Bacta War: Excerpt from Chapter 11

The moment Tycho Celchu's X-wing reverted to realspace, a chill ran through him. He had been to Alderaan--to its Graveyard--before. He had seen and flown through the stony disk that was all that remained of the world on which he had been born and had grown up. His last vision of the world as a whole, cohesive ball had come when he shipped out to the Imperial Military Academy and the pride that marked that memory now mocked him.

He had returned to Alderaan before, but he had not yet Returned. Among the survivors of Alderaan, Returning had taken on a reverence and importance unlike any other tradition he could recall. It seemed as if all the mental and emotional energy that had been funneled into the planet's pacifistic philosophy had been shifted and focused on a person's Return. Some people even described their Return as a watershed experience, one that changed their lives completely and profoundly, opening them to the greater truth of the universe.

Those claims had been made by people wearing beatific expressions. They talked about what should be done on a Return. They specified what should be said, what should be offered, and what should be expected in return. They ritualized what Tycho felt should be a distinctly individualized experience, then encouraged each other to share their experiences so they could mutually reinforce their beliefs in the healing nature of the Return.

The Return had become something of an industry to service the Alderaanian community, and Tycho had not found himself immune to its lures. After guiding several bacta tankers to Coruscant, Tycho had set down on the planet and spent some time with a few Alderaanian friends. As a result of their conversations, he had decided to make his own Return, and then went out and proceeded to buy all the things he would need to do it correctly.

Following the dictates of others rankled him, but he could not deny that inside he felt a need to do some of the things bound up in a Return. He purchased a Memorial Capsule, then bought little gifts for all of his dead. He picked out things he knew they would have enjoyed--romantic holodramas for his grandmother and sisters, wine for his father, flower bulbs for his mother, and a datacard of the latest recipes for his mother's father--the gourmet. For his brother, he picked up a holobio of Luke Skywalker, knowing Skoloc would have thrilled at being able to meet Luke and learning the Jedi would be returning to the galaxy. While part of him rebelled at the idea of buying these things and jettisoning them to orbit amid the Graveyard, the symbology of it satisfied a need inside of himself to place amid the shards of the world items that would mark the lives of people of whom there was no longer a trace.

Choosing something to memorialize Nyiestra had been all but impossible. He had known her all his life, and before he hit puberty, he knew he loved her and would marry her. He had been as certain of that as he had been that the sun would rise and set on Alderaan for the rest of their lives. She had agreed to wait for him throughout his time at the Academy and then even through his first year of duty. If he survived a year as a TIE pilot, then he'd get moved up in the chain of fleet command, making it possible for him to marry and start a family. Never had he doubted, never had she doubted he would survive that first year, so to both of them their future had been assured.

Then the Death Star exploded that future.

Another chill sank through Tycho, puckering his flesh. Because his father was the CEO of Novacom, the largest HoloNet provider on Alderaan, Tycho had been able to make a realtime HoloNet call to his home on the occasion of his birthday. Everyone had been there, all smiles and laughter. They had presents for him and toasted him with wine. Though thousands of light-years distant from the celebration, he felt every bit a part of it; then the transmission went down, the holographic images dissolving in a gray-black blizzard of static.

Tycho had just smiled. Such interruptions had happened before and in each instance he had given his father a hard time about it. Throughout the next week he mulled over what he would say to his father. He had looked forward to the exchange, since matching wits with his father was a true joy in his life.

Then word filtered down through the fleet that Alderaan had been destroyed. Blame had been placed on the Rebels, but he'd known instantly that they were innocent. While his Imperial indoctrination had left him no doubt that the Rebels would destroy a planet to gain their ends, he knew it would not be Alderaan. They drew support from Alderaan, according to the rumors, so destroying it would only make sense for the Empire. The fact that the Emperor dissolved the Imperial Senate before Alderaan died, instead of in reaction to its death, firmly focused blame as far as Tycho was concerned.

So he defected. At the next planet, Commenor, he went on leave and never came back. He joined the Rebellion and for well over seven years had fought to guarantee no other world would face the fate of Alderaan. And guarantee no other man would have to decide how to memorialize the woman he had intended to share the rest of his life with.

Part of what made the choice so difficult were the changes he had undergone since Alderaan's death. Had he made his Return immediately after leaving the Imperial Navy, he would have encoded a poem on a datacard and set it adrift in a device that would have broadcast it over and over again. The comfrequency traffic that his R2 unit scrolled across his main screen showed thousands of others had thought of the very same thing.

It hurt deep down knowing that the man he had become would not have been a suitable match for Nyiestra. The life they had planned together would have been possible in a bygone age, but only if they refused to look at what the Empire was doing within the galaxy. Wrapped up in its cocoon of pacifism, Alderaan had seemed insulated from things going on in the galaxy. It was as if when we disarmed we set ourselves above and beyond the petty concerns of the galaxy, and we thought doing so would keep us safe.

