So You Want to Be a Jedi?

by Adam Gidwitz

  You grit your teeth. “Stay with me, Dak. We’re coming in.” The speeder darts between the snow walker’s tall, double-jointed legs. “Now!”

  Dak might be nervous, but those young hands are steady. His blast explodes directly on the underside of the walker’s head.

  Your stomach turns over.

  The walker is moving forward. Entirely unaffected.

  “Forget the blasters!” you shout into the intercom. Other pilots are cursing.

  You pause. And then you think of elephoths.

  “Use your harpoon and tow cables! Go for their legs!”

  A pilot’s voice crackles through the transmitter. “Will that work?” Lasers are exploding all around him.

  “No idea! But the blasters won’t!”

  “Luke!” Dak’s voice is laced with panic now. “Luke! We’ve got a malfunction in the fire control!”

  “Hold on, Dak. Focus on the tow cable!”

  “Luke!”

  “Stay focused!” You’re steering toward another snow walker, through a crushing volley of lasers and shrapnel.

  You’re getting closer. The snow rushes beneath the ship; the great beast is growing before you. The sounds of explosions, crunching snow, and buckling metal are nearly deafening.

  “Ready, Dak?”

  There is no response.

  “Dak?” You turn around.

  Dak’s head is slumped over to one side, and his body lies limp against a blinking control panel. Blood is clotting in his hair.

  You swivel back to your steering columns. You feel sick.

  You take a deep breath. Your eyes are open, but you do not see. You are breathing, in and out, in and out.

  Dak is dead.

  Yes, and you cannot change that.

  LESSON IOTA:

  PEACE IN A TIME OF CRISIS

  What? Meditate? Luke’s gunner—and friend—is dead, and he’s supposed to meditate?

  Yup.

  I mean, he could give in to rage or despair. Go out in a blaze of glory. Or turn tail, run, seethe, weep.

  Those would all be normal things to do.

  But those are, at best, the paths to defeat. At worst, they are paths to the dark side.

  Think of something that has upset you, my young friend. Something that makes your blood race through your veins, or brings up an uncomfortable bulge in your throat when you think of it. When someone teased you, or lied to you, or hurt you. Please—think back to such a time.

  Now stand on one foot, or balance the book on your head, and breathe. Have someone count to thirty, or time yourself. See if you can focus only on your breath. Nothing else.

  Did it?

  It isn’t easy, is it?

  Go ahead: keep trying. You’re making progress. I can tell.

  THE SNOW WALKERS are nearing the rebel trench. Behind the trench, a dish gazes up into the sky. In great cubes of steel and lithium, power surges, flowing to the halls of the rebel base, to the ion cannons, to the shields.

  Your breath is flowing in and out of your body. Your eyes are clear. You are calm. You speak: “Rogue Leader to Rogue Three, I’ve lost Dak. You’ll have to take this shot. Follow me on the next pass.”

  “Coming round, Rogue Leader.”

  The speeders bank, and you steer for the legs of the lead snow walker. Your hands grip the steering column, knuckles blanching with the pressure, breath concentrated into a single line that goes in your nose, down to the bottom of your belly, and then gently flows out the way it came. Laser blasts erupt all around you. You ignore them. They will not hit you. You can tell.

  You reach the snow walker, and as you duck through its great legs, followed hard by Rogue Three, you shout, “Go!”

  From the back of Rogue Three, a harpoon shoots out and buries itself in the snow walker’s knee joint.

  You turn hard, creating a tight circle around the snow walker. Rogue Three follows. You peel off, but Rogue Three continues its run, looping the steel tow cables around and around and around the snow walker’s legs. At last, Rogue Three follows you away from the steel beast.

  “Release!” the pilot shouts. His gunner obeys, and the tow cable detaches from the speeder as it retreats, screaming over the snow.

  As you speed away, the enormous snow walker attempts another step toward the trench and the power generators behind it. It lifts its great foreleg—and then stutters. The war machine totters, just for a second. And then, like a great tree after a lumberjack calls “Timber!” it tumbles through the air and smashes into the ground with a gruesome shudder. It will not rise again.

