But beyond the terror, beyond the flaring light of my disintegrating hull, beyond the dark reaches of the Empire and the endless black of space where stars burn like little promises of hope, I feel the wind of Tatooine sweeping across the desert, and hear the call of my mother for dinner, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Luke will not miss.
The fear is gone, and then there is only peace.
Nera Kase sat on an empty proton torpedo crate in the former Massassi temple on Yavin 4, in what the rebels used as their main fighter bay, with her boots dangling eight centimeters from the floor, and she stared at nothing, and waited for the grief to come again.
She’d been religious growing up, a gift from her parents, who had venerated the Force in the Phirmist tradition. Their home had been their ship, and they’d had no world, just the endless, repeating cargo runs from the Core Worlds to the Outer Rim to the Mid Rim and over and over. She’d been born on their ship. She’d lived the first half of her life on their ship. She’d imagined she would die on their ship.
Instead it was her parents who had died, and their ship had been impounded by the Empire. In the space of seven minutes, Nera Kase lost her home and her family.
In the space of seven minutes, the Empire had made her their enemy.
She couldn’t remember any prayers, but that was all right, because an insincere prayer seemed to her less than useless at the moment.
She was a small woman, three years shy of thirty, and the combination of a decidedly youthful face and small stature caused people—in particular new arrivals to Base One—to mistake her for much younger than she was, and by extension, someone of little import and no authority. Her general appearance did nothing to correct this assumption. The mechanic’s jumpsuit she habitually wore could, at best, be described as “stained,” and only the greatest charity would have gone on to call it flattering to either her frame or her figure. When she was only seven she had discovered—the hard way—that long hair in a narrow crawl space could lead to getting hung up on the machinery, pain, and disaster. She’d shaved her head ever since, but the last week had been utterly relentless, and Kase had barely found time to bathe or eat, let alone groom or sleep. The result was now her scalp appeared as smudged and grimy as her clothes.
Despite all appearances, however, there were those in the Rebellion—and in particular, in the High Command—who would argue that Nera Kase was one of the most crucial people on Base One. Of those, at least two would have taken it further, and argued that she was one of the most critical people in the entirety of the Alliance to Restore the Republic. Mon Mothma and Bail Organa may provide the heart and soul of leadership, but Nera Kase, they’d have argued, puts the body in motion.
Kase shifted on her crate, sore and tired, and continued to wait. Her tool belt, overloaded to the extent it now rode her hips rather than her waist, clattered softly in response. She tightened her grip on the datapad in her hand. She didn’t look at it. She would have to soon enough.
She would put that off for as long as she possibly could.
The bay wasn’t truly empty, it just felt that way, the same way a closet cleared of clothes feels empty, no matter how many hangers have been left behind. There were service vehicles and cargo trolleys and loadlifters parked all around the space. Crates of ordnance, most of them as empty as the one she now sat upon, stacked up high against the walls. Fuel lines crisscrossed the floor of the bay, running from hastepumps and fuel cells, curled around the many scattered repair and fabrication stations used to keep the fighters fit and flying. A couple of droids idled, duties completed, lost in electronic standby dreams.
Aside from the droids, Nera Kase was alone. The flight crews, all sixty-seven sentients she coordinated and guided through every hour of the day, day in and day out, had left shortly after the last fighter lifted off. Most were now crammed into the pilots’ briefing room, where they could watch the telemetry data come in live from the battle about to be joined. Those who hadn’t gone to the briefing room were likely clustered in or around the command center itself, hoping to do the same. Anywhere they could see and hear the pilots flying into the mouth of Imperial evil.
They’d launched every fighter they could for the battle. There’d hardly been a point in holding anything in reserve, after all. Thirty fighters divided into two groups, Red and Gold—twenty-two Incom T-65B X-wings and eight Koensayr BTL-A4 Y-wings—against the largest battle station the galaxy had ever seen. Thirty fighters against a machine that could destroy a planet.
