“We’ve been isolated,” she replied. “We’re only just rebuilding the communications relays. You’re the first to make contact, but—” She tried to eliminate every trace of scorn from her tone. Fool or not, he was still Imperial. “—I’m pleased you found us.”
“You didn’t leave much of a trail,” he said.
“We didn’t care to.”
Madrighast snorted. “No, I imagine not. But it’s past time—prepare to join my forces. We’re moving to the Gordian Reach, where we’ll regroup with the 108th.” Shakara was unable to stifle her brief, surprised laugh. Madrighast’s voice turned harsh. “Or you can transmit your location and we’ll discuss it in person.”
The threat was palpable. Shakara had heard of Imperials fighting Imperials for resources. But the threat wasn’t real—not from Madrighast, not if she was right.
“I heard about your troubles during Cinder,” she said, and though her words were conciliatory she lashed them like a whip. “I don’t imagine you’re in shape for battle. Neither am I, frankly—I’m building something here but I need time and I need space.”
Madrighast paused awhile. He sighed noisily into the link. “I never took you for the sort to carve out your own little empire, Nuress. But I wish you luck with it.”
Shakara laughed again, lower and without mockery. “You’re right—I’m not the sort. Very soon I’ll have a base of operations strong enough to supply a good portion of our surviving fleet, no matter who ends up in command. After that, I’ll gladly follow whatever strategy Moff Pandion or Admiral Sloane or whoever takes charge has in mind.” She scoured the last of the humor from her voice. “Instead of leaving for the Gordian Reach, pay us a visit in a short while. We’ll have you repaired and restocked before you move on.”
Madrighast sounded humbled as he asked, “What is it you’ve found there?”
“Somewhere to make a stand,” Shakara said.
The transmission crackled out. The two minutes were over. She hoped Madrighast understood.
She put the headset aside and climbed out of the pit. The Star Destroyer was passing through the minefield now, transmitting clearance codes to avoid attracting the explosives and moving through gaps broad enough to admit the vessel. Shakara smiled tightly as she saw the first TIE patrols on the scanner.
Very soon, she’d told Madrighast, but the first phase was nearly done. The 204th had a new garrison. They’d blinded their enemies. Now the nature of her task would change, but she could adapt. So could her people.
The Star Destroyer adjusted course. A world shrouded in scarlet clouds came into view: Pandem Nai.
II
Yrica Quell believed in the value of rules. Rules made a chaotic galaxy livable. Rules created pockets of sanity and predictability—sterile environments in which a person could live and breathe and think without fear. She’d believed these things as a child (often to the dismay of her older siblings) and she’d believed them while contemplating a future in the Rebellion.
The Empire had nurtured and refined her reverence for order. Obedience and deference, along with the knowledge of what was permissible and what was not, could take a person far at the flight academy. Where other cadets broke, Quell thrived.
But now she had defected to a nation founded by lawbreakers and anarchists. If she was to succeed in her mission, principles had to be bent.
Maybe someone would even respect her for it.
She stepped out of the turbolift into the darkened cargo bay of the Buried Treasure, her jumpsuit too loose and her oxygen mask too snug in the cold, nearly airless compartment. She swept her glow rod about the vast space, pausing where she’d hung her target with Tensent the night before. Aside from the scorched threads of fabric on the floor, there was no sign of their visit.
Maybe they’ll blame you for this one, Nath, she thought. You and your friend on the bridge.
She shivered and strode briskly to the wall where the line of inert and depowered astromech droids waited. She thought of stories about the Clone Wars and the droid armies that had fought against the Old Republic, before the Empire; but these machines looked more absurd than harmful, squat cylindrical chassis giving them an affect of plump self-indulgence.
