Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  He tried not to pity himself. Char and Blink, flying behind him and capable of destroying his ship with the squeeze of a trigger, were probably worse off. A TIE fighter didn’t even have shields; the pilots must have been roasting alive.

  He adjusted his comm with tender fingers. “Approaching target. Counting forty gas pods. Divide them up, same as before.”

  Static roared in reply. He couldn’t make out a word, and his systems diagnostics were down—he wasn’t even sure if the problem was on his end or the TIEs’.

  “All right,” he murmured. He wanted to stroke the console but feared being burned again. “One more tanker, one more mission, and we’ll get you home. Nothing wrong that can’t be repaired.”

  The TIEs, the U-wing, and Wyl broke formation as they neared the tanker, dipping below its mass to access the pods. Streams of emerald and crimson poured from the fighters, carving away at metal. But fire washed over them like a tide, and each swell forced them to scatter—the pods might last against the full force of the storm for a few moments, but the TIE fighters and the A-wing couldn’t.

  The first pods fell toward Pandem Nai even as TIEs were blown away by the gale and failed to return. Wyl saw one fighter—he thought it might have been Char—swept into the flame and burst like a nova, providing more fuel and heat to the blaze. Wyl wanted to mourn but he didn’t have the time. He tried desperately to cut away at a pod’s moorings, but even his single functioning laser cannon sputtered and crackled and caused his ship to vibrate with every shot. The target barely looked scorched.

  The pods closest to the storm front began to glow with heat. The surviving TIEs and Kairos didn’t stop firing, didn’t stop flying.

  Wyl Lark believed in his mission. It felt right. It was a shame, he thought, that they might fail anyway.

  II

  There was no one left to fight.

  Chass drifted through the storm, thrusters at low power and energy diverted to stabilizers and repulsors. The wind carried her ship and fire licked her hull. She had nowhere to go—she saw nothing through the flames, had no functioning scanner. Only gravity suggested a difference between up and down.

  Her music had stopped, the beat replaced by the throbbing of her burnt right arm. Without a battle, she saw no point in trying to fix whatever had gone wrong. She felt anxiety like withdrawal in her veins—a desperate craving for the fear and tranquility and certainty she had felt only moments before.

  Is this all I deserve? she wondered.

  Would they find her corpse charred to the bone, broken to ashen fragments in a B-wing crashed on a cinder of a world? Would anyone even discover that much, or would she just be counted among the thousands—the tens of thousands—who’d died in a disaster that had wiped out two warring fleets?

  She didn’t want to boil to death in her own sweat. She didn’t want this.

  Maybe I do deserve it.

  Something burst far below, lifting her ship on a shock wave. She bounced in her harness and the B-wing leapt forward, tumbling through the heat and light. Chass leaned over the controls, trying to level the ship out and searching for some scrap of information on the console to guide her.

  When she looked up, her dry lips parted and she stared. Far beyond the B-wing, silhouetted against the burning sky, was the wedge of a Quasar Fire–class cruiser-carrier orbited by at least twenty TIE fighters. At one time in her life, from so far away, she might have mistaken the cruiser-carrier for a far larger Star Destroyer—but after the chase through the Oridol Cluster, recognition came instantly.

  Was it Shadow Wing? Were they trying to escape?

  How could it be anything else?

  She fumbled to redistribute power to her thrusters as she resettled herself in her seat. The starfighter lurched, her engine emitting a sweet, chemical odor. The cruiser-carrier was moving away but it, too, appeared hampered by the storm winds. She could catch it.

  Panting for breath, ignoring the pain in her arm, she reached under the console and pulled a manual toggle to reset her subsystems. Nothing happened, and she tried again; finally, beneath a tinny ring and the roar of the storm, her music started up again: a deva pop track with an easygoing beat and saccharine lyrics recalling some local holiday banned by the Empire.

  Chass couldn’t remember why she’d even brought it with her, but she liked the rhythm and the irony in the verses. Leave it on, she decided. You’re lucky it’s playing at all.

