site of the command center, nearly all of the other large production arms had been shifted over to the left side, where they currently sat idle. All available personnel were to devote themselves to the completion of the Dreadnought to the exclusion of all else, on pain of occuring the wrath of the First Order and its legendarily unstable Supreme Leader.
               After sneaking into the central platform of the facility, the small team of rebels laid low for a few days while gathering as much intel as possible on worker shifts and guard routes; soon they established the longest period of time when the arm would be free of both workers and guards, and decided to use that as their window.
               The plan was twofold- Rey and Rose would take their supply of specially-designed thermal detonators onto the arm, strategically placing them at the mouth of the regularly-spaced access ports connecting the arm to the ship. Meanwhile, Finn, Poe, and the droids would launch a surprise attack to take out the workers in the control room. While the droids took over the system controlling the arms, Finn and Poe would send a general evacuation order sounding throughout that section of the facility, in an effort to minimize non-First Order casualties. By then, at the very latest, every stormtrooper in the facility would definitely be coming for their heads, but according to the layout of guard posts they'd spent days carefully analyzing, the amount of time it would take to gather a force able to bust through the sealed doors should be long enough for them to finish their primary task; using the droids to shift the arm with a massive Star-class Dreadnought attached to it until the ship was facing the command platform at a sharp, 90-degree angle.
By then, Rey and Rose should have finished placing the detonators and be on their way back to the landing platform, using two of the special, rocket-propelled spacesuits stored all across the facility for spacewalking emergencies. Once they made their way out of the command center to the ship they had prepped and waiting for their escape on the landing platform, and with (hopefully) all civilian personnel having evacuated to safer parts of the facility, they would detonate the charges remotely. On their own, several dozen thermal detonators would obviously not do any major damage to either a Dreadnought or even the arm itself. The very force of the explosions would, however, especially within the vacuum of space, push the Dreanought into a slow drift....
               .....straight into the landing deck and command center, with all its sophisticated and delicate computer systems. Neither the atmospheric force field nor the reinforced glass that made up the windows of the command center were built to withstand the sheer weight and bulk of a Star-class ship bearing directly into them. Even iff the force of the crash ended up not being enough to break through the Ring entirely, it would at the very least leave the most critical segment of the shipyards crippled and an utter wreck, delaying the further production of any more warships for the First Order for the foreseeable future.
That, at least, was the plan, agreed upon after endless hours of heated debate. All that was left was to set it into motion and hope nothing went awry.
               That is to say, all that was left was the hardest part of all.
               "Okay," Rose muttered, "I think I heard the last of them leave around the corner. Rey, we all clear?"
               Rey inhaled slowly and stretched out with the Force, feeling beyond the door they stood wedged behind, into the hallway and out into the liftways heading towards their target. Nothing.
               She nodded, "We're clear. Let's go."
               Slowly, carefully, the eased open the door and untangled themslves, slowly rubbing the blood back into their legs and arms. Rose checked her watch.
               "If the boys are on schedule, they should be taking over the control facility in about 20 minutes' time. Let's try and finish before they start moving that thing."
               Rey nodded and they started a light run towards the production arm and the first of the connective hatches. They truly were alone here, but Rey couldn't shake a bad feeling, as if a shadow still dogged them. After wrestling with it in her mind for a bit, she decided to just push it away as best she could. She'd been feeling something of the sort almost every day since Crait, and it wouldn't do to let it hold her back now.
               Rounding the last corner, they found themselves standing at the far end of the massive, five-kilometer long hallway that made up the main part of the arm. To save themselves distance while making their escape, they clammered into one of the grounded speeders on thin rail lines that facilitated fast transportation over the distance so as to start the far end, then work their way back towards the front end, closest to the landing platform, visible outside the hatch windows to their left. To their right, Rey quickly noted the closet containing the space suits they would need later.
               No more words were needed. With a grim determination, Rey and Rose sped out to the far end and started moving back in increments, stopping in front of each patch of access doors. With the Force, Rey would quickly feel out the main hinges they wanted to target, and would lift up the needed explosives, floating them over to attach them securely to each hinge. In this way, they were able to cover segments relatively quickly, and after just over a quarter of an hour they were once again nearing the entrance they'd started at. Looking at the half-dozen or so doorways left, they started to get out of the speeder when a stab of premonition hit Rey in the back of her head, leaving her cold with shock.
               "Rose," she whispered, "we have to hide. Now!"
               They quickly scampered behind a stack of parts sitting next to one of the last doors. A crack between the boxes allowed Rey to see the entrance, where she soon learned what, exactly, the Force had been warning her about.
               A whole company of stormtroopers, led by a commander in pitch-black armor, were marching directly towards them.
               Rey and Rose looked at each other in horror. How? No military patrols were scheduled for another hour. They'd gone through the station plans so many times Rey had started to worry she'd start seeing timetables in her sleep. There was no way they'd been detected, she was sure of it. What could have gone wrong?
               She realized this is what had been pressing at the back of her head all the morning. That awful feeling that something, somehow, would definitely go wrong today.
Whatever the reason for this hitch, she knew she would have to think over it later. Now, she had to act, or their mission- as well as their lives- were as good as fragged.
               "Rose."
               "Yeah."
               "Get ready to move. While I take care of them, you move as fast as you can to the last set of doors. Get the explosives set up and I'll clear our escape."
               Rey glanced over. Rose's eyes were set, a confident smile on their face.
               "Roger that. You got this."
               Rey allowed herself a short smile before she braced herself and stood up to face the incoming soldiers, simultaneously pulling out her lightsaber and igniting the twin blades of crystal blue on either end, holding in a ready stance horizontal to the ground. Carefully following the instruction in the old Jedi texts, she'd spent a whole week taking the burnt remnants of Luke's lightsaber and combining it with parts from her old quarterstaff. Though her years in the desert had made her adept at using two-sided weapons, she had not yet had the chance to actually test using a lightsaber version in combat. Oh well, she thought silently, first time for everything.
               Out loud, she said, "I am Rey, Jedi Knight of the Resistance. Leave now, and your lives will be spared."
               The troopers glanced at each other for just a moment- Rey could practically hear their silent laughter ringing out in the Force- before they turned back, lifted their weapons, and began firing. At the same time, Rose jumped up and started firing from her blaster as she ran towards the long archway to the last set of doors. Rey matched her movements, quickly swinging both ends of her lightsaber to bat back blaster bolts that attempted to cut Rose down, until she made the shelter of the archway.
               Alrighty then, Rey though, gritting her teeth, you had your chance. And weaving her blades in an arc in front of her, plasma-red bolts dancing off the ends, she dove forward. With the Force guiding her every move, her eyes seeing each turn of a soldier, each pull of a trigger, before it happened, her body moved of its own accord. With blue streaks left in the air behind her to mark her path, she ducked, leapt, and parried, each thrust leaving another soldier crumbling to the ground behind her.
               It was a testament to the professionalism of the soldiers that, even as the hopelessness of their situation must have been made clear, she felt no flicker of fear or panic in the Force; only a grim concentration of their killing intent on her person. Sensing that Rose was almost finished- meaning that they were just about out of time for their part of the plan- she realized she needed to speed this fight up a bit. Letting just a bit of her concentration stray over to the large, metal closet containing the space suits to her left, with a thought she tugged-
               -and sent the whole thing spinning through the rest of the troup before her, catching them so unawares that only two had enough time to duck away from the massive crush of metal spinning towards their heads; the black-suited commander, who leapt backwards with a gymnast's skill, and a lone regular trooper at the very front, who jerked forward to avoid the closet only to find himself staring down a second later at a blue fountain that suddenly burned through the center of his chestplate.
               As he fell to the ground, the commander took stock of the situation for a moment before tossing away his blaster and pulling a wicked-looking vibroblade from behind his back. Spinning it expertly, he leapt over the remains of the fight before him and charged Rey head-on. He was elite, clearly, and Rey allowed herself a moment's regret that someone like that had ended up fighting on the side of the First Order before slicing off first the arm holding his blade, then his helmed head.
               It was over.
               Before she could even turn to see if Rose had left the hatch, she felt a great shuttering all around her, and a momentun so great she just barely stayed on her feet; the arm was moving.
               She then saw Rose, bracing herself against the frame of the door to the ship; "We're all set. Seems like the boys did their part too."
               "Yeah," Rey nodded, "then let's get to our ship."

