Victory's Price (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  Wyl looked to T5, as if expecting the droid to join his protests. The droid did not. Nath had already turned away, tugging at pipes and conduits to test their strength.

  “All right,” Wyl said. “All right.”

  Nath only grunted.

  Wyl retreated a short way down the corridor and wrapped his arms and legs around the largest cooling pipe he could find. T5 remained at the door, but Wyl heard the distinctive crackle of the droid engaging its magnetic grip and saw its thruster jets ignite—soft blue flames ready to counter the force of depressurization. The odor of fuel wafted through the air.

  Nath held on to a horizontal power conduit with both hands, glancing between the corridor and the blast door. Wyl caught only a glimpse of the man’s face and was sure he saw doubt.

  Wyl was ready to call out again when Nath declared, “Do it!” and T5 squealed.

  The blast door began to iris open. The first hiss of escaping air was no louder than comm static, and the current’s touch barely riffled Wyl’s hair. As the aperture grew, however, the tug became insistent. The hiss became a roar. T5’s rockets flared and Wyl had to tighten his grip or be pulled away. He tried to fix his gaze on Nath as the man pulled himself along the conduit hand-over-hand, but grit splashed across Wyl’s eyes and he was forced to squeeze them shut. He thought he heard a scream of frustration in the wind.

  Wyl’s grip began to weaken. His muscles twitched and his hands grew numb. He felt unbearably cold, yet even as he feared his body would fail him the roar became a hiss and the gale diminished and faded. The blast door was sealed. T5 rested firmly on the deck.

  Nath was gone.

  “Is he—” Wyl began, but it turned into a cough. T5 didn’t seem to notice.

  Wyl imagined Nath dragging himself through the corridor, body revolting against the vacuum, breathless and dying.

  He let go of the cooling pipe. He swayed as he crossed to the blast door and gripped Nath’s conduit under one arm. There was a sweet, chemical aroma in the air—something filtered through the vents when decompression had begun—and it made concentrating hard.

  T5 beeped. Wyl didn’t understand.

  They waited.

  Nath was dead, Wyl thought. He couldn’t still be alive after—how long now? Nath was dead, sacrificed for reasons Wyl couldn’t understand. Others would die, too, but—

  Nath was dead.

  He stared at the blast door.

  The next sound Wyl heard was a metallic ring. He was momentarily convinced it was damage to his eardrums; then, absurdly, he thought it was a bell. By the time he realized what it truly meant, T5 was already squealing, rockets ablaze, and Wyl shouted, “Nath!” as if the man could hear him through the blast door.

  The door irised again. The hiss and the breeze came, then the roar. Wyl secured himself despite the prickling in his hands, and saw Nath—the man’s face purple with ruptured blood vessels, his eyes agog, legs whipped behind him by the wind. Nath was trying to pull himself forward but for every centimeter he gained he slid back another.

  Wyl was past the point of strain. His muscles were in rebellion. Somehow he kept his grip on the conduit with one hand and extended the other, allowing it to flap in the wind like a ribbon.

  He felt his fingers being crushed and saw Nath had grabbed on. Wyl pulled against the fury of the gale, pulled as T5 squealed and blasted its rockets, pulled as he and Nath both screamed. Both his shoulders felt ready to dislodge; his body seemed apt to tear in two. He found the strength to think Nath is enduring worse, and he pulled.

  When he hit the deck, the wind had stopped. Nath lay on top of him, a crushing weight that was nothing compared with the pain of moments earlier.

  “You did it,” Wyl whispered.

  Nath grunted and rolled to one side while T5 babbled away.

  * * *

  —

  The astromech delivered updates as they lay limp and unmoving. The bridge had been alerted to the status of the breach field override, thanks to a message from T5, and General Syndulla had taken command of the ship. One by one the Deliverance’s compartments were flushed to remove as many sabotage droids as possible. Security teams were assembled to clear out the remainder and to assist crew members in need.