  But the assault continues. Blast after blast, from snow walkers and rocket launchers, rock the rebel base.

  Han Solo rushes through the smoky halls, followed by a panicked C-3PO. He finds his way, through the shouting and the drifts of smoke and the smell of burning plastic, to the command center. There, Leia is commanding the general. Han almost smiles. Her throat is straining, her voice ragged with shouting.

  “We have to launch the last transports now! Both of them! This is the end!”

  “We can’t cover two at once…” General Rieekan is pleading with her.

  Leia’s cheeks are red like hot steel, and her eyes are just as bright. “We have to try!” Then she turns and sees Han. She jabs a finger at him through the air. “What are you still doing here? You had clearance to leave!”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll leave. But I’ve got to get you to your ship. You’d stay way past the end if I didn’t….” Han says it like it’s criticism. But it isn’t.

  “Your Highness!” C-3PO warbles frantically. “We must take one of the final transports! It’s our last hope!”

  Leia pivots to the grey-eyed general. “Send all troops in sector twelve to protect the soldiers on—”

  Gravity goes funny. The ground is shifting beneath them. C-3PO careens into Han, his golden arms scrabbling at the air. One strikes Han in the face. Han grabs the tumbling droid and steadies him.

  A voice comes over the general address system. “Imperial troops have entered the base. Repeat. Imperial—”

  “That’s it, Princess,” says Han, taking her arm. “We’re going.”

  “Signal total evacuation!” Leia shouts to the general, as Han drags her away. “And get to your transport!”

  Han leads Leia into the corridor. Red lights are ablaze everywhere. C-3PO totters behind, still babbling frantically. Shouts and cries compete with desperate announcements over the loudspeaker to which no one is listening. Occasionally, an explosion drowns the rest of it out. The smoke smells now not only of plastic and metal, but of flesh. The rebels have lost. They have lost.

  Another explosion rocks the corridor, and this time, the ceiling falls in. Right in front of them.

  Leia stares at it, bewildered. But just for an instant. Then she falls upon the rubble, trying to clear it from their path. But there’s too much, and it’s piled too high. Han watches her, frozen. The explosions are getting closer. Then he pulls his transmitter to his mouth. “Transport, this is Solo. I’ve got the princess with me. I can’t get to you. I’ll get her out on the Falcon.”

  Leia turns from the rubble. “That bucket of bolts can’t get past the blockade!”

  “That’s your ride, Princess,” Han calls back over his shoulder as he starts down the hall, away from the rubble, C-3PO tottering behind. “It’s up to you!”

  Leia hesitates. She looks down the blocked corridor. She glances after Solo. “We’ll never survive!” she shouts.

  And he shouts back, “At least we’ll never survive together!”

  She frowns, hesitates, and runs after him.

  The once-peaceful snow plain is now streaked and stained with blood and oil, shrapnel and space junk. The air, once whistling only with the wind, now whistles with laserfire and crashing ships.

  You bank your speeder for another run at a snow walker.

  “Rogue Two, are you all right?”

  “I’m with you, Rogue Leader.”

  “
Your harpoon this time. I’ll cover you with my manual blasters.”

  “Like hunting sharwhales on Uthura! I’m coming home!” the pilot of Rogue Two crows.

  You laugh. “Okay, don’t get too far out ahead of me now.”

  But Rogue Two isn’t listening. Taken by adrenaline and fear, he’s already shot out onto the icy expanse between you and the walker.

  “Slow down!” you tell him.

  “Rogue Two, coming home!”

  And then he explodes.

  From across his bow, a bright red blast of laser hits his speeder directly in its propulsion system.

  You watch in horror. And in that moment—as you stare at that brave pilot with the stupid sense of humor smoldering in the wreckage of his speeder, his gunner desperately trying to pry himself out of the back—that’s when you’re hit.

  The control panel looks like a thunderstorm. Your dials are spinning, readouts have become tiny electric light shows. You’re trying to hold the ship up, but gravity is fighting a battle with your speeder, and suddenly, it’s winning. The g-force is strong, and stronger, and you are pulling up—but that’s not doing a thing. Your head is being flattened into your seat. You lock your jaw and close your eyes.