Thirty fighters against an Empire that would do it again, and again, and again if they weren’t stopped. There wasn’t a single person on the base, not a single pilot up above, who didn’t know what had happened to Alderaan. There wasn’t a single person on the base who didn’t understand what was bearing down at this exact moment on Yavin 4, and what would befall countless other planets in its wake unless the Rebellion ended this, here, today.
It ended now. Or it would never end.
Only seven spacecraft remained in the bay, now: five X-wings, one Y-wing, and one U-wing. Two of the X-wings had been cannibalized for parts following the Battle of Scarif, and the other three, though flight-worthy, had no pilots to crew them. The lone Y-wing needed another thirty-six hours of dedicated effort just to get its repulsor engines back online, let alone its ion thrusters. The U-wing was another story entirely. It was ready to go, but had been left behind during the battle a week ago due to lack of available crew, and would’ve been utterly useless in the attack about to commence far, far overhead.
Far, far overhead, but coming inexorably closer.
As if in answer to the thought, the hangar’s sound system crackled to life, speakers clicking on high above her where they’d been secured to the ancient stone ceiling. Someone in the command center, most likely the flight controller, was patching in the live audio from the fighters to the ground. There was a hiss that faded to silence, then a fresh ripple of static, and then Kase heard Red Leader’s voice.
“All wings report in.”
Red Leader. Flying Red One (pilot: Garven Dreis, 21,082 flight hours, quadruple ace, twenty-four confirmed kills), Kase thought automatically. Serious, sincere, precise. One of the most levelheaded pilots she had ever known. Professional, that was the word. She’d had a crush on him for the better part of a month after they’d first met, all because he’d taken the time to get down on his back beneath Red One where Kase had been trying to get the haptic feedback to properly compensate on the fighter’s mag launchers. They’d spent twenty minutes under there, Dreis handing her tools and talking specs, and when they’d finished he had given her a nod and a smile and turned to go. As he went, he’d extended his left hand, stroked the side of the fighter’s fuselage like he was petting a much-loved beast of burden. Kase was certain Dreis hadn’t even realized he’d done it.
Over the speakers, one after another and in no appreciable order, each of Red Squadron’s pilots called in.
“Lock S-foils in attack position,” Red Leader said.
In the same way that her mind tied each pilot to his or her ship, Kase immediately could picture the execution of the maneuver without any conscious thought. Each of Red Squadron’s pilots on their sticks, each of them reaching out to flip the same switch in each of their cockpits. The current pulsing as the circuit closed, the charge redirected down the wiring that ran through the dorsal hull to the splitter, where the signal was redirected port and starboard, ordering the actuators to engage. The hydraulics coming to life in response, flooding fluid into the motivator channels, the strike foils opening as if each of the X-wings were flexing its biceps.
There’d been a problem with the hydraulics on Red Seven’s fighter following Scarif, Kase remembered. Red Seven (pilot: Elyhek Rue, 3,804 flight hours, ace, six confirmed kills), not a hotshot but not a traditionalist by any means; the man could make any fighter you put him in twist, turn, and tumble. He flew hard, had flown hard at Scarif, and Red Seven always came back the worse fo
r wear. Kase had lost count of the hours she and her crews had put into recalibrating systems on the fighter, on making certain that when Rue needed it the ship would answer as called.
They were passing through the magnetic field. She heard Red Two (pilot: Wedge Antilles, 1,598 flight hours, ace, nine confirmed kills) break comm protocol, heard the awe in his voice, and Red One told him to clear the channel. Kase understood that Garvin Dreis wasn’t so much admonishing Red Two as he was using the opportunity to refocus the pilots, all the pilots, on the task at hand.
Kase didn’t know what she thought of Red Two. His time on the stick was misleading. He’d flown for the Empire, trained on TIEs, had flown before that doing what she didn’t even know. He was one of the few pilots on Yavin who could claim to have logged flight time in an A-wing. General Syndulla vouched for him. Everyone who’d flown with him said he was the real thing. Whenever he spoke to Kase, he always called her ma’am, was always polite to the point of shyness with her crews.
