“In addition to my other talents, Double…um…ma’am, I am a highly decorated napper,” he said. “Maybe you could drop us off at a beach planet for the next month or so?”
“I’d like nothing more,” Mothma said, while the Contessa made a face at Wedge. “But I’m afraid the Alliance will have to give you a raincheck. Because I suspect we’ll need your squadron sooner than that.”
She smiled and moved off alongside the Contessa.
“Highly decorated napper?” Wedge asked Janson. “Really?”
“Just making conversation.”
“Making a mess, you mean. Wait, shh.”
Mothma had bent her head close to the Contessa’s, and Wedge was able to just catch the end of her question.
“…but why do they both smell like they’ve been in a barnyard?”
The Contessa offered a whispered explanation, and the Alliance leader looked at her curiously. Mothma shook her head, sighed, and then Wedge saw her smile.
“Pilots,” she said, and Wedge wondered if that was admiration or exasperation in her voice.
He suspected it was a little bit of both.
THE FINAL ORDER
Seth Dickinson
“In time of peace, the Imperial Star Destroyer will disburse the Emperor’s peace and justice, and by its presence deter disorder, both material and ideological.”
His new XO paused here for breath. Captain Canonhaus wondered if they’d trained her when to breathe on Carida. You may take the initiative, Cadet Tian; you may even take unscheduled breaths. The Imperial Naval Academy on Carida produced superb officers, officers like Kendal Ozzel, who had taken the initiative and would never again take a breath, scheduled or otherwise.
Certainly Tian was also superb. She had excellent marks, except in Tabor Seitaron’s history class. Seitaron always downgraded students who missed his hints about what had really happened. No special insight, he’d written on Canonhaus’s own file, when he was Canonhaus’s captain. Officer must seek this insight through experience. Fine, old man, give us poor marks for regurgitating official history—but COMPNOR will give us good ones. The Commission for the Preservation of the New Order approves of those who know the official truth.
Look what had happened to Seitaron, after all. Disappeared. Proscribed.
Her name was Tian Karmiya, Commander Tian to him, and with her prime marks from Carida and her fine service on Enigma and Victory at Batonn, she must have expected to serve under Commodore Rae Sloane here on the Ultimatum. But Sloane was indisposed. So Canonhaus had received Ultimatum, and this bright young plaque of New Order excellence as his XO.
She was calm, cheerful, occasionally quite droll at the captain’s table. “An officer’s love life,” she would say, “operates under the same rules as old religions: two sides, and they must never meet.” When he laughed at her quips, Canonhaus felt his dry scabs crack, and some of the old blood, the old love for the work, welled up to stain his thoughts.
Bad luck for both of them.
Full of breath, Tian now said:
“In time of war the Imperial Star Destroyer will seek out the enemy’s principal force and close, by means of superior speed and protection, to destroy the enemy with massed fighter strikes and the fires of the main battery; and, if the enemy is planetbound, by the deployment of the embarked legion.”
“Very good. And in which element of the doctrine are we now engaged?”
She sometimes had a sly way of looking, this Tian. Just a little flash of teeth. “Pursuing an escaped transport falls under disbursing peace and justice and deterring disorder.”
“The Emperor’s peace and justice, Commander.”
“Yes, sir. It goes without saying, sir. As there is no other source of true peace or justice.”
They stood side by side, hands clasped at their backs, before the incredible panorama of Ultimatum’s bridge. Ahead, the endless chaotic detonation, the swarming scatter of the Hoth system’s fragmentation-cascade asteroid field. They had sent fighters in after an escaping rebel ship. None had returned.
“And the need to pursue one small transport with all our forces, rather than attempting to vector the other rebels?”
“As we said on Iloh, better to catch the fish at hand than to cast at shadows, sir.”
“Quite. Very good. Very good.”
