Battle to the End Read online

  Vizago laughed. “Kanan? A Jedi? You’re funny, kid. That scoundrel couldn’t be a Jedi any more than you could.”

  Ezra recalled how much Kanan despised dealing with the gangster. Now Ezra felt the same way. But he needed the information Vizago had. So he closed his eyes, extended his hand, and, sinking himself into the Force, imagined the stack of Vizago’s crates. He pictured one crate levitating from the stack and moving in Vizago’s direction.

  Vizago stopped laughing. When Ezra opened his eyes, Vizago was staring up in shock at a crate that hovered over him. He dove for cover.

  Ezra let the crate fall. It thudded in the dirt.

  “You,” Vizago said, picking himself up, “you are a Jedi?”

  “And so is Kanan.” Ezra steeled his voice, aware that Kanan would despise what he was about to offer. “Help me and you’ll have a Jedi owing you a favor.”

  Vizago showed a needle-toothed grin. “Come with me, boy. Alone.”

  Neither Zeb nor Sabine said anything, but their glances told Ezra to be wary. Vizago could be trusted only as long as the situation benefited him.

  Ezra followed the gangster into the Broken Horn, behind droids restacking crates in the cargo hold. “Look,” Vizago said, “ever since you blew up the Empire’s comm tower—”

  “That wasn’t us,” Ezra said.

  “—they have no long-range communications,” Vizago continued. “So they’ve started using these.” Vizago took out a datapad, pressed a button, and projected the image of what looked like an astromech droid, although with Imperial markings.

  “Droid couriers,” Vizago said. “They take data from the city up to their communication ship in orbit.”

  “What kind of data?” Ezra asked.

  “Everything. You name it—personnel, weapons, deployments”—Vizago paused, as if for dramatic effect—“prisoners.”

  “Kanan?”

  “Possibly, but I can’t guarantee that,” Vizago said.

  Ezra shook his head. Vizago never could guarantee any of his information. It was a shame they couldn’t deal with someone else. “So what do you need in return?”

  Vizago chewed it over with a smile. “Today, nothing. Tomorrow, who knows? I’ll call you when I want to collect.”

  Ezra didn’t like that part of the bargain, but he didn’t have a choice. He exited the Broken Horn and walked up to Sabine and Zeb. Their backs were to him as they conversed with someone—maybe one of Vizago’s droids?

  “It’s okay, guys. I have a lead—”

  Sabine and Zeb turned around, revealing that the third member of their conversation wasn’t a droid, but Hera! “For what you just bargained, you better have something more than a lead!” she said, heading back to the Ghost.

  Ezra rushed after her. “Hera, I know you’re mad, but—”

  “Mad? Try furious. You just put all our lives in jeopardy. I gave you a direct order and you disobeyed me.”

  Ezra understood how she felt. But she’d taught him that being a rebel meant sometimes you didn’t play by the rules. “It paid off. I know how to find where Kanan is,” he stated, before adding with less certainty, “maybe.”

  Hera stopped at the Ghost’s landing ramp but kept her back to Ezra. “Maybe? All that for ‘maybe’?”

  “Hera, none of us want to give up on Kanan,” Ezra said as Sabine and Zeb joined him.

  The tips of Hera’s head-tails curled, a Twi’lek sign of aggravation. “And you think I do?”

  “No, I don’t,” Ezra said. “That’s why I took this risk.”

  Hera sighed, then faced them. “What did you learn?”

  “I have a plan,” Ezra said, looking up the landing ramp, where an orange-and-white astromech droid waited in the hatch. “And it involves Chopper.”

  CHOPPER BUZZED nervously while Sabine gave him a new paint job. Each spray of black and white paint made him look more and more like an Imperial courier droid and less and less like himself.

  “It’s for Kanan,” Ezra said. “We’ll paint you back fresh and new once we rescue him.”

  They’d better paint him back. Chopper detested being mistaken for a model with an inferior central processor. But he didn’t grumble as much as he normally would. His probability module determined that his temporary paint job would indeed increase their chances of finding Kanan.

