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A brilliant sunburst, the viewport brimming with light, and Hux knows the experiment is a success. They've done it.
They've broken a star.
He refuses to blink as it sears his retinas, even through his ocular shields. All he sees is blinding white. All that's needed is for the prototype Starkiller receptors to siphon the cracked star's energy.
Hux feels like a god. He is a god. No one's done this, not even Tarkin.
His command shuttle convulses. The ground lurches out from under him, a siren screeches, and his side slams against something hard.
Distantly, he hears a voice screaming itself hoarse as excruciating heat consumes him. His voice.
Then — nothing.
He gasps himself awake.
Something firm and plastic wedges between his gums and his lips. Hux sputters to eject it from his mouth. It doesn't budge.
He squirms, his chest heaving with rapid, shallow breaths. The contraption is fixed to his head with a strong elastic band. A long tube attaches to his mouth, extending further than his arms can reach.
His arms scream when he moves them.
Everything, everywhere burns.
His eyes snap open.
A cool weight presses against them, blue and gentle. Hux can dimly make out a medi-droid, its red optical light turned purple through the aquamarine haze.
He blinks at the tube protruding from his mouth as his chest swells with another breath. Bacta. He's in a bacta tank.
Hux's throat strains with muffled protest. He does not have time to be in a bacta tank.
He thrashes against the walls of the cylinder, tugging at the irritating apparatus strapped to his face. His fingertips scrabble between his cheeks and the thick elastic band.
Hux chokes on a shout. Everything hurts, but nothing as much as his flesh where the elastic chafes against his face, where his aching fingertips scrape skin against skin.
"General Hux," the medi-droid drones, its voice dull through the bacta like it's speaking to him in a dream. "Cease movement."
Hux bites down on the breathing apparatus to contain a yelp of pain as he claws at the slick glass. He won't be able to climb out.
"You have developed severe radiation dermatitis due to your exposure to a coronal mass ejection of unprecedented scale," the droid continues. "You will require a minimum of five days to recover. Your command shuttle was critically damaged. A rescue crew was required to…"
Hux isn't listening. His throat is raw with silent screams, the tube swallowing his questions and demands: I do not have five days! Did the prototype work? What went wrong? Get me the engineering lead! We cannot fall behind schedule!
Hux. Shut up.
The voice resonates in his mind, clear as a bell, while the droid's muted droning continues. He glances around, stifling a wince. Even his eyelids ache.
Stop, the voice commands. Do you want to explain to Snoke that you botched your recovery because you couldn't sit still?
Hux can't make out anyone else in the room. A new communication protocol, perhaps? Maybe there are other devices attached to him transmitting directly into his head. It's snarkier than any First Order droid he's heard.
Then get me out! Hux blasts his thought back at the droid. It's not rational, yelling won't make his wounds heal faster — that's something Ren would do, not him — but rationality is out the airlock, his entire body caked in burning agony that gets worse the more he moves, but he can't stop, he has deadlines, he needs to—
Everything goes black.
Hux wakes to grey clouds and cool mist on his skin. He pushes off damp grass and sits up, taking in the gunmetal sea as it breaks against familiar rocks below.
Impossible. This cliffside is on Arkanis.
He stares at his hands, flexing them in and out of fists. His skin slides smoothly over his knuckles, unburnt and pain-free.
A simulation, then.
"Let me out!" Hux snaps, whirling to seek a target for his frustration.
Gentle breezes stir the grass around his knees. Not another soul occupies the clifftop. Even the worn footpath to Arkanis Academy is overgrown. It's as if it never existed.
"I know you can hear me! I order you to release me from this simulation!"
No response but the wind.
He inspects an irregular boulder by the cliff's edge. A checkered dejarik board rests on the flat top, carved stone figures filling the spaces. Hux scowls at the stump set beside it, an obvious seat. Neither existed when he visited this place in reality.
"I have no time for games!" He shouts skyward.
He doesn't expect a reply and doesn't get one. The cold indifference turns his blood molten.
Hux's cheeks heat at the embarrassing spectacle he's making of himself, but who's there to see it? Someone must be monitoring the feed. His powerlessness riles him further — moments ago he rewrote the laws of reality! He darts toward the cliff, stopping when the tips of his boots graze the void at the edge.
"I'll do it!" Hux snarls. "I know this isn't real!"
It could reset the program. He might wake up and be able to get Starkiller back on track. A wave thunders against the jagged stones below. He wonders how lifelike the pain is in this simulation. If it's like the trooper training sims, very.
The grass rustles beside his feet as an ash-rabbit emerges. It sniffs Hux's boot, nose twitching.
It dives off the cliff.
Hux's voice catches, his hand shooting out on reflex. Too late. The critter plummets. He braces himself to see it break against the rocks like the waves.
It disappears. Hux frowns — he didn't look away. It's simply gone. He blinks and it's back on the clifftop, wholly intact and nosing at his boot.
Hux scowls. Message received.
He sits down and makes his first move.
One of the pieces opposite him slides forward of its own accord.
Hux obliterates his opponent.
"Is that your best?" he gloats after their first match. "Keep playing like that and I'll jump out of boredom."
The second match is much harder. He should have anticipated it. It's common for hustlers to lull their opponents into a false sense of security and study their strategy to formulate a counterattack, but he's never seen a computer do it before. Hux narrowly ekes out a victory.
"Still no match for the mind behind Starkiller base," Hux goads his invisible opponent.
He loses the third match.
"You may be a passable dejarik player, but you're a terrible machine," he grumbles. Its movements are irrational. The only strategy seems to be not having a strategy. "Again."
Hux loses track of time after that, but never the score.
Game after game, give and take, they exchange wins and losses like steps in a dance. The machine stimulates him like no other opponent, though Hux is starting to doubt that it is a machine. Its behavior is too unpredictable.
"Ha!" Hux topples his opponent's last piece. "Tie broken. The lead is mine. Your move."
This time the board doesn't reset itself.
The clifftop dissolves.
He awakens with lungs heaving, dripping bacta onto the black medbay floor.
"Breathe, sir." Lieutenant Mitaka wraps him in a coarse standard issue towel. It doesn't chafe.
His skin is healed.
"Mitaka." Hux steadies his breath. "How long was I out?"
"Five days, sir. Don't worry," he adds, handing Hux a datapad. "Engineering's full report. They've identified the problem and deployed a fix. They assured me we're still on schedule."
"Hardly." Hux's thumb smears blue gel on the screen. Surprisingly, the report does seem to be in order. "I'll admit I'm impressed that you've managed all this while tending to my recovery. I didn't know you played dejarik, Lieutenant."
Mitaka's lip twitches. "On the occasional shore leave, sir, but I can't say I'm much good."
"Don't be modest. You outplayed me a few times." He straightens, standing with as much dignity as he can muster in a towel. "I wasn't aware we'd integrated simulation tech into medical recovery."
"Sir?" Concern flickers in Mitaka's eyes before he schools his expression to a careful neutral. "There's no record of simulation use during your recovery."
"That's not possible."
"Records here, sir." Mitaka pulls his medical chart up on the datapad. "Your brain waves were uncommonly calm, as if you'd entered a sort of trance. Perhaps… you dreamed of playing dejarik with me."
Mitaka looks entirely too hopeful at that prospect, but Hux stopped listening after trance.
Of course his opponent was irrational.
Ren's door slides open. Those too-large brown eyes sharpen into clarity as they flit to the dejarik board under Hux's arm.
"I will enjoy demolishing you in person, Ren."