3: Scavenger

THE HOTH SYSTEM, THE SIXTH PLANET

Ageless Void smelled joffa. Somebody was brewing a cup nearby. The Zabrak recalled the smell from countless journeys aboard starships, upon which he hitched rides under some civilian rank or as part of a non-governmental organization’s charity work. Joffa was a favorite pick-me-up in the mornings for Corellian natives, caffeinated and often infused with the rich smell of ground-up ookkli leaves. Sallo used to make good joffa. Sallo was dead now, as were all his trooper pals.

He did not open his eyes immediately upon waking. He had been trained not to. It was a good habit in case an intelligence officer ever got knocked unconscious and taken hostage. You did not want your captors knowing you were awake, you wanted to listen to them chit-chat while they thought you were still out, in the hopes of gleaning some useful information from their idle talk. By reflex, Ageless tugged lightly at his wrists and ankles, to make sure they were not bound.

All clear. He slowly opened his eyes. Pale, flickering light painted the room poorly. The smell of joffa grew stronger. He slowly turned his head side to side, testing. He was not restrained in any way, but he was definitely under thick layers of warm electric blankets.

He turned his head farther to the right. The 2-1B medical droid was standing three meters away, its metal hands holding a pair of dinner knives under an ezher light, running the blades under the sterilization field. Ageless wondered if those dinner knives had been used on him. He vaguely recalled the droid saying it did not have any surgical tools, that the Empire had taken what the Rebels had not managed to save as they fled.

Ageless slowly rose, his hand reaching out by instinct to pick up the stylus pen sitting beside the datapad on the table next to his bed. The sheets made a light rustling sound as he carefully peeled them off. Other than that, he was silent. The 2-1B did not stir. Ageless had a thorough knowledge of droids—not only had he been required to know how to repair them when he was a darktrooper, but the Nest had also taught him how to cannibalize their parts and splice them into makeshift devices, should he ever need to escape and had nothing else to work with.

So, when he grabbed the 2-1B’s head and cocked it sideways and drove the stylus down into the interstitial coupling of its servo relay, he knew exactly what it would do. The medical droid shivered a moment like a cub caught in a freezing rain, then it went still and pitched forward and would have fallen over if he hadn’t caught it.

“I am afraid you’ve caused a disruption in my servo-link, sir,” it said. “I am unable to transmit my intentions to the rest of my limbs.”

“I know,” Ageless said.

“As you and I are on opposite sides in this war, I can only assume this was intentional?”

“It was.” Ageless slowly lowered the droid down to the floor, laying it on its back.

The 2-1B’s eyes were as blank as any other droid’s, and yet somehow they conveyed betrayal, as did the quizzical voice. “I would hope that you would notice that you are not injured, and that I did not hurt you or bind you. You were left completely unrestrained.”

“Only because there are no binders left in this place, I’m sure,” Ageless said. “Am I right? And the other droids I saw were in no shape to help you rig something up.”

“Even if they had, I would never have bound you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You do not have to believe me, but it is the truth.”

“How many are with you?”

“People or droids?”

“Both?”

“Eighteen droids were left behind, either because they hid out in the wastes very well, were damaged enough the Empire believed they were not good enough to salvage, or were trapped beneath some rubble. I rescued two astromechs like that.”

“And people?” Ageless said, looking around the room. It was small and dark, only a couple of beds and one empty bacta tank. Overhead, an electric torchlight provided the only dim light in the room. His face felt itchy. He scratched it, and found he had started to grow a beard. “How many people?”

“You are all that we have found,” the droid said. “Alive,” it added.

“How long was I out?”

“Almost a week. You were low on fluids, sir, but there were a few nutrient soups left in a freezer that the Imperials did not bother with.”

“You fed me?”

“You would not wake up,” the 2-1B said. “So I force-fed you, using tubes. I also took care of some of your injuries using wound sealant.”

Ageless looked around the room, then looked down at himself. But for the bandages around his head, he was naked…

His head.

He touched it, vaguely recalling the shot that had sent him spiraling into darkness, then waking up briefly to flee for his life. And getting caught in the blizzard. Suddenly a spike of anger shot through him. Commander Zumter, formerly stormtrooper TK-17474, codename “Spear” and now an aging member of the top-secret intelligence sect known as the Kingdom, had been the one to betray him. Ageless recalled the moment he realized, just a bit too late, and saw the look in Zumter’s eyes—

He pushed the thought away.

