THE FINAL ORDER
Seth Dickinson
“In time of peace, the Imperial Star Destroyer will disburse the Emperor’s peace and justice, and by its presence deter disorder, both material and ideological.”
His new XO paused here for breath. Captain Canonhaus wondered if they’d trained her when to breathe on Carida. You may take the initiative, Cadet Tian; you may even take unscheduled breaths. The Imperial Naval Academy on Carida produced superb officers, officers like Kendal Ozzel, who had taken the initiative and would never again take a breath, scheduled or otherwise.
Certainly Tian was also superb. She had excellent marks, except in Tabor Seitaron’s history class. Seitaron always downgraded students who missed his hints about what had really happened. No special insight, he’d written on Canonhaus’s own file, when he was Canonhaus’s captain. Officer must seek this insight through experience. Fine, old man, give us poor marks for regurgitating official history—but COMPNOR will give us good ones. The Commission for the Preservation of the New Order approves of those who know the official truth.
Look what had happened to Seitaron, after all. Disappeared. Proscribed.
Her name was Tian Karmiya, Commander Tian to him, and with her prime marks from Carida and her fine service on Enigma and Victory at Batonn, she must have expected to serve under Commodore Rae Sloane here on the Ultimatum. But Sloane was indisposed. So Canonhaus had received Ultimatum, and this bright young plaque of New Order excellence as his XO.
She was calm, cheerful, occasionally quite droll at the captain’s table. “An officer’s love life,” she would say, “operates under the same rules as old religions: two sides, and they must never meet.” When he laughed at her quips, Canonhaus felt his dry scabs crack, and some of the old blood, the old love for the work, welled up to stain his thoughts.
Bad luck for both of them.
Full of breath, Tian now said:
“In time of war the Imperial Star Destroyer will seek out the enemy’s principal force and close, by means of superior speed and protection, to destroy the enemy with massed fighter strikes and the fires of the main battery; and, if the enemy is planetbound, by the deployment of the embarked legion.”
“Very good. And in which element of the doctrine are we now engaged?”
She sometimes had a sly way of looking, this Tian. Just a little flash of teeth. “Pursuing an escaped transport falls under disbursing peace and justice and deterring disorder.”
“The Emperor’s peace and justice, Commander.”
“Yes, sir. It goes without saying, sir. As there is no other source of true peace or justice.”
They stood side by side, hands clasped at their backs, before the incredible panorama of Ultimatum’s bridge. Ahead, the endless chaotic detonation, the swarming scatter of the Hoth system’s fragmentation-cascade asteroid field. They had sent fighters in after an escaping rebel ship. None had returned.
“And the need to pursue one small transport with all our forces, rather than attempting to vector the other rebels?”
“As we said on Iloh, better to catch the fish at hand than to cast at shadows, sir.”
“Quite. Very good. Very good.”
Canonhaus tapped his foot. The lieutenant running the crew pit to his left glanced up to see if the captain wanted his attention. You had to train a new crew to understand your mannerisms. One tap meant “conversation over, I’m thinking.” Two taps signaled “get on with it.” Shooting his cuffs meant “I’m about to give an order.” Back on Majestic his officers understood this, all four watches.
Old Seitaron had once told him, in the wardroom, that it was important to know your crew. Read their files, learn their failures and talents. Canonhaus had tried that, on Majestic. He had been a good captain, or at least a good mayor of a town of ten thousand, which was the real trick to command. Anyone could say full speed, open fire or hold the range, deploy the fighters or send in a team to make a scan. The unbelievably difficult part of the job was not fighting a Star Destroyer in combat, but keeping the beast fed and fueled and trained, and in communication with the rest of the fleet and with your own local network of informants and contacts, so that the ship could turn up where and when it was needed.
He could do that. He could do it better than most, he’d thought.
