Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Lost Stars (6 page)

She intended to locate him as soon as she could—then was taken aback
by the academy president’s speech.

“You are not here merely to learn military tactics or to practice flying starfighters,” Commandant Deenlark said, every word crisp. “Those are important skills, to be sure. But
we ask more of you. Our students are meant to become citizens of the Empire. To think of themselves as patriots and soldiers first. Can you stop thinking of yourself as a native
of your home planet
and begin thinking of yourself as an Imperial first? An Imperial only? Can you accept that protecting and serving the world you came from is best accomplished by strengthening the Empire to which
it belongs?”

Ciena had never thought of belonging to the Empire as giving up Jelucan. To her, the two identities coexisted comfortably. But maybe some students here came from
worlds with rebellious
senators—places disloyal to the Emperor. They might need reassuring that they still could belong here at the academy.

Deenlark continued: “Some few of you have come here alongside friends from home, or have older siblings already in Imperial service. Your natural tendency will be to seek these people out
at every opportunity and to rely on relationships you already
have. But if that was all you meant to do—you might have well stayed at home, don’t you think?”

A few people laughed, obediently. Ciena felt stung. She and Thane weren’t supposed to spend time together? At all?

Well. “At all” was putting it too strongly, she decided. The instructors simply didn’t want them to rely on each other completely.

Yet that was what she and Thane had been doing
for the past eight years of their lives.

After the ceremony and dinner ended, students milled around, introducing themselves to each other and—sometimes—not so subtly sizing up the competition. Ciena wanted to find Thane,
though she told herself she shouldn’t.

Luckily, he found her.

“We both plan to serve the Empire for the rest of our lives,” Thane said as they sat down in chairs
facing the glittering cityscape beyond. “We’re never going back to
Jelucan—not to live, anyway. So we don’t have to worry about ‘living in the past’ or however Deenlark put it.”

Sometimes Thane could be very glib about authority figures—uninterested in rules—but Ciena thought he was more or less right about this. “It looks like we’ll share some
classes and take some separately. So we can
each make our own way here.”

“This place scared the hell out of me at first,” Thane confessed. “You lived farther out in the countryside than I did, but it didn’t faze you for a second. How did that
happen?”

He was only joking, but Ciena answered him seriously. “I was ready for Coruscant because I’ve always dreamed of being here. You weren’t ready because—because I think
mostly you
dreamed of getting
away
from Jelucan.”

Thane remained silent for a moment, and Ciena wished she could snatch the words back. But then, finally, he nodded. “You’re right.”

“We shared the most important part of the dream, though,” Ciena said.

“More than that. We got each other here. It’s not coincidence that we both were admitted to the Royal Academy, you know? Flying together, studying
together—we made each other
so much better than we ever would’ve been on our own.”

Her throat tightened. “Yeah. We did.”

Thane smiled as he shook his head, perhaps in disbelief at how far they’d already come, or how far they still had to go. “Now it’s the academy’s turn to make us
better.”

“To make us officers. It’s going to happen.”

“You’d better believe it.”

The window
looking out on the Coruscant night reflected them slightly, superimposing their images over the buildings and hovercraft beyond. Ciena saw herself sitting next to Thane, both of them
in the stiff, unfamiliar jackets and boots they’d been assigned today. Always they’d looked so different: Thane tall and pale, forever wearing the bright elegant clothing of a
second-waver; Ciena dark and slim,
in the simple homespun garments of the valleys. Now they wore the same uniform, and anyone could see that she and Thane were alike in the ways that mattered
most.

They sat there side by side for a moment longer before getting to their feet. Thane smiled down and whispered, “You can do this, you know.”

“So can you,” Ciena said. They didn’t have to lean on each other. They were more than
ready to fly.

Then they turned away from each other to walk into the crowd, meet new people, and become the citizens of the Empire they were always meant to be.

I
F THE PREPARATORY track for the Imperial academies had been hard, the course load at the Royal Academy of Coruscant was
brutal.

The first day’s easygoing
friendliness had lasted exactly that long—one day, no more. Science, mathematics, piloting, physical training: every possible test challenged the
students’ limits, every single time. Classes shrunk to about half their original size each year of the three-year program. Few would graduate, and the competition to be among those few
remained fierce. Forget sleeping in, cutting class, or even whispering
to other students during a lecture; if you wanted to stay in the academy, to become an officer someday, you could never, ever
slack off. You had to push yourself to the limit every single day.

Two months into his first year, Thane decided he’d never had so much fun in his life.

“You must—be—kidding me,” Nash panted as the two of them ran their ninth lap around the Sky Loop, a track on
the academy’s roof, high above most of the bustle of
Coruscant. A cool cloud had settled around the building, enveloping them in pale fog. “Getting up at dawn—doing homework until midnight—exercising until you vomit?
Fun?
”

Thane grinned as he wiped sweat from his forehead. “Hell, yeah.”

“If this is how they have fun on Jelucan—I think I’ll vacation somewhere else.” They crossed the
finish line and slowed down, loping to a stop. After Nash had leaned over
with his hands on his knees and taken a few deep breaths, he continued, “Someday you’ve got to come with me to Alderaan. Trust me, we can show you a better time than this.”

Nash didn’t get it. He couldn’t. As the two of them walked toward the locker room, Thane tried to find the words. “Most of my life, my parents
fought me on everything I wanted
to do—even getting ready for this place. I had to sneak around to practice flying with Ciena. Can you believe that?”

“Seriously?” Nash shook his head in disbelief. His gray T-shirt had gone dark with sweat. “But Ciena Ree’s one of the best pilots here. You could’ve gone to twenty
different worlds and never found anyone better to fly with.”

