by Renee Ahdieh
Lobot’s mouth tightened in an all-too-familiar note of resignation.
“I told you that Klikklak game was a bad idea. Too hard to calculate the odds. Too messy.”
“It wasn’t the game. I had the game. Bunch of Imperials busted in, killed Freidal, ran us all out of there. Technically, I didn’t lose—let’s be clear about that—but they confiscated my buy-in. Lost my credits, kept my skin—the Lando Calrissian story, just like always.”
Lobot raised an eyebrow, the metal implants on either side of his bald head flashing rapidly as he processed this new information.
“You’re kidding,” he said. “Freidal paid up every month, right on time. It was a point of pride with him. He ran the cleanest illegal backroom casino in the city. That’s why he could bring in the big fish. And also the smaller fish.”
Lobot lifted his own glass—water, of course. Lobot never drank or consumed anything that might cloud his thoughts, for fear it might allow his Imperial-issue implants the window they needed to finally take over his mind. The things were useful, especially when it came to gambling and calculating odds, but they extracted a price, no doubt about it. He tilted his glass toward Lando in a mock toast.
“Such as you.”
Lando ignored the comment and took a sip from his fresh drink. The bartender was hovering, waiting to see if new credits were forthcoming, and Lando waved him away with a little shooing motion.
“The Imperials were riled up,” Lando said once Okkul was out of earshot. “Furious, even, and it wasn’t just stormtroopers. They had a ranking officer with them, too. Don’t know what happened, but—”
“I do,” Lobot said. “They’re trying to assert their authority. Get a little pride back.”
“Pride? What the hell are you talking about?”
Lobot called out to the bartender, “Okkul, can you run that feed again?”
The bartender nodded amiably and reached for a control stick for the large holoscreen mounted above the bar.
“Sure,” Okkul said. “You know, I’ve watched that thing ten times, and I’m still not sick of it.”
Grainy footage appeared on the screen, sharpening up after a few initial bits of static. It looked like it was shot from the point of view of a starfighter, something long-nosed, zipping through space.
“What is this?” Lando asked.
“The Rebellion just leaked it on the DarkNet—it’s getting play all over the place.”
“Not another one of their propaganda clips? I wish they’d give it a rest. The more they shout about their stupid cause, the less interesting it gets. That’s just basic psychology. You’d think they’d figure that out.”
“Just watch,” Lobot said, his voice quiet, and his eyes focused on the holoscreen.
So Lando watched—it was footage of a space battle, a bunch of X-wings and a few other fighters of various models, all of them looking like they should have been scrapped years ago, deploying against the biggest space station he’d ever seen, a huge gray sphere, almost like a miniature moon, bristling with turbolaser defense turrets.
“What is that thing?” he asked.
“They call it the Death Star,” Lobot answered. “A planet killer, if you believe the rumors. How they blew up Alderaan.”
Lando watched the fighters make their attack runs, watched the X-wings being picked off by the endless swarm of TIE fighters, watched a bunch of heroes die the way heroes always died. Suckers, one and all.
“Why would they release this?” Lando said, taking another slug of the increasingly drinkable brandy. “Do they want us to feel sorry for them? Who’s to say this is even real footage? Both sides put out these propaganda pieces all the time, and—”
And then Lando knew it was real, because another ship had appeared on the screen. A very, very familiar ship. A Corellian YT-1300 light freighter, old, sure, maybe a little banged up here and there, but…still beautiful. She was still beautiful.
“That’s…that’s my ship,” he said, rising out of his seat a bit. “That’s the Millennium Falcon.”
He watched, stunned, his drink halfway to his mouth, as the Falcon swooped in from out of frame, behind a trio of TIEs—one a little modified, maybe a custom job—that were trailing some X-wings running through some kind of trench on the Death Star’s surface. Its quadlasers fired, and it picked them off, vaporizing two and sending the last one, the custom, spiraling away into space.
The ship—his ship—pulled up and flew away, out of frame. Lando felt more than sensed everyone in the bar leaning forward, as if they were waiting for something to happen.
