Ariela would follow me into the Rebellion. Most of the other farmers probably would too after what had happened today. The Jawas would help. In time, maybe even the Sand People might come to understand what had happened to them—and that restoring the Republic would stop Imperial atrocities. Farmers like me, in an odd alliance with Jawas and maybe Sand People, would have to fight for our right to live in peace on the world we called home.
After I thought this through, something told me I’d find the Rebellion just fine, out in the mountains and valleys of the water farms of Tatooine.
Something told me things were going to change on Tatooine, in ways the Imperials never imagined or wanted.
Something told me that, in the end, someday, somehow, there would be peace here.
We would draw the maps of peace.
One Last Night In the
Mos Eisley Cantina:
The Tale of the Wolfman
and the Lamproid
by Judith and Garfield
Reeves-Stevens
Instants after the jump from lightspeed, the situation became as simple as the balance between predator and prey. Despite the secrets bought with Bothan blood, the half-finished Death Star above the forest moon of Endor was ready for what was supposed to have been an unexpected assault. The Rebel fleet was doomed.
Sivrak punched the controls of his X-wing fighter even as Admiral Ackbar gave the order for evasive maneuvers. But that would buy only a few moments of life. The Imperial fleet already advanced from Sector 47—Star Destroyers, Cruisers, waves of TIE fighters—and Sivrak knew it was a trap. It had always been a trap.
The fur rose on his face and his fangs flashed in the reflexive grimace of attack. In the common tongue of the Alliance, Sivrak was a Shistavanen Wolfman, and he faced his death with all the primal rage that evolution and unknown genetic engineers had encoded in his cells.
The TIE fighters surged ahead of their fleet, as if the Star Destroyers were not needed in this final battle. Already space blossomed with deadly flowers of exploding spacecraft. Sivrak heard his orders through the static of Imperial interference and the cries of the dying: Protect the fleet no matter what the risk.
Sivrak howled at the challenge. He had nothing more to risk. All that had given his life meaning was now ash scattered across the icy wastes of Hoth.
His lips glistened with anticipation of the hunt as he switched his weapons to manual and wrenched his craft onto a collision course with a trio of TIE fighters. Over his helmet communicator, he heard the medical frigate was under attack. But it was too late to alter his trajectory. His course was as set now as it had been the day he had first met her.
Endor’s moon spiraled before Sivrak. The three TIE fighters converged as they changed course to meet him. His weapons carved space like blazing gouts of blood released by the stab of his fangs. The Imperial ships fired back, closing faster than even a perfect hunter’s eye could track.
But Sivrak throttled forward, faster still, and his fighter’s engines shrieked behind him. His full-throated voice joined theirs as he shouted out her name as his battle cry. The all-encompassing roar swept to a thundering crescendo as charged particles from the Imperial fighters resonated against his own fighter’s canopy. Space distorted, wrapping him in red destruction. He embraced the end of his existence, the begin-rung of nothingness. Yet somewhere inside that senseless maelstrom, Sivrak heard faint strains of music. Music he had heard before. Long ago. The day he had first—
—walked into the Mos Eisley Cantina, boots heavy with the dust of Tatooine, burning with the heat of streets scorched by two blazing suns. He wiped a paw against his mouth, feeling the scrape of grit and sand against his fangs, letting his eyes adjust to the dimmer light.
For a moment, he experienced a slight wave of vertigo, as if his body had not expected to be back in a natural gravity well so soon after … after … he couldn’t remember what. He closed his eyes and a green world spun before him. Something about a deflector shield. Something about a … Death Star? He shook his head to dispel his confusion, then walked down the stairs by the droid detector, heading for the bar.
Without prompting, the bartender served Sivrak his regular order—a mug of crushed Gilden, organ tendrils still writhing, attesting to their freshness. Sivrak lapped at it, trying to remember how this drink could be his regular when he had never been in this cantina before. He was a rim scout, or had been, until the Empire had closed off the Outer Rim Territories to new exploration. Now he was just another displaced being, on the run from the Empire and all political entanglements. And Mos Eisley had too many Imperial stormtroopers for his liking. He knew he’d leave as soon as he had the necessary credits. He … moved to the side an instant before a Jawa scuttled past him, rushing up the stairs for the door.
