12 The Epic: Hoth flashback

"You remember me?"

"Of course!" And Luke Skywalker actually hugged her in that tunnel made of snow packed walls. "You gave us the tour on Arda-2. I was told they found you, when they took apart that horrible Imperial labor camp. I wasn't with the ground invasion, but I helped with air support. I'm so sorry you ended up there. But I'm glad you're with us now."

When she met Luke again, she would understand the point of the whole chaotic struggle- the meaning of the Rebellion's effort through his eyes, beyond useless waste and killing. Her convictions hadn't really been with either side. Her point of view had simply been the task in front of her. And then there was Luke's enthusiasm. "You just got here right? Cm' on, I'll introduce you to people."

At the mess hall table, Luke and his friends were trying to one up another on miserable home planets. As they ate, their breath was visible and they sat untypically close to one another on the benches. The space couldn't be heated. The ceilings would melt. Within the base, only the bunks and refreshers had a semblance of warmth. "Well at least you had trees, Wedge. Cescily?"

"No trees, just moss."

"Chewie?"

The towering creature made a sound she couldn't understand. Cescily had never seen a Wookie before arriving at Echo Base.

"No complaints," Luke interpreted.

"Tell me about how hot it was on Tatooine," Wedge begged.

"I'll get to that, but the sand! Even if you had all the doors shut, you could come into a room a couple of weeks later, and a pile of sand would have formed there, in the middle of the room. Blown in though you'd swear there were no cracks under the door. A lot of critters though, for the lack of vegetation. Then there were the sand people."

"Sand people?" Cescily was curious.

"Yes. Tusken Raiders. Quite vicious. No going for evening drives. To look at the stars with a date." Luke smiled at her.

"Do Tusken Raiders inhabit other planets, beside Tatooine?"

"Not that I'm aware of."

Cescily leaned back in thought. Sand people took the life of Vader's mother. What a peculiar coincidence, that of all the planets, Luke and Vader came from the same one.

There was another similarity to Vader; the silver cylinder clipped to his belt. "Luke is a Jedi knight in training," Wedge explained. "It is the weapon of a Jedi."

"I see."

Luke was more responsible than anyone for the 1,200,000 lives snuffed out on the Death Star. And yet, somehow he reconciled his sanity and carried on - uniquely so with disarming sensitivity and humility.

There was a scarcely spoken bitterness aboard the Star Destroyer Executor, of the Death Star's destruction (a project of greater than 20 years of construction). Cescily had picked up on it and held in her thoughts too well to get all warm and cozy with the Alliance. It would work against her ability to be convincing. She would toil tirelessly, and do all that they asked of her to the best of her ability, but you couldn't hide whether or not your heart was behind it. And at that point she had looked around, took stock, and set her sights on Captain Leahmour. After her two and a half standard years with the Rebels, he had the distinction of being both a path to her freedom and the hindrance. He was all too wary of being exploited, and gaining his trust was slow going. So many sleepless nights she had spent believing she was going to be cast aside, when in fact, near the end Leahmour was proving more difficult to shake loose.

Outside, Cescily stared at empty early morning skies, still grey from the last blizzard to pass over. A pile of snow needed to be removed before she could move her frustrations onto the damaged barometer relay. It hadn't worked since relocation. Echo Base had been established just a month before. But even her couple weeks there had dragged on unbearably. It wouldn't be much longer before the Rebels figured out she wasn't capable of repairing squat. There would be no help from the Executor, and not even from the holonet.

But the very fact that she stood there meant all was already lost. An Imperial attack was coming. She could console herself that her immediate woes were soon to be trivial. At any day, any moment, the ice pack roof would blow in and smother them all.

Expectantly, she looked back in the direction of the base less than a thousand meters away. Luke was missing, and he wasn't even in there. His chances of survival slim to none. She dwelled a moment on his inescapable optimism, recalling the last time he was seated across from her in the mess hall, poking fun at the cold food.

Communication with the Imperials hadn't really been reestablished when she reached Hoth. Nearing power reserves, she had sent word of her location when she arrived, and they had sent back a couple of directives. Were they waiting for her to complete them?

She looked to the skies, and then back at the base again. It was at a head. Maybe even today. Then she was going to come out the other side (allowing for her survival). And would she be at ease with herself, as Luke? Or should she just come clean and warn the Rebels- prolong the war? She had come so very close...to speaking up. And when she was torn to shreds inside, she had sought out Luke, but he was nowhere to be found.

And now she was beside herself for another reason. Captain Leahmour had been messaging that he had something serious to speak with her about. At that point she was guessing the game was up.

But she saw Leahmour approaching on foot from the bunker, and if he was willing to come see her out there alone, perhaps he was suspicious without proof. She pulled the wire out of her pocket and reached for her wrench. It would be brutal and personal, but she'd never have to bed him again.

He was stronger and almost got the best of her. He had given up nothing, but she couldn't allow the time to really try. Three deaths now by her own hands. The indirect were too difficult to count. She wanted to hide in her quarters- in her bunk with her face turned to the wall. There was one last message for Vader: the Rebels could know in a matter of hours that their location was compromised.

Cescily was on shift. She stood in the dim beyond his office alcove, perfectly silent, but distracting none the less. Yet Palpatine didn't feel like dismissing her completely, as would have one of the other Courtiers. That was when the indulgence started. He would let her pass the time with the volumes from his personal library, to be 'conveniently near,' while he silently worked-writing books, reading reports, or fact checking to locate another precious Sith object.

Whereas Vader learned through firsthand experience, a large part of Palpatine's knowledge was gained by study. The texts of his library were unwittingly telling. Dark, very dark troubling material. Many were antique and actual books: Poems by the Croke Asenec. Ick. A few passages later, she put it back on the shelf. "Wasn't that banned?" That she knew, deeply impressed Palpatine. "…Something on the Sith…" She recognized a symbol on the cover as matching those on his burgundy velvet robe. He raised an eyebrow, but no matter; it wasn't written in a language she could read. Cescily pored over the few illustrations while he looked on from afar. He was surprised at himself, that he cared at all to gather her impressions of the materials. After a while, she seemed to notice and so settled down with a book on the history of the very Jedi temple they occupied.

For lighter tasks, he sometimes asked her put on music. They had come to realize they shared the same taste. She was perfectly content to stay in in the dim, windowless space, her back turned on Coruscant and the worlds beyond. Being penned in a cage with an idiosyncratic personality was preferable to many of the harrowing days she had endured. How very strange, that her quiet space had become one shared with the instigator of such upheaval, an unexpected sense of peace where her sins were absolved, because in comparison hers were nothing.