“But—”
“Trust me!”
I shouldn’t have. But, well. You know.
My TIE screamed as it sliced downward, not directly at the rebel but above and to one side of him. On Howl’s mark, I tweaked the thrusters, sending the fighter into a hard spin to the left, not a great idea if you want to see where you’re going—
But it gave me a front-row seat as Howl put her machine through some kind of mutant upside-down Koiogran, crossed with a twist I don’t even have a name for. The rebel hotshot tried to follow her through it, but the X-wing wasn’t made for that kind of tight maneuver, and he lost control and ended up sliding after her, right in front of my guns. I barely even had to aim, just held down the trigger until their shield flared and the ship went up, stupid little astromech’s head popping off like a pull-tab on a can.
Howl had known. Where she would go, how he would follow, where I would need to be to make the shot. I’d never seen anything like it. Still haven’t. Vader himself couldn’t have pulled that move.
“Thanks!” she said, cheerful and unfazed, as though she hadn’t just given me a divine-level master class in combat flying.
“N…no problem.” My voice shook only a little.
Five minutes later, we got the recall order. Fifteen minutes after that, I plugged my TIE into the docking clamp and lifted myself out of it with shaking hands. Five minutes after that, I was in the shower with Howl, kissing her as frantically as I’ve ever kissed anyone, and finding to my shocked delight that she was kissing me back just as thoroughly.
* * *
—
I blink, and swear. Daydreaming. Don’t daydream while flying, no matter how pleasant the memory. Maybe that should be a rule.
“I’ve got something on my scope,” says Clipper. “Down in the rocks.”
“That’s not in our brief,” I tell him. “We’re on watch in case they make a run for it.”
“It’s right there,” he says. “Just on the edge.”
“I see it, too,” Dawn says. “Grid two fourteen by forty-five.”
I poke my scanners. There’s…something. A lump of metal. Could be a ship, could be a rock with an ore deposit. No way to know from here.
“Stay on course, follow orders,” I tell them.
“Lord Vader himself wants this freighter,” Clipper says. “If we’re the ones who bring it in, do you have any idea what he’ll give us?”
“I have a pretty good idea what he’ll do to you if you mess up your patrol route,” Howl says. “Theta Four is right. Stay on course.”
“The Empire’s glory isn’t achieved without risk,” Clipper says. It sounds like some dumb slogan they teach at the Academy. I consider telling him about the rules, but I doubt he’d be interested. “I’m going to check it out.”
“Theta Four has seniority here,” Howl says, “so that’s her call, not yours—”
Clipper’s TIE is already veering off. Scum-sucking Academy boys. Not surprisingly, Flameskull and Shockwave go after him. After a moment, Dawn turns off as well. I thought she had better sense.
That leaves Howl and me, flying our patrol pattern.
“The lieutenant is going to love this,” I mutter.
“Assuming anyone tells him,” Howl says. Which is fair, because I certainly won’t. Getting one up on a cloudfly like Clipper isn’t worth getting tagged with a rep for ratting people out to the officers.
“Let’s just hope the rebels don’t come blasting out anytime soon,” I say, “because you and I probably aren’t going to be able to stop a YT-1300 on our own.”
“Speak for yourself,” Howl says, teasing. “Did I ever tell you about the time—”
Someone screams over the comms. Dawn.
“Theta Seven,” I say, warningly. “Don’t.”
“They’re not far in.”
“Howl. They broke formation!”
“There’s something there. Scan won’t resolve. But—”
“Howl!”
Her fighter veers off, heading into the asteroid field.
I thumb the comm off and turn the cockpit air blue with every bad word I can think of.
Rule number one. Cloudflies are cloudflies. Chat with them, sleep with them, but don’t get attached…
Kissing Howl in the shower, skin slick and water scalding.
Rule number two. Don’t be a hero. Never be a hero, heroes end up dead.
That smile. Like she’s got one up on the universe, and she knows it.
The rules—
I keep up the barrage of profanity as I jam the stick hard over and lean on the pedals, torquing the TIE into a hard turn, diving among the rocks.
It doesn’t take me long to find Dawn and the others, or to figure out what the problem is. The problem is a hundred-meter worm that emerged from a burrow in one of the larger asteroids, maw gaping, studded with teeth the size of our fighters.
The asteroids are dense, like flying through a moving mountain range. Clipper and Flameskull are circling one of the spinning boulders. No sign of Shockwave. And Dawn’s fighter is in a hundred tiny pieces, but she’s still screaming into my ear, so she must have ejected.
Speaking of—
* * *
—
Rule number five: Never eject.
I mean, if you’re in an atmosphere or something, fine, go nuts. But out in deep space, in the middle of a battle? You’re almost guaranteed to be safer in your TIE than out of it, until it actually explodes. Thing is, while the TIE/ln doesn’t have much armor, it’s still a lot more than your flight suit. A battle tends to produce a lot of debris, which means a lot of little fragments pinging around that will bounce right off your canopy but would happily zip through your suit and your guts and come out the other side. Not to mention the hard radiation from weapons fire and ships going up. Three guesses how much rad protection is built into our flight suits.
