by Renee Ahdieh
“Pull up!” Red Two, almost shouting now.
“No, I’m all righ—”
There was a flash of static as Red Six’s comm channel flared out, almost in time, but not before everyone heard him start to scream.
Wuz looked to Kase, shattered.
Kase checked her pad, marked off Red Six—Porkins, and then added, Mechanical?
When she looked up again, Wuz had gone.
Then the Empire launched their fighters.
—
The battle over the Death Star lasted another seventeen and a half minutes.
Kase ticked the names on her datapad without emotion. She made a note with each loss, and where she was uncertain of the cause, she added a question mark. She concentrated on her job, moving her attention from the pad in her hand to the tracking board and back, over and over again.
TIE.
Flak.
TIE.
TIE.
TIE.
Flak. Flak?
TIE.
TIE.
Flak.
TIE?
TIE.
TIE.
Flak.
TIE.
TIE.
TIE.
TIE.
TIE.
TIE.
TIE.
TIE.
TIE.
“Red Leader, we’re right above you,” said Red Five. “Turn to point five, we’ll cover for you.”
Kase looked up from her datapad.
“Stay there,” Red Leader ordered. “I just lost my starboard engine. Get set up for your attack run.”
Garven Dreis. She’d never had the nerve to tell him about her crush, to say anything, to do anything.
He was always a professional.
The whole command center heard his scream as he was shot down.
Kase made a note.
TIE.
—
There were four ships left, only four. Gold Three (Evaan Verlaine, 3,637 flight hours, four confirmed kills), Red Two, Red Three, and Red Five. Gold Three had tried to get around behind the element that had claimed Gold Leader and Red Leader attack runs, but her Y-wing didn’t have the speed and it didn’t have the maneuverability, and she was forced to do what she could from above, trying to stay alive amid the combined fire from the Death Star’s turbolasers and the TIE fighters still hunting above the trench.
Then Red Two took a hit, and Kase moved her hand, ready to make her note, and she heard Red Five ordering him off. The regret in Wedge Antilles’s voice came through loud and clear, but he did as ordered. Kase was mildly surprised that the TIEs let him go. Her eye tracked his travel on the board, watched as Red Two maneuvered to assist Gold Three.
The Death Star was in range of Yavin 4.
Kase watched the board.
Red Three vanished from the screen.
She checked the line Red Three—Darklighter and dutifully added the word TIE.
Red Five was somehow still flying.
He’d taken a hit earlier dogfighting a TIE, and the repair made by his astromech had now broken free. She imagined him trying to control the X-wing, wondering if he had ever, in fact, flown an X-wing before, or even anything like it. Wondering if he could keep the fighter, now with a broken port stabilizer, steady enough to make his shot at the exhaust port without at the same time turning himself into an easy target in the shooting gallery the meridian trench had become.
“His computer’s off,” someone said. “He’s switched off his targeting computer. Luke, your targeting computer’s off. What’s wrong?”
Kase tensed. Red Five had been one of Benis’s ships, part of her crew. If this was another mechanical—
“Nothing,” said Red Five. “I’m all right.”
If the command center had been as still as a morgue when Kase had entered it, it now had the silence of the same. Nobody moved, each of them processing what they had just heard.
There was a fizz of static, an electronic wail.
“I’ve lost Artoo!”
That would be his astromech, then.
Kase found the line on her datapad that read, Red Five—Skywalker.
There was truly no point in continuing, now. It was clearly over. The Death Star had cleared Yavin, was at this very instant preparing to fire on Yavin 4. In a few more seconds, a minute, perhaps, everyone and everything here would go the way of Alderaan: Pilots, ships, crews, datapads, all of them, everything would cease to exist.
The Rebellion would cease to exist.
But the Empire…the Empire would continue.
A voice cut across the comm in the command center, broke the silence. The voice was yelling, but it wasn’t in pain.
It sounded to Kase an awful lot like glee.
