He studied it again. Its breath was shallow. It was built to be so frail, so useless. He did not comprehend how this thing had managed to survive; it did not appear to be a cub. Its arms were not suited for striking their prey, and it possessed no claws. Its legs were too short to run quickly across ice or snow.
He peered into its face. Did it have a family, too? A home? Did it know that it had taken everything from him? What did it think about? Did it hate his kind like he hated its kind? Was that why they had stolen his home?
It did not matter.
He would get back what was owed to him.
He ate. He tore at the flesh of the horned beast, devoured it quickly, then focused on the fatty insides. He wished that it was still fresh; there were few things more satisfying than warm blood in the throat. He ripped at the sinews and muscles in one of the legs, lost in the sheer thrill of the feast, and the frenzy was what kept him from noticing it sooner.
He froze.
Heard a grunt.
A small crack.
He looked up at the creature, and it strained against the ice, stretched its arm out, and the rage filled him again. Did this thing believe it could escape? That it could fight back? That it could conquer him? He roared, loud enough that the cavern seemed to shake, loud enough that the creature’s eyes went wide after it plunged to the ground. It stood and faced him and then—
A light. A beam of it. Again.
His kind never forgot. Their memories were what helped them track down prey, to remember which ranges give way to treacherous, deadly gorges. He remembered. His home. The scream. The flash of light that hurt so terribly, the blood, the chaos.
But this was different. Somehow. The beam was not moving toward him. It did not move at all, like the two of them in that tiny space.
This being could hold the light.
No.
It seemed to be wielding it.
He sniffed and caught a scent of the same sharp odor of the debris scattered around his former home. Was that what this creature held?
But he was not afraid. He couldn’t be. The anger rushed up and out of him.
He would not let this happen again.
He charged forward, certain that he would crush this awful thing with one blow, and then the beam cut through the air, and there was no pain at first, and then it crushed him, filled his every thought, and he had never heard a sound like that, of flesh being severed so quickly, had never looked down and seen his own arm resting before him.
He roared again.
No.
He screamed.
The creature escaped out into the snowy unknown. It would surely die soon; it could not possibly survive the ice and wind like that. But he could not think of it anymore as the pain raced through his body. He packed his stump with ice, much as he had done that day long ago, and it stopped the bleeding. His mind drifted, first to the pain, then his den-mates, then to the cubs he might not ever see again.
He slept.
He hurt.
The pain did not subside for many moons. There were times when he felt his arm was still there, as if he could tear at the flesh of another with claws he could not see. He continued to hunt alone—more poorly than he had before—until his strength came back. Until he believed he was ready.
He finally ventured down into the valley when he was strong enough, when he had adapted to his new reality. He had feasted recently, and his hunger was now for retribution. Perhaps this would be fruitless; not every hunt was a success, and he knew he might fail, that this might be the day it all came to an end. Still, he had to try.
But when he crested the ridgeline, his body curled in anticipation, he found himself relaxing, unfurling.
He saw no strange objects on the ground.
No strange creatures fluttering about near the caverns.
He still descended slowly, assuming that at any moment, those things could ambush him with their beams of light and drive him back. But he heard nothing. Saw nothing. There was no stench of their sweat or odor. He sniffed again.
Something had recently been burning.
There was more debris at the mouth of the caverns: twisted pieces of something hard and sharp. A smear of frozen blood. Charred remains of what was once here, what came after his clan.
He crept into the entrance, his body low, but there was no torrent of sound, no clinking or clanking, nothing that pierced his ears as it had before. It was not long before his wandering was not cautious. He had risen upright and slunk from one cavern to the next, all of them empty, abandoned, forgotten.
There were many more nooks he needed to search, more places to examine, but standing in what was once the home for him and his clan, he knew that this place had been returned to him.
And that cavern within him shrank, replaced by something new.
Hope.
Hope that a reunion was possible.
With his clan.
With his den-mate.
With his cubs.
With what they stole.
His home.
ION CONTROL
Emily Skrutskie
Toryn Farr was certain she knew a lost cause when she saw one, so when the controllers had started the betting pool, there was no question where her credits were going.
“Even if he takes the shot, the princess will shut him down,” she’d declared as she jotted down her wager on the datapad being handed around. It had already circulated through most of the rest of the room, and the odds weren’t looking great for Captain Solo.
Then again, Toryn considered as the smuggler strode into the command center and every person whose name was on that ledger straightened with sudden awareness, Solo’s the type to gamble on long odds.
She tried—she really tried—to keep her focus on the readouts she was supposed to be monitoring for anomalies. They’d picked up a signature that looked suspiciously like a Star Destroyer a day ago, and while it had cruised by Hoth without deviating from its flight path, the anxiety of the moment had left them all rattled and unsure. But Toryn couldn’t help slipping her focus clear through the transparency in her charts to where Princess Leia was perched next to Captain Serper’s station.
The princess’s eyes were fixed warily on Solo. Behind her, Toryn caught the pause of his footsteps—and then, surprisingly, the moment he moved not to Leia but to General Rieekan, who was fidgeting with a comm array in the back corner of the command center. She felt the tension in her team loosen. Seemed no one was winning any bets today.
