EYES OF THE EMPIRE
Kiersten White
“Pick any of the last ten transmissions you’ve looked at. You have to live there for the rest of your life. Where are you?” Lorem said, her voice ringing through the small processing room where they all worked.
Maela admired how Lorem could multitask, sorting through data while keeping up a steady stream of chatter.
Dirjo Harch did not admire it. “Just do your job.” He deleted whatever he was looking at on his screen and pulled up the next data packet. Maela wished they could work individually. Or better yet, in small groups. She’d pick Lorem for her group. And Azier. So really, she’d make a group that was everyone except Dirjo, with his sour expressions and his pinched personality.
“I am doing my job,” Lorem said, chipper as always. Sometimes she wore her cap at a jaunty angle over her dark curls. Just enough to be off dress code, but not enough to give Dirjo an excuse to report her. Maela liked the uniform, liked what it meant. That she was here. That she did it.
A light flashed near Maela’s face and she flipped the switch, accepting an incoming transmission and adding it to the ever-growing queue. She had spent so long with the Vipers, infinite rows of them, round domes and legs like jointed tentacles. She used to stare into their blank black eyes and wonder where they would go. What they would see.
Now she saw everything.
“But while I’m doing my job,” Lorem continued, and Dirjo’s shoulders tensed, “I don’t see why we can’t have some fun. We’re going to be looking through a hundred thousand of these transmissions.”
Azier leaned back, stretching. He rubbed his hands down his pale face, clean-shaven, wrinkled. Maela suspected working on the Swarm transmission recovery and processing unit was a demotion for him, though she didn’t know why. Dirjo and Lorem were just starting their Imperial service, like her.
“Lorem, my young friend,” Azier said in the clipped, polished tones of the Empire, the ones Maela was still trying to master to hide that she came from somewhere else, “the man we report to is serving on the Executor as part of Lord Vader’s Death Squadron. Do you really think fun is a priority for any of them?”
Lorem giggled, and even Maela had to smile. Dirjo, however, scowled, turning his head sharply. “Are you criticizing Lord Vader?”
Azier waved a hand dismissively. “They’re bringing death to those who would threaten the Empire. I lived through a war none of you remember or understand. I have no desire to do it again. And Lorem, to answer your question, I’d rather stay in this floating tin can forever than visit any of the forsaken rocks our probe droids are reporting from.”
“Not a hundred thousand,” Maela said softly.
“What?” Lorem asked, turning around in her chair to give her full attention to Maela.
“Project Swarm sent out a hundred thousand. But some won’t make it to their destinations. Some will crash and be incapable of functioning after. Some might land in environments that make transmission impossible. If I had to guess, I’d say we’ll receive anywhere from sixty-five thousand to eighty thousand transmissions.” Vipers were tough little wonders, and their pods protected them, but still. Space was vast, and there were so many variables.
“In that case,” Lorem said, grinning, “we’ll be done by the end of the day. And then we can decide which planet we’ll live on forever! Though none of my prospects are good. You’re from the Deep Core, aren’t you? Any footage from your planet so we can add it to our potential relocation list?”
Maela turned back to her own work. Her accent attempts hadn’t been as good as she thought, after all. “No footage. We didn’t send droids to Vulpter.”
Azier snorted a laugh.
“Why?” Lorem asked. “Why is that funny?”
Dirjo hit a button harder than necessary. “Half the probe droids we have are made on Vulpter. Back to work.” His tone was brusque, but he looked appraisingly at Maela. “You came from the manufacturing side. I would like to speak about it, sometime.”
Maela went back to her screen. She knew this work wasn’t sought-after. That it was either washouts like Azier or those who hadn’t managed to climb up the ranks yet like Dirjo. But she had specifically requested it and had no desire to move elsewhere in the Empire’s service. She slipped her hand into her pocket and rubbed the smooth, rounded surface of a probe droid’s main eye. How many times had she traced these eyes, longing to see what they saw? Imagined flinging herself through the reaches of space alongside them to uncover sights untold?
And now here she was. As close as she could get. The fates and visions of tens of thousands of probe droids at her fingertips. It was an actual dream come true.
For her, at least.
“No,” her mother said, not bothering to take off her mirrored goggles. “Absolutely not.”
Maela felt the pout taking over her face, which made her angry. She was past pouting age, and definitely past being teased for the way her lips refused to allow her to hide any emotions.
“It’s not fair,” she said, gesturing at the prototype her mother was tinkering with. “There’s so much out there, and they see everything, and all I see is this factory.” Maela leaned close, looking at her distorted reflection in the probe droid’s main eye. She knew it wasn’t an eye, not really, but she always thought of it that way. She would walk down the lines of droids, hanging like fruit from mechanical vines, making certain she saw herself in every single eye. That way, when they went out into the galaxy, flung to places and planets she would never visit, at least part of her would be taken. A ghost in her mother’s machines.
