Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Lost Stars (28 page)

The
Liberty
was far larger and more sophisticated than most of the vessels in the motley rebel fleet. However, it was designed for the comfort of the Mon Calamari, not humans.
Temperatures were higher, and the humidity in the air was so intense Thane’s skin grew damp within
minutes.

He needed some distraction from the discomfort, Thane decided. Better not to be alone with his thoughts anyway. He kept seeing that TIE fighter tumble down, kept imagining Ciena dying in the
heart of it—and he had to stop that somehow.

First he sought out friends. Wedge clapped Thane on the back, and Thane managed to smile as they congratulated each other on the walkers they’d
taken down. But Wedge’s face fell when
Thane asked about Dak Ralter. “Dak died during the battle. Their snowspeeder was hit; only Skywalker made it out.”

Only half a day before, Thane had been teasing Dak about hero-worshiping Luke Skywalker. Now Dak lay dead and abandoned on Hoth, his body crushed by an AT-AT.

The kid hadn’t even been nineteen years old.

“If it’s any consolation,”
Wedge said, studying Thane’s expression, “Luke said Dak died from the blast. Instantly.”

“Consolation,” Thane repeated. “Right.”

Wedge looked like he might say more, but Thane didn’t want to hear it. He turned and walked through the launching bay, watching the activity around him as if he’d never seen any of
it before. Pilots laughed and joked, because that was how you dealt with unending
mortal danger: you pretended it didn’t exist. Only a handful of the rebels standing around showed any
evidence of grief or shock.

They were probably imagining scenes as terrible as the one playing over and over in Thane’s mind—Ciena and Dak, both dead, their bodies broken as they lay on the surface of Hoth.
Soon they would be covered by the snow, never to be seen again.

“Hey, are you
all right?” Yendor fell in step beside him, his blue lekku hanging down his back.

“I’m fine.”

“If this is what ‘fine’ looks like for you, I
really
don’t want to see your version of ‘bad.’”

“Dak Ralter bought it.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Yendor said. “He was a good kid.”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t think you guys were that close, though.”

“We weren’t.”
It’s not just Dak. I might have
killed Ciena today—and I realize it almost certainly wasn’t her, but it
could’ve
been her and
I’ll never know
—“Skip it, all right?”

Yendor was smart enough to move on. “Consider it skipped. Come help me get the new recruits set up with some gear, why don’t you? A couple dozen of them were on their way to Hoth
when the alert went out.”

“Sure,” Thane said. It was something to do.

He even had one pleasant surprise as he handed out helmets, blasters, and communicators to the rookies—a familiar face. “Look what the gundark dragged in,” said Kendy Idele, a
broad smile spreading across her face. Her dark green hair hung in a long braid down the back of her white coveralls, a few damp strands clinging to her forehead. “Thane Kyrell. Never thought
I’d see you here.”

“Kendy.
I thought you were in the Imperial Starfleet for life.”

“Shows how much you know.” Kendy laughed out loud. She seemed a little happier to see him than he was to see her. It
was
good to find Kendy again, in some ways; they
hadn’t been good friends at the academy, but he’d always admired her. In particular he remembered how deadly she’d been on the practice range, how she could take down three
target
fliers per second with her blaster. The Rebellion needed people who could shoot like that.

But she had been one of Ciena’s bunkmates and best friends. Thane couldn’t even look at Kendy without expecting to see Ciena at her side.

Nothing much would get done that day except taking names, taking stock, and sweating. Echo Base command center had been hit, which meant disorganization
and uncertainty had taken over. Several
vital personnel were missing, apparently. Not only had Luke Skywalker failed to show at the rendezvous point, but the
Millennium Falcon
had gone missing also, with Princess Leia Organa
aboard. General Rieekan had called an emergency conference of the senior officers attached to this portion of the fleet, which Wedge got pulled into. That left the rest
of them to fix damage to
their starfighters, haul equipment into something vaguely resembling regulation, and wait for new orders and their next destination.

So it wasn’t that surprising when one of the transport pilots mentioned that they’d brewed a little engine-room hooch.

