He pulled away from the moon and set course for the Yadeez and the battle between Shadow Wing, the New Republic, and Colonel Madrighast.
He didn’t allow himself to feel—it wasn’t yet time—but he spared one final thought for Wyl Lark, the man who’d caused his unit such grief over the past year. He could admire the man’s efforts to turn enemies into friends—efforts Soran had mistrusted in the past but which he now believed were sincere. If you live, Wyl Lark, I hope you find the peace you dreamed of.
Even if Lark had somehow survived, however, Soran doubted he was in any condition to cause further trouble.
* * *
—
Soran arrived on the bridge of the Yadeez without his helmet but still in his flight suit, face a dripping mess of sweat. He’d received a summary of the situation over comlink during his hurried walk through the ship, and found himself broadly approving of Broosh’s decisions so far; he allowed the commander to finish conveying orders to the tactical station before drawing his attention and asking, “What’s the status of Lieutenant Quell’s team?”
He saw frustration flicker across Broosh’s face. Quell’s mission was the last of Broosh’s priorities, Soran knew, but he replied anyway: “Their ship arrived in-system and cloaked seconds later. If they get any closer to the planet, even during low tide, I imagine the radiation will cause their cloak to fail. They must be staying around the system’s fringes.”
“Waiting for us to give them an opportunity,” Soran agreed. He glanced at the tactical display and saw the marks of the squadrons clustered about Madrighast’s Star Destroyer, the Unyielding. “Current particle count?”
Broosh looked to Captain Nenvez, who leaned heavily on his cane behind the weapons station. “Falling rapidly,” he declared. “Tide’s going out. Dropping those satellites onto Chadawa seems to have accelerated their timetable.”
Soran nodded and tugged at his gloves. If that was true, by the time Madrighast was defeated the New Republic battleship would be able to approach Chadawa again. One of the Raiders was already lost and the other badly damaged; if he stayed, he risked becoming mired in a series of winnable but dangerous battles and winnowing his forces further.
But he had what he’d come for. He had hope.
“Prepare to withdraw from the planet and jump to lightspeed,” he said. “Let the Chadawans and Syndulla fight it out. If we can tow the Raider, do it—otherwise, I want it evacuated by the time we reach low tide. We’ll rendezvous with Quell’s team on the way out.”
“Sir!” He’d expected a protest but he hadn’t anticipated it from Nenvez. His own fault, really—the man was a patriot and a true believer in the Emperor’s will. “We’ve barely begun the purge on Chadawa. Most of the landmasses are still inhabitable.”
“I’m aware,” Soran said. “But trust me when I say that there are larger matters in play.” He raised his voice, swept his gaze around the room. “We have made sacrifices here, but this mission is not a failure. I promise you that.”
They doubted anyway. There was only so much he could do to ameliorate the problem with a brief speech. Yet his people obeyed—they called orders to substations and sent coded messages over the comm.
Soran looked to the tactical display again and began planning their retreat even as he reexamined his own words. In truth, he didn’t yet know if they had succeeded or failed.
He had hope. Until he saw everything Quell had retrieved from the Emperor’s Messenger, he couldn’t know whether that hope would grow into the opportunity he needed to make the cost in lives worthwhile.
CHAPTER 14
NEGATION OF IDEOLOGICAL CHOICES
I
The tide of battle was changing, and though Hera Syndulla wasn’t sure how far that metaphor extended the particle counts were dropping. The Deliverance had been standing by too long. “Move in on Chadawa and make for the Yadeez,” she told Captain Arvad, who couldn’t quite hide the gleam in her eyes. “Careful not to overdo it—we’re not at low tide yet, and who knows what the radiation will do to our systems.”
Arvad snapped a “General!” before pacing the bridge and calling orders to her crew. Hera felt the deck shudder as the battleship’s gargantuan thrusters ignited and millions of tons of duralloy and steel and ferroceramics were pushed toward the inner system. Moving the Deliverance was like moving a moon—arduous and slow, but once in motion impossible to stop. It wasn’t her sort of ship but then, she reasoned, she wasn’t captain.