               It had, Finn reflected, all gone astonishingly according to plan so far. Timing their part to begin right when Rey and Rose should be about halfway done placing the detonators, BB8 had jacked into the defensive systems of the command center from an outside port and triggered a switch that flooded the room with stun gas. After waiting a minute for everything to clear, he and Poe had quickly dashed in and pulled the unconscious crew into a side closet, sealing them inside. They then closed and sealed the two entrance doors while the two droids joined efforts in hacking into the general system and sending off the evacuation warning. So far, so good.
               Once they saw via security cam feeds that evacuations were actually being carried out, they turned their attention to the control programs for the arms themselves. With R2-D2 tweedling instructions, Poe started to move the arm with the Dreadnought attached to it inward, watching out the window as it started to slowly turn towards them. Again, so far so good.
               Somehow, though, Finn couldn't avoid a strange sensation, running up the back of his neck. Almost like a premonition. Like things had been too smooth. Somehow, something was going about to go wrong. He just couldn't figure out-
               -the feeling suddenly became a sharp pressure in his brain.
               "Um, Poe..." he said, quietly.
               Poe was so intensely focused on the controls he didn't even glance up. "Yeahwhat?"
               Finn glanced back at the doors, which to his eyes seemed to triple in height, casting a massive shadow over them.
                "POE!"
               Poe turned, "Wha-"
               BOOM.
               The two doors shook as if they'd been hit by torpedoes. Jumping with shock, grabbing their weapons, they both looked down at the security footage being fed in from right outside the center; on both ends were large companies of stormtroopers, the heads of which held large, sizzling, ramming-type devices clearly meant to blow throw the sealing mechanisms that were supposed to protect the center from just such an attack.
               "Aw what the hell," Poe groaned, his mouth twisting in a grimace, "we checked all this, there shouldn't have been this many soldiers nearby." He glanced at Finn, "Could they have known?"
               Finn shook his head helplessly, "No idea. But we have to hold out as long as we can. And hope that Rey and Rose can get to the ship in time."
               Another BOOM.
               Poe sighed. "Whelp. Firefight it is then. See ya in hell buddy."
               "Yeah..."

