**For previous chapters, please refer to the Table of Contents**
Po took a moment to surveigh the spread of ships before him, encompassing everything the Rebellion had left in fighting shape and with enough people to crew. It wasn't an encouraging sight. Given the losses they'd suffered- in part, through his own rashness- on the flight to and battle at Crait, it was certainly impressive they'd managed to gather what ships they did have. It just wasn't enough.
It's all on the mission, Po thought, either they get to the Beacon and the galaxy responds, or...
Well, he always figured when his time came, he'd go out in his ship, fighting the good fight.
Stop it, man, he thought to himself sharply, catching the depressing downspiral his thoughts had started into, that's bantha shit. Of course they'd get to the beacon. The message would get out. And the free races of the galaxy would respond. Po had to believe that. He couldn't let himself believe otherwise. Not now.
He felt another fleeting moment of regret over the fact that he wasn't on the ground on Coruscant with the gang, right now. He understood and accepted General Leia's decision, but he couldn't help but feel like he was letting his friends down by not being there.
He'd gave them each a hug as they departed the ship after he landed, and he'd also taken a moment to rub BB8's head and remind him to pay extra careful attention to the others. As he lifted off, he couldn't help but watch them through the rear vid feed on the ship until they'd turned the corner out of the hanger bay.
At least he'd had R2 for company on the way back. The old companion of Luke and Leia could be every bit the chatterbox BB8 was when it was in the mood. On cue, a wheedling sound came through the system as they drew closer to General Leia's flagship, where they'd dock and join the others on the bridge to wait until the signal came.
"They'll make it, buddy," he responded, tamping down his own worries at the same time, "We do our jobs right and you'll be the first one out to greet Rey when she gets back, guaranteed."
Before R2 could respond, his comm unit crackled to life and began to reverberate with Lando's warm baritone, "You get out alright, soldier?"
"Yes sir," Po responded, slowing his ship down to prepare for entry into the opening to the ship's docking station. "Got them onworld without a hitch. Now we wait."
"Good to hear. Get up to the bridge as soon as you can. Leia will go through the rest of the plan with us then."
***
As Po approached the bridge of Leia's new flagship, the Star Cruiser Ackbar, he heard the raised voices of Chewie and Lando through the open doorway. Upon passing into the gleaming command center, he was able to make out enough that they were apparently arguing over who would take the lead in flying the Falcon in the upcoming fight. Smiling a bit inwardly, he turned to the left set of consoles, where Leia was looking over the shoulders of attendants doing a series of diagnistic tests.
"General," he said loosely, sliding up behind her, "Lando said you wanted to go over the plan with me?"
"Po, yes," she looked over, smiling warmly, "Though really there's not much to plan out yet. We don't even know how many ships we'll have."
"Fair enough." He scratched his chin impatiently, wondering for the thousandth time what exactly would happen once the message went out. "Mind if I wait with you here?"
"Sure. Just don't shoot anything." The fact that she could not only crack a joke like that, but accompany it with a wink and that sly grin of hers, caused much of the compressed coils of stress inside Po to fade away. She may just be putting up a front for the other soldiers- maybe she was even more worried about failure than Po was- but still, she'd always had a way of making everyone she spoke with believe in themselves.
***
After an (in Po's mind) absolutely interminable wait, the prepared message had finally gone out, overriding every communications systems on the ships with the call for help from Leia, the naming of Coruscant as the place to gather, and the channels with which to contact the Resistance forces. It had been a moment a true joy and triumph throughout the fleet, since it meant Rey, Finn, and Rose were alive and had carried out the mission after all.
Unfortunately, it had been promptly followed by more waiting, now stretching out to over an hour, as the communications officers keeping watch for some response, any response.
Po, sitting off to the side at a small desk with Lando waiting with everyone else, was rubbing his temples so much he was amazed he hadn't bored down to his brain yet. Chewie, who'd been standing right behind him and rumbling in a low-key voice for over ten minutes now, was not helping matters.
He glanced over at Lando, who somehow seemed as collected as ever, and arched his eyebrows. "What do you say, General? Think we'll get stuck holding the bag again?"
Lando smiled, but it didn't extend to his eyes, one of the few telltale signs that he wasn't quite as calm as he appeared. "Galaxy's a big place. Even if every inhabited planet jumped into the nearest cockpit, it'd take a bit to coordinate coming all the way to the Core."
"I suppose," Po turned back towards the far side of the bridge, where Leia was once again bent over the comm officers at their desks, though whatever they were looking at was obscured. "I don't want to worry too much, but..."
Right at that moment, even at a distance, Po noticed rows of lights at the comm desk lighting up, the system warbling out the receipt of one incoming message after another. Leia remained still for a moment, staring intently at the information that was now suddenly rushing across the recently-empty screens. For a moment, Po couldn't bring himself to believe it.
Then, her shoulders rising as if she were filling up with the galaxy itself, Leia looked up at Po and Lando, breaking out in the biggest, most sincere grin, he'd ever seen.