Making jet juice was one of those things the brass officially banned but in fact turned a blind eye to as long
as neither the manufacture nor consumption interfered with duty. For the next day
or two, before they migrated to their next location, they were as free from danger as it was possible for a rebel army to be: if the Imperial Starfleet had any idea where the rebels’
rendezvous points were, it would have immediately followed them in force. Any good officer knew soldiers needed a chance to blow
off steam, particularly after a big battle—so nobody said a
word when the cups started being passed around.

Thane gulped down his first so quickly his eyes watered. Whatever else engine-room jet juice might be, it wasn’t “mellow.” But as soon as he’d finished coughing, he held
out his cup for a refill.

“Hitting it hard tonight,” Yendor observed, one lek quirking inquisitively.

“Why not?” Thane said. He didn’t meet Yendor’s eyes.

It wasn’t as if Thane never drank. He’d had a couple of cups of hooch on occasion, and he didn’t mind an ale or two. Over time he’d even developed a taste for Andoan
wine. But heavy drinking had never interested him, not even when he was a kid on Jelucan and the other boys in his school would get completely wasted on festival nights.

He had never even tried any inebriates before that evening in the Fortress, with the flask of valley wine Ciena had smuggled in her robes. They had been no more than fourteen. Both of them had
hated the sticky-sweet stuff and wound up pouring most of it out. Her full lips had still been stained berry dark as she had rinsed out the flask, laughing, saying they shouldn’t even have to
smell it
any longer—

Ciena. Always Ciena. Did Thane possess a memory worth having that she wasn’t a part of? Could he drink enough to blot out even the thought of her?

Apparently not. But he didn’t fail for lack of trying.

Another drink. Then another. Thane’s experience of the evening became fragmented and surreal. He knew Kendy had told the story of how her entire patrol had mutinied on Miriatin,
and how
only one-third of them had managed to escape with their lives. He remembered a game of sabacc but none of the cards he’d held. Maybe some guys from Ord Mantell had sung an obscene song about
the unique pleasures each species could provide in bed. At some point, Yendor had asked Thane whether he didn’t want to lay off and go to sleep, but Thane had told his Twi’lek friend to
mind
his own business. When the room spun around him, Thane simply braced himself against the side of the nearest X-wing and kept going.

That was how he found himself, at some unknown hour of the night, stumbling through the unfamiliar base alone and trying hard not to fall flat on his face.

C’mon. You can figure out where the bunks are. They showed you earlier.
But his drunkenness had folded
the strange corridors of the Mon Calamari ship into even stranger angles. The
walls kept showing up where the floor should be, and vice versa. Finally Thane decided sitting down would be a great idea.

As his back slid down the wall, he felt his stomach turn over, a threat of what was to come. He’d never drunk to the point of vomiting before. That was not an experience he’d been
eager to
try.
First time for everything,
he thought in a haze.

Then someone helped him to his feet, a woman he’d never met before—or he thought he’d never met before—but she seemed kind as she put one of his arms around her
shoulders. That seemed as good a reason as any for Thane to tell her his life story.

“I mean, really I’m only—only telling you the parts about Ciena,” he mumbled as the woman
steered him toward the nearest head. “But that’s pretty much my
whole life. The good part of my life, anyway.”

“Sounds like it. Here, sit down.”

She poured him into a chair. Thane let his head droop backward. “I know I probably didn’t shoot her down today. But I
could’ve
done it. Or any of the other
guys—they could’ve done it, and they’re on my side, you know? They’re my friends, and
we all hate the Empire, but if I ever found out one of them had killed Ciena—and
it’s crazy, because, you know, she turned me in to the Empire. Can you believe that? She gave me a head start, but she turned me in. Sometimes I think about that and I get so angry I
could—but it still
kills
me to think about her getting hurt—”

“Shhh.” The woman laid some sort of cool, damp towel across his
forehead. This was the best idea anyone had ever had. Thane decided she was some kind of genius.

So maybe she could help him figure out what was going on.

