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The raging space battle receded behind him. He watched it diminish in a cockpit display. It appeared his damaged X-wing was no longer a target worthy of the Empire.

He focused on the forest moon, closing fast, bringing him a new life. Another life.

As if any life could have meaning without her.

Rebel craft exploded on the battle display. Sivrak knew that meant the force-field generator on the moon’s surface still protected the Death Star. Perhaps his battle wasn’t over yet.

He touched the atmospheric controls of his fighter, searching for the first sign of resistance from the wispy upper reaches of the atmosphere he plunged into. To change course one way was to land in safety. The other way, Rebel tacticians had set the odds of a successful atmospheric attack on the generator at a million to one. Standard Imperial ground defenses were too strong.

Sivrak’s claws tapped the control yoke as he considered his choice. One way or another. And then his fighter yawed violently as an Imperial particle beam sliced through a rear stabilizer. His tactical display showed two TIE fighters closing behind him, hiding in his propulsion wake—the same two he had faced before. For whatever reason, perhaps to avenge the death of their wingman, Sivrak was still at least a worthy target to them.

The Wolfman felt relieved the choice had been taken from him. There was now no need to plan, no need to decide. There was only the fight. The balance. The reassuring enormity of now.

Unable to change his fighter’s course in space, he threw it into a spiraling roll, releasing all his decoys and mines in an expanding cloud of sensor-opaque, carbon-fiber chaff. Then he locked his rear sights onto the cloud’s dark center, daring one or both of the TIE fighters to survive the cloud’s perils. Sivrak calculated he would have time for at least two shots before the Imperial pilots could target him. Perhaps those shots would be enough. Perhaps they wouldn’t. Sivrak did not care either way.

He glanced ahead at the rushing disk of the moon, colors smearing as he wildly spun. At last, he felt the first tremors of atmospheric resistance fight his craft’s roll. With fierce satisfaction, he pictured his X-wing tearing itself into pieces, raining down on the moon like a comet come to die. It was a good image. A fitting image. A hunter’s death.

The tactical display flashed as the mines he had deployed erupted behind him. At least one of the fighters had vanished. But then the display glowed as a piercing beam of brilliant energy shot from the defensive carbon cloud, blinding his rear sensors with a wash of static-filled white that enveloped Sivrak like a smothering snowdrift—

• • •

—carved by the icy winds of Hoth.

Sivrak dove for the trench before him as an energy bolt from an Imperial walker obliterated a nearby gun emplacement. Echo Station—the Rebel base’s lone outpost on the north ridge—was a charnel house. The awkward dead lay all around him as he pushed himself to his feet and shook the snow and ice from his matted fur. It was so achingly cold he could not even scent the blood of the dying. But then he caught the scent of her.

The ground shook with the thunder of approaching walkers and the constant firing of the ion cannon as desperate Rebels tried to clear the way for the retreating transports. But Sivrak was aware of only one sensation—she was close.

He ran to her, dodging the other troops in the slippery, ice-lined trench, his brilliant orange flight suit startling amongst their white Hoth camouflage. The main communicator channel crackled with the call to evacuate all ground crew. The command center had been hit. All troops in Sector 12 were to report to the south post to protect the fighters. But Sivrak was beyond the reach of orders now. He collapsed in the snow at Dice’s side.

It was stained with the rich purple of her blood.

Sivrak spoke her name and touched her face, afraid to disturb the ragged shard of metal that had sliced through her insulated suit and cut deeply into her upper thorax. Purple drops of frozen