Deena had considered quitting before. It was not impossible, although the stories she’d heard of those who had left service didn’t inspire much confidence. The one thing the Empire brought was order. She could see that. For the young and the vulnerable, those looking for a way out, a chance at a new life, there were worse things to do than volunteer for Imperial service. But once that structure and stability were gone, once you were on your own, left to deal with the trauma and stress that had, until that moment, been softened by whatever the Imperial medical droids injected into your arm when you were sent down to the infirmary after a sortie? What then?
The survival rate for stormtroopers in battle often wasn’t great.
The survival rate on the outside was sometimes even worse.
But Deena was different, wasn’t she? She could do something else. She knew she could. Something to…help.
She hadn’t told anyone about her feelings, not even Tig. Because while the others in the squad might not have been fanatics like FS-451, they were still loyal soldiers. Imperial service was a way of life, and at her level, those who surrounded her were all career troopers. Any talk of leaving, any expression of doubt, would probably be considered treasonous even by those closest to her.
So she kept her mouth shut and her eyes front, and she spent days and weeks and months wondering just how much more she could take. How much more killing. How many more deaths. Stormtroopers were disposable. She knew that. She’d come to accept that. But when FS-451 came back one time as the sole survivor of what should have been a routine op for his fireteam, Deena realized that behind every visor there was a living, breathing person.
Just like her.
Just like—whisper it—the rebels.
To be honest, Deena wasn’t sure what to make of the so-called Rebel Alliance. To fight against order and against law and against structure, everything the Empire stood for, made no sense.
But to fight against cruelty, and tyranny? And what actually was the opposite of order? Chaos?
Or…freedom?
The first time she’d walked out was after Alderaan. She’d been forced to watch the holovid along with everyone else, multiple times. The others cheered—FS-451 louder than most—but to Deena, Alderaan was not a victory. It was a pointless waste.
So she’d quit—for a whole five minutes. She’d excused herself, been sick in the toilet out the back of the rec room. When she’d come out, FS-451 had been there, arms folded, leaning against the wall opposite. He hadn’t said anything, but he’d had that look on his face. He had enjoyed the holovid, and now he seemed pleased with the effect it’d had on her, because it meant she understood the scale of it all, how powerful the Empire was, how dalliance with rebellion would result in total extermination.
That was three years ago. And she was still here, standing alongside FS-451, somewhere in the industrial bowels of this city in the clouds. The room was huge but it was dark, lit mostly in a sick orange that came from the vast machinery surrounding them. Ugnaught technicians fussed around the equipment while Lord Vader stood in impassive silence, supervising proceedings, a bounty hunter in battered green Mandalorian armor by his side.
This was the city’s carbon freezer unit, and what they were about to do was as abhorrent as it was pointless.
They were going to put a prisoner in carbonite. Deena’s stomach turned at the very thought of it.
As a method of execution, it was hopelessly inefficient. Carbon freezing was for organic materials destined for long-haul space freight, not as a way of preserving living things. There was no way the prisoner was going to survive the process, not after what she and FS-451 had done to him just a few hours earlier. The bounty hunter hadn’t been keen, and even the city administrator, a flamboyant man in a gold-lined cape, had tried to argue the point. Lord Vader had brushed them both off, claiming that this would be a test, that the prisoner—someone called Captain Solo—would be frozen to see if the real prize, the rebel pilot Lord Vader had become obsessed with, would survive.
Luke Skywalker—the Death Star destroyer—was already on approach in an X-wing starfighter.
Some test. To add to this theater of cruelty, Lord Vader had the process carried out in front of the prisoner’s friends. There was a Wookiee, who had knocked Tig—only just summoned from the shuttle—off the side of the platform in a fit of rage before the prisoner had managed to calm him, and a woman Solo had called “princess.” Was this Leia Organa of Alderaan? Deena had seen her image on the Imperial HoloNet several times, but she looked smaller in person than Deena expected.
Deena remembered the last words the pair had exchanged. She replayed that moment, over and over again in her mind, as the prisoner was lowered into the freezer.
Enough.
As the slab was lifted out and fell to the metal decking with a heavy thud, Deena glanced sideways at FS-451. He hadn’t moved a muscle. She could imagine the cruel smile behind the helmet. That same twisted expression she’d seen the day they’d watched Alderaan die.
And then she looked at the princess. Her eyes were wet, her expression one of total loss.
Deena vowed to remember that, too, forever.
Monsters. All of them.
As for Captain Solo…he was alive. Perfect hibernation. Deena wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. Perhaps it would have been better to have died instantly in the freezer.
FS-451 shuffled a little beside her, his helmet tilting. He was disappointed. Deena knew he was, especially after the care and attention he’d given the prisoner earlier.
Why Lord Vader had wanted the prisoner tortured, Deena didn’t know. Orders were orders and it was hardly unusual treatment. Sometimes you had to extract information by force, and then once you had what you wanted, you kept going, just to make sure they really were telling the truth.
