Victory's Price (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  Chass waited for more. Quell shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

  “That’s it?” Chass asked.

  “That’s it.”

  She expected Quell to turn and leave, but the woman only stood there, rubbing at her arms.

  “What happened to your tattoo, anyway?” Chass asked.

  Quell flinched, though Chass’s tone had been matter-of-fact. “I erased it.”

  “Must’ve hurt.”

  “Yes.”

  “Before you went back?”

  “Yes.”

  “They know you had it?”

  “No.”

  Chass grunted. Quell’s expression remained flat.

  “Is it weird?” Chass asked. “Not being able to tell them?”

  Quell’s fingers traced their way to her left biceps and rubbed the spot where her squadron tattoo had been. “It’s not great,” she said.

  “Sometimes—” Chass’s lips twitched. She let the words pass through her, as if she weren’t responsible for the sounds. “Sometimes it’s easier to have people you trust. Even if you don’t like them.”

  “It gets lonely,” Quell said.

  “It gets lonely.”

  “You want to walk?”

  Quell tilted her head toward the western edge of the platform. It was out of the worst of the wind, though Chass figured Quell might’ve just been suggesting a patrol route. “Sure,” she said, and they moved together in silence. They reached the platform edge and turned, heading toward the cliff, and the structures blocked the gale as they passed.

  Words rose from Chass’s chest again and passed through her lips unbidden. “I never planned to survive the war.”

  They slowed and halted as one. “I know,” Quell said.

  Chass nearly laughed, weary and bitter. Quell looked over to her, then past her, and gripped Chass’s wrist with warm fingers and a somber expression.

  “Look,” Quell said.

  Chass followed her gaze. There were lights in the jungle, each limning a figure with cloak rippling in the wind, face of thorns or bone staring toward the outpost. There were at least two dozen in all, and each figure held up a bowl of jade fire like a torch. Each figure, too, was motionless, as if they were statues that had weathered the jungle for decades.

  Or as if they were waiting.

  “We need to talk to Kairos,” Quell said.

  “You go,” Chass said. “She doesn’t talk to me like she does to you, and someone should keep watch.”

  Quell hadn’t let go of her arm or looked away from the lights.

  “She’s bonded to me,” Quell said. “She doesn’t trust me. She won’t admit it, but I think she needs us both.”

  * * *

  —

  Kairos wasn’t in the command center. Quell grew visibly tense at this discovery but said nothing to show her worry. Back outside, they looked for any sign of Kairos’s passage and Chass studied the lift shaft to the upper platform. Without power to the outpost, the lift itself was useless—but someone had opened the interior hatch to the emergency ladder.

  “Maybe?” Chass called over the wind. Quell shrugged, and they climbed together.

  They’d searched the upper platform when they’d first arrived at the outpost and found it empty except for the cut fuel lines. Chass emerged from the lift shaft now with few expectations yet saw Kairos immediately, poised at the platform’s edge and facing the cliff. A broad, rocky ridge jutted out from the cliffside ten meters from the platform’s drop-off—the closest the cliff came to the outpost anywhere.

  “She’s not going to jump over there?” Chass asked. “She can’t jump that far.”

  Quell rattled out of the lift behind her and they marched toward Kairos. When Quell shouted her name over the wind, the woman turned toward them.

  “You see what’s going on?” Chass asked. She stopped with Quell ten paces away, as if coming any closer might push Kairos over the edge. “All those lights, and stuff?”

  “Yes,” Kairos said.

  “They’re your people, aren’t they?” Chass asked.

  Kairos didn’t answer.

  Quell repeated Chass’s question, her voice low and calm. Chass resented the need, but Quell got the response Chass had been denied. “Yes,” Kairos said. “They come because they see. They suspect the Empire has returned.”

  “They plan to drive us out?” Quell asked.

  “Yes.”

  Chass glanced into the wind, but she couldn’t see the jungle, couldn’t tell if the lights had moved. “So tell them,” she said. “Tell them we’re not Imps.”

  “I—”

  Chass interjected before the woman could finish. “And don’t tell us I cannot!”

  Kairos bowed her head. Somehow, barely moving the muscles beneath the chitinous plates of her face, she appeared chagrined. Chass almost felt bad for yelling.

  “They mustn’t know about me,” Kairos said, voice almost too soft to be heard above the wind. “I can’t. I can’t permit it.”

  “Tell us why,” Quell said.

  She stepped forward and Kairos stepped back, one foot hovering over the edge of the platform. Chass swore. Quell froze, then retreated with exquisite care. Kairos moved in sync with Quell, returning her foot to the metal as if mirroring the human. Kairos was trembling now, her head raised again as she looked between her two companions.

  “My people,” Kairos said. “My people. We—they—are pure. Blood and spirit untouched by what is not us. This is how we have been, always, and how we remain who we are.”

  “That’s the reason for the suits,” Quell said. “Because the Empire isn’t pure.”

  Chass tried to remember Kairos’s words from the tunnels: Shells. Contaminated and discarded.

  “Yes,” Kairos said. “Because you are not pure. I am not—they do not know.”

