ENDING PROTOCOL
Hannah Whitten
Riz cocked an eyebrow, though the other stormtrooper couldn’t see it beneath her helmet. “How many Hutt mouths have you walked through, exactly?”
“Let me amend: Walking through this forest feels like how I assume walking through a Hutt mouth would. Humid and smelly.”
The humidity she couldn’t argue with, but Riz didn’t think it was that smelly. Granted, not much got through her helmet. She refrained from telling Gir that he was probably just smelling his own breath.
Gir stumbled, foot tangling in thick green underbrush. His blaster, held carelessly in his armor-plated hand, swung out wide as he tried to regain his balance and struck Riz in the chest. It didn’t go off—his brain wasn’t so packed with nerf fur that he’d forgotten the safety—but Riz froze anyway, the sweat pooling on her neck going clammy and cold, her heart knotting up in her chest.
Being at the business end of a blaster—especially one from another trooper—made her twitchy, for more reasons than one.
“Kriff,” Gir grumbled as he righted himself. “At this point, I would rather walk through a whole horde of Hutt mouths. Doubt I’d trip as much.”
This was the part where usually she’d say something witty, fulfill the role she’d taken in the stretch of days they’d spent tromping around this tiny, overgrown moon, watching for rebels who seemed much better at blending into their surroundings than Imperial troopers ever were. But the smack of Gir’s blaster hitting her armor had stricken the possibility of anything witty from her brain.
Gir’s head tracked from the smudge on her white armor where the blaster had hit her to the weapon in his hand. With a sigh, he holstered the weapon carefully, then reached up and disengaged his helmet. His pale skin was sheened in sweat as he glanced at her, his eyes narrowed. “Blasters still bother you?”
Following his lead, Riz pulled her own helmet off. Her short blond hair was practically plastered to her skull, and the cool breeze through the trees felt impossibly good. She closed her eyes a moment, as much to enjoy the respite from her helmet as to avoid looking at Gir’s face. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “Still.”
That, at least, was an understandable explanation for her jumpiness. Seeing your commander shot during what was supposed to be a simple interrogation wasn’t something you just got over.
NE-034—Neo, they’d called her, cobbling together nicknames because none of them were particularly attached to the ones they were born with—wasn’t even supposed to be leading the mission. But the captain had been called away at the last minute, something about a special assignment to Cloud City, and Neo was the next highest in rank. Under her leadership, they’d been deployed to Nar Shaddaa for recon. A simple enough task, though they’d all been instructed to listen for any news of Luke Skywalker while they were there. Lord Vader was particularly interested in learning of his whereabouts.
Riz shouldn’t know that, though. And she didn’t, for certain. It was just a feeling she’d had, when the order came down from the higher-ups. A twinge in her middle that told her Vader’s interest was more personal than political.
She’d always had what she interpreted as a strong intuition. Not necessarily a trait the Empire valued in its troopers, so she’d done her best to squash it down, to silence it. At least, she had back then.
The order came that morning to find a human woman rumored to know something about Skywalker, for reasons that command didn’t deem necessary to share. Neo programmed the reported coordinates, and off they went.
Riz was uncomfortable through the entire march, a scattering of goosebumps across the back of her neck, a pitted feeling in her middle. She liked Neo well enough, but the other trooper had a reputation for going too far, sometimes. For relishing the brutal parts of the job.
Not that Riz had a leg to stand on in that regard. Not really. No one in her contingent spent much time sharing the stories of how they’d come to be in the Imperial military, but Riz suspected that many were like her—orphaned, nowhere safe to sleep, not knowing where their next meal was coming from. Hunger was sharp enough that you’d do anything to blunt its edge. It was only once you were sated that you looked guiltily back on what it had cut.
Maybe it’d started like that for Neo, too. Backed into a corner, seemingly no other way out. Maybe she’d just decided to keep the blade sharp, even after the hunger was blunted, the stability secured.
Either way, all of them were here, doing the same things, enacting the same violence. It came easier to some than to others, but there was no way to hold this job and innocence in the same hand.
The woman they were looking for lived in a warren beneath a skybridge, broken durasteel creating a makeshift door into hollow darkness, kept away from the glow of urban sprawl. Stepping through the jagged doorway felt like stepping into a waiting mouth.
She’d looked harmless. Thin and pale, as if she never got quite enough to eat, dressed in ragged layers of cloth that may or may not have ever been intended as clothing. Despite her thinness and her age, though, there’d been a glint in her eye that spoke of well-honed survival instinct, prey that had managed to evade the predator far longer than expected.
