—Chapter 17: Recovery—
Ben gestured for Rey to follow him, and the two of them proceeded up the hallway from where the trucks were steadily pouring forth. Lightsabers ignited, they carved their way through the torrent of blaster fire. Upon seeing the lightsabers, several stormtroopers produced vibroblades from their belts to better defend against the electromagnetic threats. However, they were still no match for the coordinated efforts of two highly skilled Force users, and Ben and Rey steadily progressed up the sloped hallway.
"This corridor leads to the docking bay, where we'll find the Central Command office. The officers will most likely have barricaded themselves inside there. Come on!" shouted Ben to Rey, slicing the arm off of an attacking trooper as he lunged at him with his vibroblade.
They ran up the hallway, cutting through stormtrooper after stormtrooper as they went. They passed the area where the trucks were parked. Judging by the number of trucks sitting idle in the carrel, they weren't moving the children out as rapidly as they could be.
"Looks like we should have brought more drivers," lamented Rey.
"Once we get this place locked down, we can call in some of the other squadrons to assist with moving the children," replied Ben.
The long access hallway had been climbing ever so steadily back toward the ground floor, and Rey could begin to make out the wide opening into the docking bay. To their left, a bay of windows revealed several nervous looking officers barricaded behind a wall of armed stormtroopers, blasters leveled at the windows and door that Ben and Rey needed to breach
Ben ran up to the door and, with a flick of his wrist, disengaged the locks holding the door secure, flinging it wide. The stormtroopers opened fire, quickly reducing the windows to dust and the metal doorframe to a blackened, smoking edifice. Rey threw her hands out, knocking the troopers backwards into the officers and the control panels. She hoped the impact hadn't damaged any equipment they would need in order to disable the facility's defenses.
Ben held out his arm, stilling the hostile occupants of the cramped command center. Rey approached the stormtroopers and stated with authority: "You will leave this room and engage any other stormtroopers you encounter. You will assist the Resistance fighters in their rescue of the children."
The stormtroopers weakly repeated Rey's words back to her, and subsequently left as Ben released them from his hold. As they exited, some headed for the docking bay and others for the incubation facility, firing in different directions. The stormtroopers thus neutralized, Ben and Rey turned their attention to the two gutless officers in front of them.
"We need you to order your troops away from this facility and lock it down, immediately. Give the orders, now," explained Ben to the officers, matter-of-factly.
"The Supreme Leader would kill us if we did that," said the older officer.
"We will kill you if you don't," said Rey. Ben studied her, trying to determine the degree to which she actually meant what she'd just said. It didn't seem like her.
"I would rather die here than die a traitor," replied the officer as resolutely as he could muster.
Ben could tell from his insignia that this man was the higher ranking of the two officers, and therefore more likely to be knowledgeable of the First Order's machinations. He turned to Rey and said, "I'll get whatever else we need from this one, you go to work on that one to get this facility neutralized." With that, Ben held out his hand to the officer's face, and began probing his mind for the information they needed. The officer began to sweat profusely, a pained expression twisting his features. Ben leaned into the man's face. "It only gets worse from here. You could make this easier on yourself by answering voluntarily."
Lieutenant Ainu'u looked worriedly at her older comrade, then at Rey. Ainu'u had fallen into a chair when Rey had assaulted them with her Force-fueled attack, and the officer remained seated in apparent resignation as she looked back at her captor. Rey took a step forward and peered down at her menacingly. Ainu'u held up her hands defensively and stammered, "I can lock down the facility—it's no problem."
Rey almost looked disappointed by how readily her prey had acquiesced to defeat, but she took a step back and gestured for the officer to move to the control station. The officer cautiously rose from her seat and stepped over to the controls. Rey read her mind for her intentions and could see no attempt at artifice, so she allowed the officer to access the controls freely. The older officer squirmed and gurgled in the seat beside them as Ben continued to ruthlessly sift through his brain.
"Attention all troops, this is Lieutenant Ainu'u, commander of the Adragna and commanding officer in charge of this facility. You are ordered to stand down. Retreat to your quarters immediately and engage no further in the defense of this facility. Repeat: You are ordered to stand down." Ainu'u then turned her gaze to her diminutive captor, and looked to her for approval at what she'd said. Rey gave a nod, and proceeded to swipe her hand at the officer's temple, tugging the invisible cord holding her consciousness in place and rendering her immediately insensate. The officer slumped into her seat at the console, and Rey turned to Ben, who appeared to be wrapping up his interrogation of the senior officer.
"Finished?" she asked.
"Finished. Let's get the hell out of here," said Ben as he pulled away from the panting and dazed officer. Rey swept her hand at his temple as well, knocking him out before following Ben out the door.
—
At the controls of his truck, Finn raced up the hallway toward the docking bay. He had hardly believed his ears when the order to stand down was given, but the troops that had been attacking them glanced to one another, then proceeded to drop their weapons and step back, hands raised in submission. Surrender seemed to come as a relief—these soldiers were themselves kidnapped children, and Finn could imagine that, had it been his job to defend this place, he'd certainly have had second thoughts about it. The Resistance fighters wasted no time filling their trucks with children and speeding off toward the hangar.
