Марта Уэллс: From a Certain Point of View

In the clearing dust, she spotted the hunched form of Corporal Sunsbringer slumped over her station. Toryn lurched to her feet and laid a hand on the younger woman’s snowsuit, relief coursing through her when her breathing hitched. Sunsbringer’s head rolled back, revealing a worrisome line of blood trailing down one cheek and an unfocused look in her eyes. “Co…mmander.”

“Shh,” Toryn said, tucking her junior’s flyaways back behind her ears. “You’re done. Get to the bay. Can you stand?”

Sunsbringer braced herself against her station, and Toryn’s gaze dropped to the controls beneath her hands. Against all odds, the thing was still operational.

So when Sunsbringer vacated her seat, Toryn took it.

Her junior hesitated, peering at her in a concussed daze. “Commander, we need to g—”

“You go,” she snapped, fingers already flying over the buttons and switches. This station wasn’t designed for the kind of work she needed to do, but she’d make it work or…well, die trying. “ Now, Corporal.”

Sunsbringer still hesitated, even when another controller threw one of her arms over his shoulder and started drawing her through the minefield of rubble toward the command center’s door. She was a good kid. Deserved to make it out on a transport. And that meant Toryn had work to do.

But what could she do? The ion cannon had been taken out by the Imperial ground troops, the sensor array was in tatters, and the blockade had firmed up around Hoth. Sunsbringer’s station was set up for communicating with the hangars, not laying out the gauntlet of capital ships the remaining transports would have to get past. She was fumbling blindfolded through her duty with one hand tied behind her back.

Toryn glanced over her shoulder and found, to her shock, that she wasn’t the only one scrambling to salvage the machines. Trailed by her fussy protocol droid, Princess Leia was working her way down a bank of comm stations, dusting off the debris that had fallen onto them and checking to see if they were operational. Toryn bit back a laugh when the princess reeled back and kicked one in frustration.

“Shouldn’t you be evacuated already?” she called.

Leia’s head snapped up. “Shouldn’t you?” she replied, but there was a wry archness to it. When their eyes locked, Toryn felt their sameness click into place. Both of them had handed over their lives to this Rebellion young. Neither of them would give up the fight now.

All that remained was to give all that remained.

“There are five transports left to clear,” Toryn said, turning back to her station and slipping a headset over her ears. “Let’s give them the best shot we can.”

She knew there was no going back to the rhythm of before. Her resources had been cut out from under her, and every minute that ticked by saw another sensor knocked from her array by a shot from one of the Imperial walkers thundering closer and closer. Her voice was scraped raw with dust and ash. The chatter in the headset had gone from the calm, firm order of the Rebellion holding its ground to the scattered chaos of retreat.

But she tried—for the freedom of the galaxy, for Samoc in her snowspeeder somewhere over the ice fields, for whatever damn reason she could muster that would keep her from hyperventilating in her chair, Toryn Farr kept her post.

Until Captain Solo’s voice tore through her concentration. “You all right?” the smuggler shouted, picking clumsily through the rubble.

“Why are you still here?” Leia fired back from over Toryn’s shoulder.

“I heard the command center had been hit.”

“You got your clearance to leave,” the princess snapped. Solo’s distracting presence used to be a welcome one in this room, but Toryn shared Leia’s irritation now. The captain should have been long gone.

The fact that he wasn’t was…well, maybe some bets were getting won today.

“Don’t worry, I’ll leave. First I’m going to get you to your ship.”

C-3PO pounced on the opportunity to get more nagging in. “Your Highness, we must take this last transport. It’s our only hope.”

Leia let out a hiss. Toryn kept up her frantic flipping of switches as the princess staggered to the other side of the center, where Commander Chiffonage was using the only other operational comm station to coordinate what was left of the ground defenses. “Send all troops in Sector Twelve to the south slope to protect the fight—”

The devastating thunder of a blast tore away Leia’s voice. Toryn bent low over her station, covering her head against the rain of new debris. With her cheek pressed against the buttons, she felt like an animal pinned in a snare, kicking frantically to get free.

“Imperial troops have entered the base. Imperial troops have entered the base.”

Solo stepped up to the princess’s side, catching her arm with far too much gentleness for the middle of a war zone. “Come on, that’s it,” he murmured.

Toryn felt the pause in her bones. The moment the princess weighed everything they could still do against how much it would buy them. It was the calculation Toryn had been ignoring ever since the roof collapsed, and when at last Leia turned to Chiffonage and declared, “Give the evacuation code signal,” she felt as if all the air had been let out of her.

“And get to your transports!” Leia shouted as Solo all but dragged her from the room.

The first, wholly irrational thought that crossed Toryn’s mind was that Corporal Sunsbringer would kill to have seen that interaction.

The second, far-too-rational thought that chased it was that she’d just have to get out and tell the kid herself.

Toryn had all but expected to die with her headset on. It felt like throwing off the burden of an entire moon to slip it from her ears. She rose on unsteady legs, aches throughout her body barking reminders of all the places she’d hit the ground when she’d dived clear of the ceiling collapse. There was one last transport staging for evac.

Toryn Farr ran for it.

She tore through the crumbling remains of Echo Base like a wind across the ice flats, carried not by faith or love or conviction but by a scrap of barracks gossip—and damnit, that was enough. The Rebellion was filled with grand ideals, but a person’s mind wasn’t built to hold on to something so enormous when everything was crumbling around them. All Toryn could do—all she needed to do—was let the small things carry her convictions in a relay through the moments when it all grew too big to grapple with. When she skidded out of the tunnels and into the hangar, she swore the armored shell of the GR-75 was the most beautiful sight Hoth had to offer.

That was, until she spotted a familiar scrap of Chandrilan luck-cloth wound around the arm of a flight suit in the knot of injured pilots waiting to be loaded onto the transport.

Her muscles could argue later—Toryn broke into a sprint, sliding to her knees next to the stretcher. Samoc grinned up at her from beneath a worrisome burn that had already been slathered in bacta. “Rogue Six, reporting for duty,” her sister croaked. “Orders, Echo Base?”

Toryn threw her arms around Samoc and knew she’d found the next thing to keep her going. “Let’s get the hell off this rock.” She sat back and glanced up at the GR-75, her eyes catching on the letters etched across its hull.

With a rueful shake of her head and a thin smile, Toryn Farr prepared to board the Bright Hope.

A GOOD KISSC. B. Lee

Chase Wilsorr tugs on his clothes over his thermal layers, shivering in the cold morning air. Not that he can tell it’s morning aside from the 0400 blinking at him from his datapad. The barracks are dark aside from the soft glow of the screen, and he’s the only one unfortunately awake at this hour.