He did not intend to chase rumors with Colonel Madrighast.
His people were committed. They had a task they believed in—one that would test them, challenge them as soldiers sought to be challenged while offering the tangible prize of their tormentors’ defeat.
Pursuing dreams of a reborn Empire would destroy them as surely as it had Shakara Nuress. Perhaps his subordinates would disagree; but Colonel Soran Keize was in command of the unit now.
II
Chass na Chadic was drinking a teensy-tiny bit too much, but at least she wasn’t doing it alone. She’d made new friends. Friends of varying shapes and sizes, friends committed to seizing her B-wing by hook or crook, but friends nonetheless. “Fifty on blue,” she said, slapping her hand down on the table. “And bring me something fizzy.”
The establishment was called Winker’s—a cantina, gambling den, trading post, and fuel stop rapidly built in the ruins of the garrison-world Verzan on the outer fringes of the Cerberon system. After Syndulla’s battle group had obliterated most of Verzan’s airless surface, an entrepreneurial pirate named Edineezious Winker had taken advantage of the open real estate. Since Verzan was too small to retain an atmosphere, Winker’s magnetic field surrounded the totality of the rock’s population—a permanent staff of two dozen ready to service a visitor complement of a hundred or more.
Most of the people enjoying Winker’s hospitality were stranded—fuel was in short supply, only a few traders still ran local routes to Troithe and Catadra, and most anyone with access to hyperspace travel was long gone. But the gambling tables were open for business and the guests eager to pass the time.
“Fifty on blue,” the computer agreed. Chass swore as the blue mark shifted to gray. She didn’t know the game well, but she knew that wasn’t good.
“Pity, pity, terrible pity,” said the Vurk to her right. The reptilian man loomed over her by a full half meter, his crest painted in intricate crimson-and-azure whorls. He enunciated too well for someone with so many teeth. “Your mind is elsewhere tonight.”
“Spiraling down the black hole, is what it’s doing,” Chass said. Another drink had appeared on the table before her. She grasped it in one hand, attempted to play a fresh mark with the other, and was rebuked by the computer. She slapped the button three times before she realized it wasn’t her turn. “What was I saying before?”
“Something about friends.” The synthesized voice came from the respirator mask of the Kel Dor to her left. “But please focus—”
“I don’t need to focus!” Chass spat. She felt her drink splash her wrist as she swung the cup away from her body. “And I’m not here because of my friends. My friends are fine.”
The computer indicated a new round had begun. Chass stared at the Kel Dor’s respirator and thought of Kairos. The strange woman was floating in a bacta tank somewhere, if she’d been lucky enough to warrant the treatment despite the medicine shortage. Or maybe she was bleeding on a surgical table under a rusty scalpel droid.
“I’m not worried about her,” Chass said. She took a swallow of her drink and felt tingling down her throat and into her stomach, where bubbles danced eagerly above her intestines. “Freak doesn’t talk much but she’s tougher than she looks. So’s—” She began laughing. “So’s Kairos.”
She missed them. Quell and Kairos both. Somehow they made her feel safe. It was disgusting, but real.
“Perhaps you should bring your friends here sometime,” the Vurk said. “We’d be happy to take their credits.”
“They’re working,” she said. “There’s a big project going on. Real big and real nasty—but you can’t trick me into talking about it, because it’s secret.”
“I wouldn’t dream of trying,” the Vurk said. Probably lying, Chass thought. “Bring them here after their project, then. Celebrate together.”
She bared her teeth and slammed her cup against the game table, but her voice was soft. “There’s not going to be an after. They’re not going to be my friends after. Don’t be an idiot.”
That was why she was at Winker’s, after all. Why she’d progressed from spending her evenings drinking alone to drinking with the infantry and refugees to flying to the fringes of Cerberon: so she didn’t have to think about what came after Shadow Wing.
Screw Wyl Lark, she thought, suddenly furious. If she’d died in the Oridol Cluster or Pandem Nai, she’d have died a hero. Only losers and fools died now. Losers, fools, ground troops, and Kairos.
