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1: Ghosts in the Ice

HOTH

IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE EVACUATION OF “ECHO BASE”

He would die in the ice. Every part of him understood this. The wind was a blade drawn from an icy sheath and it cut deeply into exposed flesh. Amid pain of betrayal and winds of infant winter, the spy lay unconscious and freezing. All around him were the burning remains of a dead Rebel base. The charred body of a Rodian was his only company. He searched the corpse, found nothing useful, and so kept crawling. A snowstorm had started in, one of many that would pervade this season, and soon the spy would be buried beneath several feet of snow and ice and he would vanish from the face of the universe. It seemed fitting. He could barely be said to exist anyway, he had been a ghost that haunted the alleyways of countless spaceports on countless worlds, a faceless assassin with no past, no future, no name. Who would miss him now?

And so, it was over. He was consigned to an unmarked grave here in the ice. When he finally laid down and faced the slate skies, he meant it to be for the final time. He meant to die.

He soon felt warm, and closed his eyes, all consciousness bled from him, grateful to be free of the fragile organic body.

The first to spot him was a crimson-plated R-3PO. The protocol droid’s bright-red carapace made it appear like a bloodstain on the white virginal snow. Seen from above, the droid would have looked like a lone wanderer trapped in a purgatory. The machine-creature was a survivor from Echo Base that had barely made it out. Something was wrong with its servomotors on its right side, it had not yet determined what, but now it limped and staggered in the storm like a drunkard. It was coming from no place at all, heading to no place at all. Utterly lost.

Its joints were collecting ice, and would soon be frozen to inaction.

R-3PO hobbled forward, as if searching for some purpose, perhaps searching for its master. The limited mobility of protocol droids did not allow them to raise their feet high off the ground, so the droid trudged more than walked, the snow caking around its legs, up to its knees. One of its photoreceptors winked on and off indecisively, and a deep whirring noise was coming from inside its chestplate, just beyond the smoking hole where it had taken a blaster bolt meant for a Rebel soldier. That Rebel soldier had made it to his speeder and escaped, but there had been no room for the droid.

Such is the way of things, was a thought that passed, half assembled in computer code, through the droid’s main cognitive module.

R-3PO tried to think about what it should do, who it ought to call for help. Its logic circuits were failing and it had no plan of action for something like this. It was not built for survival.

Behind it, an entourage of other orphaned droids had gathered in a sad procession, as if they thought R-3PO knew where it was going. All of them were freshly abandoned, just masterless machines with pseudo-sentience and an almost child-like need for parenting. Occasionally the two R2 astromechs would get their treads caught in some ice and would beep and squeal for help. Always the other protocol droids and power droids would assist them. And then they would continue on, following R-3PO like a messiah through the snow.

Their line of robotic refugees stumbled across the ice, drawing a long gash in the snow behind them. Now both of R-3PO’s photoreceptors were failing it. It was going blind. Once that happened, it would wander around out here until its joints were completely frozen, which, judging by the current temperature, wouldn’t be long now.

Its thoughts were in binary and other complex droid code. If a droid could be said to have real thoughts, this one was pondering its likelihood of survival, cross-referencing that with any objectives it currently had (none), and running diagnostics checks that weren’t looking good. So many of its systems were redlining. If it experienced worry, its permanently puzzled expression perfectly summed it up.

Suddenly, R-3PO’s left foot snagged on something beneath the snow and it pitched forward and almost fell face first. Its hands came up in time to catch itself, and it landed on a lump of cold flesh. It felt around, scanned the body as well as it could with its failing eyes. R-3PO felt the top of the being’s bald head, felt the series of jagged horns across a bald head. It was a Zabrak, and no doubt about it.

And there was something else. He detected warmth. Blood. An injury to the temple.

R-3PO tugged on the Zabrak’s arm, and the spy responded immediately by jerking awake and slamming his fist into the droid’s jaw, knocking the head clean off its neck socket. The droid’s head landed somewhere in the snow and its body remained on its knees, sort of swaying like seaweed in a soft current for a moment, then it stood up and the body went in search of its head.

The Zabrak looked around, eyes wild. A flash of pain went through his head. He lay there a moment, the world spinning. When did I pass out? He’d been crawling forever and couldn’t remember. He looked up at swirling stars—no, not stars. Snowflakes. Millions of snowflakes coming down in a horrid storm. He was freezing. His breath came out in huge tufts of white cloud. A needle of fear went through his heart, something akin to panic. His whole body was caked in snow and ice, his hands and feet were numb, and his eyelids were almost frozen shut. Immediately his intelligence-officer training came to him, specifically his survival training—the order of needs: shelter, signaling, water, and then food.

Shelter.

