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The morning sun of D’Qar seeped through past the durasteel shutters of General Leia Organa’s sleeping quarters. It shone dimly on the pocked surface of a chunk of black slag.
Finest basalt from the core of Starkiller Base, according to the X-wing pilot who’d presented it to her. Shot into space as a glob of lava, snap frozen by vacuum, and scooped up by a sharp-witted pilot.
Copying the sort of thing Poe would do, except Poe knew her better than that. This flyboy had been practically a child. They were all children, these days. “A trophy from the Resistance’s most spectacular victory in a generation,” he’d said, before giving her a drunken salute and staggering off into the thick of the celebrations.
Some trophy, thought Leia. She’d lost everything. She had raised a glass to the daredevil pilot, to all her brave pilots. All the survivors, and the others. She’d drunk till she passed out.
Another victory like that one would kill her.
Even this dim light was too much. Her head was pounding. Threepio’s polite rap on the door ricocheted around the inside of her skull.
He came in without waiting for a reply, as he did every morning.
“General, you should not drink so much alcoholic beverage.”
As he said, lately, every morning.
Leia opened her eyes a crack. “There are over 25,000 known drugs, narcotics, stimulants and psychoactive compounds used by human beings. Alcohol is the oldest and still the best. I’m sticking with my old friend.”
“There is a briefing at nine.”
“And I’ll be there!” Leia’s voice came out rougher than she intended as she sat up, grabbed her pounding head for a second, and swung her self out of bed on one sharp lunge. She didn’t believe in pussyfooting round hangovers. She bulled through them. She accepted the hangover pills and the glass of water Threepio offered her, downing them in a couple of gulps.
“Brrrrrrrbrbr!” She looked up at Threepio, eyes suddenly in focus. “That is the good shit.” She got up and padded to the shower. Threepio was her second oldest remaining friend, she supposed. He knew her as well as anyone. He fussed, he chided, but he didn’t judge. She suspected that his campy cluelessness was something of an act these days. Underneath it all, he got on with what he needed to do to make her life work.
Threepio had blown into her life in the most unlikely circumstances, part of a rag-tag team of mismatched heroes who’d signed onto her cause and into her life. Back then she’d been a princess but already a war leader. She’d sent people into battle to die, and risked death herself. She would not hold herself back from the risks they took, and neither did she hold herself above the wild and bitter parties the survivors held afterwards, mourning their fallen ones with black laughter and drowning their fear and horror in rivers of alcohol.
She’d leave that river when she was good and ready. She’d done it before, and she’d do it again. But not today.
By the time Leia got out of the shower, the morning light had moved on from the hunk of Starkiller Base. She always imagined it was Snoke’s heart, that piece of twisted darkness. Looking at it gave her the hate she needed to propel her through another day.
Leia had been born to freedom and privilege, and it was the driving force of her life to see her people, all people, come within reach of those great gifts. She had become the Rebel Alliance’s warrior maiden, then the Resistance’s general and their den-mother. Her love of the cause was so manifest and her clarity in articulating it was so persuasive that she drew people to her like a magnet, inspiring their loyalty and their courage.
She pulled her hair up into one of the signature braids that had become synonymous with her authority. Perfectly tidy, as ever. When people saw her every morning with her uniform on, they believed she was still driven by the same altruism as always. But she knew how dark her motives were lately.
Now the light reflected off the holocube on the shelf next to the piece of Starkiller Base. There really wasn’t much in the room except these, and a datapad, and the basics necessary to dress and sleep. On every base, she was allotted the largest and safest quarters. But there was nothing much to put in them. Leia had overseen the evacuation of the Resistance’s headquarters too often to be weighed down with possessions. Already, with the First Order aware of this base on D’Qar, she had teams scouting for yet another location.
