Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  She stood there as the fire waned in the night sky, forcing herself to stay awake and shivering in the easy breeze. She observed the scavengers as they circled and sniffed and crept forward, and every time one charged she jolted to alertness, frantically trying to bring her blaster to life before Pandem Nai’s monsters could tear her guts out. Each time, she was convinced she was going to die. Each time, the blaster sent the scavengers retreating at the last possible moment.

  In the back of her mind, she knew she should have searched the X-wing’s cargo compartment for emergency supplies. Found a flare, or better yet a signaling device to alert someone that she was still alive. She lacked the strength. She doubted the compartment remained intact. It was all she could do to hold off the scavengers.

  Would they leave in the morning? Would daylight scare them away? she wondered.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to see Pandem Nai in the daytime, exposed and scarred.

  When the scavengers began squawking and clacking their beaks, she was slow to perceive that something had changed. The creatures were no longer looking at her, and the wind had suddenly strengthened and turned warm. There was a humming sound beyond the awful drone inside her head—the low, distant rumble of a ship.

  By the time the scavengers fled back across the plains, she finally spotted it: a U-wing performing a vertical descent, positioned to land within a stone’s throw of the X-wing. Quell felt a lurch of hope, then realized the crest of Alphabet Squadron was missing from the hull. The ship might have come from the New Republic fleet, but it wasn’t Kairos.

  It settled delicately onto the dust plain, its running lights painfully bright. The loading door slid open and she saw two figures inside: one, a humanoid silhouette, and the other a sphere hovering a meter above the deck, distinguished by a glowing red dot like an eye.

  Hello, IT-O, she thought. Hello, Adan.

  Her knees bent, and she rested them against the interior of the cockpit to stop herself from sinking.

  Adan emerged from the ship, antenna-stalks raised. After stepping out onto the dust, he looked to either side as if expecting to be ambushed; then he clasped his own wrists and marched toward the X-wing. The torture droid didn’t move, observing from inside.

  Quell heard the blaster slipping from her hand and striking the floor of the cockpit.

  “Why you?” she slurred. She should have been more grateful, but she lacked the strength for courtesy. She was as barren and open as the plains of Pandem Nai.

  Even so, she’d expected Adan to smile.

  “I know about your last mission,” he said.

  She tried to comprehend. “What last mission?”

  “I know about your last mission with Shadow Wing. I know the truth about Operation Cinder.” His voice was edged with steel.

  “I don’t know what you mean.” That was true—the lies and the guilt and the confusion of her concussion blended together.

  The intelligence officer’s antenna-stalks curled inward. His shoulders stiffened. Quell had heard him rage before, but she’d never learned to tell what was real and what was performance. “You want to lie about it here? After what happened today?” He did smile now, but it didn’t reach his voice. “If you have so little shame, maybe we should leave you on Pandem Nai.”

  It wasn’t the threat that stung.

  If you have so little shame…

  She’d been drowning in shame for a month. She could barely breathe.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Start with a confession,” Adan said, “and we’ll go from there.”

  It wasn’t too much to ask.

  This is the story she told.

  * * *

  —

  Yrica Quell had never believed in the Empire. Not the way some of her comrades had—not with the patriotic fervor of a true disciple or the resigned sense of necessity she saw in Clone Wars veterans. She’d left home and joined the Academy with the fantasy of learning to fly and defecting to the Rebel Alliance; nothing she’d seen since had convinced her that her Empire was just, or that her Emperor was a righteous man.

  What she believed in was her unit. Major Soran Keize had told her once, in a moment when she’d doubted her mission, “We fight for our brothers and sisters beside us.” She’d clutched those words since then.

  She’d believed in the 204th. She’d believed in Major Keize. And when rebel terrorists had assassinated the Galactic Emperor, she’d seen it as an attack not just on the Empire but on every Imperial.

  “Those last six months before Endor—you don’t know what they were like on our side.” She didn’t hear the words as she said them. She didn’t see Adan’s face. Instead she pictured Major Keize’s angular cheeks and thin lips. “Every day there was a new rebel attack, and we kept trying to hit back but—no matter how hard we hit, no matter what we did, you kept coming.

  “We shed so much blood just trying to stop you, and it didn’t work. No one wanted to do the things we did. We were tired of killing, but we didn’t have a choice.”

  It wasn’t completely true. There were those who’d joined the bombardment of Mek’tradi eagerly instead of with somber determination, but Quell hadn’t been among them.

  In those last months, she’d forgotten her fantasies of joining the Rebellion. She’d fought with the 204th because she had nothing else to fight for, and closed herself to enemy propaganda and sightings of prisoners and anything that gave a face to her foe. In the days after the Emperor’s death, she’d walked the decks of the Pursuer in shock and slept in the same bed as Sergeant Meriva Greef just for the warmth and comfort. She hadn’t been alone in her distress. If anything, she’d kept her senses better than most.

  For two weeks the Pursuer had jumped from system to system, trying to find a battle worth fighting. When orders had finally come in, everyone knew—the senior officers vanished like exorcised ghosts.

  The briefing had come six hours later, after two squadrons had already departed on secret tasks. Quell had sat in her rigid seat as Major Keize declared, “Operation Cinder is under way.

