“Then you won’t have to work for me much longer,” Adan said. “But they are still dangerous, even without a leader. Are you going to tell me they’re not?”
She shook her head. It hurt, but it hurt less than trying to talk.
Adan scoffed and glanced toward the fires above. “You should know New Republic High Command considers this operation a success. Pandem Nai is free, a vital strategic resource is out of Imperial hands, and no matter how close we came, we didn’t wipe out an entire planet’s population. If General Syndulla weren’t already a war hero, they’d call her one now. I expect a commendation along with a reprimand for carelessness.” He gave Quell a final, pointed look before turning away. “Enjoy the victory, Lieutenant. It might be a while before you get another.”
A victory, then. That was the New Republic’s verdict.
She thought about it as she was being half carried to the U-wing by someone she couldn’t see. She wondered if she agreed as she lay in the cargo netting with the torture droid floating above her administering sonic treatments and pumping her full of anesthetics. Victory. It didn’t seem right, yet Quell decided she could accept it.
She didn’t have another choice.
CHAPTER 22
CELEBRATION FOR HEROES
I
The victory party was aboard the Lodestar, and though a handful of officers had tried to forestall it—there’s still cleanup to be done, they said; Pandem Nai may contain pockets of Imperial resistance, they said—they’d been unable to halt the eruption of exuberant forces from the Krayt Hut all the way to the hangar. For one delicate moment, when the Lodestar’s captain had marched snarling through the corridors, it had appeared possible that the party might be snuffed out; but then someone yelled, “The general says she’ll allow it!” (a shout that was answered with “General Syndulla has surrendered!”), and the celebration had become unstoppable.
Wyl Lark always enjoyed a party, and he felt buoyed by the joy of the others on the battleship. He passed through the crowd, embracing strangers and toasting mechanics seated happily in the tight corridors of the vessel. He heard a roar come from the direction of the turbolift and someone yelling, “To the heroes of Pandem Nai!” and he smiled as he caught a glimpse of the New Republic special forces team that had planted the explosives on the orbital station.
The specforce troops marched past him and he pressed his back against the wall to allow them passage. They were nearly gone when one—a yellow, leathery-skinned humanoid with twice Wyl’s body mass—turned back and grabbed Wyl by the shoulders, grinning a wild grin. “Chass’s buddy!” the man cried. “Alphabet boy!”
“Alphabet boy,” Wyl agreed with a smile. The man’s breath was noxious, and he was leaning against Wyl as much as embracing him. Yet he exuded pure delight, and for that moment Wyl loved him.
“You all did good out there,” the man said. “And hey—hey! You keep it up like that, and maybe someday they’ll let you back in the starfighter corps! Get you out of Intelligence and let you work for a living—”
Wyl gave the trooper the gentlest of shoves, which sent him sprawling back into the arms of his brethren. The yellow-skinned man laughed in delight, and Wyl spent the next hour being bodily dragged by the specforce troops around the Lodestar, alternately mocked and praised.
He didn’t mind. The troops had earned their accolades, and all of it felt familiar. It reminded Wyl of Riot Squadron and the days after the Battle of Endor—and if it troubled him that the most joyous times he could remember were among warriors instead of the people of Home, he had a thousand distractions in front of him to carry his thoughts elsewhere.
The celebration showed no sign of stopping by the time he slipped away on his own again. He was hunting now, scanning the crowds for familiar faces he’d barely seen since the chaos and aftermath of the battle. It was foolish, he knew, to worry—nothing had changed since he’d landed his burning, rattling ship in the hangar—but it felt like a loss to be without his squadron.
The sound found him before the sight: an electronic squeal and a series of loud pings. He spun around in the hangar and crouched almost in the same motion in front of the antique C-series droid. “Hey!” Wyl called in delight, and the droid hobbled forward. It smelled like smoke, and much of its paint had turned black. “You doing okay? You got a little singed, huh?”