That look said the stormtroopers would have a hell of a time getting anything incriminating out of her.
Still, Neo began with what they’d been taught best. Intimidation.
Neo crossed her white-plated arms, making sure her blaster was clearly visible, rolling her neck as if loosening up for a fight. “Now,” she said, her helmet flattening her voice to something cold and droidlike, “you’re going to tell us everything you know about Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia Organa. And we know you know something, bantha-bait, so don’t try to pretend.”
Riz didn’t usually like to watch this stuff. She’d close her eyes beneath her helmet, sinking into her own mind as if it could be an escape. She’d made a place for herself at the bottom of the barrel, thought of as too weak to carry out any important aspects of a mission, so she was never asked for much other than her presence. Still, she always stood aside, a quiet witness who never stepped in, even when everything in her screamed that it was wrong.
The old woman’s flinty eyes darted to a ratty curtain hanging over the back half of her makeshift home. They’d taken a cursory look behind it when they first forced their way in and seen nothing but dusty boxes. It didn’t look like the boxes had been disturbed in years, and the other troopers hadn’t bothered checking inside before declaring the all-clear.
But that intuition, that tug at her ribs, told Riz to look. Slowly, she backed away from formation, flicked aside her hand to open the curtain. A cloud of dust bloomed in the air; it made her glad of her helmet.
In the storage room, Riz carefully opened one of the boxes. It’d taken her a moment to realize what she was seeing. A mess of metal and plastoid, jumbled weapons in various states of repair. And in pride of place, set delicately atop the rest of the contraband, two silver-and-black hilts.
Lightsabers.
The woman was an arms dealer, then, and a collector as well. If Lord Vader knew she had lightsabers, he would’ve come here himself; the information must’ve been garbled along the way, twisted out of relic collecting and into her knowing about Skywalker. Such a thing would still bring her before Vader, though, and Riz couldn’t imagine that would end well.
Maybe the woman did know something about Skywalker’s whereabouts, but the tug of feeling in her middle told Riz she didn’t. The knowledge was a rush of strange relief.
Riz eased her way out of the curtained-off storage room and into the back of the formation again, chewing her lip bloody beneath her white-plated visor.
Neo knelt, leaning closer to the old woman, her armored hand hovering over her blaster. “Start talking, lady, or things are going to get real nasty real quick.”
With a lurch, Riz stepped forward. “Ne— Commander. A word?”
Even through the helmet, Riz felt her superior’s confused stare. Neo’s hand wavered, but then she stood. “You may have your word right here, trooper.”
Riz got as close to Neo as she could in the cramped space, wishing she could take off her helmet and whisper, knowing that would be a catastrophic breach of protocol. She didn’t have much in the way of a plan, and she was certain they weren’t going to get anything out of this mission, anyway. But maybe she could at least spare the old woman some pain.
“You aren’t going to get anywhere like this.” The voice filtering unit turned Riz’s whisper to a hiss. “Offer her immunity.”
“Immunity for what?” Neo gave a slight shake of her head. “Listen, you can’t just—”
“Trust me,” Riz interrupted. “If you offer her immunity for past crimes, she’ll tell you everything she knows. I’d bet the fleet on it.”
Her incredulous look was hidden behind white plastoid, but Neo sighed, the sound a soft seethe through the filtering unit. “Okay. We—”
Interrupted, again. But this time, it was by a blaster bolt.
Riz remembered turning so fast that her neck creaked, but the images of that moment in her mind were all slow-motion. The spindly old woman holding a blaster, screeching as she fired off a few more rounds that went blessedly wild, the ember-bright bolts streaking through the air like comets. The chaos of the other troopers ducking, running, trying to wrest the blaster back from the old woman. Neo, crumpling, her chest a smoking hole.
Riz, patting at her side, where her blaster should be holstered, and realizing the weapon the old woman held was her own.
“RZ-440. GR-792. You are in breach of recon protocol; please replace your helmets immediately.”
The cool, automated voice floated out of Riz’s helmet beneath her arm, startling her back into the present. The present, where her blaster was snug on her hip. The present, where she couldn’t bring herself to fire the damn thing, not for the entire week since Neo died and they were all reassigned.
“Damn.” Gir shook his head, sliding his helmet back on. “That’s the clearest the comms have sounded in weeks.”
Riz didn’t respond, though Gir was right. The comm sounded too clear.
Which meant that they must have sent someone else to fix it, for once.
