“They’ll take care of you, I promise,” he said.
“What’s your name, soldier?” Corwi asked.
“L’cayo Llem.”
“Thank you, L’cayo. I won’t forget this.” Corwi brought her holorecorder up in front of her and tilted her head toward it. L’cayo nodded. She didn’t know exactly why, but she felt compelled to capture an image of the soldier—she wouldn’t be in a position to escape without him. Gratitude emanated from her every pore.
Covered in sweat and breathing heavily, Corwi glanced around her as she waited to board the carrier. Rebels waved others onto ships, urging their comrades on with encouraging, if stressed, shouts. Everyone looking out for one another. Everyone who volunteered to join the Rebel Alliance and defy the Empire. Everyone who stepped up to save the galaxy from oppression.
A waving hand motioned her to board the carrier. Corwi wasted no time filing in and sitting where instructed. Beings rushed aboard, but the atmosphere was eerily quiet. She followed the example of those around her and strapped in. The space around her filled with bodies. They were still on Hoth, so they were still in danger. In the stillness, Corwi could hear snippets of frantic comm chatter, but she couldn’t make out the words. She tried not to give in to spiraling fear. Tried not to think about all she still wanted to do. She redirected her focus to how she got on this carrier and to those around her who had committed their lives to this kind of existence—the kind of existence that can be upended in mere minutes once the enemy arrives.
Corwi closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She thought about how she’d chased the heroes of the Rebellion around Echo Base. But it wasn’t only about them. Not at all. The pilot of this carrier, the defensive fighters waiting to escort and protect them, L’cayo who led her to this seat of safety—heroes. Every one of them. Maybe their names weren’t uttered in cantinas around the galaxy. Maybe the galaxy didn’t know about their heroic deeds. It didn’t make the efforts of the dozens of beings around her any less significant. Everyone was a hero.
The sound of the ramp closing rattled through the ship. The engines groaned. Corwi felt the ship move out of the transport bay and swiftly into the air. She released a deep breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. It was one step closer to safety, but they were far from celebrating a successful escape. She surveyed those around her and absorbed a range of emotions from the other evacuees: a single tear running down a cheek tense with fear across from her, white-knuckled hands clenched on top of a bowed head in a seeming plea for help near the front of the transport, multiple unfocused anxious stares. She heard someone nervously tapping their foot. Corwi strained to listen to the comms, to the rumbling of the ship—whatever might give her a clue about whether they would survive. She recalled Leia mentioning that each ship had only two fighter escorts and wished she had forgotten that detail. Two fighter escorts against a Star Destroyer? Corwi blinked the scenario out of her mind and pictured an entire squadron just beyond the ship’s hull protecting them as they leapt into hyperspace.
A blast buffeted the ship’s hull. She gasped. Was that…was that the Empire shooting at them? Corwi squinched her eyes so forcibly she saw lights dance at the edge of her vision. She heard a sharp sob far away and a chorus of ragged breathing. Her own knuckles turned white as she gripped the seat underneath her and braced for an explosion. Another light movement. More intense breathing. And then the light sound of comm chatter. The pilot shouting, “We’re away! Repeat: We’re away!”
Those words, those precious few words, hung in the air as despair turned into elation. A few individuals looked numb, as if their hearts couldn’t take the emotional whiplash and the revelation of survival. Grim mouths turned to broad smiles. Hands relaxed from worried grips to pound friends, perhaps strangers even, on the back in triumph. Loud cheers replaced the terror-infused breaths. Corwi cried from relief; she slumped in her seat as every bone-crushing worry lifted and tears streamed down her face. They were safe. She was safe. A feeling of hope settled back into her mind.
“Hope,” she whispered to herself. “Hope.”
Jyn Erso’s words came to mind. “Rebellions are built on hope.” Corwi had equated hope with heroic deeds like Jyn’s sacrifice or Luke destroying the Death Star. She’d believed those huge moments and the heroes who carried them out were key to inspiring more beings to join the Rebellion. That wasn’t true at all. Hope wasn’t limited to only a handful of names. That’s not who made up the ranks of the Alliance. Hope was about people—ordinary people that made a choice to join the fight and to stay in it.
Hope was the rebel soldier who guided a lost propagandist to safety, who recognized the value of a single life and did what he could to protect it. Hope was all around her in the now reassured faces of the evacuees. People who had decided to band together against the Empire and didn’t waver even in the face of annihilation.
Every person in the Rebellion was a hero. But it wasn’t only that. They all represented hope. And that was the way forward for the Rebellion. Not to focus only on the big, sweeping heroic deeds. No, it was to create more hope. And they would do that by honoring and championing the heroism people exhibited every day. Hope.
An energized Corwi flipped her holorecorder on. She turned to the person next to her and took in his weary, cheerful demeanor. Corwi gave him a warm smile and asked, “Why do you fight the Empire? Tell me your story.”
“Why me?” he asked.
“Your story is going to save the galaxy.”
