Rebel
To the shift workers making the hour-long commute from their dormitory space-stations to the sprawling shipyard complex, the BBT-1 shuttles in which they travel seem more like mass-transit turbolifts than spacecraft.
Each is just a boxy compartment with twin doors at the front, containing a tightly-packed crowd of humans and aliens, all wearing nondescript grey jumpsuits, standing patiently. No-one attempts much conversation. The subliminal tremor of the antigrav impellers carrying them to their destination is the only background noise.
There is no cockpit, not even a droid-brain or a proper suite of sensors - just a locational transponder and a slave-circuit to control the drive; their simple flight plans are completely automated, with the entire flotilla being supervised from a row of computer desks aboard one of the guarding Star Destroyers.
Only the length of their journey hints at the distance they are travelling. The shuttles depart from the ten dormitory stations at 0455 hours, and dock simultaneously with the shipyard hub at 0520. But everyone is used to that.
Eventually, lights above the double doors blink into life, patterning through an abstract sequence which indicates that the shuttles are docking at the shipyard. The doors open into a brightly-lit corridor, and thousands of workers file out, combining into one huge, well-ordered group as they move towards the security checkpoint. Amongst the myriad different beings, the compact, short-haired girl who steps from shuttle K-3 is utterly nondescript.
"AR-327," she says, presenting her identity chit to the black-helmeted security guard. The man's only response is to check the disc with the scanner gun he holds, which answers for him with an authorising electronic beep.
"Turnstile three," the comm plug in her ear says, unnecessarily, before switching back to mood music.
She drops the tag back down the front of her undershirt, and joins the queue moving through the appropriate scanner gate. The cursory exchange is the only personal contact she will have in the two hours between leaving her children sleeping in their room and arriving at Imperial-9, the deep-space slipway where she serves her shift.
She still has a half-hour walk along the curving promenades of the transit hub ahead of her, followed by a ten-minute scrub in the industrial anonymity of the communal shower, before heading into her team-locker and changing into the tight armour of the spacesuit that is her protection for the length of her twelve-hour working shift - a shift which begins with another another forty-minute repulsor ride to reach the shipway.
Even with the length of her actual working day curtailed by that journey and the corresponding return trip, she still spends by far the largest part of her waking hours on the shipway, suited up in hard vacuum, welding together hull plate and installing systems modules. Commuting to and from the shipway, totalling over four hours at either end of her shift, comes second. Dorm time is relegated to third place, compressed into whatever part of the abbreviated off-shift between 2000 and 0430 she chooses not to spend asleep.
She does not complain. Nor does she feel any desire to do so. She isn't sure where she left behind the sense of sharp dissatisfaction which was once her constant companion, but she doesn't miss that part of her old self.
She builds Star Destroyers for a living now, following a tight, inflexible schedule of four months from keel-laying to commissioning. The ship currently taking shape is the third one she has worked on. Before that, she spent a year as a shaft-worker in an asteroid mine, the most mindlessly unskilled of all unskilled jobs in a shipyard system, swinging a cutting blade through the rock, and carting off the resulting rubble, just to open up new access tunnels for the extrator teams to reach the actual ore deposits.
And before that...?
Thirty standard months earlier, Bilbringi had simply been the quickest escape route on offer - the closest Imperial system to Coruscant, a fast way out for a pregnant girl with a fake ID looking to leave Alliance space in a hurry. She was surprised to discover that she was joining a well-travelled hyperlane for migrant workers, and that the Empire had processing arrangements in place to recieve them - the question of Alliance citizens taking the jump into Imperial Space wasn't anything she'd ever heard about from journalists or politicians or security experts, and she supposed the issue wasn't quite important enough to attract their attention, but every waiting area and passenger compartment along her route was busy, making clear that she had become part of a wider movement of sentients, and the people-runners were well-organized enough for the experience to be essentially collective, transforming her from an individual into a part of a movement.
Some of the migrants she had travelled with were running away from the Alliance's criminal underclass, or deserting from the military, or, like her, escaping from a messed-up personal life, but the bulk of them were ordinary industrial workers who simply had no place in the Alliance any more, replaced by droids on the production-lines and shipways when the big corporate conglomerates retooled after the Vong War.
She had been surprised, back then, by how many of them saw Bilbringi's shipyards as a destination. To her way of thinking, all that mattered was getting across the border, out of Alliance jurisdiction.
She hadn't planned to stay in-system - she had a vague idea of joining a freighter crew, maybe a ship heading for the Confederacy or a smuggler moving illegal cargo back across the border, or even signing on aboard a privateer with an Imperial letter of marque, but the Empire had other plans.
