From a Certain Point of View

by Seth Dickinson

  I generate near-identical men in white armor, flowing in waves upon waves away from Yoda, under his feet. Marching to follow Yoda’s orders. Yoda failing them as living beings, the lives he claimed to so honor.

  The young one rises from the dirt floor in a swirl of orange smoke and blue and white. Ahsoka. Turning away from the Council that Yoda led with arrogance. Yoda’s failure to her bright light in the galaxy, ego and overconfidence leading the way.

  The now familiar shape of Anakin swells up from fire and smoke. His anger brewing for years and growing under Sidious. Yoda’s failure to stop his training before it started, failure to detect his corruption as it happened. Yoda’s failure to save him before he rose as a specter even the old Master had not faced.

  Yoda’s breath comes in short pants and he leans heavily on his cane. With an outstretched hand, he walks through my apparitions until he reaches the other entrance tucked between long roots. Behind him, the phantoms of his past roar as one, rising up into a whirlwind. Where he goes, I will follow, I will send his ghosts—

  He turns abruptly. Smiling.

  “Old fears are these. Stubborn. But see them, I must.” Yoda stands against his tormentors, nodding not at them but at me. “My thanks, you have.”

  And then the old Master leaves my shadows.

  * * *

  —

  I am still angry when Luke arrives. No one thanks me. I am in no one’s service.

  He is young and rash, just as Yoda had predicted. Against his Master’s warning, he takes his weapons within my walls, the fool. A blaster and a lightsaber are no match against the phantoms from this boy’s mind.

  Luke’s fear produces a black specter. The boy gives him shape and sound. A menacing cape, darkness embodied. Mechanical breaths like the many starships that have landed on my surface. Luke’s mind supplies a name:

  Vader.

  This Vader is walking death.

  If I could laugh, I would. The boy makes it easy. I do not need to amplify the fear that this lord instills. Luke’s doubt overwhelms even me, but I use it, expand it until the light in him has grown small. Smaller. So that his own terrifying visions can grow.

  The boy brought his lightsaber, didn’t he? And now he creates a reason to use it.

  Luke floods his Vader with all of the prowess that he fears the real one possesses. Calls into existence the red weapon of those who call themselves dark against the blue of those who claim the light. One blow. A second. A third.

  I press his dread down, and shape it into panic. Luke swings.

  Nothing feeds me better than the ones who think they know their true fear.

  The black specter’s helmet rolls—and reveals the boy’s own face.

  The disgust and horror that spill out of him is enough to feed me for a year.

  * * *

  —

  Later, when Luke readies his ship, even I can hear Yoda’s protests. The boy wishes to leave and face Vader, his fear in both flesh and machinery. Let him.

  Then: “The cave. Remember your failure at the cave!”

  The cave is me. Yoda means me. Luke’s failure?

  But I am not a test. I am not a lesson. I am mist sweeping aside to show weakness. The trap beneath the leaves of blackvine. I am a mirror. A revelation.

  Luke shouts back, “But I’ve learned so much since then!”

  And the shimmering man speaks, too. The three of them argue about Luke hurrying to face Vader, caution him against temptation toward the dark.

  But on my side of the swamps, smoke spins within me and without as I search for answers. How? How have I shown Luke a future he could learn from? How have I provided a warning against danger that, paired with Yoda’s teachings, could prevent that future from coming to pass?

  As Luke’s ship powers up and the droid trills and beeps, I answer my own question.

  I remember Yoda’s willingness to pass my threshold, these many years, and grow denser and colder with realization.

  Over time, we had both sought dark apparitions, had we not? Yoda always worked to confront his inner darkness, while I always worked to show it…because we both desire the manifestation of fear. Different methods, for the same ends. Alongside, not against.

  A dance. A push and pull.

  And Yoda knew all of this when Luke came to me. He knew his teachings and he knew my methods. He’d relied on my darkness. I had been alone, but with the old Master—

  As Luke’s ship rises and he rushes to his friends, a fifth understanding dawns in the light. A word that is both emotion and fact. One that acknowledges the past, the future, and the present. One that means hope and sacrifice. This word, this understanding, is one I cannot mimic or shape into terror, no matter how hard I try. It is…

  Alliance.

