THE SKIES ABOVE CORUSCANT, 40 YEARS ABE:
When the stout and stalwart Ito turned her smoking, sparking X-Wing toward the bridge of the nearest Star Destroyer and crashed through the transparisteel viewport in a more successful reprise of Rogue Four's last moments, Poe let out an oath so foul it made BB-8 whistle. Ito had been a Rogue even longer than him and her loss felt like the end of an era-and maybe it was, Poe thought dismally. Maybe this battle would be Rogue Squadron's nightswan song-but if this was to be their end, then it would be a battle the Empire would never forget, Poe vowed.
He turned his X-Wing back toward the now-burning Star Destroyer, Leeso tucked in tight on his tail without a word of complaint or question despite the fact that he was flouting his own orders to head straight for hyperspace and not look back.
He only realized it was a mistake after seven vaped TIEs and too many close calls to count. Swearing floridly he drew his attention back to the flashing readouts and screens of his cockpit, and the shrill beeping of his BB-8 astromech droid, who was unleashing a lecture that, despite consisting solely of beeps and trills and whistles, would have done Leia Organa-Solo proud.
"I know, I know!" Poe snapped back, half-annoyed and half-apologetic. "Dammit, someone has to have made it out…"
"Eleven and Twelve might have, sir." Leeso's voice was as rough and cold as ever, but her words filled Poe with a brimming warmth. "I caught sight of them near the edge of the engagement a few minutes ago."
"Yeah?" he said. He found that somehow despite everything, he was grinning. He could hardly have hoped for a better outcome-well, all right, he had hoped for a better outcome, but if only one pair of Rogues was going to make it out of this furball alive, he couldn't think of anyone he would rather it be than the pair that included Leia's daughter.
"Eleven here, sir, sorry." Breha's voice-tense, breathless, strained-dashed his hopes as efficiently as a bucket of ice water. He watched her X-Wing tearing its way through the seemingly endless swarm of TIEs and felt his stomach sinking into his stupid shiny dress boots. Then she said, "Twelve made it, though." She hesitated, thinking about the damage his ship had taken, then added in a softer voice, "I'm sure he did."
Poe let out his breath in a rush. "Okay," he said, trying to smile again. At least the word would reach the fleet...and if he died here, he would never need to face Leia and explain how he had let her daughter get vaped on his watch. "Well, let's see if we can go for a little redundancy. Eleven, Two, I want you to pair-up and punch your way back planetside. They won't expect that." Poe juked and jinked and cycled his lasers as he spoke, multitasking with the grace of a lifetime's worth of experience; the green laserblastes flashing past his cockpit barely made him blink. "Then you can slingshot around the other side and make for hyperspace from there. It's the long way around," he added with something approaching his usual humor, "but better late than never."
"And where will you be, sir?" Leeso asked coolly, her own laser drilling a neat hole through the cockpit of a hapless TIE that strayed across her firing arc.
With only three X-Wings left-Poe hadn't seen what had happened to Nine, but he had heard the scream-the TIEs were clustering so badly that they got in each other's way more often than they got a clean shot on the Rogues. That wasn't much comfort, since even a sloppy shot could kill and the sheer volume of green lasers currently filling the skies over Coruscant were overwhelming enough that they would get lucky eventually, but Poe would scrape whatever scraps of hope he could from the dregs the galaxy was offering today. The turbolasers have stopped too , he told himself with forced cheer, refusing to allow his brain to entertain the follow-up thought that the big guns had powered-down only because there was no reason for overkill like that when there were a good hundred TIEs out here for for each X-Wing.
"I'll be shooting for deep space from here," Poe explained to his wingmate. His tone was light; the grip of his hands on his control yoke was tight. "I should be able to draw most of them after me; I'll be a higher priority target than two ships retreating dirtside. If one of you could get your astromech to make some smoke or sparks to sell the illusion of damage…"
"Sir, you are aware that there are approximately three-hundred and seventy TIEs currently in Coruscant airspace?" Leeso asked.
Poe almost squirmed and turned the discomfort into a quick roll that let him snap-off a shot that turned a luckless TIE fighter into a ball of superheated gas and flame. "I didn't do a headcount, but yeah," he admitted.
"Then, sir, even if you draw-off seventy percent of them, there will still be an overwhelming number left to follow the lieutenant and myself-"
"All right, all right, so it's a crappy plan," Poe interrupted. "Do you have a better one?"
"Yes," said Leeso, shocking him. "The odds of success are miniscule, though."
