Марта Уэллс - From a Certain Point of View

Why Lord Vader had wanted the prisoner tortured, Deena didn’t know. Orders were orders and it was hardly unusual treatment. Sometimes you had to extract information by force, and then once you had what you wanted, you kept going, just to make sure they really were telling the truth.

But the session with Captain Solo had been different. Lord Vader hadn’t asked any questions—in fact, he hadn’t even stuck around, apparently happy to leave his trusted bodyguards to their work.

Deena wasn’t entirely blameless. She knew that. She’d done her part, making sure the prisoner had been secure in the harness, making sure one of the electrode probes was correctly seated after all the trouble the machine had given her and FS-451 as they’d struggled to reassemble it once it had been unpacked from the shuttle.

FS-451 had operated the device, lowering the prisoner’s cradle onto the interrogation machine. Deena had stood back and closed her eyes and listened to the man scream and imagined the smile growing behind her fellow stormtrooper’s helmet.

There was no point to it. Enhanced interrogation was one thing. Torture for pure, sadistic pleasure was something else entirely.

It wasn’t war. It was criminal.

So Deena had closed her eyes and listened to the screams and then listened to FS-451’s low chuckle as he turned the machine up and up and up. When they were done, Deena helped unstrap the prisoner and carry him back to the holding cell, where they found his Wookiee companion trying to reassemble their golden protocol droid.

Oh, FS-451 was good at his work. He’d taken the prisoner to within a micron of death, and there wasn’t a mark on his body. FS-451 had been quiet after that, his lust for pain, for meting out punishment to rebel scum, temporarily sated.

It was quiet in the freezing chamber. Deena watched the Wookiee, but he seemed calm now. Tig hadn’t returned from down below. Deena hoped she wasn’t hurt; it was a fair drop. Lord Vader left without an escort—Deena’s squad was to remain in the freezing chamber while the Ugnaughts reset the facility. She watched as FS-451 took a keen interest in their work.

It was now or never. With FS-451’s attention elsewhere, Deena left her post and headed down the access stairs leading to the foot of the main freezer unit. At the bottom, she found Tig, unharmed but with her white armor covered in black grease. She was examining her E-11 blaster, and looked up as Deena approached.

“Damn thing got busted in the fall,” said Tig. “Safety’s jammed.”

Deena thought a moment, then made her decision.

“Here.” She offered her own weapon to Tig. “I need to head to the shuttle to prepare for Lord Vader’s departure. I’ll swap out a new one for you from the armory.”

Tig hesitated, looking down at the offered blaster. Deena held her breath. She hadn’t thought it through. Swapping weapons was against protocol. She could be reported. But Tig was a friend, and they’d done their fair share of protocol infringement in the past, hadn’t they? Why would she be suspicious?

Tig’s comm clicked back into life. “Good call,” she said. They swapped weapons, and as she headed away, Deena gave her comrade a knock on the front of her breastplate with the back of her gauntlet.

“I’ll be as quick as I can,” she said, and then she left, not looking back, knowing that was the last time she would speak to Tig or anyone else in the squad again.

—

She found a public bathroom, locked herself inside, and sat in silence for minutes, or hours, she wasn’t really sure.

But she needed the time to think, to plan. It was too late to change her mind. The decision to leave had been made, so what she needed to figure out now were her priorities and a plan of action. Her first task was a simple one: She had to get out of the city, alive.

But…beyond that? There would be time to come to terms with the path she had chosen later, she knew that, but she also knew it was important to keep her future in mind, even if it was unknown, undefined.

She was good at what she did—that’s why she was here in the first place. She was a soldier. A survivor. She had skills she could use, and she still had a part to play in the events that were threatening to tear the galaxy apart.

It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. But she knew she could do something .

Something good.

Deena sat a few minutes more, taking long, deep breaths. Then she got to work.

—

In the tiny cubicle, she stripped off her armor down to the black bodysuit, which she then checked in the mirror. The bodysuit would do just fine, nobody would know who she was or what she had been. Her red hair was cropped to regulation length, but having seen the fashions of the city’s citizens, it didn’t strike her as looking unusual. A bigger problem was being recognized by her former colleagues—few troopers outside her own squad had seen, or would remember, her face, and while Xander, Ella, and Riccarn were still on the Executor , being spotted by Tig or FS-451 would be a problem. She’d have to be careful. She’d be able to recognize them, even in their armor, close-up, but it would be far harder to pick them out among other stormtroopers from a distance. Getting caught wouldn’t just mean arrest. She knew what the Empire did to those who betrayed the cause, and she wouldn’t put it past FS-451 to make a personal plea to Lord Vader to take charge of her interrogation himself.

So yes, she’d have to be careful, and she had to get out of the city, fast. Her odds of survival diminished with each passing moment she spent here.

—

The toilet itself was a blocky contraption, the main unit surrounded by various attachments enabling it to be used by a variety of different species. Deena knelt in front of it and, with a little effort, managed to pry the unit’s side panel off. Inside was a mass of tubing and sealed cisterns, but there was enough room to squeeze the component parts of her armor inside. The only thing that was too bulky was the helmet. Deena considered for a moment, realizing she couldn’t just walk around the city carrying it. So she stood and placed it on top of the toilet’s lid, then took Tig’s broken blaster and stuffed it as best she could under her top, checking again in the mirror—if she held her arm by her side, over the mass of the blaster as it stretched out her top, it was…completely obvious what she was hiding.

Deena sighed. She really didn’t want to leave it behind with the helmet, but she couldn’t just wander around the city carrying an E-11.

Turning it over in her hands, she partially disassembled the blaster, slipping the sight off and separating the main body from the grip. She tucked the grip into her waistband and slid the sight into the top of one boot. That just left the barrel and main body, which at a glance looked like a random piece of machinery and which nobody would take any notice of at all.

At least, that’s what she told herself. Then, as she activated the door control to leave, she hit the MAINTENANCE REPORT button. Once she was outside, the door slid closed and the red light over the door switched to blue: out of order.

Squeezing the blaster barrel rather self-consciously in one hand, Deena walked briskly away.

—

Deena stopped and took stock of her surroundings. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t even know how she’d gotten there. She’d been wandering in a kind of daze; as soon as she realized this, she snapped herself out of it. A lack of focus was an easy way to get caught—by, for example, the squad of stormtroopers who were marching toward her across the large plaza she was now standing in.

The sight of the troopers made Deena freeze on the spot, but only for the briefest moment. Fighting to control the nausea in her stomach, she forced herself to move, ducking across to one of the tall lampposts that lined the open-air boulevard that circled the square.