  The ship slams into the ice.

  You cannot breathe.

  Do you know the feeling? When you get the wind knocked out of you?

  You gasp at the air, but it will not enter your mouth. You arch your back, desperate, empty, literally breathless. Screaming in silence for the breath that just moments ago you never had to think about.

  And then the wind comes rushing back into your lungs, and you thank the Force, or whatever you believe in, and you breathe.

  You breathe, just as the enormous steel foot of a snow walker appears over your tiny snowspeeder.

  You gaze up at it, motionless. The steel foot descends. You will be crushed. You will be crushed, and you will die.

  And then the cockpit is open, and you are over the metal gunwale, and you are rolling, rolling, rolling—a child’s game turned suddenly serious—rolling across the icy snow. The great foot crashes down upon the speeder, and the snow walker continues its inexorable march toward the rebel base.

  You spring to your feet. You don’t know where you get the energy. It courses through you, though, like your newly regained breath. You start to run.

  At full speed, you can just keep pace with the war machine. You look over the ruined field of snow, the sun hanging bright and distant in the empty blue sky. The rebels in the trench are barely firing anymore. They must be retreating, back to the transports. It’s over. Their only hope now is to get out before the power generator is destroyed, and the shields go down, and the great armada of Star Destroyers hovering just out of orbit pulverizes the base with their cannons—obliterating it and everyone inside. The only question now is how soon those generators will be blown. The sooner they are, the more rebels will die.

  Still running, you look up at the steel underbelly moving above you. Swinging from your belt is a harpoon gun. For elephoth hunting, you think. Ridiculous to carry it into battle. But it’s standard rebel equipment. Lucky for you.

  You aim it upward and let it fire. It catches on a mechanism on the snow walker’s underbelly, its steel cable trailing back to your hand. Running sideways now, you fasten the cable to your belt and hit “retract” on the gun. Suddenly, you are careening upward through the air, toward the belly of the walker. Your arms and legs dangle, your belt is trying to tear itself from your body, and the wind is so cold on your neck that your teeth hurt. You reach for your lightsaber. The belly approaches. It arrives. You are dangling like a spider. A deadly spider.

  With a single swing, you hew the hinges from the escape hatch in the belly of the steel beast. The door goes spinning down into the snow.

  In a pouch hanging from the back of your belt is a grenade. You don’t like grenades. If you want to commit the dire and irreparable act of taking a life, you think, you ought to at least look the person in the face before you do it. That is why Jedi prefer lightsabers. Also, it is harder to kill someone accidentally with a lightsaber. Grenades, like guns, have a disturbing tendency to take the life of the wrong person.

  But you’re not a Jedi Knight. Not yet. You’re just a kid with a lightsaber. Maybe you would be a Jedi already, if Darth Vader hadn’t killed Old Ben. Rage grabs your shoulders and chest, making them tight and hot. You wonder if Vader is out on one of those Imperial Star Destroyers, waiting to kill you, too.

  Old Ben. What had he said, while you lay unconscious in the snow? Dagobah? Yoda? Master Yoda?

  The snow walker fires a blast right at the satellite dish perched on the generator. It bursts into flames. Focus! you tell yourself. You start the detonation sequence on the grenade and hurl it through the hatch. Then you release the cable from your belt.

  As you hurtle snow-ward, you suddenly wonder if the walker will crash down on you when it explodes.

  LESSON KAPPA:

  RELAX! PEOPLE ARE SHOOTING AT YOU!

  Get someone to help you.

  You are going to stand on one foot, or balance that book on your head, and someone is going to—very gently—throw things at you. These things should be soft. I recommend balled up socks or crumpled pieces of paper. They should be thrown gently. You are going to bat them away with your hands without losing balance.

  Get yourself set—stand on one foot or put the book on your head. Do one second of instantaneous meditation—close your eyes, smile, breathe in and out, open your eyes. Then have your assistant begin to gently toss objects at you.

  See if you can stay balanced and still defend yourself.

  Get going, young one. Let’s see what you’ve got.