"Perfect," said Poe, diving so close between a pair of TIEs that his upper starboard s-foil scraped a deep gouge in one solar array. "Let's hear it."
"I jump to hyperspace right here. The two of you line-up exactly behind me and each follow a second later."
"That's suicide!" Breha yelped before she could stop herself.
"Only for the first ship," Leeso said coolly. "Maybe the second. My passage may clear the way enough to allow-"
"All right," said Poe. "But I'll go first. I'm in command."
"Sir-"
"That's an order, Two," Poe snarled.
Silence-except for the constant roar of the battle swirling around them-held for a long moment before it was broken by BB-8's soft, mournful trill. For once, Poe ignored his loyal droid.
"As you wish, sir," Leeso growled.
"Commander…" Breha whispered; Poe ignored her, too.
"This is going to be tricky to line-up," he warned them both. "Especially without getting vaped." His mind raced, moving through the possibilities as quickly as his ship blazed through vacuum. He smiled. "Time for some good old fashioned TRD, I think."
Leeso groaned but Breha gave an eager whoop. She was the daughter of heroes of the First Death Star; much as the phrase "Trench Run Disease" gave Imperials nightmares, for her it had been the stuff of bedtime stories and childhood games. Poe felt a little better; the odds of Rogue Eleven surviving this crazy scheme were slim, but if it failed at least she would die with a smile on her face.
"All right," said Poe, "follow me on my mark. Three...two...one...MARK!"
In almost perfect unison the three X-Wings banked away from the cloud of TIEs and dove for the surface of the Super Star Destroyer. Green light strafed around them and Poe forced himself not to look at the readouts on the strength of his deflector shields; after a dogfight like this they had to be nearly depleted despite his and BB-8's best efforts at balancing and cycling them. One lucky hit, and he'd be blown to smithereens like the rest of his squadron. Leeso and Breha were sure to be in similar straights. Their only chance was to get low fast, ducking under the Super Star Destroyer's deflector shields, where the pursuing TIEs would hesitate about letting too many wild shots gouge divots in that pristine pale gray surface.
That there would be pursuit Poe did not doubt; while TRD was actually relatively ineffective on capital ships, Imperials had an almost pathological fear of little snubfighters getting too close to their hulls-a sort of shared cultural reaction to the loss of two monolithic battlestations to the predations of "insignificant" little snubfighters.
Poe grinned, knowing that he had to be making a lot of Imps sweat right now.
Breha felt laughter bubbling up in her throat and swallowed it down hurriedly; the last thing she wanted was for either of her superior officers to hear her having hysterics right now-and she wasn't; it was just a great deal of emotional upheaval in a short space of time: losing most of her comrades, watching a peace treaty turn into an attack in an eyeblink, worrying about her mother and brother and father, wondering if Jaen would make it to the fleet with his damaged fighter...and now, flying down the belly of a Super Star Destroyer like she was Uncle Luke going after the First Death Star.
It was tricky, terrain-following flying and she had to concentrate on what she was doing: sticking close enough to the hull to be under the deflector shield, but alert enough to bob up and weave around any of the myriad of protrusions that dotted a hull that only looked sleek from a distance-including turbolaser emplacements; while most gunners wouldn't risk hitting their own ship by trying to target a small, evasive craft like an X-Wing that was flying so close to its durasteel plates, a particularly enterprising or reckless gunner might well take a chance on those times when Breha or one of the others had to rise a little to crest some inconvenient stack of pipes or cowling. And then there were the TIEs behind them. While the amount of fire being directed toward her and the other Rogues had slackened it had not tapered off completely. A few stray shots from a tiny snubfighter wouldn't be crippling to a ship this large and the TIEs chasing them continued to shoot whenever they thought they had a lock on a target.
It meant that in addition to delicate terrain following flying, Breha also had to maintain a constant erratic pattern of evasive maneuvers-made even trickier by the fact that the TIEs could see said terrain in front of her too, and thus knew when she would need to rise or sideslip to avoid an obstacle. It should have been the most harrowing, horrifying flight of Breha's life-but it wasn't.
Somehow she felt completely at peace, as though her body and ship had merged into one and the whole galaxy was whispering in her ear, telling her when to twist and turn and roll. She had to fight the mad urge to close her eyes, as relaxed as though she were sleeping-or meditating. She felt like she was back at the Jedi Training Academy with Uncle Luke's voice in her ear or the soft chords of Master Tionne's double viol washing over her.