She knelt in front of a three-legged unit topped with a clear plastex dome—a window into a rat’s nest of wires and circuit boards. She’d spent enough years studying basic engine mechanics to feel comfortable with the guts of a starfighter, but droids were another thing. The colored cabling meant nothing. The scratches on the chassis suggested the droid had been in service for some time but revealed nothing explicit. If she was looking for a sign—some indication she was making the right choice—she didn’t find one.
Her gloved fingers touched the icy unit and quickly located a power toggle. The droid hummed softly as its energy cells revived. Function indicators glowed blue.
“You working?” she asked.
The droid responded with a lengthy high-pitched stutter. Quell understood none of it. She silently prayed that it was an initialization sequence—that the unit was, as its cargo status implied, freshly memory-wiped.
But hopefully not entirely memory-wiped.
“Basic functions check,” Quell said. “Mobility? Technical interface? Astrogation?”
Three chimes. That boded well.
“Come on,” Quell said. “I’ve got a job for you.”
The droid rolled forward no more than two centimeters and rotated its dome, taking in the cargo bay with its photoreceptor. It made no evident objections and Quell rose, rubbing her torso to try to regain a semblance of warmth. She clutched the glow rod awkwardly in the crook of her injured arm.
She was rounding a stack of magnetically secured crates when she spotted a flicker within the cargo lift. She squinted, then flinched when she recognized the glow: the indicator lights of a visor.
“Kairos.”
The woman moved inhumanly fast, apparently unimpeded by the cold and the near-airlessness of the hold; either her anatomy was truly foreign or her garb had a practical purpose. In her gloved hand was a metal rod—perhaps a multitool or a pry bar by design, but unmistakably a weapon in Kairos’s possession. One swing hooked Quell behind the knees and slammed her onto the cargo bay floor. A second swing caught the straps of Quell’s oxygen mask and tore it free, sending it skittering away.
Quell heard the droid squeal and roll forward. She turned her head in time to see it extend an arc welder, throw sparks into the darkness, but Kairos lifted her weapon and the droid halted. Kairos watched as Quell felt air escape her lungs.
“Listen—” Quell’s voice sounded dull, muffled by the thin atmosphere. “You’re right. You’re right about what I’m doing. But I need—”
Kairos made no motion as Quell swallowed and gasped.
In horror, Quell thought: She’s going to stare at me until I faint. Maybe until I die.
She’d been an idiot. She’d thought she could be a rebel, prove herself to her new masters. Fly for a good cause.
But she still hadn’t earned it. Maybe she never would.
“I need a chance,” she croaked. She couldn’t hear herself over the sizzling of the droid’s arc welder. “I want to make it right.”
The visor flickered. Quell stared into it. She thought of lunging for her oxygen mask. She thought of lunging at Kairos, wresting away the weapon or tearing at the strange woman’s wrappings until she saw flesh beneath. She doubted she had the strength, but she tensed her muscles anyway.
Then a hand pressed the mask back onto her face. She shuddered violently. The droid whistled. She thought she heard a voice say, “Make it right,” before Kairos stalked away to the cargo lift.
* * *
—
She was trembling as she made her way to the moorings, half frozen and breathless from her enc
ounter with Kairos. But there was no stopping now. She had bent the rules, broken her principles, and it was best to finish the mutilation rather than dwell on the pain.
She chose her ship the same way she’d chosen the droid. She didn’t believe in intuition or luck and she certainly didn’t put faith in the religion of the Rebellion’s zealots—those heirs to the monastic Jedi and their cousins. No—the ship she chose, she chose at random. She would have to hope for the best.
Six starfighters were clamped to the underside of the Buried Treasure, accessible via hatches through a passage so small that, in places, it forced Quell onto her knees. Boarding the U-wing would have been simpler, but detaching it from the freighter would have set off too many alarms. The starfighters, like the droid, were cargo—comparatively insecure. Quell loaded the astromech into the connector tube and whispered her instructions. The droid chimed brightly and disappeared from sight.
She waited five minutes, looking from the indicator panels to the ladder leading back to the main deck. At last, a buzz indicated that her ship was locked into the loading ring. The pilot could now board.
