Tribble Fan Fiction #16: The Tribble Strikes Back
Tribble Fan Fiction #16
I. That’s No Moon
The tribble arrived on the Death Star in a crate of Alderaanian grain.
This was ironic for several reasons, not least of which was that Alderaan no longer existed — Grand Moff Tarkin had seen to that approximately three hours earlier with a demonstration of the battle station’s primary weapon that was, by any civilized standard, the worst thing anyone had ever done. The grain crate was from the last supply shipment before the planet became an asteroid field. Nobody checked the manifests. Nobody checked anything on the Death Star except whether it could blow up planets, and the answer to that question had been emphatically confirmed.
The tribble — small, green, the color of Dagobah swamp moss — tumbled out of the grain crate in Docking Bay 327 and rolled under a TIE fighter. It purred. No one noticed. The Death Star was a sphere one hundred and sixty kilometers in diameter, crewed by approximately 1.7 million people, and all of them had better things to do than look under TIE fighters for small, round, purring objects.
The tribble ate the grain. It reproduced. By the time Luke Skywalker was rescuing Princess Leia from Detention Block AA-23, there were forty tribbles on the Death Star. By the time Han Solo was arguing about payment in the corridor outside the Millennium Falcon, there were eighty. By the time Obi-Wan Kenobi was becoming one with the Force in the most dramatic exit from a narrative since Hamlet, there were one hundred and sixty tribbles, and they were everywhere.
II. The Dark Side of the Purr
Darth Vader sensed the tribbles before he saw them.
He was walking through Corridor 7-A on his way to the bridge — a walk that involved approximately five hundred stormtroopers stepping aside with the practiced urgency of people who had seen what happened to officers who didn’t step aside — when he felt a disturbance in the Force. Not a large disturbance. Not the kind that meant a Jedi was near or a planet was about to explode. A small disturbance. A warm, round, contented disturbance that purred.
He looked down. A green tribble sat on his boot.
The breathing apparatus — the rhythmic, mechanical respiration that had terrified an entire galaxy — continued its steady cadence. Hhhkkk-purrr. Hhhkkk-purrr. The tribble was purring in sync with the respirator. It had matched its frequency to his breathing. It was harmonizing with the Dark Lord of the Sith.
“What,” Vader said, in a voice that could peel paint from a blast door, “is this?”
A nearby stormtrooper looked at the tribble. He looked at Vader. He looked at the tribble again. His helmet hid his expression, which was fortunate, because his expression was “I am reconsidering every career choice that led me to this moment.”
“It appears to be a small, furry creature, Lord Vader.”
“I can see that. Remove it.”
The stormtrooper bent down. The tribble purred louder. The stormtrooper picked it up. It was warm. It was soft. Through his gloves, through his armor, through every layer of Imperial standardization that separated him from his own humanity, the stormtrooper felt the tribble purr.
“It’s…” he said.
“Remove. It.”
“Yes, Lord Vader.”
The stormtrooper walked away with the tribble. He did not remove it. He took it to the barracks on Level 5 and put it in his locker, behind his spare helmet, where it purred against his regulation socks and ate his emergency ration bar.
Vader felt the disturbance growing. More tribbles. Dozens of them, scattered through the station, each one a tiny point of warmth in a Force signature dominated by fear, anger, and the soul-crushing boredom of being stationed on a moon-sized weapon of mass destruction.
He chose to ignore it. He had a rebellion to crush. The tribbles were irrelevant.
The tribbles were not irrelevant.
“I have felt a great disturbance in the Force. As if a thousand small creatures purred at once, and kept purring.” — Darth Vader, personal meditation
III. A New Hope (For Tribbles)
The tribbles found the thermal exhaust port before the rebels did.
This was not a strategic decision. Tribbles do not strategize. They follow warmth. The thermal exhaust port — the one that was two meters wide and led directly to the main reactor, the one that Grand Moff Tarkin had dismissed as “insignificant” and that would shortly prove to be the most significant two meters in the history of galactic architecture — was warm. Very warm. Reactor-core warm.
Forty-seven tribbles had nested in the exhaust shaft by the time the rebel fleet arrived at Yavin. They purred against the warm walls, ate whatever organic compounds they could find in the thermal lining, and reproduced with the focused enthusiasm of creatures who had discovered the warmest spot on a planet-killing battle station and intended to stay.
