Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Lost Stars (31 page)

He said, “Corona Two, do you also read negative?”

“Confirmed. Complete negative on Imperial activity,” Yendor replied. “Unless the Empire’s drafting small woodland creatures all of a sudden.”

“Doubt it.” Thane considered for a moment. “We should list this planet as a potential base in future. The Empire’s
not interested, not much space lane traffic in this
area, and there’s plenty of water.”

“Plus it beats Hoth,” Yendor said.

“The belly of a sarlacc beats Hoth.” Thane began punching in the navigational codes that would take him back to the
Liberty
.

Corona Leader apparently agreed. “Let’s get out of here.”

Once they had returned to their ship, the rest of Corona Squadron went through
maintenance on their X-wings in the muggy repair bay of the
Liberty
, trading the usual banter back and
forth. “Come on,” Yendor said to the squadron leader and the eldest pilot in the group, a stately woman who was addressed only as the Contessa. “You can’t tell me this
isn’t more fun than life in a palace.”

She gave him a look. “You need to spend more time in palaces.”

“You know,
I do,” Yendor agreed. “You can fix me up with that, right?”

“Honestly,” the Contessa huffed—but not without affection. “You could learn from Smikes here. He never pretends we’re having a better time than we are.”

“We’re never having a good time,” Smikes said from beneath his X-wing. He had a bandana tied around his forehead to combat the endless sweat suffered by any human who lived on
a Mon Calamari ship. “We’re in a war. What’s fun about this?”

“So cranky,” Yendor said amiably. “Someday I’m going to hear you laugh, and I hope a protocol droid is around to record it.”

“Don’t be so hard on Smikes,” Kendy said, tossing her dark green hair over her shoulder. “He’s just grumpy.”

“I’m not grumpy, I’m a realist,” Smikes insisted. He was in fact
always
grumpy, but a
great pilot.

Thane shook his head as he looked at all of them—as mixed up a crew as you were likely to find, people who wouldn’t have spent time together outside this squadron or this war under
any circumstances. But at least they had his back.

Unlike some people.

Much later, once everyone else had finished up, Kendy said, “I have to admit, intelligence work is a little less glamorous
and dramatic than I always thought it would be.”

Thane didn’t look up from the open panel in his wing. “My guess is that the dramatic stuff is what’s most likely to get you killed. We can deal with that when we come to it.
I’ll do whatever we have to do, but I’m not suicidal.”

No reply followed for a few minutes, during which Thane remained engrossed in his work. He’d almost forgotten
he and Kendy were even speaking until she said, in a low voice, “You
know that’s what Ciena reported.”

He remained where he was, staring into the wires and chips that powered his ship. The wrench in his hand remained poised above the coupling he intended to work on. He didn’t look up at
Kendy. “What did Ciena report?”

“She identified you as a probable suicide on Jelucan. I heard about
it through some other classmates of ours—and I sent a holo to Ciena right away, because I couldn’t believe
it. She didn’t really want to talk, though. At the time I thought it was because she was hurting. Then when I realized you were here with the Rebellion, I figured, hey, Thane covered his
tracks pretty well. But the more I think about it…you could’ve fooled anyone else in the galaxy more
easily than Ciena. The two of you know each other too well. She covered for you,
didn’t she?”

“Yeah.” It was as if Thane were back on Jelucan, shutting the door behind Ciena as she left. He’d believed she would turn him in no matter what. “She did.”

Kendy whistled. “Ciena Ree broke an oath?”

“Sometimes we’re loyal to more than one thing.” He spoke from memory, haltingly, but still
sure. “When there’s a conflict, we have to choose which loyalty to honor.
I guess—I guess she chose me.”

Ciena had covered for him. She’d orchestrated that elaborate lie—when she
never
lied—all for him. Knowing her as he did, knowing where she came from, Thane realized what
it had cost her to do that. The hard knot of anger he’d been carrying in his chest for the past three years finally
went slack.

But that made it worse, because his anger had been his only shield against losing her.

The thump of boots hitting the floor of the hangar made Thane look up from his X-wing. Kendy had hopped down from her own starfighter to stand beneath his, hands on her hips. “Then why
isn’t she here?”