“You’re all clear, kid, now let’s blow this thing and go home!” the voice said.
Her eyes went to the tracking board, to the callout for Red Five. She saw the notification flicker across the glass.
Torpedoes away, it said.
Nobody dared to breathe.
Then, just as silently and without any fuss, on every monitor that had shown the graphic representing the Death Star, the graphic winked out. The callout on the tracking board in front of Kase was the last to go, the image of the Death Star far too big to be shown on the glass, represented only by the simple words BATTLE STATION at the center of the board.
Then those two words vanished, as well.
The voice was saying something, but Kase couldn’t understand it. Nobody could understand it, because suddenly everyone was in motion, and everyone was making noise. Hugging one another, jumping up and down as they laughed, as they screamed in triumph, as they poured out their relief and their joy. Kase saw the princess through the glass look skyward, mouthing something, then run for the exit. General Dodonna followed after her, into a scrum of men and women rushing to clear the room, to get to the hangar, to welcome the pilots home.
Benis and Ohley were waiting for her in the doorway.
“I’ll catch up,” Kase told them.
They nodded and rushed out, after all the others.
Kase was alone.
She stood still for several seconds, datapad in her hand. Then, very carefully, she switched it off and lay it on the nearby console. She tried to take a step, and succeeded, and tried to take another one, and failed, and she collapsed with the sob already rising out of her, and the tears already beginning to fall.
The grief caught her.
In the very near future, no more than a day from now, there’s going to be a battle above the fourth moon of Yavin. Scored and pitted X-wings will launch from the moon’s jungle, condensation boiling off their hulls as they emerge from the atmosphere under the light of a red gas giant. The squadron will race toward a space station armed with nightmarish weapons dreamed up by bitter old men.
The X-wing pilots—young and ambitious and goodhearted youths who have already seen their share of bloodshed—will seek to exploit a vulnerability in the station and ignite its reactor core. But their hurriedly assembled plan will fare poorly against the designs of the bitter old men. One by one, their starfighters will be destroyed. The space station will enter the moon’s orbit, where it will emit an obliterating beam that disintegrates every storied stone of an ancient and haunting temple.
Along with the temple’s inhabitants.
Along with the rest of the moon besides.
This is not the future Mon Mothma hopes for, but it isn’t an unlikely one.
—
“I could overrule you,” she says as she diligently transfers a stack of datapads from her desk to a metal case. She double-checks the files on each device before stowing it—she reviews rebel cell listings, coded contact frequencies, safe house locations, stolen Imperial documents. Twenty years of work reduced to a courier package, she thinks.
“Overrule me to what end? Even if things go well, you can’t help us. We’ll need to dismantle the whole base.” Jan Dodonna raises his hands haplessly in the
doorway to Mon’s office. “If things don’t go well—” He works his lips before the words finally form. “Mon, you won’t just be leading the Rebellion. You’ll be all that’s left.”
Mon doesn’t flinch. She learned to suppress that instinct in the Senate (back when there was a Senate). But she slams the case shut too hard. The snap of the latches echoes in the small chamber. “I want every droid in the complex ready to analyze those station schematics once the princess lands. If they’re tracking her—if her signal was accurate—the Empire won’t wait long to follow.”
Did she give that order already? she wonders. She hasn’t slept in over three days, and facts and intentions are blurring together.
She brushes past Jan, who follows her down stone steps toward the hangar and the jungle’s tapering drizzle. Cianne appears at Mon’s side with a pair of duffels slung over her shoulders. “Fresh clothes and small arms,” Cianne explains, “along with a few mementos.”
Cianne served Mon in the capital before Mon began moonlighting in treason; since then—since Mon’s flight from the Empire and public endorsement of the Rebellion—she’s barely left Mon’s side. She probably added the evacuation to my daily calendar.
“I spoke to the comm crew,” Cianne goes on. They move onto the tarmac and into a wet, tepid breeze. “We’ll contact Base One every ninety minutes for updates.”