  Chass heard her humiliation, saw the trembling magnify into bodily shudders that looked likely to throw her over the platform. But Kairos didn’t lower her head again, nor did her voice fall as she continued. “The camp. The experiments they performed. The Empire hurt me. Adan saved me, but his blood—Ito gave his blood to me, but it was not my blood. What was inside me, what I saw, what I knew made me not of my people.

  “I wore the suit to protect. To insulate myself from the galaxy. To stop my pollution, so body and spirit could heal. So I could purge what was wrong and restore myself.”

  “Then Cerberon happened,” Quell said.

  “Yes,” Kairos replied.

  Chass tried to understand. She didn’t, really, but she knew what it was like to wear a cloak of shame.

  II

  She had not been named Kairos when she’d been young, nor when she had become the emissary of her people (for she had taken a second name then, as was the custom). She had not been named Kairos in the camp, when they had made her less than she was—when they’d ripped away her skin to see what was underneath, when she’d seen terrors to scar her soul; when those same terrors had attached themselves to every memory she possessed, so that she could not remember her people, her jungle, the beauty of her niece, without the taint of nightmares.

  She’d named herself Kairos only after being given life by Adan, who had acted with purity of intent but given her no choice in the matter. Kairos was the name of the creature who cocooned herself and sought to heal. Kairos was the name of the creature bound by blood and spirit and horror to Adan and IT-O, and who waged war against Emperor and Empire while her soul mended; who fought the shadow that Adan saw, the shadow consuming worlds, and did so in anger and righteous fury.

  Then had come Cerberon.

  Under the black sun Kairos had watched innocents be sacrificed to summon the shadow, to trap and destroy it forever, and she had di
ed to ensure the success of Adan and Syndulla and Yrica Quell, the defector. She had accepted her fate but she had not been permitted to pass on.

  Again, Adan had given her no choice. Out of love, he had called the surgeons of the New Republic to strip away her suit, her cocoon, her last protection against the world that was not her world. Her body had already mended from the camp but her spirit had not, and both were racked again as instruments cut her; as foreign substances were pumped beneath her skin; as voices reached her unfiltered by the mask; as alien eyes saw her and in seeing touched her essence.

  Adan had done this out of love, and IT-O, too, but their love was not the love of her people. She forgave them, but forgiveness did nothing to change what had occurred.

  She had woken no longer truly Kairos, no longer anything, remade in body and incomplete in essence, whole in flesh but wrong in spirit. She had considered reweaving her cocoon but she had been removed from it too long. Body and spirit were no longer aligned. Her metamorphosis had been aborted, and her incomplete self would need to pursue its journey with the soul-crippled form it possessed.

  She might have accepted this, too. She understood necessity.

  She had never expected to return home.

  She could not accept the disgrace of her people knowing what had become of her.

  She explained it as well as she could to the defector-who-was-the-last-of-Adan-and-IT-O, and to Chass na Chadic who burned. The words were clumsy and blunt and the alien tongue she spoke conveyed only a reflection of truth.

  III

  “That’s messed up,” Chass said. Empathy and anger—anger at Kairos’s people for their superstitions about purity, anger at Kairos for believing it all, anger at Adan for utterly ignoring Kairos’s wishes and putting her in that position—roiled in her. “It’s messed up.”

  “You could talk to them,” Quell said. “You don’t know what they’ll say. You don’t know they’ll refuse to accept you as you are.”

  “I know my people,” Kairos whispered.

  Chass put her weight on one heel, pivoted about, and walked toward the opposite end of the platform. From there she could see the lights in the jungle. If they’d moved closer, it wasn’t by much. “You have any idea what it’s like? Being ashamed to go back to people you—people you don’t fit with anymore?” She glanced behind her at Quell.

  After a while, Quell nodded.

  “Let her be,” Chass said. “She can make her own choices.”

  Quell retreated from the platform’s edge as well and stopped midway between Kairos and Chass. “All right. That leaves us with a problem, though. Kairos, I assume they’ll kill us if they can?”

  Kairos took a single step away from the cliff. “Yes.”

  Chass grunted. “Guess shooting at them isn’t anyone’s first choice?”

  “We need to convince them we’re gone, and gone for good,” Quell said. “We need to do it without exposing ourselves.”

  “Take cover and run,” Chass said.

  Quell shrugged.

  “So we put on a light show.” Chass smiled darkly. “We got the equipment for it?”

  “I think so,” Quell said. “Kairos? You understand?”

  There was a long pause. The wind rose, and Kairos stood unmoved in the gale, fixing her eyes on Quell and then Chass. Chass felt the woman’s doubt and helplessness and finally gratitude, as if she’d learned to read Kairos’s expressions at last.

  “I understand,” Kairos said.

  * * *

  —

  They worked through the night as the lights crept closer. Chass and Kairos wired the outpost as Quell gathered equipment for the U-wing’s repairs, and though they moved rapidly, took no breaks, and spoke little, there was a camaraderie to the chore. They were united by their goals. They were united by their motives.