She saw that they’d somehow played another three rounds. She wasn’t sure what she’d spoken aloud. “The time has come,” the Vurk said. He raked his claws gently down her forearm, drawing pale lines and demanding her attention. “The set is complete and payment is required.”
Chass stared blankly at the Vurk. “The money’s in the pot. Don’t mess with me.”
“You didn’t have the money,” the Kel Dor interjected. “You promised your ship instead.”
She felt onlookers and other gamblers shuffling behind her. Some were edging away; others were blocking her exit. “That’s garbage,” she said, emphasizing the words with another slam of her empty cup. “You think I’m that out of it? I paid you!”
Doubt crept into her brain. She smashed it back down.
“I will take your ship,” the Vurk said. “It is what I am owed and I will not remain here another month—”
Chass felt her knuckles dig into her wrist as her fist hit the immovable wall of the Vurk’s body. She followed the first punch with a second, then a third, both equally ineffective. The next moment she was airborne and her ribs hurt, and she realized she’d been hoisted by the Vurk and tossed backward into the crowd.
She braced herself, ready to feel her skull crack against the pocked metal floor. Instead she fell into a cushion of flesh that gave beneath her, then buoyed her as whoever she’d smashed into lifted her upright. “Come on,” a voice snapped, and a hand clasped her raked arm.
She didn’t want to run. She tried to pull away. When she saw the Vurk barreling toward her, however, she followed her rescuer’s lead and they dashed between patrons, out the door of the gambling lounge, and into the narrow alleys that joined the outpost’s shanties. She caught a glimpse of a humanoid body dressed in checkered swatches—a style she vaguely remembered seeing on Troithe—and somehow rushed past her rescuer onto the cracked-glass field of the landing pad.
She smelled ozone and heard the electric ripple of three stun shots. She spun on her heel, trying not to fall as she did, and saw her rescuer standing above the body of the Vurk.
“What was that?” she asked, pushing past the checkered man to reach the Vurk. “No one asked you to kill him for me!”
“Stunned only,” the man said.
“You know how a Vurk’s anatomy works? You know what three stun shots will do to one?” She gave the man another glance, confirming her suspicions: Human. Late middle-aged, red-faced with burn scars across his cheeks and scalp.
She looked back at the Vurk. He was still breathing. She was almost disappointed, but the human didn’t correct her.
“You should leave Winker’s,” he said. Chass swayed and corrected the imbalance. “I suggest you set your controls to automatic pilot.”
Chass snorted and glanced across the nearly empty landing pad to the B-wing. “You don’t want anything?”
“In your heart, you’re already among us.” He spoke like what he was saying made sense. “I’ve seen you here before. You long for answers. For fellowship.”
Chass’s brain wasn’t working right. She wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to understand. “I don’t want to sleep with you,” she said.
“Nor I with you,” the man said. “But if you ever wish to find answers, I invite you to find us. The Children of the Empty Sun welcome anyone prepared to put aside weapons and violence for the w
ill of the Force.”
Chass spat on the ground. “You’re the local cult?”
“Call us what you like. We provide meaning and sustenance—spiritual and physical—to the people of Catadra and the other worlds of Cerberon. Through the Force and our leader, we—”
She landed one solid punch to his throat and he fell coughing. Chass marched to her starfighter, fumbling her way inside and wishing he’d let the Vurk eat her alive.
For the rest of the flight home, she thought of her mother and all the cults she’d known in her life. She hoped to wake up with the memory of Winker’s long gone.
III
Catadra’s moon was called Narthex, and though it had once been inhabited it had been left to fast-growing crystalline brambles called dirkweed for the better part of a millennium. The weed’s dull, slate-blue hue seemed to tinge the atmosphere, as if the whole world were obscured by campfire smoke.
Finding the hideout where Quell believed Caern Adan was being kept had not been overly difficult. The Utai at the Catadra cantina had led Quell and Nath to a gaunt woman named Sarvada Dream, who was romantically involved with Adan’s kidnapper—a nephew of the smuggler flushed out by Alphabet’s operation in the Cerberon debris field. Sarvada confirmed that Adan’s buyers were Imperials recently returned from some special mission near the system’s black hole. After questioning from Nath, she’d pointed the way to an Aleena operating a combination soup stand and illicit comm station; the Aleena admitted to regularly relaying in-system data to an ancient observatory on Catadra’s moon.