  It would be a while before they had a casualty list. Wyl felt satisfied, nonetheless—they’d saved the ship.

  Nath had saved the ship.

  “We good?” Nath asked—groaned, really, as he rose to his knees beside Wyl. Despite the exhaustion in his tone, his expression was intent and alert.

  He wanted an answer.

  “We’re good,” Wyl said, and attempted to stand on trembling legs.

  Nath caught him by the forearm, and Wyl couldn’t say which of them pulled the other into a quick, fierce embrace. When they separated, Nath smirked and looked to T5. “You did half decent yourself,” he said, and the droid returned a series of irritable chimes. Wyl laughed and rubbed the droid’s top.

  “We should get back,” Wyl said. “Figure out where everyone’s gathering—we don’t really know we’re safe.”

  “You’re in charge,” Nath said. “Lead the way.”

  Wyl did, and gladly. With Nath behind him, the older man couldn’t see Wyl’s expression.

  We’re good meant everything’s fine between us, but that was a lie. Wyl knew he could trust in Nath Tensent’s protection, as he had at Cerberon; as he had just minutes before. But it was Nath’s sense of duty and compassion toward others that Wyl doubted, not the bond between Nath and himself.

  If Nath had faced death by suffocation to save the Deliverance alone, he might have restored Wyl’s faith. But his every act seemed spurred by personal loyalty (or worse, greed); not by a reverence for life. It made trust difficult when the stakes were higher than the lives of Nath and Wyl and the rest of their squadron; when whole worlds were at risk.

  Then again, what else could Nath do to win Wyl’s trust? If Wyl looked askance at any act he took—attributed every sacrifice Nath made to ulterior motives—only a secret deed Wyl never heard about would be evidence of heroism.

  He suppressed a sigh. He made himself smile. He would do his best to feign comfort for Nath’s sake. How could he do anything less, when the man had nearly died for him?

  It would all be over soon anyway. He thought about the words of Elder Zephyr of Polyneus, whom he’d spoken to over the comm after leaving Chass in the hangar. Wyl had told the man of his desire to return Home; relayed General Syndulla’s reassurances that the war was ending. “But planets are dying,” Wyl had said, “and they need me here to stop disaster. When our mission is done, I will come back. Even if the war isn’t finished. When our mission is over…”

  The elder had looked at him sadly, smiled a distorted holographic smile, and told him of Stam Groundling of the village of Tor, who had arrived on Polyneus the day before. Wyl had smiled and looked nervously at the deteriorating transmission readout and asked, as gently as he could, why the elder had chosen to share that particular story.

  “One hundred and twenty warriors left Home to fight the Empire,” the elder had said. “Some are gone from this existence, but of those who live Stam was one of two who had not returned.

  “Now you are the last, Wyl Lark. Your people await you.”

  It had to be over soon, Wyl thought, and wished he could say as much to Nath. For now, that truth would remain his own.

  He hoped the others were faring well. He hoped the pressure they’d all faced in the belly of the Star Destroyer had turned the squadrons to diamonds, not crushed them to dust.

  V

  Maybe Chass na Chadic was wanted and maybe she wasn’t. But she wasn’t needed, not in the crisis with the sabotage droids—she’d been midway through the forward particle flow tube when power had been restored and warning lights had blazed aro
und her. She’d squeezed into a shelter station (getting intimate with the offline repair droid inside) before the tube had flooded with energized gas, and spent the next hour searching for a way out.

  She’d heard General Syndulla announce that the Deliverance was safe and—by implication—that Chass’s efforts had been pointless. She’d found her way to the hangar anyway, filthy save for the breath-mask-shaped clean spot around her mouth and nose. She was profoundly exhausted, ready for a shower and sleep, as she dropped out of one of the TIE rack’s hydraulic shafts and hit the deck beside a dismantled X-wing.

  The voice of Let’ij declared: “Every time you pick up a weapon, you become someone else’s tool.”

