Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Lost Stars (29 page)

“Aw, man,” Yendor deadpanned. “I always hoped I’d get to live in a sauna someday.”

Rieekan raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me, Private Yendor?”

“I meant, I always hoped I’d get to live in a sauna someday,
sir
.”

That made the others laugh, and even Rieekan smiled. Mon Mothma’s face remained impassive—but not disapproving. The same minor informality would’ve landed an Imperial officer
in the brig; in the rebel fleet, discipline could coexist with humanity.

“Both group
and individual assignments will be discussed as they arise,” Mon Mothma continued as smoothly as though there had been no interruption. “But you all deserve to
know—the risks will be considerable, even greater than those you already face. It is possible that any or all of you may be asked to go on missions with little or no chance that you will ever
return. If you feel you cannot accept such
missions, speak now. There is no shame in doing so.”

Everyone remained silent and at attention, wordlessly accepting the danger. Thane kept his gaze straight forward, not directly looking at anyone in the room. But he could feel Mon Mothma’s
gaze on him.

When the quiet had gone on long enough, Rieekan nodded. “Good. For now, get your new members up to date on our protocols”—that was
accompanied by a nod toward Kendy, the newest
of them all—“and await further instructions.”

“Thank you for your courageous service, officers,” Mon Mothma said. “You are dismissed.” As everyone turned to go, and just as Kendy leaned toward Thane to ask a
question, Mothma added, “Lieutenant Kyrell, I’d like to have a word.”

And he’d been so close to making a clean getaway.

Thane
turned around, again at attention, to face Mon Mothma. From the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of General Rieekan; the general seemed surprised. At least Mon Mothma hadn’t
shared the tale of Thane’s drunken moping with the entire Rebel Command.

Not yet, anyway.

The doors slid shut after the last of the others left, and Thane was alone with Mon Mothma. Under most circumstances,
junior officers waited for their superiors to speak first. Thane thought
this might be an exception to that rule. “Ma’am. I apologize for my—impropriety last night. Obviously, I overindulged in our, uh, celebrations. It won’t happen
again.”

Mon Mothma leaned back in her chair, mouth quirked. “Lieutenant Kyrell, if I drummed pilots out of the service every time one of them had a little
too much of the engine-room hooch, there
would be no Rebellion.”

“Yes, ma’am.” But why then had she singled him out? He remembered some of what he’d said last night about freezing up, and his horror deepened. “If you’re
concerned that I’ll fail to do my duty on one of the special missions for Corona Squadron, you don’t have to be, ma’am.”

“My concerns are irrelevant,” she said crisply.
“The problem here is that you’re questioning
yourself.
Self-doubt will cripple you more surely than fear ever
could. I hear you’re an outstanding pilot, Kyrell. Moment to moment, I feel certain you’ll do your duty. However, if you fall apart after every major engagement, you’ll
self-destruct before long.”

Thane could say nothing. He knew she was right.

She continued, “Many people in
the Rebellion have friends or family who serve the Empire in some capacity, or on planets or ships that may fare badly in this war. You aren’t the only
one with conflicts.”

Yendor sometimes spoke quietly of his son, Bizu, left behind on Ryloth. Kendy’s entire family back on Iloh would now be at risk because of her defection. “Yes, ma’am. I realize
that.”

Mon Mothma rose to her feet,
and as she stepped closer Thane saw in her expression the kindness he’d sensed through his haze the previous night. “It’s all right if you still
love someone on the other side of this war—as long as you love what you’re fighting for even more.”

He had never thought of himself as fighting
for
anything. Thane had joined the Rebellion to fight against the Empire, not for the restoration of
the Republic or any of the other grand
schemes people talked about. As long as the Empire fell, he’d figured, the rest could sort itself out. Now, however, he finally asked himself what his decision really meant.

Fighting against the Empire meant fighting for galactic authority that valued justice and valor more than raw power, that treated the governed with respect instead of endless deception
and
manipulation. Fighting against the slavery of the Bodach’i and the Wookiees meant fighting for individuals to have the right of self-determination. Fighting against those who had callously
and brutally destroyed Alderaan meant fighting for every other inhabited world in the entire galaxy.

Thane believed in all those things, enough to die for them, and yet he knew that wasn’t why he
was in the fight. He’d joined the Rebellion to take down the Empire and remained
unmoved by all those starry-eyed notions of the New Republic to come. Just because he thought the next galactic government would be better than the Empire didn’t mean he thought it would be
good
. In the end it would be another bureaucracy, another group dominated by the Core Worlds while the Outer Rim had to handle
problems on its own—superior to the Empire in every way,
of course, but that wasn’t exactly a high bar to clear.

So his answer was no. He didn’t love the Rebellion more than he loved Ciena.

But he could be willing to die for only one of those things, and he knew which one he had to choose—no matter how much it hurt.

Mon Mothma said, “Can you do your duty, Kyrell?”

“Yes, ma’am,”
he said. Thane felt the full weight of his words. He had just sworn to do whatever it took, up to and including taking Ciena’s life.

Yet he knew he would never hesitate to fire in battle again.

J
UDE HAD NEVER mentioned that Bespin was so beautiful.

Ciena stared down at the viewscreen displaying the images of round-edged, clay-colored buildings
seemingly aloft in the clouds. It was so like Jude not to have mentioned the way the filtered
sunlight turned the sky an eternal sunset pink, or the elegance of Cloud City’s structures, which bloomed above slender unipod cables as though they were parasol sunshades dangling in midair.
Instead, whenever she had talked about her homeworld, Jude had discussed the geological reasons tibanna gas mining
was so difficult or the aerodynamic properties of the gliders she’d flown as
a child. No matter what, Jude had always been a scientist first. She had searched for truth as avidly as those bounty hunters had searched for the
Millennium Falcon
. (How galling to have
that scum succeed where Imperial officers had failed. Yet small civilian vessels had the advantage of passing through space largely
unnoticed—the one thing no Star Destroyer could do.)