Now was not the time to think of retribution. Now was the time to think of survival. He was on the sixth planet of the Hoth system, itself known only as Hoth, and it was as harsh a world as one might ever contend with. Its only saving grace was that it had atmosphere. The only way Ageless could be in a worse spot was if he were stranded on an airless moon somewhere. But then I’d already be dead. This is just a much more protracted death.

It was good to think like that. He had to start formulating a plan.

“Are there any ships left?” he asked, already knowing the answer. He moved about the room, gathering up his clothes, which he found lying neatly folded but still dirty on an empty bed filled with dried blood—most likely the blood was from a Rebel the 2-1B had tried and failed to save, or else was taken off the operating table when the Empire infiltrated the base.

“No, sir,” 2-1B said, still lying on the ground and facing the ceiling. “There are no starships remaining.”

“Any vehicles at all? Snowspeeders, landspeeders—”

“None that work. There are bits and pieces of destroyed snowspeeders out there in the ice.”

The weight of that hit him.

Stranded. Marooned on a near-dead planet.

There was a moment when that threatened to cause him despair, and then he moved back to the list. His order of needs. What did he actually have on hand? Droids. I’ve got droids. And shelter. That’s a start. I’ll need to get around to finding food if there truly isn’t any here.

“Any method of transport? Any at all? Any mounts? I heard the Rebels were using draft animals of some kind to get around.”

“You mean the tauntauns. No, there are none here. When the Empire broke down the perimeter walls the tauntauns scattered outside. After a brief search, the droids and I found most of them frozen to death out in the hills. If any are still alive, they will be huddled somewhere and trying to avoid predators like the wampas.”

Wampas. The name vaguely connected to something in his head, something mentioned days ago, during the mission briefing…

After he was dressed, Ageless moved quickly about the room looking for resources. He picked up the two dinner knives the droid had dropped and stuffed them into his waistline. He looked about at denuded shelves, ransacked cabinets, empty drawers. He did find a bundle of bandages and put them inside his jacket pocket.

Suddenly, the world lurched and he almost fell over. Ageless shot out a hand and gripped the edge of a counter to steady himself. The whole world spun for ten seconds, then stabilized. There was a lot of blood on the floor. He wondered whose it was.

“You are still suffering effects of severe blood loss and dehydration,” the droid said from the floor. “Your head was bleeding badly.”

“Yeah, I took a hard spill,” he said, referring to Zumter’s surprise attack, and then the hit by a stun weapon right before he fled out into the snow.

“No. I am talking about the blaster bolt to your head.”

Ageless froze. “What?” He reached up and touched the bandages. He had not really been fully aware of them until just now, his mind so focused on getting his bearings. But now that he touched them, he found they were thick and thoroughly wound. “What happened to me?”

“A blaster bolt,” the 2-1B said. “As I said, sir. A glancing blow, but it did cause minor hemorrhaging. I dealt with that with a minor incision—don’t worry, I did not cut deeply, I conducted the surgery using laparoscopic cameras and fluoroscopic images to help me find the trouble areas and decrease the swelling. There was internal bleeding. That is your blood there on the floor. I had to drain it from your skull but had no containers to put it in.”

Ageless blinked, and waited a beat to make sure the world wasn’t going to spin again. He inhaled deeply, and let it out slowly. Then he started moving, looking for more materials he could use—something, anything to help signal someone, or make a call on the HoloNet, or rig a ride out of here. Anything.

He composed himself. His brain was scattered and he knew he would have to strive to keep his thoughts organized. Remember the order of needs. Shelter, signaling, water, and then food. Signaling could wait for now, he could look for ways to do it while he worked on the last two. Food and water could be necessary for a long-haul stay.

A long-haul stay, he thought. But how long?

He tried not to think about that. He had been trained not to.

Just work the problem. Just begin.

And so, he did.

* * *

The first thing to do was to get his bearings, and determine whether or not the 2-1B was correct in its assessment. Ageless Void stepped out of the room, out of the osmotic field and its warmer air, and then slinked through the freezing, ice-draped hallways, hugging the shadows, not taking anything for granted—the medical droid was still a Rebel-owned droid and could be lying on their behalf. For all he knew, this could be an elaborate psy-op, meant to break down the mind of a captured Imperial spy.