But the session with Captain Solo had been different. Lord Vader hadn’t asked any questions—in fact, he hadn’t even stuck around, apparently happy to leave his trusted bodyguards to their work.
Deena wasn’t entirely blameless. She knew that. She’d done her part, making sure the prisoner had been secure in the harness, making sure one of the electrode probes was correctly seated after all the trouble the machine had given her and FS-451 as they’d struggled to reassemble it once it had been unpacked from the shuttle.
FS-451 had operated the device, lowering the prisoner’s cradle onto the interrogation machine. Deena had stood back and closed her eyes and listened to the man scream and imagined the smile growing behind her fellow stormtrooper’s helmet.
There was no point to it. Enhanced interrogation was one thing. Torture for pure, sadistic pleasure was something else entirely.
It wasn’t war. It was criminal.
So Deena had closed her eyes and listened to the screams and then listened to FS-451’s low chuckle as he turned the machine up and up and up. When they were done, Deena helped unstrap the prisoner and carry him back to the holding cell, where they found his Wookiee companion trying to reassemble their golden protocol droid.
Oh, FS-451 was good at his work. He’d taken the prisoner to within a micron of death, and there wasn’t a mark on his body. FS-451 had been quiet after that, his lust for pain, for meting out punishment to rebel scum, temporarily sated.
It was quiet in the freezing chamber. Deena watched the Wookiee, but he seemed calm now. Tig hadn’t returned from down below. Deena hoped she wasn’t hurt; it was a fair drop. Lord Vader left without an escort—Deena’s squad was to remain in the freezing chamber while the Ugnaughts reset the facility. She watched as FS-451 took a keen interest in their work.
It was now or never. With FS-451’s attention elsewhere, Deena left her post and headed down the access stairs leading to the foot of the main freezer unit. At the bottom, she found Tig, unharmed but with her white armor covered in black grease. She was examining her E-11 blast
er, and looked up as Deena approached.
“Damn thing got busted in the fall,” said Tig. “Safety’s jammed.”
Deena thought a moment, then made her decision.
“Here.” She offered her own weapon to Tig. “I need to head to the shuttle to prepare for Lord Vader’s departure. I’ll swap out a new one for you from the armory.”
Tig hesitated, looking down at the offered blaster. Deena held her breath. She hadn’t thought it through. Swapping weapons was against protocol. She could be reported. But Tig was a friend, and they’d done their fair share of protocol infringement in the past, hadn’t they? Why would she be suspicious?
Tig’s comm clicked back into life. “Good call,” she said. They swapped weapons, and as she headed away, Deena gave her comrade a knock on the front of her breastplate with the back of her gauntlet.
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” she said, and then she left, not looking back, knowing that was the last time she would speak to Tig or anyone else in the squad again.
* * *
—
She found a public bathroom, locked herself inside, and sat in silence for minutes, or hours, she wasn’t really sure.
But she needed the time to think, to plan. It was too late to change her mind. The decision to leave had been made, so what she needed to figure out now were her priorities and a plan of action. Her first task was a simple one: She had to get out of the city, alive.
But…beyond that? There would be time to come to terms with the path she had chosen later, she knew that, but she also knew it was important to keep her future in mind, even if it was unknown, undefined.
She was good at what she did—that’s why she was here in the first place. She was a soldier. A survivor. She had skills she could use, and she still had a part to play in the events that were threatening to tear the galaxy apart.
It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. But she knew she could do something.
Something good.
Deena sat a few minutes more, taking long, deep breaths. Then she got to work.
* * *
—
In the tiny cubicle, she stripped off her armor down to the black bodysuit, which she then checked in the mirror. The bodysuit would do just fine, nobody would know who she was or what she had been. Her red hair was cropped to regulation length, but having seen the fashions of the city’s citizens, it didn’t strike her as looking unusual. A bigger problem was being recognized by her former colleagues—few troopers outside her own squad had seen, or would remember, her face, and while Xander, Ella, and Riccarn were still on the Executor, being spotted by Tig or FS-451 would be a problem. She’d have to be careful. She’d be able to recognize them, even in their armor, close-up, but it would be far harder to pick them out among other stormtroopers from a distance. Getting caught wouldn’t just mean arrest. She knew what the Empire did to those who betrayed the cause, and she wouldn’t put it past FS-451 to make a personal plea to Lord Vader to take charge of her interrogation himself.
So yes, she’d have to be careful, and she had to get out of the city, fast. Her odds of survival diminished with each passing moment she spent here.
* * *
—
The toilet itself was a blocky contraption, the main unit surrounded by various attachments enabling it to be used by a variety of different species. Deena knelt in front of it and, with a little effort, managed to pry the unit’s side panel off. Inside was a mass of tubing and sealed cisterns, but there was enough room to squeeze the component parts of her armor inside. The only thing that was too bulky was the helmet. Deena considered for a moment, realizing she couldn’t just walk around the city carrying it. So she stood and placed it on top of the toilet’s lid, then took Tig’s broken blaster and stuffed it as best she could under her top, checking again in the mirror—if she held her arm by her side, over the mass of the blaster as it stretched out her top, it was…completely obvious what she was hiding.
