by Jason Fry
One member of that entourage—a slim protocol droid with a gleaming golden finish—was more agitated than the others, or perhaps just doing a worse job of hiding it. Leia stepped forward and nodded at C-3PO, who signaled in turn to an old cam droid.
The hovering droid accompanied Leia as she stepped forward and looked down at the object she’d placed among the roots of one of D’Qar’s sprawling trees. The droid’s sensors tracked her gaze, and its lens focused on a crude wooden figurine, whittled by an inexperienced hand.
Han had carved the figurine while she lay against his shoulder in an Ewok hut, the night before the Battle of Endor. He’d meant it to be her, wearing a primitive dress and holding a spear. But he hadn’t told her that, and she’d asked innocently if it was one of their Ewok hosts. Han had tossed the carving aside in embarrassment, but she’d quietly retrieved it and had it in her pocket when the second Death Star exploded in the sky overhead.
It made for a pretty sorry memorial. But then Han had always traveled as if determined to avoid making much of a footprint. She’d first slipped inside his cabin on the Falcon during the journey to Yavin 4, hoping a look around would give her some understanding of how someone could be at once so charming and infuriating, and found a chaotic mess: worn spacer gear, stacked flight manuals, and bits of equipment shed by the Falcon during innumerable malfunctions. The only personal touch she’d found aboard the whole ship was the pair of golden dice hanging in the cockpit.
Leia turned to face the Resistance members, automatically waiting for the whir of the cam droid as it repositioned itself in front of her. She stared into its lens, her gaze steady.
“Han would hate this ceremony,” she said, knowing her voice was clear and firm, as it had been during countless Senate sessions. “He had no patience for speeches or memorials. Which was to be expected from a man who was allergic to politics and suspicious of causes.”
She saw a smile creep onto General Ematt’s face. That was something. But then Ematt had fought alongside Han during the days of the Rebellion. So had Admiral Ackbar and Nien Nunb. Others, such as Commander D’Acy and Lieutenant Connix, knew of Han only through his connection to her, which had been severed years earlier. They were there for her, and waiting stone-faced.
“I once told Han that it was tiresome watching him do the right thing only after he’d exhausted every alternative,” she said. “But sooner or later, he’d get there. Because Han hated bullies, and injustice, and cruelty—and when confronted with them, he could never stand down. Not in his youth on Corellia, not above Yavin, not on Endor, and not at Starkiller Base.”
In the distance she could hear the whine of speeders moving heavy equipment—she had agreed to speak if Ackbar, in turn, agreed that her speech wouldn’t halt the evacuation preparations. They’d both known the First Order had somehow tracked the Resistance to D’Qar—which meant its warships would be coming.
“Han fancied himself a scoundrel,” Leia said, smiling at that last word. “But he wasn’t. He loved freedom—for himself, certainly, but for everybody else in the galaxy, too. And time after time, he was willing to fight for that freedom. He didn’t want to know the odds in that fight—because he’d already made up his mind that he’d prevail. And time after time, somehow, he did.”
C-3PO turned his golden face toward her, and for a moment she worried that the droid might chime in with some anecdote about Captain Solo being particularly reckless—despite being programmed for etiquette and protocol, C-3PO had a singularly awful sense of diplomacy. So she pressed on before the droid could activate his vocabulator.
“Han didn’t want to know the odds when he and Chewbacca flew back to the Death Star in time to save my brother Luke—and the last hope for our Alliance,” she said. “He didn’t ask about them when he accepted a general’s rank for the ground assault at Endor. He didn’t want them calculated when he fought for freedom at Kashyyyk. And he refused to think about them when he saw a way to fly through the First Order’s shields and infiltrate Starkiller Base.”
And when he agreed to reach out to our son, she might have added. To reach out and try to draw him back out of the darkness.
But she didn’t say that. Leia had given everything she had to Alderaan, and then to the Alliance, the New Republic, and now the Resistance. But that was hers alone.