Sivrak felt a shock of recognition. He had expected the Jawa to run past him. He had known what the Jawa would do. Exactly what the Jawa had done that first time he had stepped in here and met …
Sivrak stared past the bar, into the gloom on the side of the cantina opposite the band.
And he saw her again. Just as he had seen her that first time.
He stood by her table, savoring the unmistakable pheromones that identified her as female, admiring the sinuous twists of the muscular coils she draped over her chair, all the more sensual for the strength they contained, able to squeeze the skull from a bantha. She turned to him, her loose-hinged coral jaws revealing rings of glittering fangs, with the outermost the length of Sivrak’s claws. Her light sensors bristled as they shifted toward him, seeing in wavelengths beyond those even the Wolfman’s glowing eyes could perceive.
Sivrak had heard of such beings before—Florn lamproids—the sole intelligence born on a world of such dangers it meant instant death to any who set foot on it without hyperaccelerated nerve implants.
“Buy you a drink?” the lamproid hissed seductively. Her inflection of the predator’s tongue was intensely personal, as if they had hunted and shared blood a thousand times.
Sivrak felt the temperature of the cantina increase and he shrugged off his jacket and sat down across from her just as he had the first time.
But this was the first time, wasn’t it? How could two beings meet for the first time except for the first time?
“Lak Sivrak,” she breathed, and Sivrak growled to acknowledge that somehow, incredibly, she knew even his litter name.
“Dice Ibegon,” he replied, disturbed that he knew her name in turn, the moment he spoke it aloud, as if he had always known it.
“You are troubled,” Dice said.
“We’ve met before.” Sivrak had said those words in a hundred other cantinas on a dozen other worlds, but this time he meant them. Though how could he, a perfect hunter, forget having met such a perfect killer?
“Are you certain?” the lamproid asked. She trailed the exquisite tip of her lethal tail through the shimmering translucence of a snifter of clarified bantha blood. The reflective surface of the liquid made Sivrak think of force-field emanations. Wasn’t there something else he should be doing? Someplace else he was supposed to be?
“At the bar, I knew a Jawa was going to bump into me,” he said.
“Jawas often do.”
Sivrak concentrated. A new memory came to him. “A golden droid will enter soon.”
Dice brought a single drop of bantha blood to Sivrak’s muzzle. The liquid trembled on the tip of her tail. “Their kind is not served here,” she said. Her voice was inviting, distracting.
Sivrak drew a single, razor-sharp claw against the cool pink flesh of Dice’s tail tip, transfixed by her light sensors and her scarlet mouth and its endless rings of needle teeth. “The farm boy with the droid will talk to it.”
Dice’s voice dropped in tone, sharing secrets. “And the golden droid will leave.”
Sivrak’s rough-rasped tongue flicked out and captured the teardrop of blood from the lamproid’s tail. His claws tightened around the sweet, boneless flesh, feeling the st
eel cords of her muscles flex in response.
“Tell me what is happening,” Sivrak said.
“Only that which has happened,” the lamproid answered. A single light sensor shifted to the left. Sivrak glanced in that direction and saw a horned Devaronian sitting against the wall, nodding dreamily in time to the music of the cantina’s band as he watched the main entrance.
Sivrak looked over to the entrance to see what the Devaronian saw—an old man in desert robes, a farm boy, an Artoo unit.
And the golden droid.
The old man hurried ahead to the bar. Without knowing how, Sivrak was aware of what lay hidden beneath the old man’s robes—an antique lightsaber. There was an Aqualish pirate at the bar who would soon be short an arm.
Sivrak released the lamproid’s tail and began to rise from his chair. But Dice’s coils snaked out to bind him tight, keeping him in his place across from her.
“Hey! We don’t serve their kind here!” the bartender shouted.
“Tell me,” Sivrak demanded.
“What you already know?” Dice replied.
