Planetfall always left Leia Organa a little disoriented. She supposed it was the transition between space travel and atmospheric flight that bothered her: Within a few minutes a planet changed from an object below you in space to the entirety of your surroundings, and it was strange to think that the two were in fact one and the same.
But this time, it was a relief to be enfolded by the outer envelope of Crait’s atmosphere. Her transport and the five others that had survived were finally safe from the First Order’s turbolasers.
But not for long, she knew.
Leaving Poe at the portside windows, she walked across the deck to the cockpit, acknowledging the nods and salutes of the weary soldiers, pilots, and technicians.
Goode and Nell were both exhausted, drained by a journey in which they’d been helpless, surviving only through luck that had eluded too many others. Leia knew there was a price to pay for being spared in such a fashion. All too soon, Goode and Nell would recall their escape from the Raddus not with relief at having lived but with guilt that others had not. And Leia knew that guilt would never leave them.
Leia acknowledged the problem and put it aside, out of mind. It was real, and she would do her best to help them, but it would only matter if they survived the coming hours.
So she verified that Goode and Nell had the coordinates Holdo had sent to all the transports, offered them encouraging words and a hand on the shoulder, and then left them alone—flying a brick like a U-55 loadlifter was chore enough without having the leader of the Resistance standing behind you.
She found Poe squinting out the viewport at the brightness around them. They were below the ionosphere now and able to discern surface features: vast white plains streaked with red and shot through with thin ribbons of blue, bordered by high, thin mountain ranges.
“We’re not equipped for cold weather,” Poe said anxiously.
“We don’t need to be,” Leia replied. “That isn’t snow. It’s salt.”
Poe frowned, studying the planet below. He wasn’t the first to be fooled by the broad expanses of Crait’s salt pans.
“You’ve been here before,” Poe said.
Leia nodded. “When I was young. Back before the hyperdrive was invented.”
That at least got her a smirk and a dismissive wave.
She let her mind go back decades, to the first time she’d seen this lonely world. She’d been a teenager then, an apprentice legislator in the Imperial Senate and a princess preparing to claim the crown of Alderaan, as per her homeworld’s ancient traditions.
Clues in obscure records had convinced Leia that something was happening on Crait, and she’d recklessly taken it on herself to investigate—only to stumble across an insurgent camp. One that had been established by her father, using Alderaanian credits funneled into secret accounts by her mother.
“It was a mining colony once,” Leia told Poe. “Abandoned because a labor dispute ate into the profit margins. The mining company built a shelter with blast doors to guard against crystal storms. That was what caught my father’s eye, back when he was putting the Rebellion together. His techs added a shield against orbital bombardment, but the real work had already been done.”
She had Poe’s attention now—he had grown up on his parents’ Alliance war stories, and as a young New Republic pilot his disappointment at missing out on the action had been palpable. She doubted he felt that way now.
“So there was a rebel base here?” he asked.
“No,” Leia said. “The Alliance didn’t exist yet. By the time it did, the Empire had changed its patrols, and my father worried that ship traffic in the area would be detected. We considered Crait as a new principal base after Yavin—did a survey and even brought some equipment. But there were complications.”
Poe raised his eyebrows inquiringly, but this wasn’t the time for telling tales.
“The coordinates went in my files after the peace with the Empire,” Leia said. “The files I kept just in case.”
That made Poe nod. Most of the Alliance’s military secrets had been turned over to the New Republic immediately after its formation, and had proven critical in the short, savage war against the remnants of the Empire. But Leia, Ackbar, and other rebel leaders had made sure to keep a few things back, as a safeguard against disaster. Their secret files contained navicomputer data for secret hyperspace routes, the location of rebel safeworlds, and any number of bolt-holes and equipment caches. Without them, the Resistance would have ceased to exist soon after its formation.
“Well, I suppose this qualifies as ‘just in case,’ ” Poe said.
“I suppose it does,” Leia said gravely, extracting her comlink. “Now let’s hope the codes for the blast door still work. Or we’re going to look pretty silly camped out on the doorstep when the First Order arrives.”
Fortunately, both Leia’s codes and the blast door’s huge drive mechanisms did still work. The transports flew low over a ridge and Poe spotted the grooves of trenches cutting across the salt plains, leading to a massive slab of a tower with a yawning portal set into it.
The transports came in low across the plain and set down in the tower’s gloomy interior. The last soldiers were coming down the ramp of the sixth and final transport when the first alarm was raised.
Leia hurried to the entrance and saw what she’d feared she’d see: the dots of new ships descending through the atmosphere. Holdo’s sacrifice had knocked the First Order back on its heels and given them time to reach the planet, but the respite had been temporary.
“They’re coming,” she said grimly. “Shut the door.”
