Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Lost Stars (26 page)

Dak’s chatter broke his reverie. “I still can’t believe I
got assigned as gunner to
Luke Skywalker
. The guy who singlehandedly destroyed the Death Star!”

“Somebody’s going to be his gunner. Might as well be you.” Thane was mostly glad it wasn’t him. Yes, Skywalker had shown incredible courage and made a near-impossible
shot—he deserved respect—but that particular act of heroism was one Thane preferred to admire from a distance.

“And they say
he hopes to become a Jedi Knight, just like in the olden days,” Dak continued, talking as dreamily as a schoolkid with a crush. “Do you know he has a real, true
lightsaber? He even learned how to use the Force from the great General Kenobi, the last of the Jedi!”

It was all Thane could do not to groan.
Please, not more superstitious nonsense about the “Force.”
In his opinion, the rebel troops
needed to be motivated by the harsh truth
about the Empire, not crazy religious beliefs.

Then he remembered Ciena’s voice so vividly that it was as if she’d whispered in his ear.
Believing in something greater than ourselves isn’t crazy. It’s proof
we’re sane. Look how vast the galaxy is. Don’t you have to admit we can’t be the greatest power within it?

She had said that to him during
one of their final days on Jelucan, before they left for the academy. He’d laughed at her for suggesting that maybe the Force had made sure they went to the
same school on Coruscant, to keep them together. By now, even Ciena would have to admit they weren’t lucky enough to share a destiny.

So why was the memory of her still more real to him than the person actually standing a meter away?

“Let’s just get this done, all right? We don’t want to run off and leave these things to starve penned up in here.” Thane patted one tauntaun on the nose before slipping
off its halter. The beast bounded away, eager to find a pack and burrow down for warmth. “We have to haul out of here within the day, Rieekan says. I don’t want to get stranded on Hoth
because we didn’t finish tauntaun
duty in time.”

“Sorry,” Dak said so earnestly that Thane felt a twinge of guilt.

So he gentled his tone. “By the way—you must have impressed somebody to get assigned to fly with Skywalker. They wouldn’t pair him up with just anyone.”

“…really?”

“Definitely.”

He glanced over at Dak and saw that the kid was smiling. With that, they cleared the stall of the final two tauntauns.
As the beasts ran into the snow, leaving only their stink behind—

—every siren on the base went off at once.

The shrieking echoed within the cave walls; Thane jerked upright and dropped the harnesses within the first second. Dak yelled, “What does this mean?”

As green as he was, Dak knew the answer. He just didn’t want to believe it. Thane shouted over the din: “The Empire got here
faster than we thought. They’ve found
us!”

After a quick briefing from Princess Leia, it only took Thane four minutes to suit up and run to his snowspeeder. Four minutes was almost too long.

“Haul your Jelucani ass up here!” shouted Yendor, Thane’s Twi’lek copilot and a fellow member of Corona Squadron. He’d already donned his specially fitted helmet,
which allowed his blue lekku to
trail down his back. “We’ve got multiple Imperial walkers marching in.”

“I trained on walkers at the academy.” Thane swung into his seat. Even as he put on his helmet, the overhead canopy descended and locked. “I know them inside and
out.”

“What can you tell me about these things?” Yendor flipped the switches that would prepare them for takeoff.

“They’re the most heavily armored
ground vehicles in the Imperial Army.”

“…so what you’re saying is that you have a thorough knowledge of just how screwed we are.”

“Pretty much,” Thane said. “Look at it this way. If even the Death Star could fall, there’s nothing the Empire has that we can’t take down.”

Yendor released the clamps. “Let’s test that theory.”

Thane put his hands to the controls and felt the engines
surge to life beneath him. “Here we go.”