“The Empire may jam our transmissions or try to trace incoming signals,” Jan adds. “If you can’t make contact, don’t keep trying forever.” He hesitates as they approach a passenger shuttle covered in fading pastel graffiti. Mon doesn’t recognize the alien alphabet. “Do what has to be done, Commander.”
He snaps a salute. Raindrops wriggle between his fingers.
Mon can’t recall ever seeing him salute her before. She reads it as a final farewell.
“Give my thanks to the princess when she arrives,” Mon says. And my condolences, she wants to add, because she knew the princess’s father so very well. But it’s no use thinking about Bail right now.
She would embrace Jan, but there are flight crews watching and they need to see her strength. Instead she climbs aboard the shuttle clutching her metal case in both hands. Cianne hauls herself in behind Mon, seals the hatch, and calls orders to the pilot. As the vessel rises from the tarmac, leaving the rebels of Yavin to fight for their lives against an impossible foe, Mon wonders whether Jan understands at all what has to be done.
Like Mon, Jan is simultaneously practical and idealistic. He may well understand, and that thought breaks Mon’s heart.
—
In the future—or in a future, a not unlikely future—the obliteration of Yavin 4 will send the remnants of the Rebellion into a panic. Mon will try to reestablish contact with the surviving rebel cells, to implement some sort of coherent strategy, but she’ll be left impotent amid the chaos. Her shuttle will jump from star system to star system, constantly fleeing pursuit, and she’ll spend hours daily listening to static on her comm unit and watching her life’s work fall apart.
The scattered rebels will seek refuge among civilians but will find no haven. The destruction of Alderaan—a peaceful world, a beloved world, home to billions—will have convinced the ordinary people of the Empire that they cannot afford to show complicity in rebel crimes. It’s one thing to endanger oneself for a cause, after all; another to endanger one’s entire home planet. Stormtroopers will massacre the last remaining insurgents, hunting them relentlessly through deserts and treetops and hollowed-out asteroids.
One day, a death squad will find Mon Mothma and Cianne hiding in their shuttle in the radiation belt of a black hole. The shuttle’s engines will be nonfunctional, its fuel spent. Without scanners, they won’t notice the TIE fighters until too late.
Within the decade, the Rebellion Mon built will be erased from history and erased from consciousness. Soon after, even the Empire’s censors will begin to forget the past.
—
“There are four, maybe five safe houses in range that we believe are secure and well supplied. Also two habitable planets off the Imperial charts, if you’re willing to go without infrastructure. The mobile squadrons haven’t managed to regroup, so we shouldn’t count on those…”
Cianne goes on as Mon’s seat vibrates with the turbulence of hyperspace. Mon only half listens. She knows all this. There are details that escaped her mind—she lacks the encyclopedic knowledge of rebel assets that some of her peers in High Command possess—but no one is more aware than her of the Alliance’s capabilities and limits.
The princess should be arriving on Yavin 4 any moment now.
“No safe houses.” Mon dismisses the option with a wave. “No hiding in deep space. If there’s any point at all in our survival, we won’t prove it in isolation.”
Cianne’s first duty, as she sees it, is the safety of her senator. Mon knows this because Cianne has said so. But Cianne also knows when it’s pointless to argue, and she doesn’t argue now. “All right,” she says. “We could try to contact ground forces in the Rim worlds—bit of a gamble, but it would be a start.”
Because that’s what this means. Starting over.
Exhaustion subsumes Mon like a rising tide. She remembers the metal case nestled between her feet—the twenty years of work in a courier package. She remembers her first meetings with Bail and the others, when she was practically a child and so certain of her own experience and ability. She had imagined toppling the Emperor in a matter of months, not decades.
“Not the Rim worlds,” Mon says. Her voice is commanding, loud enough for the pilot to hear. He’ll draw inspiration from her, even if Cianne won’t. “We go to Coruscant.” Heart of the Empire, heart of the galaxy.
