I've started to post this up on AO3... but all new parts will be put here first. You can find it here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6295426/chapters/14426950
No matter how hard he tried, Hux couldn’t focus on doing his work. He had what seemed like a mountain of paperwork to fill out- Lieutenant Parsons, the main engineer of the weapon, had done some more calculations and had determined that they were going to need another ten tons of cured concrete and another four tons of plastine for the weapon, and now Hux was going to have to figure out a way to get an order of that size from one of the Outer Rim worlds to Starkiller Base without running into a Resistance blockade. Obviously a crew from a First Order-affiliated planet wouldn’t be able to get through, but space pirates were a notoriously unreliable lot. Maybe he could get a neutral planet to cough up a crew? The government of Coo’sa still owed the First Order a favor from the time they’d helped capture and kill the masterminds behind a plot to assassinate the teenage son of the planet’s king. No, that wasn’t going to work- that same prince was attending school in the New Republic, and King Durlosu was quite a bit less friendly towards the First Order as a result.
Any other option that he was able to come up with had other problems with it. Other planets that might have been willing to help at one point or another had already been assimilated into the First Order, or had been taken over as satellite states of the Republic. And now that he thought about it, he couldn’t think of a suitable pirate crew that would have been willing to work with them- Bala-Tik had dropped out of communication a while ago, Maka Bakune and her crew had been executed for their crimes by the New Republic, Han Solo was part of the Resistance and obviously wouldn’t be willing to help the First Order, Ryoro Nagemic and his crew hadn’t been heard from for over two years and were presumed dead, and Beathri Diala had taken time off from piracy because she’d gotten pregnant. That… was pretty much all of the pirates he knew enough about to decide whether or not to trust them. It was a problem, really- there wasn’t a directory of pirates one could consult to do quasi-legal building material runs. And the only pirate world Hux knew of was Takodana, which was well-known to be controlled by a Resistance-sympathizer.
Maybe Phasma would know someone he could use- she did seem to know everyone.
Just as Hux was starting to debate the merits of just taking the Finalizer, loading it up with a bunch more guns, and towing the building materials along behind it, his communicator chirped. Really hoping that it wasn’t Lieutenant Parsons with more bad news about how much more stuff he was going to need to finish the weapon, he answered it.
“Tarkin Hux here.”
"Sir?” It was a woman’s voice, so at least that meant it wasn’t Parsons. “This is Kannanon Arkkriss, from the medical bay. If you have a moment, I need you to come down here. There’s something I need to discuss with you.”
Hux felt his stomach sink- there were only two people currently in the medical bay, and he was certain that nothing good would require him to go down there. Either Mitaka had something more serious than the Kuyper pox, or something had gone wrong with Ben. “What’s going on?”
“It would probably be best if I spoke to you in person, but your patient thinks he can feel something rattling around in his lungs. His theory is that the hemorrhage, ah, knocked something loose for lack of a better way to put it and that it needs to come out. He wants us to do an exploratory surgery on him to try to find it.”
“Can’t you do imaging to find it instead of just cutting him open?”
“Well, that’s the problem,” the doctor replied. “We did do imaging and didn’t see anything. But we also did the imaging before the hemorrhage and it wasn’t safe to move him to do more of it once he’d fallen unconscious.”
“Then do the imaging now!” Hux snapped. And this woman was supposed to be an elite doctor?
“He won’t let us, he’s demanding we just anesthetize him and take it out immediately or he’s going to take the scalpel to his own chest,” came the response. “We managed to calm him down long enough to get him to agree to wait until we heard what you had to say about it first, considering you were the one who wanted him to stay alive.”
“He wouldn’t be able to do it himself,” Hux said. “He’s the one who keeps yelling about how he can’t be the one to kill himself, that would probably extend to doing surgery on himself as well. Do the imaging and then if you see anything, do the surgery.”
“Sir,” came the deferential reply, before the comm link closed.
Hux pressed his fingers to his temples. Once again, he found himself wondering two things- one, why he cared so much about what happened to this one man, and two, why this man seemed so determined to put himself through more torment. Hadn’t he already had enough of that? If what he was saying was true, he would have suffered unavoidably for years at Snoke’s hands. And Hux was beginning to tire of being the only one in that medical bay with any sense at all.