But after Alderaan and Helix, they took Majestic away from him, moved him from sector fleet duty to Death Squadron on account of his “excellent reliability.” And he had to start all over, learning the names and faces of the nearly ten thousand people aboard Ultimatum. It was impossible. Only the roles were familiar, like the cards in a sabacc deck. First and second weapons officers, first and second defense officers, three sensor watch officers; communications, operations, engineering with its reactor and engine substations; navigation, helm and hyperdrive and the constant plot of objects in the narrow and chaotic jump-collision hazard radius; bay and flight officers; flasks and sabers, air and darkness, staves and coins. All the cards slotted into their stations in the crew pits below the gleaming black walkways, which were as polished and satisfying as boot leather.
On Majestic, all his officers knew what he’d done with the refugees. An ugly piece of work, they all agreed. Hard work. But it had to be done.
He tasted acid and coughed.
“Commander Tian,” he said.
She had begun to turn away, to go check with the helm officer about their formation. She was a stickler about formations. The idea that Executor itself was tracking her must be very exciting. A chance to show her talent at staying in her slot.
Now she turned back. The youth in her bright eyes, her clear dark skin; how could she already be a commander? They got younger every year. And hungrier.
At Carida, gossip said, she had reported two cadets with better marks for selling their exam answers. They had been expelled, and she’d made it into a merit society in their place. A snitch.
“Sir?”
“What do you think of Admiral Ozzel’s recent decisions?”
She flinched like he’d pulled a weapon. A flash of fear, like the light of a blaster reflected from wide white human eyes in the jungle night on Haruun Kal. The place where he had learned to fear blasters more than anything else.
That was all it took. The flashbacks came on him unpredictably, for no reason at all, for a reason as simple as Tian’s frightened eyes.
And he was there again. Is there again. Will always be.
He is a lieutenant, a liaison to the stormtroopers aboard the Quasar Fire-class cruiser-carrier Swoop. They call him Footoo. They like him, because he tells them honestly what the navy expects, but don’t trust him, because he hasn’t seen combat.
There is an insurrection smoldering on Haruun Kal, in the highland jungles. Something left from the Clone Wars.
He goes down with the Sentinel assault shuttles to land in the “smoke circles” where orbital fire burns back the jungle. The air smells of burnt pollen and sulfur, and he has to borrow a stormtrooper helmet to breathe outside. In two days, fungus grounds the shuttles and all the speeders forever. Only the wheeled Juggernauts still work. Their weapons are only saved by obsessive cleaning.
The CO orders a foot advance toward a lake thirty kilometers away. It is not a very good decision, tactically, but the CO has fever wasp larvae growing in her brain. By the time anyone realizes, the wasps are crawling out of her tear ducts and they are all lost in the deep jungle.
The Korun natives attack from the trees at night. Their crude slugthrowers can’t pierce stormtrooper armor, but their bombs can. At first, Swoop’s stormtroopers return fire coolly and accurately. Later, they take to mowing the jungle with the squad E-Webs.
Canonhaus takes it upon himself to confirm their kills. He thinks it will help morale.
He sees everything a blaster can do to a body. The primary wound, a crater of red and white, where galvened plasma flash-boils skin and detonates bone. Seams of black char where fat burns like buried coal. Heads are full of fluid, all of which expands when hit: stormtroopers call this kind of hit a “detonator,” call those who are hit deep enough to burn from the inside out “dry bones.” By the time you see the remains of a dry-bone, a wretched pile of skeleton and hair, your lungs are already coated in a thin layer of burnt them—
“Sir?”
Canonhaus blinked. “What?”
Tian was at his side, watching him. “You seemed not to hear me, sir.”
“I was thinking of Haruun Kal.” Why had he said that? Because he wanted a reason to pour out his bile and regret, to corrode her as he had been corroded.
“A glorious victory, sir.”
“Oh, yes. One of the battles that gave the Imperial Navy its dread reputation.”
“Did you help conduct the bombardment, sir?”
“Yes,” he lied. His unit had sheltered in the lake while the fleet exercised Base Gamma One. The lake boiled off in the firestorm. Their Juggernauts couldn’t cool the air fast enough. At first it was dry, and thus survivable; but when the air filled with their sweat, their sweat could no longer cool them, and people began to go into convulsions. As he stripped down, Canonhaus found a dead fever wasp in his uniform. Perhaps the heat had killed its eggs. Perhaps he was just lucky.
