Victory's Price (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  Keep pressing them! she wanted to say, but she saw the rings around Chadawa coruscate like sunlit diamonds. “Pull back!” she called as the comm emitted a high-pitched pattering. “Pull back now! The rings are activating!”

  Arvad yelled for the Deliverance to halt. The New Republic specks fled Chadawa as a pulse ran along one ring, then the next, then a third. The cage around the planet glowed and erupted and the cosmos blazed with color, as if all the ships’ weapons had been replaced with fireworks. The bridge went silent except for the hissing of comms and the electrical popping of the subsystems.

  It was a beautiful sight. Exactly as she’d promised Arvad.

  The glow faded. The sparks of the New Republic starfighters drifted away from the planet as if carried by a breeze.

  The bridge chatter resumed. “They’re all right!” someone called. “Fighter squadrons made it out.”

  “What now?” Arvad asked.

  Hera shook her head, buying time for an answer as she considered.

  Shadow Wing was inside the rings, and while the Deliverance waited for the particle count to drop the enemy would begin eliminating the last defenders, killing the planet and fortifying its position. Half of Alphabet Squadron was gone, and with it much of the squadrons’ expertise on the 204th. Hera didn’t know how many fighters she’d lost, but she had time to find out while they sat and watched helplessly from afar.

  “Now we do things the hard way,” she said.

  She did her best to smile. To show confidence. She told herself it wasn’t entirely unwarranted.

  After all, a standoff wasn’t a defeat, and Shadow Wing was going nowhere.

  PART TWO

  ELEMENTS OF A MALEVOLENT EQUATION

  CHAPTER 9

  AMORAL PRIORITIZATION OF OBJECTIVES

  I

  The nameless vessel pierced the veil of hyperspace more swiftly and subtly than any Quell had flown. If she hadn’t been staring out the cockpit viewport, she would’ve been aware of the ship’s deceleration only by virtue of the changing lighting: The vessel’s overheads had paled to milky pink at lightspeed but now flushed with their familiar arterial red.

  She wondered if the change extended to the main compartment. Her passengers had done nothing to demand her attention.

  She felt confident the team hadn’t heard Chass na Chadic’s transmission over Chadawa. (Chadic was alive—Quell had believed before, but now she knew, she knew.) They’d been away from the cockpit comm, with no reason to use the single headset in the cabin, and she’d activated the jamming signal only seconds after hearing the Theelin’s voice. She was less sure whether Keize and the Yadeez had heard the message or understood its importance. It was possible her lies were once again exposed; that Keize knew she had been part of Alphabet Squadron, and she would face consequences if she returned to the bulk freighter.

  Then again, there might not be a freighter to return to. General Syndulla had begun her attack, and while Keize’s plan was sound it held no guarantee of Shadow Wing’s safety.

  The future was a knot of possibilities, constricting and tangled. The longer Shadow Wing survived, the more of Chadawa would die; and Quell’s life, too, would be endangered. Yet if Keize fell before Quell’s assignment was complete, she might be left without answers. The paradox of her hopes nauseated her, and she reminded herself that the only factor she could control was the completion of her assignment. Speed would resolve much; other problems could wait.

  She checked her charts and sensors. The Netalych system was ancient and cold, its dozen barren planets orbiting an unnaturally green sun. A perfunctory scan revealed no ships or spacegoing life-forms, and with a few keystrokes she instructed the autopilot to proceed to the seventh planet. If her files were to be believed, that frigid world half thawed each day and refroze nightly; she wondered if anything at all had evolved to survive such conditions.

  The vessel hummed and adjusted its speed. Quell unclipped her harness, checked to make sure the duffel containing her cargo was secure beneath her seat, and proceeded out the cockpit door.

  Like the cockpit, the main compartment appeared built for elegance over comfort. Five men and women sat on two crescent benches against the wall, and they turned rigid with attention as Quell emerged. “We’re landing shortly,” she announced, and although her voice sounded soft no one seemed to strain to hear. “We’ve got five minutes for a briefing.”