The snowspeeder shot out of the base and into the fray. Laser bolts striped the silver-white sky, and rebel ships scattered wide to face the intruding army…because that was what they had
here. Not a strike team. They were up against the full ground forces of the Empire, at least.
How many snowtroopers are down there?
Thane wondered.
And they’ll probably
send
flametroopers into the base to burn everything still inside—and everyone.
Worst of all, he could already see five AT-AT walkers on the horizon. Each one would carry dozens of soldiers and
countless armaments, not to mention the deadly cannons mounted in front.

It wouldn’t matter how far the walkers made it if the rebels could just get the transports away, Thane reminded himself. Actually
destroying one of those monsters would be a bonus.

Yendor said, “Did your classes at the academy tell you how to deal with the walkers’ heavy armor? Because our blasters aren’t worth a damn against these things.”

Thane took the speeder in fast and low, sending flurries of snow out in a plume beneath them. “Not every place can be fully armored. Think about it. The legs are vulnerable exactly
where
any creature’s legs would be.”

“Gotcha,” Yendor replied. “Targeting the joints.”

The entire snowspeeder vibrated with the power of the fire they shot at one of the walkers, specifically its “ankles.” While their blasters didn’t have the strength to destroy
those alloys, it might be possible to weaken the bolts and fry some of the circuitry.

We can make them unstable. Slow
them down. Anything to help the transports get to safety.

Each of those transports would contain nearly a hundred rebel soldiers, the heart of their fleet. If the Empire triumphed today—it truly could be the end of the Rebellion.

But Yendor’s aim was sure and steady. He kept hitting the AT-AT’s lowest joints in the exact same spots, maximizing the damage. As Thane zoomed in with his sensors,
he realized they
even had a chance to take one of the feet off the thing, which would stop it dead.

“Keep it up!” Thane shouted to Yendor. “I’m taking us all the way in!”

“I can actually target quite well from a distance, you know,” Yendor joked, even as he started firing faster.

By then the lowest section of the walker loomed large in the viewscreen. Thane looked upward to see the
thing for real. At first he wished he hadn’t—the monsters looked big enough
when you were in them, but from below they seemed to outweigh the entire sky.

But then he told himself,
They’re not as big as the mountains back home. You flew through those. You can make it through these.

So he accelerated until the snowy landscape was no more than a blur, bringing them back in as fast as possible.
Yendor kept firing with pinpoint accuracy, every hit now winning a puff of black
smoke or a shower of sparks.

They were within two hundred meters—one hundred meters—

Thane made the decision in an instant. At the last second he could’ve swerved, he didn’t.

Yendor yelped—still firing—as Thane steered their snowspeeder directly at the AT-AT’s feet. In the final moments before impact,
he jerked the speeder sideways until it was
perpendicular to the ground, sliding between the AT-AT’s legs until he spun out behind it, still in one piece.

That was more than he could say for the walker, now hobbling on burning, damaged feet. One of the legs lifted minus its foot, then froze; that AT-AT wasn’t going anywhere

“So, that was
not
a suicide run?” Yendor said.

Thane laughed
as he took the snowspeeder around for another pass. “I used to turn sideslips like that through mountain stalactites every day back home. You were safe as a baby the whole
time.”

“Remind me never to hire you as a babysitter.”

As Thane zoomed back toward the conflict, he realized that somebody else had managed to bring a walker down—as in, all the way down, flat in the snow. The head
blew as he watched, a cough
of black smoke against the white ground. For a moment he imagined himself inside the walker. It would’ve been so unbearably hot just before the explosion; the heat must’ve cooked those
guys in their armor.…

That’s right,
he told himself savagely.
We’re here to kill them, just like they’re here to kill us. Better them than you.

Yendor said, “Got word from
Commander Skywalker. They looped the walker’s legs with a tow cable.”

“That’s faster,” Thane said. “And saves our energy for later.”

“And doesn’t make us do that damned death-somersault thing—”

“Don’t knock the move that just saved our butts,” Thane said as he headed straight for the next walker. “Just get the tow cable ready.”

