ABOARD THE MALACHOR, 40 YEARS ABE:

Breha ducked another narrow red beam mid-stride and raised her borrowed blaster over her shoulder, returning fire by instinct rather than aim. One of her remaining pursuers caught the bolt in his throat and went down hard. Breha swept her arm wide and the last two stormtroopers went flying across the hangar, one banging hard into the wing of a TIE fighter and the other skipping across the sleek floor like a rock on a pond.

She raced around the side of the Lambda-shuttle-and skidded to a stop when she saw sixteen stormtroopers waiting there, blasters already raised.

"Huttspit!" she gasped, and looked around desperately. Maybe the snubfighter cradles and cranes overhead-?

"Freeze, Jedi! Drop the weapon!"

Breha raised her hands and the blaster she held over her head and then bent down, slowly, lowering it to the floor while her mind raced. Sixteen stormtroopers was a lot to deal with without a lightsaber, but if she could distract them somehow…

A crash from the other side of the hangar made her flinch, but the stormtroopers were all too disciplined-or too afraid of their towering commander-to look away from their target. Breha would have to come up with something they couldn't ignore...

Before she could concoct that something, sudden movement caught her eye and she turned to see her snubfighter commander rise from behind a stack of crates. He was wearing an Imperial overcoat and holding a blaster, but he didn't point it at the stormtroopers around her; instead he cupped his free hand around his mouth and shouted, "Kid! Malapoor Station!"

Breha gaped, then dropped into a low crouch. She let her borrowed blaster tumble free, pressing her hands against the deckplates and closing her eyes to focus on the cool metal.

The stormtroopers must have thought she was surrendering; distantly she could sense half of them spinning around to aim their weapons at Poe, even as he threw himself forward and grabbed at the cables securing his pile of supply crates. Blasters raised, ready to fire-

And then the ship's artificial gravity cut-out.

Breha had no idea how much of the ship was affected. It could have been the whole thing, or just this deck; for all she knew, it might have been only this one hangar. It didn't matter; the important thing was that the hangar was affected, and so were all the beings within its walls.

The stormtroopers, caught off-guard and flat-footed, floated up gently into the air. Their shouts of surprise buzzed harshly from beneath their white helmets, but it did them no good; without anything to grab onto or push off of, they hung helpless in midair in a loose, slowly-expanding semi-circle.

Poe floated too, the crates to which he clung rising from the deck as though they weighed nothing-because right now, they effectively did. But he wasn't using them as an anchor, but for leverage. He maneuvered himself over the top and around to the other side, then pushed-off and soared through the air towards Breha.

She was the only thing in the hangar not already secured by cables or brackets that wasn't floating. At Poe's warning-the name of a place that was meaningless on the surface, but whose import any pilot who had flown in Rogue Squadron's skirmish over Ansion three months ago couldn't fail to recognize-she had pinned herself in place using the Force.

Now she held herself loosely to the deck and waited as Poe glided towards her. He had closed half the distance between his crates and her position when Breha belatedly noticed that the flailing of the stormtroopers around them was something other than random.

A few of them had been standing close enough together when the gravity cut-out that they could now use one another as leverage, and they did so with alarming adeptness. While the implacable realities of physics meant that those troopers who had provided the leverage were in turn sent spinning off away from the battle, those to whom they offered boosts and braces now soared into place around Breha. She saw blaster muzzles raise, their aim fixed not just on her but on Poe as well.

Grimacing, Breha raised one hand and stretched it out towards the stormtroopers instead. She floated up as her grip and her concentration alike diminished, leaving her now held to the deck only by the tips of five fingers. This was going to be tricky; the Force did not enact the same penalties of physics that physical motion did, but the way physical forms reacted to the Force was dictated by the mental limitations of those doing the pushing-and Breha knew down in her heart of hearts that every action had an equal and opposite reaction, especially in zero-gravity.

If she shoved the stormtroopers, she would in turn find herself shoved-not as hard as she would in reaction to a physical blow, but still potentially harder than her tenuous grip could maintain. She took a deep breath and told herself it didn't matter; told herself that she would be able to pull both herself and Poe back to safety once the troopers were gone. Told herself to trust in the Force, to stop thinking and act…

As she drew her hand back preparatory to thrusting it-and the Force that the gesture would be mentally guiding-at the stormtroopers, another factor entered the fray: a bright red turbloaser blast that scorched through the floating ring of stormtroopers with devastating effect.

Everyone still alive flailed as they tried to turn towards the source of the blast. Breha, pivoting on her Force-secured fingertips, bobbed a slow one-eighty that left her facing the Imperial Shuttle she'd been trying to reach. Its running lights were on, its ramp down, and one laser cannon was lightly smoking, the heat of its recent discharge swelling out in an irregular blossom rather than rising into the air.

Breha sensed movement from within the cockpit and channeled the Force to enhance her vision, allowing her to see-

"Stella!?"

Stella waved, a crooked grin on her face. The gray officer's cap and tight bun that had tamed her curls abandoned, her high collar loose, she no longer looked like the sinister Imperial Intelligence Agent that she had been impersonating but rather what she was: a beautiful rebel, causing trouble.

"Get on board already, slowpokes, and let's grab the boys and go home!" Stella's voice crackled cheerfully from the ship's exterior speakers.

