Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  “We hope,” Wyl agreed. “Following that…how much longer, do you think? Until it’s all over?”

  He was asking Nath, which was why Chass felt obliged to answer. “Not very,” she said. “Mop-up will take years, but it’s going to be stomp a dirtbag here, stomp a dirtbag there, don’t let them gather in one place. Without the Emperor, the Empire’s done.”

  “You in a hurry?” Nath asked, watching Wyl with a grin.

  “I was supposed to be back home by now. Of course I’m in a hurry. But…one more mission, right?”

  “I hear you, brother.” Nath raised his canteen in a toast. Chass had seen him pour something into it earlier; she lunged suddenly, her shadow leaping under the light of the heat lanterns, and snatched the canteen for herself.

  Nath laughed and clapped as she took a swallow. Whatever was in the canteen, it was awful—bitter and herbal, like drinking someone’s garden. She thrust the container back into his hands before she returned to her seat. “I don’t want to know,” she said. “I don’t want to think about that ever again.”

  “Be glad,” Wyl said, his voice soft, “you never went drinking with Sata Neek. Man had interesting tastes.”

  A picture of the bird-frog flashed into her mind and she felt more sorrow than rage. She’d liked Sata Neek—he’d been strange and funny and kind, and he’d fought at Endor, and he’d liked her. He was dead because of—

  She looked at Wyl and smirked back. She was tired of loathing him.

  “You know it’s your turn,” Nath said.

  She looked back at the older man, who took a deliberate, luxuriating sip from his canteen. She asked, “My turn for what?”

  “Storytelling. Wyl did it. Kairos did it. You going to hold out?”

  Chass snorted. “You didn’t tell a story.”

  “I’m an open book. Anything you don’t know about me, you probably don’t want to know.” Nath grinned broad enough to flash teeth, and even Wyl looked away in distaste. “If you’ve got questions—”

  “No,” Chass said. “No one has any questions.”

  The night was cold but she felt hot, flushed as Nath and Wyl and even Kairos watched her. She turned away from the lot of them, toward the temple, and studied the great spire extending into the starry sky.

  “You don’t have to.” Wyl’s voice, disgustingly smooth and calm. “No one expects—”

  “Shut up,” she snapped, and didn’t look toward him.

  Wyl’s decision to share his tale two nights earlier hadn’t surprised her. His mix of sincerity and unwarranted confidence had made it almost inevitable—Chass had cringed even as a part of her admired his honesty.

  But Kairos had been a surprise. Kairos, the nightmare girl, had chosen here and now to reveal herself to all of them. Just the same as Wyl.

  “You don’t have to,” Wyl said again.

  He might as well have said: I know you’re afraid to do what I did. Worst of all, he was right.

  She looked from Wyl, to Nath, to Kairos, searching for a thread of condescension or mockery. She found nothing. The air outside the temple seemed too still for anger or judgment.

  “No dirt drawings or legends about the Hundred and Twenty, but I’ll talk,” she said. “Just don’t—you get what you get. Remember you asked for it.”

  Her audience waited, politely attentive. She thought of her secrets—not all of them, because she couldn’t remember all of them, but she riffled through the ones she could bring to mind like playing cards. Secrets about her childhood; about the Unignited Stars; about figuring out what it meant to be Theelin without guidance in an Empire made for humans.

  Finally, she decided on a tale they would want to hear.

  This is the story she told.

  * * *

  —

  “You know Jyn Erso?” she began, because if they didn’t the rest of the story would be meaningless. “The woman who started it all and destroyed the Death Star? The first one, the real one, I mean.”

  “General Skywalker and Red Squadron destroyed the Death Star,” Nath said.

  “Skywalker fired the last shot, was all. Jyn did everything that mattered. I met her once.”

  It had been in the Five Points system, on an awful little world called Uchinao. “I was out of work—” Chass said, which wasn’t true; “—and out of credits,” which was. “There was someone looking for me back then, and he had connections. I had scandocs that would pass a mobile inspection but would trip alarms at a real checkpoint. All of which is to say it wasn’t a great time in my life.”

