To the average passenger, hyperspace is boring, bordering on madness. All a ship has to do in hyperspace is keep moving.
That means six bri and a droid stuck in one room with full view of the athul nothingness outside for several days' worth of travel. Before the hyperdrive, it would've been dozens of millennia from one side to the galaxy to the other, and equally boring for the entire time.
The junkers weren't big on talk, and the former Terries respected that. But after trying and failing to sleep in shifts, a tense discussion of their drainroom situation, and scrounging for the materials to slap a water condenser out of, talk became inevitable.
Each one aboard, save the droid, would have easily snapped another's neck if they had to stay in here much longer. To keep a bit of the madness away, the two human bri improvised a black shade to hang over the view port. Hyperspace has been known to inspire homicidal tendencies from time to time.
"Ye got any holos in yon droid?" Unkar suddenly prodded, pointing a thumb-shaped index dedder to Beebee.
"No," he replied. Only such that Poe and Finn could understand, and Finn was out. Poe glared up, almost delirious. He now wore his jacket over the mess of bandages covering his torso, almost bled completely through in three spots across his stomach.
"He says no."
"No need to say it twice, I 'erd 'im."
This actually got Poe's attention.
"You speak droid?"
"I weren't olways a Jakku brilljunker, boy." He held up the thing around his neck. Poe was in no mood or mindset to say, but he thought the brillblob was about to tell a sad story. Without the constant in-stream of xenophobic propaganda, he found himself wondering for the first time if he'd feel sorry for the alien - for anything other than merely existing, at least.
"Go on..."
"Were a holy man preaching hokey religion out on yon Rim." His thick dedders seemed to stretch like putty as he fondled the dimly glimmering crystal. His oyos seemed to be elsewhere than his own head.
On his bench along the small shuttle's port side, two of Unkar's alien companions slept. The third, one of the Teedos, fidgeted with an internal control panel. This third shot sparks to the floor, whacked the panel, and kept on working. No string of alien profanities meant it was the silent one.
"Thought t'were a good way to make creds, 'specially with that war on - Rebellion and all that. I went places most humans ain't never reached, too dirty and primitive, too suggestible to scams. Chief among them was this banch'a smugglers. Ended up making up a sermon they din't like, offended thei' better sen'bilitis."
"Oh, I like where this is going." A little wince of pain as exhausted muscle contracted around a wound. That forced him to lie back in place again.
"Oh, yar. Don grabbed me by min gerpin an' hauled me to a shuttle, dropped me from the sky onto that heap. Plenty-a junkers tell same story as yok."
That's explain it. Sad part is the fact that considering the cycle of junker-eat-junker, traditional population was simply unthinkable. Everyone comes from somewhere. The only natives on Jakku were those who survived the drop.
"Yon's how I end up here. And now we're gone again."
"Seems so." Short pause. "You said we're... following someone?"
"Yar. Someone very important. Someone wen't afford to lose."
"Yet you can't say where they're going, how you're getting there, or what you'll do when that happens."
Unkar shot him a glance, a tired one with one eye squinted almost completely shut. This might've been more talking than he'd done in so little time since... well, since Jakku. He himself had spent long hours not saying a word with Finn, just looking out at it all.
"A little silence'd do us good, wouldn't it?"
"P'rappy yar, p'rappy nar. Bat fer now, oll we'n do is wait."
And so they waited.
Beebee had seen them before. She had run away from them, used him as her excuse. So far they hadn't asked what the razordisk was doing trailing behind him. For now he would simply say nothing.
Outside, the athul-streaked universe blurred by, unseen and ready to incite insanity.
...
The last of the First Order fleet phased out of hyperspace into Starkiller system.
On a casual astronomer's readout, it was just a normal system: two parallel suns - "And the worlds between them." Starkiller, the larger and heavier star; and Juno, the name given to the dwarf across the system. The individual planets were stripped of their titles when the new tenants moved in, assigning phonetic values in their place: Wun, Too, Tree, Foar. Fife and beyond were just asteroids and unwanted balls of ice and gas, mostly for easy harvesting. The Empire had required resources from literally all over the galaxy to build a station the size of a moon, their whole fleet, all their armor, weapons and computers. No, the First Order was better than that, and that was what Starkiller Base was all about.
Due to the orbital system already in place before they arrived, only the inner midrange planets were properly habitable, though life grew on every one of them, all of it now safely under the control and protection of the First Order. Gas entities, two-legged giants, over-evolved insects. All of it served man.