Leia saw Ematt’s eyes on her and realized she was blinking hard, her lower lip trembling. She forced herself to breathe in, then out, until she knew from years of practice that she once again looked calm and composed.
Almost there.
A transport lifted into the sky above the Resistance base, its ion exhaust riffling the tops of the trees and sending a flight of sonar swallows skyward, warbling in protest. The faces around her watched the starship shrink into the distance before turning back in her direction, and she felt the anger return. They all knew how little time they had and everything that needed to be done. And yet she knew not one of them would dare to stop her if she talked all day, undone by grief and loss, until finally a First Order barrage silenced her forever.
Leia had been horrified to hear the Resistance called a cult of personality—that had been her New Republic critics’ choice of words when they sought to dismiss her as a warmonger and a relic. They’d been wrong about most everything, but the criticism had a grain of truth: Leia and her fellow leaders had struggled to find the time or resources to make the Resistance anything else.
Well, no time to fix that one right now. And anyway, all my critics are dead.
“So many of you have offered me your sympathy, and I thank you for your kindness,” Leia said. “But now I ask you to focus once again on the cause we all serve.”
They were nodding now. Good. It was past time to finish this, and release them. The sooner she did, the sooner she could escape their endless parade of questions and demands, if only for a little while, and be alone with her private grief.
“We face long odds,” Leia said. “The New Republic is leaderless, and the First Order is on the march. I can’t tell you what those odds are—and I don’t want to know. Because nothing could change my mind about what we have to do now.”
She said nothing for a moment, letting her words hang there for the audience to consider.
“We must return to the fight,” she said. “We do so because, like Han, we believe in justice and freedom. And because we will not accept a galaxy ruled by cruelty. We’ll fight for those ideals. We’ll fight for each other, and the sacred bonds we’ve forged serving side by side. And we’ll fight for all the people in the galaxy who want to fight but can’t—who need a champion. They’re calling to us, in terror and grief. And it is our duty to answer that call.”
Leia nodded at the officers around her, then at the cam droid and all those watching.
“We all have our sorrows,” she said. “And we will never forget them, or those we have lost. In time, we will honor them more fully and properly. But we must save our sorrow for after the fight. Because right now, we have work to do.”
On a chilly planet in the galaxy’s Outer Rim, two sisters huddled in a space designed for one.
Refnu’s wharves were thronged with Resistance crewers trundling carts of black spherical magno-charges, directing plodding power droids to charge ports, and running diagnostics on the eight StarFortress bombers that would soon leave their berths.
Crammed inside the ball turret of the bomber Cobalt Hammer, Paige and Rose Tico had an excellent view of the activity around them. But the transparent ball shut out all sound, turning the Resistance’s preparations for war into a pantomime. At least for these last few precious minutes, the sisters could pretend they were alone.
“I hate to think of you flying without me,” Rose said, looking up at Paige. “What if you forget how the guns work?”
Paige laughed and patted the gunsight mount.
“You just checked them,” she
pointed out, then yawned and stretched as much as the turret’s cramped confines allowed. “I pump these triggers, and the bad guys go away.”
The twin cannons attached to the ball turret were locked down and didn’t so much as twitch. But a gold, teardrop-shaped medallion wrapped around the gunsight mount did. Rose heard the tink the medallion made against the shaft and reached into the top of her jumpsuit to touch the similar medallion she wore on a cord around her neck. They represented the emblem of the Otomok system—the sisters’ home.
Paige looked over and twitched her shoulder to bump her little sister out of her reverie.
“Besides, you’ve got work to do,” Paige said. “If your bafflers can keep our other ships safe from detection, it could be a big advantage against the First Order.”
Rose looked down, embarrassed. “All the bafflers do is hide engine emissions. Anybody could have done what I did. And probably better, too.”
“Not this again. You know that isn’t true.”
“Fine, maybe it isn’t. But I want to go with you.”