  Weapons came next. If the cruiser-carrier hadn’t spotted her yet, a test would give away her position. Still, she gave her trigger a squeeze and was satisfied to see the auto blaster below her cockpit and her laser cannon spit particle bolts. The ion weapons were less responsive, but two stuttered out white pulses of energy.

  Against a cruiser-carrier and twenty TIEs, she’d have to move fast. Get in close to the carrier, she decided—fry its deflector generators on the first pass, go for the hangar on the second. Maybe she could get inside—rip through the thing like a bullet from a slugthrower.

  She could stop Shadow Wing. Where everyone else had lost sight of the mission, she could finish it.

  No shields, broken weapons, and the target we all came for. The people who killed Fadime. It’s your sort of fight, Chass.

  She eyeballed her distance from the cruiser-carrier. Twenty seconds till she was in range, maybe. The TIEs had noticed her but they weren’t leaving the larger ship—just forming a defensive barrier at its rear. Chass picked her first target, ready to scatter the swarm.

  “Chass?” A voice broke through the music. “Chass! Is that you?”

  Wyl Lark.

  The man who’d stolen her targets. Who’d stolen her choices twice now. Not the man she wanted to deal with. Not the voice she wanted to hear in her final moments.

  “Chass, we need you up here—trace the transmission vector if your scanner’s down. We need to cut away the fuel pods on this tanker, or the whole thing goes up—”

  “I’m working!” she shouted. “I’ve got a carrier full of TIEs right here, and they’re making a break for it.”

  “You can hear me?” he replied. You’re an idiot, she thought, but he sounded so relieved she couldn’t muster much spite. “Listen to me, we need you. Quell’s orders were that this is a rescue mission, so—”

  “Screw Quell. Our mission was to stop Shadow Wing. I’m here. I’m stopping them.” She forced herself to draw a deep breath. She was coming into firing range of the TIEs. “You don’t need me, Wyl. You keep the fire contained. Let me finish the job.”

  She squeezed her trigger, aiming at one of the TIEs. Particle blasts and crackling energy streaked through the burning clouds; her foe neatly evaded the volley with a quick horizontal cut. The TIEs didn’t scatter. Their defensive formation remained intact.

  “Please,” Wyl said.

  The TIEs returned a volley of their own. Chass’s viewport flashed emerald and she spun and dodged, her breathing accelerating. She felt the music reverberating in her skull, calming her and guiding her motions.

  If she couldn’t scatter the TIEs, she could blaze through the center of the formation. She could overcharge her weapons, build enough momentum to crash past the fighters and ram the carrier. It had to be in bad shape already from the firestorm. She could deliver the finishing blow.

  She redistributed her power again, keeping an eye on the steady streams of particle bolts outside. “Goodbye, Wyl,” she said. “Do what you got to. Tell people about me, huh?”

  But it wasn’t Wyl’s voice that replied.

  “I know what you’re thinking. But look around you—we all blew it. There aren’t going to be any damn heroes today, sister.”

  Wyl’s voice cried, “Nath!” and the older man snickered.

  A cannon blast passed close enough that she heard the hissing interaction of charged particles and ga
s. She kept her course steady, eyes locked on the cruiser-carrier, but her shoulders were quivering.

  Nath’s words repeated in her brain. She tried to brush them away but they grew into an image of the Lodestar, of General Syndulla and the aftermath of the battle. She heard angry shouts and accusations about the fate of the planet Pandem Nai.

  No one would care about a cruiser-carrier.

  “Chass,” Wyl said, “we need you right now.”

  She slammed her fists against the console. It was a childish, petulant act. She let herself indulge, then pulled up and away from the Quasar Fire.

  Because Wyl was right. Nath was right. Of course they were right.