And he was almost a double ace already. Kase could almost—almost—feel sympathy for any Imperial TIE pilot who found himself in Wedge Antilles’s crosshairs.
Sometimes it was the quiet ones you had to watch out for.
The only pilot Kase genuinely wasn’t sure about was the new Red Five (Luke Skywalker, unknown flight hours). Prior to Scarif, Red Five had been Pedrin Gaul (952 flight hours, one confirmed kill), awkward and eager and still rated as a cadet. He’d died over Scarif, disintegrated while attacking the shield gate.
Like so many others who had died over Scarif.
And high above them, at this moment, Kase knew that so many more would die over Yavin 4.
With an effort, she pushed herself off her perch, landed with another clattering of the tools at her waist. The battle was about to be joined. She needed to be in the command center for this part.
The grief followed her, waiting for its moment.
—
The pilots know the truth.
They are the women and men who test their skill, their mental fortitude, their physical strength in machines that reward even a moment’s inattention or complacency with cruel—and oftentimes fatal—retribution. They put their lives on the line every time they go up, whether in combat or outside it. The glory they wear as a result is bought dear, and much-deserved.
To fly in combat is to tax the body in ways that even the most battle-hardened ground trooper will never understand. It is physically exhausting, the pilot responding to constant stress, acceleration, deceleration, the variance of artificial gravity and true gravity. The rank funk that rises from the cockpit after a battle is heavy with sweat and adrenaline and fear, all cooked in an atmosphere of recycled air and overheated electronics.
It is mentally exhausting, demands constant situational awareness and multitasking. It requires a mind’s-eye picture of the battlefield in three dimensions, constantly in motion, a macro-level view that no computer will ever adequately replicate. It requires an obsessive, relentless attention to detail, a total understanding of not just the pilot’s own vessel—how it is responding, what it is trying to tell him or her—but also of all those that surround it.
Yet when viewed from afar, the pilots and their ships are seen not as a cohesive unit, but rather as a mass of individuals. They may hunt in a pack, but the belief is that every pilot flies alone.
But the pilots know the truth. The pilots know this:
They never fly alone.
Every time they take to the skies or the stars, the pilots take their flight crews with them. Every flight, they carry with them the men and women who made it possible, the men and women who poured heart and soul into not just caring for their ship, but into caring for their pilots themselves.
On Yavin 4, at Base One, each rebel fighter was served by a crew of five or six personnel, depending on the needs of the ship and its pilot. Logistically, this meant that every flight crew worked triple, even quadruple duty. Thus, a single ground team of five was responsible for Gold Two (Dex Tiree, 3,237 flight hours, ace, five confirmed kills), Red Nine (Nozzo Naytaan, 1,060 flight hours, three confirmed kills), and Red Twelve (Puck Naeco, 5,879 flight hours, double ace, eleven confirmed kills). These teams served both the fighters and, by extension, the pilots in a relationship that was intensely personal and oftentimes intimate.
Ship, pilot, and crew became one.
When a ship was lost, when a pilot was lost, the crew remained. And they grieved.
For Nera Kase, it was worse. Every ship, every pilot, and every member of the ground crew was her responsibility. From the astromechs to the ordnance loaders to the mechanics and up to the pilots themselves, they all belonged to her. That was her job.
Chief Nera Kase, Fighter Boss, Base One.
Her flight crews. Her starfighters. Her pilots.
She carried with her every pilot fallen in combat, and she carried their crews, as well, bearing their grief atop her own. Their sorrow when their pilots failed to return. Their self-recrimination and self-doubt, all the hours lost wondering if there was something more that could have been done, or should have been done, or—worst of all—something they failed to do. Another tweak of the deflector shields, an extra boost to engine efficiency, a higher cycle rate on the laser cannons.
Something, anything, that would have brought their pilots safely back home.
Nera Kase had lost fifteen ships and nineteen pilots and crew in the past week alone. It had begun with the mad scramble to put Blue Squadron onto target at Eadu, a flight of seven X-wings and two Y-wings quickly scrambled at General Draven’s order for a hit-and-run.