The decision to start leaving the communications towers in disrepair had come almost subconsciously. Riz was one of the better mechanics in her contingent; wherever they were stationed, her two jobs were almost always perimeter duty and patch-ups. But ever since they’d been on the forest moon of Endor, she’d just…stopped. Left the comms the way they were. Let the signal crackle and fade.
Most of it could be blamed on the thick forest, and the Empire was so sure of their impending victory that a few jammed communications lines weren’t of great interest. Riz still wasn’t sure why she did it. It wasn’t like it was making much of a difference.
When she lay awake in whatever hours had been assigned to her for sleeping, the only answer she could come up with was that she wanted this to end. The Empire, maybe. Her part in it, certainly.
She couldn’t hold innocence, never again, but that didn’t stop her from trying to reach for it.
Riz’s helmet hissed as it sealed to the rest of her armor, blocking out the ambient noise of the forest. At least they hadn’t seen any Ewoks today. Those things gave her the creeps.
“Look.” Gir ignored the comm, his baritone voice tuned back to helmet monotone. “You were trying to help Neo. You can’t blame yourself forever for the way things went.”
He didn’t say it wasn’t her fault, Riz noticed. They all knew it was. She saw the sidelong looks, heard the mechanic hiss of whispers in the halls.
After Neo’s death, everyone in her contingent had been sent to guard the shield generator protecting the new, improved Death Star. No time for mourning. No thought for the people who’d seen a friend die. Troopers were pawns, moved about the board at the will of their betters, and no thought was given to those inside the armor.
Something in Riz was withered, now. In abstract, she’d always known that she was barely a person to the Empire, valuable only for what she could offer them—a trigger finger and a body to use as a barricade. She’d always comforted herself with the thought that at least they were mutually using each other, she and the Empire. She got three squares and a roof, and they got war fodder. But that deal was lopsided.
So, the comm signals. So, this feeling brewing in her middle, a slow-growing determination that yes, the Empire was the villain here, and yes, she had been complicit in things she could never truly make up for.
“Think about this instead of blasters,” Gir said, taking an exaggerated huge step over a tangle of weeds. “We just caught a handful of rebels. Maybe that means it’ll be over soon, and we can get off this damn moon.”
Over soon. That sounded nice.
Something in the distance. Sounds of scuffling, shouting. Faint enough that Riz wondered if she was imagining it. Her stomach twisted, that feeling sparking to life, telling her to be watchful, be wary.
If Gir could hear the same sounds she could, he didn’t seem fazed. “And you’re going to have to use that blaster again eventually,” he continued. They’d moved from the relatively open ground on the outer perimeter of their route to the thicker bramble that grew close to the bunker, reaching up nearly to his waist. “You can’t just—”
A sound, too clear to be imagined this time. A blaster.
They broke into a run, eating up the distance remaining between them and the bunker.
Not just one blaster—lots of blasters. And Ewoks, too, chittering in their high, unintelligible language, jumping down from the trees to beat at stormtroopers with sticks. Blasters, and Ewoks, and scout walkers, shooting bolts of light that whizzed through the trees.
Gir dropped down into the tall grass; Riz followed, training taking over her muscles even though the sounds of battle had turned them all liquid. Her comm was shouting in her ear, staticky and garbled but in better shape than she’d left it, ordering all hands to the bunker, the prisoners had escaped, the bunker was under attack.
They crawled through the underbrush until Riz could see the bunker door through the swaying yellow-green grass.
Four figures. Two droids, one humanoid and golden while the other was a white-and-blue R2 unit, and two humans. One of the humans messed with exposed wires in the bunker wall. The other wore a green cape and had her hair braided in a dark crown, crouching in the corner with her blaster outstretched. Riz was too far away to see their faces.
Her intuition flared again, looking at the woman. As if she should recognize something.
Blasterfire zinged around the forest, harmonizing with the shouts of Imperials and the screeches of Ewoks, the whine of scout walkers. A bolt skidded along the side of the bunker, and the woman by the door returned fire. Rebels, then.
Riz hoped the woman’s shot landed.
“I think I’ve got it!” the man at the door called triumphantly, wires sparking in his hands. Another blaster bolt hit the side of the bunker, just missing the woman crouched at his feet. She fired back—another white-armored body sprawled in the brush. “I’ve got it!”
He didn’t. The bunker doors were doubled; he’d only managed to close the set he’d already hot-wired open.
Gir didn’t hesitate. He lurched up from the ground, still at a crouch so he didn’t emerge fully from the undergrowth, and fired.
His shot went wide, sparking off the bunker’s side. But it got close to the woman, and she reeled away. Riz could clearly see her face for the first time.