  “This is the first galactic counterattack since the Battle of Endor,” he said, “based on contingency plans prepared some time ago. The 204th has a small but critical role to play, and I expect the very best from all of you.”

  Major Keize had displayed holograms of the Nacronis system, describing in detail the planet’s defense systems and its unique meteorology. He’d discussed each stage of a complex assault leading to the deployment of specialized explosives in atmosphere to stoke Nacronis’s siltstorms. Quell had listened, yet the pieces hadn’t coalesced in her mind until she’d stood and asked:

  “Sir? What is the strategic objective of the mission?”

  “The strategic objective,” Major Keize said, “is the elimination of all enemy presence on Nacronis, up to and including all resources that could be subverted by the enemy.”

  She understood then what Operation Cinder was: the destruction of worlds.

  She didn’t ask any more questions.

  In the fourteen hours between the briefing and the mission launch, she did the same thing she’d learned to do over the course of many months. She pushed away memories of broken bodies and burnt vehicles. She buried her youthful fantasies in the dark of her mind. And she told herself she fought for her unit.

  She could have spoken with Major Keize. He was busy—meeting with the squadron commanders in strange, private conferences in cargo bays and machine shops—but she knew him well. He would have made time for her. Yet she’d asked enough of him, and he had other tasks, and she knew her duty.

  Just after twenty-three hundred hours shipboard time, Quell checked in with the ground crews and her comrades and confirmed that her squadron (commanded by Captain Nosteen, who had appointed Quell his second-in-command up
on her transfer fourteen weeks prior) was ready for combat. She climbed into her TIE fighter and, moments after the Pursuer jumped into the Nacronis system, launched from the Star Destroyer’s hangar with her fellow pilots and raced toward Nacronis.

  Nosteen was a competent commander, and after Major Keize transmitted final instructions to the wing and ordered his own squadron to intercept the first rebel defenders, Nosteen directed Quell and the others—Tonas and Barath, Xion and Hastun, and six more—to escort the TIE bombers into the atmosphere.

  Tonas was the first to die. He went in the line of duty, positioning his ship between an enemy X-wing and the bomber it targeted. With quick, efficient movements through the sky, Quell maneuvered to the X-wing’s rear and shot it from behind. Barath was the next loss, struck by a surface-to-air missile no one detected until it was too late.

  The bombers began delivering their payloads. The vortex detonators—customized explosives programmed for one purpose—increased the fury of the siltstorm forming in Nacronis’s atmosphere. The TIE fighters were buffeted by the gale as they continued their defense of the bombers. Captain Nosteen died then, incinerated by a bolt of lightning, and Quell took command of the remaining pilots in her squadron.

  Theirs was one of many storms stoked across Nacronis. They nursed their charge to the size of a sea, then a continent. The enemy stopped attacking by the time all the planet’s storms merged together.

  Quell observed from above even after the bombers returned to the Pursuer. She watched as the siltstorms ravaged the surface and the planet’s life was snuffed out. Without Captain Nosteen, no one tried to order her home.

  She didn’t understand why she stayed. But when the storm diminished to a mere flurry, she took her TIE fighter down. She flew over a ruined city flooded with silt and glimpsed specks in the mud that might have been bricks or corpses (impossible to know from so far away). She drifted into the marshes and landed. “Engine trouble,” she reported to the Pursuer. “I’ll make repairs from here.”

  She stripped off her helmet, climbed out of her fighter, waded into the silt, and stared into the wind as the colorful mud slashed at her cheeks and painted her face.

  Just for a minute, she promised herself. Then she would return to her squadron and the Pursuer and her duty.

  She’d had every intention of keeping that promise. But she didn’t.

  “I couldn’t,” she told Adan. “I’d turned a planet into a graveyard and I couldn’t go back.”

  But that was a lie. It was a different lie from the one she’d told Adan the first time, but it was a lie nonetheless.

  She stood in the silt as if transfixed until the second TIE landed barely fifty meters away. She straightened her back and raised her chin, wondering if she was to be arrested, executed, or merely scolded. She intended to meet her fate with dignity, regardless, and she watched the other pilot descend into the muck and stride toward her.

  “Major,” she called, when she recognized him at last.

  “Lieutenant Quell,” Major Keize said, lifting off his helmet. The wind nearly vanquished his words. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I reported in—” she began, but his eyes held on her, silenced her like an unseen force around her throat.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he repeated, and drew close enough to stop shouting. “You told me before—you told me everything I needed to know, but I didn’t expect things to fall apart so quickly.

  “You shouldn’t be in the 204th.”

  She shuddered. Her neck and shoulders felt like ice. “I did my part,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t have landed but I did the job, I made sure it happened after Captain Nosteen—”

  Keize stepped forward and dug his fingers into her shoulder. The black fabric of her flight suit, now stained with color, bunched together. “You were extraordinary today. I don’t doubt your dedication or your loyalty. No one ever should. But Lieutenant—Yrica—” His hand slid off her shoulder and he wiped the silt on his hip. “You’ve been sick. You’ve grown sicker with every mission against the rebels. You told me that.”

