Марта Уэллс - From a Certain Point of View

—

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.

The Quantum Storm sailed cleanly past it, hyperdrives already warming as it cleared the fringes of Hoth’s grasp.

“The first transport is away,” Lieutenant Navander announced into the base intercom. It felt as though every soul on Hoth roared in reply, fists flung in the air, nearly drowning out the lieutenant as he repeated the announcement.

Toryn sank back in her seat and let the triumph wash over her. She hadn’t faltered. Hadn’t tipped over the delicate balance of the base’s morale. She’d nailed the calculation, taken out a Destroyer, saved an entire GR-75 full of rebels.

And it hadn’t been enough. She could feel the victorious moment ebbing, ripped away from her shoreline by the gravitational pull of her dread. One transport wouldn’t save them. It wouldn’t sustain them. One transport wasn’t the answer to the question that had risen inside her, ravenous for an answer that wouldn’t come. Why are we fighting? it railed. There’s no hope left for the Rebellion. The Empire has whittled us away into nothing. Even if every blow we strike strikes true, even if every shot we fire hits its target, they’ll keep coming until we’re dust beneath their boots.

Toryn Farr set her jaw and inhaled deeply. There were too many people relying on her and her splintering foundations. All of them were doomed, but if that was the case, then the final thing she owed them was everything she had left. She’d throw herself into her command and hope that somewhere along the way, she’d figure out the reason that kept her fighting. “Settle down, people—we’ve got twenty-nine more transports to clear,” she called to her team.

This time it was undeniable: The tremor had crept into her voice.

—

Toryn had gotten a good rhythm going—one that the ceiling collapse ruined.

She rolled to her knees, her skin smarting from the sudden drop in temperature, and coughed against the acrid stench of the laser blast that had brought the ice down on top of them. Her brain grappled hopelessly with the fact that her station was gone. Even more hopelessly with the fact that she’d thrown herself clear in time.

Not everyone was as lucky.

“Sound off,” she choked, but all she got was confused groans and more crumbling from the hole that had been blasted in their ceiling. “Come on, who’s not dead?”