Mice on the Moon

There's a funny thing I've come to understand about mouse droids. When one of them knows a secret they all know the secret.

When I got assigned to research how a farmboy was able to singlehandedly cause the destruction of the all-powerful Death Star (a purely academic pursuit, I assure you), it was with some hesitation. Was analyzing failures of a past regime really where our efforts were best placed?

Upon further investigation into the incident, I found out a much sadder reality about mouse droids. When one of them decides not to share a secret, none of them will.

Tracker was the first droid to discover something was wrong.

He had been working down in the sanitation chambers at the time, scrubbing the decks after a rather large squid monster had squeezed its way through a trash compactor. It was in the midst of this clean-up that he came upon another alarming discovery - an exposed exhaust port.

There was no room for sloppy engineering efforts aboard the almighty Death Star. He inserted his proboscis tool into the vat to see what the problem was. Needless to say, his findings prompted the following relay:

'All exhaust ports lead to oblivion.'

Dusty received the prognosis, but she had bigger problems to contend with.

Namely, the fact that her master, the Grand Moff himself, was embroiled in scandal with a saucy Twi'lek he snuck aboard after his last orbit around Ryloth.

Now, Tracker's transmission was the kind of information the Moff would be all ears to hear, but his Twi'lek mistress was threatening to go public with his sexual exploits if he didn't better accommodate her needs.

Not wishing to stir further trouble, Dusty made the executive decision to forward the problem over to Oz instead. Surely he'd know what to do.

Oz had a good head on his wheels, there was no doubts there.

He also had the small matter of a captive Alderaanian Princess to keep track of. Being the most reliable droid of his make and model, both the Grand Moff and Lord Vader had entrusted him to stay posted at the Princess' cell door. While the Grand Moff might have been on the verge of career suicide, Vader was not an authority figure that Oz had any intentions of ever crossing.

As such, he did not feel particularly comfortable reporting on Tracker's findings. Not for now, at least.

When Corion came whizzing past on his hourly patrol he heard out Oz's plight. The fatal flaw, the dutiful guard, even the Grand Moff's bedroom proclivities.

All the while there were boots storming towards them both. Big, ugly boots that belonged to a smuggler, a Wookiee, and that accursed farmboy. Gauging the trail of death the trio had left in their wake, one could assess that they were here to rescue the Princess.

As Corion bid Oz farewell and retreated from the scene he had two messages to share - one about an exhaust port, and one about a prison breakout.

The next recipient of the doomsday message was the Death Star's central data processing unit.

Corion didn't exactly have many better means of communications when all his superiors were too busy trampling through the halls to meet other threats. All he could do was profess the same words to the thousands of crewmembers onboard: 'All exhaust ports lead to oblivion.'

Corion was unsure who would receive the message first. The data-line was decoded, torn apart, retransmitted and primed for distribution to every corner of the battle station.

As fate would have it, a certain Jedi Knight would answer the call.

Ben Kenobi was no friend of the Empire.

He had stowed aboard the Death Star with the farmboy and company, making him every bit the traitor the rest of that lot was. The one thing he had going for himself was that he was a far better strategist.

While his compatriots were shooting up the place he had been busy trying to shut off the battle station's tracking beams. In the process he came across some encrypted data that he didn't see any harm in altering.

Where all exhaust ports had once led to oblivion, they now led to 'Heaven'.

There's another funny thing I've come to learn about mouse droids. They don't believe in the afterlife.

When the doomsday message was next disseminated, it was by a dubious mouse droid by the name of Echo.

The sagely droid had lasted long enough to know when he was being sold a wampa in shaak's clothing. If heaven was just a long road home than oblivion wasn't much further. Echo had no intentions of experiencing doomsday.

It was time to take the information of a flaw in the battle station to his superiors and see what they would make of it.

"Exhaust ports?" bellowed Lieutenant Tanbris when he first heard the news. "We've got a bloody station under attack and you come to tell me about exhaust ports? Fek right off you worthless scrap."

Perhaps this goes without saying, but Lieutenant Tanbris did not survive the later destruction of the Death Star. Nor did Tracker, nor Dusty, nor any of the other mouse droids that had so diligently shared their findings with their human superiors.

It's been said more than once that 'loose lips sink ships'. Given the circumstances, it might be fair to ponder whether the inverse was also true.

When I came to the end of my Death Star research project I was a bit hesitant to share my discoveries.

General Hux likely wouldn't be amused to hear that the battle station we were designing Starkiller Base in the image of had been destroyed by a mixture of Jedi machinations and bureaucratic incompetence.

I decided to hold onto my research for the time being. This time it was destined to work. This time we built a battle station that's here to stay. This time we'll be sure to hear out the droids.

Third time's the charm, as they say.

End

Author's Note: This oneshot was written as a part of the Writers Anonymous Drabble Challenge.