XXII. A Day to Celebrate
Gendered grief among humans was the oddest of things. In the smuggling world, males and females seemed to take on whatever roles kept them alive: their clothes and mannerisms were nearly uniform, to the extent that they sometimes fooled Chewbacca's eyes, and only his razor-sharp sense of smell could tell the equally hairless human sexes apart. Keeping a wary eye on the civilian passengers as the Falcon sped away from the Death Star, he understood perhaps it was not so everywhere.
The young male, Luke, was from the farthest reaches of the Outer Rim, one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest worlds. The young female was very clearly from one of the wealthiest houses and families in the Core. Maybe that had something to do with it; maybe not. But in the space of a few minutes they taught the Wookiee that here, in more standard human societies, males were socialized to be warriors and females to be nurturers. It was something he'd ask Loyal Han Solo about one day. Han had been shot at by many human females in his travels; if they were not normally raised to be warrior-caste, Chewbacca now wondered what their fights could possibly have been about.
The boy, having lost a single very old comrade-in-arms, was inconsolable. Slumped over the Dejarik table in abject grief, he was comforted by the girl who had lost her home, her family, her entire world, everyone she had ever known and all of their kin. He sensed an incredible strength in both of them, but there was no question: these hardest of moments were what she did best. He wondered for the first time, but not for the last, why the human females, so equipped to withstand excruciating pain and possessed of such quick little bodies in a blaster-wielding society, were casted to be caregivers, and big warm loud males the warriors.
He touched them both with exceedingly gentle paws as he passed, as if to model for the male what it was like to share in the grief of others as well as his own.
"How are we doing back there, pal?"
Chewbacca started up at the sound of Han's voice. Remembering his errand, he hurried to the power bay, hydrospanner at the ready, and wrenched off the converter cover as quickly as he could. The sound he made in response was not a proper word in Shyriiwook, but clever Han Solo understood it just the same.
"Nothing?" he called back.
Chewbacca hustled back to the cockpit. "Power converters were burned out fighting the tractor beam," he warbled. "The coils may heat up one or two systems, but we're not making a lot of fast-twitch adjustments."
"No dogfights?" Han pouted. "I love a good dogfight."
"Not without precision power controls," said Chewbacca. "This ship is going to handle like a garbage scow."
"If we hit sentry orbit, they'll blow us to bits," said Han. "How long till you can give me a jump to hyperspace?"
"Without slotting in the new converters?" Chewbacca lowered his lip into a frown. "A few minutes at best. L3's offline with no convertible power to the main banks. The Class 2 hyperdrive runs on standard, but I'll have to do some of the connecting calculations longhand."
Han's eyes betrayed his fear as he looked toward the edge of the Death Star's sentry orbit.
"We don't have that kind of time," said the smuggler. "You think that kid can shoot a cannon half as well as he shoots his mouth?"
"He'd better," Chewbacca warned. "The missiles are offline without the converters."
Han cursed. "No L3, no missiles... we got anything that isn't offline?"
Chewbacca shrugged. "Deflector shields, the main turrets, and whatever came with the ship."
Han smirked out of the corner of his mouth. "Great. So, landing gear, sublight, the Class 2, and if we're real lucky the refresher still flushes."
Chewbacca looked down at his friend. "You should get on the guns, too," he said. "We're a flying brick without the starfighter mods. A good pilot's no use up here."
"A great pilot," Han muttered as he plugged a set of emergency jump commands into the computer. "Okay, bounce us a few light-hours out, soon as we're able. Those TIEs are sublight-only; that's far enough to keep them off our tails until we can recalculate for wherever this base of hers is."
"I don't like jumps into unknown space," said Chewbacca.
The sensors rang: enemy ships. Chewbacca groaned in protest but started the calculations.
"Come on," Han urged. "It's space. Big and empty. I'm sure the landscape hasn't changed much in the last standard da—"
The pair reeled in their seats as a fist-sized chunk of Alderaan's iron-nickel planetary core bounced hard off the front mandibles. Chewbacca huffed a wordless sound Wookiees only make when they're right about something.
"You've got a point," Han admitted. "Maybe put us clear of that."
Chewbacca looked back toward the guns uncertainly just as the ship profiles flashed on the little monitor.
"We're coming up on the sentry ships," Han said. "Hold 'em off! Angle the deflector shields while I charge up the main gun."