Toryn tuned back to her work, her eyes skimming with practiced precision over the asteroids flirting with Hoth’s orbit. The cover they provided made Hoth an ideal place for a hidden base. The Empire’s sensors would be hard-pressed to pick out a rebel ship from the more metallic of their number.
Unfortunately, the reverse was also true.
But before she could sink into the tedium of it, her ears latched onto the tail end of Solo’s words to the general. Did he say “I can’t stay anymore”?
A glance over at Corporal Sunsbringer, who was desperately trying to catch her eye, confirmed Toryn hadn’t misheard. The corporal widened her eyes and flexed a hand, a motion that read as, Seriously?
Toryn was just as startled. The captain had been bumming along with the Rebel Alliance for years. Ever since the Battle of Yavin. Now he was claiming he had a price on his head set by Jabba the Hutt—which sounded like a convenient excuse to get off this freezing rock. Toryn wouldn’t have begrudged him trading the desolate, icy world for the sands of Tatooine—except it ruined the best entertainment the base had seen since they’d touched down on Hoth.
And speaking of entertainment, Solo had just shaken hands with General Rieekan, turned, and fixed his eyes on Leia. “Well, Your Highness. Guess this is it,” the captain said, sauntering up to her.
With the bank of controllers positioned on a shelf of ice above the main floor, the princess had a rare height advantage over the captain, one she lorded with the easy grace of royalty. “That’s right,” Leia replied coolly.
Toryn’s grip on her stylus tightened as Solo’s face contorted through a complicated emotion that convinced her of two things: Han Solo wasn’t just leaving over some bounty, and she was about to come into some serious money. So she nearly groaned and dropped her head into her hands when Solo blurted, “Don’t get all mushy on me. So long, Princess,” and bolted for the door of the command center.
Leia was off like a shot on his heels, all sense of duty to whatever she’d been helping Serper with forgotten as she stormed out into the corridor shouting, “Han!”
The moment the doors closed behind her, the thin veneer of subtlety that had fallen over the command center dissolved. “Someone has to go after them,” Sunsbringer declared over the mutters. When Toryn threw her junior a warning look, the corporal shrugged. “We have to know what happens—this is my Boonta Eve Classic, ma’am.”
“Make those readouts your Boonta Eve Classic,” she said firmly. “The barracks gossip will be there when you’re back in the barracks.”
It earned her an approving nod from General Rieekan, which Toryn returned with a wry look. She’d seen his name scrawled in a neat hand next to a modest wager on that ledger—one of the few pulling for Solo. “Settle down, folks. Back to work,” Rieekan intoned, and the command center quieted under his order.
Toryn returned to the drudgery of her charts, the tension settling back into her shoulders like the fit of a trim dress uniform. It had been years since the Death Star, but every day had passed with a shadow hanging over it. The wasp-worm nest had been kicked. By luck, a miraculous engineering flaw, and a crack shot from a rookie pilot, the Rebel Alliance had taken down the monstrous battle station, but Toryn knew—had come to realize, over the years of running—that they didn’t have the resources to hold out against the Empire’s retaliation.
Bouts of entertainment like the Solo ledger were nothing but desperate attempts to stave off the creeping dread of the inevitable. Hoth could very well be the Rebellion’s last stand.
Toryn had hated it on sight. She understood the necessity of hiding in a place that was remote, undesirable, and cloaked by a dense asteroid belt, but everything about the planet made her ache for the rolling green hills of her homeworld, Chandrila. Her only consolation was having her sister to commiserate with in the mess during the fleeting moments their schedules aligned. Samoc Farr, three years her junior, had a more optimistic view of the planet, though that was owing to the fact that she’d seen far more of it than Toryn ever would.
“It’s beautiful, in an austere kind of way,” Samoc would tell her through a mouthful of tough, oversalted cave lichen. “When it’s just you, your patrol route, and all that ice. It’s quiet. We haven’t had quiet in a while, y’know?”
Toryn wished for something as simple as quiet. Her days were filled with the urgent chatter of the command center and the comm transmissions pumped through her headset, her nights with the worrisome creaking of the ice they’d dug out to form Echo Base. But the worst noise was the one that only she heard—that gnawing voice in the back of her head that had started the moment the Death Star blew. She never let it anywhere near her speech, not even in the hushed conversations she had with Samoc where they both admitted how tired they were, how long it had been since the two of them were bright-eyed teenagers vowing to stake their lives on Mon Mothma and her cause. Rebellions were built on hope; it was true.
And Toryn Farr feared that the seed of doubt she carried might bring the whole thing crumbling down once and for all.
She knew two moments were approaching with increasing inevitability: the moment her crisis of faith could no longer stay hidden, and the moment the Empire grabbed Echo Base by the scruff of its neck, tore it out of its icy warren, and held it up in the cruel light of day. Toryn tried to use Hoth’s tedium as an opportunity to reckon with her doubts, to quell them with pure, firm conviction. She owed it to the brave people she fought alongside—to Samoc, to General Rieekan, to Princess Leia. She owed it to Mon Mothma not to cheapen her years of faithful service by falling apart when the Rebellion needed her most.