The calm snapped abruptly as Commander Dameron's voice announced, "All right BB-8, transmit the calculations. Two, Eleven, get ready to break up relative perpendicular on my mark. Match velocity and follow me exactly . Eleven, you get in tight behind Two and follow her. We jump at one second intervals, starting with me and ending with Eleven. Copy?"
"Copy, Leader," Leeso said automatically.
Breha had to swallow before she could force herself to say, "I copy, One."
"Then may the Force be with us," said Poe. "Three...two...one...MARK!"
The three X-Wings shot upright in a perfect line, Poe's ship in the lead and Breha's following last. As they left the relative safety of the Super Star Destroyer's hull, TIE fighters swarmed in around them. A flurry of green laserblasts unleashed in a nearly blinding cloud. Breha's ship shuddered under the impact of what felt like a dozen glancing blows and she gritted her teeth, resisting the urge to roll away from the line of fire.
"Close s-foils!" Poe ordered, and all three ships snapped theirs shut in preparation for the jump to hyperspace. "Jumping in three, two-Sithspit!"
Poe's X-Wing gave a strange, wobbling jerk and lurched almost to a dead stop in midair. Leeso cut her ship into an almost ninety-degree turn, tight as a TIE, shooting out away from Poe's stricken snubfigher; Breha, less experienced, didn't realize what was happening until the tractor beam snagged her ship, too.
Helpless, she yanked futilely on her control yoke as she watched Leeso's X-Wing disappear into a knot of TIE fighters. The darker ships swarmed and spiraled around the lone X-Wing like insects dragging a feast into their hive. In only seconds, every trace of Rogue Two's ship had vanished from view. Breha tried to comfort herself with the fact that she had seen no explosion, but she knew that not every snubfighter's life ended so vividly-and furthermore the number of TIEs between her and Leeso acted as a near-impenetrable screen. There were so many of the little round ships roiling and twisting in the vacuum between them that Breha wasn't sure she would have seen an explosion even if one had occurred.
"Two!" Poe bellowed into the comm unit. "Rogue Two, report! Leeso?"
There was no answer.
A cold, hollow certainty settled over Breha like a slow swell of ice-cold water. She knew, as surely as if she had read it in plain Basic scrolling across the readouts in front of her, that she couldn't break the tractor beam's lock. It didn't matter how hard she fought, she was caught… but there were alternatives to fighting.
With a deep, heavy breath, Breha lifted her hands away from the piloting yoke. "They've got us, Shaker," she announced to the small, round astromech droid sitting in the X-Wing's socket a few feet behind her.
The ship's internal comm circuitry transmitted her words to where the droid sat in the merciless, soundless expanse of vacuum. The same closed-loop direct-noise transmission piped his mournful whistle through her cockpit to her ears even as the screen to the right of her targeting system scrolled the translated words of his response for her eyes. The little droid agreed with her.
"There's too much data in your systems and in the ship's navicomputer that we can't let the Imps—or whoever these sithspawn are—get their hands on," Breha continued. She swallowed hard and found, not entirely to her surprise, that she had to blink hard to hold back a fresh bank of tears.
Another, sadder whistle, this time underscored by a few resolute beeps. Breha didn't need to look at the translation screen to know what Shaker was saying, but she did anyway. These were going to be some of the last words her faithful little droid ever uttered; the least she could do was read them all.
"I'm sorry," she said, forcing the words out around the lump in her throat. "I'm going to miss you."
Shaker let out a long, sad little trill—he would miss her, too.
Breha dashed the back of one gloved hand across her cheeks, wiping away her tears. "Okay," she said, and forced herself to straighten, to reach for the buttons of the ship's computer. "Inputting the codes you need now…"
The other X-Wing moving alongside Breha's on that steady, inexorable journey into the Super Star Destroyer's hanger jerked and wobbled restlessly. Inside the cockpit, Poe Dameron let loose with a string of angry swear words that stretched across a galaxy's worth of languages as he wrestled with his piloting yoke. "I know!" he shouted at the little droid plugged into the starship's socket behind him. "I know! What does it look like I'm doing?"
The orange and white BB-8 unit warbled and bleeped at him enthusiastically, but neither the droid nor the pilot could do anything more to break the tractor beam lock than had Breha and slowly, helplessly, both ships arced into the hanger.