  At the Capital City spaceport, Sabine and Zeb took out a squad of stormtroopers and stole the accompanying courier droid. It was Chopper’s job to replace the droid.

  “I know you can do this, Chopper,” Ezra said to him.

  It was almost an insult: Chopper could play this role with 93 percent of his circuits off-line. Imperials didn’t program their droids with personalities. All they wanted were beeps of yes and no.

  Chopper wheeled into the hangar where the stormtroopers had been leading the courier droid. Two troopers guarded the ramp of a transport shuttle.

  “There’s the courier, but where’s his escort?” one trooper said to the other.

  “Not our problem. We’re running late as it is,” his comrade said. He waited for Chopper to roll up the ramp before he spoke into his wrist comm. “BN-Seven Forty-Nine to pilot. Courier is aboard.”

  Chopper planted his treads on the cabin floor as the shuttle took off. The cockpit blast doors were open, so once the shuttle had gained orbit, his photoreceptor made out their destination in the viewscreen. They were heading toward a light cruiser.

  Chopper couldn’t see the Ghost anywhere in the star field, which he calculated was a good thing. They were out there, flying undetected by the Imperials.

  The shuttle docked with the light cruiser. Chopper went out with the troops the shuttle had ferried and switched on the beacon Sabine had installed inside him. It would allow Hera to track his location on the cruiser with the Ghost’s extensive passive sensors.

  He trundled down the cruiser’s main corridor and onto the bridge. It was a busy place. Officers conversed with the captain while technicians consulted screens and operated their various stations. “You’re late, Two-Six-Four,” one technician said. “Plug in.”

  Chopper tooted back at him in binary. He was never late. It was the shuttle pilot who was late. Chopper had one of the best internal clocks ever invented.

  Following the technician’s orders, he extended a connector arm from his dome and inserted it into a port. Instantly, he had access to the entire Imperial network. Given the network’s size, sifting through it to find out where Kanan was being held would take three hours, forty-four minutes, and eleven seconds—too much time, according to their mission plan. So he began downloading and copying everything he could with the intent to search it all later.

  The technician glanced at his monitor, which was still blank. “Where’s the data? I’m not seeing it.”

  Chopper wanted to zap the man. Organics could be so impatient. He whistled and sent a stream of text from one of his downloaded files to the screen.

  “Hold it—you’re not authorized to copy communication logs!”

  Chopper tweedled a fake apology as he searched the files for something with the proper security clearance to display. “What’s the problem here?” a nearby officer asked.

  “This droid is malfunctioning, sir,” said the technician.

  Though he had completed downloading only 57 percent of the available data, Chopper recognized his time to complete the mission was up. He rotated the small radar dish on his dome and sent a signal to the Ghost. Now success depended on them.

  “Looks like an older model,” said the officer. “You’d better check the encryption codes.”

  The technician bent down to inspect Chopper. He never put a finger on the droid. An explosion suddenly shook the bridge, knocking the technician back.

  “We’re under attack!” yelled the officer.

  Chopper disconnected just as the bridge rocked again. The console Chopper had been plugged into sparked into flame. Alarms rang out. Officers and technicians rushed about. No one paid any attention to
the black-and-white courier droid heading for the turbolift.

  The lift took Chopper down to the cruiser’s lower corridor. He angled straight for an emergency air lock and began to operate the controls with his manipulator. Four stormtroopers hustled past on a duty errand—only to be sucked out the air lock when Chopper opened it.

  Chopper flew out with the troopers into the emptiness of space. Unlike the troopers’ armored suits, he was designed to operate at full functionality in the zero-gravity environment. While the troopers tumbled and whirled, Chopper received Hera’s message to “hit it” and fired his booster rocket in the direction of her transmission.

  The Ghost peeled away from a strafing run on the cruiser to head toward Chopper. The freighter was noticeably damaged, and any of the cruiser’s cannon shots might permanently cripple it. But the Ghost skirted the latest barrage and opened its cargo bay. Chopper burned his last bit of fuel to give his rocket maximum thrust. He shot inside the cargo bay, and right as his booster sputtered out, his manipulator arm grabbed the ladder. He held on against the vacuum of space.