“What happens if—what if someday I’m in battle against the Empire again and I freeze up? What if I can’t fire because I know Ciena could be in any one of those TIE
fighters? What if I do fire and she
is
in one of them?” Thane became
aware that he was on the verge of tearing up and managed to stop. He might be a sloppy drunk, but he’d be
damned if he’d break down. “I don’t want to kill her. And I don’t want other people to die because I’m afraid of hurting this one person in the entire Imperial
Starfleet that I love.”

“I understand,” the woman said, putting a cup in his hands. “Drink some water. You’ll thank me later.”

After that, things became even blurrier. At some point, Thane must have found his bunk, because he dimly perceived crawling into it fully clothed, down to his boots. And that was where he woke
up the next morning, hating life.

“This is where a lesser being would say, ‘I told you so.’” Yendor grinned as Thane leaned over the nearest bucket.

“Please shut up.”

“Not until I tell you
that our squadron has a briefing with the top brass in, oh, half an hour.”

Thane rolled his eyes at his own stupidity, then winced. He hadn’t known rolling his eyes could
hurt
. “Can you get rid of hangovers by dunking yourself in a bacta
tank?”

Yendor considered that. “Huh. You know, that’s not a bad idea? We’ll have to test it someday. Right now, though—you’re out of time.”

“Great.
Just great.”

Through what felt like superhuman effort, Thane managed to shower and get into uniform. The dark circles under his eyes and the faint reddish stubble on his cheeks—well, people had showed
up for roll call looking rougher than he did. The surgical droid 2-1B gave him an injection that would restore his blood chemistry to bearable levels within an hour or two. All Thane had to
do was
make it through the briefing.

When the entire squadron stood at attention, General Rieekan entered the room—but he wasn’t alone. Behind him walked a composed, majestic woman with dark red hair, dressed all in
white.

“I don’t believe it,” Kendy whispered.

“Me either,” said Yendor, who stood by Thane’s side, a huge grin on his face. “We finally get to meet Mon Mothma herself!”

Mon Mothma.
One of the only senators to openly defy Palpatine as he rose to power. “Most Wanted” on every list of criminals the Imperial Starfleet kept. One of the leaders of
the Rebel Alliance.

And the woman who had spent the previous night listening to Thane spill his guts, literally and figuratively.

How could he have failed to recognize her? He’d been even drunker than he’d thought.
Of course the news reports from the Empire only showed images of Mon Mothma from many years
before; she had been underground for some time. But Thane had been too intoxicated to recognize the woman even when she held his head over a basin as he puked his guts out.

Great. Just great.
If only he could have sunk into the floor and let it close back over him to hide any evidence that he’d ever
existed—but Thane had to stand there and
pretend everything was normal.

“Good morning,” she said, her voice as calm and steady as it had been the night before. “It is an honor to meet more of the warriors who have helped the Rebel Alliance stay
strong during these dark times.”

Pride rippled through the squadron, even getting to Thane despite his shame. To think that the leader of the
entire Rebellion would say it was an honor to meet
them
. He doubted the
Emperor had ever said such a thing to any of his troops.

Mothma continued, “All of you understand that obviously we must be on the move soon.” Her eyes studied each of the pilots in turn; Thane wondered how a voice that gentle could belong
to the same person as that steely gaze. “However, Corona Squadron, you will
not accompany the rest of the fleet to their new rendezvous point.”

Everyone exchanged glances. Was it some kind of penalty for their carousing last night—or some other, more significant infraction? But they hadn’t done anything worth any kind of
penalty, so far as Thane knew; in fact, they were one of the top squadrons in the fleet.

Mon Mothma then said, “We have…important tasks for
you.”

No further words were necessary. She meant intelligence work. That also meant danger. But Thane hadn’t joined the Rebellion to play it safe.

“You’ve been chosen for this work even though many of you are new to the Rebellion. However, you have the right skills for the tasks to come.” Mon Mothma took a seat at the one
desk in the small space. Somehow the sheer power of her presence
transformed the room into a chamber of state.

She’s already the Emperor’s match,
Thane thought,
even if Palpatine doesn’t know it yet.

General Rieekan spoke up. “For the foreseeable future, Corona Squadron will remain based on the
Liberty
. You’ll get permanent bunk assignments within the next few
hours.”