Dameron's was first and as his ship crossed the magcon field barrier that held the vacuum at bay he grumbled, "All right, all right, I'm setting it down. I said I'm setting it down!" he shouted. It wasn't clear whether he was shouting at the droid, at the unseen forces manipulating his ship, or merely at the galaxy at large. "Repulsors," he muttered, "landing gear, blah blah blah…serve them right if I turned off the landing protocols and made them drag us in on our belly, scrape the kriff out of their nice shiny hanger…"
Despite his unhappy muttering, Poe engaged the landing cycle and allowed his small starship to come to a gentle landing inside the hanger. He couldn't help looking up at the tall ceiling far above him, or at the rows and rows of TIE fighters stacked along the walls; it was clear that the Super Star Destroyer had not fielded even a third of its starfighter screen for the assault on Coruscant. In his heart, the commander of Rogue Squadron was offended that any ship should feel confident enough in a conflict with the Rogues to hold ships in reserve, but underneath his cocky fighter pilot bravado he knew—they hadn't stood a chance against a force like this anyway, not one lone squadron of X-Wings, no matter how famous their exploits or brave their pilots.
Likewise he didn't stand a chance against the detachment of stormtroopers jogging forward toward his ship, their blasters held at the ready. He thought fleetingly of strafing them with his turbolasers, but dismissed the idea; he was already at the Imperials' mercy and killing other sentients (even stormtroopers) when it served no purpose would be a vile act. Besides, the idea of shooting people with a ship's lasers made his stomach churn.
He wondered if the stormtroopers had paused to think about the possibility of his vaping them from his ship. He wondered if stormtroopers even knew how to feel fear. It was impossible to tell if they felt anything at all behind those grim white helmets. Certainly none of them seemed to flinch as they lined up in front of his ship and waited for him to exit.
Grimacing and wishing that his flimsy dress uniform had included a blaster at his side, Poe hit the button to raise the hatch of his X-Wing. "Just stay chilly, buddy," he muttered to the droid behind him. "Maybe they won't notice you." He raised his hands over his head before he started to rise, just in case any of the stormtroopers below were feeling nervous.
BB-8 warbled uncertainly and Poe forced a smile for him. "Hey," he started to say, "you never know what—"
His words were cut off by the sudden, soft whump of a small explosion.
Half-raised from his seat, Poe spun around to stare as Breha's X-Wing canted sideways in a shower of sparks and smoke. It had barely crossed the threshold of the magcon shield when it slammed to the ground, one pair of wings crumpling beneath its weight. The astromech in the back of the ship wailed in distress.
Three-quarters of the stormtroopers whirled to point their blasters at the smoking X-Wing; the rest held to their discipline and kept their attention on Poe, although he was too flabbergasted to move, let alone try and make a break for it. He stared as the canopy of the other X-Wing started to raise, hitched and stuck, and then slammed open as Breha shoved it the rest of the way up manually.
She stood in the cockpit, smoke pouring across the glistening orange of her dress uniform, and stared at the stormtroopers for a moment. Then she, too, raised her hands.
"Port repulsor blew," she announced in a carrying voice. "One of the TIEs must have strafed it in the furball, and the pressure of the tractor beam overloaded it."
Poe frowned—that didn't sound right—but nodded. "Good landing," he called sarcastically.
"E chu ta," Breha responded. She turned, shot a look at her still-wailing droid who abruptly fell silent, and then slithered down from her cockpit. She raised her hands again the moment her boots hit the deckplates and she turned and straightened slowly as two dozen stormtroopers raced forward to take her into custody.
Poe, grimacing again, hopped down from his own X-Wing and repeated Breha's careful surrender. He felt sick inside, but fighting further wouldn't accomplish anything other than to get himself and his lieutenant—not to mention both droids—killed in a hail of blasterfire. Like most pilots of Rogue Squadron, Poe Dameron would have been content to go out in a blaze of suicidal glory for the good of the mission, or of the New Republic—but dying now would gain him nothing.
Better to wait, learn what he could, and fight again later.
Breha seemed to feel the same way about it, since she allowed the stormtroopers to take her helmet, manacle her, and march her roughly over to join Poe, who was grimly permitting his own white-clad guards to slap identical binders around his gloved wrists. They were none too gentle, but they weren't overly rough either. Poe got the impression that they weren't going out of their way to manhandle him; it was just that gentleness was not a natural trait of stormtroopers. Go figure , he thought drily, and turned to inspect Breha as she approached.
She was a slim brunette woman with a pale complexion, standing roughly halfway between her mother and father's height. Her face was grimy with tear-streaks; a side effect of the smoke he assumed, since Breha wasn't the sort of person who would willingly let the enemy see her cry. She didn't seem to have been hurt by the little crash, but he couldn't stop himself worrying: he was her squadron commander. That made her his responsibility, whether they were in vacuum or in the middle of an Imperial Super Star Destroyer.