Some of the Resistance fighters were still in the incubation facility prying the kids out of their holding tanks, but about a half-dozen trucks had already been filled and were on their way to the transport ship. Blue Squadron had reported only minor injuries suffered in the acquisition of the vessel, and most of their pilots were on their way to the incubation facility to assist with recovering the children. Additionally, now that the guards had all turned tail, pilots from several other squadrons had easily infiltrated the facility and were applying their efforts to the rescue.
Ben and Rey had left the control room and were running back toward the incubation chambers. Optimistically, there still had to be over a thousand children remaining in the hibernation pods, awaiting rescue. Truck after truck raced up the hallway, Resistance fighters greeting Ben and Rey with cautious optimism as they passed them going the opposite direction.
When they reached the area where the trucks were parked, each of them boarded their own vehicle and fired up the engines. Hurriedly, they returned to the large facility, and Ben veered toward the back end of the chamber, passing rows of occupied incubation pods. Rey followed.
"Where are you going?" Rey shouted over the whine of her engine.
"This room was full when we got here. I'm guessing there are more children in the next room over. We need to disconnect them from the facility as soon as possible and start loading up trucks of our own."
Rey didn't respond, the high-pitched roar of their vehicles making hearing prohibitively difficult, but she understood and remained on his tail. They passed several Resistance fighters diligently working to retrieve children from the incubation pods, and eventually reached the end of the long room.
There was a wide door at the end of the chamber, shut and locked against intrusion. Ben screeched to a halt in front of it, disembarked from his truck and strode up to an access panel to the left of the door. After punching in a few numbers, the door slid open and Ben reboarded his truck, driving forward only a few more feet before parking again in front of a fresh row of occupied pods.
The facility was designed to operate like an assembly line. Each incubation chamber connected back to the docking bay via a long hallway, and completed clones would march up the halls, through armories, and immediately board transports to deploy them to wherever. Rey had to admit, it was all very efficient, in a crass, inhumane sort of way; very orderly. Muttering to herself, Rey pulled her truck forward to meet Ben, who was peering through the glass of one of the pods. Inside, Rey could make out the face of a broad-shouldered blonde girl, probably about thirteen years old.
"She's older than the others," Rey remarked with some surprise.
Ben glanced at Rey, then back into the pod. "That's because she's not one of the stolen children. She's a clone," Ben stated with disappointment. He surveyed the rows beyond, and saw only more blonde girls. "Shit."
"These are the clones?" Rey couldn't hide her bewilderment. "Ben, these are kids too, we have to get them out of here!"
Ben glared at her in disbelief. "Are you serious? Think logically. The ship we're stealing is only big enough to hold the kids who were stolen, we can't possibly get all these clones out of here. It's impossible."
Rey considered what he was saying. "Okay, you're right, I see your point. But we can't just see them here now, turning into slaves of the First Order, and walk out without doing something. Is there anything else we could do?"
Ben threw his arms up helplessly. "I suppose we could kill them. Would that make you happier?"
She scowled at him. "Can we at least, I don't know, turn off the brainwashing? Maybe slow down their growth? That would at least buy us some time before the First Order pits them against us in battle."
Ben glanced around the room, looking for something. Rey followed his gaze and eventually spotted what looked like a control station nestled into the wall to the right of the pods. He ran over to it and started punching queries into its databanks.
"What are you looking for?" Rey asked.
"Well, first of all, I want to know where the hell the other Lothal kids are so we're not peering into every goddamned pod in this whole blasted facility trying to find them. Secondly, I'm looking into the things you asked about. I should at least be able to turn this shit off, like I did in the other room…"
Even if Rey weren't so attuned to Ben's emotions, he was wearing his frustration on his sleeve with every curse and exasperated gesture.
"There, thank god, the kids we want are just in the next chamber over," he stated with some relief, his agitation abating somewhat. "This whole room is filled with clones made at the same time, so they're all developed to an equivalent age of about ten years old."
"Ten? Are you sure that's it? They look older…"
"I don't doubt that, but Phasma was always built like a giant. Yes, I'm sure." He turned from the control panel to look at her. "So here's what I can tell you. From this station, I can kill them all. I could also just jumpstart their internal organs to take over and shut them off from further inputs. That would stop their accelerated aging and their mental conditioning. They'd still probably be pretty screwed up people, and they'd be naked and on their own here—a quick death might be kinder. Another option is to just leave them be. There might be other possibilities, but I wouldn't know without probing around at this console a little more, and I don't know that we have time for that." He looked her over, gauging her reaction. "So what do you want me to do?"