Plus, the navy isn’t always scrupulous at picking everybody up after the action is over. There’s always somewhere else to be, some other rebellion to crush. Stay with your ship, eventually a salvage crew will come along. You may be asphyxiated by then, but at least someone will find your body! That’s something!
It’s not. But still. Never eject.
* * *
—
I’m not going to put too much blame on Dawn, though, given the state of her fighter, and the fact that giant space worms aren’t exactly in the handbook.
“What in the name of the Emperor is that?” Clipper said.
“Giant space worm,” I snap, “obviously. Now shut up and let me get a location fix.”
“It’s gonna eat me it’s gonna eat me it’s gonna eat me—” Dawn moans.
“What happened to Theta Twenty-Two?” Howl says.
“He turned the other way,” Flameskull says. “Lost track of him.”
Probably halfway home by now. Smart kid. My scanners finally pinpoint Dawn, floating in her ejector seat near the surface of the rock. Spectacular.
“Right,” I say, dropping protocol. “Howl, you and me will make a firing run, get its attention. Clipper, you and Flameskull go for Dawn, tag her with a utility line, get out of here. Got it?”
“Got it,” Clipper says, and the others echo it.
“On my mark—”
But Clipper is already powering in, so I just shout “Go!” and throttle up. The worm twists toward us and shifts ponderously in our direction. But it’s not agile enough to catch a TIE, not by half. Howl skates by above it, her stuttering laser cannons leaving a line of scorched craters across the thing’s skin. I go for the base, guns tracking a spray of shattered rock and space-worm hide. As it swings toward me, I cut to the left, ready to make my escape—
—and find Clipper coming right at me, about to commit an egregious violation of rule two, subsection one: Don’t
run into each other.
In the quarter second before we pancake, I yank the stick the other way and stand on the thrusters. Acceleration shoves me sideways, the TIE slews, and I go into a spin, missing Clipper by the space of a fingernail. Unfortunately, that leaves me whirling the wrong way, and I fight the suddenly overloaded stick to get the spin under control.
Not fast enough. One panel tip slams right into the space worm with a crunch I can hear through the hull, shearing entirely away. The engine on that side screams, and I slam the control for a hard shutdown before feedback blows the reactor. And that leaves me dead in space, no weapons, drifting slowly in front of a giant space worm, which opens its jaws wide as a cavern.
Why? I wonder. How much of a mouthful could I make for it?
(The giant exogorth, it turns out, is a silicon-based life-form that tunnels through the asteroids eating ore. It doesn’t give a damn about squishy organics, but our fighters, dense with refined alloys and radioisotopes, must look like candy)
I close my eyes and try to draw an appropriate lesson.
Rule six. Don’t go chasing after your girlfriend no matter how much you like her.
Rule six. Asteroid fields are bad news.
Rule six. Don’t get eaten by a giant space worm.
Rule—
“Shadow! Hang tight!”
Howl’s fighter screams past me, into the worm’s gaping maw, cannons spitting green fire. The thing rears up as her lasers scorch its insides, and its mouth starts to close. Howl, halfway down its throat, spins her TIE in a neat pirouette and punches forward at full power. The ship is fast, but not that fast, nothing is, and the last I see of her is a glimpse between the interlocking teeth of the worm as its jaw closes—
“Howl!” No no no no no, not her. I taught her rule number one, not for me—
A stutter of green light. The worm’s tooth shatters, fragments blowing outward, and Howl’s TIE sneaks through the gap in the thing’s smile, the fit so tight it scrapes the paint on her side panels. Then she’s free, drive flaring, and the giant worm has had enough for one day, slipping back down into its tunnels.
There’s a clunk as a utility line hits my hull, magnetic grapple catching.
“You all right, Shadow?”
“I’m still here.” I gasp for breath, tears beading inside my helmet where I can’t wipe them away. “Palpatine’s withered nuts, Howl—”
“Let’s get you back to the Avenger.” The cable goes taut, and the rocks slide gently around us.
“You’re supposed to finish your route,” I say when I can trust my voice. “Otherwise Captain Needa might throw you out an air lock.”
“Let me worry about Captain Needa,” Howl says, and I can hear her grin.
* * *
—
Rule number six: If you are going to get attached to somebody, make sure it’s to a girl who flies like an ash angel hopped up on death sticks.
* * *
—
Clipper, I later learned, had grabbed Dawn, and Shockwave wandered in eventually. Even cloudflies sometimes get lucky.
And we didn’t even get in trouble! Turns out Vader had strangled Needa just before we finally got back. All’s well that end’s well, Imperial Navy style.
THE FIRST LESSON
Jim Zub
Harmony, we seek.
The swaying stream of existence brings shifting tides of chaos and order in measures that can never be fully understood, only recognized and confirmed.
Reality, we accept.
A patient agreement with existence does not mean one cannot influence or improve one’s position in the universe. Acknowledgment does not equal passivity.
