by Chuck Wendig
Thing is, those wasps fly a certain way. Individually, they’re hard as anything to catch or kill, because they fly up, down, left, right. They can zip forward, then stop in midair and hover before zipping back the other way. (And usually that’s when they go in for the sting—and one stick from a redjacket’s stinger can leave your whole arm numb for an hour.)
Flying a TIE fighter reminds Norra of those wasps.
It’s incredible. Such maneuverability. She can do just as the wasps do: thrust forward, then retroboost to a stop, then streak to the left or the right. On a lark she gives the whole thing a spin—literally corkscrewing the ship as she flies it over the city that was once her home.
Of course, the trade-off is this: The TIE is a suicide ship, isn’t it? To get the speed and maneuverability, the Empire sacrificed safety and sanity in the rest of the design. The whole thing is brittle like a bird skeleton. Doesn’t even have an ejector seat. It’s not just a fighter.
In dire situations, it doubles as the pilot’s grave.
Still, Norra isn’t thinking about that when she takes out the other TIE fighter menacing the rooftop of the comm station. Her twin laser cannons tear the wing panel off and as it crashes, disintegrating, she thinks:
That’s what you get for messing with my boy.
Norra whoops, exhilarated.
Now for the task at hand.
Ahead, through the sun-glitter haze hanging over the city, she spies the massive citadel that is the satrap’s palace. Gaudy and opulent. All its towers and parapets splayed out in the asymmetry of an insane being. (Every satrap builds something else onto the palace, it seems—regardless of how well it matches the design of the rest. The result is something altogether more chaotic than intended. Beautiful, too, in its strange, slapdash way.)
Around the center dome and tower sits a ring, and around that ring are parked the familiar fins of Imperial shuttles.
Those are her targets.
Below her, her screen blinks, then flashes green.
Two bogeys on her tail. Another pair of TIE fighters, joining the fray. She thinks: It’s flashing green because it doesn’t know they’re enemies, does it? It reads their signature as friendly.
She hopes they read her as friendly, too.
But she learns quickly the reality of that situation as both of the evil-eyes behind her open fire—muscle memory precedes proper thought (for her hands are fast even when her brain is slow) and she again spins the fighter through the air, spiraling it forward and then up as laser bolts pepper the air around her. G-forces put pressure on her temples like a crushing vise and it feels like her legs and guts are somewhere still down about a thousand meters below, and everything feels like it’s going to be torn apart—
The blood rushes back into her head (or is it out of it? she can’t really tell) and when she again rights the TIE, her two pursuers are now the pursued—the pair flying dead ahead of her.
She feels a surge of excitement. Her panic is buried beneath it.
Then Norra pulls the triggers on her twin flight sticks.
Green lasers cut through open air and rend the first TIE into shrapnel. The bulk of the destroyed fighter lists into the other. A flash. A great shuddering concussion of air and fire as her enemies spiral downward and disappear into the city in one final detonation.
She flies through the fading fire.
And again sets her sights on the palace ahead.
—
There, on the screen held vertical in Adea’s hand. An incoming TIE. An enemy combatant flying it. Heading right toward the palace. Rae understands its purpose. It can’t do anything to the palace. The walls are too thick. But one part is exposed:
Their ships.
Those shuttles are their lifeline.
It’s too late to get their own ships back in the air. And they have no defenses, no cannons, no—
Wait.
She snatches the holoscreen out of Adea’s hand and punches up the controls for one of the three ground-to-orbit turbolaser cannons they set up across Akiva’s capital city. Her assistant’s eyes go wide.
“Admiral, the turbolaser isn’t meant for this—”
“It’s our only chance.”
“It’s pointed right at the palace.”
Rae looks at the calculated trajectory.
It’s not ideal.
But it’ll have to do.
She fires.
—
One minute Norra is flying along, her path safe, secure, assured. And then the air lights up with blinding light and something shears the right wing panel off her own TIE, and suddenly—she’s lost all control.
No, not all of it.