The word and the concept were suddenly paramount in his mind. He tried to stand up. He failed. He got halfway to his feet before his knees turned to water and gravity yanked him back down into the ice. All right, then. He pushed himself up to his knees and began the breathing technique to warm his body. In through the nose, fill up the belly and then the chest, then let it out in a huff. Then a series of fast, heavy breaths, in and out, in and out. Again and again he did this, while waving his arms around furiously, slapping himself in the chest, trying to get his blood up.

He stood up. Took a few steps.

And once again his knees buckled and he fell onto his face. The world spun. He felt darkness taking hold. He felt warm. That was bad. That meant hypothermia. He was going to die and he would never know why. He would never know how he had failed the Imperial Intelligence Service. How he had failed the Emperor.

Wait…Emperor?

The word itself sounded strange inside his head. A lot stranger than the word shelter.

The spy felt the fingers of warmth spreading throughout his body. Once more, his mind softened to the idea of death, and he relaxed. This felt right. This felt better. So much more comforting than the frigid ice-world around him and its cruel winds. He blinked and it was nighttime, and the crimson-plated protocol droid stood over him, along with several other droids arrayed around him, some of them holding a portion of the Zabrak’s limbs. The world was swaying easily around him. One of the droids—a power droid—had opened its central carapace and was allowing its generator to extend heat out towards him. An R2 unit, decorated with carbon scoring from a couple of blaster shots, held a torch a few inches from the Zabrak’s face, warming his cheeks.

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He looked around.

“Wh-wh-where…are you t-taking me?” he mumbled through numb lips. His entire body trembled uncontrollably and his vision was blurry.

One of the droids spoke in a prim and proper voice, its vocabulator glitching, “The zzzzznow has let up, and we have found a way back to the base.”

He blinked, and again his environment had changed. Now he was in a cold dark room—much less cold than outside, but still freezing. He thought he felt a tingling across his skin, a familiar feeling of passing through an osmotic field. Osmotic fields were typically used by medical professionals in harsh conditions; they could be set to let the air circulate freely, while keeping out negative elements, such as alien pathogens that could infect a patient’s body.

This osmotic field generator must have had a frigid terrain overlay feature, which bled energy from the air molecules as they passed through a selective barrier, and were heated up so as to increase the air temperature, because soon he felt the room heating up.

A gunmetal gray droid stood over him, its nonjudgmental eyes gazing flatly down at him. “Hello,” the 2-1B medical droid said. “I have no medical equipment, and the bacta is all gone, as are all the stimpaks. Your Imperial friends took everything useful. You are likely to die here. But, the Force as my witness, I will honor both my programming and my purpose, and despite the fact that we are enemies, I will endeavor to save you, Imperial.”

The spy blinked. His codename, his only name, was Ageless Void. He tried to fight it, but before he knew it he was lost in darkness. In his dreams, Ageless saw the face of his betrayer. He saw a thin smile through a gray beard. And only a single thought slithered through his mind: Zumter…I’m going to kill you.

* * *

One kilometer away, atop the rocky hills overlooking the smoking ruin of Echo Base, a jagged piece of black metal hovered a meter off the ground. The Imperial probe droid was a Viper model. Black and bulbous with squid-like protrusions, it had been left behind to scan for anyone that might come back, or any smugglers foolish enough to come and try to salvage what was left or attempt to start a new smuggler’s base in the charred husk of the Rebellion’s abandoned base.

Three antennae extended from its flattened head as it chittered off encrypted Imperial code, broadcasting to satellites that had been placed in orbit around the planet, which in turn relayed the sensor information to HoloNet buoys dropped at the edge of the Hoth system. The probe droid’s scanners swept over the cold, white desolation, differentiating between the heat signatures of the flames and local wildlife, such as the two big wampas that had come out to inspect the columns of smoke that stretched into the sky.

The probe droid was also equipped with a sensor suite to pick out life-indicating algorithms, and separate animals from sentient creatures. By analyzing heat signatures, respiratory byproducts, and EM-polarization effects, the probe droid could identify key organic beings and assign a probability to whether or not they were sentient.

When it detected the warm body being dragged by the droids, the Viper noted two things that made it feel that it was worthy of a report back to its masters: first, the life-indicating algorithms all showed strong indications of a sentient (probably a Zabrak), and second, the droids were carrying the body towards the Rebel base, not away from it.

It wouldn’t be the only living sentient left alive. The Viper suspected it had detected the silhouette of a Duros several kilometers back, but had lost track of it in the snow. So Hoth wasn’t completely devoid of sentient life. The only question was, who were they?

The probe droid created a brief report and sent it up to the satellite orbiting above. That done, it continued its lonely vigil of the dead world.

