He remembered how Trenchenovu had ended. His friends had died. He’d lost Reeka. In the end, he’d fled for his life.
He kept on course for the Yadeez as his allies gathered and tried to fend off the TIEs. Hail Six was barely a stone’s throw from Nath as they angled around the worst of the particle cloud.
He was in too deep to escape this time; all he could do was screw up his courage and put on a show. “Chass had to announce herself. You all know who I am, though, don’t you?”
Wisp stopped singing. “Captain Tensent, I’m guessing? Hero of Troithe. Last leader of Alphabet Squadron.”
Nath pounded the console and T5 chirruped, readying a torpedo as they came closer to the freighter. Now the TIEs stayed too close for the Yadeez to barrage them with missiles. “Hero of Troithe, New Republic Intelligence asset, savior of Chadawa. When we win Jakku, I might be offered General Syndulla’s job. I’ve got you all to thank for that. But what you don’t know about me—”
Faster than he would’ve guessed possible in the particle field, a pair of TIEs swept in and picked off a Flare fighter like a bird of prey on a weasel.
“—is what I did at Pandem Nai,” he went on. “I’m the one who sneaked inside your headquarters. I’m the one who shot Colonel Nuress.”
Maybe drawing Shadow Wing’s ire was a mistake, but Nath figured anger was more likely to throw them off rhythm than to inspire them. The New Republic pilots roared together as they died under cannon barrages, died to protect Nath.
Fire and radiation surrounded him, and T5 did its best to keep the ship on course. Without a working targeting computer he had to hope he was in range—the Yadeez filled his view and he had no intention of ending up like Chass, flying too close to the blast. He loosed a torpedo, and Hail Six did the same, and Nath knew some old spacer’s god was on their side when both torpedoes impacted the freighter. The last of its bright-burning thrusters went dark even as explosions tore through metal and shined like a short-lived sun.
Nath laughed and swung to port with no destination but away—away from the Yadeez and away from the Shadow Wing TIEs. The remaining New Republic fighters followed, pilots cackling. There was no more singing; no more naming the dead.
“That was fantastic—”
“They’re down! They’re down!”
“Stay with the captain! Protect the bombers!”
The TIEs sped after them, spitting cannon volleys and attempting to outflank the New Republic forces. Nath could see that much, though his sensors were still useless. “What do we got out there?” he asked T5. He clamped down on a vibrating panel as if he could hold his ship together bare-handed.
The droid whistled and Nath glanced to one side, past the pursuing TIEs to the burning hulk of the Deliverance sailing toward them. It was still bearing down on the Yadeez, and with the bulk freighter’s thrusters gone it had a real chance of coming close.
“Hey!” he called. “You really want to be chasing us right now?”
A bolt flared past his canopy. There was no shimmer from his deflectors—those were long gone.
“I don’t see why not,” Wisp said.
“Sure you do. You’ve got to put some value on that freighter—even if you don’t care if your crew lives or dies, you’re just a few TIEs in a very big battle without it. The Yadeez is drifting toward the Starhawk and it’s got the Deliverance on a collision course. You’ve got work to do, and fast, if you want to salvage anything.”
More likely, the Deliverance would miss by a few hundred meters—steering the wrecked Star Destroyer with precision would’ve been a feat for any pilot. But the TIEs couldn’t count on that.
Shadow Wing had the New Republic fighters surrounded. The noose was closing.
“We’ll see you around, Captain Tensent,” a new voice said—a man’s voice, one Nath hadn’t heard before. “Squadrons, defend the Yadeez. We’ve bled enough today. Broosh out.”
Nath poured enough power into his thrusters to alarm T5 as the TIEs fell away. He didn’t much care what they did next so long as they were off his back; he needed to reboot his systems, one by one, at a safe distance from the particle cloud.
He led his pilots away from the Yadeez and away from Jakku. The sky was still ablaze but the worst of the fighting remained clustered tight in orbit. A series of flashes behind him suggested the Deliverance was breaking apart or being carved up by the TIEs, and Nath was surprised when T5 reported a transmission coming through and he heard a woman say:
“Protect your own. Stay together—”
Yrica Quell. You really do stand by your squadron.
