From A Certain Point of View

  Illustrations by Chris Trevas: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, and 35

  Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  ISBN 9780345511478

  Ebook ISBN 9780425286708

  Deep sky photo: iStock/standret

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Cover art and design: Will Staehle

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Raymus by Gary Whitta

  The Bucket by Christie Golden

  The Sith of Datawork by Ken Liu

  Stories in the Sand by Griffin McElroy

  Reirin by Sabaa Tahir

  The Red One by Rae Carson

  Rites by John Jackson Miller

  Master and Apprentice by Claudia Gray

  Beru Whitesun Lars by Meg Cabot

  The Luckless Rodian by Renée Ahdieh

  Not for Nothing by Mur Lafferty

  We Don’t Serve Their Kind Here by Chuck Wendig

  The Kloo Horn Cantina Caper by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction

  Added Muscle by Paul Dini

  You Owe Me a Ride by Zoraida Córdova

  The Secrets of Long Snoot by Delilah S. Dawson

  Born in the Storm by Daniel José Older

  Laina by Wil Wheaton

  Fully Operational by Beth Revis

  An Incident Report by Mallory Ortberg

  Change of Heart by Elizabeth Wein

  Eclipse by Madeleine Roux

  Verge of Greatness by Pablo Hidalgo

  Far Too Remote by Jeffrey Brown

  The Trigger by Kieron Gillen

  Of MSE-6 and Men by Glen Weldon

  Bump by Ben Acker and Ben Blacker

  End of Watch by Adam Christopher

  The Baptist by Nnedi Okorafor

  Time of Death by Cavan Scott

  There Is Another by Gary D. Schmidt

  Palpatine by Ian Doescher

  Sparks by Paul S. Kemp

  Duty Roster by Jason Fry

  Desert Son by Pierce Brown

  Grounded by Greg Rucka

  Contingency Plan by Alexander Freed

  The Angle by Charles Soule

  By Whatever Sun by by E. K. Johnston and Ashley Eckstein

  Whills by Tom Angleberger

  About the Authors

  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….

  “What is it they’ve sent us?”

  Captain Raymus Antilles watched as Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan turned away from him, holding the data card he had handed to her. The data card for which almost the entire military might of the Rebel Alliance, both on the ground and in orbit above the planet Scarif, had just risked everything to steal from one of the most secure Imperial strongholds in the galaxy. The grand, all-or-nothing gambit had led to the single largest combat engagement in the long history of conflict between the Rebellion and the Empire, and one that despite heavy losses had resulted seemingly in a victory: The card, and whatever highly prized data it held, had been delivered safely into the hands of one of the Alliance’s most capable covert operatives. The rest was up to her.

  “Hope,” she replied as she looked ahead, through the forward viewport of the Tantive IV’s cockpit, to the limitless ocean of stars beyond.

  Always so damn enigmatic, thought Raymus. Leia never told you more than you needed to know. That was for the protection of others as much as her own. She had learned that lesson well, the princess who had become a galactic senator, the senator who had secretly risked her life countless times to help nurture a fledgling Rebellion from a handful of squabbling, disgruntled star systems into the organized and dedicated Alliance it had become. Still no direct match for the awesome war power of the Empire, but enough to capture their most closely guarded secrets in a mission that even Raymus thought breathless in its audacity. Enough—maybe, just enough—to give the oppressed peoples of the galaxy a fighting chance at freedom.

  Raymus watched the stars outside stretch into a kaleidoscopic tunnel of light as the ship jumped into hyperspace. Then Leia turned back to him and they both stepped through the cockpit door, into the hallway.

  “Will we make it?” she asked. Before departure, Raymus had warned her that her ship was not yet capable of even the routine flight to Tatooine, which had, until recently, been its assignment. It had not even been able to travel to Scarif under its own power, carried instead in the belly of the rebel flagship Profundity as mechanical crews worked hurriedly to repair its overworked and malfunctioning hyperdrive. By the time they arrived at Scarif, Raymus was able only to assure her that the Tantive IV could perform a hyperspace jump, not that it could sustain lightspeed travel long enough to reliably get them to any given destination.

  “I’ll be able to give you a better answer in operations,” he told her.

  “Then let’s go,” she said, leading the way. Raymus followed, forced to quicken his step in order to keep pace with her.

  —

  They arrived at the ship’s operations center to find several senior officers working frantically at their control stations.

  “Status,” Raymus requested as the door slid closed behind him.

  “We’re maintaining lightspeed, for now,” the nearest officer informed him. “Remains to be seen how long the engines can keep this up. Maintenance crews are doing all they can. If we can hold this speed, we’ll be at Tatooine within the hour. But the drive’s still in bad shape; motivator could go at any time.”