He crept from column to column, down through the corridors, over mounds of rubble and the bloody smears where bodies had been dragged away. Cold wind came howling through the punctured walls, revealing frozen wastes illuminated by a pale and distant star. The air smelled of death. He came upon the source of the odor—a dead and decaying tauntaun lying on its side, the beast’s fur burned from where it took multiple blaster bolts. Likely, some Rebel had used the poor creature as cover while the onslaught of stormtroopers hammered him and his friends.

The jagged corridors of ice wound labyrinthine for at least two kilometers. Most of the lights were off and he had to feel along the walls in some sections. Most of Echo Base was underground, but sometimes Ageless ascended a ramp and got another view of the outside world, completely barren except for abandoned fuel hoses and empty compristeel boxes that had likely once held rations. There was the destroyed fuselage of an X-wing, likely destroyed by AT-ATs as it tried to take off.

Droids limped and rolled listlessly through the corridors, sometimes giving him a long look, almost mournful, as if they expected him to give them a purpose. Now that their masters had abandoned them, they were worse off than children. Most droids were programmed with their precise function in mind—protocol, maintenance, decryption—and didn’t have many subroutines for learning anything else.

They’ll have to make it on their own, he thought, moving on. Until I cannibalize their motors to create something that can generate sufficient heat.

He came to the main hangar bay where the GR-75s had gotten most of the Rebel leadership out at the start of the battle. The bay was cluttered, and smelled of dust and old exhaust. Carbon scoring pocked the walls and ceiling in smoky black dots. Ageless could still smell the ozone of spent blaster cannons, and there was a tripod with a destroyed E-Web heavy repeating blaster cannon atop it, left behind because it was beyond repair.

But was it beyond all use?

Ageless examined the shattered remains of the cannon. Its components might come in use later. He made a mental note and walked towards the gaping doorway at the far end of the hangar bay. Here was the opening where he had seen the Millennium Falcon make its escape. He stood there, facing the most endless stretch of nothing he had ever seen. The wind had suddenly died down, and an unsettling pall fell over the world and draped his heart in hopelessness. Such desolation. Except for a few wisps of snow, nothing moved.

Nothing at all.

If it had been the Rebels’ goal to create an underground base so labyrinthine that it would confuse invaders, they had done a good job. If, however, their priority had been convenience, they had failed miserably. The tunnels wended this way and that, and sometimes ended suddenly, or took illogical turns that led nowhere, or sloped for apparently no reason and created slipping hazards. There were places where Ageless had to struggle to keep his balance, and once he became dizzy, and slipped and fell down icy stairs and hit his ribs against a stalagmite.

Further searching led him to the barracks, where he found beds tossed and most of the lights not working. A few clothing lockers had been left, their contents scattered to the ground but left intact. Extra clothing was good, it could be used for a variety of things. He came to one room where a grenade had apparently gone off because the small crater was filled with rubble from a partially collapsed ceiling.

As Ageless walked, he became aware of the droid following him. It was a red-domed R4 unit that tried to keep up with him, but its treads kept sliding on the ice that had formed in the hallways from burst pipes.

Pipes.

Ageless finally remedied the darkness problem by turning to the R4 and saying, “Do you have a hologram projector?” It twittered something. “I don’t care what you project, as long as it makes light.” The R4 blatted something obscene before projecting a 3D model of a Y-wing’s engine. It was dim light, but enough to see by. Ageless inspected the pipes and power cables that ran along the walls and ceiling. He followed them to a large room filled with busted computer screens and destroyed servers. The remains of the Rebels’ tactical equipment, from which they would have coordinated their escape.

A bit of the ceiling had collapsed in here, too. Cables draped from the ceiling like dangling black vines, charred at the ends where the electricity had melted them. He maneuvered slowly around them. He didn’t think they had any power, but if even one of them had charge, then he would be dead before he knew he had touched the wrong one.

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Ageless continued following the cords and pipes on the ceiling out another doorway, down a series of dark tunnels, his way lit only by the R4’s revolving hologram. At last, he came to a generator room. Unsurprisingly, he found it had all been blown to pieces. Looked like an incendiary had gone off in here. Several man-sized power cylinders were cooked, as were the breaker boxes. Nothing had survived.

And yet there were components. As with the E-Web blaster cannon, he made a mental note to make use of what he had later.

I can’t believe they did it. They left me here.