As they sped back into the thick of the battle, Thane
saw a transport rocket through the atmosphere, preparing for its leap into hyperspace. Were they actually going to escape this mess after
all?

Some of them would. But there were crashed snowspeeders lying on the ground, cinders blowing in the wind around them. No matter how many transports got away, the Rebellion had to leave behind a
tremendous amount of ships and material. And all the
work that had gone into building the base had been wasted. Now they’d have to wander through the galaxy again, looking for someplace even
more obscure and unlivable than Hoth…if such a planet even existed. Maybe the Rebellion brass had a long-range plan that would render the day’s battle meaningless, but for now, the
Empire was making them pay dearly for their defiance.

Thane gritted his
teeth. The larger strategy of the Rebellion wasn’t up to him. He had one job only: to cover the transports.

For the next long while, he allowed himself to think of nothing but the targets, to do nothing but fly in as close as possible so Yendor could make every shot. The ground troops beneath their
speeder were sometimes no more than shadows, their white snowtrooper armor rendering them
almost invisible against the wintry landscape. Once the last walker went down, the other rebels cheered.
Thane stared up at the bleak sky above them.
What are they going to send down next?

Nothing came. No more Imperial ships descended. That meant they were waiting above the atmosphere to pick off the rebel fighters one by one.

The moment the final transport streaked into the sky, Thane
and Yendor rushed their snowspeeder back to base. By now they had mere minutes to get their individual starfighters off the
ground.

All Thane had to do was fly safely out of planetary atmosphere before going to lightspeed—but first he had to outrun the TIE fighters that had just zoomed into range.

Damn!
If he’d taken off five minutes earlier, the TIEs would have missed him entirely.
Now Thane would have to shoot his way to freedom.

But TIE fighters weren’t as sturdy as walkers. They provided almost no protection for their pilots—which was the main reason why being a TIE pilot was so revered in the Imperial
Starfleet. Flying one of those things took guts.

Knowing that didn’t make it easier for Thane to shoot the TIE fighters down, but he did it anyway. As his blaster
bolts raked across one of the TIEs, a shower of green sparks flumed into
the air, and then the ship was spiraling down, wings clipped, falling to its doom.

Thane had experienced that in TIE fighter simulators. He knew what it looked like from the inside.

This was a war. They’d all chosen their sides. So Thane accelerated upward, not bothering to watch on sensors as the TIE fighter crashed
to the ground.

As soon as the space outside his X-wing had turned black and the sensors showed all clear, he laid in a course for the rendezvous coordinates and prepared for the leap to lightspeed. Only in the
last moments did he see the Imperial fleet amassed off his starboard side, so enormous that even the darkness of space did not dwarf it. There was no time to study it in detail, hardly
even a flash
of silver before the stars changed from points into a tunnel and his engines whined as his ship leaped into lightspeed.

Thane felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He knew what he’d seen in that final split-second view of the Imperial fleet: a Super Star Destroyer.

When I left, Ciena was assigned to the
Devastator.
They’d never post her to any ship smaller than a Star Destroyer
again. By now she probably isn’t assigned on TIE patrols
very often, but she could be—and she’d volunteer just for the joy of flying.

He was being ridiculous. Of the many Star Destroyers under the Emperor’s control, what were the odds that a particular one would be assigned to that battle, on that day?

But however remote the chances were, the possibility was real. And now, sickened by
fear, Thane realized the TIE pilot he’d just killed could have been Ciena. It was no less likely to be
her than any other pilot in the fleet. If so, he hadn’t even bothered to watch her die.

The worst part was that he would never know.

T
HE METALLIC RASP of Lord Vader’s breathing echoed throughout the
Executor
’s bridge. Ciena knew better than to glance upward or
give any other indication
that she even realized he was there, standing on the higher level only a couple of meters above. Although she didn’t believe some of the wilder rumors about Darth
Vader’s vindictiveness, by now she knew it was wisest not to draw his attention for any reason. His rages when he was displeased were legendary.