“Wait, can you run that back for a second?”
Okkul paused the feed, to a few groans from around the room, and looked at Lando incredulously.
“This is nothing, Calrissian. The best part’s coming up.”
“Come on. Just run it back for me.”
Lando gave his best smile, the very best one, the one he reserved for extremely special occasions. The smile that promised whatever the recipient might want or need—credits, friendship, protection, short-term or long-term love, the wonders of the galaxy itself—if only they would do what the owner of the smile wanted. The Calrissian Special.
The bartender shook his head but rewound the footage. Of course he did.
“Stop,” Lando said. “Right there.”
He watched it again—the Millennium Falcon saving the day, then zooming up and away.
“Again,” he said. Okkul didn’t even protest this time, just ran it back.
Lando had been sure the first time he’d watched it, but needed the next two play-throughs to process what he’d seen. But there was no doubt in his mind. The tactics, the maneuvers…he’d seen it all before. No one flew the Falcon as well as Lando Calrissian—but one man came as close as anyone could.
“Han Solo is flying that ship,” he said.
“Looks like,” Lobot said.
“But that is impossible,” Lando said.
He was dimly aware of the footage continuing, of an enormous explosion, of cheers in the bar—cheers that would probably get everyone in here killed if there were any Imperials within earshot—but he wasn’t really paying attention.
What was Han Solo doing with the Rebellion? And not just, say, smuggling for them. That’d be fine, sure. A gig was a gig, and fuel wasn’t free. But this…Han was attacking an Imperial superweapon. It just…it just didn’t make sense.
Lando knew a lot of people, all across the galaxy—it was sort of his trademark. But very, very few people knew him. He could count them on one hand. Lobot, maybe a few others, and Han Solo. He’d have said that was mutual. He’d even have said they were the same, morally speaking—more than anyone else in the galaxy. They were out for themselves, because no one else was.
And then this Death Star thing. Now, Lando could understand helping people out from time to time—that made sense. Never know when you might need to call in a favor. But this…this was lunacy. It was like doubling your bet in sabacc when the other guy had the Idiot’s Array. It was like kicking a sleeping rancor. It wasn’t just pushing your luck, it was shoving it off a cliff and laughing while it hit every rock on the way down.
The Rebellion was a lost cause. The rebels were heroes, with all that implied. They were doomed, because the Empire was the house, and the house always wins. And yet there was the Millennium Falcon, his ship, right in the thick of one of the ugliest battles he’d ever seen.
Lando would have bet every credit he had—used to have—that Han Solo was neither a hero or susceptible to the sort of nonsense ideologies heroes subscribed to. But there he was, heroing it up. Troubling.
Lando stared moodily up at the screen. The bartender had started the clip over, and he watched the heroes start their impossible attack once again. He tried to understand, and couldn’t. He couldn’t see the angle in it. Why would Han do this?
Lando turned to look out at the bar and lifted his glass.
“To the memory of the greatest smu
ggler I ever knew!” he shouted, to some halfhearted cheers from the other patrons.
He looked back at Lobot, and pointed at the screen, where Han Solo was once again risking Lando’s ship, his precious, beautiful Millennium Falcon, for no reason he could figure.
“If I ever do anything like that…shoot me.”
“No problem,” Lobot said.
As Lando watched the Death Star explode, he considered the one rule of confidence men, tricksters, gamblers, and scam artists the galaxy over: If you can’t see the angle, it means you’re the one being played. You are, in fact, the sucker.
Lando sat, and thought, and drank drinks he had no money to pay for, and wondered what he was missing.
Miara Larte breathed in and remembered how much she loved real air. Sure, a large part of her heart was in the skies and the void of space beyond it, trained in an A-wing cockpit before transitioning to an X-wing and, eventually, a cruiser, but nothing recycled through a ship’s O2 scrubbers could match good, green air planetside. Even now, in the wake of battle and horror, one or two deep breaths was enough to steady her.
“Is now really the best time for this?” Jessamyn was red-eyed, but her voice was clear and Miara couldn’t smell any alcohol on her. Her second in command was a professional to the end, it seemed.