But she was so tired, and Hoth was so cold. It felt like stagnation. Like freezing in place, unable to go on anymore.
So the second moment came first, and when it did, Toryn felt the pit of dread inside her blow wide as a nexu’s jaws.
* * *
—
In some ways, it was a mercy. There was no time for internal crisis with a fleet of Star Destroyers inbound, and so Toryn forced herself to boil away her doubts like vapor off a ship’s hull in the outer atmosphere. General Rieekan had given the evacuation order, and Echo Base had dissolved into a familiar, functional chaos as once again the Rebel Alliance prepared to drop everything and run.
It all boiled down to a flowchart of procedure—yet another mercy, because at least the simple logic of it kept Toryn’s anxiety down to a simmer. A fleet of capital ships dropping from hyperspace in Sector Four? Bring up the energy shield to stave off any hope of them bombing the base from orbit. Energy shield blocking the exodus of rebel craft? Drop it for seconds at a time, allowing the GR-75s and their escorts to clear Hoth’s orbit. Star Destroyers targeting the escaping transports?
Well, for that there was the ion cannon and Toryn Farr’s steady command.
She’d prepared relentlessly for these moments. Taught herself to process the trigonometry of the cannon’s targeting in an instant, to boil down the ion blast’s rate of travel and the distance to target into a simple measure of time, to reduce everything to an instinct that would allow her to keep her eyes pinned on the orbital charts.
As long as she was clearheaded. As long as she didn’t think too hard about how the Empire would never stop coming, about how this battle would cost them people, ships, and equipment they couldn’t spare, about how a battle had already been fought in her head over whether this was all worth it and she still wasn’t sure whether it had been won or lost.
She wouldn’t know until she spoke, and she wouldn’t speak until the precise moment it was needed—the moment she could feel prickling closer and closer as Lieutenant Navander called the approach of the Star Destroyer Tyrant and Corporal Sunsbringer announced that the Quantum Storm, the first GR-75 staged for evacuation, had finished its final checks. The transport bloomed to life in the bottom left corner of her readouts, and the mathematics of its frantic escape from Hoth’s gravity followed in a scroll of data that poured across her station. Toryn kept her eyes on the ship. The math she already knew.
“Their primary target will be the power generators,” Rieekan murmured. At his side stood Princess Leia, ready to assist the moment the strategy required a bifurcation of command. As the Quantum Storm threw itself toward the perimeter of Echo Base’s defenses, Rieekan turned his attention to operations and declared, “Prepare to open shield.”
The trick was not to think too hard about what that order meant—but of course, every officer in the command center was thinking about it. The shield dropping was a moment of vulnerability, one the Tyrant was in the perfect position to exploit as it wheeled its guns toward Echo Base. The Star Destroyer had an opening for a shot that would take out the Rebellion’s best defense, one they’d opened just to give a single transport and the two X-wings escorting it time to slip away.
Fortunately, the Tyrant was too focused on the prey streaking toward it to realize the opportunity it was wasting. Its main batteries targeted predictably on the Quantum Storm—Toryn wasn’t crass enough to say disappointingly, but she did think it. It was classic Imperial officer thinking, prioritizing the cruel over the strategic. Shooting down the transport full of refugee rebels rather than taking out their military base’s most critical defense.
/> Toryn rarely took joy in her command, but this?
This she might relish.
“Stand by, ion control,” she said, and watched as the v-150 Planet Defender wheeled its targeting to paint a straight line between its massive round housing and the Tyrant’s distant bulk. Toryn’s brain sank into the calculation it presented, weighing it against the data she’d been pulling together since the Quantum Storm launched. The problem she posited had a single answer: the moment she’d open her mouth next.
She couldn’t doubt that answer when she arrived at it. She’d trained for too long, fought for too many years to make such a rookie mistake. But even so, there was a moment—a moment she felt grab her by the throat and ask her who she thought she was, to make a call like this, to climb out of her sodden, frigid cave and spit in the face of fascist oppression.
Toryn Farr kept her eyes steady on the charts, and when she felt the moment slip into alignment, she announced, calm and clear, “Fire.”
Her voice was the finger on the trigger, the techs operating the Planet Defender the chemical reaction, and the end result was two pairs of pulses fired at a six-second interval hurtling away from Hoth’s ice as the aftershocks of the ion cannon’s discharge sent rumbles and creaks through Echo Base. They tore past the energy shield’s boundary half a second before it bloomed back into existence, skimmed by the Quantum Storm and its escort and—
Toryn knew by the collective breath the room inhaled that every eye was on her readouts. Every eye saw the data—the moment the first bolt struck the Tyrant’s body and the second slammed into the bridge. Perfect timing, married to perfect targeting, and this was the glorious result: an entire Star Destroyer going dark as the ion pulses made mincemeat of its systems.
The Quantum Storm sailed cleanly past it, hyperdrives already warming as it cleared the fringes of Hoth’s grasp.
“The first transport is away,” Lieutenant Navander announced into the base intercom. It felt as though every soul on Hoth roared in reply, fists flung in the air, nearly drowning out the lieutenant as he repeated the announcement.
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