“—Ciena?”

“She always said an oath was forever, a promise is a promise, you had
to be true to your personal honor,” Kendy said, and she had begun to sound angry. “I didn’t even
think she could lie. Now I discover that she broke her word to save you, but she still serves in the Imperial Starfleet. How can she do that? If she could defy them for your sake, why won’t
she do it for the sake of the
entire galaxy
?”

“Ciena was never disloyal to the Empire.” Thane hated that
but knew it to be true. “One time, back then, she chose her loyalty to me. That doesn’t mean she set aside her
oath to the Empire.”

“I don’t see the difference.”

“That’s because you’re not from Jelucan.”
And you don’t know Ciena like I do.
The coupling could wait. Thane shut the panel, stowed his tools, and slid down
to face Kendy. “Listen. You and I were in the Imperial Starfleet,
too, remember? Good people can wind up in the service of evil.”

Kendy shook her head as she folded her arms across her chest. The air smelled like welding tools and engine grease; her dark green hair glinted in the harsh hangar lights. “Good people can
start to serve the Empire. But if they stay, they stop being good. You do one thing you thought you’d never do—follow one order that makes
you feel sick inside—and you tell
yourself it’s the only time. This is an exception. This isn’t the way it’s always going to be.”

Thane remembered how he’d tried willing himself not to notice the pitiful slavery of the Bodach’i. “Yeah. I know.”

“But you keep going,” Kendy continued. Her gaze had become distant. By now she spoke to herself more than to him. “You make one more compromise,
and then another, and by the
time you realize what the Empire really is, you’re almost too far down that road to turn back. I managed to do it, but if the others hadn’t felt the same way—if I’d had to
leave on my own instead of getting away with a group—I might have stayed. And I don’t like the person I would have become.”

By now Thane had realized that Kendy was trying to warn him that
the Ciena he had known, the one who had saved him, might not even exist any longer.

Probably that was true. By now Ciena might have participated in one of the punitive massacres the Empire inflicted on noncompliant worlds. She could have been in one of the Star Destroyers in
the Battle of Hoth, coolly aiming their lasers at the many rebel starfighters that never got away. The Empire had
probably corroded her honor into stiffness, snobbery, and ruthlessness.

Knowing all that didn’t make it easier to accept.

Thane said only, “Guess we’ll never know. Not like either of us is ever going to see her again.”

In the instant before he turned to walk away from the hangar, he glimpsed the expression on Kendy’s face. It was pity.

Although he continued working throughout the
day, Thane brooded enough that Yendor finally asked him who died, and even Smikes told him to cheer up. After they’d finished the full briefing
about D’Qar, he excused himself from the usual group meal and after-shift card games. Instead he holed up in one of the rare empty computer bays on the
Liberty
, so he could be
alone.

Solitude was a rare luxury for a rebel pilot—just as it had been
for an academy cadet. He rarely got to be alone with his thoughts. As a boy, if he’d wanted to be alone, he was
always able to sneak out to the Fortress. Sometimes Ciena had been there, but her presence had never disturbed him. Before they were ten years old, they’d known when to let each other remain
silent, how to be close to each other without intruding. How many people ever understood
someone that well?

We wouldn’t understand each other at all, now,
he reminded himself.
She’s been an Imperial officer for years. Everything good inside Ciena got poisoned a long time ago. If
we met up again now, she wouldn’t cover for me; count on it. I need to move on.

Thane stretched out, wiped his brow, and pulled up the news feeds from Jelucan. Seeing his native world made him…whatever
the opposite of “homesick” was. The planet changed
month by month, always for the worse; it was impossible to read the reports without realizing that the rugged, primitive world he’d grown up on didn’t really exist any longer. The girl
he’d known and come to love, the Ciena who had been, was as lost as the old Jelucan.

So he let the first few gloomy images play out in front of him, the
desolation ironically easing the ache he felt inside—

—until they reported on the upcoming trial of Verine Ree.

