THE BURDEN OF LEADERSHIP
Danny Lore
No, Lando Calrissian knows the trick isn’t to stay blank; it’s to show exactly what you want someone to see. Normally, that’s comfort; a casual sense of ownership of both the room and the table. Sometimes, it’s a false tell, a twitch of your mouth or brow. A lack is a tell in and of itself, showing that you’re forcing your face and body to contort. Besides, the harder you keep your smirk off your face, the easier it is for someone to notice when it twitches in the opposite direction.
When Han insisted he was okay with Lando taking the Millennium Falcon into battle, Lando did exactly what he would have done at the sabacc table. He chuckled, smirked, played up his cool while Han fretted. Dismissing it with a salute and even calling his friend a pirate, until Han was calmed enough to walk away.
He wasn’t fully reassured, but Lando knew just what he needed to do to keep Han focused. It was a skill he’d acquired years ago
A skill that was getting used a lot since he’d joined up with the Rebel Alliance.
As it turned out, all the skill and expertise in the galaxy didn’t allow Lando to forget reality: Any one of them, or all of them, could end up space dust collecting on an asteroid belt before the attack on the Death Star was over.
Lando managed a snort of dark laughter before finally letting his head and shoulders drop. With Han aboard the stolen Imperial shuttle, preparing to take off, Lando could pretend he was in between card hands, without other players scanning his gaze for accidentally shared honesty. He found his fingertips already at the clasp of his cloak, releasing it. There was a weight lifted then as well, as he draped the cloak over his arm and walked back to his former ship.
As Lando strides up the ramp of the Falcon alone, he thinks about a version of the present where he never left Cloud City. He’s still the baron administrator; Lobot is nearby, explaining some mind-numbingly mundane administrative task. In it, he either gave Han over and accepted whatever Vader did, or more preferably, it’s a version where Han never showed up at all. No one sacrifices themselves to make up for Lando’s betrayal. No Empire breathing down the city’s neck. He doesn’t want any of that to happen, of course, and imagining those scenarios twists his stomach and thickens the lump. He’s made his decision, but he searches for other possibilities, hopes to find one that doesn’t make his skin crawl worse than Han’s worried pout before his friend had boarded the Imperial shuttle.
Lando enters the ship to find that Nien Nunb is already speaking with the technicians, and the snippets Lando hears sound about right: how few of them Han even let breathe near the ship, so most of the inspection information was whatever Han, Chewbacca, and a couple of droids had already offered up. Lando chuckles, his hand running across a wall panel. When he’d first boarded the ship to look for Han, this was one of the first panels he’d touched. At the time he hadn’t recognized any of the dents or scratches that marred the metal, and even though he did now, it still felt strange to him, still part of the life the ship had lived without him…
“What’s wrong, Nunb?” He knew something was up from the sound of his friend’s footsteps. “Something not ready for takeoff?”
“Hmph,” came the response as Lando turned to face him. “Not with the ship.”
“Of course not,” Lando joked. “If there was, I’m sure Han would have already blamed me for it, somehow.” Nunb was unenthused by the joke, and Lando allowed himself a moment of seriousness. “Who is it?”
“The stragglers you were worried about.”
Stragglers. It wasn’t quite the right term, but Lando wasn’t sure how to catagorize the dozen or so Cloud City citizens who had chosen to follow Lando to the Rebel Alliance. They all had their reasons—hatred of the Empire, loyalty to Lando, interest in the Rebellion…or just feeling like they had no other option. People who felt as if they had to follow Lando because he would know what to do. They could have stayed behind or taken their ships and gone anywhere in the galaxy, but Lando knew a few of them felt they had fewer and fewer options. People who’d spent years avoiding the Empire, who felt as if Lando’s choices had placed them in limbo, at least until the attack on the Death Star played out. Once it did—maybe the stragglers would feel the expanse of space open up again, instead of the pressure of the war suffocating them. Lando’s thumb rubbed against the ropework of his cape thoughtfully. “Anyone tell them we’ve still got a war to fight?”
“Besides you? Only every being on this base,” Nunb supplied in Sullestese. He would switch to his native tongue when he wanted to keep things between him and Lando, knowing few others around them would understand. “Starting to gather that’s the problem.”