“You think you’ll see so much, working for the Empire?” Her mother made a face like she had a bad taste in her mouth. “You don’t want any part of them.”
“How can you say that?” Maela threw her hands in the air, astounded at her mother’s hypocrisy. “You work for them!”
“I do not work for them. I design and manufacture droids. Which is not an easy business to be in after the Clone Wars.” She sighed, leaning back and running her hands through her wild curls. They were more gray than black now, and Maela knew beneath the goggles she’d see the fine lines of age slowly claiming all the skin around her mother’s eyes. “This is what I’m good at. It’s what keeps our family safe.”
“And keeps us locked up here on this lifeless planet in this lifeless factory!” Maela kicked the table, and the prototype parts went skittering away. “At least if I were working with the Empire, I’d be doing something.”
“Yes,” her mother said, in a tone like a door sliding shut. “You would be doing many things.” She walked away, leaving Maela alone with the metal that was not yet a droid.
Maela picked up the eye and stared at her reflection. She didn’t want to be a ghost, a memory, a prisoner. The eye fit perfectly in her pocket, tucked alongside the decision Maela had made. She would send herself out into the galaxy, flung to new and unknown destinations by the same Empire that claimed these droids.
Maela’s eyes were grainy, so dry she could hear her eyelids click when she blinked. She didn’t know how long she had been watching footage, dismissing transmissions that offered no useful information. The others had wandered out at some point, to eat or sleep, she didn’t know.
She didn’t need her mother’s droids to carry her ghost into the galaxy, because she was connected to them now. They were at her fingertips, and she stared out through them at countless new sights. She was everywhere.
Plants as tall as buildings, towering overhead, glowing in colors human eyes couldn’t have discerned. Desertscapes so barren she could feel her throat parching just looking at them. A depthless ocean, eyes and teeth and fins exploring her as she sank into darkness. World after world after world, and she was seeing them all.
She was so blinded by the infinite white ice of the newest planet that she almost missed it.
“Someone made those,” she whispered, tracing the even, symmetrical mounds rising out of the snow. They were metal, and, according to the droid, they were generating power. Which meant they were being used. But before she could make the connection active and direct the droid, the screen flashed and then the feed was dead.
Her droid had self-destructed. Which could only mean it had been attacked. Maela’s heart began racing. This was it. She had found what they were looking for, she was certain.
She pushed her comm. “Dirjo, I’ve got them.”
His answer crackled with static and sleepiness. “Got what?”
“The Rebellion.”
Within minutes he was at her shoulder, leaning over. The rest of the team had joined them, the space too tight to accommodate all of them at her station. “Are you certain?” Dirjo asked. “There are a lot of settlements out there.”
“Not on Hoth. The only things I’ve found are snow and the occasional animal.” She had gone over the entire feed from the droid, searching backward, but other than the generators and the attack, all she had found was snow, ice, and lumbering beasts that ran on two legs, with small arms and powerful, thick tails. They were cute, actually. She had spent more time looking over the images of a herd, imagining what they must sound like, what their fur would feel like, how those curling horns would function, than she had worrying about the Rebellion.
“Besides,” she said, trying to focus, “those generators are too big for a settlement. And someone shot at the droid.” That one hurt. She wanted the connection back. She didn’t want her droid, her eyes, lying dead in the snow.
Dirjo bit his lip, frowning. “If we’re wrong…”
“If we’re wrong, then we keep looking.”
Azier snorted. “Being wrong in the Empire is never that simple.”
Maela didn’t care. She was certain she had found the Rebellion. And it felt right, that she was the one who had succeeded. Her droids, her eyes. All that time she had spent wishing and putting herself inside them. It had worked.
Dirjo took a deep breath, then nodded. “I’ll send it to Piett.” Maela moved out of the way as Dirjo took over her station.
Lorem frowned. “Maela is the one who found it. She should get the credit.”
“It’s not about credit,” Dirjo said. “It’s about the Empire.”
“If it’s not about credit, then why are you insisting on being the one to personally send it to Piett?” Azier muttered.
Maela had already moved to another station. If it turned out she was wrong, they would need to keep looking. So she might as well get a head start on it. But she couldn’t stop thinking about those creatures she had seen. Or the flash of light and then the end of the transmission. A violent end for her mother’s creation, and an abrupt end to her trip to Hoth.
While everyone was distracted waiting to hear from Piett, Maela searched through countless transmissions. A surge of triumph flooded her when she found it: Another probe droid had crashed into Hoth. Which meant that she could still explore.
She shouldn’t. Either Hoth was their target or it wasn’t, and she should move on.