               Rose felt a shuddering sensation in her suit as she and Rey broke through the light force field around the landing platform. With gravity once again acting on them after a good quarter-hour of spaceflight, thrusters in the sides of the suits automatically kicked in, turning what would have been a sharp drop onto a very hard surface into a gentle descent.
               After pulling off their helmets, noting the emptiness of the place- the emergency alarm had clearly done its job- and locating their getaway ship, Rose turned to find Rey staring back at the arm they'd just left, her brow furrowed. Once Rose looked at it too, she understood why.
               They'd felt the arm begin its shift, but somehow, while they were in transit, it had stopped. Instead of facing the command platform directly, the arm and ship were sitting silent and still only about halfway turned inwards, at a 45-degree angle, not nearly enough to do the kind of damage they'd been aiming for.
               "Blast. Something must have stopped them. Rey, can you feel anything?"
               "No....the command center is shrouded in darkness. They're alive but they're in trouble. We need to get the ship and get up their fast."
               "Got it."
               They turned and ran over to the ship, which they'd thankfully pre-prepped that morning. A few minutes later, they were swinging into the air and turning towards the glass windows of the command center above them.

               This was, Poe thought, supremely annoying.
               Pinned down as they were, with no option for retreat, all he and Finn could do was keep on jumping up and sending out supressing fire to keep the troopers from overwhelming them completely. They'd kept moving the arm as long as they could, but once the troopers had managed to fully bust in the doors, the flying laser bolts had forced the droids to break off connection with the system and scurry with the two of them out of the direct line of fire. BB8, always a trooper, had tried reaccessing the system from the other side of the computers, but one of the soldiers must have been carrying some kind of override drive, because the entire center then shut down completely. Nothing more they could do now, other than hope that Rey and Rose could find a way to get them out of this mess. And that sort of momentary helplessness was, as far as Poe was concerned, about as bad as death itself, if not worse.
               Not much time to dwell on it, though. He and Finn kept alternating jumping up and sending as many blasts as possible into the consoles behind and bove them, enough that any stormtrooper trying to jump out and towards them fell back down with smoking holes in their armor. They couldn't keep this up for long against so many, though.
               "Where the hell-" Poe began, but was cut off by the sudden glare of lights flaring up behind them. Glancing back, they saw Rose sitting at the helm of their getaway ship, hovering just outside the center, and beneath the forward nose, torpedoes armed and ready.
Instantly, Finn, Poe, and the droids ducked out of site as Rose let loose, first with the torpedoes to shatter the glass separating her from the inside of the command center, then with a fury of laser blasts that drove the stormtroopers further back towards the doors.
Quickly, she flipped the ship around while opening the entrance hatch at the back of the ship, where Rey stood balanced, lightsaber at the ready.