  Uchinao was a decaying orb specked with massive metal rigs plugged into bergs floating on a liquid surface. The liquid wasn’t water, and neither were the bergs—their ice was dark and veined with yellow, like a bruise on pale skin. There were rumors that creatures lived deep inside, but on top it wasn’t so different from any other city-world, with a thousand cramped streets filled with garbage and inhabitants treated worse than the waste.

  Chass had stolen a coat—heavy and bulky and warm, the best thing she’d ever stolen and a garment she still missed—and had come barreling down a side street only to run into a Chevin four times her size. The Chevin’s leathery gray skin stank of cheap perfume and its snout alone was nearly as tall as Chass. She’d backed up rapidly and found the Chevin wasn’t alone.

  “There were maybe five or six of them. The Chevin and his buddies, making a deal in this alley with a human woman not much bigger than me. Selling or buying, I don’t know. But the Chevin decided not to let me go.”

  You have offended me, the Chevin had said, and one of his buddies had pulled out a shock collar.

  Chass had worn a shock collar before. She knew what would happen if she didn’t escape. But she didn’t have a weapon, didn’t know anywhere to run to. She’d eyed the Chevin’s blaster, readied herself to snatch it.

  She hadn’t needed to.

  “The woman kept talking to the Chevin, trying to get his, her, whatever, attention off me and back onto whatever deal they were making. But the Chevin kept looking at me, making these sleazy comments, saying I shouldn’t have been wandering around at night…”

  She hadn’t been watching the woman. The shooting took her by surprise—the sudden flare of light, the Chevin stumbling in shock. Chass had backed into a corner, covered her ears, and waited for it all to end.

  “I looked up and she was the only one left. I don’t know why she did it. She certainly didn’t tell me. But you looked at her, and—you know how some people have this thing, where you know they’re the most amazing people you’ll ever meet even if they’re just drooling in their sleep?

  “She had that.”

  They’d spoken briefly—very briefly—but Chass didn’t tell Wyl and Nath and Kairos what the woman had said to her. She didn’t say the woman had given her name as Liana Hallik.

  That was it, though. They’d gone their separate ways before local security could make a fuss. Chass had returned to her life and it wasn’t until a year later, on Koiogra, that she’d realized who the woman had been.

  “I found this little black-market shop. Specialized in holovids. Guy owed me, didn’t have the credits, so he gave me an armful of banned recordings.”

  She’d robbed him.

  “I went through them at home. Some of it was pervert stuff, but some of it was music and—that’s the stuff I liked. There was weirder stuff, too, and I started watching a rebel propaganda vid and recognized this girl. It was a grainy shot, with most of the room filtered, but she was making a speech. It was Jyn Erso—it was my girl, the girl who’d saved my life, talking about attacking the Death Star. I didn’t really understand back then. I wasn’t political. But she was—if you’ve seen it, you know.”

  Chass had memorized the words long ago.

  You give way to an e
nemy this evil with this much power and you condemn the galaxy to an eternity of submission.

  The Empire doesn’t care if you surrender. The Empire doesn’t care if you’re hopeless. I’ve given up before, and it doesn’t help. It doesn’t stop.

  Rebellions are built on hope.

  “It was after that speech that she went off to Scarif. Led a strike team, led a whole armada, to steal the plans of the Death Star battle station the Emperor had built to kill billions.”

  Jyn Erso had died on that mission. Legend had it that she’d sent the last transmission to the rebel fleet—the Death Star plans themselves—moments before the battle station’s weaponry had boiled the planet’s seas and burned away its surface. Jyn had been a martyr. She had been a hero.

  “That’s when I knew. That’s when I knew if—I thought, I met her. I could be like that, too. Crawl out of the gutter to do something great.”