She’s spinning, once more winding through the air, this time in an uncontrolled spiral, but she does have some control.
Just a little. Just enough.
She holds the flight sticks firm, locking one against the other, fighting against the spin. Her head is dizzy. Everything’s gone loopy. Her guts churn and she wants to puke. Steady. Steady.
The distant thought reaches her:
I’m going to die.
This is it. The culmination of all she’s done and all she is.
Part of her feels proud. I’ve accomplished so much, she thinks.
But then another warring thought intrudes like a rude visitor: But I haven’t accomplished so much. I have failed my son. And I failed my husband. Brentin, Temmin, I love you.
She aims the spinning TIE right at the palace. Dead ahead is the landing ring. The shuttles. A yacht. They’re lined up just right.
Maybe, maybe I can take them out with me…
A stray, idle thought as the palace rushes forward to greet her.
I sure wish these things had an ejector seat.
The palace shakes with the impact. The lights flicker. Dust streams down from the ceilings, where cracks appear in the smooth stone. Rae moves fast through the building. Running now, not walking. Someone calls after her. Adea. But then another voice: Pandion, too. Ahead: the staircase and doorway to the landing ring. A staircase in lapis blue and copper, ancient and elegant, beautiful in its construction—but Rae is blind to all of that.
All she sees is her pilot, Morna Kee, staggering down the steps. A line across her brow blackened with soot and dribbling blood. Rae catches her as she comes down. “Are you—?”
“I’m fine,” Morna says. “Don’t go up there.”
“I need to assess,” Sloane hisses, then hurries past her.
Again, Pandion’s voice behind her. Stay back, you prig, she thinks.
She throws open the door. Sunlight. Bleaching everything out. The smoke catches in her nose and clings there like an infection. A merciful wind rises then, pushing some of the billowing black away, and she sees the damage done:
Three shuttles, in various states of destruction. Crassus’s yacht is not here—it took off again and went to orbit, an act for which she is suddenly thankful—but at the end of the row sits a charred lump of slag:
A TIE fighter. One of their own. A suicide attack.
Easy enough to see its path through the wreckage. It cut a diagonal line across the three Imperial shuttles: smashing the back end of the first, the middle of the second, the nose and cockpit of the third. Effectively destroying each, rendering them useless.
A sound reaches her ears:
A dull roar.
She thinks: What could that be?
Rae steps through the smoke, past the wreckage. The landing ring shifts beneath her feet and the metal of one of the shuttles groans and bangs, but then everything is still once more. She shouldn’t go farther, and yet she does—her feet urging her forward without her explicit consent.
At the edge, an old copper railing dusted with emerald patina.
She presses up against it.
The roar is the crowd below. A thin, wan crowd—
But one that is strengthening even as she looks down.
From other streets, Akivans move toward the palace. And that othe
r sound she heard? Rocks. They’re throwing rocks against the palace. None of them can hit her here—she’s a hundred meters above them. They look small to her as a crowd, but as a mass: They’re growing. Like a spreading cancer.
She turns around to behold the wreckage once more and she realizes:
That did it.
The fires of their shuttles burning lit the fuse.
Now the bomb is counting down—the bomb of riot, rebellion, insurgency. It is at their doorsteps. Soon it’ll be climbing up the walls. It hits her all at once: This was engineered. This was orchestrated by someone, maybe one of our own. Maybe someone inside the satrapy. Someone has kicked over the pile of dirt to watch all the little ants spill out.
And then, another thought:
We are trapped here now.
The ring shifts again. She jukes forward, catches herself on the railing. Hands catch her elbow, pull her back. Morna. “Admiral. Please. Back inside. Look.” Her pilot points. Across the way, on the rooftop of the old capitol building—the one with the rusted tower they took out with the shuttle’s cannons upon arriving here—she sees a few people climbing up there. Citizens, probably. Trying to get a look. Or a shot.
“Yes,” Rae says. “You’re right. Back inside.”