“What’ve I told you about talking to the droid?” a voice asked.
Wyl rubbed a fingertip through the charred paint, dislodging flakes. “It never ends well,” he said. “How are you, Nath?”
Nath Tensent, like his droid, had been burned—the red-and-white lattice of a fresh scar ran up his neck and to the right side of his chin. The mark was bold and angry now, but Wyl suspected it would fade with time and medical bacta. “I’m all right,” Nath said. “Got off easy next to everyone but you.”
“I was luckiest,” Wyl agreed. The warmth in his smile didn’t reach his voice.
“Nah,” Nath said. “You’re blasted good, is what you are.” He clapped Wyl’s shoulder with a heavy paw.
They drifted through the hangar, discussing their comrades. Quell, Wyl had heard, had been evacuated to the medical frigate, while Nath had seen Chass’s electrical burns being tended aboard the Lodestar. Kairos was alive and unhurt (so far as Wyl could tell)—Wyl had seen her in passing, but didn’t expect to encounter her at the celebration. The only fatality of the squadron was, perhaps, Quell’s astromech unit. “No way the ship can be salvaged, from what I hear,” Nath said. “Maybe there’s enough left of the droid to rebuild. Memory cores are durable.”
“That droid was smart,” Wyl said. “It could’ve found a way to preserve itself.”
“Could’ve.”
“It must’ve helped her, too. It must’ve known what she was doing over Induchron—”
Nath laughed. Wyl cocked his head and then understood as the larger man smiled apologetically. “Could’ve died a hero,” Nath said. “When we know for sure, if the news is bad? We’ll drink to the tin box then.”
You’re more sentimental than you pretend, Wyl thought, though he said nothing of the sort.
When conversation about their colleagues faltered, they turned to talking about their ships; then to discussing the other celebrants, swapping rumors about romances among the ground crews and rivalries among the specforce operatives; then, finally, to stories of older battles and older celebrations. Wyl spoke of Jiruus, and what should have been his last night with Riot Squadron. Nath spoke of the day he was accepted to the Imperial flight academy.
They found their way to a seat atop one of the maintenance cranes. Their legs dangled off the crane’s arm, six meters above one of Meteor Squadron’s X-wings, and—out of earshot of the other celebrants at last—Wyl broached the subject that had been on his mind since finding T5. “You went off comms out there for a while,” he said. “Even before the station started burning. You tried to make it look like you didn’t, but you did.”
He expected Nath to say: There was a lot of interference. Or maybe: What are you blathering about? I was talking, same as you.
But instead Nath rocked his head forward in a slow nod and didn’t answer.
“Whatever happened out there—” Wyl paused and tried to meet Nath’s gaze, but Nath was staring out at the hangar doors. “—you should’ve trusted me. I was your wingmate. You need someone besides Tee-five to watch your back.”
Nath grunted, abruptly glanced Wyl’s way, and asked, “How’d you know?”
Wyl smiled wryly. He thought of the bombing runs they’d made together—Nath’s disappearance from his scanner and his intermittent silence. “You’re a good liar, Nath. But you have to at least try.”
Nath laughed loudly, and the sound echoed through the massive room. “Fair, on both counts. But you? You’ll get yourself killed one of these days. Next time wait
for me before running off to save lives, huh?”
“Just be there when I call,” Wyl said.
Nath clapped him on the back. Wyl nearly fell from the crane. “So what’s that mean for you?” Nath asked. “You were on your way out when this whole thing—Shadow Wing and all—started. Hellion’s Dare caught wind of Pandem Nai and now we’ve got the planet. You think you’re done?”
“Shadow Wing’s still around,” Wyl said.
“Not much to it, though.”
Wyl shrugged. “I don’t know if Adan will see it that way. I’m pretty sure Quell won’t.”
“Probably not.”
Wyl tapped at the metal of the crane, looking out at the crowd. “If the squadron isn’t disbanded—if Adan and Quell and the others stay—” If you and Chass stay. “—then yes, I think I’ll stick around. There’s lots to do, isn’t there?”
