Star Wars Rebels: Rise of the Rebels (2 page)

Chopper trundled
down the corridor, grumbling in low tones.
Do this, Chopper. Do that, Chopper.
Hera and Kanan were always telling him to get things done—things that always had to be done
now
. Yet when was the last time they had thanked him with a lubrication bath? It had been thirty-two days, twenty-three hours, fifty-seven minutes, and four seconds since his last dip. Parts of him were getting rusty. Rust slowed his joints. Rust made his circuits misfire. Rust made him crabbier.

Chopper stopped before the turret. Inside, Kanan whirled in his seat, trying to get a lock on the approaching TIE.

Chopper chirped for Kanan to shoot better. The droid knew Kanan couldn’t understand
exactly
what he said without a translation screen. That was one of the difficulties of working with organic beings. Their brains couldn’t handle binary.

Kanan pressed the gun triggers. This round didn’t miss. It reduced the enemy fighter to space dust.

“I’m a little busy, Chop,” Kanan said, scanning for the other two TIEs.

So am I,
Chopper wanted to reply. But the droid kept those beeps to himself. He started to move away to the comm center.

“Wait…” Kanan said. He looked down at the droid from the turret. “What are you doing back here? Shouldn’t you be fixing the shields?”

Chopper rasped Hera’s message to Kanan in binary.

Kanan shook his head and fired again. His shots kept the two TIEs from getting closer. “Did you say you’re fixing the comm?” he asked.

Chopper revolved his dome toward Kanan. The droid had to admit this human was one of the smarter organics he’d worked with. Kanan Jarrus often got the gist of what Chopper chirped.

Kanan didn’t wait for Chopper’s response as he pumped the cannons. “Because I don’t need to talk to ‘Captain’ Hera right now. What I need is for you to get back there and fix the shields!”

Chopper groaned. He could have fixed either the shields or the comm unit during the 34.2 seconds he had wasted here. He turned around and headed back toward the cockpit.

“Oh, yeah,” Kanan yelled from the turret. “When you see Hera, tell her to fly better.”

Chopper repeated his low-toned grumbles. Organics were so inefficient in communicating with each other.

Hera jerked the flight yoke right and left to avoid the TIEs’ lasers. The navicomputer showed that the two fighters blocked the escape vector into hyperspace. If Kanan couldn’t do his job and blast them, she’d have to find a way to get rid of them.

Chopper reentered the cockpit. The droid whistled something that sounded like she needed to fly better.

“Oh, he said that, did he?” Hera yanked the yoke to one side, pulling the
Ghost
in a fast arc around a TIE. Her fingers danced on the controls. The nose gun’s targeting system came online. Almost immediately she had a lock on the TIE.

“Do I have to do everything myself?” she said, pressing the firing button.

The TIE stood no chance against her attack from behind. Its explosion reminded Hera of fireworks on her homeworld of Ryloth.

“There, I just reduced Kanan’s targets by half.” Hera glanced over her green head-tails at the droid. “Tell our fearless leader he should be able to handle one lone TIE fighter on his own.”

Chopper blurted out something and turned back toward the corridor.

“What was that?” Hera asked. She heard nothing more as the droid rolled off.

When Chopper was out of Hera’s visual range, he angrily waved two of his repair arms back in her direction. This was ridiculous. Going back and forth, like a computer program caught in a never-ending loop. Meanwhile, without shields, the
Ghost
had nothing but a thin layer of hull plating to keep them all from being obliterated.

While Hera and Kanan might be reckless with their lives, Chopper actually cared about his circuits’ continuing to operate. And though he’d never tell them in binary, he cared about theirs, too. His programming instructed him to preserve their lives at all costs.

That was why he wheeled past the turret without stopping.

“Chopper?” Kanan said. The human must have heard the rust in his joints. “Chopper, where are you going?”

Chopper didn’t answer. There wasn’t a microsecond to spare. His logic chips assured him that what he was doing wasn’t disobedience, because Hera had not told Chopper precisely
when
to relay to Kanan what she’d said. Chopper could tell Kanan
after
he was finished saving them all.

Chopper entered the
Phantom
, the small craft attached to the tail section of the
Ghost
. Its cockpit was cramped. Its control panel lacked multiple banks of switches and status gauges. It had no navicomputer, because it had no hyperdrive.

But the
Phantom
didn’t need all those features. The vessel was designed for one function and one function only.

To fight.

Chopper extended his arm into the main socket. On the control panel, the targeting screen powered on. The droid uploaded a batch of commands.

Unlike the
Ghost
, which often responded rudely to what Chopper asked it to do, the
Phantom
followed Chopper’s commands without objection. Its laser cannons angled toward the TIE fighter that streaked past. Chopper waited for the right moment to tell it to fire.

The Imperial pilot likely believed he had a bull’s-eye shot at the
Ghost
. But the pilot never got to unload his lasers. In the moment before he could fire, the
Phantom
’s cannons atomized the enemy ship.

Chopper headed back to the
Ghost
’s cockpit, this time tootling a victory tune.

“All right, I admit it,” Hera said from the cockpit. “That was some fine shooting.”

Chopper rolled through the doorway and let out a string of triumphant beeps. Then he saw Kanan was also in the cockpit, facing Hera. “Thanks. You too,” the human said to Hera.

Chopper realized that Hera hadn’t been talking to him. Rather, the two organics were
communicating
with each other. And they stood rather close to each other—a third of a meter closer than usual, to be exact.

Chopper excused himself with a sharp beep and moved to go.

“Just kidding, Chop,” Kanan said. He turned away from Hera and crouched at the droid’s level.

“We know you got the last one,” Hera said. “Good work.”

Chopper looked at them for a moment, then waved away their praise with a socket arm. His circuits had trouble processing what organics wanted when they displayed too much emotion. It was illogical. It was what they called “sappy.”

What Chopper wanted more than their praise was an oil bath. It had now been thirty-three days since—

“Now get that comm fixed,” Kanan said.

“And the shields. Don’t forget the shields,” Hera said.

Chopper shifted his dome’s photoreceptors from the human to the Twi’lek. Was this another display of emotion? Or one of their so-called jokes?

His logic chip couldn’t figure out the difference. But the chip did inform him that because his friends’ lives were no longer in danger, he needed to attend to those duties they had requested.

As he went to do so, the droid popped off a long stream of grumbles.

“What was that?” Kanan and Hera asked.

Chopper rolled forward to a central computer socket. The
Ghost
’s complicated electronic systems and engines were things he could understand. Organics, on the other hand, tended to say one thing but mean something else.

And they obviously didn’t understand the need for lubrication baths.

A thousand
thousand worlds sparkled in the night sky above the capital city of Lothal.

Sabine found the view breathtaking as she scaled the city wall. The galaxy’s Outer Rim was such a big place. So many planets, so many stars, with names like Lasan, Utapau, and Mandalore, her birth world. All teeming with mysteries and diverse species.

She wanted to visit them all. She wanted to have a thousand thousand adventures on those thousand thousand worlds. She wanted her name and her artwork to be known across the stars.

That was impossible with the Empire in control of the galaxy.

The Imperials did everything they could to limit personal freedom, including suppressing creative talent. They cracked down on anyone whose work didn’t glorify the Emperor’s New Order.

Their efforts didn’t frighten her in the least. They only made her want to paint more images that defied the Empire.

No one was going to squash Sabine Wren.