Burnout

4 ABY

Malastare

The first circuit I ever raced had been for my mother.

Most of her waking life had been spent trying to convince me to do something else with mine. 'Get a real job', she'd beg me. Work in one of those new shipyards that the Empire was constructing all of the time.

I would've listened to her now if I knew better. Would have kept my mouth shut and fused hydro-coils together for a living. But in those days I didn't care much for listening. After all, what fun was there in building ships if you knew that you could race one?

And oh, could I race. It was the only thing I was ever fully convinced I could do.

Back in those days I had my eyes on making some real money as a racer. With an illness as bad as ma's we were going to need it. So much of the color had gone from her face that it was going to take all the earnings from the Boonta Eve Classic just to buy some back. Her meds were too expensive in those days, any government programs that told you otherwise were a sham.

Somewhere between getting laid off from my second job and the pharmacy rejecting a revised payment plan on all the prescriptions I decided to wager the last of our savings on a new control vane for my swoopbike. Now she could hug the turns tighter than all the dancers on Nar Shaddaa put together. We were two months behind on rent and I was convinced that a stab at the Dragonbane Circuit was all it would take to change our fortunes for good.

Well, it did. I blew out a turbothruster in the second leg of the race, spun out right in front of all my cousins and family. No prize money. No medicine. No mother.

The second circuit had been for my brother.

After ma passed away it was me, him, and a stack of overdue bills taller than all of my flight manuals put together. As a kid I used to think money was there so you could go out and get what you want. A couple visits from the tax collector later and I realized it was only really there so you could give them what they wanted.

Those might have been the worst months. We used to have to eat the scraps at the noodle shop near our apartment. It wasn't uncommon to find a Twi'lek's headtail mixed in for flavoring.

I had to grow up fast for my brother, finally concede that maybe my mother had been right. Work at the shipyards helped me build up a nest egg for ourselves, gave me just enough extra money to play around with on the bike in my spare time. Turns out buying secondhand parts from the Toydarian that lived out of his cargo carrier was every bit the scam it sounds like.

Little did I know my brother had been trying to make some money on the side himself. Got himself tangled up with the wrong people. When the galaxy keeps throwing punches your way I guess you look to start throwing some back. A bunch of these Black Sun dropouts convinced him to run escort for one of the local gangs for awhile. I had been so busy with work that I didn't even realize what he was up to until he didn't come back home from school one night.

The third race had been for myself. At that point, I didn't really have anybody else left.

One drunken night too far gone I strapped a repulsor pod the size of the Senate Building on my bike and prayed that I'd make it past the second lap. I guess even the Force can have a sense of humor every once in awhile. Not only did I make it through the second lap, I muscled my way all the way up to the top three. Now there was interest from sponsors. Real, honest-to-goodness sponsors, some of whom promised lodging for races as far offworld as Nubia. It wasn't the sponsors I ended up listening to, though. It was the cigar-toting military recruiter.

The fourth race had been for the Empire. They had promised to give me something nobody else could: a purpose.

It didn't take long out of basic training for me to become part of the military's reconnaissance unit. It was boring paperwork and long tours at listening posts for the most part. In those days the military was big enough that the Empire simply didn't have enough rebels for all of us to shake a blaster at. Not until they decided to start building superweapons again, at least.

By that point it was all hands on deck, boots on the ground, and butts in the saddle. They dubbed us scout troopers, fashioned us with heavy-duty armor, and stationed us on the forests of

Endor

The 74-Z speederbikes they gifted us with were an entirely different breed from my Mobquet back home. These babies had been churned through the military-industrial complex, refined over the better part of two decades. No unsightly fuselage, no power cells that had been fished out of a trash compactor, not a circuit out of order.

Every cut was precise, every tailfin balanced perfectly. The material in the handle bars was worth more than the down payment on my house. If I had stayed with the shipyards back home I would have been stuck sculpting one of these bad boys, now I got to joyride in them.

That promise was all I ever wanted. All I ever needed, really. I'd run the greenwood during the day and drink through the night. I might have traded a few morals along the way, but that's a small price to pay for the way this galaxy smacks you around.

Case in point: two months into my usual speeder sweep around base me and my buddy get a call from one of the lieutenants. Apparently some dwarfnut with a laser sword repossessed one of our speeder bikes and was giving our boss the chase of his life. I don't know if you know anything about dwarfnuts with laser swords but there's only one guy that fits the description, and he's definitely not supposed to know anything about this place.

When I get off the call me and my partner exchange a pair of looks and have an uneasy wait ahead of us. Boss said he's aiming to lure the dwarfnut around the edge of our sector, asks us to help pick him off if he can't shake him. They're less than a klick away. Boss isn't shaking him.

I'm nervous. I didn't take this job to play hero against the Rebellion's top dog. They say that rocket jockey blew a hole through our first Death Star with a single proton torpedo. His mere presence on this place should be enough to make the shield generator we're guarding here just up and implode.

"You don't really think it's him, do you?" A voice chimes in beside me, desperate in its disbelief. "You know... him?"

My partner's question was a goad to make this all real for us. A goad I wasn't willing to take until I saw him with my own eyes. Invoking the name wouldn't do us any good if this was just some drunken tourist.

As if only there to negate the possibility, a trio of engines came roaring past us then. A blur of white armor and two blurs of green that each gave chase. It wasn't until we caught the glint of silver bobbing at his side that all our worst fears were confirmed. The metallic sheen of a blade hilt far too civilized to be one of ours.

The three of them were gone almost as soon as they had appeared, kicking up a trail of leaves in their wake.

The pocket of silence that followed their departure was almost too uncomfortable to break. Too uncomfortable for me, anyways.

"Boss..."

"That's him, alright," I finally decided at my partner's prompting. "That's Skywalker... You know, you're lucky that suit of yours have got a built-in filtration system, sergeant. With the tone of voice you're using you're probably gonna need it soon."

My partner just shook his head in turn, goes to tighten his gloves with a scoff. "What's got you feeling so confident all of a sudden?"

"They said Skywalker could fly, they never said he could race."

A certain level of risk always seemed to permeate every decision I had ever made. I guess that's what made it easier to kick my thrusters into overdrive and disappear back into the tangle of woods.

You don't have to worry so much in life when you never have any expectation of making it back.

End