Марта Уэллс: From a Certain Point of View

“The Bright Hope is leaving in ten minutes. I repeat, ten minutes. This is the last transport ship for all evacuees.” That’s Toryn Farr’s voice echoing throughout the base now.

“Go!”

Suddenly all the lights in the corridors go out. That’s it. They’ve lost power.

“That’s too many directions, I can’t possibly remember that and in the dark!” Officer Sendak cries out.

“Just follow me,” Chase says. He knows every tunnel here by feel, and even if he can’t see, he knows how many paces it’ll take to get to the next intersection—yes, turn here—another ten paces—another right—he checks to make sure everyone is with him, and they burst into the hangar just as another transport ship takes off.

Officer Meeks is gesturing people toward the Bright Hope, the launch door still open as people rush aboard.

“Good work, Wilsorr,” Meeks says, looking up in relief as Chase approaches with everyone he’s found. “Stormtroopers approaching. We don’t have much time.”

“Just give me a few minutes!” Chase says.

“You’ve got three.”

Chase runs, ignoring the sounds of blasterfire and the base falling apart all around him. He makes it to the tauntaun pens, which are alarmingly silent—they must have all joined the fight.

Sunshine is still in her pen, and she clambers toward Chase when she sees him, snorting in distress.

To Chase’s immense relief, Jordan is with her, trying to calm her down as she rears up.

“What are you still doing here?”

“Major Derlin said to stand by in case anyone else needed to gear up to fight!”

“Echo Base is lost. Come on, we have to evacuate!”

“I’m not leaving Sunshine!”

“I’m not leaving you ! There’s one ship left that’s leaving”—Chase doesn’t want to think about how much time they have left—“ now ! Let’s go! We’ll take her with us!”

“We’ll have to ride.”

Jordan throws a saddle onto Sunshine, who harrumphs but stands still as Chase approaches. He’s always been afraid of the massive creatures, but he takes Jordan’s outstretched hand and climbs up behind him.

“Which way do we go?”

Chase thinks quickly—they can’t take his usual shortcut, it’s too small for the tauntaun—they’ll have to risk the main corridor.

“Take the eastern corridor, and then hang left!”

He shouts out directions as Jordan steers, and Sunshine gallops forward.

As Chase feared, there’s a massive cave-in blocking the way to the hangar.

If there’s one thing Chase can count on, it’s his inexplicable certainty to mess up weapons. He grabs Jordan’s blaster out of his holster, presses all the buttons at once in a slapdash sequence, and hurls it directly at the blockade.

“What are you—”

The blaster malfunctions and explodes, causing the ice to shatter just enough.

“Jump, Sunshine!” Chase shouts.

She clears the ice and they’re free.

The doors to the Bright Hope are closing, and the engines are already lit.

“Wait for us, Meeks!”

“More personnel incoming!” she says, stalling the takeoff. “Come on!”

Sunshine dashes forward and clambers up the ramp just as it shuts. The ship’s loading bay is full of people—many of whom Chase just guided through to safety.

The room explodes into whoops and claps.

“We’ve made it,” Jordan exhales, as if he barely believes it.

They dismount, and Chase pats Sunshine distractedly as Dr. Melthabi claps him on the shoulder and Poras says, “Good work, Chase.”

Chase grins, the words from Be Your Best Self echoing through him and for the first time feeling true. You’ve always had this power in you.

“Hey, Jordan?” Chase taps him on the shoulder.

“Yeah?” Jordan steps closer, close enough for Chase to see the flecks of gold and green in his eyes.

“You look like you could use a good kiss,” he blurts out. For a second, Chase thinks it might be too much, but Jordan laughs and pulls him close.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Their lips meet, and Chase thinks maybe there’s something to this confidence business after all.

SHE WILL KEEP THEM WARMDelilah S. Dawson

A tauntaun’s life has two rulers: warmth and cold. The first is a signal to wake with the sun, to hunt, to mate, to feed crop milk to squeaking taunlets, to run through the snow, nostrils huffing steam. The second is a signal to sleep, night’s fall triggering a darkness so cold on the planet Hoth that even tauntauns can’t survive it unless they huddle together, barely moving, their blood slowed to slurry. For Murra, matriarch of this herd of tauntauns, such natural rhythms have lost all meaning. She’s been captured, corralled, tamed. She can smell the shift from day to night and back again but rarely sees the sun and moons. The odd, hot, buzzing things that provide false light in the pens among the caves are weak and cloying, and they never turn off.

She now has a third ruler: The strange two-footed creatures that control her.

They call themselves rebels.

For these captured tauntauns of Echo Base, part reptile and part mammal, the entire world has shrunken down to a few sections of a single cavern. Tauntauns can’t count, but Murra knows she’s with fewer animals than she once had under her care, when they lived free. Back then they often spent the night in caves like this one, sleeping so deep that nothing could wake them, their blood a heartbeat away from freezing as they piled together, their scents and bloodlines commingling. But when morning came, they crept out into the sparkling brightness, scenting the air for the reek of predatory wampas and, when finding none, snorting their pleasure and tossing snow with their horns to make sparkling rainbows against the white sky.

That’s what Murra misses the most—freedom and high spirits, the ability to throw her head, butt horns, nudge a sister or daughter with her hip, sneak away with the bull of her choice, wiggle her tail to give the taunlets something to chase. When she leaves the caves now, she’s bound with straps, head and body no longer capable of fully rejoicing in the fresh snow. The rebels turn her neck to tell her which way to go, nudge her ribs with hard boots, and shout things that have no meaning when she makes too much noise. She knows her name only because someone said it over and over again while feeding her ice scrabblers from a bucket, and now she knows that if she hears that sound and pads over, they’ll have something else for her to eat, even if it’s generally less appetizing.

This morning, she had a rare treat: She was taken out on patrol with her favorite daughter, Riba, and although they were both bound and saddled by the noisy rebels, they were still together in their element. The world was bright and full of smells and room to move, and they tossed their horns and bugled until the one riding Riba said, “Wow, they’re really excited today, huh, Han?” And the one on Murra’s own back yanked on her head and muttered, “Only dumb animals could get excited about this much snow.”

Not that Murra understood any of it.

Murra vastly prefers the female rebel with the soft voice, the one who stayed with her when she was throwing her most recent set of taunlet twins, confined to a stall, alone. It was a difficult birth—probably because tauntauns are meant to run out their labor, not to pace in a cramped corner—but the female rebel sat with her, stroking her face, murmuring comforting things, and when the two taunlets were finally out, that same rebel warned the male caretakers away, saying, “She’s exhausted. Give us a little breathing room. Goodness knows we all need it.”