With twins on the way, and Imperial Customs unable to verify her fake ID, she had discovered she was stuck in immigration custody, forbidden from working legally, obtaining proper accommodation, or even formally entering Imperial territory; even so, she set to work, working to persuade her case officer to to accept the modest docket of academy grades, freight-crew experience and speeder licence from her fake ID, which would let her find legitimate work as a ground-pilot or a cargo tech, and making more discreet enquiries among the other immigrants, making a dozen contacts which might land her more interesting berths aboard faster ships.
She had been there for nine days, finding her footing in the busy anarchy of the Arrival unit aboard the Purgator, an accommodation hulk parked at the edge of the system, when Ensign Brill invited her to take a walk with him. She smiled, and followed, assuming he was going to ask her for some kind of bribe, but instead, he marched her to the far end of the ship, to what he described as the women's wing, and explained that she was being assigned new quarters for the duration of her stay.
She was grateful for her first proper shower in several weeks, and she was pleasantly surprised by how visibly pregnant the girl in the mirror had become, but she was less pleased when she was shown round her new accommodation. Block 8 was a dedicated dormitory for single females without valid ID files, berthed thirty to a cabin in triple-tier bunks stacked so close you could hold hands across the gaps between. Human girls were a very small minority, and she seemed to be the only one who wasn't from a distinctive culture like Emberlene or Socorro. The rest were even more foreign - Twi'lek dancers, Sullustan techs, Gamorrean bodyguards, and Shistavanen asteroid-miners.
There were droid guards on the exit, forbidding fraternization with the rest of the ship, and arguing with droids got nowhere. Eventually, she learned what had happened by catching the attention of one of the other Customs officers who dropped the girls off - her forged ID had been rejected, and her attempts to join a pirate crew had been noted with stern disapproval, but when her twins arrived, they would become Imperial citizens, and she would be granted limited residence rights as their immediate relation. The Empire would find her some sort of work so she could provide for them.
Until then, all she could do was wait; so she endured six months of enforced inactivity aboard the Purgator, losing her figure to the effects of pregnancy, a diet of cheap slop in the communal galley and trashy holonovels in the shared lounge of the dormitory, and an almost total lack of exercise. She simply hadn't know how to give her high-maninenance physique an adequate workout without using martial-arts and special-forces techniques that would immediately draw the wrong kinds of attention, and even if she could have figured out a new training routine, she was effectively confined to busy public spaces, with no room to even put down a stretch-mat. Her deliberate decision to close herself off from the Force to escape detection probably didn't help matters either.
She lost the last traces of her accent, along with what little sense of modesty or personal privacy she had retained. She cut her hair short, and was issued with a worker's grey coverall when her old clothes stopped fitting. She started to call the unfamiliar girl in the washroom mirror Fat-and-Lazy.
Everyone else just called her Reb, the Empire's generic nickname for a human from Alliance space. She was the only Reb out of the hundred girls she now shared her life with - so her new name stuck.
At first, she wondered if the whole experience was a deliberate attempt by the Empire to deconstruct her identity. By the time she gave birth to Vic and Vin, the Empire had succeeded. She was assigned to a communal dorm for young families on K-Station, and told to report for rock-breaking work, to earn the credits for her kids' support. In the Empire's eyes, she was qualified for nothing else.
She had fully given up on any attempt to get the Empire to recognize the accreditations from her fake ID, and she knew that all the promising leads for shipboard positions she had hustled had long gone cold. Then she made the mistake of volunteering for the asteroid mines rather than the usual grunt-work assignment on the ore-grading floor. She still wanted to get back into space. Instead, they handed her a hydro-punch, and put her on twelve-hour shifts in the sweaty, narrow rock-tunnels.
She was surprised, at first, by how quickly she adapted to her new role. Since then, two years of hard physical work have toughened and strengthened her physique in a new way - the inevitable result of her new career in heavy manual labour, first in the asteroid mines and then on the shipways, augmented by stim injections to build up her muscles and her endurance.
She continues to be surprised that men still find her attractive. She supposes that they have low standards, but she is starting to accept that strong and working class can be sexy in a girl, and she finds that many Imperials share her egalitarian attitude to low-maintenance hook-ups when their off-shifts coincides. She is dating a security trooper from the detention block on one of the Golan Platforms, who thinks that Palpatine and Vader were the good guys, but who doesn't mind a girlfriend with two kids fathered by some no-good Rebel husband, and a third from a mistimed liason with a shuttle pilot.
