“Very well,” Soran said, and tried not to laugh as Broosh struggled to contain his alarm. “I’ll join you presently.”
He gestured again and Heirorius closed the channel. Broosh murmured, “Colonel…this seems like an awful idea.”
“Your critique is noted.” Soran gave a conciliatory nod. “I wouldn’t be concerned—I trust in your ability to respond to any rebel ploy while I’m occupied. I almost believe in Lark’s sincerity; not so General Syndulla’s.”
“If they make a move, I’ll do my part. But why even take the risk?”
“Because—” He could barely frame the words. Experience and instinct often directed him before his conscious mind could sort out reasons. “Because he said the right words to stoke our people’s lust for vengeance; we have to give them something, and a duel’s safer than a frontal attack on Syndulla. Because losing Wyl Lark will injure the enemy dearly. And because—”
Broosh observed him, resigned in the manner of a disapproving parent.
Soran clapped a hand on the man’s right shoulder. “—because I am in command, and it’s my prerogative…and it’s been too long since I flew against a Polynean.”
He called final orders to the bridge and ducked out before they could see his smile.
CHAPTER 12
UNFLINCHING ACCEPTANCE OF LOGICAL CONCLUSIONS
I
The outpost was under lockdown. The interior lights had switched from pale blue to a roasting red, and a ceaseless warbling from the public comm suggested a string of announcements in a machine language Yrica Quell didn’t recognize. For several minutes the droids had focused on herding organics out of the streets and into what one called “containment zones.” Now Quell spotted no living creatures at all, and the drones floating past swept their scanners and wielded plasma torches and arc welders—tools repurposed for killing.
Quell crept through the shadows and stayed to maintenance ducts and gutters whenever she was able. Her body ached and scratches—some superficial, others oozing blood—stung her arms and shoulders where she’d been cut by the broken window. Her undershirt was no protection from the cold and the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees; she suspected the droids had deactivated the thermal units, though there was enough residual heat to keep her from freezing.
As she slithered through a drainage shaft running parallel to an outpost throughway—concealed from the road by piping and plastoid sheets, her palms and knees plunged in icy violet fluids—she reminded herself she’d faced worse. In Cerberon she had faced worse and endured.
She could handle pain.
She didn’t know who was coming after her team. Not the droids or the Surgeon—she couldn’t imagine they’d have locked down the outpost in that case. The New Republic was a possibility—Intelligence or even Alphabet Squadron might have tracked her down somehow. She wasn’t sure it mattered yet.
Coming after her team. She thought of them that way even now.
Rikton’s face flashed into her mind, and she shrugged it away like a gnat.
She stopped and peered through pipework when she arrived at a central plaza. She remembered it vaguely as the place where she’d consulted an outpost directory, and she scanned it now, smiling tightly as she spotted a comm kiosk. She exited under the sheeting and dashed across the open space, nearly slipping on the plaza’s metal and the slush on her boots.
She made it to the kiosk, threw the door open, and entered a private booth the size of a closet. The computer status lights were dark, but she was able to bypass the power cutoff in under three minutes. (It would’ve been faster if her hands hadn’t been numb.) She took a moment to listen to her own ragged breathing, to reassure herself that she was, relatively speaking, safe, and placed her hand on her hip pocket to feel the comforting bulge of the datachip.
She hesitated to pull it out and plug it into the machine before her. It was what she’d come for; but if it wasn’t worth the lives and the risk? If she’d lost her place inside Shadow Wing for data with no meaning…?
Then, she supposed, her decision would be easy. All she’d be able to do would be accept defeat, knowing she’d failed herself, Keize, and General Syndulla all together.
If the data did mean anything, she’d need to decide what to do with it.
She took the chip out, inserted it into a socket, and watched text scroll down the screen.
* * *
—
She saw nothing that shocked her.
The Surgeon had promised answers: the processes, the algorithms, the databases that the Emperor’s Messenger had used to find monsters who’d kill whole planets for a dead man’s spite. Everything the Messenger had required to select Operation Cinder’s executioners.
She read through it all, even trying to solve the equations at the calculation’s heart the way the Messenger might. Quell had always had an aptitude for math, but she shuddered as she read formulas to assess an individual’s loyalty (to the Empire, to Emperor Palpatine personally), resourcefulness, conscience; recognized variables accounting for past kills (during and outside of military service), disciplinary actions, family trauma, education, genetic predispositions, species predispositions, personal associations, history of obedience to unlawful commands, involvement (including nonparticipatory exposure) in physical interrogation, and something called MDC-count. Line by line, she studied the code for how to identify not an unflaggingly loyal person, but a corrupt and broken one. Or one who was primed to be corrupted and broken.
She studied further formulas that assessed individuals as parts of units and judged those units as a whole, determining the moral character of a battalion or a fighter wing based on its leaders and recruits and all its history. The calculations gave the most weight to a unit’s worst members, tracing their corrupting influence on all around them.
Quell was confident she’d passed the Messenger’s test along with the rest of the 204th.
None of it shocked her. It chilled her profoundly, forced her to lean against the kiosk wall as she trembled. But the answers weren’t surprising.
