You know what they told us in officer’s school before we took on this job, Han. Don’t get emotionally attached to your charges; most of them will be dead before their fifth mission into dangerous territory.”

“Yeah,” Solo said, leaning back and sipping his spice coffee. “Hard, though. Especially with a batch like this one turned out to be.”

#

“What you gon’ do now?” Bondo asked Norrin as they walked into the sports arena. The other hundred-plus cadets had begun their customary drifting towards various sporting activities, teams, and other evnets. “You gon’ throw the ball at yourself some more?”

“You know,” Norrin said, “I’ve been thinking more and more of trying to get onto one of the gravball teams. They say a guy my size can be good as a roller, someone who keeps the ball moving and gets it to the guy who’s good enough to score. Sometimes the roller even gets to score. What do you think?”

Bondo smiled. “I think that…you’d make a great roller. Maybe I’ll go out for gravball today too; I’m kinda tired of lifting weights by myself each day.”

Slak and Dav watched as Norrin and Bondo got in line to be assigned to a gravball team. “Now there’s something I didn’t expect to see,” Slak said, his metal eye staring, unblinking, at the two young cadets. “Those two were total loners when they came here. And Norrin couldn’t even hit a slow-pitched ball to save his life. Yet there they are, going out for one of the more demanding team sports in the galaxy.”

Dav said, “Things surprise us about life, don’t they? If someone asked me a year ago where I was headed, I’d never’v guessed I’d be here.”

“Good point,” said Slak. “I’d likely be either dead or spending nights in some alleyway right now. Sure didn’t think it was gonna be like this.”

“None of us did. None of us thought- oh, grud; Slak, the monitor’s on us. If we don’t start playing something, we might get the Grey Room!”

“Let’s hit tie-jitsu. I want you to teach me some moves in case those jerks from One Flight come after us again. I can see Freddik and Medea giving us the evil eye again over there.”

“How? There’s over a hundred…oh. Your eye thing again. Lucky you got that, in the end.”

“C’mon,” said Slak, running at a jog just fast enough to make him go off the monitor’s check scan, “last one to the tie-jitsu ring’s a One Flighter!”

“You’re gonna get us in trouble again,” Dav yelled over the sounds of cadets roaring, cussing and clashing in the sports arena.

“Always!” Slak shouted back over his shoulder. “We’re Four Flight! And WE ROCK THE BOAT!”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

#

Commodore Bast stood, as he always did, with his hands behind his back while watching the monitors in the wall of his office. Seeing the two young lads from Four Flight as they ran to the fighting ring brought back memories of himself as a younger, slimmer pilot in the Imperial Navy. Medea an Freddik filled up a different monitor, glaring at the boys with malicious intent, and a third screen followed young Sanddancer as she ran from her room to the observation deck.

The names of the children change, thought Bast to himself without a trace of irony, and the places and particulars shift like sand dunes in a gentle wind. But in the end, the story is always the same. Though we believe we are the first characters in the saga, we are actually only the players in this particular act, repeating the parts played by those before us. Dav is me at that age, the reluctant leader. Slak is my oldest friend who died last year after failing his duty. Sanddancer and Medea are every girl I knew in this profession, dedicated and either idealistic, hurting, or conniving. Or all three. Our greatest hopes are not to see what we can accomplish, but to see how and if our own stories will be different than those before us, or the same but happier.

“Commodore Bast?” said the voice on his comlink mounted on his desk. “Lord Vader wishes to speak with you. He wishes an update on the bombing raid he ordered on the rebel base.”

Bast smiled. He’d changed a bit in the past few weeks, watching this group. His own father had been an officer in the Navy, and had spent his years of service scurrying to obey orders of every officer with a few pieces of blue or red enamel buttoned to his grey tunic.

“Tell Lord Vader I am occupied at the moment, and cannot give him a detailed account personally. But let him know that the mission was…a success. An unqualified success, in fact, and that my report will be on his scanner within the hour.”

“Yes sir,” said the secretary after the briefest pause, and cut the link.

They can choke me, fry me, cook me or kill me, thought Bast, now lost in his own memories. My story will be different than yours, father, even if it means my dying horribly on the whim of the Emperor’s latest toy protégé. But today, if I die, I will die telling my own story. Not yours, not grandfather’s, no one else’s but my own.

He watched Jada on his own monitor, who sat on a railing by a window and looked out at the eternal night of space. Alone, and secure in the knowledge that she was alone, she began to cry. Softly at first, she then let a torrent of tears and wails flow and froth when she knew that the other cadets wouldn’t be by for at least another hour.

And then, after she’d nearly cried her insides out, she stopped, wiped her face and looked out at the stars and whispered a vow in a voice only she could hear.

“I will avenge you,” she promised, speaking to herself, her brothers and her parents in a voice only they could hear.

#

And, on another Star Destroyer far away, Vader himself paused in his duties for a rare moment. He’d have to discipline that little upstart Bast. But for now, something in the stars had caught his attention. He looked far out into the lighted darkness, and longed for a time when the night sky was quiet and calming to his spirit.

After a few minutes, he turned and continued walking down the hall, on his latest mission for his Master, the Emperor.

THE END