She used the enforced suspension from shift duty during the third trimester of her second pregnancy with Gilad to obtain her space-walk and tech-installation qualifications, and secure her reassignment from asteroid-mining grunt-work to her current skilled position as a shipyard worker. Her supervisor, a trim young woman with an accent that now feels distinctly superior to her own, approved her application on the basis that the higher shift-check of the shipyard assignment would allow her to eventually repay the hefty debts she was incurring during three months off duty. She supposes she could do more, but she has no desire to attract anyone's attention. The otherwise worthless fake ID she purchased before fleeing Coruscant did not offer any hint of her past as a combat pilot and a Jedi Knight, and if nothing else, the Empire appears to have taken her unremarkable civilian background for granted.
She is not a subject of the Empire - that is a privilege reserved for those who have made a certain level of economic contribution to the state, and passed through a demanding series of classes and exams, a status attainable for an ordinary shift worker like herself only after several more years of hard graft. And anyway, she is unsure she wishes to claim the benefits in the first place. She has no need of the privileges which naturalization brings - what's the point in personal hypercomm access when there's no-one you want to call, or the right to travel to different worlds when your work schedule is too tight to even fit in a day-trip to the resort asteroids at the edge of the system? She has better things to do with her limited spare time than study for the assimilation tests, and she prefers to keep the small surplus on her credit balance to spend on her three sons. As a rule, immigrant shift-workers like her only get round to becoming Imperial subjects after they retire.
But the Empire has become the place where she belongs, nonetheless. She is untroubled by the fact that her children, born in Imperial Space, are Imperial citizens by right of birth, and are being raised as such - Imperial programming on the HoloNet, Imperial lessons in the kindergarten, an Imperial concierge droid providing childcare in the dorm they share with three other immigrant families.
She is glad none of her children have the Force.
She is happy to have found a place where she can feel secure, and raise her kids, away from her broken family life, the contradictory demands of the Alliance, and the unattainable expectations of the Jedi Order.
As she starts to undress before her shower, she takes stock of herself in the wall mirror - a stocky human woman in a worker's loose-fitting coverall, straight dark hair worn back behind her ears and kept in place by a grey fabric band, streaked with the first hints of grey, dark eyes edged with creases at the corners, smile-lines at the corners of her lips.
She looks competent, content, and uncomplicated.
She remembers being Jaina Solo, but she no longer feels like the girl who fled from the Jedi Temple in such haste, and that no longer bothers her in the slightest.
She is AR-327 for all official purposes, Reb to everyone she knows socially, and mom to Vic and Val and Gilad.
And when she's on shift, she's not even sure she has a name of her own at all.
She bundles her clothes into a locker, keeping only the identity chit dangling around her neck, and palms a squirt of cleansing liquid as she steps into the steam-shower. Six brisk minutes later, she steps through into the team-locker, where several of the other members of her work-unit are already fitting themselves into their spacesuits.
Team Nine-DX-One-Four consists of eight human women who share the same height and build, grouped together because they all wear the same model of spacesuit. Even after a year, she does not really know any of the others. This suit-up session in the team-locker, and the corresponding strip-down when they return at the end of the shift, are the only times they are normally together outside of their spacesuits, and for those brief minutes, they are too focused on putting on their own armour to talk much to one another.
She recognizes the various physical features of the girls around her in the team-locker - dark skin, blonde hair, a slave tattoo, but there is little point trying to relate those details to the suited figures she works with on the shipway. Once they are armoured-up, they are essentially identical.
Each suit has an individual number - One through Eight - and those are the identities they will wear when they are working on the shipway, automatically superimposed as a holo-glyph in each other's visor HUD; but the girls are required to suit up on a first-come basis, so they do not get to keep the same suit, or the same number, from one day to the next - their designations are randomized by the arbitrary order in which their counterparts on the night-shift put their gear in the cleaning bay, and the unsystematic sequence in which they enter the team-locker and pull them out.
She checks her number as she pulls on her helmet. Today, she is Suit Five.
Once suited, their body language is defined by the joint range of their identical gear, and the way they hold their tools is dictated by the precise fit of armoured gauntlets around matching handgrips. Even when you stand close enough to see the face behind someone else's visor, they look like an abstraction.
The comm tech in their helmets is low-quality, discouraging socialization - a single open channel, designed primarily for interaction with the supervisor-droid A.I. networked in their suits and the uniformed administators overseeing them from a comfortable control deck near the top of the shipyard hub. The individual officers' voices in their earpieces are clear and distinct, but their own answers are all filtered to the same flat tone by their crude vocoders. Any attempt at personal interaction while on shift is answered by a brisk, and very public, rebuke.
