PIETT & MOTHMA
Written and submitted by M. Nama Narayana

(Written in response to the story challenge:  I want Admiral Piett and Mon Mothma playing doctor in a treehouse on Endor.)

Here's one with the rated- G ending!  Clean, in other words.

They pushed him through the door at spearpoint, the flint tips hard at his back, forcing him to drop to his knees as he staggered into the hut.

He heard them rattling down the ladder, a dozen voices speaking in a babbling, primitive language. Tonal and alien. Still on his knees, he surveyed the damage. One tunic sleeve was in tatters, and blood was running down his arm from a dozen knife cuts. His side felt like one raw wound. A thrown spear had hit him in the chest as soon as he had managed to heave himself out of the capsized escape pod. And the escape pod landing . . . He groaned with the memory. A purple bruise covered half his temple. He couldn't even remember what object he had failed to stow, but it had struck him on touchdown. The fact that he could not remember was nagging at him. Concussion. Memory loss.

He became aware he was not alone. A woman - a human woman - was watching him from a bench built into the side of the hut. She was fortyish, he thought, trying to be charitable in this unprecedented situation. Very serious looking, poised and reserved. She had short, dark reddish hair, a contrast to her pale skin. He straightened up. "Your pardon, madam. I did not intend to intrude."

She got up, then, and helped him to his feet, taking him to a pallet made of straw. As his legs began to buckle, she took his weight with a hidden strength, lowering him to a sitting position. He stared at her. What was she doing on this moon, of all places? He took in her face again. Possibly an anthropologist, studying the natives -- the ugly and unpredictable Ewoks who had taken him captive. Almost certainly a lesbian, an intellectual, cast out from polite Imperial society. Bitter and scarred. However, when he thought about it, she did not seem bitter. She had a warm humanity in her eyes that did not fit the stereotype he had so quickly constructed.

'Take off your tunic, Admiral," she instructed.

Piett smiled. "I believe I will remain clothed, madam."

"Mothma," said the woman. She pronounced it 'Moss'ma'.

He heard it as 'Mossuma'. It meant nothing to him. "Piett," he said. "And you know that I am an Admiral."

"I can read insignia, Admiral Piett. And as for me, I am a doctor. You will be quite safe with your tunic removed. Safer than if you leave it on. You may have a pneumothorax - a sucking chest wound. I can treat it or I can ignore it. Your choice."

"A doctor? How?"

"Not all Universities have such stringent criteria as Coruscant," she said quietly, letting the man decide what she meant. Coruscant had not admitted women into the medical programs for fourteen years, now. Mon Mothma had studied at Cartago, which admitted women for a simple reason. If a Cartagian man touched a married woman, the woman was put to death for adultery. Therefore, they had begun training female doctors.

Mon Mothma considered her options. She was prime among the Rebel Alliance, the respected figure. The leader, she thought with some guilt. If an egalitarian organization could be said to have a leader. And yet she was about to try to treat the Admiral of the Imperial Fleet. She had spent the last four months planning to kill him and scatter his ships. In the grass-walled, log-floored treehut of the Ewoks, those plans seemed long ago and far away. He was a man. Humani nihil a me alienum puto, she thought. The immortal words of Terrence. No human is a stranger to me. A doctor's credo, internalized into a command.

She mentally reviewed how she had come to try to direct the battle from the forest moon of Endor. A commander, down in the gravity well? Plainly stupid, now she came to think of it. But she had been persuaded, she had set up the command post, it had been overrun, and she had been captured. And now she lived among the little people that had initially helped her troops, the furry, life-loving Ewoks.
 
 

Piett groaned. The wound in his ribs felt like a fire. He tried to lift off his tunic for the doctor, but could not raise his left arm. Mothma stooped to help, and stifled a gasp at the injury. A purple bruise spread from his waist to his left collarbone. The angry red center suggested an infection, but the primitive spearpoint had failed to penetrate the chest cavity.

"You'll live," Mon Mothma said, but Piett didn't hear her. He had dropped into unconsciousness, slumping onto the grass bed. She quickly checked his pulse and tried to check his pupillary response. No luck there; his eyes had rolled back.