“You’ll be with me,” Paige said with a smile, reaching up and tapping her medallion.
Rose looked up, her hand on her own medallion. “It’s not the same.”
“Maybe not. But it won’t be long. I’ll see you aboard the Raddus once the D’Qar evacuation is finished.”
“Right,” Rose said, clutching her medallion hard now. She could feel tears pooling in the corners of her eyes and threatening to spill down her cheeks.
“Rose,” Paige said, one hand reaching for hers. “I’ll be fine.”
“I know, Pae-Pae,” Rose said quietly, using her pet name for her sister, the one left over from their childhoods. “You’re the best gunner in the whole Resistance, after all.”
Paige just smiled and Rose closed her eyes, trying to lose herself in the familiar warmth and weight of her sister’s body against hers. Their breathing had fallen into the same rhythm, their shoulders gently rising and falling together.
On their first mission aboard Cobalt Hammer, Rose had left her flight engineer’s station once the bomber had entered hyperspace, clambering down the ladder from the flight deck and squeezing herself into the ball turret beside Paige. They’d spent hours staring out at the tumbling blue-white infinity around them and talking about everything they’d do once the galaxy was at peace—the planets they’d visit; the animals they’d raise; the homestead they’d build on some world with a kind warm sun, gentle breezes, and good grass.
If the rest of Cobalt Hammer’s crew thought that odd, they soon accepted that the Ticos had a bond that would have been extraordinary even between twins. Since Rose’s birth the sisters had rarely been apart for more than a couple of days—not growing up on Hays Minor in the Otomok system, and not while serving in the Resistance after fleeing their homeworld and its First Order occupiers.
That was about to change.
Refnu had no berths large enough for the Ninka. The frigate waited in low orbit, a glimmering star in the deep violet of the gloomy planet’s perpetual twilight. Rose was scheduled for the transport after the next. The bombers would launch not long after that, fueled and stocked and armed, and coordinate hyperspace jumps with the Ninka. Paige would spend the journey to D’Qar in the ball turret, suspended in a little bubble surrounded by unimaginable cosmic forces. Rose ached to make the journey with her, but it was too late—she had agreed to stay aboard the Ninka, showing the techs how her baffler technology worked in the hope it could be adapted for other craft.
“What made you decide to say yes?” Paige asked, sensing her sister brooding.
“I wanted a new flight suit,” Rose said.
That got a little laugh from her sister, as Rose had hoped. But then that was Paige—she’d be calm even with one engine offline, an unresponsive rudder, and space around her filled with turbolaser fire, coolly sizing up the situation and figuring out what needed to be done. Whatever genetic lottery had bestowed Paige with such poise had passed Rose over, leaving her empty-handed. Battle terrified her, and the hours waiting for it made her stomach clench and heave.
That’s why you’re a Resistance hero and I’m a maintenance tech, Rose thought about telling Paige, but it wouldn’t help and there wasn’t time. So she talked instead of bravery and responsibility—at least until she heard herself and admitted the real reason she’d agreed to take on her new assignment.
“I thought you wanted me to,” Rose said. “I thought you were ready to let me take responsibility for myself.”
“I want you to be yourself,” Paige replied. “But of course that means being my sister, too.”
She reached up, the motion precise and efficient as always, and freed her Otomok medallion from the cannon’s gunsight mount, slipping it over her head.
“Nothing can change that,” Paige said. “We’re connected to each other, and to home. We don’t have to be in the same place for that to be true.”
The sisters hugged—it was time to go, and they both knew it.
“See you after the evacuation,” Rose said, begging whatever power governed the universe to turn that bland prediction into an ironclad guarantee.
“See you then, Rose,” Paige replied. It was what she always said before a mission—a deliberately casual farewell that Rose had come to believe was their good-luck charm.