Thane sat up so fast the holo rippled into static, unable to assess the ideal distance to project from its viewer.
That’s not possible,
he told himself.
I imagined that because
Kendy and I just talked about Ciena and I’ve got her on my mind.
But then the face of Ciena’s mother
again took shape. The label hovering beneath her image read
THE
ACCUSED
.

Embezzlement? Impossible. Someone from the valleys might snap in a fit of rage and hit or kill you. Crimes of passion took place there the same way they did anywhere. Perhaps they also fell prey
to other criminal impulses—stealing from shopkeepers, that kind of thing. But a crime as premeditated and corrupt as embezzlement
went against everything they believed.

Surely there were hypocrites among the valley kindred, but not anyone in Ciena’s family. He only had to know Ciena to be sure of that.

Thane’s lips pressed together in a hard, tight line. If anything remained of the Ciena he’d known, it wouldn’t survive this. Once Ciena condoned her own mother’s
conviction and imprisonment, she would truly be lost
forever. As lost to him as if he really had killed her that day above Hoth—

Good-bye,
he thought, remembering the little girl in her plain brown dress, the fallen autumn leaf. It was time to leave her behind forever.

This can’t be Jelucan,
Ciena wanted to say to her shuttle pilot.
You’ve brought me to the wrong system.

Yet she knew too well that she was on the right planet. It was
just that everything had changed.

Thick fog seemed to have settled permanently on the ground, and the air was thick with grimy soot. The mines that had carved gouges in so many of the mountains did not attempt to filter the
byproducts of the work, so people simply walked through it, coughing, some with kerchiefs or light masks over their mouths and noses.

At first Ciena thought the masks
were confusing her, making it harder for her to tell valley folk from second-wavers. Although she’d seen more mass-produced clothing the last time
she’d been home, the two groups had still been distinct. Now it was impossible to discern any difference. She’d never thought she would miss the gaudy long coats of the second-wavers,
but she searched in vain for even one flash of crimson or cobalt.
No shaggy muunyaks wandered the streets any longer; people either rode ridgecrawlers or walked.

Valentia had seemed greatly changed to her three years ago, but it had at least been recognizable then. Now the migrant-worker shanties had multiplied to the point that the original buildings
carved of stone were almost invisible. The senatorial building that had become an Imperial garrison was
now a full military outpost, ringed by a force field that glowed a sickly green and with a
constant flow of officers and stormtroopers walking through its gates.

Jelucani people walked more quickly past the outpost, Ciena noticed. They didn’t want to attract notice. Nobody would meet her eyes.

“I shouldn’t have asked you to come,” Paron Ree repeated, just outside the door of her old
bedroom. “I thought of myself, and not of you. What will your
superior officers say?”

“They’ll say a mistake has been made, because it has.” Ciena tossed aside her uniform jacket, which landed atop her trousers and boots. Her old clothes still fit and were only
slightly musty. The mauve leggings and tunic seemed so impossibly soft; had she really worn things like this every day? She opened
the door and stepped into the main room, where her father stood
with his hands clasped, as if preparing to give a formal report. She took hold of his shoulders and squeezed. “It’s all right, Pappa. The truth will come out.”

Her father’s face remained tense and drawn. “The real culprit is unlikely to be identified by the authorities.”

“Because they haven’t found him yet? Well, we’ll see
about that.” If only she’d already made commander! That rank might have done her some good when she went to
speak with the magistrate the next day. “Forgive my saying it, Pappa, but you don’t look good. Have you been eating?”

“With your mother gone, I—lose track of time.”

Ciena paused. She hadn’t realized until earlier that day that her mother remained jailed, and she couldn’t believe
her father when he said Mumma couldn’t even have visitors.
That was another thing to take care of with the magistrate the next day. She’d requested an audience for first thing in the morning, so surely she would hear from his staff shortly.

Surely.

Her father had some meat and root vegetables in the refrigeration unit, so she started throwing together a basic soup. She hadn’t cooked
in so long, but she still remembered which herbs to
crush and the way the scent clung to her fingers afterward. Her stomach growled, eager for something—anything—that wasn’t Imperial nutritives. (Ciena had taken a couple of bottles
of nutritive drink with her, but…better to save those for the trip home.)