  TOOTH AND CLAW

  Michael Kogge

  Bossk scraped his tongue across his teeth, tasting blood. His trap had worked.

  Though the gunship that had emerged from hyperspace on the asteroid belt’s edge didn’t appear on the Hound’s Tooth’s scopes, he wasn’t troubled. He had visual confirmation through his cockpit canopy and could even make out the ship’s curved prow and tubular fuselage. Only a Wookiee would helm a ship shaped to resemble that most antiquated weapon, the bowcaster. And a Wookiee ship meant this had to be his long-sought quarry. This had to be Chainbreaker.

  Bossk engaged the timer on his wrist chronometer, sealed his vac helmet, and hastened to the air lock, grabbing his Relby mortar rifle on the way. He’d already suited up in preparation for the next phase of his plan, since every second was precious. The Imperial flight itinerary he had altered to lure his target here afforded him approximately nine standard minutes until a dungeon ship full of Wookiee prisoners was scheduled to pass through the Rycep belt. But Bossk gauged he had even less time than that. The famed liberator known only as Chainbreaker hadn’t freed thousands of Wookiees from captivity without knowing when to run. If there were any signs that the dungeon ship was a ruse, Chainbreaker would assuredly skip to lightspeed, and Bossk doubted he’d be able to trap his prize again. For this reason, he’d deliberately chosen a more furtive approach to boarding the gunship than ambushing it in the Hound’s Tooth.

  As Bossk entered the air lock, a chime alerted him to the reception of a high-level communication. It was probably another candidate holo-ad for the upcoming guild elections—he’d been swamped with those recently—so he ignored it. He was about to press the EGRESS button when he noticed on the air lock viewscreen that the communication wasn’t from the guild, but from an Imperial address. He played the message.

  “This is for the bounty hunter Bossk of Trandosha,” said the pale-skinned human male in a black Imperial uniform, his hands behind his back. “I am Lieutenant Masil Veit, communications officer on the Star Destroyer Executor, and am contacting you based on the recommendation of your guild. My commander will pay a significant bounty for the capture of a Corellian freighter called the Millennium Falcon.”

  Bossk drooled at the mention of the Falcon. Its pilot, the renegade known as Chewbacca, not only rivaled Chainbreaker as the most wanted Wookiee in the Empire, but was also the one being Bossk detested more than his own father.

  “Lord Vader will receive you on his flagship for further instructions,” Veit said. “The rendezvous coordinates are—”

  The human’s image became distorted and disappeared. Bossk prodded the viewscreen controls to continue, but there was nothing more to play. Perhaps the ionic winds that occasionally swept through the belt had interfered with the transmission, though oddly the Hound’s Tooth hadn’t picked up any since landing on the asteroid to hide. Veit’s comm address was also garbled, so Bossk couldn’t request that the coordinates be re-sent, and he didn’t dare relay his interest through the guild. Notice of a bounty offered by Darth Vader, the second most powerful being in the Empire,
would attract other hunters in the guild, like bug-eyed Zuckuss or that crosswired protocol droid 4-L-something, if they didn’t know about it already. Truth be told, Bossk stood a better chance of trying to reconstruct the message with the new military-grade transceiver he’d installed. But that would take time, and his chrono presently read eight minutes, eleven seconds.

  He hit the EGRESS button.

  Launched into space with the pressurized air, Bossk initiated a quick burn of his jetpack to stop his spin and propel him on a path toward the Wookiee gunship. The energy emitted wouldn’t register on sensors as anything more than a blip, equivalent to the tiny collisions that were commonplace across the belt.

  He navigated the outer ring of asteroids without incident and entered empty space on a trajectory that would take him to the gunship in less than three minutes. For that duration he tried to relax into semi-estivation so as to reduce his body temperature and make himself virtually undetectable. Normally, he could self-regulate without much effort, but right now he was utterly distracted.

  Bossk couldn’t get his mind off Chewbacca.