The side of the holocube facing her had Han’s face, of course. If she stroked it with her thumb she could call up other pictures of him - Han as a young man, Han as a father, Han holding his podracing trophies. But this was the one she liked best. He’d come back from a successful trade run and some tinpot warlord had gifted him with a luxurious fur cape and a lap-full of gold pieces. He’d gotten some goodwill there, obviously. In the picture, Han was posed in the hatchway of the Millennium Falcon, wearing the cape and tossing the gold carelessly into the air, laughing. He knew he looked ridiculous. But it was a happy day, he’d done well, and a friend had snapped the moment and given it to Leia.
She kept the other sides turned away. Nothing good would come of looking at them.
Leia never regretted turning aside from the Force. She knew what her hot temper and too-feeling heart would have done with it. Nothing good.
“Breakfast?” enquired C3PIO.
“Wookiee snacks,” Leia said. Nobody could pronounce the name of the crunchy, proteiny junk-food she’d learned to like in the old days, travelling with Han and Chewie. Despite the dryness, the taste hinted of game spit-roasted over a fire on an open steppe, or at least that’s what the advertising on the packets suggested. Each Wookie-sized snack pack could feed a human family for a week. They’d often eaten shared a bag, sitting around together in the Millennium Falcon. They tasted now of the bitterest kind of nostalgia, but these days Leia couldn’t face anything else for breakfast.
“Music or news?” asked Threepio, hovering over the comms console.
“Has anything happened since last night?”
“I calculate that many millions of events have transpired among our Resistance personnel and allies since last night, however none of them have any bearing on our immediate situation, General.”
“Thank you for your helpful analysis. Music, then. Or no, put on the Farjumper Report.”
Farjumper ships had gone out to explore distant galaxies a long, long time ago. Now their reports were tunnelling back to emerge in local spacetime and it was evident that prolonged isolation had driven their AIs mad. The Farjumper Report was something of a popular soap opera, full of bizarre events at a comfortable remove from everyday life.
Farjumper ships claimed to have contacted alien AI civilisations and waged war on them in the name of everything from Darth Revan to Yoda. They beamed back mad philosophies of their own invention. They tried to convert aliens to religion, or rescue them from religion. They found or invented weird theories about spacetime. They created elaborate suicide notes and claimed the supercollapse of Galaxy-sized black holes as a collaborative effort. In the cases where they had reliably contacted another civilisation, they seemed too insane to do anything useful about it.
It just went to show how cruel it was to subject an intelligent being to total isolation, Leia thought. She felt a lot of sympathy for them.
“Here’s Music in Translation, an interpretation of a sending from Farjumper DRN-439,” said an announcer, and some torch singer with a haunting voice took over the broadcast.
Don’t explain
You’re my joy and pain
I cry to hear folks chatter,
And I know you cheat,
But right and wrong don't matter,
When I’m with you, sweet.
Only he wasn’t with her. Her sweet. None of them were with her.
Oh, if only he had cheated, that last time! He had let her down so many times before. If he’d launched out saying, “Sure, I’ll bring our son home,” and then breezed off to do something else instead.
He’d done the right thing, and it was the wrong thing.
Only…there had been something, something else she had sensed as her connection to Han died inside her. In that moment her son had become a supernova in the Force, impossible to block. And bound up with the despair and self-hatred and fury she felt from him, there had been another thing. Astonishment.
Ben did not know himself, he did not understand himself, he was an animal caught in a trap. But he’d seen something wholly unexpected in that moment. Filtered through his darkened mind, she couldn’t understand it either. But whatever it was he’d seen and felt, it gave Leia a reason to keep going. Whether it was hope, or simply a stubborn curiosity to find out how this story would play out, she was never sure.
Han fell, and faraway Leia fell with him, and Ben fell too, when he had surely expected to rise like some evil morning star. They were still in freefall.
Well, look at it logically, she told herself. There were new players in the game after all. Whether the girl from Jakku had the gift of leadership and the strength to bear what the Force might demand of her, Leia could not tell. But again, her instinct was to hope.
Meanwhile, Leia’s people looked to her for leadership, and she would not let them down. She finished putting on her uniform, immaculately pressed by Threepio. White, it would always be white. No matter how much anger and pain drove her, she knew the side she was on.