Was it worth
explaining the divide between the Jelucani valley kindred and second-wave settlers? Thane decided to skip it. That was the kind of homeworld thinking the academy instructors frowned
upon. “The point is this is the first time in my life when I’ve been able to go after something I want without anybody getting in my way.”

Nash sighed. “Sounds rough. On Alderaan, people are encouraged to learn
and grow. All education is free, and people volunteer to teach various skills or crafts just for fun. Of course,
someday the entire Empire will be like that.” Thane laughed, which made Nash frown. “What’s so funny?”

“You, thinking the whole galaxy can turn into starshine and flowers, all because of the Empire.”

“That’s what the Empire is for, isn’t it?” Nash tried to wipe sweat from
his face with his shirt but, finding it even sweatier, grimaced and let it fall. “To take
the best of every world, every culture, and spread it throughout every system?”

Thane shrugged. “That was what the Galactic Republic was about, too. At least, they probably thought so at the beginning. But things fall apart.”

“Don’t let too many people hear you say that, all right?” Nash glanced
around them, but nobody was walking especially close. “They might think you’re disloyal.
Whereas I, your friend, know that you’re merely a cynic.”

“Guilty as charged.” He’d learned his lesson the first time his parents sucked up in public to the same people they’d mocked in private: appearances were deceiving.

“Well, someday you’ll come to Alderaan with me and see for yourself how wonderful
it is. Not even you could be cynical about my world.”

Thane could tell Nash was homesick, so he decided to take his roommate’s boasting about Alderaan at face value…for now. “It sounds like a good place. I’d like to go
sometime.”

“Just wait, my friend. You’re going to love it.”

So Thane had a voyage to Alderaan to look forward to. By then every world he learned about had become a
possible destination; what began as hunger simply to leave Jelucan had ripened into
genuine wanderlust. A career in the Imperial Starfleet would allow him to stand in the deep snows of ice planets, to dive into the depthless oceans of a waterworld, to bask in the searing heat of a
beach beneath a binary star system.

And he got to fly every day, sometimes all day. Sure, at that point the
cadets mostly used simulators—but the academy’s simulators operated at a level of sophistication Thane had
never seen before. (Plus, anything beat a crappy old V-171.) From the outside, the simulators were stark globes of dull metal; on the inside cadets found completely accurate cockpits, glowing
control boards, and viewscreens that showed three-dimensional images of whatever starscape or planetary
atmosphere they’d be training in that day.

The flying felt absolutely genuine, and the challenges presented were more immediate, terrifying, and plentiful than they were likely to encounter in real life—at least so far. One day
Thane would try to bring a TIE fighter from deep space into atmosphere on a planet with gravity strong enough to crush a human. The next, he might maneuver a snowspeeder
through a blizzard with
winds that threatened to tear the metal plating from the hull. Some students tensed, panicking about their training scores or what it would be like when they had to do it in real life.

Thane actually felt more relaxed when he was piloting. He couldn’t
wait
to do it for real. Being at the controls of a vessel remained the purest kind of joy he knew.

His combination
of enthusiasm and steadiness showed in his scores, too. The class rankings always had Thane in one of the very top slots for piloting—

—and one of the few names that ever came in above his was Ciena Ree’s.

They laughed about it together, congratulated each other for winning, and proudly declared they’d take back their title on the very next flight. Ciena had become his rival, but a friendly
one. They saw each other more days than not, either in class or the main academy mess. Although the balance between maintaining their friendship and becoming “citizens of the Empire”
was a delicate one, he felt they’d found it. While their meetings were often brief, they still got to hang out a couple of times a week—hours when they let the competition drop. Thane
knew they’d always made
each other better by striving to match the other’s skills; even at the academy, he and Ciena kept each other at the very top of their game.

“It’s ludicrous,” Ved Foslo said sniffily one night after Ciena had reclaimed the top spot. “She took your rank away from you. Why are you so thrilled the competition is
making her a better pilot? You should be trying to knock her down, not pick her
up.”

“There’s room for more than one of us in the graduating class,” Thane shot back as he sat at the edge of his bunk, polishing his uniform boots. “Besides, isn’t the
goal to create the best Imperial officers possible? This way the Empire gets two great pilots, not just one.”

Ved shook his head. “Someday you’ll understand.”

From his place beneath the thin gray blanket of his bunk,
Nash laughed. “Admit it, Ved. You’re only angry because Thane and Ciena always score higher than you! Despite your father
being—what’s his rank again?”

“You know perfectly well,” Ved said. Written on his face was his displeasure at being regularly bested by not one but two kids from a hunk of rock in the Outer Rim. Without another
word, he buttoned his pajamas to the neck, like he did
every night. The guy
never
relaxed.

Otherwise, though, Ved wasn’t a terrible roommate. He was clean, he didn’t snore, and he didn’t mind explaining the finer points of military culture on Coruscant. Meanwhile,
between room inspections, Nash threw his stuff everywhere in a truly spectacular display of messiness, but aside from a few arguments about why it was gross for Nash’s dirty socks
to wind up
on someone’s toothbrush, he and Thane were unshakable friends.

But the single best thing about Thane’s first months at the academy was seeing Dalven again.

For most of Thane’s life, he had been of an average height among his peers. Sometimes he’d looked at his statuesque mother, towering father, and lanky older brother in despair.
There, too, he thought he’d be shortchanged.
A few months before he entered the academy, however, his body started making up for lost time. His leg bones ached at night, and he didn’t
seem able to eat enough to stop feeling hungry—and he needed new uniforms within three months of arriving.