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On Hoth, the coolant conduits would ice over at five degrees. The life‑support systems would seize up at two.
Even without an immediate existential crisis, the base on Hoth was falling apart: the thermal coils struggled, shuddering through sealed vents. Flaking insulation needed constant maintenance. The whole base’s infrastructure was held together by the rebellion’s favorite word: hope.
The faulty nature of Echo Base’s heating and cooling kept Vel awake at night, worrying over patched coolant lines, wrapping X‑wings in reflective sealant, briefing fire‑team crews on emergency radiators. Kleya only knew the extent of this base's failings, how precarious the entire ecosystem of the Alliance was on this freezing planet, because of Vel. Kleya only knew ever knew anything about what was happening beyond her small world of locked up transistors, because of Vel. She was learning to be comfortable with only knowing some of what happened around her, not having a thousand whispers to orient her to any threat on the horizon. Only a short code signal, a series of quick, staticy tones, were hers to know, connected only to Leia, with little to translate: emergency. now.
She walked the narrow hall to Leia’s briefing bay, no sign of crisis or concern visible in the night shift crew she passed. Even the crumbling of vital infrastructure looks routine, business as usual: insulated pipe on one side, frost on the floor of the other.
Kleya entered her code and the door slid open.
Leia sat on a crate, back braced against the heating pipe, calibrating a holo‑map of evac corridors. The display flickered—half a sector gone. A tin mug steamed beside her.
“Commander,” Kleya said.
Leia nodded in Kleya's direction, her eyes still on the lost sectors.
“Want one of those ration bars? They’re in the cabinet.” She waved in the general direction. “I didn’t know I’d ever look forward to one.”
Vel had said they weren’t terrible, but that meant nothing. Leia said they tasted like synthetic chard.
Leia gestured at the holomap:
“Imperial probe relays are sweeping sector coordinates. Ships are dropping out of network. No deviations—just gone.”
Kleya nodded.
Leia said, “I wanted to make sure you were briefed.”
They both understood.
Kleya’s mind flickered—if I followed this corridor to its end, down narrow shafts and emergency bulkheads, I’d come to the logistics hallway. I'd find Vel poring over sensor feeds, re-routing coolant flow with red eyes and two hours’ sleep, and I’d...
She shook the strange thought away, banishing it back to the half frozen corridors it came from. There was work to be done.
“What do we need to get off-world?” she asked. Leia handed over a subspace transceiver.
“The planetary vector set and burst-relayed it to Yavin‑4 via ghost relays. We locked evac channels on 0210. No repeat signals expected. If a probe picks us up, destroy the cache, reroute crews to surface loop. That gives us, maybe, forty‑five seconds.”
Fast. Direct.
Kleya clipped the transceiver to her belt, connected the slicer unit, and tuned the flickerburst encryption. She adjusted the phase alignment to match Echo Base shield harmonics—watching the red light blink green. No packet loss. Not yet.
A low beep confirmed uplink reception. Overhead, the exhausted vents sighed.
Leia didn’t move, turning her attention back to the screen, but let her head rest against the side of the wall, a rare sign of fatigue. The wall wasn't frozen like the other side of the office, but that wasn't an indication of comfort.
The transceiver’s relay light kept blinking green.
Leia blinked, then tapped a few buttons to kill the holofeed. The real work was done.
“Do you ever think about your family?” Leia asked casually, her eyes still on the screen. That was her tell, Kleya thought, irritated. If she had actually been casual she would have gone out of the way to make eye contact, her best point of leverage.
“What makes you think I had one?” Kleya said evenly, not taking her hand off the transceiver.
“We kept our own logs about Luthen's team, you know.” Leia was too pleased with herself, maybe even gleeful. “We triple checked everything, even if we didn't have the same networks or the same... skill set available. We cross‑referenced old desertion records, contacts in other resistance nodes, missing persons databases, what files ISB wouldn't share with Military. We’re not complete amateurs.
Kleya exhaled. Only a few months ago, walled off and desperate but disciplined above all else, Kleya would have cut this frivolous inquiry off immediately. She'd use spite, anger, whatever curt word, threat, or insult could stop Leia from breaching her role as operative, the dangers of disclosure, vulnerability, for Leia's own sake. Kleya is not sure it is better that, transceiver in hand, she is unable to do the right thing, the ethical thing, now -- the yawning cold darkness within her, dormant for so long, reaches out, yearning. She has already become too human for real love in these days on Hoth, too thawed to be righteous any longer -- her longing has made her weak and unkind, forsaking true justice and care for fleeting, passing, selfish witness.
“Also,” Leia said, and Kleya could tell without looking at her that she was smirking, always pleased with her own audacity, into the silence. “Because of how you act.”
Kleya was not so selfish that she would let her teenaged spy commander hear her laugh at this.
Leia said, softer, into the silence, “Sometimes I think about how my mother tied her hair back. Not for formal events -- around the house, when only the children would see her. It was type of part... everyone did it on Alderaan. I never thought it was a 'Raani style -- it was just a way to part your hair! Everyone did it. But I've never seen it on Coruscant. Or Yavin. Or, anywhere." Leia laughed, a choking sound. "And I've definitely never seen in on Hoth..."
Kleya listened -- the cold darkness rose again, pleading, shamefully reaching out to Leia's words -- then set up the final relay. She tapped in the encryption key, watched the uplink disappear. They let the silence hum between them— static buzz, the soft drip of water from the vents.
Kleya made one final adjustment to the signal, then succumbed to her weakness, the cold metal of the transceiver warming under her glove. She thought again, of the logistics hall -- but that was enough callous greed for one day.
“My mother sang,” she told Leia. “Lullabies. Folk songs... I don’t know. I don't remember the language. But I remember that she sang.”
Overhead, cables sparklocked and indicators pulsed steady -- Echo Base held together by warring snow and will.