As one of the few ships in the hangar currently operating under its own power, the Lambda-shuttle's magnetic clamps held it in place against the deck while all around it, other vehicles floated dangerously free and unimpeded through the air. Fortunately the Super Star Destroyer itself was parked in orbit; a sudden acceleration would have spelled disaster for the ships and most of the sentients within the hangar as they were sent careening into one another, the walls, the floor, or the ceiling; as it was, there were still collisions but most of them were low-energy crashes: glancing blows and bumps rather than explosive impacts.

It wasn't just ships that were crashing into each other; the people were, too. And not just the stormtroopers, but everyone who'd still been in the hangar when the gravity had been cut-off. Everyone including Poe Dameron.

"Hey, kid!" he shouted, his voice tight with suppressed concern, and Breha swiveled around again in time to see her commander careening towards the frantically flailing cluster of surviving stormtroopers.

"S-foils to cruise!" Breha snapped, and Poe obediently pulled his limbs in tight, crossing his arms over his chest and twisting his ankles together to provide the smallest profile possible.

Breha stretched out a hand and focused on Poe, drawing the Force in around him and then drawing him forward through the gaps between troopers. Two of them managed to brace one of their colleagues enough for her to draw a fix on Poe with his blaster; Breha lifted her other hand from the deck and flapped it at her in a shooing motion, and all three stormtroopers went tumbling away towards the hangar's distant walls.

That left Breha floating up and away in the other direction, but a quick Force-tug pulled her sideways towards the Lambda-shuttle instead. Poe arrowed neatly in her wake, wincing as he passed almost within arm's reach of another stormtrooper. The woman snatched at the trailing edge of his stolen coat, but the heavy fabric slipped through her gloved fingers. She cursed fluently as the attempt sent her into a slow, steady spin and the retaliatory blaster bolt she snapped-off at Poe went wide by half a meter.

Breha pulled herself onto the ship's ramp, her feet settling softly to the floor as the shuttle's artificial gravity enfolded her. At her beckoning gesture, Poe followed; he unfolded his limbs and stumbled back to his feet, grinning-then ducked as a splatter of blaster fire creased through the air over his head.

Poe and Breha threw themselves up the ramp and into the cover of the shuttle's hull, the illusory languor created by the lethargy of motion in zero-gravity snapping abruptly back into the necessary haste of an impatient reality. "What's shooting at us?" Breha shouted, craning her neck to look towards the cockpit.

"Some of the stormies have reached the hangar walls," Stella shouted back, her hands flying over the ship's controls. "I'm trying to get the shields up, but I guess the ship has some kind of automatic safety feature that disables them in interior hangars-probably something 'clever' Booster added to make sure no one could hold the Errant Venture hostage from the inside. I'm trying to shut it off!"

"Even without shields it'll take them a while to burn through a spaceship's hull with nothing but hand blasters," Poe offered optimistically.

"Until one of them gets clever enough to climb into one of the TIEs on the ceiling, or boots-up one of the other ships to use its turbolasers. We're a pretty obvious target right now. Where are Bail and Finn? We need to get out of here-"

Outside the shuttle, all the lights went out.

"Stang!" Stella yelped and slapped at the instrument panels. The shuttle's lights shut-off, leaving them sitting in darkness disrupted only by the faint glow of the cockpit controls. "What is going on out there?" Stella demanded. "Is it Bail, is he doing this?"

Breha shook her head. "No," she said, "it's not him. I have no idea who it is and neither does he."

"I, uh, I might," Poe admitted.

The two women turned in the shadows to squint at him. Laser fire continued to sputter ineffectually around their shuttle, a stray blast occasionally striking the sturdy hull or splashing across the transparisteel viewport to bathe all their faces in lurid crimson flares.

He scratched at his curls. "A mouse droid told me-"

"A mouse droid?" Stella repeated incredulously. Breha shushed her.

"Yeah. Told me that the hangar doors were all sealed so reinforcements couldn't get in, and gave me a warning count-down on the gravity shut-off."

"So that's how you knew that was coming," Breha murmured. Her brow furrowed in confusion. "But mouse droids don't have enough processing power for all...this. There must be someone in charge, someone giving them instructions…"

"Yeah," said Poe. He cleared his throat against the pain of hope. "Yeah. I think I recognize the style. I think maybe it's…"

A sharp, excited trilling interrupted his words. Poe was out of the cockpit and halfway to the ramp before either of the women could react. He was brought-up short by a metal grappling line suddenly burying itself in the deckplates in front of him. Poe jumped backwards, narrowly avoiding being gored, and stared into the dark hangar bay. His eyes were bright, equal parts anxious and eager, as the grapple reeled itself in, drawing the shooter out of the zero-gravity hangar and into the dimly illuminated confines of the shuttle.

With a heavy thunk, an orange and white astromech droid thudded down onto the ramp. The grapple popped free and coiled itself back into the little round body as Poe flung himself to his knees and wrapped his arms around the metal orb. "BB-8!" he cried. "You made it, buddy! I never gave up on you!"

The droid trilled happily, it beeps and chirps pouring out so fast that even Poe's experienced ears could hardly keep up.

"Whoah, whoah, not so fast! I'm happy to see you too, but I can't understand what you're saying. We-"

He leaned back and looked up at his bemused human friends, both of whom had followed him from the cockpit and now stood staring down at him from the doorway.

"We're in trouble," he said.