  Raymus nodded. All this he knew. After the damage sustained on its last mission, the Tantive IV was in no shape for a desperate flight from the Empire. For years he had carefully steered this ship—his ship—through countless Imperial blockades and checkpoints, always able to avoid detection or suspicion. But now it had been spotted fleeing the scene of the most daring military assault in the history of the Rebellion, carrying stolen goods that the Empire would go to any lengths to recover. Suddenly, the Tantive IV was the most wanted ship in the galaxy, and it was in sorry shape. For the task of ferrying the most critical Imperial secrets ever captured, they could scarcely have picked a worse vessel at a worse time. But that was the hand they had been dealt, and Raymus had no option now but to play it as best he could.

  “The real problem is what we’re leaving behind us,” the officer continued. “We can’t exactly run quiet with a hyperdrive that’s barely holding together. If the Empire detected any trace of an abnormal hyperspace wake when we jumped to lightspeed, it won’t take them long to use it to track us.”

  Raymus sighed; he had dreaded this possibility and had warned Leia of it prior to their setting their escape course from Scarif. Typically a jump to hyperspace meant a clean getaway, a ship�
�s lightspeed trajectory impossible to track. But the Tantive IV’s impaired hyperdrive was like a leaky oil pan, leaving behind it a residual energy signature that was unique—and traceable. He wondered now how long it would take the Empire, with all their resources no doubt already diverted to finding them, to pick up their trail and follow it. For that reason, Leia had thought it too great a risk to return to the rebel headquarters at Yavin 4. Faced with no good options, she had ordered Raymus to instead set course for Tatooine, their planned destination before the hurried redirection to Scarif. She hoped still to fulfill the vital mission that her father had entrusted to her earlier that same day, knowing that even if the Empire pursued them to that barren desert outworld they would find nothing there but endless wastes of sand.

  Raymus saw the grim expression on the face of the ship’s bosun, who was examining new readouts at his station. “Don’t tell me it gets worse,” he said.

  “The Profundity took heavy damage when she was disabled,” the bosun reported. “Her electrical systems overloaded, and since we were still docked, the overload fried half our grid, too. We barely have deflectors or weapons. If it comes to a fight, we won’t be able to put up much of one.”

  So there it was. Surely only a matter of time before the Empire found them, and little chance of defending themselves once they did. Raymus tried to think of a time during all their many high-risk missions and close escapes when they had faced a situation as dire as this, and came up wanting. “What about the escape pods?” he asked.

  “As you ordered,” said Helfun Rumm, the Tantive IV’s stalwart security officer. “All secured and ready to launch.”

  Raymus noticed Leia looking at him inquisitively. “Your Highness, if we are stopped and boarded by the Empire, my first priority is to get you to safety,” he told her. “At that point, the pods may be our only option.”

  “Surely it will not come to that,” said Corla Metonae, Tantive IV’s chief petty officer and a long-serving retainer of the Organa royal household. “We’re still flying under a diplomatic flag. The Empire would not dare board us.”

  Raymus considered that; technically it still held true. The Tantive IV was officially a consular ship that Leia used in the performance of her duties as Alderaan’s representative in the Galactic Senate. As a diplomat, she enjoyed special legal protections that meant not even the Imperial military could board, search, or in any way impede the free passage of her ship without her express permission. It was a broad and very convenient privilege that in the past had allowed her and Raymus to conduct acts of espionage and subterfuge right under the Empire’s nose. But now Raymus found himself doubting, given the apparent import of what had been stolen from Scarif, that it would be enough to protect them this time.

  “This just came in,” the bosun reported, looking up from his station. “The Empire has issued a priority red directive. Any ships matching the description of a CR90 corvette are to be stopped and held. Priority red means all previous orders and duties are immediately superseded for all Imperial ships galaxy-wide. I’ve never seen this much comm traffic—the Empire’s flooding every frequency with it. Whatever Rogue One beamed us from Scarif, they really want it back.”

  All eyes were on Leia as the full gravity of their situation began to sink in. Raymus had seen this look on her face before; she was concerned, worried even, but it showed in a way that only those few who knew her best, had served with her longest, could detect. To all else she projected only firm resolve in the face of crushing adversity. But he knew how bad this latest news was. The ship’s fragile consular status aside, one of their few slim hopes lay in the fact that the CR90 was a ship common throughout the galaxy, literally thousands of them in service, and the Tantive IV looked like almost any of them. But though they were a needle in a haystack, the Empire had the resources—and apparently, the determination—to tear the entire haystack apart in order to find them. And diplomatic protocol would not stand in their way. Briefly his thoughts turned to the innocent crews of other Corellian corvettes that even now were being stopped and invaded by armed Imperial boarding parties. Some would be foolish enough to resist.

  “If the Empire does find us…” Toshma Jefkin, the Tantive IV’s second officer, pondered aloud.

  “Then let’s make sure that they don’t,” said Leia.

