[The Old Man]

H-482 wasn't sure how he'd managed to get nominated for this shit. And that's what it was: shit. That wasn't a word you were allowed to use in the First Order (at least not where anyone could hear you, which was just about everywhere), but it was definitely a word he could think. He knew all the real curse words and thought them frequently. His unit getting assigned escort duty for the Rebels? That was shit.

If CL-0745 was going to send someone out to babysit the assholes, it should have been the FN squad. They were experienced. They worked well together. They knew each other. They weren't a bunch of misfits masquerading as proper stormtroopers.

But that was really uncharitable. He trusted Ten-ten, even though he'd only known him for a week or so. And … well. That was it. His other squad members included DL-8192, Donner, who thought she was a badass, talked about how good she was way too much, and (as he'd read in her file) consistently scored middling in the sims, usually not even above average. At least she wasn't bottom of the barrel, but her boasting when she clearly couldn't back it up bothered the hell out of him.

Then he had DL-1364, who despite what the Lady said ('Lady' being the name CL-0745 had picked out for herself, thinking it was an actual fancy woman's name instead of a title – he hadn't had the heart to explain non-Order status systems to her and besides, it really didn't matter), DL-1364 needed to be sent for a few more rounds of reconditioning. She needed every bit of poison scrubbed out of her brain so she could start fresh. Instead, it was all in there festering. He knew a thing or two about letting the darkness eat you alive. All this coddling wasn't good for her, but he'd been ordered to go easy on her.

Then he had FO-1282, whom he hardly knew. Most would hold her bloodline against her. He didn't. He didn't hold anything against her except that she was a stranger and he didn't trust her yet. She was the only survivor of her unit. Was that because she'd been lagging behind or got separated? She claimed no, but how was he to know? He was suspicious of everyone until proven otherwise.

"Hold back," H-482 ordered his group. "Let them go first."

CL-0745 cut in immediately. "Corporal, do a proper escort formation." Her tone was brisk and no-nonsense as always. There was no explanation and he didn't need one. While he might be personally overjoyed if the Rebels were eaten by something or swallowed up by a sinkhole, he understood the mission would be pointless if the faithless jerks died without retrieving the wing and repairing the shuttle. They were the ones who had crashed it in the first place.

"Ten-ten, you're on point. Donner to the left. DL-1364," she used to be called Tracer, but had rejected the name after her comrades had died, morbidly saying the name had died with them, "to the right. FO-1282 and I will bring up the rear." CL-0745 had had a few things to say about his guard deployments the night before. She had a point. This way he'd keep an eye on the newest person while having everyone else ahead of him in his field of view. And field of fire. Not that he intended to shoot any of the Rebels. But hey. Maybe. The day was young.

General Hux had announced they were now at a truce condition with the stupid Rebels. While that was definitely his prerogative as general, H-482 was free to dislike it as long as he did his duty and kept his thoughts to himself. Hux had also announced the bit about the food supply, which H-482 had stumbled over when doing the inventory. Obviously, it wasn't a big secret – anyone with two brain cells to rub together would figure it out – but it was nice to have it out in the open.

When he'd done inventory, he'd double-checked with CL-0745 that yes, the general was aware of the food situation, because it seemed preposterous that they were sitting around sharing breakfast with the Rebels when they had such limited supplies. Again, he supposed, general's prerogative. But that pilot putting his hand on the general's knee had unsettled him.

Best not to dwell on it. Same for their behavior the night before, or being woke up for his watch to find the general and pilot had been *ahem* standing watch before him. The hand on the knee bothered him more than whatever they got up to in private. Precisely because the knee thing wasn't private, which made it hard to ignore.

In the middle of his escort formation walked the Rebel scum, or at least some of them. The engineer Commander Tico, the traitor Finn, the Wookiee Chewbacca, the Abednedo what's-his-name, and the pilot, Commander Dameron. Five of them. Five of the First Order. That left just three of the Rebels back at the shuttle along with all five of FN squad, the staff sergeant, the first sergeant, and the general.