—
Outside the cantina doors and windows, a small crowd surges, moving down the street and toward the palace. Sinjir catches a flash of white armor—the crowd carries a struggling stormtrooper past.
It worked, didn’t it?
It worked better than we even imagined. The TIE fighters destroyed the antenna at the comm station, and he feared that the message hadn’t gone out long enough. But then—explosions at the palace. Norra must’ve succeeded. That and the doctored propaganda they sent out. It worked. The city is responding. Reacting. All that pent-up rage? The cork has popped. Everything’s foaming over now. It’s not just from this one moment. Not just from the occupation. The Imperials have long toyed with planets like this one. Though never formally occupying them, they imposed tariffs and taxes on law-abiding establishments while letting the black markets and criminal syndicates go about their business as long as they tithed back to the Empire. That was one of the striking things about seeing the Imperials fighting alongside Surat Nuat’s thugs: It exposed that alliance bold-facedly, revealing what everyone always suspected but few ever really knew.
Across the oka-wood bar, the Mon Cal with the droid arm slides across a bottle of something that glows green like industrial slimewaste. Sinjir gives him an arched eyebrow and Pok just shoves it forward another few centimeters as if to say, Don’t ask, just drink.
Well, that squid-faced fellow hasn’t been wrong yet.
Sinjir takes the bottle and heads to the table, where Temmin sits next to his droid. Mister Bones was here when they arrived—Pok’s Place being the go-to meeting spot for the lot of them after the operation’s conclusion—and the droid looked even rougher. Scuffed up. His metal scored in places. Several of his little osseous accoutrements have gone (which also means his bony jangle is no longer present). Otherwise the droid looks pretty good for having cannonballed through the front windshield of a roaring TIE fighter.
Still, Temmin sits, chin on his folded arms, stewing. Eyes narrowed. The tip of one thumb sits thrust in the kid’s mouth as he chews the nail.
Sinjir plunks down the bottle. Takes a sip, and immediately makes a face. A taste fills his mouth that is somehow both bitter and sweet. Too bitter and too sweet. And the liquid is thick. Almost gummy.
It’s awful stuff.
His mouth goes a little numb.
Huh. He takes another sip anyway. Looks around idly: The cantina is mostly empty. Just a few old salts in the back, drinking their drinks. Together but alone at the same time, somehow. Most of the crowd is outside.
“You drink that stuff?” Temmin says, not lifting his chin.
“I suppose I do. Not that I know what ‘this stuff’ is.”
“Plooey-sap. Comes from one of the trees in the jungle.”
Sinjir scrunches up his nose. “Well, it tastes like I’m licking the underside of a leaky droid, but I seem compelled to keep drinking it.”
“More power to you.”
“You’re worried.”
“Worried? About what?”
Duh. “Your mother.”
“Whatever, Mom’s fine. And if she’s not, y’know. Whatever.”
“Yes, you said that already. ‘Whatever.’ ”
Now Temmin lifts his chin. His lips lift in a sneer. “What? You don’t believe me?”
“I believe every boy worries about his mother just as every mother worries about her boy. My mother used to whip my back with switches she pulled from the tree in our front yard. I hated her. But I loved her and worried after her just the same because that’s how sons and mothers happen to be. It is just one of the many truths of the universe.”
“Well,” Temmin sniffs, “my mother abandoned me to go fight in some dumb war. So, trust me: I don’t care. I don’t care.”
Mister Bones echoes: “HE DOES NOT CARE.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so. I. Do. Not. Care—” Temmin’s eyes flit to the door.
Sinjir cranes his neck and sees Jas walk in. Her gaze finds them and she comes over. But there’s something in her approach. The slightest hesitation. Her body language screams: I have bad news and I do not want to deliver it. Then the way she looks at Temmin as she steps up…
Oh. Oh, my. Sinjir realizes what it is even before she says it.
“Temmin,” she says. “Your mother succeeded in her mission. But she didn’t make it. Norra is gone.”