The farm boy spoke to the golden droid. The golden droid and the Artoo unit left. The farm boy joined the old man by the bar. Sivrak struggled—not against the lamproid, but against hidden knowledge that was somewhere inside him.
There could be only one answer, yet it made no sense.
“Is it the Force that binds us to this place?”
“The Force binds all, if you would believe in it.”
“I believe only in the hunt”
The lamproid’s teeth shifted in amusement—the Florn equivalent of a smile. “That’s not what you said when we first met here. You were most eloquent then, my romantic Wolf man.”
Sivrak’s eyes narrowed. Was she teasing him? “Is there a price to be paid?” he asked stiffly. An altercation began at the bar. “To understand why everything is familiar yet new at the same time?”
“Poor Wolfman,” Dice said. “You still don’t understand the promise I made you. So for now the price of your understanding is the same price it was the first time we met here.”
Sivrak searched his memory for events yet to happen. He cast back to predict what he had already seen. On the other side of the bar the farm boy was thrown into a table. Despite Dice’s hold on him, Sivrak leaned forward threateningly. “You’re a member of the Alliance, aren’t you?”
A lightsaber thrummed into life. The Aqualish pirate screamed. Sivrak’s nostrils flared at the scent of fresh blood exploding through the smoke-filled air. The lamproid’s tail tip fluttered as she scented it, too. A severed arm fell to the floor of the cantina.
“I am a member of the Alliance,” she said. “Just as you chose to be, that first time.”
But the heady wash of the blood scent pushed Sivrak beyond understanding, and Dice swiftly released the pheromones that would guide the Wolfman to the one state he could achieve without endangering bystanders.
Sivrak arched in her deadly grip, and with a powerful undulation, Dice uncoiled the rest of her body and slithered across the table toward him. Then perfect killer met perfect hunter as their fangs clashed, then locked in the lethal kiss of predators. Sivrak’s senses were overwhelmed. He felt the floor of the cantina shift beneath him, gaining momentum as it spun faster and faster, just as if he rode an—
—X-wing fighter spinning through space. A storm of debris rattled against his fighter’s skin as Sivrak fought to stabilize the craft. His tactical display showed that two of the TIE fighters had survived his headlong strike. The third was a vapor of incandescent particles dispersing in vacuum. He turned to Dice to make certain she was safe and growled when he saw only the reflection of his own glowing eyes in the canopy. The cantina had been a hallucination, a dream of what had been … what might have been … he couldn’t be sure.
A second sun flared over Endor’s moon and Sivrak was torn from his memories by a lance of unthinkable energy that burst from the Death Star to claim a Rebel frigate. The communicator channels were flooded with transmissions of shock and confusion. The Death Star was operational.
Admiral Ackbar ordered a retreat—all fighters were to return to base. General Calrissian countermanded the retreat—all fighters were to engage the Star Destroyers at point-blank range. And every other Rebel voice asked about General Solo’s strike team on the moon’s surface. Would they destroy the force-field generator? Had they already tried and failed?
Sivrak pulled back on the controls to bring his X-wing on course to the nearest Star Destroyer. There were many ways to die in space. He would find one soon enough, he knew.
The X-wing did not respond.
Sivrak activated the diagnostics, rechanneled auxiliary power, and closed his wings for increased etheric stability.
But the X-wing continued its fall toward the forest moon, and nothing he could do would change its course.
One thought and one thought alone flooded through him: He was going to live.
Once in the moon’s atmosphere, Sivrak knew he could use the fighter’s control surfaces—useless in vacuum—to bring his craft to a soft landing. A whole forest world waited for him. The Alliance and the Empire would fall from his consciousness as he stalked its prey and returned to what he knew and understood—the hunt. Perhaps, in time, he might even forget Dice Ibegon, and things would be as they had always been. Simple. Balanced. The pure equation of life and death, free of the pain of love and duty.
The raging space battle receded behind him. He watched it diminish in a cockpit display. It appeared his damaged X-wing was no longer a target worthy of the Empire.
He focused on the forest moon, closing fast, bringing him a new life. Another life.
As if any life could have meaning without her.