She stepped into a hatch and dropped into the cockpit of a T-65 X-wing starfighter.
The vessel was still attached to the Buried Treasure, encased in a magnetic field, and the freighter’s mass did little to conceal the cerulean storm of hyperspace. The yawning void of realspace was familiar to Quell, comforting for all its dangers, but a TIE fighter lacked a hyperdrive; she’d never been in a vessel with so little between her body and the weird, impossible flux that ripped apart all natural laws.
The zealots of the Rebellion revered a mystical, omnipresent, and undetectable energy they called the Force, claiming its ineffable power controlled destinies. The mysteries of hyperspace were fearful enough for Quell.
She tried to adjust her body to the seat as the canopy resealed. The cockpit felt too open, built to accommodate a hundred varied species rather than molded for humanoids alone. Controls crept over every panel like vines. But the basics were the same as in any vessel: sensors and scope, flight computer and comm, throttle and rudder pedals and repulsor controls. She squinted at an unfamiliar screen and realized, with a laugh, the purpose of the attached dials.
Shield controls. She’d always seen the rebel reliance on shields as contributing to sloppy flying. Why learn to dodge when you can soak the damage?
Then again, she reminded herself, they won the war.
She powered the ship for flight. Status indicators flashed. A message from the droid scrolled down the display, announcing the unit’s readiness and designation: It was an R-series model with a twenty-character serial number it compressed to D6-L, and it claimed to be recompiling its code to optimize its performance for starfighter operations instead of capital ship maintenance.
That struck Quell as a poor omen. She hoped the droid’s confidence in its own adaptability was warranted, but she had no way to judge; a TIE fighter pilot didn’t need machine assistance.
She fumbled with the controls until she was confident the droid could hear her. “Prepare for unmooring and send this message upon detachment: Yrica Quell departing to investigate a lead for Intelligence working group. Intent is to rendezvous with the Buried Treasure within twenty-four hours.”
The freighter would stop to refuel by then, and the X-wing’s oxygen levels were already uncomfortably low. No ground crew had resupplied the ship for flight. If Quell wasn’t ready in a day, she would have her choice between failure and suffocation.
“End communication. Detach now.”
The X-wing rattled as the astromech droid disengaged the clamps. As the ship drifted clear, the Buried Treasure became a blur overhead, disappearing into the hyperspace tunnel even as the universe twisted and distorted around the starfighter. Streaks of color and flickering afterimages stained the cockpit for a paralyzing eternity. The console blared warnings. Quell wondered if, in her inexperience, she’d made an awful mistake by trying to drop directly into realspace.
Or maybe her mistake had been trusting the droid.
Then the spectral distortion vanished and night swaddled the ship. Strapped safely in her harness, Quell stared out at billions of distant stars.
She was flying again. Flying after too long.
She wanted to float for an age. To stroke the fighter’s controls without going anywhere and let starlight soak into her bones.
But she had a mission.
“One last thing before we go,” she murmured.
Gingerly, she removed the sling from her arm and rotated her shoulder. She was tender and stiff, but it was time. Even the torture droid had agreed it was almost time.
She was finally free.
* * *
—
Quell’s task was to determine the 204th Fighter Wing’s location and current activities. But Caern Adan had given her none of the tools she needed. She wasn’t an analyst. She wasn’t a detective. She knew Shadow Wing as well as anyone, but she’d been looking in the wrong place.
Intercepted communications wouldn’t tell her anything. Seeing where the 204th had been might provide a clue.
When they’d met in Traitor’s Remorse, Adan had told her that Shadow Wing had made nine attacks over the course of two weeks. Those were old sightings, too outdated to do her any good, but it was unlikely Grandmother hadn’t acted since then. That meant, in turn, that Shadow Wing’s recent attacks hadn’t been identified as such—that the strikes had been either disguised (which seemed doubtful; the 204th was a decorated unit but not a covert one), swift and anonymous, or thorough enough to eliminate all witnesses.