Deena sighed. She really didn’t want to leave it behind with the helmet, but she couldn’t just wander around the city carrying an E-11.
Turning it over in her hands, she partially disassembled the blaster, slipping the sight off and separating the main body from the grip. She tucked the grip into her waistband and slid the sight into the top of one boot. That just left the barrel and main body, which at a glance looked like a random piece of machinery and which nobody would take any notice of at all.
At least, that’s what she told herself. Then, as she activated the door control to leave, she hit the MAINTENANCE REPORT button. Once she was outside, the door slid closed and the red light over the door switched to blue: out of order.
Squeezing the blaster barrel rather self-consciously in one hand, Deena walked briskly away.
* * *
—
Deena stopped and took stock of her surroundings. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t even know how she’d gotten there. She’d been wandering in a kind of daze; as soon as she realized this, she snapped herself out of it. A lack of focus was an easy way to get caught—by, for example, the squad of stormtroopers who were marching toward her across the large plaza she was now standing in.
The sight of the troopers made Deena freeze on the spot, but only for the briefest moment. Fighting to control the nausea in her stomach, she forced herself to move, ducking across to one of the tall lampposts that lined the open-air boulevard that circled the square.
This was it. Her desertion had been noticed, and the Empire was looking for her. She’d been spotted, and the stormtroopers would have her in custody within moments.
Heart thundering in her chest, Deena leaned against the lamppost, trying to blend in with the crowds of people. She glanced in the direction of the squad, their heavy footfalls growing louder as they approached. Some of the city’s citizens had noticed the stormtroopers, too, some stopping to look, and point.
Deena glanced around, trying to pick the best direction to run. The truth was, she had no idea of the city’s layout, and any direction was just as likely to lead her straight into another squad.
Then the sound of booted feet marching in step began to fade; to her surprise, Deena saw the squad move right past her—and keep going. Within a couple of minutes they disappeared from view completely.
Deena checked around her; then, the coast clear, she stepped out from the lamppost and crossed the boulevard, back toward the plaza. She glanced around, but nobody was paying her the slightest bit of attention.
Deena let out a sigh of relief. Maybe she was being paranoid. Or maybe she’d got lucky. Either way, she knew she was in the wrong place. She needed to find a way off the city and out of the system, but she also needed to keep a low profile. She thought back to her arrival in the shuttle and tried to recall the route back to the landing platforms.
No, too open, too obvious. What she needed was passage on a commercial or industrial transport. A ship she could smuggle herself on board, or, better still, sign up as auxiliary crew. For that, she had to reach the city’s industrial port, which would be on a lower level than the main landing pads up top.
To Deena’s surprise, it was relatively easy to access the lower levels of the city. Away from the public spaces, the industrial heart of the complex became apparent. Deena found herself wandering dark corridors, passing various facilities and departments, the air tangy with Tibanna residue and the scent of hot machinery at work. The only other people she’d seen so far had been a handful of Ugnaughts, but they’d been busy in their work, and she had no trouble avoiding detection. Down here, her black bodysuit was practically camouflage, and out of public sight, she’d taken a moment to reassemble her weapon. She didn’t know if she would need it, but she had to admit she felt better with it complete in her hands.
* * *
—
She hadn’t found the way to the city’s i
ndustrial port yet, but she knew it was a big place and, for the moment, she could afford to be patient. The city’s inner workings felt relatively safe, and, so far, free from Imperial intrusion.
Eventually she came to a larger chamber, some kind of auxiliary control room, in the middle of which was a series of large circular consoles with complex cradles of equipment suspended above. On one side of the room was a large circular conduit that ran up at an angle to another dark room beyond, but Deena was drawn to the circular window opposite. Moving over, she looked out at what seemed to be the central hub of the city, a dizzying funnel of curved walls and windows stretching above and below.
There was a sound from behind her, almost like tentative footsteps. No sooner had Deena registered the sound than there was the heavy clunk of a power relay activating, and the conduit on the other side of the room was lit up in white, the silhouette of a man clearly outlined at the other end. Deena ducked instinctively and scooted around the consoles to find a place to hide. From behind a console at the edge of the space, she watched as the man jumped down into the room. Just as he seemed to get his bearings, a heavy grilled gate snapped shut behind him, closing off the conduit.
Deena watched him with interest. He was dressed in a drab uniform of some sort, with a pouched utility belt, and was holding some kind of cylindrical tool in one hand. He was a worker perhaps, but the way he looked around, it was like he knew as much about his surroundings as she did. Then, as he moved into the room, toward the window, Deena noticed the holstered blaster on his hip. She frowned to herself, wondering why the worker would be armed, when a new sound filled the room—the deep, hollow rasp of artificial respiration Deena knew only too well.
Lord Vader was here.
Immediately the man fell into a combat stance and lifted the cylindrical tool in his hand. There was a fizzing snap, and a blade that looked like it was made of shimmering blue light ignited from the object.
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