“I HAVE A REALLY LOUSY feeling here,” Dec told Sari as he brought their shuttle in for a landing by the gray bunker that sat in the middle of an expanse of deep dark green.

“You want to go back and face those First Order scouts? Or maybe go all the way back to Vodran and just hunt around for our friends until we get eaten by rancors or tawds or worse?” Sari responded, leaning over his shoulder to watch the ground grow closer beneath them.

“Nothing’s worse than a tawd,” Dec said, setting the shuttle down. He stood up. He was glad to be back on solid ground, anyway, even if they were facing the unknown. At the very least, maybe the bunker would have some fuel. They were low after all that evasive flying.

They packed some rations and hydration, as well as a stun rod they’d been given to ward off dianogas on Vodran, and walked down the boarding ramp into an eerie silence. Thick mist swirled around them, and they could barely make out the bunker in the near distance. There were no signs of life.

“Maybe it’s abandoned,” Sari reasoned.

“You think someone living by himself on an invisible moon in the Outer Rim is going to welcome us with a parade?” Dec replied.

“Good point, but now that you ask, that’s what I’d vastly prefer.” When Dec shot her a skeptical half scowl, Sari shrugged. “What? Parades are fun.”

They took a few steps forward before Dec put away his flashlight. “Light’s just bouncing off the mist,” he said. “We’re walking in blind.”

“Okay,” Sari said. Then, steeling herself, she added, “What’s the worst we could find?”

As they moved toward the bunker, a large paneled door slid up. Through the haze, they couldn’t see inside at all, but figures emerged from within. A gang of indistinct shapes, maybe a dozen of them, moved eerily to intercept Dec and Sari. Dec set his stun rod to charge. It hummed softly. Sari clenched her hands into tight fists the size of young Ewoks’ heads.

“What do you think?” asked Dec. “Guavian Death Gang?”

“Craygalon Marauders from Snowdn-4?” asked Sari.

“The Galgardi Syndicate?”

“Noreeno Horde?”

“Estipona Party Squad?”

Sari shot him a puzzled look. Dec explained, “They’re cannibals.”

“Oh.”

Dec and Sari hunched in ready positions. Maybe they would die on this invisible moon, and no one would ever know what happened to them. That they died fighting. That they died together, great friends, defending each other to the end.

“The Mangan Ring?”

“Bloody Montantis?”

“Droids.”

“Droids?”

“Look,” she said, pointing. “They’re droids.”

“We can definitely fight droids,” Dec said.

“They’re droids.” Sari shook her head, trying to explain. “We probably won’t have to fight them. How many territorial droids do you know? If they were sentries, they would have attacked already. No one sends a bunch of broken-down droids to fight. Do they?”

As the figures came more clearly into view, Dec saw that they were broken-down droids. A dozen of them, in various states of disrepair, all different classes and types. Some wobbly protocol droids of different heights. A floating probe droid with only a few spindly legs remaining. An astromech stutter-rolled, stopped, then continued toward them, emitting a low, prolonged tone. And more: a medical droid with half a head; a hulking construction droid; a lightweight navigation droid whose right hand had been replaced with the dual laser cannons of a B2 battle droid. She must have been their leader, for she met Dec and Sari first, stopping a couple of meters from them and raising her cannons. Behind her, her droid cohorts softly beeped and booped, blinking their signal lights.

Dec put down his stun rod and raised his hands. “We don’t want any trouble,” he said.

Sari put her hands in the air, too, and nodded. “No trouble.”

The navigation droid didn’t lower her cannons, even when all the robots lifted their heads skyward. A dirty gray-and-white astromech droid buzzed close to Dec. It passed him and his stun rod was gone.

“I might need that,” Dec said casually.

The B2 and the others all leveled their gazes at the interlopers. They moved forward again, surrounding Dec and Sari.

“What are they doing?” Dec asked. He was used to asking her things. Sari knew everything.

“Ask them,” she answered.

“They don’t seem real chatty.”

The oddball collection of droids walked, rolled, and hovered closer and closer.

“Too close,” Dec said, to no effect. He and Sari started pushing back, but the droids were solid. They wouldn’t be moved. Sari lost her footing and stumbled but didn’t fall; the droids around her were so tightly packed that they held her up. They held Dec just as firmly and started moving. As one, slowly, centimeter by centimeter, the droids pushed Dec and Sari along inside their metal cocoon, herding them toward the bunker.

“Let us out,” Dec managed, but he didn’t know which droid he was telling. Maybe all of them. He felt his jacket pulled off him. He grasped for it, tugging at the sleeve as it was stripped from him, but the droids were too strong. His satchel slipped to the ground and they walked over it.

He bumped against Sari, and she put her arm around him.

“Let’s go with them,” she said. “We don’t have a choice anyway.”

They stopped resisting and allowed the droids to carry them toward the dark open mouth of the bunker.

Some of the mist had cleared, the sun was shining harder and brighter than it had been, and Dec and Sari watched as the nav droid trekked out about halfway to their shuttle and raised her cannons again. There was a thrum as she activated them and then two electric spitting sounds—thoom! thoom!—as she fired. Plasma shots struck Dec and Sari’s shuttle and it exploded.

None of the droids moved against the thunderous noise or the hot fire that followed. Dec, catching Sari’s look, read in it his own thoughts precisely: They were stuck there. They were doomed. Things could not get worse.

Then they got worse.

Dec and Sari heard it before they saw it: a First Order scout shuttle descending outside the bunker where they’d just stood, where their smoldering wreck still remained. They saw the First Order pilot through the cockpit viewport, a stern-looking young man not much older than Dec himself.

The First Order shuttle touched down and the nav droid, now wearing Dec’s jacket, walked out to meet it.

Dec touched his head. He’d scraped it on one of the droid’s chassis during the pressed-in throng. It was bleeding. That was the least of his worries right then, though. The droids were about to turn him and Sari over to the First Order.