Star Wars Rebels

by Michael Kogge

  He dropped it into his pocket. It might be worth something to someone, perhaps as jewelry.

  He caught sight of a second object in the back of the drawer. He pulled it out.

  The object was cylindrical, resembling a glowrod with a focusing lens yet missing the illumination bulb. It felt natural in Ezra’s hands and he was compelled to swing it. As he did so, his thumb accidentally pressed a button in the middle.

  To his astonishment, a sizzling bright blue beam projected from one end to nearly a meter in length. The object was by no means any heavier; on the contrary, it felt balanced. Waving the beam back and forth, Ezra had a clear sense of his surroundings, from the dimensions of the cabin down to the particles in the air. It was as if both his physical and mental reach had improved—as if the blade of light was an extension of his arm and his awareness.

  “Careful. You’ll cut your arm off.”

  Ezra spun around. Kanan stood in the doorway with Hera and Chopper behind him. The droid snickered in binary. Ezra frowned. He should’ve known better than to wander around with the droid in the ship. Chopper had ratted him out. And Kanan did not seem happy to find him in his quarters.

  Ezra held the laser blade before him. “Look, I know you’re not going to believe me. But it’s like this thing wanted me to take it.”

  Kanan’s eyes never moved, but they seemed to judge Ezra from head to toe. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t believe you. Now hand me the lightsaber.”

  “Lightsaber?” Ezra examined the blade in his hands. From some of the old spacers in the city, he’d heard tales of such weapons, laser swords wielded by mystical warriors during the Republic. “Isn’t that the weapon of the Jedi?”

  “Give it to me.” Kanan held out his hand.

  Ezra hesitated. Jedi Knights supposedly had special powers, like being able to move objects and read minds. Maybe Kanan was one who had survived—if the Jedi had even existed at all and weren’t just stories invented to put little children to sleep.

  But Kanan didn’t appear to be a Jedi. He didn’t use any special powers to call the hilt to him. He waited with his palm open for Ezra to give the saber to him.

  Ezra took one more swing, then thumbed the button to deactivate the blade. He felt small again. Almost claustrophobic. With great reluctance, he placed the blade in Kanan’s hand.

  “And get out,” Kanan said.

  Ezra lowered his head, not meeting Hera’s eyes or Chopper’s photoreceptors as he exited. Once he was in the corridor, however, his mood lightened. He took the mysterious polygon out of his pocket and squeezed it tight.

  Sabine poured herself a glass of bantha milk and leaned against the galley’s countertop. The freighter’s walls were thin, and she had heard the conversation in Kanan’s cabin. This Ezra kid was quite a troublemaker, sneaking aboard and picking the cabin lock. She would’ve been more impressed if he had used a detonator on the door, but she was impressed nonetheless.

  The kid entered the galley. He smiled when he saw her, but was too nervous to say anything, so she broke the ice. “Not too good at following directions, are you?”

  That smile didn’t leave him. “Not too much. You?”

  “Never been my specialty.” She took a sip of her milk.

  Ezra stepped toward her. “Who are you people?” he asked. She gave him a raised eyebrow. “I mean, you’re not thieves exactly.”

  “We’re not exactly anything. We’re a crew. A team.” She paused, struck by a question she hadn’t fully considered before. “In some ways, a family.”

  Ezra stopped, which was good, because if he came any closer, she might have to tell him to back off. She didn’t like her personal space invaded.

  “What happened to your real family?” he asked.

  That question she thought about every single day. It was like a charge that never stopped exploding. “The Empire,” she said. “What happened to yours?”

  The kid looked away. So that was what he was hiding. Something tragic had happened to his family. She sympathized; she knew the pain. But he’d have to let it go, and soon. The galaxy was a mean place and had no room for sensitive types.

  Zeb lumbered through the doorway, trailed by Chopper. He looked past the kid. “Kanan wants us in the common room.”

  Sabine nodded and finished her milk. Zeb addressed the droid, pointing a stubby finger at Ezra. “If he tries anything, sound the alarm—or shoot him.”

  Chopper quipped back with a query. Sabine was also curious what the droid could shoot, since the only “weapon” Chopper possessed was an electro-solder that could function as a Taser.

