Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Lost Stars (16 page)

His usual train of thought about the rebels began:
They’re terrorists, they’re thugs. The Empire has its flaws, but so did the Republic these guys worship. You
can’t trust
power no matter what. It doesn’t really matter who’s in charge.

He’d thought he was being so worldly and wise. Now—with the blaze of Alderaan’s destruction still glowing in his mind—Thane knew how hollow his rationalizations had been.
Terrorism could never be the answer, but as of that day, the Empire was as guilty of acts of terror as the Rebel Alliance was, if not more.

His tour of duty, postgraduation, was five years. After that, technically, Thane could resign his commission and take whatever work he chose—but the vast majority of Imperial officers
remained in service until they hit mandatory retirement age or died, whichever came first. He’d always figured he would be a lifer. Now it felt like he couldn’t wear that uniform
another five minutes.

How many times had he said he’d stay in the Imperial Starfleet just so he’d get to fly the greatest ships in the galaxy? The words sounded so callow now. Juvenile, even.

You don’t really want to walk out,
Thane told himself as he continued taking readings, his expression carefully impassive.
What you’ve seen today proves we’re on the
brink of galactic war. They need you.

But when he thought
of
they
, he wasn’t imagining the Emperor and his admirals needing him. He imagined protecting his fellow troops, the people around him he’d already begun
to think of as friends. And Nash.

And Ciena.

Although the
Devastator
had left the Death Star behind, the Star Destroyer’s crew had been instructed to remain linked to the station’s data feeds. The
designated viewscreens were slightly
to the left of Ciena’s station, so from the corner of her eye she could see the febrile surface of Yavin, an immense red gas giant. Other screens showed
one of the world’s moons, Yavin 4, apparently the real location of the rebel base.

So they sent Thane away to Dantooine based on bad intel. For nothing.
She longed to talk with him about the terrible events of the past couple of days. Talking
with Jude had helped steady
Ciena, but she still couldn’t sleep. Over and over again, in her mind’s eye, she saw Alderaan exploding.

Now she might be about to watch the death of a second world.

But this is a military target,
she assured herself.
No civilians will be hurt.

That explanation would make sense to her eventually. At the moment, her gut ached at the thought of seeing another
planet’s destruction. It was too soon after Alderaan; her nerves were
raw.

The rebels realized their doom, and they fought back—but in the most absurd way possible.

“Unbelievable,” muttered a commander standing near her duty station. “The rebels sent a handful of starfighters to target the Death Star? That little uprising must be on its
last legs, if that’s all the power they can muster.”

It’s uninhabited,
she reminded herself.
The only people there are members of the Rebellion, the ones who are trying to start a war. They chose their path willingly. This is what
war means.

Yet she thought of the animals that lived there, small innocent creatures, and even the trees—

One monitor showed X-wing fighters racing through a trench, with TIE fighters in pursuit. She wondered
why they had even sent the TIEs out against such a pitiful attack. Then again, even minor
damage to the station would have to be repaired. The ships zoomed past at such speed that the firefight was out of sight again in moments. Maybe another camera would pick it up.

Instead, a short time later, she saw an X-wing and a clunky old freighter headed back toward Yavin 4 at top sublight speed.
Ciena reported, “Sir, the rebel ships are flying away from the
Death Star.”

“Track them,” her commander said. “We will want to provide the most complete report possible for Grand Moff Tarkin.”

She continued logging every data packet that arrived from the Death Star, important or incidental. The auxiliary bridge continued its buzz of activity, but voices dropped and tasks slowed. Ciena
knew everyone was waiting for the moment Yavin 4 would explode. Nausea welling inside, she attempted to brace herself for the sudden blazing light—when instead every screen connected to the
Death Star went black.

Instantly. Simultaneously. Ciena realized the stream of data flowing from the station had stopped, too.

“Did the circuits fail?” someone said, checking out those monitors.
He thought the screens themselves were at fault. She knew better.

“The Death Star has gone silent, sir,” she reported. “No incoming data.”

Her commander’s face took on a strange expression, both confused and angry. “That’s impossible, Lieutenant. The rebels have created some form of interference, or those fighters
were sent to knock out the station’s communications.”

X-wing fighters
couldn’t do that to a space station the size of the Death Star. Could they?

But the only alternative was—unthinkable.

“T
HAT’S IT? They don’t know anything else?”

“Try again to get through to Coruscant.”

“Every communication network is completely jammed—”

Voices
echoed throughout the abandoned rebel base on Dantooine, which had become for the time being a makeshift Imperial station. Groups of officers huddled around—some still in full
landing armor but most by then wearing only pieces of the plating. Although their troop commander remained in charge, for hours no orders had been given to anyone but communications officers. There
was nothing for them to
do but wait and be afraid.

Thane paced the length of the hall, which seemed to have been blasted from solid rock, making it feel a bit as if they were huddling in a cave. The pieces of information they’d been able
to gather so far were contradictory, confusing, and ominous. Some said the Death Star had been destroyed; others claimed it was damaged and unable to communicate; still others
said the news had to
be false—a ploy meant to coax the rebels out of hiding so they could be more efficiently slaughtered.

Most of the soldiers in the room seemed to believe the last scenario, which had led to a lot of cursing and big talk about how when
they
were in charge, they’d never initiate an
action like that without properly informing and preparing everyone down the chain of command.
A few others protested, saying that spies could be anywhere. If even a member of the Imperial Senate as
illustrious as Princess Leia Organa could turn traitor, anyone could. So this big diversion had to be kept secret until the last possible moment.