“They have to do something,” murmured one of the new gunners, Hester or Heattens or something like that. He’d been assigned to Miara recently. Like her, he had been away from Alderaan when the Death Star attacked. Unlike her, he hadn’t been with his shipmates at the time.
Behind them, rank after rank of rebel soldiers filed into lines. Miara and her Alderaanian crew had a place of privilege at the front, but that meant they had the longest wait while the room filled up. It was the first time they’d had to stand around and do nothing, so she had expected someone to crack.
“It’s just so…” Jessamyn trailed off. Miara reached across the prescribed space between them and took her hand.
“I know,” she said. “There’s nothing anyone can say. We’ve lost too much for that. But this reminds us that we didn’t lose everything.”
Jessamyn was quiet. Miara wondered if she’d said the right thing. As a captain, she was sure of it, but she hadn’t been born on Alderaan, and sometimes those who had been took it personally when she claimed the planet as her own. It was bad enough when the planet still existed. Miara imagined that, now, her grief might seem like a fresh insult, but Jessamyn only nodded and drew herself up to attention. They didn’t speak any further, but Miara could feel her crew all around her and knew that they would hold it together just a bit longer.
At last, the great cavern at the rebel base on Yavin 4 was crammed full, though the orderly lines of uniformed troops belied the crush. Miara forgot, sometimes, how big the Rebellion was. Their losses in the past few weeks had been near-catastrophic, and yet here she stood, knees locked at parade rest, hands behind her back, shoulder-to-shoulder with what remained of the Alderaanian guard.
…what remained…
Miara felt herself drift toward memory and pulled back sharply. She could get away with fidgeting in the crowd—the twisting of her fingers hidden against the palm of her hand, and the shifting of her weight concealed by her already bent legs—but this was not the moment for her grief. The Rebellion was quick and tireless, moving from mission to mission with very little downtime, yet every now and then a yawning pause would appear. Miara knew they were on the edge of one right now—this was not the first time she had lost a planet—but they were not there, not yet.
Lost a planet didn’t quite cover it. Miara could go back to Raada if she wanted. See it from orbit, walk the dead fields, and go to the caves where Neera had saved her life with a stun blast. There was nothing left of Raada but the planet itself. There was nothing left of Alderaan but dust and memory, and what survivors remained spread out across the stars.
Without turning her head, she looked sideways down the line of her crew. Crew. Once, that word had meant family and farming. As a pilot—and later an officer—Miara found it meant a team and a job to do in all the mess.
Her people looked good, which was what she’d expected. Every line of their uniforms was crisp, and their helmets gleamed. In the bright sun of the Yavin 4 morning, no bleariness or signs of unprofessionalism remained, despite the fact that many of them had been up late the previous night. The colony here welcomed refugees from any world savaged by the Empire, places like Fest, Raada, Jedha, and now Alderaan. There was no shortage of understanding, no shortage of means by which to remember the names beyond counting and a world that was no longer a world at all.
Antilles, who had scooped them up.
Organa, who had given them a home.
Organa, who had given them a mission.
Organa, who stood here before them now and had given them hope.
All eyes were drawn to Leia, even though the ranks of rebels turned to face each other. Her small form, clad in a pristinely white dress, was impossible to miss against the unrelieved gray of the cavern walls. More than that, she was compelling in the way her mother had been, and gentle in the manner of her father, and even the most disciplined of gazes shifted to her: an orbit around a star. Miara had heard the whispers—ice princess, cold—but she could find no fault in how Leia chose to carry herself. The Rebellion had demanded nearly everything of the princess. If she wanted to keep her grief private, Miara was not about to criticize.
Miara’s own grief bubbled up again at the thought of what the princess had lost, and again, as Leia must be doing in full view of all those assembled, she forced it back down. Soon, but not yet.