* * *

Edreezel Kevv was a Duros. And he was a survivor. A single-minded creature who was determined to see a thing through. But he also had a fierce will to help those that had sacrificed for him. So, when the Imperials invaded Echo Base and a couple of his fellow pilots had been too slow on the evacuation, he did not hesitate to lay down suppression fire with his Y-wing until they could escape. The only problem was on his way out. A lucky shot from an AT-AT walker had tagged him, short-circuiting his axial controls and sending him hard to port, slamming into another Y-wing piloted by his Human friend Hillo Varzi.

They both went down. Kevv ejected but Varzi did not. When he landed, Kevv had run over to Varzi’s ship and pulled him out of the burning wreckage. He also saved the survival kit from Varzi’s cockpit, and built them a shelter. A few hours later, they started making the long trek back to Echo Base. It was on the second day that it became clear they were being hunted.

Varzi had been the first to spot the creature in the snow, and he screamed when he saw the thing charging them. Through the haze of snow and mist, they hadn’t been able to make out just what it was, but it was big. They both fired shots with their service pistols, which at first scared the beast off, but it returned several more times during the night, each time testing them by getting closer and closer.

They had been hunted for two nights now. Varzi had begged for sleep.

“We can’t rest!” Kevv had huffed. “We have to keep moving. The minute we sleep that thing will make a meal out of us.”

“I can’t,” Varzi grunted. “I can’t, Kevv. You’re going to have to go on without—”

“Don’t say it,” Kevv grunted. “Don’t you dare say it. I’m not leaving you. You’re coming with me.”

Varzi had reluctantly agreed, and thus began their long marathon run.

Now here Kevv was, moving through the lonely cold wastes of a place that had briefly been his home, at the tail end of a rebellion that was probably soon to be crushed. The destruction of Alderaan showed the Empire’s strength, but the destruction of the Death Star had only revealed the depths of their rage, and their thirst for visiting retribution on any who dared to defy them.

They will not kill me, Kevv thought. The Moroboa did not kill me, and neither will this.

“I can’t…” Varzi mumbled. His friend’s face was white and his lips were blue. Bad for a Human. He sagged against Kevv, one arm around the Duros’ neck. One leg was broken and it was all he could do to stand. “I can’t…I can’t go on, Kevv. You’re gonna have to—”

“Shut up!” Kevv said. “And keep moving. One foot in front of the other, just like they taught you in basic. Just focus on each step, and make sure you put another step in front of that one. One foot in front of the other. Say it.”

“One foot…in front of the other.”

“That’s it.”

“The creature…have you seen it?”

Kevv looked around. From one horizon to the next, there was no sign of anyone. “No. We’re alone.”

“Oh. Good.”

There was no visual sign of the creature, that was true. But from time to time there came a noise on the wind, a guttural grow that seemed to be born in the chest of a ravenous beast. Was it simply a vent of rage, or was it calling its friends? If it’s coming for us, then I hope it does bring friends. I want it to be over quick, for Varzi’s sake and mine.

They made a quick camp. Varzi was no help, so it was all up to Kevv. He knew they could not sleep. If they slept they might wake up in the jaws of a predator, or else find themselves blanketed by ice in one of Hoth’s dangerous flash-freezes, a freak weather event that sometimes occurred with absolutely no warning.

During the Rebellion’s first days on Hoth, when they had been digging out tunnels in the ice where Echo Base would be founded, six scouts had gone out looking for game. Not two hours after they left, the temperature outside dropped seventy degrees in a matter of minutes and needles of ice fell from the sky, coinciding with a fog that coated the land and froze the snow on the ground into a solid block of ice. The next morning, they found all six scouts standing up, frozen like statues, caked in ice that seemed to have grown up from the ground and around their ankles, around their knees, around their waists and necks. A frozen tableau of serene horror. They did not even have shocked looks on their faces, indicating it had happened before they had time to react.

The Duros came from a long line of explorers, had been prepared for deadly environments, and had suffered through a lot and survived. But never had he seen a place so cruel and desolate as Hoth.

“This place wants us dead.” That’s what his commanding officer had said when Kevv first arrived on site. “Never forget that.”

And Kevv hadn’t. Even as he used the chisel from the survival kit to dig them a shelter beneath the ice, he kept his eyes peeled for any sign of the creature hunting them. Twice he thought he saw it, a white-furred specter with horns, moving just at his periphery. But it might have only been a manifestation of his fear. Fear will kill you, his father had warned him when on the journey through the Maelstrom. It will kill you quicker than a blade. So remember to keep it in check, and put one foot in front of the other. His father had been a soldier, and had gone through the same basic survival courses. One foot in front of the other.

“Are w-w-we going to d-die?” said Varzi, lying on his side and shivering.

“No,” Kevv said, smashing his chisel into the ice. “No, Varzi. We’ve only just begun.”