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Марта Уэллс: From a Certain Point of View

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Марта Уэллс From a Certain Point of View

From a Certain Point of View: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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**Celebrate the legacy of *The Empire Strikes Back* with this exciting reimagining of the timeless film featuring new perspectives from forty acclaimed authors.** On May 21, 1980, Star Wars became a true saga with the release of *The Empire Strikes Back*. In honor of the fortieth anniversary, forty storytellers re-create an iconic scene from *The Empire Strikes Back* through the eyes of a supporting character, from heroes and villains, to droids and creatures. *From a Certain Point of View* features contributions by bestselling authors and trendsetting artists: • ***Austin Walker*** explores the unlikely partnership of bounty hunters Dengar and IG-88 as they pursue Han Solo. • ***Hank Green*** chronicles the life of a naturalist caring for tauntauns on the frozen world of Hoth. • ***Tracy Deonn*** delves into the dark heart of the Dagobah cave where Luke confronts a terrifying vision. •...

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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.


In some ways, it was a mercy. There was no time for internal crisis with a fleet of Star Destroyers inbound, and so Toryn forced herself to boil away her doubts like vapor off a ship’s hull in the outer atmosphere. General Rieekan had given the evacuation order, and Echo Base had dissolved into a familiar, functional chaos as once again the Rebel Alliance prepared to drop everything and run.

It all boiled down to a flowchart of procedure—yet another mercy, because at least the simple logic of it kept Toryn’s anxiety down to a simmer. A fleet of capital ships dropping from hyperspace in Sector Four? Bring up the energy shield to stave off any hope of them bombing the base from orbit. Energy shield blocking the exodus of rebel craft? Drop it for seconds at a time, allowing the GR-75s and their escorts to clear Hoth’s orbit. Star Destroyers targeting the escaping transports?

Well, for that there was the ion cannon and Toryn Farr’s steady command.

She’d prepared relentlessly for these moments. Taught herself to process the trigonometry of the cannon’s targeting in an instant, to boil down the ion blast’s rate of travel and the distance to target into a simple measure of time, to reduce everything to an instinct that would allow her to keep her eyes pinned on the orbital charts.

As long as she was clearheaded. As long as she didn’t think too hard about how the Empire would never stop coming, about how this battle would cost them people, ships, and equipment they couldn’t spare, about how a battle had already been fought in her head over whether this was all worth it and she still wasn’t sure whether it had been won or lost.

She wouldn’t know until she spoke, and she wouldn’t speak until the precise moment it was needed—the moment she could feel prickling closer and closer as Lieutenant Navander called the approach of the Star Destroyer Tyrant and Corporal Sunsbringer announced that the Quantum Storm, the first GR-75 staged for evacuation, had finished its final checks. The transport bloomed to life in the bottom left corner of her readouts, and the mathematics of its frantic escape from Hoth’s gravity followed in a scroll of data that poured across her station. Toryn kept her eyes on the ship. The math she already knew.

“Their primary target will be the power generators,” Rieekan murmured. At his side stood Princess Leia, ready to assist the moment the strategy required a bifurcation of command. As the Quantum Storm threw itself toward the perimeter of Echo Base’s defenses, Rieekan turned his attention to operations and declared, “Prepare to open shield.”

The trick was not to think too hard about what that order meant—but of course, every officer in the command center was thinking about it. The shield dropping was a moment of vulnerability, one the Tyrant was in the perfect position to exploit as it wheeled its guns toward Echo Base. The Star Destroyer had an opening for a shot that would take out the Rebellion’s best defense, one they’d opened just to give a single transport and the two X-wings escorting it time to slip away.

Fortunately, the Tyrant was too focused on the prey streaking toward it to realize the opportunity it was wasting. Its main batteries targeted predictably on the Quantum Storm—Toryn wasn’t crass enough to say disappointingly, but she did think it. It was classic Imperial officer thinking, prioritizing the cruel over the strategic. Shooting down the transport full of refugee rebels rather than taking out their military base’s most critical defense.

Toryn rarely took joy in her command, but this?

This she might relish.

“Stand by, ion control,” she said, and watched as the v-150 Planet Defender wheeled its targeting to paint a straight line between its massive round housing and the Tyrant’s distant bulk. Toryn’s brain sank into the calculation it presented, weighing it against the data she’d been pulling together since the Quantum Storm launched. The problem she posited had a single answer: the moment she’d open her mouth next.

She couldn’t doubt that answer when she arrived at it. She’d trained for too long, fought for too many years to make such a rookie mistake. But even so, there was a moment—a moment she felt grab her by the throat and ask her who she thought she was, to make a call like this, to climb out of her sodden, frigid cave and spit in the face of fascist oppression.

Toryn Farr kept her eyes steady on the charts, and when she felt the moment slip into alignment, she announced, calm and clear, “Fire.”

Her voice was the finger on the trigger, the techs operating the Planet Defender the chemical reaction, and the end result was two pairs of pulses fired at a six-second interval hurtling away from Hoth’s ice as the aftershocks of the ion cannon’s discharge sent rumbles and creaks through Echo Base. They tore past the energy shield’s boundary half a second before it bloomed back into existence, skimmed by the Quantum Storm and its escort and—

Toryn knew by the collective breath the room inhaled that every eye was on her readouts. Every eye saw the data—the moment the first bolt struck the Tyrant’s body and the second slammed into the bridge. Perfect timing, married to perfect targeting, and this was the glorious result: an entire Star Destroyer going dark as the ion pulses made mincemeat of its systems.

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