“Yes,” he repeated, unsteadily. “Yes, now—now that was an example of a bombardment well handled. But what do you think about Ozzel’s approach?”
“Yes, sir. His decision to drop out of hyperspace inside detection range was a good one. Violence of action would have caught the rebels unprepared, and if they hadn’t been forewarned, he would’ve caught them all in the initial bombardment. He made no mistake.”
“Mm. So why do you think Lord Vader executed him?”
“Perhaps because he failed to account for the possibility the rebels had been forewarned by a spy, sir. Or by the probe droid that discovered their base.”
“So you believe Vader acted correctly?”
She hesitated, looked away. In profile, her full nose echoed the uniform cap, echoed the perfect prow of the Star Destroyer, the ideal shape for a warship, all its broadside weapons capable of bearing forward. He wondered if she had been born with black hair, or if she dyed her usual Ilohian green to match the uniform. What did such young people think about? Did they do the exact same things he had done, say all the things he had said, to get that perfect COMPNOR reliability score—but believe it all, too?
“Permission to speak freely, sir?”
He blinked in surprise. “Granted?”
She addressed the open windows, the red light of Executor’s titanic engine array. “Ozzel was lucky. He knew everyone on Hoth was a rebel. He didn’t have to flush one of their cells out of a loyal population. Or make a punitive attack on collaborators. Or choose a settlement for a demonstration strike. His only decision was one of tactics. Whether to close in aggressively, or to make a cautious approach.”
“And yet I sense an objection…?”
“He failed to consider the political aspect of his choice. He should have anticipated that Vader would prefer prisoners. An aggressive posture and rapid bombardment would leave none. Therefore, he should have taken a cautious approach.”
Ah. So she would rationalize his execution: snitch thought. What a fool Ozzel had been to plan an attack from orbit! Hoth was one of the major rebel command cells, and therefore, given prisoners, an opportunity to roll up every other rebel in the galaxy. Ozzel’s idiocy had nearly wasted that chance. Therefore it was not just Vader’s right but Vader’s duty, as a direct representative of the Emperor, as a black hand wiping away corruption and cronyism in the ranks, to execute Kendal Ozzel on the spot!
Before Alderaan, Canonhaus would’ve told himself exactly the same thing.
No, that was a lie. He would’ve rationalized it to himself even after the refugee mission. He had rationalized everything. Doubt grew much slower than fever wasps.
He said, “You talk about easy choices. Do you think of Death Squadron as an easy post?”
“Not easy, sir. But I was very excited to be posted here. Direct pursuit of the rebel military is what I want. Not…” She paused, performing inner politics, composing something that would look nice in a COMPNOR transcript. “Not the painstaking and difficult work, which our colleagues perform so well, required to separate rebels and collaborators from loyal citizens. Of course, loyal citizens must take on some of the burden of battling insurrection, including the emotional duty of assigning blame for any collateral damage to the rebels. But my own personal strengths, I feel, are in direct tactical warfare against the rebels, rather than counterinsurgency.”
“You feel that Death Squadron’s mission is cleaner, then. Compared with that of, say, ISB or the Ubiqtorate agencies. Or a stormtrooper legion.”
“Yes, sir. The Imperial Navy’s mission, in general, I find more morally direct.”
“Mm.” He thought, of course, of Helix. Was he ever not thinking of Helix? “Did you grow up admiring the navy?”
“Yes, sir, in my adolescence.”
“You had model fighters? Miniature legions? Snappy uniform-style fashions? Sub-adult group membership?”
“Yes, sir. I was a patriotic child.”
“Hm,” he grunted.
“I think you should file a protest over Admiral Ozzel’s execution, sir.”
He was so shocked that he thought the code cylinders would pop from his uniform. “Against Vader?”
“Yes, sir. Obviously the protest will not be sustained. However, it would be appropriate to place a summary execution under review, in the same way that a captain who loses a ship always stands to court-martial. This way, Vader’s correct decisions can be fully documented and entered in the record for future officers to appreciate.”