Canonhaus tapped his foot. The lieutenant running the crew pit to his left glanced up to see if the captain wanted his attention. You had to train a new crew to understand your mannerisms. One tap meant “conversation over, I’m thinking.” Two taps signaled “get on with it.” Shooting his cuffs meant “I’m about to give an order.” Back on Majestic his officers understood this, all four watches.
Old Seitaron had once told him, in the wardroom, that it was important to know your crew. Read their files, learn their failures and talents. Canonhaus had tried that, on Majestic. He had been a good captain, or at least a good mayor of a town of ten thousand, which was the real trick to command. Anyone could say full speed, open fire or hold the range, deploy the fighters or send in a team to make a scan. The unbelievably difficult part of the job was not fighting a Star Destroyer in combat, but keeping the beast fed and fueled and trained, and in communication with the rest of the fleet and with your own local network of informants and contacts, so that the ship could turn up where and when it was needed.
He could do that. He could do it better than most, he’d thought.
But after Alderaan and Helix, they took Majestic away from him, moved him from sector fleet duty to Death Squadron on account of his “excellent reliability.” And he had to start all over, learning the names and faces of the nearly ten thousand people aboard Ultimatum. It was impossible. Only the roles were familiar, like the cards in a sabacc deck. First and second weapons officers, first and second defense officers, three sensor watch officers; communications, operations, engineering with its reactor and engine substations; navigation, helm and hyperdrive and the constant plot of objects in the narrow and chaotic jump-collision hazard radius; bay and flight officers; flasks and sabers, air and darkness, staves and coins. All the cards slotted into their stations in the crew pits below the gleaming black walkways, which were as polished and satisfying as boot leather.
On Majestic, all his officers knew what he’d done with the refugees. An ugly piece of work, they all agreed. Hard work. But it had to be done.
He tasted acid and coughed.
“Commander Tian,” he said.
She had begun to turn away, to go check with the helm officer about their formation. She was a stickler about formations. The idea that Executor itself was tracking her must be very exciting. A chance to show her talent at staying in her slot.
Now she turned back. The youth in her bright eyes, her clear dark skin; how could she already be a commander? They got younger every year. And hungrier.
At Carida, gossip said, she had reported two cadets with better marks for selling their exam answers. They had been expelled, and she’d made it into a merit society in their place. A snitch.
“Sir?”
“What do you think of Admiral Ozzel’s recent decisions?”
She flinched like he’d pulled a weapon. A flash of fear, like the light of a blaster reflected from wide white human eyes in the jungle night on Haruun Kal. The place where he had learned to fear blasters more than anything else.
That was all it took. The flashbacks came on him unpredictably, for no reason at all, for a reason as simple as Tian’s frightened eyes.
And he was there again. Is there again. Will always be.
* * *
—
He is a lieutenant, a liaison to the stormtroopers aboard the Quasar Fire-class cruiser-carrier Swoop. They call him Footoo. They like him, because he tells them honestly what the navy expects, but don’t trust him, because he hasn’t seen combat.
<
br /> There is an insurrection smoldering on Haruun Kal, in the highland jungles. Something left from the Clone Wars.
He goes down with the Sentinel assault shuttles to land in the “smoke circles” where orbital fire burns back the jungle. The air smells of burnt pollen and sulfur, and he has to borrow a stormtrooper helmet to breathe outside. In two days, fungus grounds the shuttles and all the speeders forever. Only the wheeled Juggernauts still work. Their weapons are only saved by obsessive cleaning.
The CO orders a foot advance toward a lake thirty kilometers away. It is not a very good decision, tactically, but the CO has fever wasp larvae growing in her brain. By the time anyone realizes, the wasps are crawling out of her tear ducts and they are all lost in the deep jungle.
The Korun natives attack from the trees at night. Their crude slugthrowers can’t pierce stormtrooper armor, but their bombs can. At first, Swoop’s stormtroopers return fire coolly and accurately. Later, they take to mowing the jungle with the squad E-Webs.
Canonhaus takes it upon himself to confirm their kills. He thinks it will help morale.