Among those three left behind were the former supreme leader and the last Jedi, Rey. Assuming she was a Jedi. The last real Jedi had died or disappeared two or three decades before H-482 was even born (the Skywalker stories were fake; everyone knew that). The idea that this Rey person was one seemed far-fetched, but he couldn't deny that something very strange had happened to them while escaping from the Finalizer, and it seemed to have been coming from her. Her and Kylo Ren were going to stay back and do Jedi stuff while the rest of them did real work.

Ahead of him hummed and whined the repulsor-lift that came standard with the shuttle. It was designed to be dual-use, for moving light personal cargo or to act as a gurney in case of accident or incapacitation. It could float a person, even a big one like the bulky Abednedo. At the moment, it was laboring. The Rebels had piled it up with four repulsor plates they'd taken from the underside of the shuttle, batteries to power them, cables and controllers, and tools. He'd added a little food and less water than he thought they needed so no one was carrying extra gear. The lift barely cleared the forest floor and frequently made distressed beeps about the weight.

Otherwise, the walk was fine. The temperature was moderate during the day, though the air was more humid than he'd like. There was no precipitation today and the wind they could hear stirring the upper branches didn't penetrate to the ground. Other than the wind, the place was eerily quiet, just as it had been the night before. He didn't like that. Especially when they'd come outside in the morning to find something had devoured – literally devoured – the top several centimeters of that tree trunk they'd cut down. He'd noticed several of the trees nearby were also scoured along with the cut stump – anywhere they'd been damaged, something had eaten part of them.

Now maybe you could tell yourself that was plant material and plant-eaters weren't a threat, but H-482 knew that where there were plant-eaters, meat-eaters weren't far behind. The fact that he didn't see or hear either of them around was doubly unsettling. He looked up a few times, noticing the back side of the trees – which would be the side the shuttle had struck as it crashed – were deeply scarred and in many places eaten to the white, fibrous bone-like interior just like the one next to their shuttle.

He stopped next to one to look at it. FO-1282 stopped with him. He prodded at the edge of the scarred area with the tip of his blaster. It looked soft. It yielded, like puffy, swollen flesh, like infected tissue. "It's like skin." The undamaged trunks were fuzzy, hairy, perhaps. This one had all the fuzz matted down, from the ground up to the scar. Like those bugs they'd found had climbed up it and chewed away all the damaged tissue. "This thing … isn't really a plant."

"Is that important?" FO-1282 asked. Chewbacca and Dameron had stopped to watch them, but were likely too far away to hear unless Wookiee hearing was better than most.

H-482 said, "Might be. Maybe those bugs aren't plant-eaters." He turned and gestured for them to rejoin the group. All of them had stopped by now.

"Everything okay?" Dameron asked.

H-482 looked over at Finn, who was the person he was supposed to talk to. Finn didn't say anything. H-482 had spent half his life outside the Order and the formative half to boot, so he turned back to Dameron and answered. "We need to increase our speed. We don't want to be out here after dark."

"The wing can't be far. What'd you see?" Dameron looked past him at the tree he'd been examining, then looked to some of the closer ones.

"Move!" H-482 said sternly, not interested in explaining, especially when he wasn't sure if it was really something to be worried about. He was not possessed of the usual First Order disgust and phobia toward things with shells and exoskeletons (it was common enough to be default), but he still didn't want to be eaten by them.

Dameron rolled his eyes. "Are you that same guy who stabbed me with your blaster muzzle last night?"

H-482 couldn't help the startled, "What?" that came out of his mouth. It was a level of innuendo that would have escaped most Order personnel. But H-482 had been married, fathered two kids, and worked odd jobs in some of the roughest, grossest parts of space. The only person he'd recently envisioned euphemistically 'stabbing Dameron with a blaster muzzle last night' was General Hux.

"Right here." Dameron pointed at his side.