Like that, brave Han Solo was off running. "Hold them off?!" Chewbacca barked resentfully. He twiddled the stick. The notoriously lithe Millennium Falcon, operating now on the standard thruster array of a cargo ship, canted slightly and slowly toward port, then slightly and slowly to starboard as he wrenched it back.
"To spice with it," he growled, and started the hyperspace calculations.
As the males crawled into the gunnery pods, the female rushed to the cockpit. She looked over the dizzying array of controls in confusion.
"Is there anything I can do to help?" she asked.
"Not much," the Wookiee replied. She looked at his lips, squinted her eyes as if it would somehow help her listen harder.
"No?" she asked. Chewbacca pointed to the stick. That much of the console, at least, she understood. She looked over the targeting displays, locking onto incoming fighters with a missile system that was decidedly offline.
"If you say so," she muttered, and tested the stick. At first she was barely sure it responded at all. "You're kidding."
Chewbacca saw the first visual sign of the fighters as they whizzed past overhead.
"There!" he shouted. Leia hit the intercom.
"Here they come!" she warned.
The next few minutes were a harrowing trial of opposing virtues. Above and below the Falcon's timeworn fuselage, blossoms of gunfire erupted from twin cannons as the young men took on the circling fighters in a flurry of action, egging each other on through the commlink as they spun and blasted frantically at the fighters. In the cockpit, pinned under heavy fire and restricted to the handling of a commercial freighter, Leia steered the ship in desperate, clumsy movements to avoid the worst of the crossfire while Chewbacca aided the backup navicomputer with manual calculations—sometimes punched in using the console instruments, sometimes literally counted on his massive, furry fingers. She was doing extraordinarily well, Chewbacca realized, at guiding the ungainly ship out of harm's way just before the eerie green plasma of Imperial blaster fire tore through its weakening shields. The radiant effect of their ion engines sent shock waves through the deflector shields when they swooped too close; the magnetic interference echoed through the hull as an unearthly, monstrous howl. It was a sound that had frightened Chewbacca to his bones in the atmosphere of Kashyyyk, and he was disappointed to have no reprieve from the horror howl of the ships even here, in the supposed silence of space.
Through it all, Leia and Chewbacca continued their work in silence and diligence. It felt for long moments like a desperate last stand—until, bit by bit, the gunfire began to lighten. Solo was an accomplished shot and well trained in the use of his own turret; and amazingly enough, the boy was a crack shot with uncanny intuition.
"We might get through this," Leia breathed.
"Shields are holding," said Chewbacca. "The last fighter won't get us."
"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't understand you."
"I'm used to it," said Chewbacca.
She shook her head helplessly as she banked the ship: with lateral controls unresponsive, she plunged the nose downward, putting the last fighter in line with Han's rooftop cannon. Tracking it with keen eyes, he blew it apart in a shower of sparks.
"That's it!" Luke shouted over the comm. "We did it!"
"We did it!" Leia shouted. Forgetting herself, she embraced the Wookiee in the joy of the moment.
"Victory!" he barked. "Wait…"
With his nose against her oddly-shaped head-fur, he sensed a strange familiarity to her. Beneath the sweat and trace chemicals of blaster fire, beneath the lingering stink of the Imperial trash compactor, she had the scent of the old man about her. She was in the prime of her life, and he at the end of his—but their kinship was unmistakable to him. Ben, they had called him. He wished now that he had asked the old man for their whole story. All he had cared about, at the time, was money for Han.
"How're those numbers coming?" Han asked through his headset. "A couple of sentry fighters are one thing. We've got about two minutes till they scramble a squadron."
"Ready to go," huffed Chewbacca. "The first jump will give us some breathing room."
"Alright, hit it," Han ordered. "We'll get our final destination from the after the jump. I don't want to stick around and see where they keep the rest of their fighters."
"You coming up?"
"Don't wait for me," Han said, frowning. "I've gotta clean some debris out of the lateral control access panel. Some big, pompous, golden, fussy debris. Just get us out of here."
Chewbacca fed his manual calculations into the last parameters of the navicomputer. Red half-finished calculations blinked a friendly green as Chewbacca's missing numbers helped the little backup drive set its tenuous hyperlane vectors.
Through the cockpit window, her manual controls shot, Leia stood paralyzed, watching the eerie gray globe of the Death Star as it skirted the edge of the window. They had come round to face it while evading the fighters, Chewbacca realized. It might have been the first time she'd seen it from the outside. He smelled the fear in her, smelled the exhaustion—then, beneath them, traces of something that twinged only the faintest ghost of his memory, something from childhood better left forgotten.
