#sw phasma

Chalis stood from her table and carried her bowl to the washstand. Namir kept his eyes on his food but couldn’t help tracking her in his peripheral vision. She walked back toward him, seated herself at the opposite corner of his table. “I’m going to give you some advice, Sergeant, because you’ve been useful to me and I think you need it. You can listen or not.” 

This time, it wasn’t the words that caught Namir’s attention. Her voice shifted as she spoke, rising in pitch and losing that odd, artificial enunciation. It took on a new accent—not entirely foreign and not entirely familiar—that brought back memories of a world Namir hadn’t seen in years. 

Chalis shrugged, and when she spoke again, the accent was gone. “You’re from Khuteb? Promencius Four? One of those Old Tionese colonial backwaters, I imagine, though I can’t place the dialect.” 

“One of those,” Namir said, almost too soft to hear. 

“Fine,” Chalis said. “So you’ve barely seen a working sanitation station by the time you’re ten years old. The Rebellion comes and uplifts you, gives you food”—there was some scorn to the word, accentuated by a flap of her hand toward Namir’s tray—“and shelter. Not much, but it’s an improvement. Naturally, you pledge your allegiance to your saviors. Am I close so far?”

“I grew up like you did,” Chalis said, though she didn’t look up. “Not on your particular colonial disaster, but close enough.” 

“Crucival,” Namir said. “It was called Crucival.” 

Chalis didn’t seem to hear him. “We had nothing,” she said. “My mother tried to sell me to a Trade Federation exploratory vessel when I was six. I was too small. Out of pity, the captain gave me a packet of nectrose crystals. 

“Imagine this little girl who sleeps on her mother’s stained mattress in the ruins of a bombed-out paper mill. Nectrose—you’re supposed to sprinkle it in water—it makes things sweet and fruity, but I didn’t know that. 

“I didn’t have fresh water. I’d stick my fingers in the crystals and lick them off. I rationed them, gave myself a treat once a week for months. I broke out in hives every time. It was the most wonderful thing I’d ever encountered. 

“That was how I knew I had to leave my world. It was how I realized I was living in filth, eating garbage and drinking poison, when offworlders were so rich they could throw nectrose packets to children.”

Something had changed in Chalis’s voice. It took Namir time to recognize it beneath the rasp, but her accent had changed. Once again, the strange overenunciation was gone, and the way she spoke was suddenly familiar. 

She almost sounded like she was from Crucival. 

“I got into the Colonial Academy. How isn’t important. I trained as an artist. I made it offworld and found I was still the lowest of the low, a pretty savage rich sponsors put to work as a novelty. Under the Republic, I had nowhere to go. I could scrabble and claw against the sides of the pit until my hands bled and never climb out. 

“When the Empire rose, it wasn’t kind to me. But it rewarded success. Count Vidian saw some…quality in my sculpture. An ability to visualize concepts in a way he couldn’t. He offered me an apprenticeship and my art fell to the wayside. 

“I did horrible things, Sergeant. I proposed mining the atmosphere of an inhabited planet, leaving its people wheezing the rest of their lives. I found ways to make slavery efficient again. I told a moff I loved him and slit his throat as a favor to another. 

“But I thought it was worth it. I climbed to the top of the hierarchy by being a damn good adviser. I earned the respect of men who thought generations of ‘good breeding’ was the key to success.” 

Her tone had become bitter, and specks of spittle dotted the front of her datapad. Her shoulders rose and fell even before she began coughing. What started as a dry rasp became wet and mucosal, like the heaves of a woman rotting on the inside. 

Namir merely watched, waited. He felt neither sympathy nor pity. 

Finally the coughing subsided. A few moments later, Chalis resumed. “Now I know the truth,” she said. For the second time since he’d entered the room, she looked up at Namir. 

“The truth?” he asked. 

“I never had respect,” Chalis said. “The moffs never considered me an equal. Darth Vader never considered me a threat. The Emperor sent Prelate Verge—a brainless sycophant—after me while Vader was…” She waved a hand dismissively. “…chasing rebels. 

“The Ruling Council never saw me as anything but a runt of a sculptor from a backwater planet. I gave up everything to defect and they barely even cared.”

Hazram Namir did not fully believe he had left the planet Crucival until Gadren—the creature from the camp—walked him to the viewport of the starship Thunderstrike. He’d ridden a drop ship up from the planet’s surface, nearly vomited down his shirt in the back of the windowless box as it rattled and clanged viciously, and he’d swayed unsteadily while descending a ramp into the Thunderstrike’s docking bay.

He’d never seen so much metal and plastic in one place before. The Rebel Alliance’s Sixty-First Mobile Infantry didn’t need to conquer Crucival. If it wanted the planet, it could buy it.

He stood alone at the viewport long after Gadren had moved on. Crucival seemed small and petty amid the stars, a mottled sphere of green and gray and yellow too insignificant to hold a single city, let alone nations.

He thought of what he was leaving behind to fly away in an alien cage. He had not expected to miss the yellow grass or the clouds. They had been fundamental to his existence; now they had been stripped away.

Yet when his mind turned to Pira, to his father, to everyone he had left far below, he felt as weightless and free as the ship.

He was out at last.

Private Hazram Namir had been in his bunk disassembling and reassembling a DLT-20A blaster rifle when word about Alderaan came down. It hadn’t meant anything to him. Only the fact that Howl had announced it over the Thunderstrike’s intercom indicated the planet’s destruction was anything out of the ordinary: In the two months since Namir had joined Twilight Company, he’d seen weaponry that could melt gleaming cities into slag, fought beside more species than he could name, heard stories of a Galactic Empire that held millions of stars in its grip. If he’d been told that planets were a common casualty of war, he’d have believed it without a second thought. 

In the mess hall that night, however, he’d seen the bitter faces of his comrades and heard their stunned oaths. Whatever had happened, it was something new. 

“You said they’d bombed and gassed planets before,” he’d asked Gadren. “What’s different about this one?”

Gadren had looked at Namir with his alien eyes and said, “This is the difference between the hope of life and absolute death. Everything that was Alderaan is now gone.” 

He hadn’t understood entirely, but he grasped enough. He’d seen the Malkhanis and the Creed and others eradicated, purged until only the tattoos of the exiled and the dead remained.