  “AAAARRAAARAAGH!” An enormous, opera-singing dog yodels soulfully beside the Millennium Falcon. No, wait. That is Chewbacca. Never mind.

  “Aaaarraaaraagh!” Chewbacca howls mournfully. His small eyes dart from the Millennium Falcon to the hangar doors. They will remain open another few minutes. At most. After that, the Falcon will not fly, no matter if the walking barber-shop floor succeeded in fixing the lifters or not.

  “Araararararargh!” he cries again. Not that the Wookiee minds dying. Not really. Wookiees are nothing if not valiant. But they are also fiercely loyal. Chewbacca is not worried for himself. He’s worried for Han, and for Leia.

  Just then, they come sprinting around a corner.

  “Aarararararargh!” That is Chewbacca, howling joyfully. In case you couldn’t tell the difference.

  Han shouts, “Start ’er up, Chewie! Start ’er up!”

  Chewie leads the way up the gangplank, followed by Han and Leia. C-3PO totters into view around a distant corner. “Oh, wait! Wait for me!”

  He should hurry. They will absolutely not wait for him.

  Well, maybe Leia would.

  In the cockpit, Han throws switches all over the place. Chewbacca studies the readings skeptically. Han glances at his first mate, who growls in the negative.

  Leia leans over Han’s shoulder. “Would it help if I got out and pushed?”

  “It might.”

  “Sir,” says C-3PO, “might I suggest…”

  Han raises a single eyebrow at the droid. “Ah, never mind,” C-3PO concludes sheepishly.

  The captain leaps from his seat. He rushes from control panel to mechanical bank back to control panel.

  Leia puts her hands on her hips. “This jalopy will never get past the blockade.”

  “Oh, she’s got some surprises left in her, sweetheart.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “I was talking to the ship.”

  Outside the Falcon, a power gasket explodes.

  “Aaaarraaaraagh!” Chewbacca roars. Not joyfully.

  “I’m trying!” Han shouts “I’m trying!”

  Suddenly, in the space of the hangar door, stormtroopers appear.

  “Now it’s a party!” Leia shouts.

  One of the stormtroopers mounts
a rocket launcher on his shoulder.

  As Han fiddles with some wiring under the cockpit’s main dash, Leia slides into the captain’s seat and fires at the stormtroopers. They are sent hurtling through the air in six different directions. Then she gets out of the seat. Han looks up at her for a moment, not sure if she’s moved or not, and then goes back to furiously fiddling with wires.

  “Now!” he shouts at Chewbacca. The Wookiee pulls back on a thruster, and the Falcon roars to life.

  “Woo-hoo!” Han cries, leaping into the captain’s chair.

  “One day,” Leia says, “you’re going to be wrong. I just hope I’m there to see it.”

  Han Solo flashes her a smile. The hangar doors begin to close.

  “Punch it!” Han shouts. Chewbacca throws a switch, and the Millennium Falcon roars out of the rebel base, up through the snowy sky of Hoth, and into the blackness of space.

  You hit the snow. It explodes around you. The snow walker lumbers ahead three, four, five steps. You are breathing hard, watching it go. The rebel troops have fled the trench. The fight is over. The snow walker fires at the generators. One catches fire.

  Then, overhead, you see it: Han’s rickety old ship, still supposedly “the fastest in the galaxy,” shoots out of the south hangar and climbs up through the atmosphere. You smile. At least Han got out. Hopefully the princess, too. Yes. She’s in that ship. You can tell.

  And then an explosion presses you into the ground. A wave of heat courses over your body. You are lying on your back, the snow rapidly melting around you, fire licking your chest. Then it subsides. You raise the blackened visor of your helmet. The snow walker is dangling from its own legs, a blackened husk.

  You get up and run.

  On a remote part of the ice field, far away from the battle and the now-ruined rebel base, you trudge through the snow. A short distance farther sits your X-wing, a spaceship outfitted for one pilot and one droid. R2 is in his place. He’s the one who piloted it out here to the muster site, to wait for you. The last of the other pilots are taking off, leaving a strange sight: a spaceship, small and lonesome, sitting on the edge of a frozen wilderness. The sounds of battle seem very distant out here.