There was a shout from outside the ship, and this time Lando did wince. Nunb looked down the still-lowered ramp with a heavy sigh. “From what the technicians were saying…no one can handle your Cloud City people but you, Lando.”
Lando opened his mouth to say something but stopped himself. No point in arguing with his copilot; he spent enough time having pointless one-sided arguments with Han if he wanted that. Instead, he smirked like he was back at the sabacc table. “Comes with the territory. Captain, baron administrator, general…one of these days I’ll pick a job where I actually get to just worry about myself.”
Lando started down the Falcon’s ramp, ignoring the way that Nunb laughed. Just because today wasn’t that day didn’t mean Lando couldn’t dream.
There’s a version of the present where Lando doesn’t have stragglers. Where he’s done this whole “leader” thing properly, and his people are all on the same page. Where his people weren’t disappointed that he’d abandoned neutrality to dive headfirst into being not just a rebel but a general. Where the folks that he’d saved weren’t so angry he’d broken the promise to avoid the Empire’s conflict that they were losing faith in him. A version where they are just happy to be alive instead of angry, feeling as if they have to stay with the Rebellion or fear what would happen to them if they went out on their own. It’s a version of events where either he successfully keeps Cloud City on the edge of the conflict instead of diving straight into it or where maybe it’s another leader’s decision instead of his.
But Lando mostly thinks about staying out of it as someone else makes the wrong choice, and that’s even worse than the version where the responsibility is still his.
Hours later, there was more shouting, this time from a Dressellian pilot named Korrimix and a human technician named Bolt.
Korrimix was like Lando. From smuggler to Cloud City denizen to part of the city’s security force, to exiled past the blockade and stuck out here. Not a rebel, not an Imperial…just a man who was quiet until he had a few too many drinks or three too many bad dice rolls. He was slightly older than Lando, and they’d run into each other more than once before Lando became baron administrator; in fact, it had been seeing Lando’s “scummy” face that Korrimix listed as the reason he’d decided to stay in Cloud City. The same “scummy” face was probably what kept Korrimix with Lando after Lando rejected the deal with the Empire.
Bolt got his name before coming to Cloud City, the moniker a nod to how quickly he could dodge a hit to the face. He’d come to the city claiming that obviously no one was after him, and he didn’t owe anyone money, a dance that Lando knew very well. To be honest, Lando suspected Bolt left Cloud City with him because being directly under the Empire’s boot was the scariest option in front of him. So as Lando followed the shouting through the hangar, he wasn’t sure which was odder: the way that Bolt was standing back up to hold his ground after Korrimix socked him, or the fact that Lando grabbed Korrimix’s arm to keep him from socking Bolt again.
“Korrimix, buddy…relax.” Normally, Lando prided himself on the way those words could actually ease his people’s tensions. A warm Calrissian smile and a gentle command could stop the rowdiest of casino denizens and yet…right as Lando let Korrimix’s fist drop, Korrimix lunged again, past Lando, causing Bolt to flinch and cower—but still not run away.
Lando jerked Korrimix back. “You have two seconds to tell me what’s happening here before I throw you both out into space and let the lack of gravity separate you!” There were other pilots and technicians looking on at the skirmish. Those whom Lando knew were working to assist for the most part; a pair helped Bolt stand, while another pair took over holding Korrimix.
“Nothing to see here, just some pre-battle tensions,” Lando assured anyone near enough to listen, before hissing to Korrimix, “Isn’t that right?”
“Tell the Baron Administrator what you just said, Korrimix,” Bolt hissed. Lando raised an eyebrow at the technician to keep from flinching at being called baron. The old title didn’t have the same ring to it when dealing with new problems. “Tell him what kind of sleemo he’s going to have at his back.”
Lando was keeping track of the bystanders. There were some rebels looking on with curiosity or disgust, whispering to one another—judging Lando and the two men, surely, wondering why it was worth even having them around. He wondered suddenly how much the average rebel knew about the path Lando had traveled to get here. Whether they were all questioning the choice to make him a general as much as he sometimes did, and why, in this moment, he even cared.