The future, we behold.
Meditation is not a body at rest or a stagnant state of selfishness. It is the diffusion of self, a desire to reach further than the physical bounds that anchor us so we may attempt to experience the wider patterns at play.
This moment of oneness paints itself upon an infinite canvas. It is a fleeting concordance between the physical world and spiritual senses that look beyond.
These thoughts and many others echoed through the energy that surrounds and binds the being known as Yoda.
A name. An identity. A shell of crude matter housing a form set upon this sharpened point of time and all the points preceding it.
The nine-hundred-year-old Jedi Master had come to Dagobah for rest and reflection. Living here was a way to carry out the fleeting time he had left before joining the spirits of his enlightened predecessors in the Force.
In the past Yoda may have occasionally used his cane to trick students into believing he was frail, but now it had become a necessary tool to keep his footing in weaker moments. His fighting form, long behind him, replaced with even greater inner strength, enlightenment, and acceptance.
Acceptance of his past mistakes and foolish assumptions. An acknowledgment of the swaying stream and his place within it.
Yet there would always be more to learn.
Feel the Force and go beyond.
Sitting outside his meager hut, introspective and silent, Yoda let his awareness swirl out in all directions, connecting him to the diverse biome that was Dagobah. He had carried out this mental exercise countless times throughout his years spent in exile, yet each time experiencing it felt engaging and new.
The ground was soft and damp. The air thick and hazy.
The seasons were in transition on this planet of marshy mist. In this moment he felt each new sprout and rotting root.
A cacophony of sounds near and far signaled a menagerie of creatures carrying out the delicate arrangement of their unfettered instincts.
A spade-headed smooka dragged its snout through mud in search of food. Yoda smelled the thick soil as it shifted to and fro beneath his nose.
A skittering nharpira built a loamy nest to keep its impending young well hidden. Yoda felt soft clumps of cool soil in his hands.
A ferocious dragonsnake hunted for a meal worthy of its grand gullet. Yoda heard the rumbling growl within his own throat.
Yoda perceived these beasts and more in ever-widening waves of awareness. He knew he was not at the center of this ethereal experience. He was just one link in an eternal and immeasurable web built and broken among the stars.
Broken?
Why broken?
That vile thought dropped into the stillness of the self, a jagged uneven thing with a strange gravity of its own that drew in tiny motes of fear and anger, disturbing the stream…
…A flash of darkness…
…A disturbance in the Force.
Yoda could not remember the last time something had broken his concentration in such a manner. Was it a sign of inner doubt or an old fear he’d managed to keep hidden within?
No. This was an outside presence.
A presence he had not felt in many years.
Potent and prophetic. Foreign, yet familiar.
A Skywalker.
Obi-Wan’s spirit had contacted Yoda years earlier. His old friend spoke of Anakin’s child and hope for the future of the Jedi, but the old Master assumed he meant Leia. Yoda relished the chance to help her find her place in the universe and potential within the Force. But this was another.
Luke, the brash.
Luke, the reckless.
Luke, the echo of his father’s yearning need to control that which he could not understand.
And Luke was now on Dagobah.
The boy arrived in a ship ill suited for a lengthy stay, carrying barely enough equipment to sustain him for a month or more. It was a perfect microcosm of his shortsighted approach to life and danger, proof he would not have the restraint required to fulfill the arduous training of a Jedi.
Courageous, but foolhardy.
Res
olute, but woefully unprepared.
Yoda could already sense Luke’s mind was a jumble of excitement and anticipation. The boy’s thoughts raced with assumptions about who he would encounter on this strange planet.
A Jedi Master.
A warrior.
A being of great stature and even greater power.
Most amusing, this first lesson shall be.
With a sigh, the old Master stood up, returning his awareness solely to the frail form that housed it. He could already sense the discord Luke brought in his wake, unsettling the swaying stream and all its inhabitants.
The smooka fled its feeding ground.
The nharpira abandoned its new lair.
The dragonsnake attempted to eat the boy’s astromech companion but, upon finding it a poor fit for digestion, furiously vomited the droid out of the water and into the trees.
Carefully moving through the swamp while staying hidden beneath the fog, Yoda soon spotted the boy and his droid unpacking their supplies. Even though the droid was caked with algae, dirt, and stomach fluid, its appearance and familiar blips were still quite recognizable.
R2-D2.
Of course the boy had Anakin’s old droid with him. Such cycles of fate no longer surprised the nine-hundred-year-old Jedi.
Yoda watched Luke’s gaze wander as he inspected the marshy environment while cracking open a metal container filled with travel rations. At the same time, he absentmindedly chatted aloud to R2, voicing his concerns.
“It’s really a strange place to find a Jedi Master…”
R2-D2 responded with high-pitched whistles and warbles of reassurance.
“This place gives me the creeps.”
He hesitated.
“Still…There’s something familiar about this place.”
Place, place, place…Repetition and small-mindedness. The boy saw only the surface of things. His perception of reality still so limited. He was less than a Padawan regardless of his age.
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