Two never came back.
Less than thirty-six hours later had been the Battle of Scarif.
Two of Blue Squadron never made it past the shield gate protecting the planet. Another two were shot down over the beaches, including Blue Leader (General Antoc Merrick, 22,542 flight hours, quadruple ace, twenty-four confirmed kills). Eleven more fighters, mostly out of Blue and Red squadrons, had alternatively been shot down by Imperial emplacements, destroyed by TIEs, or taken by the pilot’s worst enemy of all, bad luck.
Fifteen ships, nineteen pilots and crew. In just one week. Nobody under Nera Kase’s command was untouched. Some of her crews had suffered multiple losses over the course of a single day.
She had suffered them all.
—
It was as still as a morgue in the command center. Kase entered quietly, moved around the edge of the room to where she could keep an eye on the tracking board. Three of her crew chiefs had made it inside, pressed against the wall—Benis, Ohley, and Wuz. They gave her the slightest nod of acknowledgment. Nobody else noticed her. Everyone was concentrating, listening. General Dodonna and Princess Organa, along with one or two others and a protocol droid, were gathered around the map display in the center of the room.
Kase looked at her datapad.
If the ships, the pilots, and their crews were the focus of her life, then the datapad was the nucleus. On it she kept everything relating to her duties. Manifests for equipment and munitions, a detailed list of spare parts for every make and model of fighter Base One could field, the names and assignments of every member of her crew, with notes on their specialties, their strengths, their weaknesses. Y-wing influx rephase not processing at full efficiency? Put Darton Bailey on it, he’d have it singing again in minutes. Stuck repeating blaster mount on a U-wing? Give Benis a hydrospanner, and if that didn’t work, let her whack at the mount with the blunt end until it behaved. She even had an inventory of flight suits and helmets, and an icon guide just in case one pilot’s helmet was ever mixed up with another’s.
She also had the roster of pilots.
Kase switched her attention to the fighter tracking board, listening and watching. The initial attack on the station had begun, Gold and Red squadrons each making preliminary assaults to degrade the Death Star’s defenses. Kase tracked the small dots and squares, the X-wings and the Y-wings, moving in two dimensions along t
he etched glass. Gold One (Jon “Dutch” Vander, 19,997 flight hours, quadruple ace, twenty-two confirmed kills) broke his squadron, taking Gold Two (Dex Tiree, 5,062 flight hours, double ace, thirteen confirmed kills) and Gold Five (Davish “Pops” Krail, 7,603 flight hours, ace, seven confirmed kills) on approach for the meridian trench. The remaining five Y-wings in the element split, holding back, as Red Leader brought his group across the axis, trying to draw their fire.
Then Gold Seven (Gazdo Woolcob, 4,816 flight hours, four confirmed kills) vanished from the board without warning.
Anti-ship battery fire, Kase told herself.
She checked her datapad, and marked his name, and added a note: Flak.
Red Squadron was engaging the surface batteries, now, trying to clear the way for Gold One’s element. Red Three (Biggs Darklighter, 5,874 flight hours, triple ace, sixteen confirmed kills) called his target, Red Six (Jek “Tono” Porkins, 10,499 flight hours, double ace, fourteen confirmed kills) following him in and—
“I’ve got a problem here,” Red Six said.
“Eject,” Red Two said.
“I can hold it.”
Kase looked through the board to where Wuz had, even in the poor light at the edges of the room, gone pale. Red Six was one of his ships, tended by his crew. Porkins had only recently—very recently—arrived at Base One, brought in to take over for the grounded Wes Janson (unassigned, 9,869 flight hours, ace, eight confirmed kills). Janson had expressed concerns about the electricals on the fighter, in particular some of the glitching he’d been experiencing with his astromech’s interface to the X-wing’s augmented sensor package. Wuz had assured Kase he’d gone over the fighter millimeter by millimeter, that the ship was good to fly.