ROGUE TWO
Gary Whitta
Zev Senesca hated the cold. He hated the snow and ice, so cold it burned, hated the freezing wind that whipped at your face until you could no longer feel it. He hated this entire Maker-forsaken planet—if you could even call it a planet. Hoth was more like a giant frozen rock floating in space, as uninviting a place in the galaxy as could be imagined.
But maybe that was the point. The Empire had the Rebellion on the run after discovering their former base on Yavin 4 and forcing a hurried evacuation, and since then had made it near impossible for them to find a new home, having issued a galaxy-wide declaration that any civilized world offering safe harbor or passage to the Alliance would be subject to crippling sanctions and Imperial occupation. So in finding a location for a new base, all the rebels had left to choose from were the most remote and least suitable sanctuaries: the deserted, barren planets and moons to be found in the far reaches of space. But as desperate as the Empire knew the Rebellion was, they likely never considered they’d be so desperate as to hole up in a place like this, a planet so cold it was barely capable of sustaining any kind of life save a handful of indigenous creatures, most of which lived deep beneath the surface, closer to the planet’s still-warm core. So maybe it was smart of leadership, in a way, to hide here, one of the last places the Empire would ever think to look.
Still, that didn’t take the sting out of the day-to-day hardships of living in a place like this. Carving out the hangars and tunnels for the base itself had been hard enough, a brutally laborious job that had taken weeks and come at the cost of several lives, mostly to the cold or to cave-ins during construction. But now here they were, as comfortable as they could be under the circumstances. The techs had even managed to pipe heating throughout the base, and everyone had cheered when they first turned on the generators and they actually worked, allowing them all to strip down to fewer than six warm layers for the first time since they’d arrived.
But that had been just the beginning. Even with a functioning base to shelter inside, Hoth threw up one problem after another. The snowstorms and atmospheric interference were often so severe there were only limited windows in which Echo Base’s sensor operators could conduct scans for any signs of Imperial presence in the system—although that one at least cut both ways, the harsh weather also obscuring any rebel emanations from the surface that a passing Imperial ship might otherwise detect. They were oft
en blind here on Hoth, but at least they were often invisible, too.
A bigger problem concerned the surface speeders the rebels had brought with them from Yavin 4. Zev and the other pilots of Rogue Squadron loved to fly them; they were fast, maneuverable, and responsive, and though they had limited range they were perfectly suited to scouting Hoth’s otherwise inhospitable landscape. But they had been designed to operate in temperate climates and their engines immediately froze up here, rendering them grounded and useless until they could be adapted to the cold—if that was even possible. Last Zev heard, the engineers reckoned that was a fifty-fifty prospect at best. That left the rebels grateful for any small break they could get, and one had come in the form of the tauntauns, the only native surface-dwelling species they had so far encountered. They were ugly and they smelled terrible and they were headstrong beasts, not easy to break, but patience had paid off and now the base had a small paddock of the animals, strong and fast, that could be saddled and ridden. Having been satisfied with the progress of the hastily improvised program, and in the hope that it would only be a stopgap measure until the speeders could be brought online, General Rieekan had given the go-ahead for regular tauntaun patrols, restricted to a limited radius around the base’s perimeter. That had given the rebels some degree of short-range reconnaissance capability, at least.
But one thing Zev had learned was that for everything Hoth gave, it took twice as much away. There had been unconfirmed reports—little more than rumors, really—about giant creatures spotted lumbering around in the frozen wastes. Roughly the shape of a man but easily twice a man’s size, those who claimed to have seen one had said. But they couldn’t be sure; the weather on Hoth often made visibility severely limited, and it was easy to mistake a rock or other natural form for something else even from just a few meters out. And after only a few months in this wasteland, some of the men and women stationed here were showing the first signs of struggling to cope with the suffocating isolation. It didn’t surprise Zev at all that some might start claiming to have seen things that weren’t really there, their minds playing tricks on them. And that’s all he believed it was, people seeing things that weren’t there. But Rieekan, still counting the lives of those already lost establishing this base, wanted to be sure. And after the general gave the order to conduct sweeps of the area and place sensors capable of picking up any life readings, it was of course Commander Skywalker who insisted on leading the first patrol. Always unwilling to let any of his Rogue Squadron pilots undertake a risk he wasn’t willing to volunteer for himself, he had taken a tauntaun and gone out into the great white waste.
Captain Solo had insisted on joining him, arguing that the job would go faster if the two of them split up and shared the sensor-placement area—but doing so always with one eye on the princess, Leia, standing nearby. Trying to impress her as usual. If Solo wanted to keep his feelings for her a secret, he had done a spectacularly poor job of it. Everyone in Echo Base knew about it. Gossip was a key weapon in the fight against boredom in a place as desolate as this, and Solo’s painfully obvious attempts to impress the princess provided plenty of fodder for it. Zev had even secretly started a squadron betting pool, and every pilot had a wager placed on what day she would finally tire of his schoolboy attempts to show off and tell him exactly where he could shove them.