Oh, child.
He took his XO by the shoulder. “Listen to me. There is no ‘protest’ against Vader. Vader can do anything he wants. He could strangle you and me and everyone on this bridge and face no censure.
“The New Order does not exist to bring order to anything. It is not the bright strong energy that lifted us from the Clone Wars and the Republic’s corruption. It’s not the maker and the organizer and the fixer that you thought it was when you buttoned on your junior-officer uniform.
“You liked to learn the names of stormtrooper legions, didn’t you? You liked to read staff notes, memorize the weapon loadouts of our starships, and debate tactical theory on the HoloNet. You think those things are the Empire. But all the sharp outfits, all the insignia and code cylinders, all the protocols and monuments…they are all burrs. Things that attach themselves to the Empire’s real purpose.
“The real purpose of the Empire is to give people like Vader the power to do anything they want. The bureaucracy, the ideology, the gleaming system we so admire—it accretes around that central core of cruelty solely because a bureaucracy allows us, the followers, to rationalize our participation through laws and protocols. If there is a cruelty the Emperor wishes to commit, a reason will appear for it. If there is an atrocity Vader perpetrates, a bureau or a directorate or a fleet or a squadron or a legion or a special sort of stormtrooper will be created to carry it forward as necessary for the security of the galaxy.
“There is no restraint or principle at the center of the New Order. And that is why people admire it. The Empire does all the things that people secretly believe should be done with power.”
He did not say any of that. And of course he did not take her shoulder.
Instead, he clasped his hands behind his back and said, “You know, I was recently detached to support a special task for Lord Vader. We were in a support role—perimeter control, navigational interdiction, logistics. Other forces carried out the primary mission.”
She shifted from foot to foot. Nervous or excited. “What was that mission, sir?”
“The destruction of a convoy.”
“And how many rebels did you bag, sir?”
“Not rebels. Alderaanian refugees.”
Her bright eyes took on the cold, sharp, dead aspect of a security droid. “A very difficult mission. But you are known for your perfect reliability, Captain.”
“Yes. I am.” He sniffed, and missed the faint burnt-dust smell of Majestic’s old filters. Something tickled in his sinuses. Surely not the beginning of a cold. “After it was all over, I was given charge of the legal follow-up. I filed all the documents to establish that what we’d done was lawful, necessary, and fully in accord with Imperial law. No HoloNet transmissions—everything was couriered directly to Coruscant by stealth shuttle. I didn’t even keep my own copies.”
She nodded rapidly. “Very good, sir. I’m sure there was no problem.”
“No problem at all.” What was he doing? Was he really going to say this? Yes, he was, he was, because he was overflowing with bitterness, because he wanted to fling that bitterness at her, even at the cost of his own post. “Despite the fact that I misfiled every single report.”
“Beg pardon, sir?”
“I did everything wrong. The wrong codes. The wrong clearances. The wrong order of events. I dated our receipt of initial orders later than the actual mission reports. I listed Lord Vader as a spacecraft in our order of battle, and our targets as accountants from a Neimoidian purse world. I said that we were attempting to erase all records of Emperor Palpatine’s old gambling debts.”
She blinked at him, twice, trying to divine what in the galaxy he was trying to say. “As a test, sir?”
“Of course it was a test.”
“To be sure that someone was reading the reports, and holding the Imperial Navy accountable.”
“Of course. My duty.”
“And…?”
“No one made any protest. I suppose the forms went into a vault somewhere. Some airless place tended by droids. But no one read them.”
She swallowed, as if digesting. “And if we made a complaint about Admiral Ozzel’s death, sir?”
“I think we both know what would happen, Commander.”
They stood side by side in silence. A long-derelict faculty stirred in Canonhaus, and to his surprise it did not give up and slink away. It was curiosity about what was happening inside someone else’s head. He glanced aside to watch her, in this moment of crisis when she could do many things, depending on which of many people she might be. She could write him up to COMPNOR, or save this fraction of the bridge logs for future blackmail. Or arrive at a silent, shared understanding that they both recognized a problem.
