Ciena Ree had realized she was looking at her death for the second time.
The first time she looked death in the eye was on the Inflictor. She had watched the dunes of Jakku rise in the view screen from her captain's chair and thought that even this nowhere planet was beautiful in its desolation. The Dunes were larger than even the mountains of Jelucan, sand was blowing off their arches like snow would be blown from the peaks of Jelucan after she and Thane had rushed by in the V - 171. That fleeting image was enough to break her from the numbness that had overtaken her as she had ordered the evacuation of the Inflictor. Ciena had felt something then and she thought maybe it was the feeling all living things felt when realized death was coming for them, the spark of her own life somewhere deep inside her barely mended body—and she had accepted that life and the death that was to come.
But she lived.
The second time had been in her prison on Jakku, after the resistance had abandoned the outpost without freeing her.
She had been on Jakku awaiting trial for more than a year then. It seemed that The Republic—as the Resistance now referred to themselves—had more important things to do than collect prisoners from the outer rim for trial. Another glaring example of their inefficiencies, the Empire would have never allowed such a high ranking enemy to be ignored for so long. Ciena had a feeling that Thane had tried to prevent her trial from moving forward so that he could interfere. He still thought he could negotiate a lighter sentence for her, that he was destined to save her from consequences of her own making. Ciena found she could not speak with him about what was going to happen. She would plead guilty, her honor would allow no less. She had served the Empire willingly and she knew of their horrors. Ciena thought that was even more damning than those who served with the fervor and dedication of true patriotism. She had known it was wrong, and she had continued-she deserved whatever fate the Rebel Alliance dealt.
Thane had never had the ability separate his emotions from his duties, one of the reasons he had been relegated to elite flight and not a command posting after their time at the Academy. He didn't believe that she was guilty, even when that guilt tore her apart every day. Thane could only see her first waver honor as a crutch, he thought she used it as an excuse. He didn't understand that it was the only thing holding her fractured soul together. It was as if the sound in her abdomen had poisoned her very soul, the pain clawing up through her chest and into her limbs during the long hours spent reflecting. But Thane had left, he had been an elite flight pilot for a reason. He was valuable to the Rebel Alliance, and though he might have had a weakness when it came to her sentencing, she was sure he would serve their New Republic well.
The small squad of fighters still based at the outpost on Jakku had taken off in a particularly cold Jakku night, the cold seeping into her cell off the main hangar, the force field covering her doorway did nothing to insulate her her from the desert air. The X wings were rushing to a battle only a quick hyperspace jump away. Ciena had thought nothing of it besides a passing moment of irritation at how unorganized their mobilization was. Even from her cell down the hall from their hangar she could hear shouting and orders being repeated, nothing like the efficiency she had demanded during her time in command with the Empire. The resistance liked to think that giving freedom to its "volunteer" army made them superior to the Empire, but Ciena knew it just made more of them dead.
So she had tried to go to sleep, trying to keep her mind from seeing the stormtroopers and officers that would be dead by her captors hands. Ciena felt the guilt that always pressed on her shoulders most when they were mobilizing. She saw the faces of officers she had grav ball with, and the medical officers who had made small talk with her during her days of bacta treatment after Endor. Every time she found herself relaxing in her captivity, enjoying the small freedoms provided to her she remembered their faces. Ciena tried not to think about the death that was coming, because she couldn't help but mourn how fewer X wings always returned, and the volunteers seemed to be younger every time the base was sent reinforcements.
Ciena woke to silence.
Her cell was off the main hangar, and no matter what time in the cycle it was there had always been someone tooling with a damaged transport or repairing a droid. It took constant maintenance to keep their spacecraft maintained with the fine sands of Jakku wearing down every fragile component, but not a single person moved in the Hangar. When evening fell and the temperature dropped again Ciena realized that the hangar door was open, whoever had last exited didn't even try to close it, the doors fully exposing her to the cool night air of the desert.
On the third day she ran out of water.
She had some water on hand, which had lasted her the first day. Ciena realized how foolish it had been to continue consuming it as she had been, but she still hadn't realized that the Rebel fighters would just... leave her. Truth be told it hadn't even crossed her mind. She was too valuable a prisoner, and it also didn't seem to be the way of the rebellion. They prided themselves on their justice, their mercy. Were they really the type of people who would leave her to die of exposure?
By the second day Ciena had felt the arid air seep all the moisture from her body. Something that had seemed so inconsequential after the years living in the endless order and regulation of a star destroyer was what would determine whether she lived our died. She had always been posted to large ships, where each officer's bodily needs were prescribed by and consumed at the hand of a medical droid to be consumed. She hadn't even thought about how necessary water was to her immediate survival since her days in the Academy on Coruscant. Now it would be her death.