That thought battled for position at the front of his mind. Even as Ageless tried to focus on surviving, on employing the skills he’d been trained with, he realized that the people that had given him those skills had betrayed him to a degree he could previously have never fathomed.

He continued scrounging. He came to what appeared to be an officer’s room, where he found a multi-tool sitting inside an otherwise empty toolbox. It came equipped with a carbon-silicate blade, microtorch for welding, and screwdriver headings. He pocketed it.

He also lucked upon a raptor-claw-shaped harangi knife someone left in their bunk, as well as a slicer rig—not much use to him now, since there was no power and most of the servers here had been busted, but he grabbed it anyway. There was a sofa that looked disturbed, it was at an odd angle from the wall, like someone had tried moving it…

Ageless was familiar with sensitive-site exploitation—the art of taking over a hostile’s hideout and identifying key places where they might’ve hidden things—and he knew the signs of a hidden cache when he saw them. The sofa looked like it had been moved with a purpose, yet there were no signs of blaster bolts.

So they weren’t trying to use it as cover. So why move it?

He found the reason once he knelt and started looking at the rock wall behind the sofa. Some of it had been chipped away and covered over with a gray plaster, made to look like the rest of the wall. He punched through it. Inside he found a box filled with peggats—gold coins, Huttese currency, only good on the Hutt-dominated worlds of the Outer Rim. Ageless counted it: there was about fifty thousand credits’ worth of the peggats. Underneath the money, he found three blank ID slates.

His eyes lit up.

Ageless examined the ID slates closely. He marveled at their quality. These were grown identities. Legends, as they were called in the spy world. Fully adapted fake identities. It appeared the Rebel forces had gotten very sophisticated at faking IDs. These were left blank, merely awaiting the insertion of a face and genetic ID sequence. The names were Han Islic of Tatooine, Jarabo Kesh of Nal Hutta, and Ven Lor Takka of Nar Shaddaa. Likely, all of them were the names of children that had died in infancy, and the Rebels had resurrected their identities by getting hold of their birth certificates and starting credit lines and bank accounts in their names, giving them a fake history, a fake educational background, a fake life. Ageless knew this because IIS did the same thing. When children died merely days after being born, they were often not even assigned a death certificate, especially in Outer Rim worlds. It made it easy to “resurrect” them, use their names and government-ID numbers, because they had authentic birth certificates but had never officially “died.”

These were priceless on the black market, but useless to him here. Still, he took them anyway, in case he made it out of here. He pocketed it.

Ageless was just standing up to leave the room when he paused. His foot tapped something that was just sticking out from underneath the sofa. He bent down. It was a power pack. Looked like it belonged to a DH-17 blaster pistol. He looked around for the pistol but could not find it, someone must have died during a reload and the Imperial sweepers took the body and the weapon.

Ageless found an empty duffel bag and threw all these resources inside—the multi-tool, the harangi knife, the power pack, the slicer rig, the peggat coins and the fake IDs.

Next, he came upon what appeared to be a conference room. It was completely in shambles, the metal table flipped and wooden chairs set ablaze by stormtroopers with flamethrowers. In fact, one unlucky Rebel still remained, burnt to a crisp, his hands held up in useless supplication.

He looked around. Doubtless, the Rebels had held many briefings in here, coordinating with their leadership. Possibly the plan to assault the Death Star had begun in this room. It was strange to be standing in the place where countless operations had been planned against him and his friends.

And those friends left me.

Ageless recalled Zumter’s face just before he committed the act of betrayal. He had seen the steel in Zumter’s eyes, but also a friendly smile. A genuine smile. And a clap on the shoulder as they watched half a dozen Rebels being stunned and rounded up and sent off to the Star Destroyer Executor for interrogation. Ageless and Zumter had worked for over a year tracking down this particular cell, and now here they were, dismantling it, saving lives by undoing the Rebellion that had brought chaos and destruction to the galaxy’s most sacred institutions.

Hej Zumter, codename “Spear,” had been Ageless’s mentor, the one who had helped design the Nest, the man who took the Nest’s best trainees and brought them into the Kingdom—Imperial Intelligence Service’s greatest weapon. Zumter had overseen his training in tradecraft, his psychological evaluations, his self-defense and firearms training, all of it. Upon learning that a random Imperial probe droid had located Echo Base, they had both been a little disappointed that they had not been the ones to find it. Even so, they were glad to be sent in ahead of the strike teams to soften up the Rebels by performing a decapitation strike—kill General Rieekan and other Rebel leaders in order to cause disarray in their enemies.