  Her ship rattled and bounced as she cut through the burning sky, the blaze cascading across her canopy as she penetrated a gas pocket. When she emerged, she saw the tanker—a massive vessel somehow more intimidating than any Star Destroyer—and a handful of TIE fighters along with Wyl, Nath, and Kairos firing haplessly at the containment pods. One of the pods was aflame, some layer of insulation between the metal shell and the Tibanna inside already ignited. She rolled her fighter in the pod’s direction and squeezed her control yoke. The auto blaster pumped bolts out of sync with her music.

  The pod detached and plummeted like a meteor. Nath and Wyl were laughing and cheering and shouting in desperation, strafing moorings as a team, while Kairos matched the tanker’s speed and cut away metal with precise, powerful blasts. The TIEs danced around all of them, thrown from one end of the tanker to the other by the storm winds. Chass flew beneath the tanker’s enormous bulk and hoped the storm wouldn’t smash her into the underside.

  As they worked, Chass heard faint, distorted messages from other TIE squadrons reporting success defending gas extractors and supply ships. “It’s up to us,” Wyl urged as one by one the tanker’s containment pods fell away. But Chass’s burnt arm throbbed and sent pain up to her skull and the music became harder to hear. She increased the volume until it felt like her ears would bleed.

  Her fighter’s strike foils scraped against the tanker more than once, leaving sparking trails. Her cockpit’s gyrostabilizers failed, forcing her to keep her ship upright to prevent her body from being brutalized. But she held the vessel together. She found new targets. She tore another pod free, and another. She set her comm to broadcast to anyone listening, inflicting the saccharine deva pop on all the ships above Pandem Nai.

  Together with her squadron, she stood against the storm to save a world.

  III

  She couldn’t see anymore. The canopy of her X-wing was plastered with ash and dust and oil, and a thick crack ran halfway down the center pane. Only one small patch remained blessedly clear, and Yrica Quell twisted her aching body so that she could glimpse the sky and the falling debris outside. She was down to a single functioning laser cannon, but that would suffice.

  She soared and dived and soared and dived, blasting at the crumbling remnants of the orbital station above Induchron. The wreckage she couldn’t destroy she broke into parts, hoping they would burn up in descent or land beyond the city borders. She thought she’d glimpsed the flare of a turbolaser from far below—a turret defending the city from ground level—but it might just have been a flicker in her sore eyes.

  In truth, she didn’t want to look below. She didn’t want to know the state of Induchron.

  She’d never heard sounds quite like the whines and moans her thrusters made. If she’d been in her TIE, she could have diagnosed the problem, made a guess at how long the starfighter could stay aloft, but the X-wing was too unfamiliar. A flashing indicator—one of the few lights on her console that still operated—warned her to eject. She didn’t even know how an X-wing’s ejection mechanisms worked; in all her studies, it hadn’t occurred to her to check. If she’d had the breath, she would have laughed at the thought that that, of all things, would kill her. Choked to death in your ejector harness. Your teachers would be proud, Yrica.

  She wasn’t going to eject, though. Not until her last cannon stopped working.

  She soared and dived, and she was less effective with every pass but she didn’t stop firing. The metal rain hammered her ship and her body shook every time debris struck her canopy and lengthened the crack.

  She chased a charred metal wheel like a gear toward the surface, firing staccato blasts as she attempted to see through the gap in the viewport ash. She had trouble contorting herself to observe, stay on target, and fire all at once, and she’d long since given up hope of assistance from D6-L. But the wheel was large enough to blast ten city blocks into a crater, and she had no choice but to snap shot after shot and try to do more than simply dent the metal.

  She blindly slid a hand across the console, trying to divert more power to her weapon. Instead the whole fighter rumbled and she saw a white-hot streak race from beneath her cockpit toward the wheel.

  She should have been out of proton torpedoes. The display had told her she was out, and she hadn’t even done anything to trigger the weapon.

  The torpedo struck. The wheel fragmented as the explosion bloomed, and Quell flew down through the white fire.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, though she doubted her astromech droid could hear her.