In any case, their need for human contact is dulled by the stimulant injections which help them focus on the demanding technical aspects of their assignment, and provide the stamina to see them through the gruelling schedule.
They are there to work.
She jabs herself with the injector, prepping her physiology for work, opting for five doses rather than the usual three. She has a tough shift ahead of her - they are due to complete the pilots' quarters on the flight deck today, which means eight hours fitting a maze of power cables, turbo-vents and computer hardware into the structural frame of the cabins and corridors alongside the ventral bay, and then four hours welding the deck and bulkhead panels in place.
They will not leave the shipway until they are done, not when they are scheduled to complete a main assembly phase on this shift, and they will probably be late in finishing, which will mean they have to take the Late Bus - the slow shuttle that carries back the crews who miss the main flotilla, waiting at the hub until every team-unit has rotated back from the shipways, and then calling at each dormitory platform in turn.
The Late Bus will mean a rare chance for team One-Four to be together outside their spacesuits, as they scrub down in an empty shower hall and troop back down the long corridors together; but by the time they finish an extended shift, they are all too exhausted to pay much attention to each other, personalities and social skills suppressed by the extra stim-shots they have taken to keep their focus sharp. Sometimes, she relies on the droid voice from her comm plug to remember what she needs to do. The drug is designed to clear from a worker's system by the time they get back to their dorm, assisted by the blue pill they are handed by the security trooper at the gate when they depart the hub, but the come-down effect only fully kicks in towards the end of the ride back. The best thing to do during the protracted journey is to work on memorizing the schedules for their upcoming shifts.
And anyway, the other girls are still strangers - they do not carry their identities with them when they're in their spacesuits. She doubts she would recognize any of them if she met them off-duty, wearing civilian clothes. The two girls who live on B-Station seem close when they leave together, but perhaps she is imagining that, and anyway, she is excluded from such intimacies. The girl from H-station, Jia, has asked her round a few times, offering to split the cost of the long cab-shuttle ride back to her own dorm, but even if she was in the mood, she can never make the time. K-Station is out at the end of the loop, and even as things stand, she knows from experience that she might not get home until past 2130.
But that will still mean an hour or two with the boys, and a drink with Jat, before she hits the mat for a few hours' industrial-strength sleep.
The clang of the outer airlock doors demands her attention, and the girls of team One-Four turn towards the starry vista which is being revealed, then step forward into the depths of space itself. With the work-unit already suited up for hard vacuum, there's no purpose in allocating a shuttle to take them out to the shipway - they simply ride out in open space on a cargo sled, alongside the components they'll spend the shift installing.
She steps forward to one of the travel points, locking her space boots into the deck clamps, and with armoured hands, she flips open the interface port on her armour, picks up the charging cable, and sockets the connector into place. She feels the heat warming her body as the plug starts charging up her power pack from the sled's power core. A moment later, the HUD inside her helmet flashes into the colourful activity of a startup cycle, but once she's run through the reboot checks, she puts the lively holoscreens away, so that only the perfect transparency of her faceplate visor separates her from the surrounding night sky, and she looks out towards the shipway, and the brightly-lit hull of the ship she is assigned to build.
The Imperial cruiser looks beautiful, the triangular hull essentially complete, and the the half-built superstructure instantly recognizable - the terraced armour of the upperworks is in place, and the bridge wings of the command tower are taking shape. The heavy turret assemblies are not yet in place - she will start to assemble those tomorrow.
Even as she trips into the altered state of consciousness into which she will be locked for the next twelve hours, in which circuit diagrams and calibration procedures are easier to remember than her own name, she still has space for abstract sensations - she is aware of the all-surrounding beauty of space, her own infinite smallness, and the flawless majesty of the Star Destroyer's design.
She has become a small component of the production-line which builds ships like this for the Imperial Starfleet. She feels a sense of pride every time she heads out to the shipway.
She has no regrets.
...
Some notes - this was tricky to write; the Empire finds objectifying people very easy, but I didn't want to go very far along that route. The question of how to handle her Force-sensitivity is one I've dodged - earlier drafts had her taking suppressants which contributed to her sense of transformation, but that felt too complicated and too oppressive. Similarly, the challenges of her no-ID status have been somewhat skirted over, and in the latest major edit I made, I tried to suggest a bit more human contact among the work team, though I'm not at all sure about that.