Ciena knew she was slipping, she could feel the war vibration of her body that meant she was alive begin to pick up, as if it should put the most effort into living in the last few moments before death. She idly thought about how it was funny she hadn't really acknowledged her own life until she faced death, once on the finalizer and now alone in a cell on a planet filled with nothing but scrap and sand.
Ciena ran her woolen tongue over the bloody cracks and valleys of her lips and wished that she had died with the finalizer. Kneeling on the floor in front of the force field which had kept her in her cell for the past year, she felt her strength give out and fell upon the shimmering forcefield separating her from the now sandrift strewn hangar, and pressed her hand against it. She remembered the one time when Thane had visited her, how he had pressed his hand to meet hers and the barrier had hummed with the heat of their two hands connecting. She had wanted so badly to push through the barrier and feel his hand in hers, to connect with him once more.
Her lips were cracked and bleeding, and the dryness in her throat was making even breathing painful. Her tongue felt like the thick wool of her prisoners shift, even her nail beds had begun to bleed. In the distant part of herself that still held her academy knowledge Ciena knew that these were signs that the end was near. She welcomed it, anything to end this pain and give her some relief. It was different this time, on the finalizer she had only had a few minutes to face her death and even knowing what she planned on doing it still was inconceivable that a ship as large as the Inflictor could actually be pulled down from its orbit. By the time she had finished the duties necessary to ensure the demise of the ship she had only had a few seconds to contemplate her own mortality before Thane had come, determined to keep her alive. Now she had had hours to contemplate her end, as she slowly accepted that the rebels were not returning, and no one was here to save her.
She would see Wynnet and finally tell her sister how wonderfully terrible it was to live. She would tell her of the Empire, and the Resistance. She would speak of Thane Kyrene and Nash Windrider, she would tell her sister about being in love with someone and grieving friends, she would describe the difference between the haunting grief she felt for an entire world and the drowning grief she felt for her Jude. She would tell Wynnet of how her honor was her greatest strength, the only compass she had in a galaxy where there were too many stories of pain and death and destruction to know any right from wrong. She would tell her of how her honor took her decisions from her and made her question herself more deeply than any of her actions did. Ciena was ready to die.
She rested her forehead next to her hand on the forcefield, the hum grew louder, and she idly wondered if it was meant to hold for an extended period. Her vision swam and darkened as if night had fallen despite the warm breeze from the noon Jakkun sun outside the hangar. The hum grew even louder as she leaned more of her weight against the forcefield, she couldn't even hold herself up she was so weak. Her head dropped down, and she felt herself slip down, the cool floor was sandy where her cheek rested on it, and she moved her hand up to draw circles in the small drift of sand that had accumulated on the edge of her forcefield. It felt so good to lay down, to rest her head on the ground after so long pressed against the tight wrongness of the forcefield.
Ciena stopped the rhythmic circles she had been making with her blood lined fingernails, and brought her fingers close to her face. Sand, something was important about the sand, but what? The hum had continued to grow in volume, and suddenly it was deafening.
The forcefield.
Ciena shot up, a bolt of adrenaline she thought had left her with the last of her hope at escape shooting through her. The sand was at her fingers, she had slid down after the forcefield had given out. She was free, she was going to live.
. . .
Star Destroyers were never meant to sit on a planet. They were assembled in space, their structures surprisingly fragile when subjugated to the full gravity of a planet's surface. That made their wrecks too difficult for the Empire to salvage more than the most valuable of components, and after the battle of Jakku the remaining empire. Forces had been too scattered to organize any sort of recovery.
A Planet like Jakku had been all but ignored by galactic commerce hubs since the time of the old Republic. But wherever a star destroyer fell, civilization would follow. There were billions of credits of parts that could be salvaged, but the work was hard and dangerous, and if you had any self preservation instinct you would stay far from the slowly decaying carcasses of the Empire's greatest weapons.
Ciena had left the hangar after a full Jakkun day—which was slightly longer than the Empire's standard cycle—spent drinking water and trying to gather strength. She was greeted by the site of hundreds of shacks and temporary shelters, small cargo ships and light craft for personal use where before there had only been the unending sand.
Ciena had hardly recognized the landscape outside of the hangar that had been her prison for nearly a year when she first walked out. An entire outpost had cropped up, probably due to the rebellions constant need for supplies. She didn't remember much from when she was brought to the Hangar, she was still shell shocked from being saved by Thane and then taken into custody, and the endless sand had been all around the solitary transport which I had been her initial prison. After a few days the hangar had been erected to stand as an outpost, but nothing to the effect of the shantee city she saw now.
