Rusting
She slumbered.
Sand piled in crevices and corners. Swirling drifts languidly draped over her scarred skin. It darkened and adhered to the trails of grease and coolant that streaked her hull, allowing a hardened crust to form along sensitive hydraulics and sensor points. The fraying tarps covering her drive vents flapped uselessly in the scorching wind.
The slowly corroding hulks of her enemies littered the landscape about her dozing frame. Their hulls hollowed, burnt and haunted. Old foes slowly eviscerated by the local scavengers. The remains of her allies were here too, their noble sacrifice evident by the towering hunks of Imperial durasteel that lay splayed and gutted among them. Rusting.
So long ago…
Nearly a quarter of her lifespan had passed since she had soared in battle amongst them here. Streaking along the hulls of Star Destroyers, a whirling grey blur of velocity and firepower. Her quad turrets pounding mercilessly at any enemy fighter daring to cross their sights and all the while weakening the defenses of the monolithic enemies beside them. The motions of the combatants combined deadly dance resulting in the slow spectacular tumble of the Imperial ships into the gravity of the wasteland beneath them.
Her circuits momentarily flickered with a microburst of electrical memory. The exultant warwhoop of her Corellian captain resounding back through the reams of data from that battle as surely as it sounded through her corridors back then. The play of his dexterous fingers across her board, coaxing every nano particle of power from the drives. They were of the same jet-fueled blood, the same birth-world, the same soul.
A digital flutter went through her logic circuit. If she could sleep, she could have a soul. Right?
Had she chosen this fate? She didn't know. 'Choice' was not something attributed to her kind. Calculations and data analysis could provide a set of probabilities on events or strategies. But unless it was vital to the function of her mechanical components she was supposed to be helpless, totally lost to those who sat at her controls. Her fate was completely out of her hands. Never tell me the odds.
At least apparently.
They had separated, she knew. The heroes of Yavin and Endor gone from each other. Nearly all of them split in a different compass direction. The pain of their parting as acute as the tragedy that had perpetrated it. A gradual sundering of the bonds formed almost forty standard years ago. Bonds forged in war, loss, redemption and rebirth. She even had been informed in a data burst by that damned 3P0 unit that the close companionship of the two droids, over three quarters of a century together, had also collapsed. The plucky R2 astromech powering down into a memory defragmentation process that could last years given his hundred year-long uninterrupted memory cycle.
Her own memory banks too tipped at full. Over a century of her sins and heroics buried under navigational data and cabin atmosphere composition reports. Every being that had set foot in her ancient womb recorded by their use of oxygen, exhalations, the timbre of voices in her microphones, their weight on her loading ramp, the biological data in her medical bunk, and even the shifting pressures on her frame as the beings moved along her decks was in her deep memory logs. She could tell who was at her controls by the speed and pattern of their movements across the glowing console as much as their hand print on the hatch access.
And now she was back here, also now a legend separated from that storied group, from their family (her family), from her Captain. Resting, no, rusting, in this graveyard of metal, sand and despair. The droids gone; the Gambler, the Jedi, the Princess, the Wookiee, and her beloved Captain…All gone. Her corridors empty of voices all but for the whisper of memories and sand.