The FNs are antsy. Phasma doesn't believe in premonitions or the Force, but she knows that their anticipation doesn't have to have an object if there's enough rumor, and assigns them to march.
Someone knocks into someone else's shoulder, and Phasma snaps at 2187 to straighten his people up, and brings in the FOs to complicate the maneuver. Around and around Finalizer's launching bay they make sure their steps are in sync, knowing they're being punished for something at the same time as they inject every bit of patriotism they have into each stiff step, and that keeps them out of trouble until the general arrives.
Phasma feels an itch, but doesn't tap her foot. She stands in a corridor where she can see both the marching troopers and the many doors from which someone might come into the hall. It's a comfortable spot, allowing her to watch both her back and her troops. Unless the Resistance attacks right now, or the New Republic finally gets themselves in order, she will have a tolerable shift.
Hux has brought the new officer, as he was assigned to do. Kylo Ren wears a cloak and mask, like Darth Vader or the Emperor, or like a New Republic senator. It seems neither very protective nor very patriotic, and Phasma wonders whether Hux will demand him to change it.
Ren is an emissary from Supreme Leader Snoke, she knows. Hux had also told her in no uncertain terms that Ren was unpredictable, and that he would need to be monitored, if unofficially. Phasma does not fancy babysitting more than she has to.
At least she knows she won't have to worry about one person on that front. Hux had undoubtedly ridden on his family ties in order to be promoted at Arkanis, but he and Phasma kept a respectful distance by having different specialties. A passable teacher, Hux prefers delegation to involvement. He is more of an orator, and Phasma respects him.
"Why did you bring me here?" Kylo Ren says immediately, turning to Hux. His voice is deep, clipped, obviously projected in the same way as a stormtrooper's. "I was told there were quarters readied to my specifications on this ship. Not this parade."
So it isn't to be either oration or respect for him, then.
She lets Hux talk, as rank is due.
"This is Captain Phasma of the stormtrooper legions."
"I am Kylo Ren," Ren says, as if Phasma hadn't been briefed. Of course, the name isn't real - there was some suspicion in the ranks that Vader's was a title, and Phasma can see Ren lie right through the mask. His fingers twitch; she has seen smugglers with the same tells.
Phasma inclines her head.
Ren is as tall as she is, Phasma notices, or would be if he didn't slouch. Under the piles of ragged black cloth he's skinny, maybe even young.
"And what is your rank?" she asks.
Ren stares. Phasma feels suddenly as if she has been unarmed and unmasked: images of her family at an unfamiliar dinner table, of her first day at the Academy fill her mind. Images of a shouting captain from before she was one. It's a rude, flaying intrusion, and it unsettles her.
Phasma forces words out while she stares at the silver strip above the mask's hooked nose. "How does the Supreme Leader expect you to be addressed?"
The stare continues, but Phasma's vulnerability retreats as if it had never been there at all. Ren says, "I know who is in charge, captain."
Ren turns, and to Phasma's surprise, when he gestures at Hux the general follows him. She thinks that he never answered the question.
After she ends the drills, she lets her troopers gossip a little.
Like the stormtroopers, the officers have drills. As her luck would have it, the first scenario assigned to her during her refresher course is an all-hands evacuation, and Kylo Ren is assigned with her.
They stand in a hallway designed to look like the one just outside the Finalizer's bridge. The training room, were it turned off, would probably look not unlike this. Holograms fill it with alarms and running troopers, though. Klaxons blare their particular alerts: a ship has landed a catastrophic strike on the Star Destroyer and the hull is breached, never to be repaired. The First Order is retreating. It's unlikely, but it would be hubris to ignore the possibility.
"Your mission has now begun," says Hux's voice over the room's comm. "Get to an escape pod by the nearest possible route."
Phasma starts moving.
"Follow me," Ren snaps. He pulls the lightsaber from within his robes as he walks, but doesn't ignite it. Phasma knows what it is by now, has seen Ren take his anger out on consoles and troopers. She has argued with him about the latter, but the arguments have been short.
"By the way," Hux says, stentorian. He gives little indication of whether he's enjoying this, but he might be. "They've destroyed our power generators, and the strike team that did it is still inside the ship."
The lights go out, as do the HUD and fan in her suit. It's just a fraction of a degree quieter, but her vision narrows. Her suit must have been set on a timer in the armory, a perfectly acceptable wrinkle in a training exercise - but it rankles her to think of the chrome set damaged.
Without the HUD and in the dim light of pinpoint emergency lights, it's probably safer for her without the helmet than with it. A blaster to the face would ruin her vision entirely, so she unseals her bucket fast. Her almost-white hair is too short to get in her way, but Kylo Ren isn't so fortunate: in the first look she has at him he's pawing black curls out of his face. Young indeed, but not as young as he might have been. After all of the rumors, she expected disfigurement, at least a scar. The mask isn't really suitable as armor, because it doesn't seal. So it is just an affectation, she thinks, like a senator's robes.
He looks her over too, dark eyes narrowing.
"Is that thing powered?" she asks, in order to be sure of exactly what resources they lost.
"The mask?" He moves ahead of her, so that his voice is slightly muffled again or so that he doesn't have to meet her eyes. He sounds embarrassed or distracted, like a recruit who lost their dignity. "Cameras. It has not been out of my sight. If he — " He stops, trying to keep a secret.
He means Snoke, Phasma thinks. Snoke must have been in on the exercise if Hux wasn't the one to sabotage Ren's mask. There aren't any other officers directly beyond them. That's something - strange for the Supreme Leader to reach down into an annual exercise, but it is not for Phasma to discern Snoke's mind.