But she would be making her own interior calculation about who he was, and about whether he was trying to confide in her. Or whether this was reliable old Canonhaus laying out bait for the disloyal.
He did not know the answer himself.
He supposed that in this place, surrounded by the black corridors and white armor of Ultimatum, surrounded by all the uniforms and guns and systems of technology and personhood she had worshipped since childhood, she could really only make one choice.
Her shoulders squared. “The destruction of Alderaanian refugees does proceed directly from the Tarkin Doctrine, sir. Terror is an instrument of the state’s power. So it must flow from the state, not from the stories of confused refugees who lack the context to understand their own situation. Arbitrarily allowing some Alderaanians to live while others die would negate the lawfulness of Alderaan’s sanctioned execution. Either all are guilty, or none are.”
“Oh, precisely, Commander. Precisely.” It burst out of him: “And what would you have done in my situation? Given that you prefer direct tactical action against the rebels to…harder duty.”
“I would carry out my orders completely and enthusiastically, because I believe that the Empire is larger and smarter than me, and that I cannot possibly determine the right thing to do as well as my superiors.”
That was not what she said. That was what he had said when questioned about his ability to carry out his mission.
“I don’t know, sir,” she said.
“You don’t know?”
She touched the back of her cap in agitation. “Sir, I don’t wish to give a poor impression. But it would be arrogance on my part to assume I would rise to the challenge as well as you did. I only hope I can learn from your example.”
He flinched.
A mouse droid whirred up with a hard copy of the watch report. She retrieved it, passed it to him, their gloves skimming with a sound like the first whine of a migraine. He fussed over his datapad. The report was full of routine traffic, administrative matters, totally unrelated to the operation around Hoth.
“Changes to the uniform standard again,” he sighed. “New regulations for the display of recognition flash and skill tabs. The new header on personnel files accidentally corrupted dental records, and it has been judged faster for all officers to receive a new checkup than to restore from the archives, so we are encouraged to get our teeth cleaned at soonest opportunity. New orders from KDY on the safe use of pilots and tugs while in harborage…power system updates to defeat ion weapon attack, we could’ve used those today…”
She said, stiffly, “What do you think I would do, sir?”
“Eh?”
“If ordered to support a mission to eliminate Alderaanian refugees.”
“I suppose you’d do what everyone does.”
“What’s that, sir?”
He coughed into his glove. “Well, you do the work. Hard work. Awful work. But no one hesitates, really.”
“No one at all?”
“No. It’s a job, and the job is to carry out orders as efficiently as possible. That’s what you worry about—that you’ll screw up, let your end down, make things harder for the others. And if it gets to you afterward”—which it had, nightly—“well, ultimately you’re not the one who pulled the trigger. Or if you are, you’re not the one who gave the order. Or if you are, well, you’re not the one who made the whole mess necessary. You get to discussing it with the other officers, very coolly, very civilly, over caf in the wardroom. And you find there’s always someone else to blame. Someone who did something cruel, whereas you were simply merciful. Very well-designed system, all in all. A testament to the rational efficiency of the New Order.”
“I see, sir,” she said, with a kind of warmth. Did she pity him? Did she respect him? Was that the warmth? Had she just come to understand that Canonhaus truly was a person with a heart?
Or was she grateful to discover that reliable Canonhaus was in fact weak, and old, and unfit for command?
Perhaps his own eyes betrayed his vicious fear. Tian recoiled, turned sharply, paced away to consult with a lieutenant commander taking a report in the crew pit.
He tried to find a calm, authoritative stance to hold. Thinking of that mission always slashed him up inside, a long knife working at his guts like the underbrush on Haruun Kal. Where he had tweezed little wasps from his CO’s pores as she died, where he would always be, in the wet darkness of that jungle—
“Sir?”
He started. She’d crept around his other side. “Yes?”
“Orders from the flag. We’re to take Executor’s port station and screen her against asteroid impacts as we move into the field.”