  She was in the midst of pulling out of the dive when another metallic shriek rang through the X-wing. The fighter rolled and tumbled, ignoring Quell’s attempts to right it and lurching haphazardly in response to the throttle. She peered outside and realized with alarm that her port-side foils were missing altogether, sheared entirely off at the base.

  She couldn’t fly. She couldn’t stop. With her last functioning cannon now separated from her starfighter, she couldn’t even fire at one final plummeting pylon before she fell onto the rocks of Pandem Nai.

  CHAPTER 21

  AFTER-ACTION REVIEW

  I

  She woke in the cold and the dark. Her lips tasted of dust and ash. The gentle wind against her cheeks smelled like smoke and sent her consciousness whirling. She wanted to vomit at the overwhelming vertigo, but then the breeze died and she pried open her eyes.

  Yrica Quell sat in the broken cockpit of her X-wing, drifting in and out of consciousness. There was no canopy between her and the night sky, and the starfighter was half buried in dirt and gravel, but she had somehow leveled out the ship while crashing. Between moments of numbing oblivion she determined that her body was intact—she’d surely broken bones again, but she had her limbs. She could feel, even if what she felt was pain in every extremity.

  Eventually, aware that she was likely concussed and therefore likely to die if she continued slipping into blackness, she forced herself to unbuckle her harness and straighten in her seat. She fought through the sting in her neck to survey her surroundings and saw scrub plains extending in all directions, broken up only by low hills and distant mesas. Behind her, she saw faraway lights blinking and fading.

  Induchron? she wondered. Had the city survived?

  Her mission—her mistakes—swelled up in her at the thought. Dragging a breath into her raw lungs, she looked skyward and saw a pulsing glow beyond the thick clouds—a great swirling mass like a hurricane of flame. It churned high above the city lights, but as she watched it—and she watched it for a time she couldn’t estimate, minutes or hours—it seemed to ebb instead of swell, slowly collapsing upon itself.

  She wanted to take comfort in that. Maybe she hadn’t ruined the planet after all.

  But her mistakes were still too great to forgive.

  A sound drew her attention: a chortling and screeching like a bird or a child’s toy. She lowered her chin, turned toward the noise, and saw the source scurrying her way—a four-legged animal, wiry and mangy and sharp-beaked, colored the same dun as the surrounding landscape. It flinched and scampered half a meter back when it saw her move, then leisurely resumed its approach.

  Ot
her screeches rose up. There were five of the things, encircling the wreckage of the X-wing and watching Quell with glittering eyes.

  Scavengers.

  She peeled herself away from the chair and felt her body throb with pain as she searched for her pistol beneath the seat. She felt skin scrape off her digits as she dug ineffectually under levers and springs. At last, she found what she was looking for and gripped the weapon in both hands as she stood.

  She almost lost her balance, but she wedged her feet in place and rested her elbow against the top of the ship. She could see now, just a meter away, the dome of her astromech unit. The droid was covered in black dust and char, and its indicator lights were off. For an instant Quell thought: I’m sorry, D6-L. You never wanted to fly a starfighter, and though she was struck by the absurdity of mourning an astromech she couldn’t bring herself to laugh.

  The scavengers screeched. Together they crept forward. Quell lowered her blaster and aimed at the dust.

  Whatever she’d done today—no matter how many people she’d killed or nearly killed—she didn’t want to die torn apart by beaked monsters.

  She wasn’t sure she had the heart to live, but that was a problem for later.

  The screeching became an angry trill. Quell pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

  She wanted to shake the blaster or toss it furiously aside, but she didn’t have the strength for either. She squeezed the trigger a second time; she heard an electrical pop and smelled burning plastoid. One of the scavengers was loping ahead with beak parted, now, and she pulled the trigger again and again, until finally the weapon leapt in her hand and a crimson bolt slammed into the dust, raising smoke and sparks.

  The scavengers scuttled back over the rocks, but they didn’t go far.

  Quell felt another spell of vertigo. She rested more heavily on her elbow and waited for the creatures to return.