Марта Уэллс - From a Certain Point of View

Oh, he thinks, stunned more than anything, and then a little bewildered that he can’t move his hands. He blinks, but his eyes won’t clear. He can’t see the walkers—just a haze of white, and pulsing red clouds in the middle.

“Dak?”

He hears Luke’s voice but it’s muffled, as if Luke is yelling through a wall. Dak’s fingers have gone numb. Black keeps creeping into the edges of his vision. He feels like he’s falling backward through a tunnel, away from his body.

He struggles to come back to himself—he needs to get his hands on the controls, needs to release that tow cable, needs to shoot something, because Luke’s counting on him, Luke needs him to—

“Dak!”

He can’t.

He can’t feel his hands. He can’t feel anything. I’ve been hit, he realizes belatedly. That was a hit just now. I’m hit.

It’s too late. Luke’s not getting him out of this.

He couldn’t save you, whispers a little voice, but it’s immediately crowded out by a more urgent panic—this can’t be the end, he can’t—he’s let Luke down, he’s let the Alliance down, he must fire that tow cable, he must —

He can’t.

“Rogue Three,” he hears Luke say. “Wedge, I’ve lost my gunner. You’ll have to make this shot.”

Luke says something else, but it’s all fuzz to Dak now; his hearing is fading with his sight.

Dak fights like hell against the dark, but his body’s too far gone. Dak doesn’t even know where he’s been hit. His wounds are so severe there is no singular point of agony. Instead it’s a shroud, a total numbness that pulls him further and further into the looming dark. And Dak is trying to lift his head, to move his hands, but he can’t, he can’t, he can’t—

Somewhere, as if from a very great distance, he hears a great crash. He feels the speeder twist around, arcing back through the air. Seconds later there’s a great explosion; a series of booms that rattles the speeder and vibrates through his bones.

That had to be the walker.

The harpoon, he realizes. They did it. They’ve downed an Imperial walker with nothing but a cable.

Incredible.

He feels the speeder twisting around again, darting back for another shot.

That’s when he knows, with as much certainty as he’s ever known anything—they’ve got this. They don’t need him. He’s just one soldier. But Luke, Wedge, and Janson; the rest of Rogue Squadron, the rest of the Rebel Alliance—they’ll finish the job.

He doesn’t have to fight anymore.

He can let go.

Calm sweeps across him. Suddenly the numb isn’t so bad. The panic’s gone. Nothing hurts.

It’s all right, he thinks. It’s all right.

He’s falling through the tunnel; he’s left his body and the speeder behind.

He’s left Luke behind.

But Luke’s going to be fine. The rebels will get off Hoth. They’ll escape the Imperial fleet; they’ll find another hideout and build another base. And if that base is attacked, they’ll escape again—they always do—and start again somewhere else. Over and over, until one day they get in another lucky shot.

The Rebellion will survive him. It’ll beat the odds like Luke once beat the odds; like Dak once beat the odds.

Soldiers die all the time. It’s the occupational hazard of rebellion, the obvious likelihood of demise.

But that’s the funny thing about hope, Dak’s learned—you only have to get lucky once.

BEYOND HOPEMichael Moreci

Crimson particle bolts screamed through the air just over Private Emon Kref’s head; the enemy fire found its home in the turret at Emon’s back. Shards of metal, charred and scored black, rained down on Emon’s and his squad’s heads, reminding them just how feeble they were in the face of the Empire’s AT-AT walkers.

And the Battle of Hoth had only just begun.

—

Emon took cover behind the trench’s frozen wall and shook the bits of turret debris off his goggles.

“Still glad you joined the Alliance?” Andry Ked yelled. He and Emon were shoulder to shoulder, huddled against each other just as much as they were huddled against the wall. More crimson bolts sizzled overhead; explosions echoed and reverberated up and down the trench until it sounded like one big eruption.

“I was never glad!” Emon shouted back. Which, in a way, was true. It’d been a few short weeks since the Empire scorched Koshaga, ending a war that’d been waged on Emon’s homeworld for as long as anyone could remember. Emon had been born into that war; his father was a general in the Koshagan People’s Movement; he’d battled arm in arm with his own people against the tyranny of the ruling class and those who supported it. That fight was Emon’s life.

But then the Empire came.

In one single, swift operation, the war was over. The Empire swarmed Koshaga, and with its machines of death and its phalanx of stormtroopers, it smothered the planet’s Lowlands. Lines of defense were shattered; leaders—Emon’s father included—were taken prisoner. The will of the Koshagan people, once so strong and so proud, withered before Emon’s eyes.

A week later, a rebel recruiter who’d gotten wind of the Koshagan uprising quietly arrived on Emon’s home planet. When the recruiter’s ship left a day later, Emon was on it, a full-fledged member of the Rebel Alliance. Still in a state of grief and shock, he couldn’t conceive how anyone could topple the Empire. But war was all Emon knew, and the Rebellion was offering him just that. So he took the secret transport off Koshaga and, in no time at all, Emon was given a uniform and a blaster. The officer aboard his transport told him that they were going to win back the galaxy, one system at a time.

“Whatever you say,” Emon had replied.

Andry, who was in his early forties and thus a senior citizen among the grunts, poked Emon in his ribs, snapping him out of his reverie. “Come on, you’re going to need more enthusiasm than that, Kref!” he yelled in his gruff voice. “Rebellions are built on hope—hasn’t anyone told you that?”

Emon groaned. “No, Andry, you’re the first,” he yelled back, certain to convey his sarcasm. “When we get out of this trench— if we get out of this trench—you’ll have to tell me more!”

Andry laughed. “You’ll get it—one day, kid. You’ll get it.”

Overhead, a squad of snowspeeders howled past the trench, racing toward the walkers. Emon breathed a sigh of relief. Good, he thought. At least that’ll distract those damn things.

He and Andry—and all the other infantry grunts lining the trench—popped back up and steadied their weapons back on the trench’s frozen shelf. Walker fire still assaulted Emon’s position, but at least now there was less of it.

“Focus all fire on those walkers!” Sergeant Trey Callum shouted across the trench. “Keep them back!”

Emon steadied his A295 blaster rifle and checked that its energy pack was in place. While on patrol a week ago, the pack had fallen out of Emon’s rifle, and all the Alliance could offer Emon was a cord and a strip of tape to help keep it in place. On Koshaga, Emon would have been deeply offended by such an unsatisfying response. But this wasn’t the People’s Movement, and Emon wasn’t the only one equipped with a weapon that had the potential to fall apart in the heat of battle. Cally Pon’s A280 was always overheating; Su Torka’s rifle jammed as much as it fired; and Andry’s scope was so misaligned there was little sense even using it. And none of those problems had been addressed any better than Emon’s.

That was the Rebellion, though. Elastic bands and good intentions.