Re: FILL: Ghost in the Machine [10/?]
No matter how hard he tried, Hux couldn’t focus on doing his work. He had what seemed like a mountain of paperwork to fill out- Lieutenant Parsons, the main engineer of the weapon, had done some more calculations and had determined that they were going to need another ten tons of cured concrete and another four tons of plastine for the weapon, and now Hux was going to have to figure out a way to get an order of that size from one of the Outer Rim worlds to Starkiller Base without running into a Resistance blockade. Obviously a crew from a First Order-affiliated planet wouldn’t be able to get through, but space pirates were a notoriously unreliable lot. Maybe he could get a neutral planet to cough up a crew? The government of Coo’sa still owed the First Order a favor from the time they’d helped capture and kill the masterminds behind a plot to assassinate the teenage son of the planet’s king. No, that wasn’t going to work- that same prince was attending school in the New Republic, and King Durlosu was quite a bit less friendly towards the First Order as a result.
Any other option that he was able to come up with had other problems with it. Other planets that might have been willing to help at one point or another had already been assimilated into the First Order, or had been taken over as satellite states of the Republic. And now that he thought about it, he couldn’t think of a suitable pirate crew that would have been willing to work with them- Bala-Tik had dropped out of communication a while ago, Maka Bakune and her crew had been executed for their crimes by the New Republic, Han Solo was part of the Resistance and obviously wouldn’t be willing to help the First Order, Ryoro Nagemic and his crew hadn’t been heard from for over two years and were presumed dead, and Beathri Diala had taken time off from piracy because she’d gotten pregnant. That… was pretty much all of the pirates he knew enough about to decide whether or not to trust them. It was a problem, really- there wasn’t a directory of pirates one could consult to do quasi-legal building material runs. And the only pirate world Hux knew of was Takodana, which was well-known to be controlled by a Resistance-sympathizer.
Maybe Phasma would know someone he could use- she did seem to know everyone.
Just as Hux was starting to debate the merits of just taking the Finalizer, loading it up with a bunch more guns, and towing the building materials along behind it, his communicator chirped. Really hoping that it wasn’t Lieutenant Parsons with more bad news about how much more stuff he was going to need to finish the weapon, he answered it.
“Tarkin Hux here.”
"Sir?” It was a woman’s voice, so at least that meant it wasn’t Parsons. “This is Kannanon Arkkriss, from the medical bay. If you have a moment, I need you to come down here. There’s something I need to discuss with you.”
Hux felt his stomach sink- there were only two people currently in the medical bay, and he was certain that nothing good would require him to go down there. Either Mitaka had something more serious than the Kuyper pox, or something had gone wrong with Ben. “What’s going on?”
“It would probably be best if I spoke to you in person, but your patient thinks he can feel something rattling around in his lungs. His theory is that the hemorrhage, ah, knocked something loose for lack of a better way to put it and that it needs to come out. He wants us to do an exploratory surgery on him to try to find it.”
“Can’t you do imaging to find it instead of just cutting him open?”
“Well, that’s the problem,” the doctor replied. “We did do imaging and didn’t see anything. But we also did the imaging before the hemorrhage and it wasn’t safe to move him to do more of it once he’d fallen unconscious.”
“Then do the imaging now!” Hux snapped. And this woman was supposed to be an elite doctor?
“He won’t let us, he’s demanding we just anesthetize him and take it out immediately or he’s going to take the scalpel to his own chest,” came the response. “We managed to calm him down long enough to get him to agree to wait until we heard what you had to say about it first, considering you were the one who wanted him to stay alive.”
“He wouldn’t be able to do it himself,” Hux said. “He’s the one who keeps yelling about how he can’t be the one to kill himself, that would probably extend to doing surgery on himself as well. Do the imaging and then if you see anything, do the surgery.”
“Sir,” came the deferential reply, before the comm link closed.
Hux pressed his fingers to his temples. Once again, he found himself wondering two things- one, why he cared so much about what happened to this one man, and two, why this man seemed so determined to put himself through more torment. Hadn’t he already had enough of that? If what he was saying was true, he would have suffered unavoidably for years at Snoke’s hands. And Hux was beginning to tire of being the only one in that medical bay with any sense at all.