  “Shush,” Zeb said to the droid. “Just watch him.”

  The Lasat clomped off. Sabine put down her glass and went to follow. At the doorway, she looked back at Ezra, who now seemed more like a doe-eyed boy than a master thief.

  “Sabine,” she said. “My name’s Sabine.”

  His mouth opened to say something, but he was at a loss for words. She could tell he liked her. A lot. That could be useful if she needed anything done in the future.

  Heading toward the cabin room, she heard Chopper snicker at Ezra. Funny how a droid knew more about the rules of human attraction than a human kid did.

  “We have a new mission,” Kanan said.

  Zeb hunkered in the Ghost’s small common room next to Sabine. New missions were good things. He didn’t enjoy being cooped up on the Ghost, keeping an eye on thieving human children. His place was out on the front lines, bashing together the heads of stormtroopers, doing to the Empire what it had done to his people.

  Kanan continued his mission brief. “Vizago acquired the flight plan for an Imperial transport ship full of Wookiees they took prisoner.”

  Hera stood right next to Kanan. “We don’t know if they are the same Wookiees whom we were supposed to meet. Vizago couldn’t confirm the prisoners’ identities. But he had heard that most of the Wookiee prisoners were soldiers for the Old Republic.”

  This seemed to correlate with the name of the Wookiee soldier Wullffwarro that they had seen on the gunship. Yet for Zeb, it didn’t matter who the Wookiee prisoners were. Wookiees were good people. Many had sacrificed their own lives to try to prevent the massacres on Lasan. “I owe those hairy beasts. They saved some of my people.”

  “Mine too,” Hera said.

  She had never opened up to Zeb about her past and he had never asked. But he suspected they shared a similar experience. The Empire encouraged slavery of her species, and he suspected that Wookiees had rescued Twi’leks close to her. Maybe they had even rescued her. He would not probe. If Hera wanted to reveal her background, she would in time.

  “If we’re going to save the Wookiees,” Kanan went on, “we’ve got a tight window. They’ve been taken to an unknown slave labor camp. If we don’t intercept this transport ship, we’ll never find them. Now, I have a plan, but—”

  Something clanked in the walls. Had a mynock chewed its way into the power cables? Zeb detested those parasites. They seemed to have no purpose in the galactic order other than to leech energy from starships and cause catastrophes.

  Kanan pressed the button to open the supply closet. The Loth-rat Ezra tumbled out.

  The others accused Zeb with stares. Kanan had assigned him to look after the boy, which wasn’t fair at all. Zeb was an Honor Guard of Lasan, not a nanny. “I ordered Chopper to keep watch!”

  Chopper trundled in, chirping excuses. He should’ve known better than to trust that droid. Chopper never obeyed instructions.

  The boy scurried back toward the closet. Zeb grabbed him and held him in place. “Can we please get rid of him?” he growled to Kanan and Hera.

  It was Sabine who spoke. “No. We can’t.”

  Ezra stopped squirming and looked at her. Zeb recognized the kid’s wide-eyed expression. Karabast. Teenage romance was the last thing they needed on the ship.

  Sabine, mercifully, reciprocated none of it. She looked past Ezra to Kanan and Hera. “The kid knows too mu
ch.”

  The kid’s body sank into Zeb’s grip. Humans could be such weak creatures when it came to rejection. On Lasan, if a member of the opposite sex didn’t like you, you showed them your talents until they did.

  “We don’t have time to take him home anyway,” Hera said. “We need to move now. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  Kanan shot her an unsure glance. At least he agreed with Zeb that this Loth-rat shouldn’t be infesting the ship. But when Kanan nodded in approval, Zeb let go of the kid. If Hera wanted to babysit, that was fine by him. He had Wookiees to save.

  Ezra was getting used to hyperspace. His stomach didn’t complain this time as the starlines streamed past the cockpit windows. Only his mind gave him trouble. It was hard to imagine that those starlines were planets, suns, or even other starships.

  Hera sat across from him in the pilot’s seat, checking and rechecking the navicomputer’s coordinates. One miscalculation in their route could send them hurtling through a celestial body. In a breath, their lives would be over—and they’d never know.