Leia Organa. The woman at the bunker was Leia Organa. Which meant the man had to be Han Solo. The escaped prisoners, right here.
Next to her, Gir seemed to be coming to the same realization. He chuckled low, the sound made more menacing by his voice filtering unit. “The princess herself,” he murmured, raising his blaster. “This will make me captain, for sure.”
He raised his blaster. He centered his shot.
And right as he pulled the trigger, in a burst of movement that her brain barely considered before her body took over, Riz kicked out her foot.
Her boot knocked into Gir’s leg, sending his blaster-arm swinging to the side. A cry from the bunker—Organa was hit, but just in the shoulder, her green poncho sparking as she fell backward.
Relief gripped Riz’s chest in a cool fist.
Gir, surprisingly, didn’t seem upset with her, apparently thinking it had been an accident. “Come on.” He stood, tugging Riz along with him, running at a bent-over crouch to the deeper cover of trees. “We can still get them, no one else is going to.”
He was right. All around them, Imperial soldiers were falling, beaten back by blasterfire and Ewoks and a scout walker that appeared to be commandeered. The Empire was losing. They were losing. It was a shock, a possibility none of them had prepared for, and Riz felt strangely detached from it, as if she floated somewhere above her body, watching.
In the trees, Gir stood and looped around, heading back for the bunker. Riz glanced over her shoulder before following—the man still didn’t have the door open, and Leia was still crouched in the corner. Riz couldn’t see how badly she was wounded.
Her body felt as mechanical as her armor made her look as she followed Gir, threading through bodies sprawled across the forest floor. He didn’t give them a second glance, intent on his prize. And this was how the Empire worked, wasn’t it? United in violence, but when things went badly, it was every soldier for themselves.
Still, she followed, her head a haze of smoking blaster discharge and the smell of burning plastoid as Gir marched up to the bunker doors. “Freeze!” he snarled, blaster raised. “Don’t move.”
Her blaster was in her hands, the safety still flicked on. Her stomach was churning, churning.
“I love you,” Solo said, crouched over Leia so they couldn’t see her fully. He sounded awed.
“I know,” the princess replied.
“Hands up!” Gir ordered, clearly annoyed that his captives were having a moment when this moment should be his. “Stand down!”
Like that day in the old woman’s home beneath the bridge, the world seemed to stretch out into slow motion. Solo whirled away from Leia at the same moment that she raised a blaster from her lap. She pointed, fired, but only once.
The bolt caught Gir in the chest. He reeled back, fell.
And Riz went with him, driven by instinct that told her to lie down, to play dead, though only the barest spark from the bolt had hit her. She fell to the dirt beside Gir, and she tried to drum up something like sorrow for him, but all she got was blackness as her head hit a tree root and her consciousness narrowed to a pinprick, blinked out.
She didn’t know how long she lay there. The comm must’ve broken when she fell; there were no broken orders in the humid dark of her helmet, nothing but the harsh grate of her breathing. At one point, she thought she heard heavy doors opening, booted feet, a high-pitched chorus of victory. But now, it was quiet, and she was trying to summon the energy to move.
With a heave, Riz pushed up from the ground. All her muscles were tense, the tendons in her neck felt like they’d been used to rein in a dewback, but nothing seemed broken or horrifically out of place.
Riz disengaged her helmet, taking a deep, heaving breath of clean forest air. It still smelled like smoke and death, but anything was preferable to smelling her own sweat.
The bodies hadn’t been touched. White plastoid was left where Imperials had fallen in mangled heaps—troopers beaten by sticks, thrown back by blasterfire, brought down by laser bolts from the scout walker.
Complex grief clenched her heart in its fist and squeezed. This was what the Empire thought of them: letters and numbers and armor, bullet points on a report, easily replaced. Not people.
In a rush of compulsive movement, Riz tore out of her uniform, leaving her in only the skintight dark bodysuit all troopers wore beneath it. She didn’t want to touch that armor. Didn’t ever want to wear it again. Once, it had been shelter and security, but now it felt like shackles.
They thought she was dead. Someone had been by to catalog the casualties, surely, and if not, if they’d never gotten that far—if they’d been beaten that badly—the Empire would simply count anyone on Endor as a loss.
She was free.
A noise above her head. A quiet boom.
Riz looked up.
An aurora of red and orange and yellow bloomed in the sky, bright against the blue.