He hoped she was still alive, whatever was happening on Coruscant.
He switched to the encrypted New Republic channel. They were far enough from the Yadeez that standard comms were worth a try. “Flare! Wild! Hail! Who’s still out there?”
Hail Six, Flare Two, Wild Seven, and Wild Eight reported in. His screen flashed and he saw other messages from across the battlefield—support requests from the capital ships, calls to aid troops planetside, and a steady scroll of alerts. Just reading it exhausted him.
He slumped back as much as his harness would allow. His hands were shaking. He’d been lucky. He’d been so damn lucky, and it was all that had saved him from the fates of his comrades.
“Are we going back?” Wild Eight asked. “We can’t let Shadow Wing regroup—”
“With five fighters, we can’t do much about it,” Nath said. “Fire off a message to warn that Starhawk—with the Yadeez adrift, our forces should be able to stay out of its particle field. We did what we were assigned to do.”
His thoughts weren’t on his words, though. They were on the fiery night and the hundred warships and thousand starfighters over Jakku; the times he’d played hero and nearly played martyr; how there were only so many times anyone could cheat death. He was the last of Alphabet Squadron—maybe the sole survivor, maybe just the last man fighting—and no one could say he hadn’t done his part.
More than done his part. He’d finished the mission and brought pilots who’d never been his responsibility out safe. Done what Wyl Lark had refused to do. If he kept things up, maybe he’d get another medal.
But his medals were all he’d have if a group of strangers buried him. He’d be dead as his crew at Trenchenovu.
“Then how do we proceed?” Flare Two asked.
It was a fair question. How do we proceed? What was left of the squadrons still looked to him for leadership. “Give me damage reports,” he said, buying time to think. “Ordnance stocks and fuel levels, too.”
He half listened as he considered his options. His hands were still shaking. It was hard to be rational, to act on anything other than instinct, but he went through the motions and reflected on the choices he’d made after Trenchenovu. Sole survivor then, sole survivor now, and it was only fortune that had preserved him during missions for profit and revenge and loyalty. He didn’t need another medal, but his people—he hadn’t asked for it but they were his now—were waiting.
The last of the damage reports came through. “What about you?” Wild Eight asked.
Nath had berated Wyl for abandoning the squadrons he’d led. But the mission was over. Shadow Wing was defeated. And he couldn’t be saddled with the responsibility for grown soldiers forever.
“Pulling up a systems check. It’s…not looking good,” Nath said. “Blasted torpedo launcher is jammed and I’ve got an active warhead in the pipe—if this ship is so much as nudged it’s going to blow something fierce.”
Wild Eight tried to interrupt. Nath kept talking.
“I’ve got to take this thing down for repairs—somewhere real gentle, maybe a low-gravity moon away from the fighting. Anyone else who needs a fix is welcome to come with me.” He didn’t overemphasize, didn’t make a show of it, but he made sur
e as well as he could that they understood the offer he was making. Whether he was responsible for them or not, he’d give them a choice of their own. “Otherwise, Wild Eight—you up to take command? See what that Starhawk needs?”
Wild Eight—Lieutenant Itina—was one of the old-time rebels, from back when winning hadn’t been inevitable. Nath knew what she’d say.
“Yes, Captain. We won’t fail you.”
“I’m sure you won’t,” Nath said.
A few seconds later they’d swapped goodbyes and parted ways. No one else joined Nath. You tried, he told himself, shrugging it off. You carried them this far, and you barely knew their names. He briefly wondered what he’d have done if Alphabet had survived—if Wyl had been there to judge him, if Quell or Kairos had been relying on him or Chass had been ready to jump back into the fire—then dismissed the question.
“We saved the whole fleet. We’ve done enough,” he told T5, and plotted a course taking them far, far around the fighting to a place where they could wait the battle out.