—
Panic at the summit. A cacophony of competing voices like a roost full of ill-kept birds. They all stand around the grand dining table, yelling at one another about what to do next. Holoscreens are cast about the table, projecting data at various stations. Data showing surging crowds. Revealing their own casualties. Offering predictions of what comes next.
“How many TIEs do we have left?” Pandion barks. “Answer me, Admiral. How many are left on Akiva?”
Adea eases the base of one of the holoprojector disks toward Rae, and on it, a casualty report. Sloane turns it toward Valco.
“We lost five in that attack. Two at the roof of the comm station that served as the origin point for the rebel propaganda, and two from whoever was in that stolen TIE. That last fighter is the fifth. We lost half.”
“Half,” Pandion says with a huff. “We only have five short-range fighters stationed across the city?”
“Correct.”
“And how many troops?”
“A single company, besides what’s here in the palace.”
“A hundred, hundred fifty stormtroopers? That’s it?”
“And their attendant officers. Another twenty or so.”
“So, one hundred and twenty Imperials for a city of—how many?”
Here, Shale speaks: “About a million.”
Pandion asks the inevitable question: “Why don’t we have more, Admiral? Why are we not better protected?”
Truth is, he already knows the answer to this question. They all do. Negotiating this summit into existence was quick, but took a hero’s effort—sleepless nights, countless communiqués, ceaseless bickering. They exacted out each little detail, down to the food they would be served and the types of fabrics they desired in their bedsheets. They know why the city isn’t locked down with whole battalions of stormtroopers, and yet, Pandion asks the question because he wants to whittle her authority down to splinters—she the stick, he the knife. So, she answers him:
“We couldn’t have this look like a total occupation. The risk was low—”
“The risk is now considerably higher, wouldn’t you say? We need more ships. We need to bring the Star Destroyers back. Recall them from the neighboring system, Admiral. Return them to orbit. We will return to our ships and make our escape.”
Shale stands and throws her han
ds in the air—an unusual gesture for her, this physical act of exasperation. “How do you intend to make that escape? We have no ships of our own here. We are boxed into this palace by a population that has been long abused by the satrapy—”
Now it’s Satrap Isstra’s turn to speak up. Gone is his strident, fawning obedience. Present now: a taste of venom on his tongue. His handsome, smiling face twists into a mask of desperation. “No!” he says. “You cannot mound this weight upon my back. I am not your pack beast here to carry your sins. I imposed the taxes the Empire demanded. I have been a loyal ally, implementing any program you wanted, and what do I get for it?” His voice goes suddenly high-pitched. A plaintive whine. “You shot a hole in the side of my palace! That turret took off the easternmost tower—a tower that has stood tall over this palace for two thousand years.”
A lie. Sloane knows that the tower the turbolaser destroyed was relatively new—built by one of the Withrafisps in the last two centuries. The design of that tower—the speckling of red brick spiraling up the side, the onion-shaped dome—matches the architecture of that period. Not millennia before. Sloane pounds the table with her fist. The satrap’s jaw shuts.
“I will not order the Star Destroyers to return.”
Mouths gape. Crassus says: “We get to vote.”
“As has been noted,” Rae says, “decisions like these are best left to a singular authority, not a voting body. I am the acting fleet admiral and I decide what to do with those ships.”
Pandion counters: “You will bring them in. You must. From there we can bring in a shuttle, and the TIE fighters will give us enough cover. We must show strength. We will not merely sneak out and flee like scared ryukyu hares—we do not run from the fire. We must face it. Then, we use the Star Destroyers to dispatch bombers and we teach this city what it means to rise up against the Galactic Empire.”
“Right now,” Shale says, “the New Republic—”
“The Rebel Alliance,” Pandion says, correcting her.
“The New Republic,” she reasserts, “does not know what to make of this situation. They have not sent a fleet because they do not know what awaits them. And they do not want to destabilize a world that could end up as their ally. As such, they wait. Cautious. Hesitant to play too strong a hand. They have made big gains, but they are cautious gains. They are not playing a reckless game, and so neither should we, Valco.”