Rey stared back, nearly incapacitated with indecision. Why were there only bad choices? Her thinking was interrupted by a Resistance fighter driving into their chamber and preparing to open the hatch on one of the pods. He stopped when he noticed the apparent age of the child. Spotting Rey and Ben, he called out, "These aren't ours, are they?"
"No, these are clones," Ben answered flatly. "Ours are in the next chamber over. Use 3100-CRD to get in, then flip the toggle on the console inside to shut down the pods."
The Resistance fighter gave a thumbs up, then casually fired a blaster bolt into the pod where the clone was sleeping, killing her. "A stormtrooper's a stormtrooper, eh?" he shouted to them, with an air that almost sounded like triumph. He reboarded his truck and sped off, firing blindly into the rows of pods as he passed them by, peppering them with damage as he made his way toward the rear door. Rey stared open-mouthed at the pods, eventually setting her jaw in an expression Ben didn't recognize on her.
Ben regarded her pitifully. With a dry bit of facetiousness, he said, "Well, that's one way to deal with them."
Rey turned to face him, her expression shifting into a determined, grim resoluteness. "Kill these. Leave the rest. Another day, we'll come back and deal with this place. Now let's get the kids we came for and get out of here. We have to hurry." She walked dolefully back to her truck, engaged the engine and took off toward the next chamber. Ben watched her leave, a calmness in his eyes that belied the sadness he felt for her. In this moment, Rey was learning what warfare was really like. She had learned that in war, you don't get to save everyone, and the enemy's children are still the enemy. At the end of the day, you have to live with the decisions you've made. Ben gave himself another few seconds to mourn Rey's innocence, then moved to input her commands.
Before he could enter anything into the console, something, some nagging sensation in the back of his mind, said "don't". He paused, reconsidering. Rey's words the day they left the base together came back to him: "Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should." He could kill these children—Rey had asked him to, even. He had felt Rey's darkness rising the further they had gotten into the facility, and she may well have been taking cues from him.
Though he had come to believe that living on either extreme of the Force was wrong, he realized that he—that both of them—were still struggling to pinpoint where the middle was. He thought about everything he'd ever done that he regretted, and recognized that much of what he'd been doing since they landed here was along those same lines, he'd just been doing it for a different side. And Rey… would she still be happy with this decision tomorrow?
Despite time being against him, Ben couldn't help pondering. He could tell he was on the precipice of something important. Watching that Resistance fighter shoot that child had taught Rey a lesson, but was it the right lesson? Was this a change he wanted for her?
He had come along on this mission to make sure that Rey came back to him. If he didn't do something different, he was going to lose her. One way, or another.
His mind raced for a solution. What had she said the difference was between the Resistance and First Order? He tried to remember… "We even respect our prisoners…"
The First Order could justify killing children if they believed those children stood in the way of progress. Anything that was done was justified, so long as it moved the First Order's agenda forward.
Ben remembered his own childhood. He remembered Snoke. Everything Snoke had said to him. Everything Snoke had done to him. Everything, all of it, would have been justified, because it was done to weaken the Republic, weaken the Jedi, and bolster the First Order. At the time that Snoke had come to him, Ben was the enemy's child. If Ben killed these children, Ben would never be more than Snoke's echo.
As though electrified, Ben's fingers moved across the console, exploring the network, looking for different options. It took at least a minute or two of probing around, but eventually he found something he thought might work. He made changes he believed Rey would approve of, and discovered that Tonkin's administrative override code would work to lock out anyone else who tried to reverse what he'd done.
Rey needed him right now, more than she had ever needed him before. He would show her that he was beginning to understand. A moment ago, she had made a bad decision, but what she had tried to teach him before was beginning to sink in. He needed more time to fully comprehend, and to change, but he did what he believed Rey would have wanted had she been acting more like herself. She had temporarily forgotten her own lesson, and he blamed himself for that.
They would come back and deal with this place another day, but when they did, they would find these children alive.
—
In orbit above Kamino, Snap Wexley sat at the communications panel of the frigate, ready to relay information between the fighters and the Resistance base on Dendrokaan. So far, it was unreal how smoothly this had been going. Besides one dead pilot, shot while infiltrating the chamber where the kids were being held, there were very few costs to this mission—a few damaged X-wings and some minor injuries comprised the lion's share of the reports he was getting.
"Snap, all the kids have been found, and most are loaded aboard the transport." It was Poe, who had been monitoring the ground situation from the air above the facility. "Fighters are collecting the last of them now. I'm guessing we're here for another twenty minutes or so before they're ready for takeoff."
"Roger that, Poe! Everything up here is quiet. Once the transport's in the air, we'll be on our way," replied Snap cheerfully.
Poe closed the channel, and BB-8 beeped derisively from his place at the back of Poe's X-wing. "No, he didn't jinx anything, BB-8, don't worry so much." BB-8 made his own digitized analog of a grumbling noise, then proceeded to moodily plug himself into a terminal inside the X-wing—the droid equivalent of storming off to his room, Poe guessed. Well, whatever his problem was, things here would be wrapping up soon.