  When the ship was out of the cruiser’s range and descending toward Lothal, Chopper released his grip and steadied himself on the floor. Zeb, Sabine, and Ezra hurried into the bay. “That was amazing, Chopper!” Ezra said.

  Chopper pumped his manipulator arm in organic fashion. Maybe in addition to a new paint job, he’d get a lubrication bath at last after all this.

  After Chopper was scooped up, Ezra sat in Kanan’s seat and took in the view of his home planet through the cockpit canopy. Next to him, Hera piloted the Ghost toward one of their hiding spots while Sabine and Chopper searched through the downloaded files. Zeb hunched in the doorway to avoid hitting his rather large head.

  “I’m proud of you,” Hera said to Ezra. “You stepped up and took the lead. Kanan has taught you well.”

  “So have you,” Ezra said. It was the truth. They had all taught him well—even Zeb.

  Sabine stopped scrolling through her datapad. “I think we found something.”

  Chopper projected a hologram of Kanan, stamped with the Imperial symbol, in the air. “Kanan is on Governor Tarkin’s Star Destroyer, the Sovereign,” Sabine went on. “It’s still here above Lothal, but it’s scheduled to leave soon.”

  “Where to?” Hera asked.

  “The Mustafar system,” Sabine said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  Hera’s head-tails twitched, ever so slightly, and she stared out the canopy. Ezra was a novice at reading Twi’lek body language, but it was obvious she was afraid.

  And Hera was never afraid.

  “Hera?” Sabine said.

  Hera let out a breath. “I’ve only heard the name once, from Kanan. He said Mustafar is where Jedi go to die.”

  Lothal’s beautiful golden-green surface shone like an emerald through the canopy. Ezra did not see it. He saw only his master, bound in shackles, struggling to survive.

  IMPERIAL STORMTROOPER TK-626 and his comrade MB-223 made their 109th patrol of the airfield that night. It would be an understatement to say that TK-626 was frustrated. The recruiter had told him that after a few months of joining Lothal’s stormtrooper corps, he would be assigned to a Star Destroyer and be able to travel the stars. Months had passed since he had enlisted, and he was still on Lothal doing night duty with MB-223. He knew this was partially a punishment for the graffiti attack by an artist on the same airfield. Yet that was a single incident. Nothing had ever happened on their watch again. He was beginning to think he had made a mistake in joining the Empire.

  “Miss me, bucket heads?” said a filtered voice behind them.

  He and MB-223 spun around. A female in multicolored Mandalorian armor stood on the wall that surrounded the airfield. Though it could have been anyone under that helmet, TK-626 had no doubt she was the artist who had caused all his troubles in the first place. She carried a mini-airbrush in her hand.

  There was no hesitation this time. He and MB-223 opened fire.

  The artist ran along the top of the wall, leaping past their blaster bolts. “Yup, you definitely missed me.”

  TK-626 tongued his helmet comlink. “We have an intruder on the north side, sector nine. The artist is back. Sound the alarm!”

  They ran after her. Alarms rang across the airfield. Stormtroopers from other patrols joined them. Together, they would ensure that there would be no graffiti that night.

  Sprinting past the grounded transport ships toward the TIEs, TK-626 thought he heard voices behind him, but he didn’t look. If he lost the artist, his career was finished for good. Stopping her was the only thing that might finally get him promoted out of there.

  One of his shots nearly took her off the wall. “You got a little better,” she said.

  TK-626 concentrated his fire with MB-223. Still, somehow she dove off the wall and dodged the blasts. “But I got a lot better.”

  She climbed up the wing of a TIE fighter, then leapt to the top of the fuselage. Meanwhile, a transport lifted up from the airfield.

  TK-626 checked the timetable on his helmet display. No transports were scheduled to be launched until the next day. It could only mean the transport had been hijacked by…

  Rebels.

  The artist had been a distraction for the rebels to hot-wire and steal the transport. TK-626 adjusted his aim and started shooting at the departing transport. MB-223 followed his lead. If that transport escaped, night patrol would seem like a blessing. TK-626 and his comrade would be assigned to permanent cleaning duty.