“We’re going in there?” Ultimatum would happily have transited a normal asteroid field, but the Hoth field was young and dense, the cascading result of an interplanetary collision. Gravity drew the rocks back together into dense nodes where they shattered one another—and anything else in the way. “This is a capital warship, not a pursuit craft! We have squadrons for a reason!”
“We could file a protest, sir.”
Was she taunting him? “No, no. Asteroids must not concern us. Take up station on Executor’s port. Rig the ship for close defense.”
The old growl of power came up through the deck, engines battling compensators, swaying them both. Tian jostled against him: the hazards of standing with your hands clasped behind your back. “Sorry,” he said, and coughed. His throat itched now. He was getting a cold, wasn’t he? The weaknesses of flesh.
“Sorry, sir. My fault.”
“You get used to it quickly enough. The acceleration. It’s not like on the smaller ships, you know. The big KDY engines take a while to fight through the compensators. They’ll catch you by surprise.”
“I imagine they will, sir. May I ask, sir, how long you’ve been on navy ships?”
He had to do the math in his head. “Thirty years, I think. Since I was a midshipman with the old…the prior regime.”
“And if I may also ask, sir, where do you see yourself in another thirty years?”
Eighty years old. In a white place with polished black floors, in dry air that made him sneeze, in a uniform with a cap that hurt his head.
In the jungle.
“In command of a sector fleet, I suppose. Or a staff position.” He smiled, and coughed again. “Or writing my memoirs.”
“And the New Order, sir? The navy? Still chasing rebels?”
“Oh, the Rebellion will be long over. I suppose we’ll be…”
He trailed off. He simply could not imagine what the New Order would do once the Rebellion was crushed. Would the Tarkin Doctrine have achieved a full galactic peace? Omnipresent fear becoming omnipresent respect and obedience?
She was watching him closely. She would pore through the bridge records and select any sedition on his part to put in her file of old Canonhaus’s mistakes. He could not show any doubt.
But no matter how he twisted himself around, he could not imagine what general orders the navy might operate under except to crush insurrection and bring worlds into the Empire’s control. In twenty years, the inner emptiness of the New Order would become outer; the logic of loyalty and rebellion would be accelerated until everyone who was not aroused to the highest state of loyalty would be marked as a traitor and denounced; professionalism would become fanaticism, temporary measures would become permanent, the conditions those measures had been meant to avert would become routine; old loyalties would become grounds for suspicion and purge; the New Order would become newer and newer, constantly revised and updated, containing less and less of substance and more and more of reaction, each new day’s ideology ready to denounce the last day’s thought as regressive backsliding. Until at last the New Order was newer than all other things, the first thought, the first principle, from which all else proceeded, even truth itself. It would not be about anything, intend anything, mean anything. It would simply exist for the sake of power, absolute and unlimited, without constraint.
That was the eating core of the Empire. And in time it would chew through all the shells of bureaucracy, all the Kuat Drive Yards contracts and orders of battle and armor patterns and TIE acronyms and XX-9 turbolasers and uniform tab codes. In the end, the Empire would not be about tactics and procedures and logic. It would be about the empty cruelty of men like Vader. It would be fear for fear’s sake, power without purpose, symbol without meaning, nothingness, nonsense. A man in a mask, like the Hendanyn death masks that had given him nightmares as a child. But when you took off the mask, there was no man.
“Sir,” Tian said, “you’re shivering.”
“Ah. Yes. I kept the bridge a little warmer on Majestic. And I’m—” He shook his head. If he admitted he felt ill, she would offer to relieve him. She would take the ship into the asteroid field herself.
Maybe that was good! Maybe she could face the danger on the command tower while he was safe in the armored hull! But what a craven, cowardly thought that was; what an unworthy and conniving act it would be…
“Would you like some caf, sir?” she asked.
“No, thank you, Commander. Your talents are wasted on an ensign’s work.”
“I do look forward to commanding my own watches, sir.”
Oh, she did want the bridge, didn’t she? Make way for Tian’s ambition. “On second thought,” he said, “do fetch that caf.”