But Hoth felt more real than anywhere else she had been. What she had seen there mattered, and she was irrationally angry at the abrupt end of the transmission. Probe droids were lost all the time. But this one had been destroyed.
Later—it was hard for her to know how long, because she was frantically watching transmissions, hoping for something special, trying to forget how badly she wanted to return to Hoth—word came from the Executor.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Dirjo leaned against the workstation, relief and smug joy warring for dominance on his face. “We were right. They’re on Hoth.”
Lorem clapped a hand on Maela’s shoulder. “You mean Maela was right.”
“This will be a huge victory for the Empire. It’s already a victory for Project Swarm.” Dirjo stood up straight, tugging on his uniform jacket and pushing out his chest. “We should go celebrate.”
“Anything to get me out of this cell,” Azier grumbled and stood, not bothering to straighten his rumpled uniform.
Lorem laughed, grabbing Maela’s hand and dragging it away from her station. Maela looked longingly at the flashing lights, the square buttons beckoning her with the promise of other eyes. She shoved her hand in her pocket and rubbed the smooth surface of her eye. She would tell her mother. Send a message of this triumph. Proof that not only the droids deserved to be sent out into the galaxy.
She dreamed of ice. Couldn’t stop thinking about it, wondering about it, missing her too-brief sojourn on a planet that actually mattered.
A few days later, when everyone else was on a sleeping shift, Maela slipped back into the Swarm processing center. Her chair was cold and the lights were dim, but the room disappeared around her as she assumed manual control of the remaining probe droid on Hoth.
She slipped inside its metal frame and let the screen fill her whole vision. The cold of her chair became the cold of that barren landscape. She was there.
Gliding along the glaciers and snow dunes, she hoped to find a herd of the animals. But something else caught her eye. Smoke. She drifted toward it, her metal limbs never touching the ground. The smoke billowed from tremendous carcasses of the Empire’s machines, ruined and blasted, scorched and melted. They’d gotten here before she did.
But it wasn’t a “they” and a “her.” She was part of the Empire. She turned toward their target. Whatever had happened here was finished. She told herself she was looking for any information left behind that might help the Empire, but really, she wanted to see this place she would never visit, this place she had discovered, this place she had given to the Empire. It was her victory, too, wasn’t it?
The entrance to the base wasn’t hard to find, blasted and twisted just like the Empire’s machines. She carefully moved inside, navigating places where the roof had collapsed and left chunks of ice and snow to block her way. It was dim, so she adjusted the specifications for the transmission. And then she saw.
There was a taste like metal on her tongue, and a ringing in her ears.
Imperial uniforms, and others. Bodies left behind, broken and ruined. She drifted above them, touching nothing.
There, another body. A different one. She extended an arm. Trapped beneath a tremendous weight of ice and snow, only the creature’s head was visible. Her arm connected with one of those funny curling horns, but—
But it wasn’t her arm. It was the droid’s arm. And she’d never know what this felt like, what any of it felt like. The droid spun and spun and everywhere there were blast marks and bodies and broken machines, and it didn’t matter whether the bodies were rebels or Empire or creatures that should be running on the ice. They were all equally ruined. Destroyed.
She had flung herself through the stars, and she had thought all she was doing was seeing. But an eye was never just an eye. It was connected to a body.
She was the eyes of the Empire. And its hands had done this because of her.
Dirjo leaned against his chair, updating them on the Empire’s progress after Hoth and reminding them—yet again—of Piett’s successes. Lorem would say Dirjo was droning on, but Maela thought that was unfair to drones. They didn’t choose to be that way. They were made, and they did what they were told.
They looked where she told them to look.
Her hands twitched, imagining the feel of a curling horn. Project Swarm had succeeded, but it wasn’t over. It would never be over, not as long as the Rebellion lived to hide again. The droid eye stared dully at her from where she’d set it on her workstation. She looked at her reflection, distorted, then went back to her screen. Feed after feed after feed. Hundreds of them, blurring together.
A moon filled with ancient forests, the droid coming in hot enough that it ignited the vegetation around itself, the feed turning into one swirling inferno.
A planet devoid of light, so dark that no setting on the droid could penetrate it. Only repeated motion-sensor triggers hinting that somewhere out there, something was lurking.
An asteroid as big as a planet, the probe damaged upon landing so that it could only stare, motionless, powerless, as it was carried along.
A swamp planet, a riot of plants and bogs, mud and vines, nothing that indicated they should give it a second glance. Except—there, the outline of something in the night. Inorganic. Something that looked distinctly like a half-drowned X-wing.
Dirjo tugged fussily at his jacket. “Results,” he snapped. “The Empire depends on us.”
Maela hit a single button to delete the footage, erasing Dagobah from the Empire’s vision. Then she moved on to the next eyes, seeing clearly at last.