The tactical screen showed Shadow Wing’s bulk freighter attempting to disengage from battle with Chadawan forces on the outskirts of the planet’s atmosphere. Scanners were still offline and scopes hadn’t managed to pick out all the details, but if the 204th really was fleeing that meant an end to Operation Cinder. Hail Squadron, Wyl Lark, and the Chadawans had changed the course of the day; Hera just prayed they’d all live to enjoy bragging rights.
Yet stopping Cinder wasn’t what Wyl and Nath had signed on for; it wasn’t what Alphabet Squadron was built to do, wasn’t what Caern Adan and a hundred others had died for. She had a chance to catch Shadow Wing in a two-pronged attack and she intended to take it.
There was an electronic gurgle from under the deck; a moment later the bridge lights dimmed, then brightened. “Manually redistributing power!” the engineering officer called. “Radiation’s causing problems, but nothing we can’t handle.”
Hera and Arvad exchanged a look. Arvad shrugged and mouthed, You wanted to go in.
“Shadow Wing fighters loading back aboard the Yadeez,” the comscan officer announced. Hera had finally learned the young Cathar’s name: Dhina. “That Star Destroyer from Chadawa is pursuing but keeping its distance.”
“They don’t want a fight,” Arvad said. “They just want to herd Shadow Wing away from the planet.”
“And Shadow Wing wants to leave the system,” Hera agreed. “How are Flare and Wild squadrons doing? Can we launch at these particle levels?”
“We can launch, but we don’t know how badly they’ll be affected.” Arvad looked as if she was going to say more, but she didn’t have to. Hera understood.
The squadrons’ commander was missing. Maybe dead. Without Wyl Lark, in a hostile environment, they’d be badly disadvantaged.
“Keep them in reserve,” Hera said. “I want those fighters ready to fly.”
The Deliverance marched on, closing the distance to the bulk freighter. Scopes confirmed that the Raider-class corvettes were missing among its escorts (though the gunship and surveillance vessel stayed close); there was no sign of the Y-wings, either. Hera hoped they’d moved out of sight to the opposite side of the planet, and that they weren’t still engaging the Raiders. She couldn’t help them now, in any case.
“Intercept in two minutes,” the nav officer announced. “Estimating four minutes till the Yadeez can safely jump to lightspeed.”
Not ideal, Hera thought, but it might be enough. They’d have to slow the freighter or destroy it quickly. “How’s the tractor beam? Repairs finished?”
“In theory,” Arvad said. “But we haven’t tested it, and in the particle field—”
“I know, I know. But the Yadeez will have to escape the worst of the radiation to jump anyway. Prep the beam and let’s see what happens.”
The Yadeez began angling away from the Deliverance to prolong the chase. Its top speed wasn’t close to the Star Destroyer’s but the smaller vessel, clumsy and antiquated as it was, could still turn and shed inertia faster than the pursuing behemoth. Hera had played out similar chases a hundred times from the opposite perspective—for years she’d lived on the run from Star Destroyers—and she imagined a similar sense of vertigo overtaking the enemy commander.
Whoever the enemy commander was now. The winner of the duel hadn’t proclaimed his victory.
Arvad opened fire when they
reached one-and-a-half times optimal targeting range. It wouldn’t do much good, Hera knew, even if the gunnery crew somehow scored a hit—turbolasers bled too much energy as they traveled. But it would give Shadow Wing another problem to worry about. Hera felt the hum of the weaponry, watched the viewport fill with light, and recalled what this, too, looked like from the opposite angle.
At the same time, the Chadawan warship was turning too slowly to tail the freighter and straightening its curve behind the Deliverance. Hera began to ask for details on the vessel when Dhina called, “Yadeez is slowing! Looks like they’re taking something aboard!”
Arvad hurried to a viewscreen, and Hera followed. The image was from one of the scopes—heavily magnified, pixelated, and rendered uniformly in pale blue—and depicted a ripple in space approaching the loading doors of the Yadeez. The longer they watched, the more the ripple gained distinct edges and substance.