  The notorious Wookiee renegade had been one of the first Imperial bounties Bossk had collected more than a decade ago, when he was part of a posse of Trandoshan hunters. But Chewbacca hadn’t remained in the Empire’s custody for long, and after escaping went on to become the bane of Bossk’s bounty hunting career. Bossk had nearly caught the Wookiee and his smart-mouthed sidekick on multiple occasions, such as the time when he found the pair trawling the sewage seas of Erub II for starship parts or when he sabotaged their efforts to build a secret Wookiee colony on Gandolo IV. Then there was the breakneck chase along the plasma floes of the Zusi hypertunnel that shattered the Hound’s Tooth’s class one generator and the explosive blaster battle on the Jurzan spaceport that destroyed both Bossk’s favorite cantina and the new starship he’d just purchased, the Bitemark. It didn’t matter if he had them cornered or outnumbered; somehow the two had managed to slip through his grasp more times than a Trandoshan had digits. These failures had done more than just embarrass Bossk or damage his standing in the guild—they had caused his own father, Cradossk, to question whether Bossk had been the proper hatchling to devour the nest-eggs of his siblings and come forth as the sole survivor of his clutch.

  Bossk’s vac suit beeped a warning. His temperature was spiking. He had to be more disciplined if he wanted to remain hidden from sensor view. Just thinking of Chewbacca boiled his cold Trandoshan blood. In a concerted effort to self-regulate, he turned his full attention to the mission. Once he captured Chainbreaker, he could worry about Veit’s message and catching Chewbacca. An egg in one’s claws was always better than two in the nest, or so his father used to say.

  He crossed the gulf from the asteroid belt and came in fast on the gunship. Measuring about fifty meters, it matched the length of his vessel, though size was the only attribute the two shared. While the Hound’s Tooth was a boxy freighter of all sharp edges, bringing to mind the squarish muzzle of its namesake, the Trandoshan hunting hound, the Wookiee gunship was rounded and smooth, crafted not from metal, but from wood.

  Perhaps that explained why the Hound’s Tooth’s sensors had not spotted the craft. The wood acted as a natural baffler to hide the gunship’s power generator and engine signatures. No wonder Chainbreaker had been able to waylay prisoner transports and evade arrest for years. One had to be actually looking at the ship in the visual spectrum to see it.

  Landing on the gunship’s underside, Bossk protracted his claws through the tips of his specially tailored gloves and sank them into the hull. The wood was thick and tough, milled from the giant wroshyr trees of the Wookiee homeworld, Kashyyyk. Wookiees cultivated the trees to build everything from armor to architecture and loved to boast how the wood could withstand the most intense energy attacks. What the braggarts never acknowledged was that their storied timber failed to repel the simplest of weapons. A Trandoshan’s claws could cut and flay wroshyr wood like Doshian jellyfish.

  Claw-strike by claw-strike, Bossk pulled himself across the hull. Along the bow the word LISWARR had been carved, in both Galactic Basic and the Wookiee language of Shyriiwook. He assumed it was the name of the ship, memorializing a deceased relative or friend of the captain, as was Wookiee tradition.

  Arriving at the air lock, he avoided touching the exterior controls so as not to trip any alarms in the ship and instead circumscribed a hole in the hatch. He then pried loose the wood, letting out the pressurized air. Once he’d crawled inside the air lock, he jammed the piece back into place behind him and went about slicing another hole in the opposite air lock hatch. Fortunately, he didn’t have to decompress, since his vac suit pressure matched that of the ship’s interior. When the hole was finished, he climbed through it, eager to begin his hunt.

  Illumination fixtures molded from tree resin cast a dismal amber light over the ship’s main corridor, which like the hull and the air lock was made almost entirely out of wroshyr lumber. The wood’s surface had been left unsanded and unvarnished, showing off the grotesque knots and rings that Wookiees found ornamental, and there was scarcely a sign of technology to be seen. All wires and conduits were tucked behind access panels, and all controls were installed inside wall boxes.

