“What does he do?” Leia asked. Next to her, Antilles and Batten were exchanging incredulous glances.
“He’s a mechanic, or he was back when we had a shop.” The old woman smiled wider, anticipating the answer.
Triumphantly, Leia said, “So we’re also hiring an official ship’s mechanic. Done. That’s two. Captain, how many extra people can we fit aboard for a short trip?”
It took a few moments for Captain Antilles to answer. “About one hundred.”
One hundred individuals out of one thousand families? It wasn’t enough, but it was a place to begin. “Then I’m about to hire ninety-eight more crewmembers. Help me register them in the ship’s official log, will you?”
“You’ve got it, Your Highness,” said Batten, who had a wide grin on her face. The captain still looked wary, but he nodded as Batten and Leia got to work.
Leia decided to find those who were youngest and oldest, sickest or pregnant, the ones who needed help most urgently. Two little children, neither of them even five years old: they could crawl into small spaces to retrieve lost things. A man with a racking cough: he knew how to fly a spaceship, so he could serve as an emergency backup pilot. A woman whose belly stretched large with a baby almost in this world: she’d owned a plant nursery, and it just so happened that the Tantive IV needed a ship’s botanist. As Leia named every new hire, Batten instantly recorded it in the log, making their status as official as anyone else’s on board.
Word spread through the camp quickly. People crowded around, all hoping to be chosen—yet they silently pushed forward those in greater need. Stormtroopers came close too; while they didn’t dare interfere with a humanitarian mission, she could hear the buzz of comms in their helmets as they tried to get new orders that fit the unprecedented situation at hand. But the ones she was happiest to see were the hired, who grabbed their few possessions and headed up the ramp into the Tantive IV, into escape and freedom.
After a former percussionist was hired as ship’s drummer, Batten quietly said, “That’s one hundred.”
“Already?” Leia felt simultaneously as though she’d been standing out here in the cold mud for hours—probably she had been—and as though she couldn’t possibly be finished. Faces fell all around her as brief hopes flickered out. More loudly, she said, “You haven’t been forgotten. We’ll tell the galaxy what we’ve seen here today. Soon, I hope, other ships will follow ours, and then we can make a real difference.”
They nodded. They believed her. None of that made it easier to walk away.
The mood on the Tantive IV on the return trip couldn’t have been more different from the way there. Their “new crewmembers” crowded every room and passageway, and while they were tremendously grateful and relieved, they were also hungry, exhausted, and often unwell. She could hear laughter, and tears too; so many of them had left people behind. The 2-1B began doing what it could for them as Leia returned to the bridge, just moments before they would go into hyperspace.
As she walked through the doors, she heard Captain Antilles saying, “—in accordance with our instructions.”
“These were not your instructions,” insisted Tedam, from the viewscreen at the captain’s station. He looked awake now. “The limits of the landing permit are entirely clear that no extra persons can leave this planet with your ship!”
Leia interjected, “Look at the permit again, Major. I think you’ll find the rule is crystal clear. We can only leave with crewmembers? We are only leaving with crewmembers.”
“You have Wobani citizens aboard—”
“Who have been hired as crew,” she replied smoothly. “The permit doesn’t forbid my hiring anyone. Like you said, let’s stick to the rules. And the rules say we get to leave here whenever we choose.” As in now.
Tedam looked like he’d rather swallow his own socks than accede to any of this, but like most Imperial officers, he knew when regulations worked against him. With a quick, irritable gesture, he shut off communications and the screen went black.
“Not bad, Your Highness,” said Batten from near the door.
Captain Antilles remained sterner in every sense. “You realize we haven’t made any provisions for these people on landing, Your Highness.”
“Yes, of course.” Their arrival at Aldera’s main spaceport would be an enormous mess. But Leia had never minded making messes. “We’ll get them settled quickly enough, I’m sure.”
The captain nodded. “As you wish, Your Highness, but—if you don’t mind—”
“Yes?”
“I’ve seen deadly combat before. Mass warfare. I’m not afraid to face it.” A small smile appeared on Captain Antilles’s face. “But you have to be the one who tells the queen about this.”
She laughed loudly. “Deal.”
Imperial restrictions around Wobani had made it impossible for them to jump to lightspeed and go directly to Alderaan; the Tantive IV would first have to stop at Calderos Station, a deep-space waypoint that served both bureaucratic and repair functions for Imperial ships around the sector and their rare invited guests. As one of those guests, Leia would send a simple signal requesting permission to leave for their home planet, which would receive approval within moments. So she watched the electric blue swirl of hyperspace with no foreboding, only impatience to get these people home—and to show her parents what she’d done—
The ship dropped out of lightspeed, and she gasped. Captain Antilles rose from his chair, and Batten said something considered indecent on most worlds, then, “Are you seeing this?”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” Antilles said. “We see it.”
Calderos Station—a large Imperial facility, important to this sector—had been damaged. No, attacked. Leia recognized laser-cannon fire all along the station’s outer surface, and various search-and-track lights along the nearest side were out. With one side more or less whole and the other quiet, burned and black, it was easy to imagine the station having been torn in two.
A swarm of TIE fighters zoomed toward them as a message came through: “Identify yourselves!”
“Tantive IV, diplomatic vessel on a humanitarian mission from Alderaan,” Captain Antilles said. “We’ve been on Wobani for the last many hours. Imperial records there will verify our whereabouts.”
“Hold for confirmation.”
Leia stared at the station, taking in the damage in full. Although it looked as though there would’ve been little to no loss of life, this attack had crippled Calderos Station—and as a result, made it easier for people to travel clandestinely to and from Wobani or any other restricted world in this area. That would be true for days, maybe many weeks.
It took serious firepower to damage an Imperial station like this. No one ship could do it except a Star Destroyer, and obviously that wasn’t the case, so—
“Confirmed,” said the voice on the speakers as the TIE fighters swerved away. “You are to leave this sector and return to your home planet at once.”