Not everyone was convinced, though. Thane had exchanged glances with a handful of others who remained tense and silent.

The Death Star can’t
have been lost. It would take a dozen Star Destroyers and attack cruisers to make any impact on a station that size. The Rebel Alliance is clearly more powerful
than our superior officers let us know, but if they had a fleet that large, they would’ve provoked direct action before now.
That part of his analysis felt rock solid to Thane; however,
the rest was less certain.
If the Death Star
has been damaged, how badly? It’s the size of an entire moon, so how can
all
the communications systems be down? And why wouldn’t
the ships docked there be able to respond, either?

If the rebels had attacked the Death Star with a fleet capable of causing real damage, the big Imperial ships would have been launched. They would have gone into battle.

Thane leaned against the rough-hewn
stone wall of the rebel base, canteen of nutritive milk in one hand. He thought of the
Devastator
in all its majesty and power, and he imagined its
laser cannons blasting the rebel fleet to shreds. He pictured it over and over—the shards of metal, the spinning debris, the brief pulses of flame before they were snuffed out by the vacuum
of space.

If he imagined the
Devastator
winning, he
didn’t have to imagine what else might have happened during the battle he envisioned—to the ship, to Nash Windrider, or to Ciena.

After a few hours at her post, Ciena’s ears rang with the squeals of badly filtered transmissions. Her head swam with the endless amounts of data she had to process,
fast. For now she had to give her ship and her Empire everything she had.

The
Devastator
’s
senior officers were in conference, as they had been for what seemed like hours. If any of them knew the reason behind the Death Star’s sudden, terrifying
silence, they had not yet shared it with the crew.

For the time being Ciena could do no more than continue to sort through the endless data packets sent from the Death Star before it went quiet. Many of these contained no useful information
whatsoever, but until they had a full explanation, she could afford to ignore nothing.

When she recognized Jude’s number on one packet, she opened it immediately. She didn’t care whether this one was important or not; Ciena needed to know what Jude had been doing
before the Death Star—became damaged, or infiltrated, or whatever had gone so horribly wrong.

But Jude’s data
was
important.
Ciena read a report from Jude Edivon to her superior officer and all local commanders in which Jude explained that her analysis had shown the rebel
attack with small starfighters did in fact pose a threat to the Death Star. She’d found a flaw nobody else had suspected—something to do with an exhaust port—and had sensed a
weakness where everyone else saw invulnerability.

Although the likelihood
of a direct hit is remote,
Jude had written,
the consequences could be highly destructive to the station, even fatal.

If anyone had sent a response to Jude’s warning, Ciena had not yet found it.

Fatal to the station? To the Death Star? No. Jude must have meant only that officers would be killed in some resulting small explosion. That made far more sense than the idea that an X-wing
fighter
could destroy something the size of a moon.

Yet the darkness and silence remained.

Shortly after Ciena had sent this information to command, she received a message to report to docking bay forty-seven. Nash shot her a look as she walked out, clearly as curious as she was about
what could possibly be going on. She hoped to be able to fill him in soon.

Instead, she found she had a
new assignment.

A stone-faced commander told her and the other pilot, “Lieutenant Ree, Lieutenant Sai, you’re to take a
Gozanti
class freighter to the Yavin system to rendezvous with Lord
Vader and bring him back to the
Devastator
.”

It was as though steel bands had been tightening around her, then were suddenly loosed. Ciena managed not to sigh out loud.
Darth Vader is alive. He was able
to contact our ship. So whatever
happened on the Death Star wasn’t the worst-case scenario.
She still hadn’t allowed herself to fully contemplate what the “worst-case scenario” might be.

The commander continued: “You are to disclose your mission to no one—not during your journey or at any time afterward. You will maintain communications silence unless otherwise
ordered by Lord Vader, or
if…the rendezvous does not take place as planned.”

What was that supposed to mean?
Ciena glanced sideways at her fellow pilot, whose expression might as well have been carved in stone.

Once they were alone in the freighter’s cockpit, however, Lieutenant Sai proved to be anything but stoic. “What are we supposed to do?” she said just after their ship had gone
into hyperspace. “Fly up
to the totally silent Death Star without asking them any questions? Or even getting permission to dock?”

“It’s going to make more sense when we get there,” Ciena said.

“Why are you so sure?”

“Because it can’t make any less sense than it does now.”

That earned her a laugh. “True. By the way, I’m called Berisse.”

“Ciena.”

Berisse turned out to have graduated from the academy
on Lothal the year before. Her brilliant smile shone brightly against her tan skin. She was as stout as regulations allowed, with dark,
shining hair she kept even more tightly braided than Ciena’s. When she learned that Ciena had been on the
Devastator
only a few short weeks, she promised to show her around, and even
offered some sympathy for Nash. “That’s rough,” she said. “Imagine finding
out your entire planet turned traitor.”

Even that can’t be as bad as seeing it completely destroyed,
Ciena nearly said—but that was when the sensors began to chime. “Yavin,” she said, swinging back into
position at the controls. “Dropping out of hyperspace.”

“Dropping out of hyperspace,” Berisse confirmed. She, too, was back in official mode.

The dread Ciena had kept at bay by chatting
with Berisse returned, stronger than before. She told herself that at least now she would know how bad the situation was. She wouldn’t have to
worry about Jude any longer. Nothing could be worse than not knowing.