Korrimix and Bolt were his to deal with, and whatever the rebels thought about them was in part because Lando had brought them here.
“You all wanna throw away your lives, be my guest,” Korrimix snapped at Bolt, “but I’m done throwing myself into Lando’s battles! I didn’t sign up for this! Nobody’s gonna call me a karking coward for that.”
“I didn’t just call you a coward,” Bolt supplied. The next few words were Bolt saying exactly what he thought of Korrimix, starting “selfish Hutt-spawned waste of space” and ending almost poetically in its disgust. Lando wasn’t so sure he could blame Korrimix for throwing a punch under those conditions. Still…
As Lando smoothed his sleeves, he realized his cloak must have become unclasped when he stepped into the brawl. Looking around, he found it dropped beside a pile of tools and metal scrap. He reached down to grab it but hadn’t even laid a finger on it before Korrimix’s words sank in.
Lando stood back up, his cloak forgotten. “What did you mean by you’re done, pilot?” Korrimix’s glare didn’t soften when he turned it toward Lando, something that Lando was very unaccustomed to. “When were you going to inform me—when we were approaching the Death Star?”
That got a flinch.
“Were you expecting to desert mid-battle?” Lando questioned sternly. One of the pilots who had been holding Korrimix took a step back. “You too?” Lando sucked his teeth. He’d picked Korrimix as a member of Gold Squadron because he trusted the Dressellian to get the job done, whatever it took. He didn’t like thinking he’d picked wrong. “And here I was putting my life in the hands of my squadron. Are you telling me that was a mistake?”
Lando’s lowered tone snapped everyone to attention. Bolt froze as if he were the one threatening to betray Lando. Korrimix tilted his head with stubborn pride as he debated what to reply. Those who had interfered to stop the fight suddenly forgot what to do with their hands, looking at Lando and one another for the next steps.
There’s a version of the present where Lando lets them duke it out. Where he doesn’t get his hands dirty and just picks another pilot. Or maybe Korrimix doesn’t throw a punch to begin with. Where everyone under Lando’s command shares a united vision of what their future looks like.
There’s another version where Lando doesn’t even need to be here, because he’s turned down the position of general. Maybe he and the others from Cloud City travel as far out in the Outer Rim as they can, or maybe it’s just him or maybe…
…he’s digging for possibilities and coming up empty.
There was no whispering from the crowd now. Instead, the smattering of rebels who were checking their fighters and prepping for battle were silent. There was no question that they, too, were waiting for an answer. The weight of Korrimix’s words was second only to the suffocating pressure around the conflict. Some droid and one of the pilots scampered off, and Lando could only assume it was to inform another officer that trouble was truly brewing.
Beyond the now captivated rebels, there were other members of Gold Squadron listening in, a couple of them also from Cloud City. Others who were about to put their lives not just in Korrimix’s hands, but in Lando’s. Who were going to fight what might be their last fight because they’d put their trust in Lando’s lead.
A panicked voice in the back of his head reminded him exactly the kind of man they were trusting. The ways he’d thrown away his friends’ lives before finally putting his foot down. That he was a leader who had promised neutrality before landing here.
“You could have left before I assigned you to a ship.” Lando’s stomach dropped but he kept his voice steady. He was a consummate con man; he’d never watched a betrayal happen at such a crucial moment for the entire galaxy. He wondered if this was how Han had felt when Lando turned him over to Vader. “Was making up your mind too hard for you, Korrimix? Or were you hoping to make us fail?”
Korrimix’s body language as much as his words would determine what happened next. Whether he’d try to run and steal a ship, making Lando have to lock him up in a cell, or if Lando could laugh this moment off for now…before everyone died in battle. Neither option was appealing, and the path didn’t clear the longer that Lando stared back at the Dressellian. Korrimix stayed tense, glaring back with an intensity that Lando hadn’t seen in a long time.
“I didn’t run when you had us fight the Imperials for your little friends,” Korrimix answered coldly. “I did it, because I told myself you could push the Imperials out. That you’d make sure we’d be left alone, like you promised.”
“And we will be.” Even Lando was shocked at the surety of his words. Was this one of the times when he could convince himself of his own con, when he needed the lie to be true so badly he made it so? “This is just—”
“A detour?” Korrimix snapped acidly. “Being left alone isn’t showing up at a place called the Death Star and begging them to lock target.”
