Марта Уэллс - From a Certain Point of View

“Quite. Very good. Very good.”

Canonhaus tapped his foot. The lieutenant running the crew pit to his left glanced up to see if the captain wanted his attention. You had to train a new crew to understand your mannerisms. One tap meant “conversation over, I’m thinking.” Two taps signaled “get on with it.” Shooting his cuffs meant “I’m about to give an order.” Back on Majestic his officers understood this, all four watches.

Old Seitaron had once told him, in the wardroom, that it was important to know your crew. Read their files, learn their failures and talents. Canonhaus had tried that, on Majestic. He had been a good captain, or at least a good mayor of a town of ten thousand, which was the real trick to command. Anyone could say full speed, open fire or hold the range, deploy the fighters or send in a team to make a scan. The unbelievably difficult part of the job was not fighting a Star Destroyer in combat, but keeping the beast fed and fueled and trained, and in communication with the rest of the fleet and with your own local network of informants and contacts, so that the ship could turn up where and when it was needed.

He could do that. He could do it better than most, he’d thought.

But after Alderaan and Helix, they took Majestic away from him, moved him from sector fleet duty to Death Squadron on account of his “excellent reliability.” And he had to start all over, learning the names and faces of the nearly ten thousand people aboard Ultimatum. It was impossible. Only the roles were familiar, like the cards in a sabacc deck. First and second weapons officers, first and second defense officers, three sensor watch officers; communications, operations, engineering with its reactor and engine substations; navigation, helm and hyperdrive and the constant plot of objects in the narrow and chaotic jump-collision hazard radius; bay and flight officers; flasks and sabers, air and darkness, staves and coins. All the cards slotted into their stations in the crew pits below the gleaming black walkways, which were as polished and satisfying as boot leather.

On Majestic, all his officers knew what he’d done with the refugees. An ugly piece of work, they all agreed. Hard work. But it had to be done.

He tasted acid and coughed.

“Commander Tian,” he said.

She had begun to turn away, to go check with the helm officer about their formation. She was a stickler about formations. The idea that Executor itself was tracking her must be very exciting. A chance to show her talent at staying in her slot.

Now she turned back. The youth in her bright eyes, her clear dark skin; how could she already be a commander? They got younger every year. And hungrier.

At Carida, gossip said, she had reported two cadets with better marks for selling their exam answers. They had been expelled, and she’d made it into a merit society in their place. A snitch.

“Sir?”

“What do you think of Admiral Ozzel’s recent decisions?”

She flinched like he’d pulled a weapon. A flash of fear, like the light of a blaster reflected from wide white human eyes in the jungle night on Haruun Kal. The place where he had learned to fear blasters more than anything else.

That was all it took. The flashbacks came on him unpredictably, for no reason at all, for a reason as simple as Tian’s frightened eyes.

And he was there again. Is there again. Will always be.

—

He is a lieutenant, a liaison to the stormtroopers aboard the Quasar Fire -class cruiser-carrier Swoop. They call him Footoo. They like him, because he tells them honestly what the navy expects, but don’t trust him, because he hasn’t seen combat.

There is an insurrection smoldering on Haruun Kal, in the highland jungles. Something left from the Clone Wars.

He goes down with the Sentinel assault shuttles to land in the “smoke circles” where orbital fire burns back the jungle. The air smells of burnt pollen and sulfur, and he has to borrow a stormtrooper helmet to breathe outside. In two days, fungus grounds the shuttles and all the speeders forever. Only the wheeled Juggernauts still work. Their weapons are only saved by obsessive cleaning.

The CO orders a foot advance toward a lake thirty kilometers away. It is not a very good decision, tactically, but the CO has fever wasp larvae growing in her brain. By the time anyone realizes, the wasps are crawling out of her tear ducts and they are all lost in the deep jungle.

The Korun natives attack from the trees at night. Their crude slugthrowers can’t pierce stormtrooper armor, but their bombs can. At first, Swoop’ s stormtroopers return fire coolly and accurately. Later, they take to mowing the jungle with the squad E-Webs.

Canonhaus takes it upon himself to confirm their kills. He thinks it will help morale.

He sees everything a blaster can do to a body. The primary wound, a crater of red and white, where galvened plasma flash-boils skin and detonates bone. Seams of black char where fat burns like buried coal. Heads are full of fluid, all of which expands when hit: stormtroopers call this kind of hit a “detonator,” call those who are hit deep enough to burn from the inside out “dry bones.” By the time you see the remains of a dry-bone, a wretched pile of skeleton and hair, your lungs are already coated in a thin layer of burnt them —

“Sir?”

—

Canonhaus blinked. “What?”

Tian was at his side, watching him. “You seemed not to hear me, sir.”

“I was thinking of Haruun Kal.” Why had he said that? Because he wanted a reason to pour out his bile and regret, to corrode her as he had been corroded.

“A glorious victory, sir.”

“Oh, yes. One of the battles that gave the Imperial Navy its dread reputation.”

“Did you help conduct the bombardment, sir?”

“Yes,” he lied. His unit had sheltered in the lake while the fleet exercised Base Gamma One. The lake boiled off in the firestorm. Their Juggernauts couldn’t cool the air fast enough. At first it was dry, and thus survivable; but when the air filled with their sweat, their sweat could no longer cool them, and people began to go into convulsions. As he stripped down, Canonhaus found a dead fever wasp in his uniform. Perhaps the heat had killed its eggs. Perhaps he was just lucky.

“Yes,” he repeated, unsteadily. “Yes, now—now that was an example of a bombardment well handled. But what do you think about Ozzel’s approach?”

“Yes, sir. His decision to drop out of hyperspace inside detection range was a good one. Violence of action would have caught the rebels unprepared, and if they hadn’t been forewarned, he would’ve caught them all in the initial bombardment. He made no mistake.”

“Mm. So why do you think Lord Vader executed him?”

“Perhaps because he failed to account for the possibility the rebels had been forewarned by a spy, sir. Or by the probe droid that discovered their base.”

“So you believe Vader acted correctly?”

She hesitated, looked away. In profile, her full nose echoed the uniform cap, echoed the perfect prow of the Star Destroyer, the ideal shape for a warship, all its broadside weapons capable of bearing forward. He wondered if she had been born with black hair, or if she dyed her usual Ilohian green to match the uniform. What did such young people think about? Did they do the exact same things he had done, say all the things he had said, to get that perfect COMPNOR reliability score—but believe it all, too?

“Permission to speak freely, sir?”

He blinked in surprise. “Granted?”

She addressed the open windows, the red light of Executor ’s titanic engine array. “Ozzel was lucky. He knew everyone on Hoth was a rebel. He didn’t have to flush one of their cells out of a loyal population. Or make a punitive attack on collaborators. Or choose a settlement for a demonstration strike. His only decision was one of tactics. Whether to close in aggressively, or to make a cautious approach.”