               Thank the Force, Rey thought, seeing that all four of their companions were still in one piece. She proceeded to flip over them, deflecting the bolts that the remaining soldiers had already started to send back their way, the blasts from the ship notwithstanding. Rey gritted her teeth; they had no more time for this. Again, with a thought, she picked up the biggest piece of metal she could quickly identify- in this case, a heavy metal table sitting at the far side of the room- and sent it careening across the entire upper level, this time sending the troopers really scrambling for cover.
               Suddenly, right as the table was about to finish its arc towards the other end of the command center, she felt a different wave of power in the Force, one dark and full of fury, smash back into the table to send it rocketing up into the ceiling, after which it crumbled uselessly back to the ground. Glancing at the source of the power, it all suddenly made sense. Why patrols had appeared when they weren't supposed to. Why there had been enough soldiers nearby to prevent their plan from being carried out in full. Why exactly what wasn't allowed to go wrong did.
               Entering the command center from the upper-right doorway, a black-clad figure holding a massive, thick blade, pulsing with the Dark Side, a clenched fist held in the direction where the table had been.
               Even without having ever seen him before , Rey knew instantly who he was. A Knight of Ren. One of the perverted personal soldiers of Kylo Ren, the most feared of his enforcers.
               Without hesitating, the Knight began to swing his blade eagerly, advancing on Rey.
               She wasn't terribly worried about losing to someone who, though powerful, was clearly only marginally trained in the use of the Force, but she knew that this was the worst possible time for her to get bogged down in a swordfight. Using the distance still between them to her advantage, and sensing that Finn, Poe, and the droids had already safely scrambled onto the ship, she jumped backwards herself, Finn grabbing her outstretched arm to help to pull her in.
               "ROSE, PUNCH IT" yelled Poe. Rose obliged, closing the hatch as she quickly accelerated out of the landing deck and out towards the rim of the facility, where they would make the jump to lightspeed.
               Having arrived at the precipice of broken class and machinery a second too late, the Knight just stood there, staring at the ship. Even after the hatch door closed, Rey could feel him following her in the Force.
               She shook her head to ward off the unpleasant sensation, and heard Rose telling Poe to "go ahead and detonate it." He pressed the remote detonator they had stashed on the ship, and the watched silently as a row of fire and debris sprayed outwards from the other side of the Dreadnought. It immediately began it's drift, but with the angle all wrong, it was clear that, at most, all it would do was maybe take a few other production arms out with it. The command center, as well as the heart of Prime Yard, would get by with minimal damage.
               Within the ship, everyone had a grim expression on their faces. "All that time, all that effort....and we won't change much of anything with this." Finn lamented. "Damn. It."
               A second passed, then two, then three; clearly, no one felt up to responding. Back at the far side of the spreading wreckage, a group of First Order ships sprang out of hyperspace, clearly backup that had been called in. Shimmers that indicated groups of TIE fighters immediately began spreading out from them, some of them clearly tracking towards their getaway shuttle, but they were too far away. Before any of them got into firing range, they would made the leap to hyperspace, making first a series of random jumps to avoid being followed before setting on their real course, to the current rebel base on Talrezan Four.

               So ended the less-than-spectacular Raid of Kuat.

Friday, April 24, 2020

Star Wars, Episode IX: Duel of the Fates (Table of Contents)


               So, The Rise of Skywalker really wasn't that good. I think we're all agreed on that at this point, right? Though I was generally positive (kind of) in my original review, the more I thought over the film- and if nothing else, recent (ahem) world events have left us all with lots of time to think- the more it soured. Revisiting just a sampling of the best novels written in the old Extended Universe before Disney put the kabosh on it only reinforced this, as the storytelling in the old EU, in its best moments, has some moments of pure, exhilerating transcendance. Plus, looking back, my initial worries about The Force Awakens after it came out proved rather prescient; in the end, the new trilogy meant to "finish" the entire grand, generations-in-the-making saga of the Skywalkers.....actually kind of cheapens the original trilogy now, since the official canon now says, in essence, "LOL none of it mattered life is meaningless buy gold BUY GOLD!" 



               And you know what? Screw that! Even if the overarching narrative of the trilogy proved wanting, the new trilogy did, at the very least, give us a great group of characters that deserved a hell of a lot more than what they were given. So, in a fit of pique (and a touch of Plague Madness), I decided to rewrite the whole damn thing. Yep. I'm insane, and this probably won't be anywhere near good, and I'm doing it anyway.

               The initial spark for this idea came to me when the storyboard and concept art for what Colin Trevorrow (who was originally slated to direct Episode IX) had planned was leaked and confirmed to be genuine. It's obviously very barebones, and of course, there is no guarantee that either he or everyone else involved in the film's making could have fleshed it out into an actual, good movie, but even the basic plot concept was well above what we ended up getting, and had far more potential to actually do justice to these characters and give their arcs proper payoff.

               So I'm doing it. What will follow, in a currently-unknown number of chapters, is me taking the basic structure of Trevorrow's original story concept and fleshing out or altering it according to my own personal whims. Not going to try and monetize or publicize it- I have neither the time nor the cash reserves to afford a fight with The Mouse- but it will be here for those who care enough to want to read it and give me their feedback.

               This page will serve as the regularly-updated Table of Contents each time I upload a new chapter, which, as of now, I plan to do once a month to give me enough to write the story out in advance.

               Enjoy! Or don't. Either way.

               This is Star Wars, the TRUE Episode IX: Duel of the Fates.


Table of Contents: