Star Wars Rebels: Rise of the Rebels by Michael Kogge Page B

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