Imperial torture drugs. Those monsters.
"Forest floor," he cursed under his breath. He caught her as she finally fell.
"Run," she managed to breathe. "We have to run." Remembering himself, Chewbacca fed the computer's calculations into the drive systems and engaged the hyperdrive. He lowered the little woman gently into the captain's chair as the sky streamed away into a phosphorescent haze of freedom.
"You're free," said Chewbacca. "You're safe now."
Leia tried to stand, then sat and composed herself when it was clear she couldn't.
"Rest," urged the Wookiee. "You shouldn't even be awake in this condition."
"I don't understand you," she breathed. "I'm sorry."
Chewbacca moved a paw in front of his face, blinking his eyes.
"I don't suppose you understand me, either," she sighed at last. "It's just as well. I couldn't say this if you did."
Chewbacca cocked his head.
"I can't do this," she said. "I can't—after what I've seen, after all that's happened. I…my father's mission…" Salty tears came rushing to her eyes.
"Ben believed in more—" Chewbacca began, then stopped. It was no good trying. He nodded sympathetically.
"My father's dead, now," she said. "My father, my mother, my sisters. Everyone on my world. My world. I…can't see any hope after that. Against that thing. The numbers we had…we lost almost our whole force at Scarif."
It was just as well she couldn't understand him. Chewbacca had no words for this.
She sobbed softly to herself for a long moment, and he hung his head. They were alone in the cockpit beneath a shimmering curtain of light as the ship barrelled through hyperspace. Down the corridor, Han cursed as he painstakingly fished the fussing protocol droid out of a tangle of wires.
It did not take long for the destination alarm to ring. "What's that?" Leia asked, instinctively.
"Something that might help," said the Wookiee, preparing to ease out of hyperspace.
"I'm sorry," she said. "If we survive this—if any of us survive—I'll try to learn."
Chewbacca shrugged and hauled back on the controls. The glow of hyperspace melted away into the peaceful silence of nowhere.
"Where are we?" Leia asked. "That was an awfully short jump."
"Nowhere," Chewbacca said, since it didn't matter what he said.
"Where are we going?"
Chewbacca pointed to Leia's face, then to where her beating heart was, then panned his paw across the stars.
"That's up to you," he warbled.
Leia bit her lip. "Anywhere?"
Chewbacca nodded, pointing to her heart again.
The blackness of space was enticing. "I want to run," she said.
"Hmm?" Chewbacca's sniff was no real word in any language.
"They barely tried to stop our escape at all," she said. "I think they're tracking us. I'd only lead them straight to the others—the last of the others. There's no hope. There's no counter-attack. We run far away—as far away as you'll take us. And we wait for death there."
Chewbacca shook his head.
"You can understand me," she said. "You understand that—that man with you. Look, I…I just want to run away. Please help me. I can't do this anymore."
Gently, with the lightest of touches, Chewbacca took her by the shoulders and rotated the captain's chair a quarter-turn to port.
"Look far," he said, immodestly holding back the fur from his hairless fingertip so she could see precisely where he was pointing.
Han would not have been happy with how short a jump he had made. The backup hyperdrive was not fast, nor were its calculations as efficient as the Falcon's legendary primary systems. Two light-hours, in the grand scale of things, was not far at all. But to sublight ships like the fighters, it was more than a billion miles—enough to keep them safe while they calculated a long-range course even on the slower computer.
More importantly, it was the right place to say goodbye.
Leia followed his naked finger with her eyes. It didn't take her long to see the yellow star, shining larger and brighter than all the rest, the way a small moon would look from a planet's surface, but glowing with such heat that it was still hard to look at its pinpoint directly.
"What is it—" she began to ask. And then she saw it.
In the grand scale, two light-hours was not far at all. But it was enough. East of the looming star, gleaming golden where its sun's rays kissed its cloudy surface, a tiny blue jewel stood out perfect and pure against the relentless blackness of space. For as long as she dared to look, Alderaan floated there peacefully, as it had for four billion years.
"But it's gone," she breathed.
From a certain point of view, said… something. A voice. Some comforting presence, echoing from a place inside her she could not name.