Lando laughed. In a nightmarish way, Korrimix’s words were funny, they were true. No tension was broken by his joke, or Lando’s follow-up. “You’re a damn good pilot. If you’re flying right, their fighters won’t be able to lock on.”
“You’ve lost your mind,” Korrimix declared. “They are relying on hope and a few refurbished ships to topple a destroyer of planets, and you think I’m wrong for wanting to step away?”
“They’ve done it before!” Surprisingly, it was Bolt who came to the Rebellion’s defense. Lando wasn’t sure what to make of the man standing more firmly than he’d ever seen, but he couldn’t help but admire it. “With more intel and with—”
“It was a near impossible shot, from what I’ve heard.” Korrimix shook his head in disgust, and while he was replying to Bolt, he kept his eyes locked on Lando. “You’re talking about a lucky hit the way the rest of these fools talk about hope. Hope was for the Jedi, you know that, right? Real people know hoping does nothing up against brute force. We’ve seen people in our lines of work—smugglers, con men, military men—and hope gets them killed.”
Lando saw Korrimix’s fist twitch a few times during his speech, the Dressellian clearly debated if punching Lando was worth it. Which one of Lando’s many titles was it, he wondered, that kept Korrimix from doing the deed. Baron administrator, Rebellion general, old pal?
Lowering his eyes to Korrimix’s fist drew Lando’s attention back to his fallen cloak. He stared at it for a moment, realizing with a start that at some point Korrimix had stepped on it, his heel squarely atop the fabric. It shouldn’t have mattered, not when desertion was on the table, but this annoyed Lando more than anything that was coming out of Korrimix’s mouth.
Had Korrimix done it insultingly it would have been better. It would have been a conscious insult in line with Bolt’s impressively displayed vocabulary. But Korrimix hadn’t looked down, hadn’t spit at the cape. He wasn’t trying to rile Lando up by snubbing a favorite item of clothing. It was worse than that: Korrimix stepped on the thing, and it didn’t matter. No realization he shouldn’t step on Lando’s possessions, no reaction to the insult to Lando’s authority.
And worse still, it had taken this long for Lando to notice as well. He’d spent so much time watching the faces around him, imagining versions of his life where he didn’t have to do any of this, that he hadn’t noticed this carelessness. He’d been distracted enough not to simply pick it up and dust it off…because Korrimix was saying exactly what a part of him had been thinking ever since Han, Chewie, and the others had shown up in Cloud City. Luck and hope weren’t going to cut it. Lando was too good of a gambler to disagree; no high-level game of sabacc was won on luck or hope alone.
But, he was suddenly so very sick of hearing it, both from Korrimix and from himself.
“You want out of the squadron?” Lando asked. Like at the sabacc table, it wasn’t about keeping a neutral expression. Instead, it was just the right amount of Lando’s anger oozing out between the words, mixed with a surety that came not from being a general or a baron administrator, but from years of convincing pirates and smugglers one more score was worth it.
Korrimix wasn’t sure where this was going, and glanced around at the faces in the crowd. The pilots and technicians who had restrained him previously looked everywhere but at him, not ready to help nudge him to what was possibly their doom. “I’m not a rebel.”
“Avoiding the point, but I get it,” Lando replied. He glanced around at his people, but past them as well, to the loyal rebels that watched. “I promised you a way out of the Empire’s line of sight, and you’re right—at the moment, we might as well be putting on a light show to get their attention.” Korrimix didn’t nod, but one of the men beside him did.
“But you come from the same line of work as I do, Korrimix, old friend, and you were damn good at it.” Lando took a step closer not to Korrimix, but to Bolt, putting an arm around the technician and making the man look like he might show off his namesake then and there. “From the stories you both told over drinks, you were better at it than this guy was, huh?”
Bolt squawked, squirmed, but Lando just patted him on the shoulder and moved on, leaning on a nearby crate. A crate that two nosy rebels were trying to pretend hid their eavesdropping. They dispersed immediately.
