Марта Уэллс: From a Certain Point of View

With his clan.

With his den-mate.

With his cubs.

With what they stole.

His home.

ION CONTROLEmily Skrutskie

Toryn Farr was certain she knew a lost cause when she saw one, so when the controllers had started the betting pool, there was no question where her credits were going.

“Even if he takes the shot, the princess will shut him down,” she’d declared as she jotted down her wager on the datapad being handed around. It had already circulated through most of the rest of the room, and the odds weren’t looking great for Captain Solo.

Then again, Toryn considered as the smuggler strode into the command center and every person whose name was on that ledger straightened with sudden awareness, Solo’s the type to gamble on long odds.

She tried—she really tried—to keep her focus on the readouts she was supposed to be monitoring for anomalies. They’d picked up a signature that looked suspiciously like a Star Destroyer a day ago, and while it had cruised by Hoth without deviating from its flight path, the anxiety of the moment had left them all rattled and unsure. But Toryn couldn’t help slipping her focus clear through the transparency in her charts to where Princess Leia was perched next to Captain Serper’s station.

The princess’s eyes were fixed warily on Solo. Behind her, Toryn caught the pause of his footsteps—and then, surprisingly, the moment he moved not to Leia but to General Rieekan, who was fidgeting with a comm array in the back corner of the command center. She felt the tension in her team loosen. Seemed no one was winning any bets today.

Toryn tuned back to her work, her eyes skimming with practiced precision over the asteroids flirting with Hoth’s orbit. The cover they provided made Hoth an ideal place for a hidden base. The Empire’s sensors would be hard-pressed to pick out a rebel ship from the more metallic of their number.

Unfortunately, the reverse was also true.

But before she could sink into the tedium of it, her ears latched onto the tail end of Solo’s words to the general. Did he say “I can’t stay anymore”?

A glance over at Corporal Sunsbringer, who was desperately trying to catch her eye, confirmed Toryn hadn’t misheard. The corporal widened her eyes and flexed a hand, a motion that read as, Seriously?

Toryn was just as startled. The captain had been bumming along with the Rebel Alliance for years. Ever since the Battle of Yavin. Now he was claiming he had a price on his head set by Jabba the Hutt—which sounded like a convenient excuse to get off this freezing rock. Toryn wouldn’t have begrudged him trading the desolate, icy world for the sands of Tatooine—except it ruined the best entertainment the base had seen since they’d touched down on Hoth.

And speaking of entertainment, Solo had just shaken hands with General Rieekan, turned, and fixed his eyes on Leia. “Well, Your Highness. Guess this is it,” the captain said, sauntering up to her.

With the bank of controllers positioned on a shelf of ice above the main floor, the princess had a rare height advantage over the captain, one she lorded with the easy grace of royalty. “That’s right,” Leia replied coolly.

Toryn’s grip on her stylus tightened as Solo’s face contorted through a complicated emotion that convinced her of two things: Han Solo wasn’t just leaving over some bounty, and she was about to come into some serious money. So she nearly groaned and dropped her head into her hands when Solo blurted, “Don’t get all mushy on me. So long, Princess,” and bolted for the door of the command center.

Leia was off like a shot on his heels, all sense of duty to whatever she’d been helping Serper with forgotten as she stormed out into the corridor shouting, “Han!”

The moment the doors closed behind her, the thin veneer of subtlety that had fallen over the command center dissolved. “Someone has to go after them,” Sunsbringer declared over the mutters. When Toryn threw her junior a warning look, the corporal shrugged. “We have to know what happens—this is my Boonta Eve Classic, ma’am.”

“Make those readouts your Boonta Eve Classic,” she said firmly. “The barracks gossip will be there when you’re back in the barracks. ”

It earned her an approving nod from General Rieekan, which Toryn returned with a wry look. She’d seen his name scrawled in a neat hand next to a modest wager on that ledger—one of the few pulling for Solo. “Settle down, folks. Back to work,” Rieekan intoned, and the command center quieted under his order.

Toryn returned to the drudgery of her charts, the tension settling back into her shoulders like the fit of a trim dress uniform. It had been years since the Death Star, but every day had passed with a shadow hanging over it. The wasp-worm nest had been kicked. By luck, a miraculous engineering flaw, and a crack shot from a rookie pilot, the Rebel Alliance had taken down the monstrous battle station, but Toryn knew—had come to realize, over the years of running—that they didn’t have the resources to hold out against the Empire’s retaliation.

Bouts of entertainment like the Solo ledger were nothing but desperate attempts to stave off the creeping dread of the inevitable. Hoth could very well be the Rebellion’s last stand.

Toryn had hated it on sight. She understood the necessity of hiding in a place that was remote, undesirable, and cloaked by a dense asteroid belt, but everything about the planet made her ache for the rolling green hills of her homeworld, Chandrila. Her only consolation was having her sister to commiserate with in the mess during the fleeting moments their schedules aligned. Samoc Farr, three years her junior, had a more optimistic view of the planet, though that was owing to the fact that she’d seen far more of it than Toryn ever would.

“It’s beautiful, in an austere kind of way,” Samoc would tell her through a mouthful of tough, oversalted cave lichen. “When it’s just you, your patrol route, and all that ice. It’s quiet. We haven’t had quiet in a while, y’know?”

Toryn wished for something as simple as quiet. Her days were filled with the urgent chatter of the command center and the comm transmissions pumped through her headset, her nights with the worrisome creaking of the ice they’d dug out to form Echo Base. But the worst noise was the one that only she heard—that gnawing voice in the back of her head that had started the moment the Death Star blew. She never let it anywhere near her speech, not even in the hushed conversations she had with Samoc where they both admitted how tired they were, how long it had been since the two of them were bright-eyed teenagers vowing to stake their lives on Mon Mothma and her cause. Rebellions were built on hope; it was true.

And Toryn Farr feared that the seed of doubt she carried might bring the whole thing crumbling down once and for all.

She knew two moments were approaching with increasing inevitability: the moment her crisis of faith could no longer stay hidden, and the moment the Empire grabbed Echo Base by the scruff of its neck, tore it out of its icy warren, and held it up in the cruel light of day. Toryn tried to use Hoth’s tedium as an opportunity to reckon with her doubts, to quell them with pure, firm conviction. She owed it to the brave people she fought alongside—to Samoc, to General Rieekan, to Princess Leia. She owed it to Mon Mothma not to cheapen her years of faithful service by falling apart when the Rebellion needed her most.

But she was so tired, and Hoth was so cold. It felt like stagnation. Like freezing in place, unable to go on anymore.

So the second moment came first, and when it did, Toryn felt the pit of dread inside her blow wide as a nexu’s jaws.