When Luke Skywalker fired his proton torpedoes — guided by the Force, by Obi-Wan’s voice, by the desperate hope of an entire rebellion — the torpedoes entered the exhaust port and traveled down the shaft toward the main reactor.
They passed through forty-seven tribbles on the way.
The tribbles did not survive. The Death Star did not survive. The 1.7 million people aboard did not survive, except the ones who had already evacuated, and Darth Vader, who was spinning into space in a damaged TIE fighter, feeling — for the first time since Mustafar — a disturbance in the Force that felt like something small and warm going silent.
He would not understand what he felt until much later. He would not understand that the green tribble on his boot had been purring in sync with his breathing because it had sensed, beneath the armor and the rage and the machinery that kept him alive, something that was still warm. Still human. Still worth purring for.
IV. Dagobah
Yoda had always had tribbles.
This was not widely known, because Yoda lived in a swamp on a planet that smelled like decomposing vegetation and existential crisis, and nobody visited except the occasional Jedi trainee who was usually too busy doing handstands to notice the small, green, furry things sitting on the shelves of Yoda’s hut.
“Tribbles, they are,” Yoda told Luke, who had just arrived on Dagobah and was still processing the fact that the great Jedi Master he’d been seeking was a two-foot-tall green creature who spoke in riddles and lived in a tree. “Companions, they have been. Nine hundred years, I have lived. Alone, I have not been.”
“They look like you,” Luke said, because they did — green, small, and possessed of an ancient calm that suggested they knew something the rest of the universe didn’t.
“Hmm. Flattered, I am.” Yoda picked up a tribble and held it in his three-fingered hand. It purred. He purred back — a low, rumbling sound from deep in his chest that Luke had never heard a living creature make. The tribble’s purr and Yoda’s purr harmonized into a single, resonant tone that filled the hut.
“The Force, in all things it is,” Yoda said. “In the rock. In the tree. In the tribble. Strong with the Force, they are. Feel it, they do — the living Force, that binds all things. Purr, they do, because connected, they are. To everything. To you. To me. To the swamp.”
“Can tribbles use the Force?” Luke asked.
“Use it, they do not. Are it, they are. The difference, you must learn.”
V. Return of the Tribble
When the second Death Star was destroyed over the forest moon of Endor — in fire and light and the final redemption of a man who had been more machine than human but never less than father — the Ewoks found tribbles in the wreckage.
They floated down from the explosion like fuzzy, pastel meteorites, cushioned by the atmosphere, slowed by their own fur, landing in the trees of Endor with soft thumps and immediate purring. The Ewoks — who were themselves small, furry, and inclined to befriend anything that wasn’t trying to eat them — adopted the tribbles immediately.
The celebration that night — the fires, the drums, the singing, the ghosts of Obi-Wan and Yoda and Anakin watching from the edge of the forest — included tribbles. They sat on Ewok shoulders. They purred in Luke’s lap. They nestled against Leia, who held one and thought of Alderaan, and of a grain crate from a dead planet that had carried life to the stars.
Han Solo picked up a tribble. It purred. He scowled at it.
“Don’t get any ideas,” he told the tribble. “I already have a copilot.”
Chewbacca, who was seven feet tall and covered in fur and had just helped destroy an empire, looked at the tribble. The tribble looked at Chewbacca. There was a moment — a brief, interspecies moment of mutual recognition — between the galaxy’s largest fur-covered creature and its smallest.
Chewbacca made a sound that was half roar, half purr. The tribble purred back.
“Great,” Han said. “Now there’s two of them.”
Tribbles spread through the New Republic like a gentle, purring tide. They were found on Coruscant, on Naboo, on Chandrila, in Jedi temples and cantinas and the cockpits of freighters that traveled the Kessel Run. Chewbacca kept one on the Millennium Falcon — in the copilot’s seat, where it purred at lightspeed. Luke’s new Jedi Academy had a tribble in every training room. And on Dagobah, in a hut that was slowly being reclaimed by the swamp, Yoda’s tribbles still sat on the shelves, green and ancient and purring at the Force, which purred back.
