Марта Уэллс - From a Certain Point of View

“They’ll take care of you, I promise,” he said.

“What’s your name, soldier?” Corwi asked.

“L’cayo Llem.”

“Thank you, L’cayo. I won’t forget this.” Corwi brought her holorecorder up in front of her and tilted her head toward it. L’cayo nodded. She didn’t know exactly why, but she felt compelled to capture an image of the soldier—she wouldn’t be in a position to escape without him. Gratitude emanated from her every pore.

Covered in sweat and breathing heavily, Corwi glanced around her as she waited to board the carrier. Rebels waved others onto ships, urging their comrades on with encouraging, if stressed, shouts. Everyone looking out for one another. Everyone who volunteered to join the Rebel Alliance and defy the Empire. Everyone who stepped up to save the galaxy from oppression.

A waving hand motioned her to board the carrier. Corwi wasted no time filing in and sitting where instructed. Beings rushed aboard, but the atmosphere was eerily quiet. She followed the example of those around her and strapped in. The space around her filled with bodies. They were still on Hoth, so they were still in danger. In the stillness, Corwi could hear snippets of frantic comm chatter, but she couldn’t make out the words. She tried not to give in to spiraling fear. Tried not to think about all she still wanted to do. She redirected her focus to how she got on this carrier and to those around her who had committed their lives to this kind of existence—the kind of existence that can be upended in mere minutes once the enemy arrives.

Corwi closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She thought about how she’d chased the heroes of the Rebellion around Echo Base. But it wasn’t only about them. Not at all. The pilot of this carrier, the defensive fighters waiting to escort and protect them, L’cayo who led her to this seat of safety—heroes. Every one of them. Maybe their names weren’t uttered in cantinas around the galaxy. Maybe the galaxy didn’t know about their heroic deeds. It didn’t make the efforts of the dozens of beings around her any less significant. Everyone was a hero.

The sound of the ramp closing rattled through the ship. The engines groaned. Corwi felt the ship move out of the transport bay and swiftly into the air. She released a deep breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. It was one step closer to safety, but they were far from celebrating a successful escape. She surveyed those around her and absorbed a range of emotions from the other evacuees: a single tear running down a cheek tense with fear across from her, white-knuckled hands clenched on top of a bowed head in a seeming plea for help near the front of the transport, multiple unfocused anxious stares. She heard someone nervously tapping their foot. Corwi strained to listen to the comms, to the rumbling of the ship—whatever might give her a clue about whether they would survive. She recalled Leia mentioning that each ship had only two fighter escorts and wished she had forgotten that detail. Two fighter escorts against a Star Destroyer? Corwi blinked the scenario out of her mind and pictured an entire squadron just beyond the ship’s hull protecting them as they leapt into hyperspace.

A blast buffeted the ship’s hull. She gasped. Was that…was that the Empire shooting at them? Corwi squinched her eyes so forcibly she saw lights dance at the edge of her vision. She heard a sharp sob far away and a chorus of ragged breathing. Her own knuckles turned white as she gripped the seat underneath her and braced for an explosion. Another light movement. More intense breathing. And then the light sound of comm chatter. The pilot shouting, “We’re away! Repeat: We’re away!”

Those words, those precious few words, hung in the air as despair turned into elation. A few individuals looked numb, as if their hearts couldn’t take the emotional whiplash and the revelation of survival. Grim mouths turned to broad smiles. Hands relaxed from worried grips to pound friends, perhaps strangers even, on the back in triumph. Loud cheers replaced the terror-infused breaths. Corwi cried from relief; she slumped in her seat as every bone-crushing worry lifted and tears streamed down her face. They were safe. She was safe. A feeling of hope settled back into her mind.

“Hope,” she whispered to herself. “Hope.”

Jyn Erso’s words came to mind. “Rebellions are built on hope.” Corwi had equated hope with heroic deeds like Jyn’s sacrifice or Luke destroying the Death Star. She’d believed those huge moments and the heroes who carried them out were key to inspiring more beings to join the Rebellion. That wasn’t true at all. Hope wasn’t limited to only a handful of names. That’s not who made up the ranks of the Alliance. Hope was about people—ordinary people that made a choice to join the fight and to stay in it.

Hope was the rebel soldier who guided a lost propagandist to safety, who recognized the value of a single life and did what he could to protect it. Hope was all around her in the now reassured faces of the evacuees. People who had decided to band together against the Empire and didn’t waver even in the face of annihilation.

Every person in the Rebellion was a hero. But it wasn’t only that. They all represented hope. And that was the way forward for the Rebellion. Not to focus only on the big, sweeping heroic deeds. No, it was to create more hope. And they would do that by honoring and championing the heroism people exhibited every day. Hope.

An energized Corwi flipped her holorecorder on. She turned to the person next to her and took in his weary, cheerful demeanor. Corwi gave him a warm smile and asked, “Why do you fight the Empire? Tell me your story.”

“Why me?” he asked.

“Your story is going to save the galaxy.”

ROGUE TWOGary Whitta

Zev Senesca hated the cold. He hated the snow and ice, so cold it burned, hated the freezing wind that whipped at your face until you could no longer feel it. He hated this entire Maker-forsaken planet—if you could even call it a planet. Hoth was more like a giant frozen rock floating in space, as uninviting a place in the galaxy as could be imagined.

But maybe that was the point. The Empire had the Rebellion on the run after discovering their former base on Yavin 4 and forcing a hurried evacuation, and since then had made it near impossible for them to find a new home, having issued a galaxy-wide declaration that any civilized world offering safe harbor or passage to the Alliance would be subject to crippling sanctions and Imperial occupation. So in finding a location for a new base, all the rebels had left to choose from were the most remote and least suitable sanctuaries: the deserted, barren planets and moons to be found in the far reaches of space. But as desperate as the Empire knew the Rebellion was, they likely never considered they’d be so desperate as to hole up in a place like this, a planet so cold it was barely capable of sustaining any kind of life save a handful of indigenous creatures, most of which lived deep beneath the surface, closer to the planet’s still-warm core. So maybe it was smart of leadership, in a way, to hide here, one of the last places the Empire would ever think to look.

Still, that didn’t take the sting out of the day-to-day hardships of living in a place like this. Carving out the hangars and tunnels for the base itself had been hard enough, a brutally laborious job that had taken weeks and come at the cost of several lives, mostly to the cold or to cave-ins during construction. But now here they were, as comfortable as they could be under the circumstances. The techs had even managed to pipe heating throughout the base, and everyone had cheered when they first turned on the generators and they actually worked, allowing them all to strip down to fewer than six warm layers for the first time since they’d arrived.