“You’re right: Hope and luck won’t win the day. But you know how the game is played,” Lando continued. “Almost as well as I do.” He gestured between him and his people. “We know their rules well enough to break them, or twist the rules into our own. It’s how we survived on every planet and station we landed on.” Who “they” were didn’t matter; every ex-smuggler listening knew, “they” were the latest mark chasing after them.
“We bend and break those rules so they can’t catch us. So they don’t see us. And that worked on Cloud City for a long time.” He shrugged, winking at the nearest Gold Squadron member with well-practiced nonchalance. “Not as long as we’d like, but a good long time. And you want that back, don’t you, Korrimix?”
Korrimix didn’t answer, sensing the trap.
“Korrimix.” Lando didn’t usually have to use that bark of authority, but when he did, it worked quite nicely.
“That’s what I signed up for,” Korrimix growled reluctantly. “I was with you as long as you kept the Empire from bothering me.”
Lando nodded. “Right. But you know that’s not how any of this works.” It wasn’t a question. “Because almost every job people like us ever take gets a wrench thrown into it. Big or small, there’s always some rule we can’t bend, or some twist we never saw coming. And the job fails when we can’t figure out a way around it.”
He took a deep breath, standing back up straight. This part of being in charge was just like the sabacc table. Even if it didn’t come naturally, bluffing until it was true did. “What happened on Cloud City was the moment I saw the wrench had been thrown a long time ago, Korrimix.” He managed to say the pilot’s name and mean everyone listening. “It was the moment that I realized playing nice with the Empire meant I couldn’t bend the rules I needed to bend. So I did what any good smuggler would do: I threw the plan away and made a new one.
“And you wanna argue this isn’t the same plan? Look around you and do the math. The Empire put its claws in Cloud City and there were only two ways out: pretend they hadn’t while they still control us, or hightail it out of there and make sure it hurts them as badly as it hurts us. Worse.”
They weren’t under the shadow of the Falcon, but Lando searched the shadow and ship out nonetheless from across the way. “Far as I’m concerned, our freedom was the score we were aiming for, and it was my job to grab up as much of that as I could. You disagree with that, go ahead and leave. But know this, Korrimix—”
Lando took a step forward, crouching down to put a hand on his cape. With a sharp tug, Korrimix stumbled enough for Lando to pick up the cape. He took his time dusting it off, making a show of putting it back over his shoulders, the fabric gently hitting Korrimix in the process. He closed the clasp properly this time, centering it.
He knew what he looked like in the cape, smirking. He knew the exact image Korrimix saw when Lando put a hand on the Dressellian’s shoulder and squeezed it just a little bit. He knew the confidence that Korrimix saw in his eyes.
“—only one of us is keeping the score, and I’m a damn better smuggler than you are.”
Lando knew that some of the rebels watching wouldn’t understand, and probably would tell their associates that Lando was threatening his men. He knew that they looked on and saw a general not punishing a disobedient soldier. And if that was a problem, well, he’d deal with that.
But he wasn’t talking to the rebels. He was talking to his people. To the folk loyal to his “scummy” face rather than a greater cause. He knew what he was doing.
Korrimix finally spoke. “You really believe there’s no other option.”
“I tried playing with the Empire already, you saw how that turned out.” Korrimix reached out, and instinctively Lando braced—but Korrimix merely plucked a shard of something that had attached itself to Lando’s cape. “You’re out, I’ll get another pilot, but—”
“No,” Korrimix grunted. “I work for my share of any score.”
Lando’s smirk became a smile. “Let’s take a walk then, friend.” He couldn’t very well pretend Korrimix’s words hadn’t happened—too many lives at stake—but he could make sure Korrimix would fight for Gold Squadron, even if he wasn’t committed to the greater cause. And right now, that was enough.
There’s no present that Lando can imagine in which he isn’t leading Gold Squadron into battle. He’s tried to envision it: where he walks away when Korrimix speaks thoughts that mirror his own, where he decides he can’t be the general that leads con artists and smugglers, as well as rebels.
He tries to imagine the present where he isn’t there to see the second Death Star, where he’s not there to make the call to keep fighting. But that present doesn’t fit, doesn’t sit right in his head.
Lando’s more comfortable dealing with the current one.