  “I didn’t say anything like that,” she said, though she had. “You told me I had to keep fighting. For the unit, for my comrades.”

  “That was before we lost the war.”

  She couldn’t breathe. They didn’t talk about losing the war aboard the Pursuer. They talked about setbacks, about the assassination of the Emperor, about what would come next. Never about losing.

  “The Empire’s not going to pull together and there’s not going to be another Emperor,” he said. “That was clear a day after Endor, and since then we’ve all just been in mourning. But it’s time we accepted it. Time you moved on, because—” His eyes flashed, his face suddenly full of controlled fury.

  “If you would do this,” he went on, and swept his hand, gesturing to the corpse of Nacronis, “then there’s nothing that will drive you out. You’ll stay with the 204th out of honor and duty. You’ll stay until the sickness leaves you empty and either it kills you or the rebels do. But there’s no point to it anymore. There’s no need for the unit, no use dying for brothers and sisters who don’t have to die at all.”

  She couldn’t deny any of it. She would stay with Shadow Wing forever, and it would kill her. And she knew that her mentor was being kind when he said that it was honor and duty that would keep her there when in fact it was fear—fear of being wrong and fear of her own guilt and complicity. All of it was clear in her mind, crystallized by the mortal terror she felt at his words.

  “What am I supposed to do?” she asked.

  “Do what you wanted from the beginning. Join the rebels. Join their New Republic. You have the nature of a soldier, and the need for—well. Trust me when I say I see the need.”

  She couldn’t feel her limbs. The chill ran too deep. Her face felt blasted by the grit in the wind. “Are you ordering me to do this?” she asked, voice rising in a challenge.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Her challenge met and defeated, her voice fell again. She felt a wash of shame at resisting so little and asked, “What about you? You’re still here. You tell me to leave, but you’re still here.”

  “I don’t have your sickness,” he said, “and I still have work to do.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Most don’t have your sickness. But most aren’t blind, either. I’ll do what I can, but I will leave, and very soon. Best to set an example.”

  “And you’ll join—”

  “No.”

  She licked yellow sand from her lips and spat it out. Keize’s voice was the voice of a major to his subordinate—clear and confident and uninterested in explanation.

  “They’ll accept you,” he said.

  “After this?” she asked.

  “We’ll make sure of it.”

  And they had. Major Keize had returned to his fighter and, without a wasted shot or a wasted moment, destroyed Quell’s own craft. The blast had left her injured, and though she doubted that had been part of Keize’s plan she was sure he didn’t regret it. The wounds would make her defection all the more plausible.

  She’d waited there for days, sheltering in the wreckage of her TIE, until the New Republic had found her. By then, she’d had plenty of time to practice the story of how she’d tried and failed to thwart Operation Cinder.

  * * *

  —

  “Someone helped me on Nacronis,” she told Caern Adan, as she faced him across the dusty plain of Pandem Nai. “He advised me to leave. He destroyed my fighter. You know what happened next.”

  Her arm trembled and nearly buckled. It was all that held her up against the ruined cockpit of her X-wing, and she knew her position made her appear fragile. (She was fragile, always had been, and she didn’t know how much of her body was broken.) Adan hadn’t
spoken, hadn’t asked a single question, and she aimed the last of her words like weapons: “I’m with the New Republic now. I have been since Traitor’s Remorse and I’ve done everything you’ve asked. I’m here and I’m loyal.”

  “You destroyed a world,” Adan said. There was no emotion in his voice. It wasn’t a question, so she didn’t answer it.

  “You almost did it again today,” he said.

  She had no defense against that.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  Adan expelled a soft, breathy sound that became a chuckle, then a boisterous laugh that stretched to the embers in the sky. He raised his arms and declared, “Nothing! I’m going to do nothing.”

  She stared. He dropped his arms and the laughter disappeared like oil combusting into flame. “You’re going to keep leading your squadron,” he said. “You’re going to keep working for me, and you’re not going to question or disobey because I know the truth and I know you don’t deserve the chance you’ve gotten.”

  “Keep leading Alphabet Squadron,” she said, trying out the words as if they were in another language. “Why?”

  “Because you’re not done. You promised me Shadow Wing and you failed to deliver.”

  “They—” Her brain wasn’t functioning right. She wanted to slap herself. She had too many thoughts and they were all forming too slowly. What happened up there?

  “They’re gone. We confirmed Grandmother’s death, and we’re still tallying the TIE kills, but we know the bulk of them escaped during the chaos. I put that on you, Lieutenant—your plan, your mistakes, and your decision to abandon the mission halfway through to shoot down garbage.”

  I saved Induchron, she thought. Or maybe she said it aloud, too soft for him to hear. She wondered if it was even true—the distant city lights told her she hadn’t utterly failed, but maybe she was too quick to claim that small triumph.

  Then she heard Adan’s words echo in her broken skull, bouncing between shards of bone. They’re gone. Her comrades had escaped Pandem Nai. She forced herself to play soldier, to guess at the consequences, and said in a slurred, droning voice: “If Grandmother’s gone, they won’t be the threat they were. They won’t have her. They won’t have Major Keize. They won’t have anywhere to go…”