The anticipation that had been building inside him this entire time coiled together in a ball of clear-eyed focus. Now was what he'd been waiting his whole life for.
It was on.
***
"How many?" Hux snapped at the comms officer who'd just spoken, hardly able to believe it.
"T...twenty, sir," he muttered back, pointing to a display where a visual feed had just propped up. "Twenty ships incoming. All with known rebel signatures, but only one heavy cruiser among them."
Hux took a moment to let his own eyes confirm what the datascrolls said. Yes. Unbelievable. After all the consternation and fury and even panic that had broken out within High Command when, against every precaution they'd taken, that damn signal had gotten out, after recriminations and endless worry that the careful edifice they'd constructed was about to come crashing down, after all the waiting, the rebels had finally arrived....
....bringing barely enough firepower to trouble one large Star Destroyer, let alone the entire Core Fleet. And with that damned fool Kylo Ren still off who knows where, that meant that final victory would belong to Hux, and Hux alone. How supremely delicious.
Turning over to the dias managing communication with the planet forces, he spoke to the managing officer; "Has Captain Nilson located the source of the broadcast yet?"
"Yes sir," the young woman replied immediately, "it appears to have come from within the Jedi Temple. He has already ordered all forces in the area to converge and flush out the team that did it."
The Jedi Temple. Interesting. Hux though to himself for a moment, then responded, "Excellent. I expect an immediate report once he has results."
"And," he added as he turned consider the coming battle, "remind him to keep a close eye on the Knights. It wouldn't do to let the Supreme Leader's pets go too far off the rails."
Oh, how he was already anticipating the reckoning to come with this beloved, MIA Leader of theirs.
Back on the forward part of the bridge, he opened a communications channels between the bridges of all the capital ships of the First Order in the area, each of which was now converging on the tiny batch of pitiful rebellion ships approaching the planet.
Before he could so much as greet them, though, proximity sensors on his own ship began to light up at a rate that indicated forces beyond either his own or the rebel pickings within his view.
"What's happening? What is that?" He barked at the comms officer, who, somehow, seemed even more out of sorts than before.
"It's....sir, there's dozens of them. Capital ships incoming from the Corellian system, Kuat, even Bilbringi."
Before his mind could process this, Commander Dartly of the Nexus spoke up, "General Hux! I suddenly have ten Wookie frigates incoming, each of them sending out a dozen Owool fighters."
"General Hux," another commander chimed in, "My fighters have just engaged two squads of Mon Calamari Star Cruisers. They came out of nowhere, sir..."
More voices, from both his own bridge and the other ships, started coming in as well, but at this point they were merely blending into a single wall of sound surrounding Hux, as a terrible, terrible feeling began to build in the pit of his stomach. This feeling only solidified when he glanced up at the massive visual display before him and he watched as the promised dozens of frigates and dreadnoughts from Correlia and the shipyards of Kuat and Bilbringi flickered into view, giant shapes suddenly appearing out of hyperspace and filling his field of vision with the promise of danger.
Oh. For a moment, Hux found himself completely unable to think. Oh dear.
***
Cautiously, Finn peered around the corner of a doorway, taking long looks in both directions before beckoning with a rapid hand gesture behind him towards Rose and BB8.
"This way, come on." He moved out quickly, jogging lightly down the lefthand way, this part of the Temple lit only by the dimmest of glow strips along the upper edges of the facade.
Rose, huffing slightly from all the sudden turns Finn had led them on, paused slightly upon rounding the corner to stare at Finn's receding back in perplexed frustration. "How do you know we're going the right way??"
"SSSHHHHHH!!!" Finn turned back to her briefly, furiously shaking his finger in front of his lips.
"Finn, what..." she tried responding, but he but her off again; "Just follow me! I'm pretty sure this is the way!"
"Pretty damn sure..." Rose muttered to herself, as she and BB8 picked up the pace to catch up to Finn.
After Rey had disappeared, she and Finn had felt several moments of utter terror trying to figure out what could have happened to their friend. At a loss, they decided to at least try and find their way back out of the Temple, hoping that, whatever sort of strange fate had befallen her, Rey might still be on Coruscant somewhere. Going slowly, so as to try and avoid getting lost in the endless maze that was the Temple halls, they'd made at least some progress until Finn suddenly got that strange look in his eye again, reaching out to grab Rose's arm just as she was about to turn a corner.
"Hang on!" He'd whispered urgently, pulling her to the ground and peeking around the edge of the wall.
"What..." Rose started to say in bewilderment, but then she saw something moving down the other end of the corridor that stopped her words in her throat. A row of fully-armed stormtroopers, led by a black-clad figure weilding a hideously large ax.
The First Order had figured out they were in the Temple, and a Knight was leading the search for them.
Wondering at how Finn noticed this, she turned to whisper to him, but before she could say anything, he'd quickly muttered. "We gotta get out of here. This way!" Before breaking off down the other end of the corridor, leaving her to sputter uselessly and hurry along in his wake.