There are two bulkheads ahead of them, and then a door that sealed when the automated evacuation procedures started. She has officer's codes, so it shouldn't be an obstacle. Ren starts forward, and for a moment Phasma is just thinking about the fall of her own feet on the floor, and about how she could shoot one-handed or leave the chrome helmet behind.
Ren ignites the lightsaber and stabs through the lock.
The red light makes spots burst in Phasma's eyes, so that even when she looks away there's a blotchy red negative with Ren's hunched silhouette cut out in the middle. His helmet is gone, probably stashed under his robes since she can't see it on the floor. She flinches back, then holds her hand above her eyes. "That won't open the door."
Ren growls through clenched teeth. Before Phasma can say more he has made a few more wide, loose swings, breaking sparks off of the simulation. It's designed to react realistically to blaster bolts, so she thinks maybe it's using the same images for this.
Then Ren rams the saber into the door like it's a fusion cutter. He carves a messy door while Phasma readjusts her helmet under her arm, deciding she can shoot one-handed.
"There." Ren is breathing heavily, his shoulders shaking. "That won't stop me."
"It wasn't supposed to," Phasma says.
Ren doesn't reply, just shrugs his way through the door. Phasma doesn't have to duck.
There are three Resistance troopers on the other side. She can see the red lights of their blaster shots before the bolts ricochet, and then she's backing up toward the makeshift door and firing. Ren is a few steps behind her when he starts swinging the lightsaber, deflecting bolts that Phasma is happy not to have to deal with. Everything is black on black, the red reflections on her armor the most solid images in her field of vision.
"Don't rush ahead," she starts to say.
"I will use the power I have been given," Ren says, snapping at her. Maybe she would rather have the blaster fire.
Then he takes off, leaping halfway down the corridor in a single jump that leaves spots in her eyes as the lightsaber swings.
The moment he lands, the floor collapses underneath him. She hears a thud and a scream. The red light bounces around the room, illuminating the heavy backpacks and light blasters of the Resistance troopers. Phasma pulls the trigger twice and hits the first two high enough on their bodies that they go limp immediately. Her bolt eclipses the tiny light on the third one's blaster, and she fires lower as the soldier bends over. The blasterfire stops.
Kylo Ren douses the lightsaber and bursts out of the wreckage of the floor with the sound of flapping fabric. On the other side of the divide, he turns to Phasma. Between the general darkness and the flashes, his face is a mess of negative impressions and blasterfire, rapidly resolving into shadows.
"Were this a real evacuation, the Force would have alerted me to any danger," he says, preening. "It's just a trap door."
"Don't rush ahead," she says again, and extends a hand for him to help her across the meter-wide gap in the floor.
When your authority is in question, Phasma had learned in her long time as an officer, assume that it isn't.
After a moment of silent challenge he does; she hears his hands at her glove and then her elbow. She leans ever so slightly in his direction when she jumps across.
He lets her use the code on the next door.
When they reach the escape pod, she thinks she hears Hux stifling laughter. He quiets it before he speaks, though, braces himself. Tells them that they've performed adequately. As soon as the lights come back on Kylo pulls the mask down over his face, whether he can see out of the dark lenses or not.
"Adequate isn't always good enough," Phasma says. She intends it to be a chastisement, but looking at him is like the blaster flashes again, and the memories. Almost. Where did that come from?
"I have the authority given to me by the Force," Ren hisses.
"And I take care of my troopers," Phasma says. "Do not get in the way of me doing that."
Even if my trooper is you.
He doesn't answer, but she has a feeling he gets the gist. Ren, she has decided irrelevant of his silent, Snoke-given authority, does not outrank her.
In the real evacuation, they aren't on the same emergency shuttle. Phasma tears her way out of a trash chute, to the great terror of some already terrified infantry. She takes them with her when they evacuate Starkiller Base, declines to put a hand on a shoulder when someone shakes.
She regroups with Hux on the Finalizer, while the Hosnian system tears itself apart even more than it would have done if the Starkiller had finished its work. Hux already has a destination in mind, one he won't tell Phasma. They're falling back, though. It's in the faces of all of the troopers, in their postures.
The emissary is on the bridge, limping.
Phasma doesn't believe in the Force, but something nearly took Ren's face off without touching his eye. The skin is the red rawness of a blaster wound, bubbled where it hasn't popped open. He could probably speak if he wanted to, but he's contorting his face instead, occasionally blinking, and keeping his mouth shut. She isn't surprised that he's here, since any officer should stay at the helm unless they've called evacuation no matter how much blood they've lost. However, she's surprised that he's here, that he cares about the Star Destroyer or Hux's command enough not to go directly to the comm for Snoke.
"What happened?" She fires the question at Hux, not Ren.
"He failed his mission."
"What happened to Starkiller Base?" She knows the Resistance took down the shield - knows, with a shame that almost makes her blush, that FN-2187 lead the team that did it. Knows that if someone else is blamed, she is less likely to be demoted to some colony and less likely to get another chance at FN-2187.
"Someone let the shields be taken down," Hux says, and Phasma stands straighter. There is no response to that, none that will let her come out of the encounter well.
"Our fleet is devastated. Get your troops in order and await word from Snoke. We will not be crippled by this."
Phasma nods. Looks at Ren, who is seething badly enough that she doesn't get spots in her eyes.
She has her troopers to tend to.
Phasma salutes and leaves.