  The corridor was quiet but for the thrum of the engines. Bossk’s unconventional method of entry seemed not to have raised the intruder alarms, just as he had hoped. He got right down to business, shedding his boots, gloves, and anything that might interfere with his hunt. When he removed his helmet, he was assaulted by a stench that was so noxious, a lesser Trandoshan would have choked. Not Bossk. He pushed out his tongue, flared his nostrils, and inhaled. He wanted to take it all in, the smells and the taste. Every family unit on Kashyyyk had its own scent, and in the roil here he smelled Wookiees of the Chyakk, Koom, and Gkrur clans, along with a trace of what had to be the Kaapauku tribe—or was it Sawa? He always confused the names, but he knew that last scent like he knew his father’s rum-drenched breath. It was a hideous odor, fouler than a swarm of diseased gnathgrgs or a bunch of broken nest-eggs rotting on the Scorch.

  It was clan-stink of his nemesis, Chewbacca.

  Bossk knew that Chewbacca himself wasn’t aboard—the stink would’ve been much, much worse—but someone related to the Wookiee was, and that kinship could work in Bossk’s favor. He could take this cousin hostage to bait Chewbacca to come out of hiding. Though Wookiees were among the smartest and strongest species in the galaxy, they had one glaring weakness Trandoshans didn’t: They’d do anything to help their families.

  Bossk unslung his Relby from his back and strode down the corridor. He was going to enjoy this hunt more than he had previously thought.

  He’d gone about a hundred paces when a hydrospanner came hurtling at his head. He batted it away with his rifle and then targeted its thrower, a brown-and-white Wookiee female who was trying to run away. A well-placed shot to her spine made sure she didn’t. Tools clanked out of her satchel when she hit the floor.

  Stepping over the Wookiee’s body, Bossk noticed that her eyes were open and her lips twitching while the rest of her remained still. He would bind her later. The paralytic effects of his stun bolt should last for at least fifteen minutes, more than enough time for him to complete his job. He’d purposely switched off his Relby’s lethal settings to maximize his gains, because in most instances these fugitives were worth more alive than dead. After he’d apprehended Chainbreaker, he could sort through those who might provide leverage against Chewbacca and those who might have a bounty worth claiming.

  His instincts compelled him to turn. A snub-nosed, short-legged Wookiee jumped out of a hidden hatch, wielding what looked like a tree branch and barking obscenities in Shyriiwook. Bossk let his rifle hang from its shoulder strap and caught the branch in midswing, engaging in a fierce tug-of-war until he landed a kick to the runt’s gut. The scrappy beast let go and fell with a ye
lp. A stun bolt prevented him from getting up.

  Bossk dropped the branch, feeling his palm tingle. He looked to see a pincer flea scrambling around his three clawed fingers, unable to find purchase on his scales. The nasty pest must have leapt out of the Wookiee’s fur. Bossk smacked his hand against the wall a couple of times to kill the thing. The resulting stain gave the wood a decoration he much preferred.

  Continuing down the corridor, he found that it terminated in a door. He bashed the controls with his fist, and the door opened.

  The chamber beyond reeked of the Kashyyyk forest. It was dark inside, but that didn’t hinder Bossk since his vision extended into the infrared. In the center of the room, three wroshyr trees gave off robust heat signatures, their branches twined around one another, full of leaves and dangling moss. Rodents scampered across the boughs and insects chirruped around the chamber as if it were night in a Kashyyyk forest.

  Wookiee shipwrights prided themselves on the individuality of each vessel they built, but most still adhered to a general plan, which incorporated a nursery like this. The wroshyr trees provided wood for patching the hull and repairing other areas of the ship, along with offering a place of recreation and rest where the crew could climb, leap, swing, and sleep. No matter where they went, Wookiees couldn’t be without their damn trees.

  In this minuscule regard, Bossk had to give Chewbacca some respect. For years the shaggy smuggler had managed to live with a cocky human copilot on a cramped Corellian freighter absent any arboreal amenities. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t yet been caught. Chewbacca wasn’t as soft and self-indulgent as the rest of his ilk.

  Bossk pointed his rifle upward and crept around the trees. He spotted the heat outlines of three Wookiees huddled together on an upper branch. From the tang of their scent, he identified them as juveniles. They must be offspring of the adults aboard. One of them dropped a handful of pellets that bounced on the ground and rolled near Bossk’s bare feet. The pellets were wasaka berries, a favorite food of the Wookiees, eaten as snacks, baked in pies, and even juiced for spirits. But for Trandoshans, wasakas were poison.