Марта Уэллс - From a Certain Point of View

That had made Lord Vader a man.

Mortal.

Pitiable.

Weak.

Lord Vader’s seat was fully turned, and the commander—the man—looked through the dark eyepieces of his helmet toward Admiral Piett.

“Yes, Admiral?” Lord Vader said, his voice even, emotionless.

Piett almost wished that Lord Vader had allowed his rage to leak into his voice. His eyes darted to Lord Vader’s hands—fingers relaxed against the rests of his chair, palms open.

If Piett wanted to sit beside Emperor Palpatine, now was the time to realize that he no longer feared Lord Vader, and without that fear, Lord Vader had lost some of his power against him.

It was not courage that destroyed fear. It was pity.

But Piett had what he wanted—the Executor. The admiralship.

And if being beside the Emperor meant being behind a mask, he did not want that.

Suddenly Piett heard, as clearly as he had a few days before, Lord Vader’s voice: You have failed me for the last time.

Ah.

There it was.

The fear was back.

Fear was power.

Piett forced the breath from his body, and with it, the image of the man. Lord Vader was no man. Piett would not allow him to be. He imagined that weak, feeble thing he had seen under the mask. And he killed it in his mind’s eye.

He put that corpse beside Ozzel’s in the graveyard of his memory.

Lord Vader was only the mask. Piett would never again allow himself to think of Lord Vader as anything but the black fist, clenched, choking away the life of anyone who did not properly fear him.

There was something calming in that idea. Piett had not liked those moments when Vader had been more man than mask.

“Our ships have sighted the Millennium Falcon, my lord,” Piett reported without a quiver in his voice. Fear, after all, gave him strength.

But even though he bowed his head, even though he accepted the command that followed, even though his heart surged at Lord Vader’s reprimand after he informed him of the situation, Piett could not quite keep the pity that lingered out of his eyes.

Much as he wished to erase the moment, he had seen past Vader’s mask.

And that had cracked his own.

RENDEZVOUS POINTJason Fry

Wedge Antilles had always wanted to fly.

When he was a kid on Corellia, he’d finish watching an episode of a somber documentary about starfighters ( Zero Hour: The Tentraxis Campaign ), then dive into a breathlessly written memoir written by a retired ace. ( Fly Fast and Die Young! )

Those digi-dramas and holonovels had been heavy on descriptions of high-g maneuvers and defiance shouted over comms, but light on other parts of life as a starfighter pilot.

For instance, none of them mentioned that you couldn’t sleep for more than a few minutes while in a cockpit. Pilots talked about sitting in the “easy chair,” but “torture rack” struck Wedge as a better description. The restraints cut off your circulation, but release them and you’d wake with a start when you nodded off and smacked your helmet into the control panel.

Nor had he learned that you sweated profusely during combat and emerged from battle drenched and rank. Which was fine if you had a shower waiting, but not if you had to stay crammed in a cockpit for hours. When a starfighter canopy opened after a long mission, flight crews stepped back to avoid getting a noseful of funk.

And Wedge had never heard about a starfighter ace heroically donning “maximum absorbency undergarments” before soaring off on an extended mission. Which, he had to admit, was probably for the best.

After the evacuation of Echo Base, Wedge had switched from a T-47 snowspeeder to a T-65 X-wing, but he’d been stuck in his cold-weather flight suit, and his X-wing’s heater was stuck on FULL. He’d reported that problem weeks ago, but every technician on Hoth had been working to get the T-47s adapted to the planet’s brutal cold. And a broken heater counted as an up gripe—meaning the fighter was operational—rather than a down gripe that would have left him grounded.

He’d been relieved at the time, but now he was sweaty and parched.

“I’ve made some terrible life choices,” he muttered to himself.

He winced as his astromech, R5-G8, beeped a question. Or more accurately, screeched a question. Something was wrong with the droid’s acoustic signaler, leaving it sounding like an agitated mynock.

“Just talking to myself,” Wedge said, grimacing at another fusillade of whistles. “Yes, people do that. No, I don’t need a diagnostic check once we reach the rendezvous point. No, do not log this exchange for a medical droid to review. Yes, I’m sure.”

R5-G8’s personality quirks had developed personality quirks of their own: Wedge had never worked with an astromech more prone to citing regulations. That up gripe would get fixed, he vowed—if not with a memory wipe, then with a wrench.

More piercing squeals. Wedge eyed the readout’s translation, ready to tell the astromech to shut himself off, Alliance flight-operations regulations notwithstanding.

But his anger leaked away when he read the droid’s question.

“I know,” he said. “We had a lot of losses at Hoth, Arfive. Too many losses.”

The first Rogue Squadron pilots to die had been Zev Senesca and Kit Valent, killed when their T-47 was shot down by an Imperial walker. That had been the start of a numbing parade, culminating with the loss Wedge could barely bring himself to think about: Derek Klivian, killed along with his gunner when he plowed his damaged T-47 into an AT-AT’s head.

Derek Klivian. Who’d hated being called Derek, insisting that his friends use his childhood nickname, the one Wedge had thought ridiculous for a grown-up or anyone trying to become one.

Hobbie.

They’d met as Imperial cadets at Skystrike Academy, playing endless hands of sabacc in the barracks. They’d defected to the Alliance together, fleeing Montross with the rebel agent Sabine Wren. They’d battled the Empire together at Atollon, Perimako Major, Distilon, and a dozen other worlds.

It was Hobbie who’d tried to comfort Wedge—in the awkward, emotionally stunted way of starfighter pilots—after he’d been left off the duty roster for the raid on Scarif. Days later, it was Wedge who’d tried to comfort Hobbie after he’d been grounded for the Battle of Yavin.

Now his friend was dead, and a galaxy without Hobbie struck Wedge as impossibly cold and cruel.

Another squawk from R5-G8.

“We’ll have to see,” he said. “I’m sure there will be a briefing once we reach the rendezvous point.”

They flew in silence for a while, surrounded by the endless churn of hyperspace. Then R5-G8 squealed a different question, one that actually made Wedge smile.

“Yes, I’m sure Artoo-Detoo will be there—and that he’ll have brought Commander Skywalker with him.”

—

But Wedge was wrong.

After the latest briefing, he wiped sweat from his brow and returned to the pilots’ ready room aboard Home One, known as the Hub. He got a slice of Kommerken steak—the Hub had a surprisingly good chef—and plopped into a chair across from Wes Janson, an old friend who’d served as his gunner on Hoth.

“How you holding up, Wes?”

“Oh, splendid, Lieutenant Commander,” Janson said, stroking his stubbled chin. “Filling up on grub but sweating it all off, thanks to our hosts building military vessels that double as saunas.”

“Well, it is their ship,” Wedge pointed out.

Not that he disagreed. Conditions humans and many other species considered comfortable struck Mon Calamari as borderline arctic and arid, leading to constant negotiations.