Now Ciena dragged her wares from the Inflictor back to the small city of stragglers, and pondered how far she had fallen. The hanger where she had been prisoner had been picked clean for parts, and she had quickly realized that the only thing which had prevented her from dying of thirst in her cell was a raider who had heard over the holonet that the squadron posted at this outpost would not be returning. Seeing the opportunity he had taken the power cell and the most valuable ships and run. She supposed she could have attempted to make contact with the Empire, but besides the scrap from the Inflictor there wasn't a single Imperial seal to be seen on Jakku. It was as if the Empire had retreated overnight, and left even the worlds which had been most reliant on its order to fend for themselves. Predictably the planet had been overrun by smugglers and scrappers within the short year Ciena had been imprisoned.
So instead Ciena had dragged herself to the Inflictor, and picked the feathers from the carrion that her ship had become. Initially she was too weak to salvage the most valuable parts, and she didn't believe they had been reached by the other scavengers yet, few of them even knew the difference between a fuel cell and a lightbulb. The wreck was still collapsing in places, the structure was still unstable even after a year of its slow descent into Jakkun sand.
Her wound still ached, and it had taken her weeks to rebuild the stamina and physical strength she had possessed before a year was spent with nothing but holonovels and a square cell to move about. She had found a crashed transport close the Inflictor, and although it meant being farther from the temporary town and the junk smugglers who had taken to trading food portions instead of credits for the parts collected Ciena preferred the solitude. Her knowledge of the ship allowed her to find its hidden stores of rations and life support supplies, specifically designed so only Imperial officers could access them in the event of landing in a hostile territory. So she had spent the last few weeks regaining her strength from the nutritives and watching the Jakkun sun as it reflected on the Inflictor. She had run through the nutritives faster than expected, primarily because she had used a large amount of them to trade for a small speeder, which she could use to travel to and from the shantee city. Already the sun had returned her skin to its warm deep tone, one she hadn't seen in the years she had spent in space.
Today though she would be forced to the enter the town, she needed supplies beyond survival gear, and although the transport had a few mass produced clothing items for imperial officers, she didn't think it was a good idea to walk around in anything resembling a uniform. It had been weeks since the resistance left, but she had been a Captain, her face known to hundreds of thousands of Imperial soldiers. She had realized she didn't want the Empire realizing she was alive and well... free.
She had cut her hair shorter so that it could not be tied into a braid, and she often pulled a sand wrapping around her face, even on clear days to try and disguise her face.
"You know the real valuable parts come from inside the ships" the Junk trader said, he was a new one and Ciena had thought she would at least run her wares by him to see if he was any less of a crook than the others. They seemed to be cutting the value of external parts drastically, probably in an attempt to force more scavengers to venture into the interior of the ship, where more valuable components were probably still intact. "If you manage to get into say," the Crolute paused, he seemed to peer at her face a little closer "the aft A deck, subsection 3?"
Ciena's head shot up. The Crolute sneered.
"I knew it" he muttered and lunged across the table dividing them and grabbed Ciena's upper arm "Defector! I've caught one"
It was a then that she heard that sound, one that filled her daydreams and plagued her nightmares—the low scream of a TIE engines powering up.
Ciena reached into the loose robes she wore to keep herself cool in the sand and pulled out a blaster, one she always kept close, just in case she had told herself, she never wanted to wield the weapon again. The Crolute tried to grab her arm and she fired instinctively, ,her blaster scraping through his overflowing flesh. His grip released her, and she turned jumping onto her speeder, only to be stunned.
"Aaghet" her voice cracked. She realized how long it had been since she had spoken, all those weeks in the dunes by the inflictor, and she had never bothered so much as to say a word to the other scavengers. Her voice was raw, and hardly recognizable even to herself. She lay in the sand on her back, the wind gone from her lungs. She still heard the TIE and for the first time since she had escaped death at the resistance hangar, she felt the old tug of her honor on her soul.
Deserter. Coward. Traitor.
She had escaped the resistance, but she had not returned. She would be tortured, executed, her family on Jelucan would likely face reparations, she didn't think the New Republic had liberated them yet. She stared at the endless blue Jakkun sky, and thought that this would likely be the last time she was ever outside of a ship. The last time she felt that thrum of life she always sensed when on a planet, she was going back to the cold shell her life had been in space. It was only now that she realized her honor had kept so much life from her, she had been throughout most of the galaxy but only stood on the surface of a handful of planets.
A figure wearing the black armor of elite flight stood above her, and for a moment she remembered seeing Thane on their graduation from the Academy, how handsome he had been even then in his uniform. She had never liked the orange and white of his rebel fatigues, the dark
The figure reached down, removing his helmet so and placing it on his knee.
"Ciena?"
Nash Windrider had found her.