  The transport’s cargo lift extended downward, giving the artist a platform to leap onto. Once she got her footing, she waved down to the stormtroopers. “Bye-bye, bucket heads!”

  TK-626 wanted to shoot her right then and there, but another familiar sound gave him pause. Attached to the TIE fighter the artist had climbed was a blinking, beeping red dot.

  “Not again,” TK-626 said. Permanent cleaning duty suddenly didn’t seem so bad after all. “Everyone, evacuate!”

  He and MB-223 turned and ran. When the red dot stopped beeping, TK-626 covered his head and dove to the ground.

  The TIE fighter behind him exploded, setting flame to an entire row of adjacent TIEs.

  After all the debris had settled, TK-626 pushed himself up. The hijacked transport whipped through the smoke of the explosion. The plumes formed the same symbol the artist had painted on a TIE wing months earlier. It had two wings swooping upward, around an avian head.

  The Starbird.

  TK-626 put his head back down to the ground, even though the explosion was over. The Empire had recruited him because he’d been a bully. Now he felt like a chump.

  Mustafar. Like Sabine, Ezra had never heard of the planet. The Ghost’s navicomputer entry had little information about it, revealing only that it was a young planet with many active volcanoes.

  A world where Jedi went to die, Hera had said.

  Which Jedi? And why? Ezra kept asking himself these questions as he and his crewmates traveled through hyperspace toward the planet.

  They had hidden the Ghost on Lothal and taken the stolen Imperial transport instead. In the transport, they could approach Tarkin’s Star Destroyer and not be instantly blasted to ions.

  But when they emerged from hyperspace, Ezra saw there was more than one Star Destroyer—there was a fleet of them, centered on the Sovereign. Through the cockpit canopy, they glowed like white arrowheads against the cracked volcanic surface of Mustafar. The black dots of hundreds of TIE fighters and transports winked in and out as they circled the destroyers.

  “I’ll send in our transponder code as soon as we know Kanan is there,” Hera said, sitting in the main pilot’s seat. “Ezra?”

  Huddled in the cockpit, Sabine, Zeb, and Chopper all looked to Ezra. They were relying on him as never before, though he knew they were skeptical about his abilities. He was skeptical, too. Trying to sense Kanan over such a large distance was not going to be easy.

  “Well, here goes nothi
ng.” Ezra closed his eyes, took a breath, and allowed the Force to flow through him. Make a connection, Kanan had told him. Ezra channeled himself outward, searching for a connection—the most powerful, personal connection he’d ever had with someone in his life.

  As they neared the Sovereign, he began to feel the thousands of presences on the ship. Somewhere among them was Kanan—he hoped.

  “Ezra,” Hera said. “Is he there?”

  ELECTRICITY COURSED from the chair into Kanan’s body. He felt as if he was being fried from the inside out. Despite the torment, he gave no straight answer to the Inquisitor’s questions. He only screamed.

  The Inquisitor took his time walking across the detention cell before he switched off the chair’s shock function. Kanan shuddered and fell forward in his binders. His body smoldered and twitched. The Inquisitor chuckled.

  “Still protecting your precious crew. Quite admirable. But what I want to know is about the other rebels—particularly one code named Fulcrum.”

  Kanan repeated what he’d said during all the other sessions. “I know nothing of a larger rebellion. And if I did, I’d rather give my life than tell you.”

  The Inquisitor stepped closer to him. “So heroic. Just like your master.”

  At the mention of his master, Kanan flinched. The memory of her death hurt him more than any jolt of electricity could. The Inquisitor noticed and smiled.

  “Tell me, Jedi: how did you survive Order Sixty-Six? Hmmm?”

  Kanan kept his mouth shut. That was a rhetorical question meant to hurt him. He could sense that the Inquisitor already knew the answer.

  “It was your master, Billaba, who laid down her life for yours,” the Inquisitor said. “Do you remember her last word to you? Her last and final breath before she died?”

  Kanan said nothing. The Inquisitor leaned even closer. “You do, don’t you? You see her in your sleep. You hear her voice when you wake.”