It had been one twist or turn after another since then, and she still had no sense of whether they were any closer to getting out of the trap that was clearly starting to close around them. Ahead, she saw Finn stop at an intersection where three other pathways crossed. Catching up to him at last, his face seem clouded and worried, his eyes still filled with that strange distance she'd been seeing more and more lately.
"Finn," she said, taking breaths to settle her racing pulse, "What's going on? What is it you're not telling me?"
Finn looked at her with a measure of surprise in his eyes. "The...First Order's trying to capture us and we've lost Rey.." he sounded a bit befuddled, as if he wasn't sure why he needed to say that.
She shook her head fiercely in exapseration, "That's not what I'm talking about, Finn. I'm talking about you. What's happening? You sensed those guards before we could see them. You're leading us down parts of the Temple we weren't in before as if you know where to go. What's. Going. On." She punctuated each of the last three words with sharp pokes to Finn's chest, forcing him to take a step back.
"I...." Finn began, but before he could say anything else, his eyes darted up towards the end of the corridor behind Rose. Filled with a sudden dread, she turned to see the dark figure of the Knight from earlier standing at a bend about 20 meters away, silently staring at them. From behind them, down the same hallway they'd just come down, the sound of marching boots suddenly began to build.
Sithspawn, Rose thought. This isn't good.
***
A wave of laser bolts passed over the canopy, but Poe didn't even need to look to know his opponent had overshot. Gripping his joystick in anticipation, he began to slowly drift left in a feinting move, then kicked the engine into overdrive to shoot to the right. Switching from back to forward propulsers, he then spun around in a rapid 180-degree move, the index finger on his right hand patiently sitting atop the firing button. Upon completing the turn, he saw to his satisfaction that the other pilot had taken the bait and was only now turning back towards the direction he'd jetted off in. The pilot probably got a good two seconds of visual to realize his mistake before Poe's shots blew him into the vacuum of space, where the detritus of capital ships, small fighters, defense platforms, and bodies was already starting to form an undulating cloud of devastation.
"Nice move there, hotshot," Lando's voice crackled over the comms line as, to his right, Poe saw the Falcon execute a nifty flip of its own that allowed both the upper and lower cannons to shoot two TIE-fighters out of the sky simultaneously. "Maybe one day you"ll even be able to top me."
"Gotta stay alive until then, General," Poe grinned, glad to have some decent banter to keep him focused on the battle at hand.
A short warble from R2 reminded him to double-check his fuel supplies, but a short glance was more than enough to assure him that he had plenty left in the tank to keep up the fight as long as necessary.
With no fighters approaching him for a few seconds, he spared a glance out at the battlespace sprawled over the great mass of Coruscant below. One Star Destroyer was already in free-fall, its slow descent into the planetary shields slowly causing the massive structure to break up into chunks that would mostly dissipate within the planet's atmosphere, thus avoiding too much serious damage or loss of life to the planet itself. Hopefully.
The rest of the First Order fleet, though, was still up and still fighting despite several of their major ships getting hammered on all sides from the widest array of battle ships Poe had ever had the fortune to witness. This sure wasn't going to end anytime soon, but the fight was evenly matched as they could have hoped for. This is what Crait should have been, could have been, but it was happening now, and the wait had been worth it.
His reflection was broken up by his comm unit crackling back to life, from which General Leia's voice soon emerged.
"Still got both wings on flyboy?"
"Yes ma'am," he responded, "and may I say, the view from here is pretty good."
"Yeah, well, don't get complacent. We've got a lot of hard fighting to go. I need you and Lando over to our side of the battlefield; we've got a bead on Hux's flagship and I'd rather not give him the chance to pass up on a personal interview with me after this is over."
"Roger that, m'lady," Lando intoned, followed by a roar of affirmation from Chewie next to him.
"Ay-yay." Poe added, "Let's finish this." He turned the throttle and followed the Falcon in a loose turn left towards the far end of the battlespace, where he could just make out Leia's command cruiser and a Correllian frigate, each dodging and exchanging fire with the largest Star Destroyer left in the First Order's fleet.
Yes, Poe thought with renewed determination as he slowly increased his speed. One way or another, this ends now.
***
In a wayward part of space sat a lonely planet, shrouded in clouds of the deepest reds.
Beneath the clouds lay a broken and dead landscape, pitted with canyons ringed with jagged blades of stone.
On a plateau overlooking one of these tectonic gashes, a single fighter sat alone and empty.
Within the ship, a blinking light indicated urgent incoming messages kept going off and on, throwing brief waves of blue light against the shadows.
The ship was too far away and the light of the activated signal far too faint to reach across the clearing to the temple ruin that it faced.
Within the temple, all was utter darkness.
Above the temple, stormclouds of an even starker shade of red swirled faster and faster in agitation, as lighting forked out of the broken roof into the sky above, blinding in its intensity and its fury.
The light blinked on, but there was no one there to answer.
