Buckets: A Star Wars Story

23. Ensign, Pt. I

Besh's loss on Hoth hurt Osk the worst out of all of us. For the following months, he wasn't quite the same as he used to be. The once happy Dantooinian was quiet. He kept to himself, spoke little, barely ever laughed.

We all had our little cliques within the group. I floated freely between Thesh and Aurek's circles, but Besh and Osk were always in one another's orbits. They were never brazen, never brash, never calculated or overly tactful. They were simply soldiers, and they were my friends. They were always in one another's confidences like I was with Aurek, though. I never did know their private conversations, much in the same way that Aurek never really talked about some of what he told me to them. We all trusted one another. We were all brothers, but at the end of the day, Besh and Osk understood one another best. None of us begrudged them that.

Besh's death devastated Osk. That was still putting it mildly. He never got over it, of that I'm completely sure.

Months passed by. Lord Vader had been on the hunt for the Millennium Falcon - some dingy freighter piloted by the stars know who - and had been going so far as to hire bounty hunters. No one was completely okay with having their ilk around, particularly Admiral Piett, whose entire career was built around eradicating scum like them from the Outer Rim, but when you needed people hunted down there were few better. There was a Mandalorian among them, and for a brief moment when I heard him speak, I wondered if he was from Concord Dawn. He had Kando's voice.

Whoever Vader was trying to draw out with these runaway rebels who escaped him on Hoth took the bait, and we heard about a battle on Bespin. There were skirmishes between then and the next big battle, but nothing noteworthy that I think needs to be said.

It was on the eve before the final announcement. We were all sitting in our quarters. Gone were the days of jovial camaraderie. We sat in silence, polishing our armor to a gleaming shine and cleaning our weapons until they looked factory finished. Thesh had a holoportrait of his wife and daughter on his desk, and between polishing his boots and writing reports, I'd catch him staring at it as if he wanted to jump into the picture and leave us behind. Aurek said little, too. It was becoming his new normal despite his total willingness to confide in me more often than he used to. Osk was cleaning his rifle. He hadn't said a word to any of us in over forty-eight hours that day. I sat with Peek between my knees, polishing him and repainting his identification numbers in black paint across his white chassis.

There was little said besides the occasional request for the polish to be passed between us, but Osk finally set his blaster down and looked up at us, "What's it all for?" His voice was almost too loud after the seemingly endless silence that had loomed over our little group. "What's it all really for? Why do we have to keep dying for this?"

"We live to protect the Empire," Aurek answered almost mechanically. It was the response we all had drummed into our heads at the academy.

"I'm fighting for an Empire that doesn't even think I should be serving in its military," Osk's reply was laced with bitterness and he turned his attention back to the rifle in his hands with a scowl crossing his features. "Why should I die for them?"

"Hey," Aurek cut in again, "you signed up. You went to that recruiting station and made that decision."

"I was thirteen!" Osk snapped back, making Thesh look up from his papers.

"So was Dorn!" Aurek swung his arm to gesture at me, making me look back down and focus intently on Peek. "We're all in the same boat here, Osk!"

"Maybe Dorn is okay with being walked all over, but I'm getting tired of it!"

"Don't you dare," I looked up from Peek again and turned to him. "Stop."

"Besh died because someone with a name and connections wanted to try for a promotion! I get treated like bantha fodder because I'm from some little backwater farming family! Our lives mean nothing to them, Dorn!"