  There was nothing complicated about it. They were doing it for Kairos.

  Some hours before dawn they left the outpost and crept into the shadows around the foundation pylons. From their shelter among the rocks Chass squeezed a button on her comlink—twice, then three times, growing increasingly worried something had gone wrong—then grinned in satisfaction as the upper platform detonated in orange flame. Thunder shook the jungle, and the smell of smoke was instantly suffocating. Metallic shrieks followed as blackened panels tore apart and fell onto the lower platform, battering the structures there.

  Kairos indicated for them to leave their shelter. “They will run,” she said, “until they are sure the danger is gone.”

  They raced out together, and as they dashed between trees and away from their foes Chass triggered her comlink again and the lower platform exploded, spewing fire and metal onto the rocks. Chass laughed loudly, though she knew she shouldn’t. She laughed and laughed and ran, and she glimpsed Quell beside her, burdened beneath a sack of equipment, half smiling and half grimacing.

  No one told her to shut up, and Kairos’s people didn’t catch them.

  They ran until dawn, when they sat in the shade of a spindly tree and watched the black smoke on the horizon. “You know,” Chass said, “there’s always the chance blowing the place up could bring actual Imps to investigate. We might’ve made things worse.”

  “I don’t think so,” Quell said.

  “You got inside information?” Chass asked.

  Seeing Quell flinch was less satisfying than she’d hoped.

  “That outpost’s been abandoned for months,” Quell said. “The old expeditionary forces would’ve sent in a stormtrooper unit if a garrison had been routed by locals. Since Endor, though—no one’s here anymore. No one’s watching the satellite feed.” She picked at a threadlike root half buried in the soil, then wiped her hand on her hip and looked to Kairos. “For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure your homeworld’s free. The Empire’s not coming back.”

  Kairos squatted on her knees, looking not north toward the outpost but to the east. Toward something they’d never approached during their travels on the planet.

  “I am happy,” Kairos said, astonished and bittersweet.

  By noon they’d made it back to the U-wing, and Chass didn’t argue when Quell took charge of repairs. She seemed to know what she was doing, and while Chass didn’t trust her she couldn’t believe Quell would sabotage the ship. Maybe Quell would leave them behind, now that she knew they could survive on the planet.

  That thought lingered as Quell operated on the computer core and Chass cleared mud from the loading door mechanisms and rebuilt two thrusters. In the afternoon, after she’d resecured one of the nacelles, she sauntered into the cockpit where Quell was crouched underneath the console and dropped into the copilot’s seat.

  “We’re heading back soon,” Chass said.

  Quell’s muffled voice replied: “If I can figure out how to fix everything I broke opening this up? Yes.”

  “So it’s going to matter soon. Your mission.”

  Quell stopped moving but she didn’t emerge. “Yes. I guess it will.”

  “You going to tell me?”

  “I don’t think so. Not yet.”

  For a moment, Chass considered swinging her boot into Quell’s ribs. She imagined Quell’s chest compressing, the woman writhing on the ground. She felt no pleasure at all, nor relief.

  “Would you tell me if I hadn’t beaten the crud out of you on Netalych?” Chass asked.

  Quell laughed, brief and surprised. “No. Probably not. Might’ve felt worse about refusing, though.”

  “That’s fair.” Chass flicked mud from her pants against the console. “You still got off light. Lucky I was the one who found you.”

  “Yeah,” Quell said. “Guess I am.”

  * * *

  —

  Chass left Quell and climbed atop the U-wing and lounged under the alien sk
y. Thoughts of Quell turned to thoughts of the Children of the Empty Sun, and though Let’ij and her cult still seemed far away Chass wondered if she would feel the same once the U-wing returned to the Deliverance—once Chass had returned to the real world, and the real war, where Quell would be in jail and Chass would be disciplined for abandoning her squadron. Her life in which three isolated comrades could grow comfortable on a strange planet would soon seem a dream.

  That particular thought—the notion of forgetting everything that had happened over the past days—pained her most of all. She’d almost wept during the night, and now she blinked away tears, keeping her head high so no one would see. She stared at the horizon, not sure what she was on the verge of losing but terrified of it just the same.

  See you soon, she told Let’ij, who wasn’t speaking to her today. The comforts of the cult held little appeal, but the war was ending and she would readjust with lectures and conversations and chanting and time. It was still the only future she had—still better than muddling along like she had before the Rebellion. Like she always did in her nightmares.

  Deep within her mind, notions like sediment at the bottom of an ocean drifted up from where they’d been lost months before. They whispered in a voice not Let’ij’s: Don’t forget…until the last battle is over, there’s always your backup plan.

  IV

  Just before sunset, Yrica Quell emerged from the console weary from the day’s work, satisfied by what she’d accomplished, and mourning the betrayals still to come. She wiped the grease from her hands on the sides of her pants and stretched her stiff limbs before leaving the cockpit. In the main cabin she stopped short.

  Chadic and Kairos stood looking into one of the emergency compartments in the rear bulkhead. Chadic turned around when Quell emerged and asked, “Well?”