His career with the New Republic would be over if anyone bothered to investigate and find he’d lied about the damage to his Y-wing. But while playing hero had possessed its charms it had never been a role that suited him, and the taste of freedom was sweet on his tongue.
IV
She was the last. She was almost sure she was the last. Anyone else left alive had evacuated and Hera Syndulla stood in a haze of smoke so thick and oily she could barely breathe, let alone see out the viewport. The Deliverance’s turbolasers pulsed anyway, illuminating the bridge in swift flashes.
Somewhere ahead of her was the Yadeez. She could see it when she pressed her face to the transparent metal and blinked away the smoke. Nath Tensent and the others had immobilized it yet it remained a threat; between the turbolasers and her collision course, she hoped to vanquish it once and for all. Her crew and her squadrons—Alphabet, Hail, Wild, and Flare; Meteor and Vanguard, too—had all sacrificed enough over the past year to earn finality.
A wisp of smoke slithered down her throat. She coughed to expel it, and the cough became a fit that lasted the better part of a minute and left her kneeling on the deck. Time to go, she told herself. You made promises.
She ensured the bridge controls were locked and caught a glimpse of a TIE fighter streaking past as she departed. The deck was so unsteady that she barely felt the TIE pummeling the Deliverance from stern to bow. Shadow Wing was doing its best to atomize the warship; there was nothing she could do about it now.
The corridor beyond the bridge was on fire. A single valiant overhead extinguisher puffed little clouds of foam into the inferno, and each cloud promptly disintegrated in the heat. Hera pulled a pair of flight goggles from her jacket, fixed them over her eyes, and ran through blazes with her limbs close to her body. She soon emerged from the worst of the fire and began navigating through the ship, ignoring the ache in her lungs and the sensation of burnt skin on her arms, legs, and cheeks. She scurried under fallen support beams and edged around sparking conduits and climbed half-melted ladders down turbolift shafts. Twice she saw bodies and checked them for life. She made sure to memorize the faces of the fallen.
After vaulting over the wreckage of a blast door, Hera found herself on an abandoned gunnery platform. The weapons readouts there were dark, but the massive viewport was clear and uncracked and she had a perfect view of Jakku and the surrounding chaos.
She shouldn’t have paused. Still, she was exhausted and there was a tranquility in the spectacle of clashing warships and burning fighters and glistening bands of molten metal coalescing in the planet’s orbit. She could identify the epicenters of violence by their radiance—the Imperial defense of the Super Star Destroyer shone brightest—but she couldn’t tell who had the upper hand. Stopping the 204th might have prevented a terrible defeat yet it hadn’t visibly changed the course of the battle.
She thought of all her friends in that conflagration, and felt—for the first time she could remember since becoming a general—truly small. She’d done her part, played her role, and despite feeling the weight of the galaxy she couldn’t perceive how any of it mattered at all.
Stranger than the thought itself was that the thought was comforting.
Something shook the Deliverance and she heard the distant roar of explosive decompression. She hurried on, pumping her legs harder and regulating the rhythm of her breath. If she kept a good pace, she was maybe four minutes from the vehicle hangar. Plenty of time to be crushed by a collapsing corridor or disintegrated by a proton bomb; even if she made it and her escape route was waiting, there was every chance she’d be destroyed by TIEs outside or caught in some other fatal calamity.
This, too, failed to perturb her. If she faltered now—if she died having seen the Rebellion through to this moment—she would be content.
The thought of her family, of her son, squeezed her heart like a hidden hand. She’d fought so long to return to a life of peace, a life with the people she loved, that it felt almost heretical to accept the notion of dying. She wanted to survive so very much, and to see Jacen Syndulla grow into a man as kind and noble as his father. But if she did die, it wouldn’t be for lack of desire to live; and thinking of all she’d done over the past decades, everything she’d accomplished as a freedom fighter and a general…
She hurtled over a gap in the deck plating and landed in the vehicle hangar just as an overhanging catwalk collapsed. She kept running as metal hit the deck behind her and smiled broadly as she saw her ride waiting twenty paces away: The VCX-100 light freighter Ghost was covered in debris, but her ship had been through far worse.