The hut began to shake as an Ewok ascended the ladder. It was a female, a baby on her back in a hide sling. She left a bowl of gray meat and shredded vegetables at the door, and turned away. "Wait," Mothma said, in her pidgin, prisoner Ewokian. "What meat is this?"

"Pig," the girl said.

Mothma shuddered. 'Pig' all over the galaxy meant meat from pink or brown omnivores. "Two legs or four legs?"

"Four legs." The girl turned to go again.

"Help me, little angel of the treetops," Mothma said, quoting a phrase she'd heard often. "What do you have to cure this . . . " and she realized she had no word for 'wound'. The nearest phrase in her vocabulary was 'I don't like'. Instead she put her hands on Piett's quiet chest. The girl nodded, and went back down the ladder, cooing to her child.
 
 

The village shaman came into the hut within half an hour. He carried a hollowed dried fruit with a paste inside, and insisted on performing spells before applying the compound. Mothma finally shooed him out as night fell. She threw her cloak over Piett. He was moving now; asleep, not unconscious. She sat by the door watching the stars. She fancied she still saw the massive ships of the fleet glittering in the light of Endor, the glowing gas giant that was the center of this little system.
 
 

Abruptly, Piett woke and saw her framed in the doorway against the ghastly light of Endor. "Who the hell are you?" he said, bewildered. "And why am I in a log cabin, for the love of Khroy?'

She did not turn around to reply. "I am Mothma, you have been captured by the Ewoks of Endor, and you have concussion. Very badly."

He groaned. That all seemed very familiar, and yet he remembered nothing since he had jettisoned the escape pod. Concussion, with short term memory loss. It would kill him, in the end. The Emperor would seek someone to court-martial for the debacle, and a disoriented, confused Admiral would be the ideal choice.

"Are you hungry?" She picked up a gourd containing a stew and came over. He sat up, suddenly ravenous. He hadn't eaten since he had left his ship. How long was that? He didn't know. Days or weeks. He began to eat with his hands, not minding the sour meat and the bitter vegetables.

He was surprised when that made her laugh. "You might want to be more cautious with the food here," she said. "The Ewoks hunt any game, and the biggest game afoot is injured Imperial soldiers. The forest is crawling with them."  Rebels too, she thought, but did not let on. He had not guessed who she was, apparently thinking she was some sort of researcher or field doctor.

He stared at the food with sudden revulsion.

"That is just meat," she said quickly. "I asked the chef."

"Why are they feeding us? Are they fattening us up for a banquet?"

"No, they read your insignia, Admiral. They would like to barter you for weapons. You are not even a prisoner. You are technically a guest. Of course, if you try to leave the village, you would cost them many blasters. I don't think they will allow that." She had a sheaf of notes in her hand, taking down details even as she spoke.

"How long have you been studying them?"

"Not long. Three weeks." She smiled. She was a prisoner just like Piett, but he had not made the connection between the Rebel stronghold and her presence. She came over and lifted the cloth aside to look at his wounds again. The bruising was diminishing, already yellow, and the infection was gone. The cuts in his arm had almost disappeared.

"You owe your health to them, Piett. The shaman brought a paste made from vampire bats and - " she consulted her notes, "mustard, and it has taken away all the swelling in a few hours. Must be some enzyme in the bats. It has healed the bruise on your forehead, but take care. A paste cannot heal the brain. You still have concussion."

He sat up and looked for his tunic. It lay over a bench, tattered and slashed beyond repair. To go native was unthinkable. Wearing Mothma's cloak was not ideal, either. "Bats," he suddenly shouted. "You are talking about bats and my men are dying by the hundred thousand!"

"Neither I, nor the bats, nor you, nor the Ewoks can stop that. Who brought your men into battle?"

"The damn Rebels," he said. "Squash the little insurgency, that was my orders. Who could have foretold that they would fling their women and children at us like flak? Not one of my men felt honorable firing at a ship that contained girls and children. We held back. We were hammered. All the Emperor desires is peace under his beneficent rule. One law to guide them all. And now my men are dead and frozen in the vacuum of space."