Rebel craft exploded on the battle display. Sivrak knew that meant the force-field generator on the moon’s surface still protected the Death Star. Perhaps his battle wasn’t over yet.
He touched the atmospheric controls of his fighter, searching for the first sign of resistance from the wispy upper reaches of the atmosphere he plunged into. To change course one way was to land in safety. The other way, Rebel tacticians had set the odds of a successful atmospheric attack on the generator at a million to one. Standard Imperial ground defenses were too strong.
Sivrak’s claws tapped the control yoke as he considered his choice. One way or another. And then his fighter yawed violently as an Imperial particle beam sliced through a rear stabilizer. His tactical display showed two TIE fighters closing behind him, hiding in his propulsion wake—the same two he had faced before. For whatever reason, perhaps to avenge the death of their wingman, Sivrak was still at least a worthy target to them.
The Wolfman felt relieved the choice had been taken from him. There was now no need to plan, no need to decide. There was only the fight. The balance. The reassuring enormity of now.
Unable to change his fighter’s course in space, he threw it into a spiraling roll, releasing all his decoys and mines in an expanding cloud of sensor-opaque, carbon-fiber chaff. Then he locked his rear sights onto the cloud’s dark center, daring one or both of the TIE fighters to survive the cloud’s perils. Sivrak calculated he would have time for at least two shots before the Imperial pilots could target him. Perhaps those shots would be enough. Perhaps they wouldn’t. Sivrak did not care either way.
He glanced ahead at the rushing disk of the moon, colors smearing as he wildly spun. At last, he felt the first tremors of atmospheric resistance fight his craft’s roll. With fierce satisfaction, he pictured his X-wing tearing itself into pieces, raining down on the moon like a comet come to die. It was a good image. A fitting image. A hunter’s death.
The tactical display flashed as the mines he had deployed erupted behind him. At least one of the fighters had vanished. But then the display glowed as a piercing beam of brilliant energy shot from the defensive carbon cloud, blinding his rear sensors with a wash of static-filled white that enveloped Sivrak like a smothering snow
drift—
• • •
—carved by the icy winds of Hoth.
Sivrak dove for the trench before him as an energy bolt from an Imperial walker obliterated a nearby gun emplacement. Echo Station—the Rebel base’s lone outpost on the north ridge—was a charnel house. The awkward dead lay all around him as he pushed himself to his feet and shook the snow and ice from his matted fur. It was so achingly cold he could not even scent the blood of the dying. But then he caught the scent of her.
The ground shook with the thunder of approaching walkers and the constant firing of the ion cannon as desperate Rebels tried to clear the way for the retreating transports. But Sivrak was aware of only one sensation—she was close.
He ran to her, dodging the other troops in the slippery, ice-lined trench, his brilliant orange flight suit startling amongst their white Hoth camouflage. The main communicator channel crackled with the call to evacuate all ground crew. The command center had been hit. All troops in Sector 12 were to report to the south post to protect the fighters. But Sivrak was beyond the reach of orders now. He collapsed in the snow at Dice’s side.
It was stained with the rich purple of her blood.
Sivrak spoke her name and touched her face, afraid to disturb the ragged shard of metal that had sliced through her insulated suit and cut deeply into her upper thorax. Purple drops of frozen blood shone there, as if, for her, time had stopped.
Her eye sensors trembled and stiffened and she looked up at him.
“Go,” she said.
“How can I?” he answered. “I have sworn allegiance to the Princess and the return of the Republic.”
The lamproid’s teeth shifted in amusement, even as her gasp of pain formed mist in the icy air.
“You never meant to wear the uniform of a Rebel. That day in the cantina, when we first met, you only accepted my offer to join the Alliance as a way to wrap yourself in my coils.”
She was right, of course. The first time in the cantina—the real first time—he had made much of his Rebel sympathies, sensing it might make him a more acceptable companion to her. But in time, he had come to believe in what the Alliance stood for. He had become a proud and willing warrior in its cause. But now Dice was dying and the past no longer mattered.
Star Wars: Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina Page 36