“A cloaking device?” Arvad asked.
“Quell’s ship,” Hera said.
She tried to think through the implications—what had Quell’s mission been, and what did it mean that she’d returned? What about Kairos and Chass, who were still missing?—then wiped it from her mind. “This is our chance,” she said. “Give the engines everything they can take, maintain fire, and aim the tractor beam. If we’re going to catch that thing we do it now!”
The bridge officers snapped orders into their headsets and the ship’s engines whined. The trembling of the deck became increasingly violent, and Hera wondered what it would take to overstrain a Star Destroyer. The turbolaser streams pouring toward the bulk freighter were almost unbroken, individual laser bolts impossible to distinguish in the cascade.
Then the deck didn’t simply tremble—it lurched. Groans and shouts went up around the bridge. “What was that?” Arvad cried, but Hera knew before the tactical station could report.
The ship from Chadawa was directly to their rear. There was nowhere else a shot could’ve come from.
Someone brought up the scope’s view of the attacking craft: a scarred and shredded Imperial-class Star Destroyer, its own turbolaser batteries ablaze. The Deliverance’s weapons and shield status showed above the tactical station—deflectors holding, guns 89 percent charged—and Hera synthesized all of it into a battle in her mind’s eye.
“Activate the tractor beam,” Arvad called, “and launch fighters. We’ll lock down the freighter and defend our rear—”
“No!” Hera snapped. “Blast it, no. Hard to port! Starboard batteries, keep firing at the Yadeez—maybe we’ll get lucky. Port side, concentrate on the enemy Destroyer.”
Arvad signaled the crew to obey—Hera felt a wave of gratitude at that—before asking soft and sharp: “What are you doing? They’ll get away—”
“We tractor them now, we’ll have to hold position—we can’t turn and maintain beam lock at the same time. That leaves our stern exposed, and our rear deflectors won’t hold against a Star Destroyer.” She spoke rapidly, hoping Arvad understood. “The fighters can only distract the warship because we don’t have our bombers. Only the Deliverance can lead a counterattack.”
Arvad swore—as good an indication of comprehension as any. She yelled at the flight officer to send the fighters at the Yadeez and its escorts as the Deliverance began its turn. “Give me the comm,” Hera said, and grabbed a headset. She tried to stay calm, to think: What would Chancellor Mothma say?
“This is General Syndulla to the attacking Star Destroyer—we just saved your planet! Cease your attack and help us catch the people responsible!”
She hoped what it lacked in diplomacy it made up for in brutal honesty.
There was no response. Now the enemy Star Destroyer was also turning to avoid presenting a stable target. The Yadeez began to pull away and Hera hoped desperately that Flare and Wild could make a difference. She paced between bridge stations, advising where she could, but the plan was clear enough—victory or defeat would be determined by an equation of time, execution, and power, and there was little she could do to affect it now.
The Deliverance and the opposing Star Destroyer circled each other, delivering endless salvos of turbolaser and cannon fire from the batteries lining their wedge-shaped hulls. Each tried to present as slender a profile as possible without concentrating enemy fire onto one section of its deflectors. At first they appeared evenly matched, but the Chadawan Destroyer’s shields rapidly began to fail; an increasing number of turbolaser blasts ripped through the coruscating electromagnetic barrier and impacted the armored hull. The already scarred warship was soon pocked with burning craters, while the Deliverance’s own shields strained but held.
The particle count fell all the while. The Deliverance’s scanners swept away ghost images and the ship’s subsystems revitalized. When the comscan station reported massive damage to the enemy Destroyer’s combat center, Hera commanded the Deliverance to turn away, to chase the bulk freighter still harried by Flare and Wild. She had just long enough to feel hope before the Yadeez and its two surviving escorts flashed into hyperspace.
She tamped down her anger for the sake of the crew. “Did we do anything?” she asked. “Tell me someone damaged the freighter’s engines, planted a homing device, something—”
Arvad started to answer—her expression told Hera all she needed—when the Deliverance shook at another enemy volley. Hera grabbed her headset again. “This is General Syndulla to the enemy Star Destroyer,” she called. “You understand that you’ve lost? Cease fire and surrender immediately!”