  Raymus looked at Jefkin. He had served with the man for years, shared many close encounters with Imperial forces, and knew that little rattled him. He looked rattled now. His face was a ghostly white; his hands were clammy. And he seemed to be gazing into nothing, the haunted countenance of a man who has seen something that can never be unseen.

  “Tosh, what is it?” Raymus asked.

  Jefkin looked at him with hollow eyes. “That…thing. In the hallway, while we were trying to get off the Profundity. It killed at least a dozen of my men, cut them down like they were nothing. Blasters had no effect, it just kept on coming, kept on killing. It was like…like a nightmare. I’ve never seen anything like it, like some kind of death angel.”

  Raymus and Leia exchanged a grim look as they realized what this must mean. To retrieve what had been stolen from them, the Empire had dispatched none other than Darth Vader himself. And that was the most dire news of all.

  —

  Raymus returned to his quarters to write, while he still had time. As captain he knew that he would go down with his ship if necessary, but in case it came to that he would first dispatch a final message to his family back home. He had already thought it through; as his crew piled into the Tantive IV’s escape pods to evade Imperial capture, he would hand someone he trusted an encrypted data cylinder, with instructions that it be delivered to his wife on Alderaan.

  As he sat down to write, that grim scenario seemed more likely to him than any other. He’d had a bad feeling about this mission from the beginning. Hastily improvised, orders rewritten at the last minute, and now here they were: barreling headlong in a broken ship toward the edge of the galaxy, carrying the last best hope for the survival of the Rebellion, and the entire Empire searching for them.

  He would write three letters, one for his beloved wife, the other two for her to give to each of their young daughters when they were old enough to understand. He had so much he wanted to tell them. More than anything, he wanted them to know that even though they would grow up never knowing their father, it was not for the lack of his love for them. No, it was because he loved them so, because he was determined they have the life they deserved, that he had given everything to help secure it for them. That was the most bitter irony of war: The greatest acts of love for your family were the ones that kept you apart from them.

  He tried to write, but no words came. He knew what he wanted to say but not how to say it, and the longer he stared at the screen, the more agonizing the prospect of composing his final words to those he most loved became. To his wife he wanted to say he was sorry, for all that she had been asked to give that so that he might serve his princess and her Rebellion, often leaving her to raise their children alone for weeks and months at a time. He had barely seen either of his daughters since they were born. As greatly as that pained him, the sacrifice had always seemed worth it to Raymus, inspired as he had been by Leia’s own passion to fight for a future in which not just his children but sons and daughters throughout the galaxy could grow up free from Imperial tyranny, something they only read about in history texts. And Leia, who had come to trust and rely upon Raymus like few others save her own father, had insisted on ensuring that his family was well provided for during his time by her side. But that all seemed like cold comfort now as he reflected on how much precious time had been lost, and how little he might now have left as the Empire tightened its noose around his ship.

  It was only when he had finally begun to write that the ship lurched aftward hard, almost throwing him from his chair. He recognized it instantly, the sudden violent deceleration when a ship dropped out of lightspeed unexpectedly. Looking to his viewport, he saw the tunnel of sh
immering blue light outside dissolve away, replaced by an inky void punctuated with pinpoints of light. The Tantive IV was no longer in hyperspace, but back among the stars. Exposed, easily detectable by any Imperial ship that might be in the area—which would certainly be looking for any vessel matching their description.

  He sprang from his chair and bolted toward the door, leaving the letters unwritten.

  —

  “What happened?” Raymus asked as he entered the cockpit.

  “Motivator finally gave out,” the ship’s pilot reported. The instrument panel before him and his copilot was ablaze with blinking warning lights. “We’re at sublight for the rest of the way.”

  “Where are we?”

  The copilot worked the nav console, punched up a local sensor image. “We’re close, about a quarter parsec out.”

  Raymus stepped forward, directly behind the two helmsmates so that he might see better through the cockpit viewport. And there it was. Barely discernible to an untrained eye, but Raymus knew what he was looking for. From this far out, Tatooine was little more than a speck, just a tiny, pale-orange dot adjacent to two far larger, brilliant lights, the planet’s binary suns.

  “How long at best speed?” They were so close, yet still so far. If the hyperdrive had held out for just a few moments longer, they would already be in the planet’s orbit. But now, forced to hobble the rest of the way at sublight…

  “Eight minutes,” the pilot responded. “I think we’ll make it.” There was hope in the man’s voice, a sense of relief—the first Raymus had heard from anyone since their narrow escape from Scarif. And now he felt it, too. Eight minutes. If they could hold out just that much longer, he could get everybody to the surface and scuttle the ship; then at one of the planet’s infamously no-questions-asked spaceports he could procure another vessel, unmarked and untraceable, with which to spirit the princess to safety. For a brief moment he allowed hope back in; considered the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there was a way out of this. That the princess might still be safe after all, that the stolen data might still find its way back to rebel command, that he and his loved ones might still—