She found what she was looking for—what, she knew in her bones, Soran Keize was looking for—in a list of functions the Surgeon had compiled. The Messenger was an analytical tool, a search algorithm, but it could do nothing to identify its targets without a well of information to draw from. The Surgeon had laughed when it had promised her databases, and now she understood why: She recognized secondary sources, military access clearances, but all were supplements to a single data bank referred to only by codes and coordinates—one grand source to fuel the Messenger’s assessments. She studied the coordinates until they were etched into her brain, useless alone but ready to be cross-checked and interpreted.
She realized she had a choice to make, then, and her own certainty frightened her. Keize had sent her to learn the truth, and she had—but only in part, and there were implications she couldn’t decipher on her own.
She’d betrayed Shadow Wing and the Empire, but she still needed her mentor. She prayed he was alive and that somehow, Chadawa lived, too.
The kiosk had no way to reach the Yadeez. Instead she opened a connection to her ship. Once the data was transferred she tore the chip from the computer, placed it on the console, and fired her blaster three times to incinerate the evidence.
She released a long, ragged breath into scorched and greasy air and leaned against the booth again, closing her eyes. She would rest just a moment, she decided, before returning to the fray. Before making the next trying decision, and the next.
Her hand still gripped her blaster when the door slammed opened and Chass na Chadic spat obscenities.
* * *
—
“How did you—” Quell began, but she didn’t finish the thought. Strong hands gripped her left shoulder and the back of her skull and she saw a flash of
green hair muddied under the red light. Chadic thrust her into the corner of the booth, and Quell’s nose smashed into metal (driving a spike of pain into her brain—she still hadn’t healed from her fall on the Yadeez; maybe now she never would). Her cheek pressed against toggle switches. She thought she still held her blaster but she couldn’t feel her hand for the burning in her head.
Her assailant loosened her grip, then hauled Quell out of the corner and stepped completely inside the booth with her. Quell tried not to breathe through her nose—she’d drown in blood if she did—and spoke again.
“Chass—”
Chadic slammed her knee into Quell’s groin. The flare of agony and nausea dwarfed the pain in her face, and she distantly heard her blaster clatter to the floor. Chadic removed the hand from Quell’s shoulder to pull the booth door closed, and Quell mouthed something even she couldn’t understand. Drool spilled out of her lips.
“How long?” Chadic snarled. She stared at Quell, her eyes wide, her horns like thorns on a flower. The contours of her face were achingly familiar; even her rage was almost comforting.
“I don’t—” Quell managed.
Chadic slammed her into the wall of the booth again. Quell barely felt it this time, still reeling from the blow between her thighs.
“Were you working for them? Did you tell them how to kill us?”
“I didn’t—” Quell tried, and Chadic slugged her in the stomach.
Quell would’ve fallen if Chadic hadn’t propped her up. There were more questions, more accusations, and though Quell tried to answer them her interrogator never listened. Any word, any movement was met with violence. Quell didn’t try to break free, utterly aware that she lacked the strength and besides—what would she even do if she overcame the Theelin? What was the point of fighting back if she didn’t know her next move?
She didn’t deserve the beating, but she understood it. It was the natural outcome of her choices; jump off a cliff and the landing hurts.
Chadic delivered blow after blow, threw her into walls until finally she let Quell crumple in the corner. Her eyes were glistening as Quell breathed slowly. The cloud of suffering obscuring Quell’s body slowly evaporated, revealing a hundred loci of burning nerves.
“Why couldn’t you just die?” Chass na Chadic asked. Her voice was hoarse and soft.
Quell had no answer to this.
Her blaster was within reach, but she didn’t have the strength.
* * *
—
Quell studied the woman’s lips as Chadic raised a comlink. She watched her say a few words and didn’t so much hear as interpret: “I got her. Meet you at the ship.”
Quell wondered if that meant the rest of Alphabet was present. She knew asking would bring only more pain.
Chadic yanked her to her feet and they left the booth, Quell’s—Rikton’s—blaster forgotten on the floor. Chadic was less cautious than Quell had been as they moved through the outpost, but Quell didn’t protest. She focused on moving her legs, allowing her weight to rest on Chadic’s arm as the Theelin supported her beneath the shoulders.
Chadic never shoved her. She didn’t snap at her or throw her against a wall to free her hands. She didn’t hurt Quell again. Quell recalled the night the whole squadron had dined and drank on Troithe, and how Chadic had wrapped her arms around her on the tram car over the city; there was no joy in the march through the darkened outpost, no wonder the way there had been on Troithe, but it felt intimate anyway.
Twice, they scrambled to hide in side passages when droids came sweeping the throughways for life-forms. Chadic slapped her hand over Quell’s mouth but applied no pressure. Quell could’ve bitten the woman, or screamed. Neither seemed likely to help.
Quell wasn’t sure how long they’d been traveling when they reached the platform where the piers came together and the tattered Imperial banner hung from the catwalk. She briefly considered making a break for her ship, then remembered the half-kilometer length of the piers. She thought, too, of telling her captor that her ship was nearby; maybe Chadic would want to see it, to search it.
To what end, though? Quell wasn’t sure.
