Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View (From a Certain Point of View #1)

by Elizabeth Schaefer

The arm smoked slightly on the floor, and its former owner shrieked. We stopped playing, of course. But then Wuher glared at us and we hastily started up again. So we were supposed to just keep on with the music while people were losing limbs? And here I’d thought this place was better than Jabba’s. (Say what you will about the slug, he didn’t mind if we were startled out of tune when he murdered someone.)

He hated droids. The Clone Wars taught him that. Clankers couldn’t be trusted. They were alive as any other, but more powerful:

I think he was more than a hermit. I think he was a Jedi of old. I thought they were dead and gone, the Jedi. They once saved my life, those Jedi, saved me from a whole battalion of dirty droids. So I’m inclined to give this one a pass.

Greedo—Greedo wears bad luck around him like a cloud of fart, like ambient surface radiation, like a haunting aura of actual garbage. Mere proximity guaranteed—guaranteed!—his bad luck would contaminate you, too,

As far as the Muftak can tell, the Pig-Nosed Man—called Dr. Evazan to his pig-nosed face but never in his absence—has no friends, except for the Walrus-Faced Man—called Ponda Baba and, same—and even so, they probably don’t like each other very much.

The Pig-Nosed Man lives life in a constant state of pain and anger. No one quite knew what, exactly, Evazan did to himself or why, but it mangled his face, split his nose, and made him quite impossible to deal with rationally.

Evazan gives the Muftak a cool thousand and, less his danger surcharge and Breaking-the-Law expenditure, the Muftak pays the balance to the Smuggler who, knowing better than to ask why or who-for of his customers, converts the money into the anodyne chemical compounds the good doctor seeks minus his own not-inconsiderable shipping and handling charges, then delivers them to the Muftak, who delivers them to the doctor and hopes this will not be the time their arrangement gets him killed. “I had to drop my cargo, pal. Sorry,” says Han Solo.

I picked up trooper buzz that Vader was looking for a couple of runaway droids. Figured I’d collect the bounty and square myself with the headman at the same time. He’s still got a mad on over those rebel spies I crisped on Coruscant. Idiots came at me with ion disruptors. What, they thought I wouldn’t carry a weapon accelerator? Flash, boom, three tiny ash piles. Tried to collect and Lord “No Disintegrations!” refused to pay without bodies.

Trailed one until its footprints were wiped out by a Jawa sandcrawler. Followed those treads a way until I found someone had wiped out the Jawas, too. “Someone” meaning amateurs trying to fake a Tusken raid. Probably stormtroopers, judging by the random blast shots. Some might call them precise. Me, I say they can’t hit the butt end of a bantha. At least they had brains enough to take out everyone who had seen the droids. Hard luck on the sizzled hicks I found at that torched moisture farm.

“I get it,” Brea said, her brow furrowed. She was surprised at Senni. “I have a debt to pay Solo, but I’ve never been brave enough to go through with it. After all, he was responsible for my greatest humiliation, and that I’ll never, ever forget.”

The place is crawling with stormtroopers. If it goes south, there is no way I’m taking work from the Empire. Not after what they’ve done to our kind.” “You’re a hunter,” Senni reminded her.

Senni smiled and delighted two locals with stories of a job they had worked in the Canto Bight Casino. Meanwhile, Brea watched the crowd. A man in a brown robe walked in and struck up a conversation with a pilot.

“Terrible things will always happen. They happened on Kiffex and they happen on Naboo and they happen on Tatooine. There will always be a war, and there will always be someone who wants us locked up. But the only thing we can do is survive, Sen. Survive until they won’t let us.”

the Millennium Falcon. Dirty and in need of a shine, but the Tonnika sisters knew how fast she could go. In that moment they had the same memory of seemingly endless nights aboard the most magnificent hunk of junk in the galaxy. But that was the past.

“Do you remember how to work the control panels?” Senni asked Brea. Brea shrugged, but a quirk at her lip betrayed her thought...

Brea thought back to the time they stowed away on a ship belonging to the Ohnaka Gang or the time they were stranded in Wild Space or the time they trashed their room on Coruscant just to get back at Lando…Senni

He wobbles off to another table filled with raucous humans. They’re laughing at me now, at the strange creature with the long snoot who hides behind robes and goggles. Their species grates on my nerves. Noisy, rude, unsubtle, uneducated, especially in the rougher corners of a planet like Tatooine.

“Know what your problem is?” I say in my own language, quietly and to myself. “Your problem is that your entire species thinks itself a sun around which the petty planets and moons spin, but really you’re just another rock, doomed to ever orbit something grander but remain ignorant of your own insignificance.”

When I first came here, they called me Long Snoot. No one asked my name or species, which I at first considered the height of discourtesy. Soon I learned that it was a protective measure among thieves and felons, all hiding out here on a planet that’s not worth searching. Did I tell them my name is Garindan ezz Zavor, and that I come from a respectable hive on Kubindi?

They see me as a monster from their nightmares, a hideous, dishonest creature that lives to swindle and degrade them. If only they could understand that I see them exactly the same way, but with the added bonus of slavery and oppression.

Of all the places for a cultured Kubaz to end up, it’s ironic that it’s on a planet bereft of arts, decorum, and education.

I was never that naïve. It’s the nature of my species to question. It just so happens that I didn’t question the right things, and that’s how I came to be here.

I’ve been told it reminds humans of the whine of insects, which makes sense, as I am descended from insects. They never question that I have gone to the trouble to learn their entire language, while not a single one has bothered to learn my name.

dewbacks. And look, those animals, I can’t explain it. There’s something graceful about them. They just move like every particle of ’em is perfectly aligned and entirely free. They’ll take you through a storm, over a river, into a building. They’ll maul the kriff out of anyone that gets in your way. They’re basically a stormtrooper’s best friend.