Poe relayed Leia’s orders, shouting into the dim interior of the mine. The Resistance evacuees were busy doing any of a hundred things: unloading crates of equipment from the transports, trying to get consoles powered up, and passing out rifles and blast helmets.
“Get that shield door down and take cover!” Poe yelled.
An eerie tinkling noise reached his ears and he spied pinpricks of light at the back of the cavernous interior, in the deep shadows beyond the transports. He looked more closely, wondering if he was seeing things.
But no, it wasn’t his imagination. There really were animals back there—dozens of them. They were small—not much higher than a person’s knee, with long, pointy ears and drooping whiskers framing their faces. Their bodies glittered in the transports’ lights, and Poe realized what he’d thought was fur was actually a dense covering of crystal bristles. When the creatures moved, their fur made a sound that reminded him of the wind chimes of distant Pamarthe.
Whatever they were, they posed no threat—they weren’t hostile, just baffled that the quiet of their den had been disrupted by strange, two-legged invaders. Nor did they fear the new arrivals—after a few moments of indecision they snuffled at the Resistance soldiers curiously.
Poe shrugged. The galaxy was full of surprises. One day, maybe, he’d get to sample a few of them in peace.
One day, but not today.
The massive door was creeping downward. Poe silently urged it not to jam on its tracks or run out of power before it shut.
“Poe!”
That was Leia. He hurried across the base’s interior, dodging Resistance crewers, and stood next to her, just outside the heavy door. His boots crunched through loose bits of salt, and the air had a tang that was sharp in his nose.
A bat-winged ship was racing across the plains, barreling directly for the base. Six TIE fighters were trailing it. Poe couldn’t tell if they were escorts or pursuers, but the Resistance soldiers outside must have seen something he hadn’t, because they opened fire.
Poe expected the shuttle to veer off but saw at the last moment that the pilot was too desperate to do so. Poe backpedaled frantically and dived for cover as the shuttle’s top wing struck the blast door with an earsplitting screech. The wing sheared away and the craft tumbled across the deck, scattering Resistance fighters, and skidded to a halt in a shower of sparks. Behind it, the door shut with a deep boom.
Leia picked up a rifle and started raking the front of the shuttle with blasterfire. Poe and several soldiers joined her, and the shuttle’s viewports exploded.
Someone yelled frantically and a familiar pair of hands emerged from the shattered window, raised in surrender.
“Don’t shoot!” Finn cried out. “It’s us!”
Once the firing stopped he popped his head out, next to a wide-eyed Rose.
“Finn!” Poe said. “You’re not dead! Where’s my droid?”
The ramp descended and BB-8 rolled out, whistling energetically.
“Buddy!” Poe said, patting the astromech’s head and trying to make sense of the answering stream of droidspeak. “Really? That sounds intense. Look, we’re a little busy but you’ll have to tell me all about it later.”
Finn, still shaken, tried to get his breath. Rose looked around the base’s interior, shock and dismay on her face. Six transports, a hundred or so people.
“Is this all that’s left?” she asked Finn.
But Finn had no comfort to offer her. No one did.
“You know which end of a hydrospanner is which,” Poe told Rose. “That makes you our engineering department. Follow me—we need you.”
Leia had remembered the way to the base’s control room, but she wasn’t prepared for what poor condition it would be in. Years of salt corrosion had left the controls rusty and pitted, and the musk in the air suggested the foxlike creatures had made it part of their home.
Fortunately, the guts of the base’s systems had been sheltered and shielded. A few splices and workarounds and a hasty search for batteries got the key equipment powered up and more or less functional.
Poe exhaled and nodded at Finn and Leia.
“All right,” he told the Resistance members who had been pressed into service as technicians. “Shields are up so they can’t hit us from orbit. Use all our power to broadcast a distress signal to the Outer Rim.”
“Use my signature code,” Leia said. “This base has sat derelict for thirty years—we meant this to be a hideout, not a fortress. Any allies of the Resistance, it’s now or never.”
Rose entered the control room, and Finn could see the exhaustion on her face and in the way she held herself. She was barely keeping herself together. But then that was true of all of them.
“What have we got?” Poe asked, though Rose’s expression had already told him that he wouldn’t like the answer.
“Rotted munitions, rusted-out artillery, some half-gutted ski speeders,” Rose said helplessly.
Poe nodded. There was nothing he could say—if the base had a secret stash of gunships or hidden turbolasers, Leia would have known about it.
Finn scowled and Poe knew what his friend was thinking—that they’d traded being dead in space for being dead in a hole. After all, it was what they were all thinking.
“Let’s pray that big-ass door holds long enough for help to come,” Poe said.
As if in answer, a boom rattled the room—deep, low, and resonant. A trickle of red dust fell from the ceiling.
After a moment, another boom rolled through the caverns. And Finn knew no barrier would keep the First Order out for long. Its leaders would crack the very planet in two to get at them.