When she’d first joined up, Riz had been told the tale of Alderaan. It was a quick story, one meant to boost morale—look how strong the Empire is, blasting entire planets out of existence, surely nothing can stand between it and victory. At the time, she’d taken it as reassurance. She’d chosen the winning side, no matter how its atrocities slowly revealed themselves to her, no matter how they began to crawl beneath her skin and settle like slow disease. She remembered the feeling in her middle sparking to life when she was told of Alderaan. Something mourning, so many lives snuffed out, all for want of power.
So many years spent trying to squash that feeling down. Rationalizing, knowing that she’d been a participant in countless terrible things, that there was no real redemption. But through it all, the intuition remained, a spark that wouldn’t go out. A pull toward something different, if only she was brave enough to reach for it.
Maybe she was now. Late, later than she should be, but it was something.
The destruction of Alderaan had apparently somehow led to Luke Skywalker becoming one of the rebels, according to rumor. Every death meant a rebirth, somewhere.
Riz turned and walked into the woods. She followed the tug, letting it wind her through the trees, around the rocks and vines.
Eventually, she heard singing. Saw the flickering of a bonfire, figures dancing around it, Ewok and human and every manner of species in between.
Rebels.
And she knew what she should do, then. That there was no justice in hiding, in pretending, in hoping that everything she’d done would fade away. There was nothing to do but face it head-on, and accept whatever atonement she could find.
Riz stepped forward, out of the tree line, into the fading light.
“Hey!”
A man she didn’t recognize, though his green-patterned clothes marked him as a rebel. His eyes narrowed, a blaster held tight in his hand. His eyes quickly took in her bodysuit and short hair; it didn’t appear that he knew immediately what she was, but his suspicions weren’t soothed. “Who the hell are you?”
The question of the hour. Riz had no idea how to answer. She spread her hands wide, showing clearly she carried no weapon. “I…I don’t…”
I don’t know.
But that part didn’t matter, did it? She took a deep breath. “I’m here to turn myself in.”
His hand tightened on his blaster, and his eyes went wide, but the guard didn’t shoot. “Wait here.” He seemed confident she would do as ordered; there was that, at least. “I’ll get someone.”
As he tromped off into the party, Riz followed his orders. She was good at that, following orders.
A few minutes, then the guard returned with Princess Leia.
She’d changed. Her hair was long, down instead of braided, and she wore a dress instead of a military poncho. Her eyes gleamed as she took Riz in, lips pursed thoughtfully.
“Anyone you recognize?” The guard narrowed his eyes at Riz. “Wouldn’t tell me who she was, but said she was here to turn herself in, so I’m guessing trooper.”
Riz almost wanted to flinch, but she didn’t let herself.
The guard’s eyes narrowed. “I’m sure Han could take care of—”
“No.” Leia gave Riz a long, searching look. Then, she nodded, almost to herself. “Go enjoy yourself. I’ll take it from here.”
The man didn’t seem to like that idea, but neither was he willing to gainsay his superior. With one last appraising glance at Riz, he headed toward the bonfire.
Then it was just them, Riz and Leia, Riz and the woman who had every right to want her dead for all she’d done and all she represented, the woman she’d saved in a quick flash of intuition and impulse. One good deed that could never balance such a stacked scale.
Leia stared at her. She was beautiful, but not in a way that could ever be construed as soft—her face was strong angles, her eyes wise. “So.” Leia gave her the hint of a smile. “What’s your name?”
Riz took a deep breath. “Riz,” she said. “At least, it has been for years. I left my old one behind when I joined.”
And that was as good as a confession.
There was no surprise in the princess’s face. “Where are you from, Riz?”
“All over, really. But I’ve been here for the past few weeks.”
There it was, laid out without words. Her identity, such as it was, and her surrender.
Leia nodded, again, and for a moment, they were silent. Every ligament in Riz’s body was held thrumming-tight.
Leia looked behind her, at the bonfire, the dancing. A deep breath, then she turned back to Riz, her face grave. “I think it’s best if you stay out here while I confer with my other officers.”
She understood that. “I surrender myself to whatever punishment you deem fit.”
A nod, short and businesslike, but there was an unexpected softness in Leia’s eyes. Not forgiveness. Not yet, maybe not ever. Riz could live with that, she thought. Forgiveness wasn’t necessary.
But if there was any way she could fix it—anything she could do to repair the damage she’d done—she would take the chance.
“Just a moment.” Leia nodded to a rock jutting up from the ground. “Sit tight, and I’ll let you know what we decide.”
Riz sat down on the soft grass. She looked up at the stars wheeling over her head. She thought of things ending, and things beginning.