If they had done the job well enough, it was possible that it would have ended the war right then and there.

Ageless tried to remember what Zumter had said to him right before he turned his blaster on his pupil. He tried replaying the memory, but he only saw Zumter’s lips moving, he didn’t hear the words. He only felt the betrayal.

* * *

Down another corridor, then another. Three of them were blocked off, collapsed ceilings preventing him from entering what appeared to be large rooms. Maybe something useful in there. But he couldn’t get through without lots of digging. That might be a project for another day.

Down another partially collapsed corridor, picking his way over the rubble. He staggered again, the world lurching beneath his feet. He was often dizzy, and would fall to his knees. The R4 nudged him each time and Ageless became so irritable he almost hit the droid. Then he paused and realized the astromech was offering its body to give him something to lean on. He put his hand on the droid’s domed head and pushed himself to his feet.

Ageless muttered a thanks. The astromech’s single eye followed him as he hobbled over to an empty crate and sat down for a second. He looked up and down the dark corridor. A week ago, it had been teeming with Rebels, the sound of footsteps flooding its halls, the constant chatter of comrades in arms telling jokes and sharing the latest rumors and worrying about the Empire striking back after the destruction of the Death Star. And now all that haunted these corridors were ghosts and wind.

And me.

“There a fresher around here?” he asked the R4. “You know. A bathroom?”

The droid gave an affirmative bleat and trundled down a hallway, leading him to a room with a busted sink but a thankfully intact toilet.

* * *

Ageless splashed water onto his face in an attempt to clear his head. He was glad the water was still running in this half of the base, and he gulped down mouthfuls of it. Until now he hadn’t realized just how thirsty he was. He looked at the sink, belatedly realizing, If the water’s running there must be at least one water heater running somewhere, or else this would all be frozen. He started to leave the fresher in search of it.

Then he gazed into the mirror above the sink. It was shocking. His flesh was normally pale but now it had gone whiter than usual. One of the horns atop his bald pate had been cut in half and he hadn’t even noticed it until now. He reached up and slowly removed the bandages, and looked at a well-sutured wound that would surely scar.

Zabraks can toss on a wig faster than Humans can put on fake horns to impersonate a Zabrak, Zumter had told him. That’s why we’re favoring Zabraks for this program: the Nest wants only the highest possibility of success, and the most loyal officers. Your record is exemplary. One of the few non-Humans to ever be selected for trooper training, and you made it all the way to darktrooper. How proud your parents must be.

They were. Ageless recalled they were very, very proud of him. Right up until the Rebel attack that killed them. They had beamed when they saw their only child saluting Moff Kettic, along with the rest of his recruit class. The 2,082nd Emperor’s Select Recruitment Class had received the applause of their family and friends on a windy day, with flecks of rain falling from a Corellian sky. All of his class had been Human, and though he was used to scowls from Imperials, his time during the class had earned him some respect, and helped change the attitudes of some of the more racist and specist higher-ups. Even Moff Kettic came over to personally congratulate him.

“I expect more things from our Empire now, son,” Kettic had said, his smile parting his white beard. “Now that you are a part of us. You’ve shown everyone the Empire can be inclusive. I look forward to you and your people allying yourselves safely with us.”

“Thank you, sir,” Ageless had said. “I will certainly try and set an example.”

“I’m sure you will.”

Four years in combat. Four years on the frontlines with the stormtroopers of the 501st, all while pursuing a higher education in economics, as well as the politics of the Outer Rim, which was where he grew up as the son of deep-space miners. When he wasn’t running sabotage raids on Rebel cells or trudging through mud looking for Rebel scouts, the young Zabrak had been in his tent, poring over his datapad and committing himself to his studies. Experience in the field was not enough to garner respect, he needed to show the majority-Human stormtroopers serving with him that he and his people were every bit as committed to the success of the Galactic Empire.

Then he had been selected for darktrooper training, and after six weeks of hell had advanced into the Dark Legion, where he had been a recon officer and scout trainer. Four years of that, then finally an invite into the Nest.