He'd have preferred the vacuum.
Once they stood side by side, the two pilots were turned by their captors to face yet another detachment of stormtroopers marching toward them. They were led by a large trooper in gleaming silver armor, a thick black cape slung across her shoulders and a heavy blaster rifle cradled in her arms. Their footsteps rang crisply on the metal deckplates in nearly perfect unison.
"All this for us?" Poe muttered out of the side of his mouth. "Seems a little excessive."
"Speak for yourself," Breha croaked back. "I'd say it's about kriffing time somebody gave me a royal welcome. My mom used to be a princess, you know."
"Sure they aren't just impressed by your dad's smuggling career?"
"They would be if they had any brains," Breha retorted.
"Quiet," the stormtrooper holding Poe's arm growled, giving the pilot a shake.
"Do they not know they captured Rogues?" Poe asked, looking at Breha askance. "Quiet isn't exactly what we're known for, my friends," he continued, raising his voice slightly to make sure that the stormtroopers approaching could hear what he said too. "Impossible victories? Yes. Equally impossible good looks and charm? Also yes. The ability to cause Imperials to break-out into cold fear sweat at the mere sight of our ships? You'd better believe it. But quiet isn't really something we—"
Once again Poe's words were cut-off by an explosion, but a much larger one this time. Everyone spun to stare at the source: Breha's X-Wing, which went up in a sudden enormous fireball. Lights flashed all over the hanger and alarms began to sound. Even BB-8 looked to see what was happening, rising from his socket and stretching his little neck forward with a startled, saddened warble for the loss of Shaker. Only Breha did not turn; under the cover of everyone's distraction she looked down at her wrists and narrowed her eyes in a frown, popping her cuffs off with a quick application of the Force. One of the stormtroopers looked at her, started to say, "Hey—!"
Then the reason for the alarms sank in: the magcon field flickered, sparked, and collapsed.
"Warning," a computerized voice announced, "magcon failure. Decompression imminent. Warning. Evacuate hanger Besh Three immediately. Decompression imminent. Warning—"
Poe stopped listening. He spun to face his own X-Wing and the little droid standing atop it. "BB-8," he shouted, "get out of—"
And then with a sudden rush of wind, the last of the lights that indicated the presence of the magcon field went off and with them, the field itself. The hanger was abruptly opened to the cold void of space. The cold, hungry void, which immediately sucked into it every scrap of air inside the hanger—and with it, everything that wasn't nailed down, from ships to tools to crew.
The large blast doors at the end of the hanger began to iris shut. Screams and shouts raised from the troopers, pilots, and mechanics who filled the large room. They would have been running for the door except that the wind pulled everyone off their feet and sucked them quickly toward the void and the certain death that waited there—everyone except for Poe and Breha.
As his feet went out from under him—went out from under all of them, stormtroopers and prisoners alike—Breha reached toward Poe with one hand and a sudden, sharp tug of pressure jerked him sideways against the rush of air. She folded her fingers tightly around his bound wrists, then extended her other hand toward the closing doors. Another burst of pressure tugged at them both and they were suddenly moving forward, against the wind. Poe squinted into the unforgiving breeze, his mouth open and gaping, and then he figured it out: the Force. She was using the Force to drag them forward, while all around them everything and everyone else was vented into the void.
Desperate troopers grabbed for whatever handhold they could reach—a TIE fighter's landing struts, a repulsor fork's front prongs, their own comrade's legs or arms—but the void's hunger was relentless and their own strength was limited. As Poe watched, he saw first one and then another trooper lose their grip and go flying away out the open hanger behind him. Even the heavy equipment wasn't immune to the pull: TIEs shook in their moorings and one improperly-secured ship snapped its tether and whirled away, crashing into three others and triggering another explosive cascade as it went. The heat barely ghosted across Poe's back before it was gone, dragged into the chill of space.
The lead stormtrooper, the one in silver armor, had somehow managed to punch a handhold straight through the deckplates. She held herself crouched there, feet braced behind her and cloak streaming over her shoulders. She met Poe's eyes with her own blank helmeted gaze and raised her blaster rifle one-handed. His eyes widened and he opened his mouth to shout a warning to Breha, but then one of the stormtrooper's feet slipped and she lost her grip. Still clutching her blaster, she blew backwards out the wide hanger door. With her free hand she grabbed at her belt, as though she might possibly have something there that could save her, but it was too late; she vanished into the void, leaving Poe and Breha to continue moving forward.