The pilot swears. Cianne hesitates, mentally assembling the pieces and searching for coherence. “The Senate,” she says. “Disbanded or not, it’s a powerful voice. And after Alderaan, the senators will have to back you.”
“Perhaps,” Mon says, and adds nothing more. Because while she’s good at lying, she never did develop a taste for it.
—
In another future, the Rebellion will live on in the days after the annihilation of Alderaan and Yavin 4—not just live, but grow, as the Empire’s atrocities become public and Mon Mothma and the Senate-in-exile kindle support. The destruction of Base One will prove a blow to the structure but not the spirit of the Rebel Alliance.
There will be a true revolution. Uprisings unlike any the galaxy has seen will erupt on a thousand worlds.
Then the Empire will respond.
Every world that defies the Galactic Emperor will be destroyed. The space station—the planet killer—will be used, not as a threat but as a weapon of absolute terror. The Emperor and his bitter old men will prove crueler than anyone imagined.
How many worlds will die before blood quenches the Rebellion’s fire? Will Mon Cala’s endless oceans boil? Will the thorn-communes of Menthusa burn? Will the ancient cityscape of Denon turn to ruins? Will two, three, a dozen, a hundred worlds fall? The galaxy is large. The Empire is unimaginably strong. For its leaders, there is no sacrifice too great to ensure its survival.
Mon will give up eventually, of course. She’s not a monster. She’s learned to stomach sending children into battle, but she’ll never abide the loss of whole planets.
Mon Mothma can’t actually see the future. She used to know people who could, but the last of them is dead now, too.
—
“No word from base, Senator,” Cianne says. She’s arranging a meal on a serving tray: stewed beans and bread and a tin cup of steaming caf, all procured from who-knows-where. Utensils clink softly, and a loamy scent fills Mon’s nostrils. “We’ll signal again in ninety minutes. For all we know, Private Harge still hasn’t figured out the comm unit.”
“Harge? What about Lentra?”
“Went to Scarif,” Cianne says. She doesn’t say and didn’t come back.
The notion of eating makes Mon ill. How often has she dined while others fought
for their lives? The wounds she sustains never bleed; she has no corporeal scars to assure her that she’s suffered for her cause. She recognizes the indulgent self-pity in this line of thinking, but she can’t entirely banish it.
She eats. Cianne does not.
“It’s all right to mourn,” Mon says softly. “We may not have another chance for a while.”
Cianne taps her left temple. “Biochemical regulatory implant. It keeps my stress hormones in check.” She doesn’t look directly at Mon. “Besides, most of my—the people I know are still on Yavin. Mourning would be premature.”
By now, it might not be, Mon thinks, though she knows Cianne is aware of this.
Still, she likes hearing Cianne act hopeful. It reminds her of Bail. Through the blur of sleeplessness she imagines his ghost and asks, Was it painful, when Alderaan died? Did you know what was happening? Did you think we’d lost?
Mon finishes no more than half the meal. She prompts Cianne multiple times until her aide finally dines on the beans and bread remaining, more eagerly than Mon did.
“We should have waited for the princess,” Mon says. “Extracted her, as well.”
Cianne only shrugs. “She wouldn’t have come. And trying might have left us with no time to escape.”
“I owe her father,” Mon says.
“Bail owed you. So does she. She’s paying off that debt now.”
Mon has heard reasoning like this before. It’s reasoning that can excuse any number of deaths, and it almost works.
But Mon has other reasons to wish Princess Leia had been evacuated. The girl is young, and the galaxy has enough bitter old masterminds trying to shape it to their respective visions.
—
In another future, Mon will walk the hallways of the Imperial Palace, her white robes in contrast to the dark tile and the crimson armor of her escorts. Perhaps she will ache from bruises sustained in her capture; more likely, she will be in perfect health.