Nath nodded somberly. Wyl regretted his words like they were lies.
The mission of the Hellion’s Dare was over. Riot Squadron’s mission was over. Shadow Wing was still out there, but Wyl had never much cared for revenge.
Yet he’d been too long with his new comrades, now. He saw the greed and cruelty in Nath—his friend Nath—and how likely they were to get the man killed. He saw the desperation in Chass and the obsession in Quell. Even Kairos, for all her mystery, didn’t seem to be a healthy woman.
How could he leave them, if Alphabet Squadron went on? What would become of them?
He’d been waiting to go Home for a long time. For their sake, he could wait awhile longer.
II
“What’s next for you, then?” Chass na Chadic asked, taking a swig of her ale.
By way of response, the woman sitting across from her in the cramped closet of Ranjiy’s Krayt Hut pushed six cards onto the table. Chass looked from the cards to the woman’s gloved hands and up to her helmeted face before grunting irritably. “Better answer than I expected,” she admitted, and tossed her own cards down. Kairos had won the round.
Chass had run into the U-wing pilot while wandering through the celebration and asked her to play when two Vanguard Squadron flyboys had slipped away from the card table. Chass hadn’t really expected Kairos to agree, let alone be invested enough to win.
Yet for the first time, she found Kairos’s presence soothing. The cryptic creature who murdered stormtroopers with obscene intensity brought a calm to the chaos of the party.
Chass dealt more cards. She scratched the bandages wrapped around her right arm. They played another round. Kairos won again. Chass could hear the conversations of thirty soldiers around her, but they mixed together into noise. In the absence of words, unwanted thoughts crept from the dark in the back of her brain toward the front. She tried to drown them in ale, to no avail.
“How did we survive out there?” she asked. It wasn’t the question she wanted to ask, but it was close. “I mean, we shouldn’t have, should we? There were five of us, and we went up against all of Shadow Wing. Hound Squadron and Riot Squadron both got killed.”
Hound Squadron had died. The Cavern Angels had died. Before that, far away from Chass, Jyn Erso had died.
But Chass na Chadic kept living.
Kairos took the deck of cards, sorted and arranged them, then placed the deck in front of Chass.
“You going to tell my fortune with a sabacc deck?” Chass asked.
Kairos pushed the deck closer to Chass. Chass laughed throatily and leaned back in her chair, lifting the front legs off the floor and feeling her scalp touch the wall behind her. “Trick question,” she said, “because I don’t have a damn fortune.”
Jyn Erso had died stopping the Death Star. Hound Squadron had died protecting the Hellion’s Dare.
Chass na Chadic kept living. But never to do anything useful.
She took another swallow of her drink. “You know Wyl was at Endor? With Skywalker and all of them. He treats it like it was nothing and I just—” She flicked her fingers, sending drops of condensation onto Kairos’s visor. Her lips worked, her mouth opening and closing.
She wanted to confess. She wanted to dredge the words from her skull and look at them in the soft, still light of Kairos’s silence, expose them for what they were.
But she couldn’t, and she slapped the bottom of the ale bottle onto the table instead.
They sat like that awhile. Chass absently shuffled the deck until Kairos tapped Chass’s wrist with a gloved finger and pointed upward.
“What?” Chass asked.
Kairos, predictably, did not answer. Chass screwed up her face, trying to understand. She began to process the noise of nearby conversation and behind it—loud but barely audible under the din—the sound of music. Another moment passed before she recognized it as the deva pop she’d played while the world had fallen apart. The song she’d blasted through the comm as she, Wyl, Kairos, and Shadow Wing had fought together to cut away the tanker’s gas pods.
“Is this mine?” she asked. Had she left the datachips in the cockpit? Had the ground crew been digging through her stuff?