It wasn't fast going; the strength of the vacuum's pull dragged at them. Breha gritted her teeth, pulling them forward against it, gaining ground slowly—but all the while, the alarms were flashing and the doors were slowly closing. If they didn't get through the opening in time, they would be as dead as the hapless stormtroopers spinning past them.
As they approached the threshold, the rush of air increased due to the funneling effect of the narrow opening. Breha almost lost her grip on Poe's wrist but he managed to twist within the binders and wrap the fingers of one gloved hand around the back of hers, clutching at her desperately. Sweat trickled down Breha's face despite the chill temperature. They inched forward into the closing doorway. One of Poe's knees banged against the blast door and he winced. He hated being helpless, being dependant on someone else's skills (there was a reason he flew solo vehicles like X-Wings), but Poe was no Jedi; there was nothing he could do but cling to Breha and hope.
They collapsed heavily onto the ground on the other side of the blast door, which irised closed behind them. The roar of the wind died suddenly, but the shriek of alarms kept blaring. Poe scrambled to his feet and ran back the way they'd come, slamming himself into the door and staring through the little diamond-paned window in the middle.
The hanger was almost devoid of life now. The last gust of air from the closing doors tugged a heavy load lifter from its moorings and it, along with the four stormtroopers clinging to it, tumbled end over end toward the hanger door—and toward the X-Wing parked a few meters from the edge.
"No," Poe shouted, "no, BB-8! No!"
He clawed at the door with his bound hands but there was nothing he could do. The lifter hit the X-Wing and it and the snubfighter, with the little droid standing on it, were sucked out into space alongside a hail of flailing stormtroopers.
"BB-8!" Poe wailed.
Breha shook him by the shoulder. He tried to ignore her but she shook him again, forcing him to turn and face her. "Commander!" she shouted. "Poe! Come on." She popped his binders with the Force and tugged at his arm, trying to pull him down the corridor and away from the airless and empty hanger. "I'm sad about the droids too, but we have to keep moving."
"You're right," Poe said in a listless voice. He shook his head. "You're right." He fell into step next to her and together the two pilots jogged down the empty hallway.
"We couldn't let the Empire access their data," Breha explained. She sounded pained and tired from the strain of Force-pulling them out of the void. "We weren't prepared for a combat situation, so we—"
"—we didn't have their security protocols engaged, I know," Poe finished for her. "I know." He shook his head again and swallowed hard. "Let's just find a way out of here before—"
They turned the corner and almost plowed right into a column of stormtroopers jogging past down a perpendicular hallway. Poe threw an arm out and blocked the shorter girl from stumbling into the troopers, and the pilots scrambled backwards and pressed themselves against the side of the hallway. They stayed there, breathing hard, until the sound of booted feet faded into the distance.
"That was close," Breha breathed.
"What I wouldn't give for a blaster right now," Poe said. "These sithspawned flimsiplast dress uniforms don't even have pockets enough to carry a vibroblade…"
Breha shook her head in commiseration as they started off again, moving more cautiously this time. "Me, I'm kicking myself for not breaking protocol and insisting on wearing my lightsaber anyway."
Poe nodded. "Yeah, that'd come in handy right now," he agreed. "Still, I'd rather have some blasters. If we can find any stormtroopers traveling in less than squad strength, I say we try and pick 'em off and take their weapons."
Breha nodded. "You're the boss, boss," she said. She frowned speculatively. "Next time we see some, maybe I can try and Force-nudge a few into ditching their buddies…"
"Worth a try," Poe said. "Do you think your mom got—"
"Stop!" Breha gasped, her voice little more than a whisper but one tight and sharp with fear. She flung out a hand, catching Poe by the arm and yanking him to a halt next to her. Her brown eyes had opened so wide that the whites stood out around the irises like warning lights and her cheeks were paler than the bleak Imperial Gray of the walls around them.
Poe stopped, his own eyes widening in reaction to her fear. "What?" he whispered.
Breha shook her head. "I feel a…a presence…a darkness…"
The door at the end of the hallway opened with a pneumatic hiss. A slim figure in a long black cloak and faceless helmet stepped forward. The white-clad stormtroopers following in escort seemed more of an afterthought than anything else; menace radiated from the cloaked figure so strongly that even Poe, lacking his companion's Jedi senses though he was, could feel it.
"Run!" Breha cried.
The two Rogues turned and ran.
Behind them, the black-clad figure walked onwards in their wake.