He sees everything a blaster can do to a body. The primary wound, a crater of red and white, where galvened plasma flash-boils skin and detonates bone. Seams of black char where fat burns like buried coal. Heads are full of fluid, all of which expands when hit: stormtroopers call this kind of hit a “detonator,” call those who are hit deep enough to burn from the inside out “dry bones.” By the time you see the remains of a dry-bone, a wretched pile of skeleton and hair, your lungs are already coated in a thin layer of burnt them—
“Sir?”
* * *
—
Canonhaus blinked. “What?”
Tian was at his side, watching him. “You seemed not to hear me, sir.”
“I was thinking of Haruun Kal.” Why had he said that? Because he wanted a reason to pour out his bile and regret, to corrode her as he had been corroded.
“A glorious victory, sir.”
“Oh, yes. One of the battles that gave the Imperial Navy its dread reputation.”
“Did you help conduct the bombardment, sir?”
“Yes,” he lied. His unit had sheltered in the lake while the fleet exercised Base Gamma One. The lake boiled off in the firestorm. Their Juggernauts couldn’t cool the air fast enough. At first it was dry, and thus survivable; but when the air filled with their sweat, their sweat could no longer cool them, and people began to go into convulsions. As he stripped down, Canonhaus found a dead fever wasp in his uniform. Perhaps the heat had killed its eggs. Perhaps he was just lucky.
“Yes,” he repeated, unsteadily. “Yes, now—now that was an example of a bombardment well handled. But what do you think about Ozzel’s approach?”
“Yes, sir. His decision to drop out of hyperspace inside detection range was a good one. Violence of action would have caught the rebels unprepared, and if they hadn’t been forewarned, he would’ve caught them all in the initial bombardment. He made no mistake.”
“Mm. So why do you think Lord Vader executed him?”
“Perhaps because he failed to account for the possibility the rebels had been forewarned by a spy, sir. Or by the probe droid that discovered their base.”
“So you believe Vader acted correctly?”
She hesitated, looked away. In profile, her full nose echoed the uniform cap, echoed the perfect prow of the Star Destroyer, the ideal shape for a warship, all its broadside weapons capable of bearing forward. He wondered if she had been born with black hair, or if she dyed her usual Ilohian green to match the uniform. What did such young people think about? Did they do the exact same things he had done, say all the things he had said, to get that perfect COMPNOR reliability score—but believe it all, too?
“Permission to speak freely, sir?”
He blinked in surprise. “Granted?”
She addressed the open windows, the red light of Executor’s titanic engine array. “Ozzel was lucky. He knew everyone on Hoth was a rebel. He didn’t have to flush one of their cells out of a loyal population. Or make a punitive attack on collaborators. Or choose a settlement for a demonstration strike. His only decision was one of tactics. Whether to close in aggressively, or to make a cautious approach.”
“And yet I sense an objection…?”
“He failed to consider the political aspect of his choice. He should have anticipated that Vader would prefer prisoners. An aggressive posture and rapid bombardment would leave none. Therefore, he should have taken a cautious approach.”
Ah. So she would rationalize his execution: snitch thought. What a fool Ozzel had been to plan an attack from orbit! Hoth was one of the major rebel command cells, and therefore, given prisoners, an opportunity to roll up every other rebel in the galaxy. Ozzel’s idiocy had nearly wasted that chance. Therefore it was not just Vader’s right but Vader’s duty, as a direct representative of the Emperor, as a black hand wiping away corruption and cronyism in the ranks, to execute Kendal Ozzel on the spot!
Before Alderaan, Canonhaus would’ve told himself exactly the same thing.
No, that was a lie. He would’ve rationalized it to himself even after the refugee mission. He had rationalized everything. Doubt grew much slower than fever wasps.
He said, “You talk about easy choices. Do you think of Death Squadron as an easy post?”