Home had always been a place that Kaeden made. On Raada, her sister had kept them fed and clothed by sheer force of will. On Alderaan, even in that first refugee camp, it had been easier. This felt like a betrayal, though Miara could not have said of whom, and it drove Kaeden to restlessness, and eventually to a medical program in one of Alderaan’s over-pretty cities. She served on a Republic medical frigate, and the sisters didn’t get to see each other very often. At least Kaeden was alive.
Miara’s path to the stars had been more direct.
The A-wing pilots who had flown in Raada’s skies as the moon was evacuated had been high on adrenaline when Miara found them—fourteen and, despite the carnage she’d witnessed, fearless now that she was in the sky—and they had told her all kinds of stories on the way back to Alderaan. By the time they’d landed, Miara was certain she was going to fly again, but next time with her own hands at the controls.
The Rebellion had been in dire need of pilots, so training had been easy to come by. Miara had risen through the ranks thanks to her own quick thinking and the prodigious death rate pilots faced in the early days, before the various rebel cells had coalesced into something more stable. Her promotion to captain had come at the request of Senator Organa himself, though Queen Breha had been the one to formalize it in a ceremony in the capital where several other promotions had been handed out. It was the first time Miara had seen the princess up close. At ten, Leia was tiny and filled with dignified fury, a seemingly perfect mix of the senator and queen, both. Miara had been young for a promotion, but she had understood why she received the honor the moment her first classified mission had come in: There was no mistaking the Fulcrum symbol attached to it. She’d had to tell Kaeden in person, words chosen carefully to avoid compromising a valuable secret.
They would need more pilots again, now. So many had died at Scarif and in the battle against the Death Star. Imperial defectors were already showing up, horror woken by the carnage the Empire’s now destroyed superweapon had wreaked. Yes, there would be bodies for cockpits, hands for the controls, souls to stretch the limits of speed and agility, bending X-wing to will.
Music sounded from somewhere, a horn pulling Miara out of memory and musing and back to the cavern with the rest of her crew. She heard Jessamyn’s breath catch as she recognized the song: another piece of Alderaan the Empire had n
ot ruined. It was against protocol—and awkward, given that Jessamyn was currently standing behind her—but Miara reached back to her second in command again. For a brief moment, Jessamyn’s fingers grasped hers, and then Miara returned to attention.
If it made Skywalker or Solo nervous to walk the entire length of the cavern with the eyes of the Rebellion on them, they didn’t show it. Miara assumed the Wookiee was fine. She hadn’t met Solo at all, had only heard what he’d done after the fact, but she’d been in the briefing when Skywalker had spoken up. He’d made her feel old, made her think of a girl on a little moon, building bombs because she could, eager to fight in a battle she didn’t yet understand the true scope of.
That was the difference the Rebellion made. It had taken that girl and trained her, made her better and given her the tools she needed to survive. She had passed along as much of what she knew as she could—to her crew, to the other pilots, to the not-quite-random idealists she’d ferried about the galaxy on those missions she wasn’t supposed to talk about. She had been alone, in the end, on Raada, and she’d been out of materials to explode, but she wasn’t alone anymore. Neither was Skywalker, though she had no idea what he’d become as a result of it.
The trio passed in front of her and climbed the stairs to stand before Leia and what remained of the Alliance High Command. As one, the rebels on the floor of the cavern turned, facing front toward the princess. The music grew quiet as Skywalker and Solo bowed to receive the medals the princess hung about their necks. Miara could tell by the way Leia’s mouth twitched that Solo must have pulled a face at her, but the princess remained cool under the scrutiny of hundreds. The light gleamed off her necklace—a traditional Alderaanian piece, Miara was sure. She wondered who had gotten it off the planet and how it had found its way to Yavin 4.
There was a shuffle on the platform as a little astromech unit pushed its way forward to stand beside the princess’s gleaming protocol droid. It chirruped—oddly cheerful for a droid, Miara thought—just as the music swelled again, so only those at the very front of the cavern heard it. Everyone could see Skywalker laughing, though, as he, Solo, and the Wookiee turned around to face the crowd. The Wookiee roared as cheering broke out. Miara took another look to her side and saw tears streaming down Jessamyn’s face. Her second in command looked at her long enough for a quick nod.