  Ezra didn’t need to worry too much, Hera had assured him. She’d said that the hyperspace lanes were predominantly safe, mapped and tested by millions of pilots over millennia. What wasn’t safe was what Hera and the Ghost’s crew intended to do after emerging from hyperspace. There was no way to test their plan.

  “You know, this whole mission thing is nuts,” Ezra said. “I’m not against sticking it to the Empire, but there’s no way I’d stick my neck out this far. Who does that?”

  Hera pulled the lever to emerge from hyperspace. “We do.”

  The starlines vanished. In their place loomed a boxy starship with powerful engines. It wasn’t big enough to store TIEs inside; instead, four of those fighters were racked onto the starship’s underbelly. Ezra swallowed. His stomach started to panic.

  Hera keyed the comm. “Imperial Transport six-five-one, this is Starbird, coming inbound.”

  Starbird was one of many fake identities the crew used for their freighter in situations like this. Only a privileged few—like lucky, lucky him—knew the ship’s official designation, the Ghost. Ezra wished he’d never heard of it. He’d much rather be back in his tower, stripping power cores from holopads.

  A pompous voice, sounding just like the one from the propaganda holopads, crackled over the radio. “State your business.”

  Hera didn’t miss a beat. “Bounty. We captured an additional Wookiee prisoner and have transfer orders to place him with you.”

  “We have no such orders,” said the voice over the comm.

  Ezra tensed in his seat. Hera gave him a reassuring smile and continued to speak. “That’s fine. We already got paid—by Governor Tarkin.” She paused to let the governor’s name sink in. “If you don’t want the oversized tree-swinger, I’ll jettison him here and let you explain to your superiors why the Empire has one less slave.”

  There wasn’t a response. The transport ship floated there, guns forward, pilots visible in the attached TIE cockpits. Hera had her hand on the hyperspace lever, in case they needed to jump again. It would be a random jump—not safe at all.

  “Permission to dock,” came the voice. “Bay one.”

  Ezra sat back, relieved. Perhaps these people did know what they were doing.

  A few hours earlier, Kanan had made Zeb a babysitter. Now he wanted Zeb to be something even more preposterous. “Your plan’s not going to work, Kanan. I don’t even look like a Wookiee,” Zeb said.

  “You think the Imperials have bothered to learn the difference?” Sabine asked. She took Zeb’s bo-rifle and leaned it against the bulkhead.

  Kanan slapped binders over Zeb’s wrist. “Just act like one.”

  Easy for humans to say. After this was over, Zeb was going to lecture both of them on the many differences between Wookiees and Lasat.

  He stood between the two at the Ghost’s airlock and held his head high, as he would expect a Wookiee to do. They never quavered in fear, even when taken prisoner. Zeb’s hands were another matter.

  “Stop flexing your fingers,” Kanan said. “You’ll bring attention to the binders.”

  “They chafe. You cuffed them too tightly.”

  “Poor Zeb,” Sabine said from behind her helmet.

  “Poor you if I lose circulation.” If he couldn’t move his hands, he wouldn’t be able to bash any stormtrooper heads. They’d have to do all the dirty work themselves.

  Kanan made a chopping gesture. Zeb quieted. The airlock door began to hiss open. He could see the white boots of two Imperial stormtroopers on the other side. He couldn’t wait to see their white helmets.

  When he did, both looked right at him. “That thing’s not a Wookiee,” said a trooper.

  Zeb cursed silently. These weren’t the usual, uneducated Lothal recruits.

  “Haven’t you seen a rare hairless Wookiee before?” Kanan said.

  It stung Zeb that Kanan would use the kid’s insult. Once they’d rescued the Wookiees, Zeb was definitely going to give Kanan a talking-to—with lots of angry growls and snarls for good measure.

  For the moment, Zeb wailed, like he had heard many a Wookiee do. While he had the height and strength of a Wookiee, however, he did not have one’s throat. His attempt sounded more like an Ugnaught’s squeal than any sound a Wookiee would make.

  The troopers exchanged looks and Zeb knew his career as an actor was over. “Oh, forget this.” In one swing, he broke the binders and knocked both troopers through the airlock. They didn’t get back up.