Bail Organa and his daughter, Leia, had seen the folly of that idea, but Alderaan had been slow to awaken to their call. Many people clung to their pacifism as if it would save them from anything the Empire could do. They had felt that the only way the Empire would win was if it could force them to abandon pacifism. Being sacrificed to preserve their beliefs was not too great a price to pay--an attitude especially easy to hold when no one believed the Empire could or would destroy a planet.

Tycho had long since seen the error of that philosophy. Pacifism for the sake of pacifism is the height of arrogant selfishness when that belief prevents you from acting to save others form harm. While he had no more love for war than any other Alderaanian, he had chosen to go into the military to be in a position to influence and change the military. And when it became necessary to destroy it, I became a Rebel.

In the Rebellion, he had seen and done things that Nyiestra could not have understood. He knew she would have done all she could have to support him and comfort him and help him deal with everything, but the fundamental changes in him meant that they would no longer have been suited to each other. At the most basic level, he accepted as true a concept that Nyiestra would have resisted with every neuron in her brain: There are some people who are so evil and capable of creating such misery, that killing them is the only way they can be dealt with. Grand Moff Tarkin, the Emperor, Darth Vader, Warlord Zsinj, Ysanne Isard, General Derricote, and Kirtan Loor were all beyond reasoned arguments designed to make them repent and abandon their evil ways.

The same events and experiences that would have sundered him and Nyiestra bound him and Winter. In many ways, his relationship with her astounded him because it was so wholly different from the one he had enjoyed with Nyiestra. Whereas they had done everything they could to minimize their time apart, he and Winter simply sought to make the most they could of the time they had together. Both of them had duties that kept them occupied and apart--and would continue to do so more often that not for the foreseeable future--yet the fact that each knew the other was out there somehow staunched what would otherwise have been a hideous emotional wound. He knew both of them--and probably everyone else from Alderaan that had been left alone--feared getting too close to someone in anticipation of losing them again. Despite that fear, they had grown closer and provided an incredible amount of support for each other.

Ultimately, it had been Winter who suggested to him the perfect gift to memorialize Nyiestra, a woman she had never met or known.

Tycho found and purchased a perfect crystal sphere onto which had been acid etched the continents of Alderaan. Into the heart of this idealized version of the world he had called his own, he had Nyiestra's hologram imbedded. From within the depths of the world she had loved, Nyiestra smiled out at him, forever preserved, unchanging, and beautiful.

He keyed the comm unit and flicked on his IFF transponder. "I am Tycho Celchu, son of Alderaan, now orphan of the galaxy. I have come to this place of my birth to pay homage to who I was and those I knew. And those I loved and love still. It is my wish that when life abandons me, I am returned here to be among you, so that for eternity we may be together as we should have been in life."

He punched a button on his console, opening and purging the storage compartment in the X-wing's belly. Under the control of the R2 unit, the memorial capsule's compressed air jets pushed it forward till it emerged from beneath the nose of the starfighter. A lump rose to his throat as the black oval capsule slowly began its trip into the swirl of stone that once had been Alderaan.

Tycho cleared his throat. "These gifts are but insufficient tokens of the love for you all that still burns within me." He hesitated for a second, then deviated from the formula he was supposed to speak to do his Return correctly. "This fighter is another. It bears the colors of the Alderaanian Guard and transmits their code. It is my pledge to you--not of vengeance but of vigilance. I hope you rest well knowing you will rest alone, because it is my life's work to see to it that no one else suffers as you have. I won't rest until this quest is complete."

He hit another button, closing the cargo compartment. The capsule continued drifting away, and he was tempted for a moment to blast it to bits with his lasers. He had no doubt that amid the debris, ships waited and searched for things to recover. The individuals who had located and brought in the Another Chance had been on a salvage mission of sorts, and countless were the stories of treasures rescued from the ruin of Alderaan.

Many of those treasures were shown to be forgeries, created and planted by confidence tricksters to prey on the Alderaanian community. Even nastier than they were the people claimed to have been from Alderaan--all rescued by miracle or coincidence--and who subsequently sought to insinuate themselves with families who had survived but had lost relatives. Because of the nature of the Imperial economy, a considerable portion of the wealth of Alderaan had survived the planet's destruction, making the survivors quite prosperous and, therefore, targets of opportunity for criminals.

He watched the capsule until it vanished into the swirl of debris. "Rest easy. I miss you all." He punched up the power on his IFF beacon and pulsed its transmission out in one grand confirmation of his vow, then shut it down, turned the X-wing around, and started the long trek back to Yag'Dhul and the war against Ysanne Isard.

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