"Oh." H-482 straightened in realization. "Yeah, that was me." He wobbled his head in the stormtrooper equivalent of an eye-roll in response. Of course, Dameron hadn't meant anything by it. Maybe they'd just been talking about the stars like when they were outside.

Dameron blinked at him. "What did you- oh." Then he laughed. "Wow, do you have a dirty mind! Where did that come from?"

"We need to move!" Angry now, he pointed his blaster, which meant three of the other troopers did the same, two pointed at Dameron with TN-1017 covering the lot of them. DL-1364 was just standing there, not joining in. The Rebels made dismayed noises about the truce.

But not Dameron. Still laughing, he put his hands up cooperatively. "Okay, okay." He turned and started walking. "This good? This what you want?"

"Yes."

"You like the view?" Dameron teased as he glanced over his shoulder. He was still holding his hands up. The rest of the Rebels were moving now, too. "Is that it?"

H-482 groaned. Great. He had a joker on his hands. "You're not my type."

"Yeah? Who is your type?" Dameron put his hands down slowly. The entire group was moving now, troopers, Rebels, and the whining repulsor-lift (it was not making a good sound).

H-482 took his blaster back to ready position and with his free hand waved the rest of his squad to do the same. "None of you."

"Ah. Something exotic then? That must be rough. The First Order doesn't offer much variety."

H-482 made a scoffing noise. "Human women. Not even picky about the human part. Humanoid is fine. But women. Not you."

"Yeah, yeah, I got that. But how does that work? I thought most of you guys didn't have types."

"What would you know about it?"

Dameron shrugged. "I talk to people." He'd moved off to the side a little and drifted back in the formation. H-482 wanted to complain that he needed to stay with the group, but Dameron was doing it to better talk to him. It was a weird conversation, but as long as the asshole kept moving, that was good enough.

"I'm not interested in anyone now." Lest the scum think that was due to the quality of possible partners, he added, "I lost my wife twenty-five years ago." That he hadn't felt desire since then didn't strike him as unusual. It was just a testament to his attachment to her.

"Oh." The amusement left Dameron's face. "I'm sorry to hear that. What happened?"

"She … there were complications after the birth of our son. We were in the Outer Rim, where they charge credits for medical care. We didn't have much money, so we didn't go until it was too late. She died."

"I am really sorry to hear that," Dameron said soberly. "They charge credits some places for helping with childbirth?"

H-482 wanted to be offended that Dameron acted like that was criminal, but the thing was, on any civilized planet it was. "I said it was the Outer Rim. It's lawless out there. New Republic can't enforce order anywhere but on their own doorstep. Never could."

"Huh. Well, is your son alright?"

H-482 scoffed again. He raised his blaster one-handed as though showing it to the Rebel, muzzle pointed skyward. "Why do you think I'm here?"

"Uh … I don't know. You tell me."

"I had a daughter, too. After my wife died, I had a toddler and a newborn, and no money at all. I was ex-imp, for all that I only served the Empire for a couple months and spent all of that on a transfer station watching them consolidate cargo. I never saw action. I barely saw civilians! But any imperial who was still in service at the end was a war criminal no matter what you'd done. I could have got out of it if my family would vouch for me, but they didn't want the stain of admitting one of their kids had ended up in the Empire and never defected."

He huffed. There was a lot of territory between that betrayal and Bes' death, but he skipped it. "I joined the First Order because they would raise my children and they did. They honored every promise they made to me, which is more than the Empire or the New Republic ever did." The vocoder filtered out most of the sneer from his voice, but not all of it.

"Oh. Okay." Despite H-482's tone, Dameron continued to act unoffended, though his voice had become a bit flatter. "Are your kids good? They're not here, right?" Dameron gestured at the troopers walking with them. All but Ten-ten were younger than his children would have been if they'd lived.

"No. Both died in the Sibensko Massacre when your General Organa sabotaged the station and drowned thousands in their beds."

Dameron's mouth dropped open, but he was momentarily at a loss for words. He looked over at Finn and sputtered, "General Organa? I remember hearing something about Sibensko …?"