“Not easy, sir. But I was very excited to be posted here. Direct pursuit of the rebel military is what I want. Not…” She paused, performing inner politics, composing something that would look nice in a COMPNOR transcript. “Not the painstaking and difficult work, which our colleagues perform so well, required to separate rebels and collaborators from loyal citizens. Of course, loyal citizens must take on some of the burden of battling insurrection, including the emotional duty of assigning blame for any collateral damage to the rebels. But my own personal strengths, I feel, are in direct tactical warfare against the rebels, rather than counterinsurgency.”
“You feel that Death Squadron’s mission is cleaner, then. Compared with that of, say, ISB or the Ubiqtorate agencies. Or a stormtrooper legion.”
“Yes, sir. The Imperial Navy’s mission, in general, I find more morally direct.”
“Mm.” He thought, of course, of Helix. Was he ever not thinking of Helix? “Did you grow up admiring the navy?”
“Yes, sir, in my adolescence.”
“You had model fighters? Miniature legions? Snappy uniform-style fashions? Sub-adult group membership?”
“Yes, sir. I was a patriotic child.”
“Hm,” he grunted.
“I think you should file a protest over Admiral Ozzel’s execution, sir.”
He was so shocked that he thought the code cylinders would pop from his uniform. “Against Vader?”
“Yes, sir. Obviously the protest will not be sustained. However, it would be appropriate to place a summary execution under review, in the same way that a captain who loses a ship always stands to court-martial. This way, Vader’s correct decisions can be fully documented and entered in the record for future officers to appreciate.”
Oh, child.
He took his XO by the shoulder. “Listen to me. There is no ‘protest’ against Vader. Vader can do anything he wants. He could strangle you and me and everyone on this bridge and face no censure.
“The New Order does not exist to bring order to anything. It is not the bright strong energy that lifted us from the Clone Wars and the Republic’s corruption. It’s not the maker and the organizer and the fixer that you thought it was when you buttoned on your junior-officer uniform.
“You liked to learn the names of stormtrooper legions, didn’t you? You liked to read staff notes, memorize the weapon loadouts of our starships, and debate tactical theory on the HoloNet. You think those things are the Empire. But all the sharp outfits, all the insignia and code cyli
nders, all the protocols and monuments…they are all burrs. Things that attach themselves to the Empire’s real purpose.
“The real purpose of the Empire is to give people like Vader the power to do anything they want. The bureaucracy, the ideology, the gleaming system we so admire—it accretes around that central core of cruelty solely because a bureaucracy allows us, the followers, to rationalize our participation through laws and protocols. If there is a cruelty the Emperor wishes to commit, a reason will appear for it. If there is an atrocity Vader perpetrates, a bureau or a directorate or a fleet or a squadron or a legion or a special sort of stormtrooper will be created to carry it forward as necessary for the security of the galaxy.
“There is no restraint or principle at the center of the New Order. And that is why people admire it. The Empire does all the things that people secretly believe should be done with power.”
He did not say any of that. And of course he did not take her shoulder.
Instead, he clasped his hands behind his back and said, “You know, I was recently detached to support a special task for Lord Vader. We were in a support role—perimeter control, navigational interdiction, logistics. Other forces carried out the primary mission.”
She shifted from foot to foot. Nervous or excited. “What was that mission, sir?”
“The destruction of a convoy.”
“And how many rebels did you bag, sir?”
“Not rebels. Alderaanian refugees.”
Her bright eyes took on the cold, sharp, dead aspect of a security droid. “A very difficult mission. But you are known for your perfect reliability, Captain.”
“Yes. I am.” He sniffed, and missed the faint burnt-dust smell of Majestic’s old filters. Something tickled in his sinuses. Surely not the beginning of a cold. “After it was all over, I was given charge of the legal follow-up. I filed all the documents to establish that what we’d done was lawful, necessary, and fully in accord with Imperial law. No HoloNet transmissions—everything was couriered directly to Coruscant by stealth shuttle. I didn’t even keep my own copies.”
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