  She’d seen Jedha, after that: the ruined pilgrim world where Jyn’s rebels had come from, to which Chass had made her own sort of pilgrimage. She’d flown with the Cavern Angels and eventually joined the Rebel Alliance. But she didn’t say those things aloud.

  Nor did she say anything about how desperately afraid she’d been all her life before finding Jyn Erso.

  “That’s it. That’s the whole story.”

  It wasn’t even close, but it was something.

  * * *

  —

  Chass woke before dawn to a ringing sound like a struck gong. She burrowed deeper into her bedroll but the sound didn’t stop, and as she listened it steadied to a soothing tone that seemed to warm her chilled digits. Nath and Wyl were climbing upright, and as Chass gradually emerged from her cocoon she saw that Kairos had started toward the temple.

  “Where’s it coming from?” Chass asked.

  “Sounds like the forest canopy,” Nath said, “but if Kairos thinks it’s in there I’m not going to argue.”

  Kairos showed no sign of alarm. She waited for the others as they pulled on their boots, then padded inside. Chass followed with Wyl and Nath and caught her breath as they entered.

  The temple was dark, but drifting about were motes of light: thousands, maybe millions of sparks in the night like stars. They covered the walls and the spire of the main chamber, and Chass felt her eyes drawn upward as if gravity pulled her body toward the chiming. Unselfconscious, she raised her arms like a dancer and turned as she marched into the chamber’s center. They stood at the center of a universe that existed only within the temple.

  The stars rotated around her. The others were present but, like her, they were looking up and were only shadows in her peripheral vision. Chass had never been interested in astronomy, but somehow she recognized what she saw: familiar stars and around them, flecks that were the worlds she had visited, worlds she’d loathed and run from along with worlds she’d secretly treasured. Uchinao and Lyran, Nar Shaddaa and Jedha. They whirled and blurred together one moment, then crystallized as if viewed through a corrective lens. The universe blazed and burned, furious and beautiful.

  “The galaxy as it was,” Wyl said.

  She knew that he was correct, but she couldn’t have said how. She was looking into the distant past.

  Then the whirling increased in speed, and the dark between the stars grew deeper. The emptiness became a hungry emptiness, and the stars became food for the ravenous void. Against the dark the light stood out clearer in contrast, almost too painful to watch. Chass’s body trembled. She wanted to dance. She wanted to fight.

  “The galaxy as it became,” Wyl said.

  This, too, was correct. In the stars, Chass saw war.

  Then dawn came.

  The dim light of the yellow sun encroached through the windows of the spire. The deepest blackness turned pale and imperfect and unthreatening. The brightest stars dimmed, and they were only stars like any Chass could see—like the stars she took in at a glance from her cockpit, mundane and unstoried. There was no longer a shadow over the galaxy.

  Then the stars disappeared. Daylight filled the temple.

  All that was left was the four of them.

  “The galaxy as it is,” Wyl said.

  Chass lowered her arms. It should have been a letdown—the loss of it all, the change from a cosmic struggle to something less extraordinary. She felt lighter nonetheless; the loss had made her buoyant.

  “Jedi knew how to build,” Nath said, and Wyl laughed, and then Chass laughed, and even Kairos bowed her head in something resembling amusement.

  * * *

  —

  They left the temple, maneuvering three repulsorsleds through the forest and bearing packs stuffed to overflowing, murmuring to one another and smiling like old friends.

  It’s time, Chass thought. As they trekked through the chill morning, she passed her sled to Nath and strolled over to Wyl.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “You understand now?” she asked. She didn’t explain. He would figure it out or he wouldn’t.

  But he nodded slowly, and she thought, perhaps, she’d underestimated his perceptiveness.

  “I do,” he said, “a little bit, I think. I’m glad you told us.”

  “Then you won’t do it again?”

  Wyl pursed his lips and blew a trail of pale breath. He didn’t look at Chass for a while, but she gave him time. Eventually, he glanced back and still didn’t speak.

  She didn’t want to do what she knew came next. It would’ve been easier when she hadn’t liked him. (When had she started liking him? she wondered.)