Chewbacca did not know if she would weep. The human was completely unreadable. In truth, she dried her eyes, but one at a time, as if looking away would make it come untrue. She sat motionless, drinking in her fill of the sight one last time. She knew it was the last time she would ever see her home—and yet, in only a few minutes, the light itself would catch up to them. She could not bear to see her world destroyed twice in one day.
"We celebrate a day of peace," Chewbacca whispered to himself reverently. "A day that brings the promise that one day we'll be free." He thought of his own homeworld and his family, wondering now if there were other Death Stars waiting for them, too. Wondering if Kashyyyk were still there, or if had already been destroyed. Wondering how far away he would have to fly, now, to see his home and his people as they had once been. Even the glimmering blue ghost of this ruined world filled him with a sense of something greater than himself. It seemed to do the same for her.
When she turned back to him, any trace of weakness was gone from her. Her voice was clear, her eyes bright, her young face heavy with conviction.
"Chart a course for Yavin Prime," she said. "It's a gas giant in the Yavin system, in the Gordian reach. I'll direct you to the base when we arrive."
Chewbacca obligingly punched in the system and set the navicomputer to its task. At the sound of Han's approach, he stood and prepared to vacate the cockpit. When human emotions became too much guesswork for him, it helped him to think of mechanical things. Only he was aware of how much below the Falcon's potential the ship was performing after the burnout of its converters, the tussle with interdictors and the Death Star's tractor beam, the battering of a dogfight, the numerous repairs that had been needed but unaffordable for months on end.
He knew by now how these things usually went. Before long they'd be on the ground, and he'd be desperately rushing to see whether the scavenged spare parts of the battered Rebel fleet that was pulverized over Scarif could somehow be slotted into the Falcon's mongrel systems to repair the damage done in the firefight and restore the ship's legendary aftermarket maneuverability. Unwieldy level flight through realspace like an ordinary cargo hulk never sat well with wild Han Solo; the fully restored systems would put a thrill in him. He'd make a show of self-interest, as he always did; then the thrill of the fight and his own smoldering hatred of the Empire would get the better of him, as it always did. Chewbacca scowled at the mess Han had made of the lateral control cables, and set to work patching the guts of the ship properly as he felt the hyperdrive winding up for the second jump. He knew better than anyone what the ship would soon be called on to do—and poor old Chewbacca with it.
What was it all for? he thought, as he often did. Why keep fighting, after all that's happened? But this time, watching Leia's resolve come back to her as she stared out at the luminous ghost of her little blue world, he had an answer for his cynical smuggler's heart.
"The promise that one day we'll be free," he repeated in old classical Shyriiwook, rumbling the words reverently as he slumped behind the Dejarik table.
"Goodness gracious me," piped a mechanical voice. "This is hardly the time for poetry!"
Chewbacca shot his head round. The golden-skinned protocol droid was still slumped on the bench where Han had tossed it.
"You can understand me?" he hooted curiously.
"Well, of course I can," said the droid. "I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations."
"Human," Chewbacca frowned. "I suppose that includes Wookiees where you're from?"
"Quite naturally," said the droid. "I am fluent in over six million forms of communication, and Shyriiwook is one of the high ambassadorial languages of the Republic. I would be a poor protocol droid indeed if I could not make sense of it."
"There is no Republic," said Chewbacca. "The Republic is dead."
"Impossible," said C-3PO. "Surely I would remember such a momentous occasion as the fall of the Republic. You travel in the esteemed presence of Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan. While she is aboard, this vessel is properly deemed a consular ship, and you ought not to say such dreadful things here."
"It's nice to talk—to be heard—by someone new," said the Wookiee. "Someone with hope. An optimist."
The golden lights behind the droid's eyes flickered as it computed. "Optimist? Me? Oh dear."
"She's a very special woman, isn't she?"
"Quite," said the droid. "More special than she knows."
"Do you believe in the Force?" Chewbacca asked.
"I'm afraid I don't understand the question," said C-3PO.
The Wookiee shrugged. Some new light filled him, some hope that perhaps there was still a galaxy worth fighting for. He understood, now, how the human woman Leia had become a chieftain of her people.
"You play Dejarik?" he asked.
"I am programmed to perform at a Galactic Interzonal competitive level in nine hundred parlour games and diversions of civil society," said the droid. "Though—circumstances being what they are—I am inclined to let you win."
The Wookiee huffed with satisfaction as the ship roared again into the safety of hyperspace, rocketing toward a brighter tomorrow.
"I think I've just made a new friend," he said.