  She looked over their faces. Two she knew well—Agias Rikton, the young mechanic who’d imprinted on her, and Fra Raida, her old rival. She was passingly familiar with Nord Kandende, one of the intense lieutenants of Squadron Four. Others she’d chosen based on personnel reports, reputation, and Keize’s own recommendations: Jeela Brebtin, of Squadron Five, and Alchor Mirro, the elderly ground crew chief who’d tried to retire three times before Endor. She needed Imperial Special Forces, not pilots and grease jockeys; but she’d selected them because they were better than average with a blaster or at circuit welding, or just more willing than most to obey in the face of madness.

  She would sacrifice them all if she had to. (She suspected Keize knew she might sacrifice them, albeit not all the reasons why. He would already be planning for their loss.)

  No one spoke, so Quell went on: “DN-949A was the Empire’s tertiary fueling post and chemical processing facility for this sector. It has no significant strategic or cultural value and a permanent population of less than five hundred organics, plus sixteen hundred droids of fifth-degree intelligence or better. Six days after Endor the local military was overthrown by those droids, who claimed independence for the outpost and the right to self-governance.”

  Mirro laughed with a sound that could’ve been admiring. Rikton looked nervously to the floor. The others stared with varying degrees of loathing and discomfort. None showed the focus Quell had hoped for.

  She kept talking even as part of her mind—the part that had led Alphabet Squadron on Troithe, the part that had been tutored by General Syndulla—noted her errors: Wrong tone. Wrong approach. “Since then, the droids have set up a—society, of sorts. The organic residents haven’t been forced out, but rumor has it they’re working for the droids now. Visitors are permitted; the machines are still selling fuel, and they need credits to better establish themselves.”

  They don’t believe in you.

  “Why aren’t we fighting at Chadawa?” Brebtin asked. Her words might as well have been a curse.

  Don’t say it.

  “Because Colonel Keize has ordered us here,” Quell returned. “The Yadeez will be safe once it entrenches inside the planet’s rings. We’ll rejoin the unit before Chadawa is gone.”

  Tell them: “We’re all worried for our friends, and I’d like to tell you everything, but…”

  “Details are classified,” she said. “In short, we’re here to solve an engineering problem. The colonel believes we can find a specialist who can analyze certain data and provide insights we can take back to the unit. If all goes well we walk in and out without hostilities; you’re my backup in case of trouble.”

  Rikton shifted on the bench and looked among the others, then to Quell. She prompted him with a nod and he said, “It’s, ah—it’s not a lot to go on if something goes wrong, Lieutenant.”

  “How do you mean?” she asked, though she knew.

  Kandende grunted and spoke over Rikton’s attempt at an answer. “If you get killed, what do the rest of us do?”

  Quell shrugged, as carefree as she could. “You fail,” she said.

  Fra Raida chuckled hoarsely, shaking her head. Mirro rubbed his face with exquisite slowness, as if speed would attract Quell’s attention. Only Rikton and Brebtin appeared to accept the reply at face value, nodding somberly the way good Imperial soldiers would’ve before the Empire had fallen.

  * * *

  —

 
As the vessel descended, the automated outpost systems assigned them a pier and an authorization code. Quell supposed that counted as a welcome, and she checked her sidearm as the ship settled onto an industrial platform in the freezing rain. No one—droid or organic—emerged from the facility at the pier’s far end, so she dragged the duffel from under her seat, hefted it over her shoulder, and returned to the main compartment.

  Rikton and Mirro wore heavy packs laden with tools and spare parts. Brebtin had acquired a rifle from somewhere—during her time on Troithe, Quell suspected, or from one of the new recruits—but Kandende and Fra Raida bore nothing more than their clothing and their pistols. Like Quell, none of them were in uniform, garbed instead in whatever shirts and trousers they’d carried with them or found on the Yadeez. As a team, they looked ramshackle and ill prepared; not like the deadly patchwork that Shadow Wing’s fighters had become, but like mercenaries short of supplies behind enemy lines.