  He grinned at Sabine and Kanan. “Told you they wouldn’t buy it.”

  “You didn’t exactly give them a chance to buy it,” Sabine said.

  “Couldn’t help it. There’s something about the feel of their helmets on my hands.” Zeb rubbed his chafed wrists. “It’s what a Wookiee would do anyways.”

  Kanan stepped through the airlock into the enemy transport. “Okay, you both know the plan. Move out.”

  Chopper wheeled out from the Ghost to join Sabine. The two went across the docking bay into one corridor of the transport. Zeb slung his bo-rifle over his back and hurried after Kanan down another.

  Ezra leaned forward in his cockpit seat, listening to the comm. As crazy as this plan sounded, it was actually working. Kanan had even used one of his jokes.

  “No troopers,” Kanan reported. “Security’s soft—”

  A burst of static cut him off. Hera flipped switches. “Spectre-1, come in. Spectre-4? Spectre-5?” she commed, using their code names. “Comm’s down.”

  Ezra watched as she made minute adjustments to the controls. She seemed to know every knob and dial in the cockpit, and there were hundreds of them. He’d been so wrong to think that if he could handle a speeder bike, he could pilot a starship.

  “No, not down,” Hera said. She gave up on her adjustments. “Jammed.”

  Ezra straightened in his seat, his instincts on edge. He stared out into space. “Something’s coming.”

  Hera looked up from the communications console. There was nothing out the canopy viewport except the spread of stars.

  “Ezra, I don’t see—”

  Emerging from hyperspace in the blink of an eye was the massive triangular vessel that had thundered over Ezra’s tower. An Imperial Star Destroyer.

  This was a trap. It had been all along. It was why Kanan and the others had boarded the transport so easily. The Empire didn’t want the crew of the Ghost to get away this time. They wanted them in their grasp, in their ship.

  Everybody was going to die.

  Ezra sat, frozen in place. Hera knew that she had to act fast to save her crew. “Ezra! You need to board the transport and warn them!”

  “What?” Ezra looked at her. “You want me? Why don’t you do it?”

  She was back at her console, turning all matter of dials and switches. “I need to be ready to take off, or none of us stands a chance.”

  “No,” he said. “No way. Why would I risk my life for a bunch of stranger
s?”

  She frowned at him, apparently insulted. “Because Kanan risked his for you.”

  She was right. Kanan had saved him from the laser cannons of a TIE fighter. But Kanan was also why he was stuck on this wretched ship in the first place. If he and Zeb hadn’t chased after him on the speeder bikes—if they had just let Ezra have his crates—then his life wouldn’t be in danger. Neither, probably, would theirs.

  Ezra looked away from her. But her reflection regarded him in the cockpit’s transparisteel. “If all you do is fight for your own life, then your life’s worth nothing,” she said.

  Her words gave him pause. He pictured Kanan and Zeb running down the transport’s corridors, fleeing stormtroopers. He pictured the antique Chopper blowing a gasket, unable to move any faster. He pictured a hidden sniper scoping Sabine and pressing the trigger.

  “They need you, Ezra,” Hera said.

  No one had ever needed Ezra. More to the point, he had never needed anyone else. He had prided himself on that. He was a lone operator, his own master. He listened to no one but himself and he did nothing he didn’t want to do. If someone helped him out, that was their prerogative. If they didn’t, he held no grudges. The universe hadn’t done him any favors, and he preferred to do the same in return.

  “They need you right now,” Hera pleaded.

  A shudder ran through the ship, rattling bolts and components. The Star Destroyer had locked its tractor beam on the transport and began to pull it and the docked Ghost into the gaping maw of the Destroyer’s lower hangar.

  Hera’s reflection faded against the canopy’s transparisteel. Now all Ezra saw was his own.

  Agent Kallus had Captain Zataire assemble a platoon of his best stormtroopers in the Lawbringer’s deployment bay. Kallus could trust these men. They weren’t Lothal enlistees wearing the armor for the first time. To serve as a stormtrooper aboard an Imperial Star Destroyer, one had to be trained at an elite facility and pass a battery of extreme tests in a variety of environments. These stormtroopers had earned their place on the ship. They were the Empire’s finest.