Although Ciena would have liked to have gone down to Cloud City, perhaps to meet Jude’s parents, she remained aboard the
Executor.
The strike team tasked with capturing the crew of
the
Falcon
comprised only a few individuals—including Lord Vader, who usually preferred to oversee operations personally. Whatever else was happening, all the
thousands of other people
assigned to the
Executor
had little to do but wait.

Ciena would have appreciated a task at the moment—any task, no matter how difficult or time-consuming. It would have been a distraction from her fury at Thane Kyrell.

Bespin made things worse, because Bespin meant Jude. Even thinking of her lost friend reminded Ciena of the way Jude had helped figure out the
truth about that stupid laser cannon project.

That incident had proved that Ciena and Thane could disagree—as did his decision to leave the Imperial Starfleet. As upset as Ciena had been when Thane deserted, she had at least
understood his decision, even if she would never agree with it.

But joining the
Rebellion
?

How could Thane ever have become a terrorist? He’d always held the
Rebel Alliance in as much contempt as she had—when had that changed and how? Had he forgiven the destruction of the
Death Star, and of the hundreds of thousands of people aboard? Yes, Alderaan had been destroyed first as a gambit to end the war before it began, and that gambit had failed. But that was one space
station, one planet, one terrible day. The rebels’ attacks on Imperial ships and bases
had never ceased, as if they could not spill enough blood to slake their thirst. If they fought for a
principle instead of mindless hatred of the Empire, they would propose peace talks or attempt to claim an independent star system where they could live under whatever governance they chose. But no.
Instead they killed again, and again, and again. For all Thane’s strength, for all his skill
in combat, he had never been a violent man. So how could he be a part of such horror?

Maybe his father did this to him,
Ciena thought as she walked through the corridors of Cloud City. A few grunting Ugnaughts hurried past her, but she hardly even registered them. In her
mind’s eye, she stood behind Thane the day he’d collapsed on the E&A obstacle course, when she had bandaged him afterward.
At the time she had been moved almost to tears by the
evidence of the abuse, the knowledge that his father’s cruelty had become physical as well as emotional—and by the full realization of how bravely Thane had endured his injuries until
the very moment of his fall.

Those who were brutalized sometimes became brutal in return. Was Thane now lashing out at the world that had hurt him first?

No. He’d always sworn he would be nothing like his father; Ciena had always believed him. But that left her with no answers at all.

“I don’t believe it,” said Nash Windrider.

Startled from her reverie, Ciena saw she’d reached the landing platform, where her friend stood in front of the
Millennium Falcon
. Their prey had flown straight to Bespin, as Lord
Vader had predicted.
So why
did we even bother with the asteroid field chase?
she thought.
We could just have come here and set the trap for them even earlier.

She walked onto the platform where Nash stood, hands on his hips as he looked at the captured ship. “When I saw it during the initial chase, I couldn’t understand why that thing
wasn’t in the junkyard. Now that I study it up close, I realize no junkyard would
accept it.”

“It’s a miracle the thing still runs at all.” She felt a spark of grudging admiration for the
Falcon
; as someone who’d learned to fly on a V-171, occasionally she
got sentimental about clunky old ships. “Our orders?”

“We’re to disable the hyperdrive.”

“Why are we disabling a ship we’ve already captured?”

“Lord Vader has his reasons,” Nash said, raising one eyebrow.
The subtext seemed to be,
Do
you
want to tell him he’s wrong?

Ciena nodded. “Got it.”

She and Nash worked together for several moments in silence. Even in the tight confines of the engineering pit within the
Falcon
, it seemed to her that Nash stood closer than necessary.
But maybe she was imagining things because she wanted so much to be alone while she worked out her thoughts about
Thane.

Disabling the hyperdrive proved simple. Before long she and Nash were on the shuttle that would take them back to the
Executor
; they were cleared to fly openly now, because another pilot
sought by Darth Vader—another target lured into this trap—had just landed. Within minutes, this entire chase would be over. Princess Leia would stand trial. Her fellow rebels would be
made an example
of. Perhaps the Rebellion itself would be exposed…

…and Thane with it.

She moved through the ship on autopilot, reporting to her bridge shift with gratitude that the next few hours promised to be uneventful. That promise didn’t come true; Vader’s
suspicions did. Sure enough, the
Millennium Falcon
zoomed off its platform, nearly made its escape—then inexplicably headed back to Cloud City
and dived beneath it.

“Where do they think that’s going to get them?” Nash’s long fingers hit the toggles that would focus all sensors on the
Falcon
.

“Who knows?” She could almost pity these people, believing in their freedom when in reality Darth Vader had been two steps ahead of them the entire time.

Although the bridge of the
Executor
now buzzed with renewed activity, Ciena could
do little but monitor these final moments of the hunt. Still she felt oddly detached from everything that
was happening, even when Lord Vader returned to the bridge.

Admiral Piett said, “They’ll be within range of the tractor beam within moments, my lord.”

Through the heavy rasp of his respirator, Vader said, “Did your men disable the hyperdrive on the
Millennium Falcon
?”

“Yes, my
lord.”

“Good,” Darth Vader said. “Prepare the boarding party and set your weapons for stun.”

Ciena would normally have felt a little thrill of pride at her service being recognized. Instead she felt detached, as if this were only a drill, or a memory—until the horrifying moment
when the
Falcon
leaped into hyperspace and vanished.