  “Lieutenant?” Kandende drew up behind Quell as she approached the boarding ramp, speaking almost too quietly to hear.

  “What is it?” Quell asked.

  “These orders,” Kandende said. “Are they really from Colonel Keize? Or from—above?”

  From the highest echelons of the surviving Empire? From the people who had us burn planets to the ground?

  She furrowed her brow at Kandende and tried to remember what Keize had said about the man. Once, Kandende had almost worshipped the Messenger.

  “From the Emperor himself,” she said. “Operation Cinder takes many forms. Tell no one.”

  Kandende nodded somberly. She lowered the ramp.

  She tried to ignore the sense of movement from the duffel on her shoulder and the imagined sound of electronic voices.

  They marched out together, trudging through the stinging sleet that smelled like methane and antifreeze. Quell repeatedly wiped her lips on her sleeve to avoid swallowing the precipitation, but the effort became increasingly futile as her outfit became saturated. The vista of bleeding glaciers and oceans of sludge receded behind them, and half a kilometer out they finally passed under a metal canopy where engineering droids floated past, tending to fuel pumps and heaters and chemical vaporators. The few organics they saw—humans, mostly—kept their heads down and didn’t look at the newcomers. Where the platform merged with other piers an overhanging catwalk had once supported an Imperial flag; now the cloth was burnt and tattered, and someone had painted a message in bold letters across the catwalk: No Meat No Masters.

  “Charming,” Fra Raida muttered.

  “They’re not wrong, though,” Mirro replied.

  A drone approached them, its single photoreceptor dilating and twitching as it looked the crew over. It held on Quell and she tried to steady her breathing, hoping the sleet would cool her body temperature and reduce any sign of nervousness, any biological indicator of worry.

  The lens looked to the duffel. Quell did not reach for her blaster. The drone moved on.

  Maybe it didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t care, or it hadn’t recognized the significance of her cargo.

  “Let’s find our specialist,” Quell said. “I want to be done with this.”

  The longer they were at the outpost, the longer she had to hope no one discovered the mass of wires and circuits and red leather in the duffel. The longer she had to keep secrets from the droids and her allies and the Empire and the New Republic.

  It wasn’t possible, but she thought she heard the Emperor laughing as she toted his Messenger’s corpse into the facility.

  II

  “Sector by sector, we’re closing in.” General Cracken, broad-faced and narrow-eyed, surveyed his audience across the vastness of galactic space. “By month’s end there won’t be a rat in the Western Reaches that hasn’t been tagged by our probes.”

  Nath Tensent almost believed him. Cracken was convincing. He was also lying, though Nath didn’t hold it against the New Republic Intelligence chief.

  The assembly room was filled with azure fog—the result of the holoprojectors’ struggle to display the attendees. The Deliverance had needed to withdraw to the edge of the Chadawa system, where the radioactive particle count was almost nil, in order to obtain a signal at all. Nath suspected the power funneled to the comm array was enough to light a small moon. Beside him General Syndulla, her aides, and Wyl Lark tried to discern the ghostly figures of the New Republic war council.

  “—just to be clear,” Syndulla was saying, “what’s your confidence level regarding the Imperial presence? If the enemy learned anything from the Rebellion, you’d think it would be to move a base when trouble is coming.”

  “I am extremely confident the Empire has not relocated its fleet,” Cracken said, “and I am equally confident we can and will find it.”

  Syndulla nodded, and Nath held back a smirk. He knew she saw the lie, too.