The invitation came in the form of two square-shouldered men who knocked on his door when he returned home from deployment. They introduced themselves as Taggar and Zumter. No other names or ranks were given. They said people at IIS had noticed his four-year service was almost up and they wanted to know if he wanted a change of pace. They laid out what they had in mind for him. Work as a data analyst in the burgeoning Outer Rim Finance Division, putting both his studies of the culture and economics, as well as his military experience in the region, to use. He would be a liaison, working closely with the Treasury Department’s own Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, to track the money laundering habits of Rebels throughout the Outer Rim.

Zumter had been the most eager to recruit him. The man who would become Ageless Void turned him down at first, but Zumter…he would not accept it. You have a gift, son. Surely you’ve seen it. The aptitude tests don’t lie, and the analyst droids all agree. You are primed. Now, don’t you want to do your duty to save Imperial lives?

That pitch had sold him, for the IIS knew this young Zabrak would do anything to save his fellow troopers. He had seen the hell of the frontlines, and wanted nothing more than for this Civil War to be over.

Suddenly, Ageless recalled Zumter’s friendly smile. The same smile he’d worn upon Ageless’s recruitment. The same smile he’d worn when he stunned Ageless, and shot at him as he fled, half conscious, out into the frigid wastes of Hoth.

Presently, he gazed into the mirror, at a set of eyes almost alien. “What are you going to do now?” he asked the man there. “What is your plan?”

He heard a whirring noise outside the fresher’s door. He grabbed his harangi—the raptor-clawed knife—and was ready in case of an ambush. But when he peeked out the door, it was only R4. The astromech had its antenna extended. Ageless stepped out into the corridor. “Say,” he said. “Do your sensors still work?”

The droid bleated an affirmative.

“I saw some rubble back there covering up a few corridors. Can you tell me if there’s anything useful behind all the rubble? Can your EM or organic-life sensors detect that?”

The droid twittered cheerily and went in the direction Ageless was pointing.

* * *

The droid approached the wall of rubble, and, after a few seconds of scanning it, buzzed excitedly, and though Ageless did not speak binary, he knew when an astromech was trying to signal it had found something. “What is it?” The R4 tweeted excitedly. “Something inside? Something useful?” It gave an affirmative tweet.

Ageless looked at the mound of ice and rock. He pulled a few rocks away, and was starting to feel heartened. He made some progress, tossing rocks and blocks of ice off to a pile down the hall. He employed a pair of R2 units to help pull buckets along and use their welding torches to melt certain patches of ice. They were starting to make real progress.

That is until the secondary collapse happened. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to undo almost all of their hard work.

Sweating and frustrated, he gave vent to an old Dathomirian curse his grandmother used to use, then set back to work. Zabraks were a stubborn people, and a piece of their souls quietly preferred to be set upon, to have an opponent, even if that opponent was a mindless wall of ice.

Once he had made a bit more of a dent in the rubble, Ageless saw an opening. It took two more hours to fully clear a way large enough for him to squeeze through, and once he did, he came upon a durasteel door that had been sealed shut. The power was cut off, it would not open. He pulled the manual switch, so that the gears would disengage and he could try to push it open. But the door fought him. Had to be ice inside the walls, collecting on the gears and other mechanisms. He got it to open just a few inches, then it would move no more.

“It appears it isn’t going to open,” muttered a silver protocol droid, who had come wandering up to watch.

Ageless Void thought for a moment. He thought about what resources he had. Then it clicked. “Stand back,” he said. “All of you.”

“What are you going to do?”

Wordlessly, he tossed his duffel bag onto the ground and rummaged through it. He pulled out the power pack. Using the harangi blade, he undid the screws on the sides and accessed the breaker meter, which was there to keep a power pack from overcharging, and thus overheating and exploding.

He disengaged the breaker meter, careful not to touch any other components—when attempting this, people often caused the pack to explode in their face. Once he had the covering safely off the breaker, he took several minutes to crack the flux seal. Then he set upon the power pack’s overload sturm dowel, which prevented energy accumulation in the pack. He switched that off, and instantly felt the power pack’s core heating up in his hand.

“Stand back!” he shouted, and planted the power pack in the tiny gap he’d made in the doorway.

Ageless squeezed back through the opening he’d made in the rubble and waited a few minutes. There was no telling when the explosion would happen. Could be five minutes, could be five hours, it all depended on how well he had overloaded it. It took ten minutes before he heard a loud whine like steam escaping a kettle and then the sound of electricity. Then a boom! that rent the air and pushed smoke and dust through the opening.