She expected no response. She signaled for the Deliverance to head back toward the Chadawan Destroyer and was surprised when a man’s thick brogue declared: “This is Colonel Madrighast of the Unyielding. We will not surrender to the Rebellion.”
The Unyielding was heading toward the Deliverance, weapons active. “Colonel,” Hera said, and forced herself to sound calm, “I lost good people defending your planet. I’m not asking for gratitude. I am asking you to let me save your lives, too.”
“So we can live as prisoners? So all we fought for can be mocked?” Madrighast sneered. “The 204th was trying to kill us, but they were never our enemy.”
“General…” Arvad pointed to the tactical map. The Unyielding was accelerating on an intercept course.
A collision course.
“Colonel.” The anger Hera had suppressed was replaced by fear and grief, and these she couldn’t prevent from subverting her voice. “Your people will be treated fairly, you have my oath. There’s no reason to continue—”
“The New Republic will fall!” Madrighast cried, like an anguished battle cry. “And the Empire rise again.”
“Do it,” Hera hissed to Arvad, and the captain nodded to her crew.
She would’ve turned away if she hadn’t been responsible. Instead Hera watched through the viewport as the Unyielding raced toward them, spewing streams of turbolaser fire as the Deliverance transferred all power to its weapons. Soon its broadside outshone the enemy barrage like a nova outshines a firecracker, and emerald destruction tore through the foe’s hull. The Unyielding’s second deflector dome burst like an overheated egg; its weapons ceased to function but it continued forward as the Deliverance cut deep into deck after deck. Explosive chain reactions rocked the vessel and ripped apart the superstructure; great burning metallic layers of what had once been a Star Destroyer tumbled toward the Deliverance until abominable weapons shattered these, too—left them molten and swiftly solidifying in the icy vastness of space.
Then there was nothing left of the Unyielding or its crew, and the hum of weapons died away. The bridge felt unnaturally silent.
“Get rescue crews ready, and medics,” Hera said. “Our Y-wings are out there, and so is Wyl Lark.”
II
Yrica Quell listened to the click of the air circulation switching on and felt the res
ulting breeze on her bruised skin. The hair follicles on her forearms rippled like blown grass and tugged at dried blood. She smelled grease and fried circuits, and tried to appreciate the peace of it all as she leaned into the cushions of the U-wing’s crew seat.
Then Chass na Chadic screamed at an access panel and slammed a hydrospanner against the bulkhead. The brief peace was vanquished.
“You won’t get in there without a torch,” Quell murmured. “Not if the releases are fused.”
“I know that,” Chadic growled.
Quell shrugged and looked from the Theelin to Kairos, who stood in the cockpit doorway. Her body faced the cabin but her head craned to peer out the cockpit viewport. It was an awkward pose, unlike anything Quell normally associated with the woman—she’d always lurked like a statue in shadow, immobile and foreboding. Now she seemed distracted by the stars.
Chadic, too, seemed different. Not just physically, though the crest of her hair was centimeters shorter and flatter than Quell remembered, as if she’d sliced it with a hand plane; but where she’d always been volatile, now she seemed to oscillate between furious and withdrawn, with nothing in between. She was less than the person Quell remembered.
Chadic stared at the bulkhead awhile. Quell waited for her to do the sensible thing, then said it herself: “If we’re going to escape you need to stabilize the power flow. You don’t have the equipment to overhaul the hyperdrive or the navicomputer, so you’re going to have to run a diagnostic to be sure—”
“Don’t patronize me!” Chadic said, and threw the hydrospanner toward Quell. It smacked into the seat centimeters from Quell’s shoulder and fell to the floor. “You want to be in charge, you should’ve stayed with Shadow Wing.”
Quell stretched her foot to kick the hydrospanner across the deck toward Chadic. I wasn’t in charge, she thought. Not by the end, when they planned to kill me. Saying so would’ve only baited Chadic, so she stayed silent.
Victory's Price (Star Wars) Page 24