Then Rose was levering herself out of the ball turret, careful not to step on her sister or knock the gunsight mount out of alignment. She emerged at the bottom of the bomber’s ventral stalk—what crews called the Clip. The bomb bay doors at her feet were open, while a ladder led to the flight deck above her, climbing past racks of magno-charges. There were more than a thousand in all, enough to crack the crust of a planet or batter down the shields and blast open the hull armor of a capital ship. Many of the magno-charges had been decorated with cartoons or hastily scrawled words—gallant invocations of the Resistance cause were racked next to obscene suggestions for the First Order’s leaders.
Rose counted six rows up from the bottom, then five magno-charges in from the edge until she found the black sphere she and Paige had marked with a stylus. The message they’d chosen was simple: JUSTICE FOR OTOMOK.
Rose heard the whine of a shuttle lifting off. That meant hers would be inbound. She lowered herself through the bomb bay doors, dropping to the deck, and glanced up at her sister in the ball turret. Paige was going over her preflight checklist, her datapad’s screen bathing her face in pale white light. As she studied it, she reached up and tucked a stray lock of black hair under her padded cowl.
That gesture—familiar and unconscious—pierced Rose in a way their conversation hadn’t. She looked wildly around the wharves, hunting for the silver-skinned bulk of Fossil, the squadron’s hulking commanding officer. She’d tell Fossil that this had all been a big mistake and she’d fly aboard Cobalt Hammer as a backup flight engineer, or do anything else that needed doing, but she wasn’t leaving Paige.
And if Fossil said no? Then Rose would wait until she wasn’t looking, climb back into the Clip, and conceal herself in a maintenance locker until they were in hyperspace and it was too late to get rid of her.
But then Paige turned, saw her sister, and smiled and waved. Like nothing was wrong. Like there was no danger whatsoever.
As the shuttle that would bear her away descended, Rose forced herself to wave back.
See you then, Paige.
Even though she was standing on the landing field outside the Resistance base, Kadel Ko Connix knew the moment the First Order warships emerged from hyperspace above the planet.
Every comlink around her begin squawking and squealing—a chorus of urgent calls that struck her as oddly similar to the nighttime calls of D’Qar’s brilliantly colored tree-lizards.
Beside her, PZ-4CO’s eyes brightened. The bright-blue protocol droid shuffled her feet and looked down
at Connix, the servomotors whirring in her elongated neck.
“Comm/scan reports three Resurgent-class Star Destroyers and a larger capital ship,” PZ-4CO intoned, her voice cool and pleasant as always. “Unknown class, Dreadnought-sized. Preliminary estimated length seven thousand five hundred meters.”
Connix winced. The Resistance had known the First Order was building warships and armies in the Unknown Regions, beyond the galactic frontier. General Organa had sent a steady stream of holographic footage and intelligence data providing evidence for that conclusion to New Republic senators, hoping to batter down the galactic government’s stubborn insistence that reports of a First Order military buildup were at best a figment of the general’s imagination and at worst exaggerations. But a capital ship of that size? That was worse than the darkest imaginings of the Resistance’s intelligence analysts.
So was Starkiller Base. What else has Snoke been hiding out there?
“I am troubled by the apparent limitations of our threat database,” PZ-4CO said.
Connix had to laugh.
“I’m troubled by a lot of things these days, Peazy. Such as the fact that where we’re standing is going to be a blast crater when the First Order gets here. What’s left on our to-do list?”
PZ-4CO’s eyes brightened again. Connix spotted Flight Officer Jones hurrying across the landing field toward them.
“Approximately thirty percent of the deep fuel reservoir remains to be siphoned,” the droid said as Jones caught his breath. “Scuttle procedure for mission-critical computers is incomplete. And maintenance stocks are still being transferred from lower-level stores.”
“There are still thirty pallets of cannon shells in C bunker,” Jones said.
Great. Add one more thing to the list.
“Time to completion?” Connix asked, her eyes jumping from the transports still on the landing field to the Resistance crewers and droids hurrying in and out of the portals to the subterranean base.