Finn nodded and matter-of-factly confirmed, "It happened. Just like what he said. It was a big setback. Caused a major change in strategy. Big shake-up. Snoke ended up in control. They started building Starkiller Base, like, months after that."

Dameron was disbelieving, which was heartening to see. "She … she did what? What happened on Sibensko?"

Finn said, "It was underwater. She depressurized the entire facility. It flooded and collapsed. Killed everyone."

Still astonished, Poe said, "So they shifted to building a superweapon that would destroy entire planets? The Hosnian Cataclysm was revenge for …?"

Finn gave Poe an expressive look that said basically, 'Yeah, of course.' The former stormtrooper looked over to H-482. "They must have been, what, they were Amaxine Warriors?"

"Yes," H-482 said proudly. "It was a great honor for them to be chosen for that mission out of so many other volunteers. They both trained for it relentlessly."

Finn nodded, grimaced, and went back to marching. It was useful, H-482 noticed, to have someone with Order background among the Resistance. Finn understood history and the Resistance believed him when he spoke, rather than wanting to argue about things that were clearly cause-and-effect.

Chewbacca warbled something in his language. Dameron muttered, "Yeah, you said it."

H-482 recognized that the vocal register wasn't the confrontational/offensive/challenging one. He probably could have told more if he'd so much as heard the Wookiee's language in the last twenty years. He gestured at the alien with an elbow instead of his blaster, which was the less rude way of indicating something as far as stormtroopers were concerned. "What did he say?"

Dameron answered, "He said war makes … uh, refugees of us all. Really, though, I think the term is un-tribed or lost family, orphans maybe, but I don't know enough Shyriiwook to say for sure."

H-482 grunted. "Shy-er-wook?"

"Shyriiwook. It's their language."

"I heard it was called Wookieespeak."

Dameron blinked a few times and looked thoughtful, like he'd never heard that word before, or like he'd heard it somewhere and was trying to place it. Chewbacca asked a wary question. Dameron translated it. "He wants to know where you heard it called that." The man used a neutral voice that made the question sound normal, when H-482 had heard perfectly well it wasn't.

"A …" H-482 trailed off as he looked at the Wookiee, realizing what the rest of the answer contained – and the reputation of Wookiees for berserk rages. Wookiees lived long enough that this one may well have been personally involved. He shifted his stance and the grip on his blaster.

"We okay?" Dameron asked, clueing to the shift (or maybe he'd understood the Wookiee's tone just fine). His light question still had every one of the Rebels looking over at him, which meant the troopers were looking, too. Even DL-1364 this time.

Defensively, H-482 said, "There weren't any slaves where I was stationed with the Empire. Not Wookiee ones. Not any ones." He paused. Chewbacca whuffed a neutral acknowledgement that was basic enough that H-482 understood it. H-482 went on, "I learned it from a Dowutin who claimed she'd been a slave-handler. If she was using a slur-word for it, I didn't know that. I'll call it … Shrywook from now on."

The Wookiee gave a mournful moan and chirp-type bark, then turned away. It defused H-482's concern that he might get attacked for incidental association with a slaver decades ago.

"That's really big of you," Dameron said with an approving nod that managed not to be condescending. "It's, uh, Shyriiwook."

"Shy-ree-wook?"

"Yeah, that's pretty close, but it's hard to tell with all the apparatus. You guys and your helmets." Dameron shook his head and patiently tried again. "Shyriiwook."

"Shy-rii-wook."

"Yeah, that's right. You got it!"

H-482 caught himself, realizing he was enjoying validation from some Rebel scum. Also, he'd actually learned something from one. He took the opportunity to change the subject. "If there's to be any chance we're not stuck out here overnight, we need to double-time it."

Dameron cast a dubious look at the sky, then ahead. "I don't know why we're not seeing the thing already. I know we skimmed for a long time, but …" He shrugged. "Come on guys, let's see what we can do about increasing the pace."