Nor did she have time to decide. As Chadic began to guide her toward one of the piers the Theelin woman suddenly froze. A moment later she was hurtling with Quell toward the basket of an unattached cargo hitch as particle bolts crackled above them. Quell slipped on sleet tracked in from outside; Chadic pulled her by both arms into the scanty cover provided by the hitch, glancing about furiously.
Quell rose to a crouch. The shots had come from the entrance to another pier—her pier, where her ship had landed. Chadic had her pistol out and waited until one of the shooters came into view, half concealed by the rain and the midday gloom; she fired twice, and Quell flinched each time.
Quell couldn’t tell who the target was. In her mind’s eye she saw Fra Raida with a burning hole in her chest; Rikton, eyes wide in surprise as he died; Brebtin screaming; Mirro breathing his last with a sad, resigned expression.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
Chadic spared her a glare, barely looking away from the pier. “What?”
“There’s not many of them,” Quell said. “Let’s just go. Let’s run.”
Chadic swung the blaster to point at Quell’s forehead. She held it there, muzzle trembling. Then particle bolts sparked against the cargo hitch, bit into the metal platform, sizzled, and sent acrid smoke through the air. Chadic returned a flurry of shots, barely bothering to aim as she retrieved her comlink again. “I’m where the pier ends,” she said. “Could use support.”
Quell squinted against the incoming fire and the smoke. She heard the rhythmic pulse of an assault rifle. Brebtin was still alive, or someone had retrieved her weapon. She tried to see how many figures were in motion but couldn’t pick out more than two.
She tried to picture herself lunging for Chadic while the Theelin was distracted. Even the best outcome seemed liable to get them both killed.
She heard thunder behind the rain and recognized the boom of a fusial thrust engine. The barely audible whir beneath the thunderclap gave it away as an Incom ship, and Quell knew what was coming. A powerful gust of wind sent sleet spraying over their attackers; Quell heard screaming, saw silhouettes running across the metal as crimson lightning struck and the platform erupted in flames.
The U-wing dipped into sight, unleashed another cannon volley, then ascended again. Quell couldn’t see through the fire to discern whether any of her team had survived, and she couldn’t fight off Chadic to get a better look; the Theelin pulled her by the arm, backward and away from the hitch. They were out on the closest pier then, the sleet slicing at Quell’s bare arms and the roar of the U-wing louder than ever. Chadic tugged Quell tight against her, blaster pointed toward the central dock, and edged toward the transport as it descended and one of the loading doors slid open.
Quell didn’t see a squadron crest on the U-wing’s side, but looking for more than an instant meant staring directly into the sleet. Maybe it was Alphabet. Maybe it was Chadic’s specforce friends, or another retrieval crew.
“Get on,” Chadic snarled, boosting Quell up to the ship. Quell struggled to crawl into the hovering transport and when her feet were inside she rolled half a meter, shivering from the bone-saturating cold and staring at the ceiling while Chadic climbed in behind her.
“Let’s go!” Chadic called to the cockpit. “Any trouble out there?”
“Yes,” came the reply, in a voice guttural and soft and strangely accented. Vaguely familiar, but Quell couldn’t identify it.
“Great,” Chadic muttered, and flicked droplets of rain off her hand. They spattered Quell’s cheek. The loading door crashed shut. “Just great. What’ve we got?”
“Pursuit.”
“More Imps?”
“No.”
The U-wing tilted and surged forward. Quell was forced to rise onto her knees to avoid sliding to the rear of the vessel. She grasped one of the crew seats, gradually standing as the deck trembled and Chadic stumbled to the cockpit door; the Theelin swore, then disappeared into the cockpit proper. Something outside the ship screamed and whistled and burst in the wind—low-yield ion warheads, possibly, but Quell couldn’t tell for sure. Nothing that had been in Shadow Wing’s arsenal, even as heavily modified as the TIEs were.
“Fire back!” Chadic was shouting.
“No,” the pilot said again.
“Why the hell not?”
The clatter of sleet against the hull ceased. The transport’s roar quieted as the air outside thinned. They were moving through the planet’s upper atmosphere, Quell assumed, and would soon be free of Netalych’s gravity altogether.
“Not of the Empire,” the voice replied. “We burned their home. Their grievance is real.”
The ship leveled out and Quell took wide-spaced, unsteady steps to the cockpit entrance. The starfield beyond the viewport was like a balm on her injuries, all the cuts and bruises and her throbbing nose; the sweeping scope of darkness felt like freedom, so long as she didn’t think of anything else.
Something streaked past them and detonated, white as a nova. Chadic was trying to activate the guns but her side of the console had been locked by the pilot. “I don’t care what their grievance is!” she shouted. “We’re not getting shot down by droids! We’re not—”
There was another flash to the ship’s port side. The vessel jolted, and sparks sprayed from seams in the bulkhead as the pilot struggled to keep the U-wing from tumbling to starboard. The analytical part of Quell’s brain declared: Ion-concussion payload. Ionized energy to damage machines; kinetic to smash organics. Probably simple to manufacture on Netalych.
Victory's Price (Star Wars) Page 21