  Admiral Ackbar took control of the assembly next, and a tactical map showed a spiderweb of red vectors across the galaxy. Bright nodes indicated rendezvous positions where battle groups were coming together. “As the number of hostile systems decreases,” he explained, “we are combining our forces into slower-moving but more powerful units. Six of these fleets will deploy along the Corellian Trade Spine, positioning them for rapid relocation to the Western Reaches…”

  Nath’s mind skipped across the surface of the presentation, paying attention only to the details that interested him. He wasn’t there to advise on strategy. He wasn’t certain why he was there, though he suspected Syndulla had invited him because someone—likely not Cracken himself, but maybe one of the subordinates flanking him—had requested an Intelligence officer in the mix. Nath was the closest thing Syndulla had to offer.

  The division reports offered no surprises. General Ria summarized the dark turn of the Xagobah campaign but expressed confidence the operation was reaching its end. General Si-Flachitt reported on border skirmishes with the New Separatist Union. Admiral Ho’ror’te had begun a quest for unaligned allies deep within the Ravager’s Rift, hoping to reinforce Ackbar’s Trade Spine fleets.

  Coruscant remained untouched and untouchable, the isolated Imperial regent and his ragged forces maintaining their occupation of the former capital. There were rumors of riots and other clashes on the ground; but the New Republic didn’t dare launch a frontal attack. Troithe had been demonstration enough of the cost of planetwide urban warfare, and Coruscant’s civilian population put Troithe’s to shame.

  When Syndulla’s turn came around, she summed up the situation at Chadawa. “Due to the scientific peculiarities of the system, we’ve temporarily withdrawn but are ready to return to the planet the moment conditions allow. Shadow Wing is currently entrenched in orbit; we believe a limited number of Chadawan defenders remain active, restricting Shadow Wing’s movement.”

  “What is their plan for Chadawa, General?” Ackbar asked. “Do you know?”

  “This is part of their Cinder campaign,” she said. “Based on their past actions, we assume they’ll find a way to wipe out sentient life on the planet using the resources at hand. Without a Death Star, they’ve gotten very good at improvising.”

  There were several static-laden chuckles, though Syndulla looked more grim than amused.

  “General? Nasha Gravas. A question, if I may?”

  A puff of fog next to Cracken resolved into a childlike woman with a stern mien. Nath tried to conceal his surprise; he hadn’t expected Caern Adan’s old protégée—Nath’s contact in New Republic Intelligence—to be in the conference, though now he knew who’d requested his attendance.

  “Go ahead,” Syndulla said.

  “You mentioned that Chadawa’s defenders—Imperial defenders not aligned with Shadow Wing—haven’t been fully uprooted. Do you intend to wait for Shadow Wing to eliminate them before moving in?”

  “N
o,” Syndulla said. “There’re half a billion people on Chadawa, and Shadow Wing will start their purge soon. We can’t afford to wait.”

  “Of course. If you’re confident your ships can take on the 204th without waiting for a third party to weaken the unit, it makes sense. And afterward, you’ll lay siege to Chadawa directly?”

  Bold, Nath thought. Very bold.

  “My hope,” Syndulla said, “is that the Chadawan government will surrender peacefully, given the circumstances. More realistically, I’m prepared to request reinforcements and take the lead once Shadow Wing is eliminated.”

  Ackbar’s voice echoed through the chamber. “We’ll make sure they’re available, General. Shall we move on?”

  The assembly refocused on the admiral, but Nath looked to Nasha Gravas. She seemed untroubled by Syndulla’s response—remarkable, given her generally pugnacious demeanor.

  Nath nodded toward her. He wondered if she would even see it through the static, but a moment before her hologram dissolved he thought he saw her smile.

  * * *

  —

  “The war keeps going,” Wyl said as they exited the conference together. Syndulla had stayed behind to consult with Ackbar and Chancellor Mothma; Nath gathered that the trio had been together since the Rebellion’s early days, and took no umbrage at his dismissal.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Nath said. “Cracken knows where the Empire’s hiding. Can’t be long now.”

  Wyl frowned in an expression Nath had learned to interpret as apologetic. “Not according to Cracken.”