“Do you blokes know where we get our name from?” Crag says

“It’s because we were born in the storm,” Commander 110 said from the doorway. And then, because 110 always gotta say everything twice, the second time wistfully: “Born in the storm.” I can’t lie, though: He looked impressive standing there in his full body armor, helmet off, backlit by the twin Tatooine suns, his shadow thrown long across the barracks floor. “Ay,” Crag said. “The storm of history. As the galaxy transitioned from chaos to order, our regiment was created to maintain that order.”

these E-11s you’ve given us, which require one to aim as far as possible away from what one’s shooting at in order to have half a chance of hitting it.

if there’s one thing you need to know and understand about the Empire it is that it will take whatever it wants, whenever it wants it. The Empire will take everything you care about, everything and everyone you love, if you let them.”

Tagge stared at the data, sorting it in his mind. He debated whether or not he dared ask the Emperor for access to the plans stolen on Scarif. All other copies had been sealed under the highest security—security so high that even he, as Chief of the Imperial Army, was denied access. He understood the concern but knew if he could examine the data there, he might find something before the rebels did…

It wasn’t weapons that kept people obedient, despite what Motti, what Krennic, what Tarkin himself believed. Weapons riled people up, reminded them that they could fight. It was bureaucratic mediocrity that made them accept their fate.

His data had been wrong, he knew that now. Tagge had looked at the angles incorrectly, surmised the outcomes based on incomplete data. He had assumed the Empire’s greatest weapon was the Death Star. But he was beginning to realize that it might just be Lord Vader himself.

“According to her diplomatic profile, Princess Leia speaks both Huttese and Shyriiwook fluently. Regretfully, and as Your Majesty is keenly aware, the princess is merely proficient in Shyriiwook.

Not Alderaan. They were in the heart of the galaxy, a major planet, a bastion of tradition and peace and prosperity… The perfect symbol to destroy. The perfect message to send. No planet was too sacred, too populous…No planet was safe.

The mountains rose up, folding toward them, swallowing them whole. She felt her husband’s warmth, his breath on her neck, then the scent of ash and smoke, and in the next moment, oblivion.

Krennic’s test proved spectacular, but the good director was destined to receive only a footnote mention in the annals of the Empire, as being tangentially connected to a mining disaster on the ancient moon.

Tarkin had carefully modulated his own distance from the project over the years—hovering ever closer when signs pointed to success, floating farther away when delays gnawed at the Emperor’s patience. In that moment over Jedha, the Death Star had moved from concept to proof, and Tarkin had stepped from distant backer to chief architect.

Now Tarkin stood atop the sky, looking down at Scarif, a world violated by rebel intruders. A world infested, its secrets—Imperial secrets—exposed to rebel vermin. These secrets were not irreplaceable; there were duplicates of the military development records on Coruscant and, knowing the Emperor, elsewhere. That was beside the point; the rebel threat was here and now. The matter called for an executive decision. The rebels could not leave Scarif. The information needed to be purged as a limb needed to be amputated before the infection spread elsewhere.

The disbanding of the Senate demanded the attention of the media, and the holonews outlets were obediently repeating the narrative that the Empire’s advisers had prepared. Rebel traitors had infiltrated the Senate. Such infiltration resulted in a devastating terrorist strike on a major Imperial military installation on Scarif. For the duration of the emergency, the Emperor needed absolute control to bring a swift end to this threat and root out insurgents who had access to the heart of the Imperial bureaucracy.

She presumed it was criminals or criminals with delusions of altruism—as in, rebels.

The moffs can’t tell one of us troopers from another, which is by design. I don’t know if they know that we can tell who’s who, but I’m sure they wouldn’t approve. We recognize one another by how we move. When we run, we may as well be yelling our call signs.

We run past that zealot Darth Vader as he exits the office of our boss’s bosses’ boss. I don’t think Vader is a good manager of people. I’m constantly surprised to see him fail upward, but that, more than anything, is the way it goes. There are so many qualified military minds on this base, and they all defer to him. There are so many rumors about what his relationship with the Emperor must be to have such sway.

Omi’s tentacles twitched as she immediately recognized something in the smaller male. Yes, that one was male, not just by choice but by physical design. However, there was something about him that was like her; she could smell it on him. He had just left home, too, as she had so long ago. There was that, but there was something else, as well, if she relaxed and focused completely on him. There was something sparkly and electric that she felt in every part of her flesh.

One was a hairless female and three were larger males, one of them protected by fur. Omi would beware of the female, despite her lack of hair. The female would be most savage and cunning. If any of them could kill Omi, it would be that one.

Soon, the four were gone and Omi never again saw the one who was so much like her. But she trusted that he went on to do great things, for she’d been chosen to baptize him through a sort of death.

“Only a master of evil, Darth.” I cannot use his real name. It would undo me, even after all this time, catching in my throat.

And worst of all, Luke, as I am now, an old man, his face creased, his eyes haunted. He’s cut off from those who love him, consumed by regret and sorrow. It is too much to bear, a future I never want to see.

The events of this fateful morning meant that Owen never let me near the boy again. He hadn’t just been angry. He’d been scared; scared of the look we’d both seen in his nephew’s eyes. The bravery. The defiance. We’d seen that look before, in other eyes.

He is frozen with shock, unsure what to do, but that won’t last long. Soon, the spell will be broken and he will come running. Those brave, defiant eyes will be cut down in a blaze of trooper fire. He needs more than a toy fighter this time. He needs to escape; to save himself, not me.

Age, he thought, has its advantages. More and more want the young, but less and less need the old.

This is what comes of not keeping your mind on where you are and what you are doing!