  It was not a voice in Chass’s head.

  There was laughter in the hangar, and other voices, too. She crept around the X-wing heap and spotted a team of mechanics standing across the bay by her B-wing. She couldn’t make out much of the vessel itself—it was blocked by a Wild Squadron V-wing—but she could see its canopy was open.

  “Maybe,” Let’ij’s voice went on, “you think you’re fighting for yourself? You think that’s better than being the tool of the Empire or the rebels or the Hutts. But at best you’re a cog in their violent machinery. Even if you don’t swear yourself to a cause, the police state and the terrorist state thrive on violence…”

  Chass took a step toward her fighter, then another, as she attempted to separate out the voices. Let’ij kept delivering her lecture as the mechanics laughed and one asked, “What is this?”

  “Not what I was looking to wind down with.”

  “Give it time—maybe she starts dancing?”

  Chass’s hips ached from the long crawl, but she increased her pace as the ground crew kept talking. As she passed the V-wing she saw a rough black scar across the B-wing’s hull; but her eyes were drawn to an object tossed from one mechanic to another. “Here!” the first mechanic said, and the second held the object up to the light.

  It glittered like the cheap junk it was.

  It was one of the amulets she’d bought at the Circus of Mortal Appetites. One of the trinkets that had decorated her cockpit.

  “What the hell?” she shouted, and she was running now. She saw her box of audio chips on the floor. “You went through my stuff?”

  “One of the sabotage droids got into the hangar,” a woman said. She sounded afraid. “Cut up six ships. Everything was scattered, we were just cleaning it up—”

  “We wanted some music!” a man cried, clutching a playback device to his chest as if it were a shield.

  “True violence,” Let’ij said, “is the hypocrisy of a social contract betrayed by state and society the moment it becomes inconvenient.”

  The man with the amulet was closest to Chass. Her run became a leap and she was in midair as she threw her first punch. The thief’s body cushioned her fall and his chin cushioned her knuckles. She snapped up her amulet and was upright an instant later.

  Someone grabbed her from behind. She tossed back her head, felt the back of her skull smash a nose. There were shouts and screams as more bodies clustered around her. Some buried part of her brain sneered: I almost died trying to save you all. You didn’t even bother to look for me.

  She saw a flash of a tattooed face—Ragnell, the ground crew chief, yelling for them to break up the fight. Chass ignored her and felt an audio chip shatter under her boot as she struggled. She heard Let’ij’s voice again, this time clear and mournful inside her own mind:

  Now do you understand?

  They will always mock you, Maya Hallik. You may as well come home.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE SEVEN ALGORITHMIC ÉTUDES OF VARDOS

  I

  “Tell me again how it happened,” Soran said as they studied the body.

  He stood at the head of the Emperor’s Messenger, looking to Yrica Quell at its feet. The yellow light of the engineering storeroom painted the machine’s red robes with fire, as if the charred hole in its chest were in danger of reigniting; as if the Messenger might spark its own funeral pyre and transform into ash and smoke.

  “I was trying to patch one of the reactor subsystems,” Quell said. “I heard a plasma conduit burst and I turned around. I found it like this.”

  “What was it doing down there?” Soran asked.

  “I don’t know. It didn’t say anything.”

  Soran observed her. She was watching him and trying not to show it. That told him little—it was certainly possible she had been involved in the machine’s destruction, but equally likely she was innocent and concerned about his own reaction. He’d never told her how much he’d hated the machine, or that he’d been responsible for the crack in its faceplate. She had every reason to wish to understand his relationship to the Emperor’s ghost, and he’d hinted at his plans often enough—

  Supposing she had been involved in its destruction, why had she done it? Had it discovered something about her—some secret about her time at Traitor’s Remorse or what had become of her after Nacronis? Had she discovered something about it, choosing to destroy the machine rather than allow it to carry out its plans? Had the pilots begun to pay homage to it again, and Quell had put a stop to that troubling idolatry?