She stiffened, sensing the closure of a door she hadn’t known was open. “Yes, sir.”
He sighed. “Wait.”
“Sir?”
“Never mind the caf. One of us should transfer down to auxiliary control, in case the bridge tower is hit.”
The Imperial-class kept its helm and weapons functions tightly centralized, to ensure “reliability.” Transferring command to the auxiliary was not an easy process—a measure meant to prevent trickery and hijacking. At Scarif there had been serious, if brief, fears of a boarding action. “If there is an impact, we’ll need to be ready to clear the field and make repairs.”
She eyed him carefully. “Yes, sir. As senior officer, perhaps you should take the better-protected station…?”
“No, no. My place is here. The bridge deflectors should be enough to stop anything that gets past the batteries and tractor beams.” And asteroids, unlike rebels, were not likely to make runs under the shields with proton torpedoes. At least the Separatist droids had been civilized enough to stand off and trade broadsides.
“Still, sir, you’d be much safer below.”
Ah, she was afraid that he was manipulating her into seeming cowardly. Maybe she thought he would report that she’d fled her post. Or was it the opposite? Maybe she wanted to command the bridge in combat, and claim he’d fled below…
Maybe she was the empty avarice of the New Order, waiting to eat him. As she’d eaten her two peers at Carida.
Or maybe she was honest, principled, funny, the hope of a new generation of better officers. He didn’t trust himself to tell the difference.
One of them had to go below. One of them had to stay here and risk death.
What would a decent man do? Impossible for him to know. But he could pretend he’d never heard of Helix Squadron. Never come around a lammas tree in the croaking jungle dark to find a Korun boy, drinking from a tap hammered through the gray bark. Never seen that final instant of white reflection from the boy’s terrified eyes. He could pretend.
What would the man who had never known these things do now?
“Go below,” he ordered. “Stand by in auxiliary control to take over if the bridge drops out. If that does happen, your orders are to clear the field and save the ship. On my authority.”
She looked up into his eyes. Wondering, perhaps, if he was trying to save her, or if he wanted all the glory for himself. Wondering who he was.
“You’re sure, sir?”
“I gave you an order, Commander. Go below.”
“Yes, sir.” She saluted. “Don’t forget the command conference with Lord Vader. I’ve configured the holo pickup and set it to the proper channel. You can take it right here.”
“I do not intend to displease Lord Vader by forgetting anything, Commander.”
“Yes, sir. Good luck, sir.” She turned smartly and headed for the lifts.
Canonhaus turned, settled back into the clasped-hands posture of cool consideration, and (when no one could see) screwed up his face to sneeze.
It wouldn’t come.
The maelstrom of the Hoth field whirled and pulverized itself ahead. Ultimatum’s sensors and tractor projectors reached out, plotting the turbulent courses, prioritizing larger fragments for deflection or destruction. The odds of anything getting through were—well, he was no droid, but they were acceptably low. Nothing would get through.
“None shall pass,” he murmured. He had vague pre-Imperial childhood memories of a show he’d loved, hazy, taboo, something COMPNOR would certainly not approve of. He remembered it as if from another reality. It was called Laser Masters. In one of the later episodes, a Laser Master defended the Senate chamber from an army of monsters. Those were the Laser Master’s last words before his final stand. None shall pass. He had loved that show. How many years since he’d thought of it?
“None shall pass,” he repeated. Something a hero would say.
The lieutenant commander running the crew pit to his left looked up in confusion. Canonhaus ignored him.
He looked back to be sure Commander Tian had gone below. No sign of her. He felt an unaccountable sadness, like an alien growing in him, fever wasps crawling out his tear ducts. And a sense of something rushing toward him from the dark, coming closer, wanting nothing, needing nothing, destroying whatever it touched. His brooding on the New Order had clearly set him badly off-kilter.
If something did go wrong—if the ship was hit, and they looked over the logs at his posthumous court-martial—they would find his final order was to send Commander Tian below. That thought comforted him, though he did not know if it should. A hero’s order. Standing the watch himself. None shall pass.
He sneezed.