  “Wyl,” she said. “What happened at the Dare. You—” You took away my chance. “You ran, and you took me with you by taking away my choice. I don’t know if it’s because you were afraid to go alone, or afraid to fight, or because you’re interested in me—”

  Wyl flinched. Chass saw him doubting himself and hurried on. The pain was necessary, but she wasn’t a sadist. “—or because you really believed you were doing the smart thing, tactically. It doesn’t matter.

  “But you can’t do it again.”

  “I know,” he said. “You wouldn’t allow it.” He grimaced and shook his head, and he looked more serious and concerned than even Quell ever had.

  Chass tried not to pity him. Wyl tried, she knew. Even with all his idyllic past and his I’m-your-humble-savior ego, she knew he tried.

  Then he said, “I—are we a squadron, now?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, do we have each other’s backs? Are we together in this?”

  Now it was Chass who looked away. The toe of her boot found a clod of dirt and sent it arcing into the air.

  It was a good question. She had underestimated him, at least a little.

  “Yes,” she said. “I guess we are.”

  “Then I owe it to you not to make your decisions for you,” Wyl said, and shrugged. “Even if they’re the wrong ones.”

  She processed it slowly. She laughed softly after a while, and Wyl smiled, and she wrapped an arm around him and squeezed his shoulder as they walked until he finally laughed, too.

  He said he understood, but she was sure he didn’t. Sure that he wouldn’t have agreed if he had—but she could live with what she’d been given. She could find joy in the morning chill of a strange moon.

  II

  Quell hadn’t slept more than a few hours at a time each night, alternating watches with D6-L. (Nath’s droid, the ancient C-series unit, didn’t volunteer for a shift and Quell didn’t ask.) Her astromech ran nearly silent, only pinging or chirruping in response to orders and questions, but each time Quell woke she found a thorough report awaiting her on her X-wing’s onboard computer: detailed scans and analysis with a top line summary of “no unusual activity.”

 
The droid was thorough. The droid was professional. It wasn’t until their third morning on the moon that Quell remembered what it had done after Abednedo.

  The droid had offered to resign. It had taken responsibility to protect her. That was an act more than thorough or professional, and it needed acknowledgment. But she had no idea what to say.

  Exhausted and filthy, she approached it after she’d finished her breakfast and crouched by it near her starfighter. “Dee-six?” she said.

  The astromech rotated its dome and offered a questioning ping.

  “You weren’t built for combat, were you? For starfighter operations?” She remembered its mention of capital ship maintenance when she’d first loaded it aboard the X-wing.

  The droid let out a lower humming sound, its chassis momentarily wobbling.

  “You’ve done well,” Quell said. “Very well. And I’m grateful for your assistance.”

  For a few moments, D6-L did not audibly respond, though its indicator lights flashed as if it were processing an influx of information. Then the unit emitted a stern, dignified buzz, rotated, and rolled away in the direction of the ridge. As it gained distance, it began to whistle softly.

  Of all the lessons Quell had learned about leadership from Major Keize, managing droid personalities hadn’t been among them.

  An hour later, D6-L let out a loud ping and Quell joined it looking down onto the forest. Below, she could see her team creeping up the mountain. She fought back her weariness and saw the ease in their body language, heard the lightness in their voices, and pride rose inside her as the four arrived at the peak.

  Not only pride, though. Something less pleasant, too—a tinge of frustration, of bitterness, that leapt further into her consciousness when she saw Chadic with her arm slung around Lark.

  She would get over it. Her team was coming together at last.

  III

  It took another two hours to load the gear aboard the U-wing and prep for launch. Wyl focused on the task throughout—strapping down machinery and power packs wasn’t difficult, but the cargo was too volatile to trust to the usual netting. “We’ve had a pretty easy mission so far,” he told Nath when the older man urged him to wrap up. “You want to be the one to explain to the general why the U-wing exploded in hyperspace?”