  The longer he kept Quell at his side, the more her original motivations—whatever had happened to her inside the New Republic—had seemed to become irrelevant. As circumstances around them shifted, he’d believed her loyalties would come into alignment with his own; that if she wasn’t yet his ally in his private struggle, she would become such sooner or later. Yet if she was capable of so dramatic an action as destroying the Messenger, he might need to reexamine his assumptions.

  “Colonel?” Quell said.

  He waved a hand distractedly. He was competent at reading people, but these conspiratorial games required one to probe, to feint, to turn the flat of one’s words to an edge. They had never been his specialty; even Colonel Nuress had tried to stay away from the subterfuge of the upper ranks of Imperial leadership.

  Then again, Quell had always been poor at deceiving anyone but herself. Call it a draw, he decided.

  “My thoughts were drifting,” he explained. “Shall we begin the operation?”

  “Where do you want to start?” Quell hefted a laser saw from the storeroom’s tool rack.

  They began by removing the chest plate, which proved more difficult than Soran had expected. Like politics, cyber-engineering was outside the scope of his formal education but not utterly foreign to his experiences. Nonetheless, he’d never before worked on a droid without any apparent access mechanisms. There were no bolts to remove from the Messenger, no release toggles they could identify, so they did their best to cut away its casing without damaging the interior.

  Neither Soran nor Quell mentioned the ostensible reason for the operation: to assess the machine’s damage and determine whether it could be repaired. Together they noted the extensive burns covering the locomotor and servoprocessor modules and extracted both without further study. They delicately parted clumps of wiring like jungle vines, peering at a ridged cylinder that might have been a power source but followed no design Soran recognized.

  The deeper they went into the machine, the less classifiable the components became. “If we had specifications to work from,” Quell said as Soran crouched beside the body, blindly probing the chest cavity with a bare hand, “I still couldn’t tell you why this thing works.”

  Soran ran his fingers over a cold metal box capped with rubber. It might have been a repulsor element. “What do you say we remove the faceplate?” he asked. “I’d be interested to see its memory circuits.”

  Quell nodded cautiously as he withdrew his hand.

  “With memory access,” Soran offered, “perhaps we could run a diagnostic?”

  “Of course,” Quell replied.


  There was something taboo about disintegrating the magnetic clasps around the faceplate. The Messenger was not the Emperor but they were defiling a being that carried the Emperor’s spirit. Soran thought of the peoples of Navosh-Hul, whom he’d read about as a child. He’d been told their burial rituals were meant to protect the living from the unkind dead. Archaeologists had discovered corpses in shrouds seven layers thick, each sheet of cloth painted with warnings to proceed no further. One message translated as: There Is Nothing of Value Here. There Are No Answers. There Is Only Contamination of the Soul.

  It was not a heartening thought, and he did not share it with Quell.

  They removed the faceplate and the holoprojector immediately beneath. The head was otherwise hollow, lacking photoreceptors or audio sensors, but in the stump of the neck they discovered an obsidian cylinder glittering with indicator lights and nested in wire filaments. “Some sort of housing,” Quell said. “Maybe its memory circuits are inside.”

  Their breath was enough to send movement through the filaments, giving them the appearance of life.

  “Why did it need all this?” Soran murmured. “What was it really built for?”

  Quell said nothing. Soran hadn’t expected an answer.

  He looked directly at her and spoke in a clearer voice. “Have you ever wondered how it chose us?”

  “For Cinder, you mean?” she asked.

  Soran nodded. “It wasn’t convenience—I doubt these machines picked their agents based on proximity and firepower alone.”

  Every Imperial unit chosen by the Messengers had agreed to participate in the atrocities of Operation Cinder—every one Soran was aware of, at any rate. Even inside the Empire, that was a startling display of loyalty.

  “Someone made a list,” Quell said. “The Emperor himself or someone close to him. Someone knew the Messengers’ agenda and picked commanders trusted to obey, and programmed the droids with a list.”