In a matter of seconds she was up the ramp, in the cockpit, and at the controls, igniting the reactor and bypassing the start-up checks. She’d have to blast her way through the hangar doors—they’d closed automatically when the magnetic field had failed—but the ship had been refitted and rearmed in the days before Jakku. It could get her outside.
She felt the landing gear retract and the repulsors kick in. She bit back a grin. She was flying into one of the most cataclysmic battles the galaxy had ever seen; she might have minutes to live.
But she’d done good in the universe, and whatever came next—the tranquility of death or the struggles of peace; reunion or tragedy—she felt satisfied with her life as a rebel.
With the Ghost’s guns ablaze, she left the Deliverance and joined the last battle of the war.
V
The last transmission Quell had received from Jakku was Chass na Chadic singing over the names of the dead. Quell almost forgot her mission then, and she wondered if Keize had forgotten his; they listened together as they flew below the Verity District, neither shooting nor attempting to outmaneuver the other. They circled the great data spheres; they spiraled into the darkness of the undercity before rising again, each vulnerable to the other as their fighters crossed paths.
Then the transmission cut out and Quell whispered “Chadic?” and the duel resumed.
Keize ran while Quell pursued. The ace of aces used his blaster cannons like a laser cutter, releasing precise volleys that sheared through towers and support pylons, sending sparks and debris tumbling into the depths. With impossible grace he adjusted momentum and angle midflight to swing around pillars and struts. He never hit anything but his targets. He did it all while denying Quell a clear shot at his fighter; her occasional blasts only left scorched, molten craters in the sides of buildings.
None of the data spheres had fallen, but one by one Keize severed the mechanisms holding them aloft. Quell wondered if they would even last long enough for him to detonate the repulsorlift generator, as he had threatened—the broad repulsor platform fed substations beneath each data sphere, too heavily armored for a TIE to destroy. But antigravity had its limits, and the massive spheres appeared doomed already.
She didn’t know how to sto
p him. She was running out of words and she was running out of time.
“You left Broosh in command?” she asked as Keize made a second pass at a pylon serving as the spine of an endless column of residential platforms below Verity. She circled around the pylon to the right when Keize circled left and she fired wildly as she came around; none of her shots hit home, and the TIE left a black scar on the pylon’s metal.
“I did,” Keize said. “He’ll do as well as I could have. Captain Tensent commands Alphabet?”
“Wyl Lark survived your duel in Chadawa,” she said, though she hadn’t heard anything from Lark in the transmissions.
“Oh? I’m pleased for his sake, though he hasn’t the heart to lead a fighter wing. He would be better off on his homeworld.”
“So would Rikton.” She had to force the name from her lungs. She didn’t know if he’d survived Netalych or been killed by Chadic or Kairos or the droids. “So would Cherroi and Wisp and all of Nenvez’s cadets—”
“Rikton tried. I tried, Yrica, but there’s no home for any of them so long as the New Republic hunts them down.”
They entered an access tube between energy towers—a rusting tunnel meant for droids and maintenance workers, barely wide enough to maneuver in. Keize flew directly ahead of Quell, tauntingly easy to hit. She took the bait anyway and he skirted her volley while blasting the tunnel roof. Panels tore and fell as Keize passed; Quell tried desperately to keep her X-wing centered in the tunnel as debris battered her wings and cockpit. She emerged intact but with a crack across her canopy: a reminder not to underestimate her foe.
“What if they die?” she asked. “What if none of them makes it out of Jakku?”
“None at all?” She could hear his sad smile. “Then we have made so many mistakes I can’t begin to calculate them. Even so, I don’t act only for the 204th. On every inhabited planet, there’s someone whose complicity in Imperial ills is recorded in that data bank. Perhaps your own brothers played informant once; or imagine a cantina owner on a forgotten world who spent six months guarding a prison camp.”
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