Kairos sat implacably. The music kept playing—the awful, upbeat, sentimental song that had carried her through her final battle over Pandem Nai. The stillness was gone, and the desperation and despair crawled back to their nest behind Chass’s brain. She could feel them, but the song suppressed their life.
The crowd shifted as someone pushed his way toward the closet and the card table. Wyl Lark emerged, boyish as ever and unmarked by the battle. He called Chass’s name, and she smirked before rising to embrace him.
“I’ll kill you if you stole my music,” she murmured in his ear.
“Blame one of the ground crew,” Wyl said, pretending not to study the bandages around her arm.
“Come on,” Chass said. “Stay with us. Be our human buddy. We’re going to celebrate like we saved the galaxy.”
Maybe her heart wasn’t in it. But for the moment, it was the best option she had.
III
Nath could’ve spent the night mingling, polishing his reputation until the last of the tarnish was gone. He could’ve ingratiated himself with the specforce troops and bought a few favors for down the line. Instead he stayed close to Wyl and Chass and Kairos. He watched them dance—Wyl and Chass separately at first, then Wyl and Chass together, and finally, to his bemusement, Chass and Kairos. He bought the drinks when they dropped into their seats sweating and dehydrated, and watched a video feed of the celebrations taking place on Pandem Nai. At least the locals are grateful, Nath thought, though he supposed the Imperial loyalists were staying quiet.
When General Syndulla found her way to the Krayt Hut, Nath invited her over and bought her a drink, too. “You turned a disaster into a victory,” she told them. “That’s what you should remember about this day.” Nath wasn’t sure he believed it—he wasn’t sure she believed it—but he appreciated her effort.
The five of them bickered and joked. He was surprised by how much he enjoyed the company of his squadron mates and Syndulla. Surprised he forgot why he was trading war stories with a hero of the New Republic and surprised by how natural it all felt.
He saw Chass weep at one point as she returned from the bathroom. He saw a faraway cast to Wyl’s gaze as General Syndulla spoke about her youth on Ryloth; her accent slipped into something less refined and more provincial as she worried over what would become of her homeworld in the new galactic order.
They talked late into the night. Kairos was the first to depart. Not long after, Wyl and Chass rose to escort an intoxicated specforce trooper back to her bunk, and Nath was left alone with the general. He watched his comrades go, then asked, “So what do you really think?”
“About?” Syndulla asked.
“The fight today. Turned a disaster into a victory is fine for them, but don’t tell me that’s r
eally the lesson you’re taking away.”
Syndulla shook her head, her head-tails swaying. “You’re a suspicious man, Nath Tensent. Almost as bad as your commanding officer.”
Nath grinned broadly. “How is Adan? Haven’t had a chance to chat with him since landing.”
That was true, although Nath had noticed Adan’s transfer of credits into Nath’s account. Payment for digging up dirt on Quell. So far as Nath was concerned, that meant his days working for the spy were over.
Unless Adan made him another offer, of course. He still needed to make a living.
“I know he went out to rescue Lieutenant Quell himself,” Syndulla said. “Since then, my guess is he’s been in contact with New Republic Intelligence and watching for whatever happens next. One of the perils of spy work—it’s always busiest before and after the big fight.”
Nath nodded. He went out to rescue Lieutenant Quell himself. He felt a twinge of—if not guilt—sympathy pain. From what he’d seen in Quell’s file, he didn’t imagine that encounter had been friendly. Adan had everything he needed to put a knife to Quell’s throat.
Nath didn’t much like Yrica Quell, but she hadn’t killed his crew and she’d fulfilled her promise: helped him reach Shadow Wing and helped him murder Colonel Shakara Nuress. He didn’t owe Quell. He didn’t care to see her hurt, either.
Not your problem, he told himself. Can’t worry about all of them.
He shook the thoughts away. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“About today’s lesson?” Syndulla sat back, unfazed by Nath’s persistence. Nath nodded and she wrinkled her nose before answering, “We’re still learning. Not about Pandem Nai, but about all of it.”
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