So Quell had made a list from the databases Adan had provided. Missing ships, noncommunicative outposts, anything that suggested an Imperial fighter attack performed with brutal efficacy. She’d eliminated sites half a galaxy away and prioritized those remaining by date and location and target. What she had left was a set of star systems that might have been visited by her quarry.
She had approximately twenty-four hours to visit as many as she could.
Her first jump took her to the Paqualis system, where a New Republic supply transport had disappeared. She found the transport without difficulty at its last known coordinates, punctured by particle bolts and bereft of life and cargo.
An apparent pirate attack. Not useful to her mission.
She found no evidence of an attack at all in the intense crimson sunlight of the Shalam system—no debris, no wreckage. Nothing actionable. On the far outskirts of Telerath, where a captured Star Destroyer had gone abruptly silent, she gently navigated her X-wing through a sea of frozen corpses: the bodies of the Star Destroyer’s New Republic crew, forced out of air locks and left to the merciless inevitability of hard vacuum.
She forced bile back down her throat. Shadow Wing could have retaken a Star Destroyer, but not like this.
She noted the Telerath system as a possibility and moved on.
Jendorn was haunted. She’d heard the stories from her father—that the great gray dust clouds of the star system collected impressions of anything passing through. The Empire called it a unique electromagnetic phenomenon. Quell’s father had said the clouds were the work of a long-forgotten species. Whatever the truth, Quell’s first sighting of a ghostly ship flickering like a malfunctioning hologram made her jump in her harness.
She followed a translucent New Republic corvette deep into the clouds and watched a swarm of flickering TIEs manifest around it. The impressions were incomplete—the phantoms came and went, leaving the ensuing battle a dreamlike fantasia—but she gazed with awe at the TIEs’ maneuvers, the grace with which they spun around X-wings and drew black scars across the corvette’s hull. She flinched when an Imperial fighter blossomed into fire after a missile struck its cockpit. She laughed in relief when the corvette began to list and burn and finally detonat
ed into nothingness.
It was only after the company of ghosts finished its performance that she remembered which side she was supposed to cheer.
On her way out of the dust clouds she spotted an X-wing heading her direction. Its S-foils were closed; the vessel was in flight mode, weapons locked together and unpowered. In the cockpit sat a compact young woman in a New Republic jumpsuit, her expression somber and distracted. Quell waved to her ghost in passing and set course for the next site on her list.
* * *
—
She found a case of emergency supplies behind the pilot’s seat and sipped a pouch of lukewarm water during her next hyperspace journey. She drank and dozed under cerulean lights, trying not to picture Telerath’s sea of corpses superimposed over the battle at Jendorn.
In her waking moments, she began thinking not of her current mission but of an operation nine months prior. Every fighter in the 204th had descended upon Mek’tradi under the shadow of the Pursuer. That jewel of a planet, with its amber seas and pearl spires climbing into orbit, had housed a rebel cell. It had been the TIEs’ responsibility to prevent any vessel from leaving the surface during the bombardment, and the pilots had performed their duty well: They’d chased X-wings in loops and burned ascending shuttles like children tearing wings from dragonflies. Quell remembered firing at landing pads, incinerating rebels racing to their ships.
She’d been horrified, yet she’d done her part.
In the aftermath, aboard the Star Destroyer, she’d debriefed with her commander and met with her ground crew and kept a stern face through it all before showering and panting into the water stream. She had felt suddenly old, like a woman whose heart was ready to give out.
Somehow, Major Keize had known.
He’d found Quell walking among the starfighter engineering teams, observing as they swapped out parts and attached cables and replaced paneling. With a silent gesture, he’d pulled her aside and walked her to his spartan office. She’d sat across from him as he asked banal questions about unit efficiency metrics and squadron power consumption.
Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars) Page 12