Reluctantly, Leia had allowed both Solo and Skywalker to go, while imploring them to stay within the authorized search radius—and with a particular instruction to Solo that any heroics he might try to pull out there would only succeed in doing the exact opposite of impressing her. Solo had assured her that he would play things by the book, then as he often liked to do added a cocky wink to undermine everything he had just said. And so Leia had stood by the north entrance’s shield door and watched as the two men headed out until they were swallowed up by that great blanket of white.
That was this morning. And now Commander Skywalker was missing.
* * *
—
The news moved through Echo Base like a howling gale, chilling everyone it touched. Within minutes of Skywalker being declared overdue, every being stationed there was fearing the worst. They knew Hoth was a pitiless world that would kill you the moment you let your guard down. The commander was not the kind of man to do that, but then Hoth had other tricks up its sleeve, too, ways to kill even the most vigilant and prepared. Maybe even someone protected by the Force, as Skywalker was rumored to be, ever since he had become a legend by firing the shot that destroyed the dreaded Death Star and saved the Rebellion. That was another popular subject of base gossip—was he or wasn’t he? Zev, who was old enough to remember the tales of the Jedi from his childhood, was ambivalent about it, not willing to rule it out but deciding it was more likely that the kid was simply one hell of a pilot.
Not just one hell of a pilot but one hell of a man. After Skywalker’s incredible feat at the Battle of Yavin, Leia had rewarded him with the rank of commander and permission to form his own squadron. As the squadron’s founder he had the task of naming it, and though there were many delightful color choices available Skywalker had decided instead to dedicate his new outfit to some fellow heroes of the Rebellion. He had heard the story—as everyone had—of the heroic sacrifice made by Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor, and dozens of other valiant rebels in stealing the closely guarded Imperial plans that revealed the Death Star’s critical hidden flaw and giving the Alliance a fighting chance at survival. Rogue Squadron it was, then. But Luke went one step further. The specific Rogue One designation that Erso and her crew had given themselves was to be forever retired with honor in the annals of rebel heroism. He would be Rogue Leader, but the next pilot in the roster would be given the call sign Rogue Two instead of One. That call sign fell to Zev Senesca, and he considered it a badge of pride. He would never tire of telling others how he got that designation, because it was an opportunity to regale those who might still be unfamiliar with the Erso story, a tale that summed up rebel courage and determination in the face of overwhelming odds better than any other he knew.
More than anything, though, Zev was proud to serve under the commander. Though Skywalker enjoyed revered status among the rank and file, he never traded on it or even seemed to enjoy it. Quite the opposite: He seemed to hate the idea that he was special or any better than the men and women who served under him, and he went to great pains to make that point. He wasn’t like other commanders Zev had served under. When he asked you how you were doing, he actually listened to you. He seemed genuinely interested in the lives of those around him, cared about every soul he had been entrusted with. I’m just a kid from a moisture farm on a planet no one’s ever heard of, he had told the assembled Rogue Squadron pilots when he first brought them together. So try to go easy on me when I screw up, okay? That brought a laugh, the first of many the Rogue Squadron pilots would enjoy as they grew together under the commander’s humble but firm leadership. Everybody liked him. And now he was gone.
Two things happened immediately. The first was that the rebel mechanics assigned the task of adapting the speeders to the cold started working round-the-clock shifts. Those speeders were the best chance, maybe the only chance, of finding the commander before he froze to death or succumbed to whatever other fate had befallen him out there. So now they didn’t take breaks, didn’t eat, but instead devoted themselves to laboring constantly until they found a workaround for the coolant problem that was keeping the speeders grounded. When Zev first heard that Hoth was so damn cold it was even freezing engine coolant, he thought it was funny. It didn’t seem so funny now.
The second thing that happened was that Captain Solo insisted on going back out and looking for the commander. Even though there were no ships available, even though the temperature was dropping rapidly as the day’s light waned, he had taken a tauntaun and gone out alone. He hadn’t asked Rieekan for permission, of course, because he knew he would never have gotten it. He just went. That wa
s Solo’s way—act now, think later. The former smuggler had a mixed reputation among Rogue Squadron; pilots are by nature a cocksure bunch, so many admired his pluck and his seemingly limitless ability to speak his mind, no matter how ill-advised it might be to do so. Others—like Zev—saw him as a blowhard who had been blessed with more luck than talent and who liked to talk way too much about that piece-of-junk freighter of his. But the fact that Solo had left the safety of Echo Base and gone out into that frozen wilderness alone and without consulting his superiors told Zev something else about him—this time at least, the man’s damn-fool heroics weren’t about impressing the princess. This time he was genuinely concerned about his friend.
Zev knew how that felt. The thought of the commander somewhere out there, lost and helpless and alone as the cold bit deeper and deeper into him, felt like a ball of ice in the pit of his stomach. Worse still was the feeling of helplessness—Solo’s one-man rescue mission may have been foolhardy but at least he was doing something. All Zev and the other Rogue Squadron pilots could do was sit and wait and try not to go out of their minds with worry as the hours ticked by, waiting for any news. But the only news that had trickled in so far had been grim: The base had now lost contact with Captain Solo, and the shield doors had been closed for the night, meaning there could be no further attempts to locate him or the commander until first light tomorrow.
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