Марта Уэллс - From a Certain Point of View

Two things happened immediately. The first was that the rebel mechanics assigned the task of adapting the speeders to the cold started working round-the-clock shifts. Those speeders were the best chance, maybe the only chance, of finding the commander before he froze to death or succumbed to whatever other fate had befallen him out there. So now they didn’t take breaks, didn’t eat, but instead devoted themselves to laboring constantly until they found a workaround for the coolant problem that was keeping the speeders grounded. When Zev first heard that Hoth was so damn cold it was even freezing engine coolant, he thought it was funny. It didn’t seem so funny now.

The second thing that happened was that Captain Solo insisted on going back out and looking for the commander. Even though there were no ships available, even though the temperature was dropping rapidly as the day’s light waned, he had taken a tauntaun and gone out alone. He hadn’t asked Rieekan for permission, of course, because he knew he would never have gotten it. He just went. That was Solo’s way—act now, think later. The former smuggler had a mixed reputation among Rogue Squadron; pilots are by nature a cocksure bunch, so many admired his pluck and his seemingly limitless ability to speak his mind, no matter how ill-advised it might be to do so. Others—like Zev—saw him as a blowhard who had been blessed with more luck than talent and who liked to talk way too much about that piece-of-junk freighter of his. But the fact that Solo had left the safety of Echo Base and gone out into that frozen wilderness alone and without consulting his superiors told Zev something else about him—this time at least, the man’s damn-fool heroics weren’t about impressing the princess. This time he was genuinely concerned about his friend.

Zev knew how that felt. The thought of the commander somewhere out there, lost and helpless and alone as the cold bit deeper and deeper into him, felt like a ball of ice in the pit of his stomach. Worse still was the feeling of helplessness—Solo’s one-man rescue mission may have been foolhardy but at least he was doing something. All Zev and the other Rogue Squadron pilots could do was sit and wait and try not to go out of their minds with worry as the hours ticked by, waiting for any news. But the only news that had trickled in so far had been grim: The base had now lost contact with Captain Solo, and the shield doors had been closed for the night, meaning there could be no further attempts to locate him or the commander until first light tomorrow.

Zev was squadron leader in the commander’s absence, so the morale of the other pilots was now his sole responsibility. He could see how anxious they all were, how on edge, and tried to think of some way to distract them or relieve the tension. Every squadron had its own betting pool—it was often said that rebel pilots loved to play the odds because they gambled with their lives every time they strapped into a cockpit—and Zev was the guy who ran Rogue Squadron’s. Since their founding he’d run a number of popular pools, including betting on what would be the most awful thing about the location of their new base (Dak Ralter had won that one by betting on “too damn cold”), and the current one centered around Solo’s clumsy attempts to impress the princess. Now he had an idea for a new one.

He entered the pilot barracks and marched over to the board where the Solo bets were placed. Some of the other pilots jumped up in protest as he wiped all the bets off the board and started writing up a new one.

“Listen up,” said Zev. “Today we start a new pool. Everyone antes up one week’s flight pay. First pilot to find the commander wins the pot. Who’s in?”

At first there was hesitance. Then Dak, the youngster whom everyone knew idolized Skywalker more than most, stepped up to the board and wrote his name. Then Wedge Antilles, Rogue Three, stood and did the same. Then another, and another. The rest were still hesitant.

“Kinda morbid, ain’t it?” asked Hobbie, Rogue Four. “Betting on the commander’s life?”

Zev was about to respond when another voice came from the barracks entrance at the far end of the room.

“Morbid? Not at all.”

Everyone who wasn’t already standing jumped up and stood to attention immediately. It was Leia.

“As you were,” she added as she stepped inside the barracks. The pilots relaxed a little but remained standing. Leia’s very presence commanded attention and respect. She had been through hell—imprisonment, torture, the destruction of her homeworld and loss of her beloved parents—and still she kept fighting. She was the embodiment of grace under fire, and the Rogue Squadron pilots admired her as much as they did the commander. Perhaps more.

Leia leaned against one of the pilot bunks and looked at the men assembled before her. “You’re not betting on Commander Skywalker’s life,” she told them. “You’re betting on his survival. Every bet you place on that board is a vote of confidence that it’ll be a matter of when you find him, not if. It’s an expression of hope. And as a great rebel once said, rebellions are built on hope. In fact, I’d like to place a wager of my own.”

She stepped up to the board and took the marker from Zev’s hand. She then wrote the names, first and last, of every single pilot in Rogue Squadron onto the board. She didn’t have to consult a roster or ask anyone; she knew the names of every pilot from memory. When she had finished writing the list of names she signed her own at the bottom.

“I’m betting on every pilot here,” she said. “That’s what General Rieekan and I and the other Alliance leaders do every day—we bet on each and every one of you to keep us all alive, keep us fighting. And I have no doubt in my mind, none, that one of you will find Commander Skywalker and Captain Solo. I don’t like to lose, so I place this bet knowing that I’m not going to.”

And with that she gave Zev back his marker and headed to the exit, every eye in the room on her. She stopped at the door and looked back. “May the Force be with all of you,” she said. And then she was gone.

After she left, Hobbie and the other pilots who hadn’t yet placed their bets stepped up and wrote their names on the board.

—

The next morning Zev and the other pilots woke early to the news that the techs, having worked all through the night, had finally figured out the coolant problem and gotten the speeders running. There were a dozen of them in the air within the hour, Rogue Squadron splitting into groups of four to cover the search grid with maximum efficiency. Zev led the search across the western sector, and for most of the morning they had flown across the frozen tundra scanning for any signs of life without success. The storm that had battered Echo Base throughout the night had at last abated, and now that the sun was up visibility was the best it had been in weeks, meaning there was a greater chance of eyeballing something even if the commander wasn’t able to respond to comm messages or his lifesigns were weak. But so far all Zev had seen was endless rolling white.

Some had tried to make the best of it here on Hoth by talking about the natural grandeur of the place, the majesty of its vast ice plains and glaciers. Zev thought all that was a load of bantha fodder; he would have happily traded in all the natural grandeur in the galaxy for a toilet that didn’t freeze your ass off when you sat on it. But the one thing he wanted right now, more than anything, was a hit on his scanner, some sign that the commander was still out there, somewhere, alive. He knew the chances of anyone surviving after being caught overnight in a merciless Hoth blizzard were remote, but still Leia’s words rang in his ears. Rebellions are built on hope. Rebellions are—