Ageless scrambled back through, and was thankful that the explosion had caused a hole big enough that he could crawl all the way through. He had R-3PO bring him a torchlight from medical, and he shed his clothing and went squirming through the blasted doorway.

On the other side, he found a locker room, along with two dead Rebels, a female Rodian and a male Human. They were huddled together, frozen, and pale. The power had gone out in here and the heaters had shut off. They had been shot in the chest, and died in each other’s arms. Hoarfrost hung from the man’s beard like frosting on a pastry.

Ageless regarded them with a solemn hate, but afforded them a quiet moment of respect before searching their bodies for items he could use. For they were soldiers, and though their argument with the Empire made them his enemy, he also saw in their frozen eyes the quiet sadness he had seen in countless of his fellow dead troopers.

He found that one of them had a blaster. He picked it up, and was crestfallen to find that its power pack was empty.

“Dank farrik!” he cursed.

Makes sense. They fled for a reason. Looking around at the room and its door, he sussed out what must have happened. They had been running from Imperials, got shot in their retreat, made it in here and locked themselves in. But no Rebel friends were coming for them, they had gotten stuck, left behind. Then the battering of the Imperial walkers on the surface had caused multiple collapses in these caves, and there was no way out.

“Sleep easy, little dreamers,” he muttered. That was something his grandmother used to say whenever she saw anyone die. On the rare occasions she left Dathomir to come visit him, she had shared her thoughts and beliefs on the afterlife. She believed the entire universe was just one big dream. Someone else’s. She believed all beings dreamed of other worlds, all of which were just as real as this one.

Ageless began searching the locker room. Most of the lockers were bolted, and it took him hours to lockpick them all. In the end, all that work netted him a single ration bar, three flight suits, one thermal blanket and lots of datapads filled with the journals of Rebels. The journals were filled with their thoughts, their yearning to someday return home to their loved ones.

He looked at the ration bar. His stomach growled at just the thought of eating it. I’ll have to save this for when I’m desperate. That was probably not too far off.

Before he left the room, Ageless looked at the two dead bodies. Lives abrogated at a key moment. Their two stories were forever bookmarked here, unable to continue, frozen in time.

He became strangely philosophical in that moment.

Then, there came a squeal from the corridor outside. R4 had found something else.

* * *

Ageless jogged down the corridor where R4 was rocking back and forth excitedly. An ice-covered droid was walking up beside him. It was a bright-red R-3PO protocol model. Both of its photoreceptors were flickering on and off. A foggy memory floated through the miasmic cloud inside his brain, and it clicked. Ageless said, “You! You’re the one that found me.”

The protocol droid said nothing.

The R4 had extended a tiny revolving dish from its dome and was still squealing.

“What’s he saying?” Ageless said.

The protocol droid’s vocabulator was shorting—it had taken a shot to its body and head. “He’zzzzz saying that there izzzz someone approaching from the northwest.”

Ageless’s first instinct was to fight back the hope that leapt to his heart. Hope was not an operative’s friend and lucky breaks like this must always be looked at suspiciously. “Someone. You mean another droid or…?”

“No, zzzzzir. It appearzzzz that Arfour is referring to an organic. They are coming around to the northwest entrance. Ought we zzzzee who it is?”

He thought for a beat. Then he looked at the protocol droid. “Have you seen any weapons lying around?”

“No, zzzzzzzir.”

“Do you know what a distraction is?”

“I do, zzzzir.”

“And do you have any loyalties to the Rebel Alliance?”

“I have had many masterzzzz in my time. The Rebels found me in a junk heap on Denon. And azzzz you can see, I have no restraining bolt.” The droid gave a little shrug. “I do, however, have a morality of my own, thankzzzz to a lack of memory wipes. I will not help you if you intend to do them harm, for some of them are my friendzzz.”

Ageless sighed. “What if I give you my word?” He knew protocol droids were programmed to search for microexpressions of dishonesty and subterfuge, to better serve their masters in negotiations. But Ageless was sincere. He would not kill if it was not his mission. However, that rule changed the instant the Rebels became aggressive. He hoped that didn’t happen. He could use the extra help if he was going to survive this. Then afterwards, he could kill them or leave them behind.

“Then I will aid you,” R-3PO said.

“That’s all you need? My word?”

“I see no deception in you.”

Ageless considered the droid a moment longer. “All right, then,” he said, fastening the duffel bag to his back. “Follow me.”