The larger Star Destroyers, including the Supremacy and its two now-whole Duonoughts, did not touch down, simply docked in the orbital ring circling Starkiller Foar. From there home carriers rounded up their officers and ferried them to stations on Starkiller Tree. Any Terror Troopers on board went to Foar, where only they could stand the less hospitable conditions. They also made for good wardens of the local ice-crawling slave horses.
The massive cities on Tree could wait for the Knights of Ren. Two Silencers launched from the ring and flew down to Foar, keeping their distance from one another. They broke the thin atmosphere and waited for the massive rollen continent to roll itself to them. From there, the golden spires of His Supremacy Snoke's palace were hard to miss. Gigantic thick-skinned creatures in labor collars climbed even to the top, assembling the skin of the skeleton building as we speak, panel by panel. Terries in black-hooded coats kept their guns trained on all of this at all times.
Making use of this incomplete space, the Silencers crawled in single file through a gaping hole in the webbed struts of the sphere-and-spike architecture. Serbris Ren led, and Kylo Ren followed.
Soon the air-exposed bones of the palace became the confines of a tar cave hidden in the rocks. Yet even as the walls closed in, the Silencers' foils seemed to curl inward on themselves, exactly as they were built to. There was no landing crew where they placed themselves, not even a lit pad. Yet with their Third Oyos they knew they'd planted their ships exactly where they needed to be.
The two climbed out. Now came the easy part: navigating the tunnels by feeling, and some of the change in echo from one place to another.
Kylo Ren did not have the patience for all this, test of patience though it was. His lightsaber flared to life, side-vents fuming in a moment more. Three blades.
He only needed one. A little flick with his thumb, the two smaller blades went silent and retracted.
The door was no longer any test of memory or guidance to find. It was right there, trickling a bit of water the construction Terries hadn't tapped down onto those about to enter. That, too, was probably some kind of test.
Two hands came up, two hands demanded the door open.
It did not. But they passed through.
This room was a shade of red - not rollen, red - Kylo could never place. Not just the floor but the walls, the ceiling. The light was a perfect blank color, only catching glints of gold and red of the room, throwing them to the Knight's oyos as four-pointed stars with a little rainbow in each arm.
Their Father was glistening almost beyond seeing, and he emerged from nowhere, his sharp-edged throne a part of his body. In this light his clothes seemed to melt into the heavy stone, impossible to tell where one color or texture ended and another began. His skin reflected no light, greyed, not human anymore, if ever there was an excuse for humanity anywhere in there. Of course, there had to be. He had to be a man, he had to epitomize the superiority of humanity, or purity, of perfection. The only species that would matter in the end. But he sure was a far cry from man in its traditional image. His sacrifice, some would try to justify it. To Kylo that didn't even matter. Just that he pretended to be his master. And would have a fury in whatever shriveled black muscle in his chest pumped his opaque blood.
"My Sons. Spires of the Order's crest." Sunken oyos poked out - like a bug's eyes, how pathetic is that - to the son on his left. The Interrogator. The kid in a big mask. "Open yourselves to Me."
They did as they were requested, and the barriers he had trained them to set up were dropped. These barriers were small, but made them insensitive to suggestion, strengthened their minds. Two deep breaths and their minds were His.
Their minds spoke directly to him. And he saw it all.
"You." He probed his other son's mind even as the accusation was made, saw what he needed to see. "You have... you have failed Me. Failed your family. Feel our shame upon you."
Any emotional shame he felt in the, say, two seconds before he was thrown from the ground to the red-crystal ceiling was overwritten on the physical level. And this pain defied traditional ability to feel. Not like the Interrogator's own methods, letting an existing thought and feeling tie to one another and grow into something unstoppable. What Kylo Ren was dull yet it stung, savored yet with the intensity of a single blow stretched out into millions. Any ability to scream was overridden by the clamping in his jaw and throat. His eyes were forced open by gigantic meaty fingers within his mask. So no, he could not tell more of how his Father promptly tortured him with the same skills he'd been taught.
Serbris dropped to the kneeling position, holding his lightsaber-pistol forward.
As this happened, he had something of his own to ask.
"Father."
"Yes, My son. Your weapon. Were it not for this louse, you would have earned it. Follow My instructions, your new weapon shall be waiting for you."
"Thank you, Father."
The Hunter got up, bowed, turned and escaped.
Leaving a Father to discipline his son.