Mothma looked down at her hands. Piett was clearly not a monster. He had been misinformed.  If she were to explain Tarkin's actions to him, surely he would see the error of the Imperium? But she realized in her heart that she would never reconcile their beliefs. There would be a war criminal trial at the end of all this, and she would be required to explain why she was better than Piett. Right now, as he sat on the bed of straw, wringing his hands over the fate of his men, she could not think of a reason to condemn him.

Later, he slept. Endor set, leaving the forest moon dark and quiet. The Ewoks came home and extinguished their fires, superstition and common sense coming together. The dark night of the forest moon was filled with inhuman noises. Mothma kept a vigil, perhaps unnecessary this high in the tree tops, but important to her own peace of mind.

He woke up again, his sleep interrupted by the flaring of bright red light to the south, as it poured in the door. "That's no dawn," he said.

She came to sit beside him. The bruises had gone, and the cuts were thin lines of scar tissue. Something the Ewok shaman had done caused the wounds to fade, as though they were nothing. "Something broke up in the atmosphere while you slept. Something big," she said.

"A Star Destroyer," Piett said with a sorcerer's certainty. "All those men dead." He was silent for a while.

She rose to look through the door. He got up with her and they peered into the angry red false dawn of the crash. The jungle was untouched as far as they could see. The tall conifers of the Ewok nation stretched beyond the horizon. The Ewoks themselves slept, quiet at night, regarding nocturnal phenomena as supernatural. If they had seen the conflagration, they were praying quietly at home. They had not come to the communal fires.

She thought of a Star Destroyer. Eleven miles long. "Are we going to survive the crash?" she asked him. A hundred asteroid tales crowded her mind as she spoke.

No, he thought. An impact like that will destroy all life on the whole moon. But he heard himself say, "It depends, Mothma." It depends on the kinetic energy. "A stalled Star Destroyer has no kinetic energy." But it got here within twenty four hours; it was powered. "A stalled Star Destroyer reaches an atmosphere and the stern dips a little, but the ship never plummets." Except under power. "The ship goes into a flat spin around the stern, and eventually it begins to corkscrew, a wide spiral about the spin. The atmosphere heats the underside, and when the lower decks melt, the ship breaks up into a million pieces." Each one with a screaming man aboard, he thought to himself. "The pieces brake quickly in the air and burn. The impact on the planet is low."

She grimaced, and found herself putting her arm around his waist for support. "I'm not a fool, Piett. The moon will die from the impact, yes?"

"If we did not smell it, we're not dead yet. We haven't heard it, so we will not die within the next two hours. But tomorrow will be the last visible sunrise on this moon for ten or twenty years."

She considered. "By the time the star rises again, there will be nothing but moss and fungus on the whole moon. The Ewoks will not survive."

He laughed, then. How sad; the vicious little furry spear-carrying bastards would fail to thrive. And yet one day, possibly a hundred thousand years hence, a descendant would excavate the Star Destroyer's downed reactor in its bottle. That would cause some grief. He found it funny, though his new anthropologist friend was remaining serious, and solicitous.

"Why are you laughing?"

"I'm not an Ewok," he said, pulling her to his chest with all his strength. "Who cares about this moon? The downed Star Destroyer will alert all the search crews, and I am sure we will be found." He hugged her, and she did not resist. "We may be dead within two hours or we may be found by the pickup squadrons." He kissed her lips; suddenly it seemed important that he touched the single human on the doomed moon.   She responded, putting her hands about his waist.

She kissed him, too. His mouth was sweet and rewarding. She hugged him tight as he put his arms around her shoulders, calming her with the strength of his presence, his focus. He was so strong; his arms encircling her seemed to drive away the fate that she feared so much.

"I'm sure the crews will find us before the blast reaches us," he said, a certainty he did not feel. "That is, if the impact was indeed that strong. We will watch the shockwave from a safe orbit."

She held on to him, grateful for every word, whether it was a deception or not. /And then?/ she thought. /What then?/