After a painstaking covert approach, they’d landed half a kilometer from the observatory. IT-O stayed with the freighter, and once Quell and Nath had picked their way up the bramble-ridden slope they were able to see that the structure was little more than a bunker embedded in the crumbling top of a mesa. “Would’ve been a sorry hiding spot in the worst days of the Rebellion,” Tensent observed, peeking above a pair of boulders and avoiding the cutting edges of the dirkweed. “Probably not more than a dozen Imps, if that, but”—he shrugged—“could still be tricky, under the circumstances. Might need to call the working group.”
Quell could count exactly how many firefights she’d been in outside a cockpit. She knelt beside Tensent, back aching. “No strike team. I want to do it now, and I want to do it alone.”
“You want to get killed?” Tensent asked, as if it were the same to him either way.
“Right now, we need stealth more than firepower. It’s better this way.”
Because if Adan was inside, they’d been talking to him. If they’d been talking to him, they knew the truth, and truth spread like a virus.
Tensent said nothing and didn’t bother to hide his disbelief.
“We have to get him out before he tells them about the trap. About Shadow Wing,” she said, which was very nearly true.
Tensent cast a glance behind him and down the slope toward the freighter. He lowered his voice, but his tone remained casual. “If he’s in there, no guarantee he’s intact. Or if he’s intact, no guarantee he comes back out.”
Quell furrowed her brow, watching Tensent and trying to decipher what he was saying.
“If we bring Adan’s corpse back to Troithe,” Tensent said, now smiling tightly, “who’s to say when or how it happened? But you will get killed if you go in solo.”
She felt cold sweat trickle down her aching back.
Tensent knew. He knew something, and he’d given her permission to cover up the crime.
“I’m getting him out,” she said, and looked to the observatory. “You can watch my back.”
* * *
—
She wouldn’t murder Caern Adan, but she was ready to be a murderer.
She’d borrowed more than just the freighter from New Republic Intelligence and more than a sidearm from the Lodestar’s armory. A handheld scanner revealed the presence of civilian-grade perimeter alarms arrayed outside the observatory; she disabled two by hand, stabbing dirkweed through cracks in the plastoid casing and slicing open her left forefinger in the process. She stanched the bleeding with a sleeve and waved Tensent forward.
They’d spied the single stormtrooper patrolling outside and agreed to a plan: Quell would ready the portable communications jammer, thumb hovering over the activation trigger, while Tensent neutralized the threat. “You want to be first through the door,” he’d said, “that’s fine with me—but can you swear you can take one in the open?”
She couldn’t. She watched as Tensent swaggered toward the trooper while the Imperial’s back was turned, somehow making not a noise on the gravel-strewn terrain. She nearly forgot to squeeze the jammer as Tensent casually opened a vibroknife and swung it upward, blade sliding between the stormtrooper’s helmet and chest plate. He did it so carelessly, she was sure he’d done it before.
She scurried to the corpse and saw the grime on the trooper’s once-pristine armor. Whatever unit she faced was as run-down and ragged as the rest of the Empire.
Tensent shrugged and gestured her to go next.
A spectrum-scope suggested no one immediately inside the observatory entrance. Quell guessed the building contained a single main room and a few closet-sized alcoves. She attached an explosive to the front door and cleared a trail through the dirkweed to the back of the structure, where she sought a ventilation shaft. She found none, waved an increasingly impatient Tensent over, and allowed him to hoist her to the low roof where she clambered to the telescope. The lens, she was pleased to see, was broken.
She withdrew a gas canister from her satchel. She didn’t expect it to do much good—cyclo-dioxis was invisible, nonlethal, and efficiently neutralized by a stormtrooper’s helmet filters—but she dropped the canister into the telescope anyway and listened to it bounce and rattle and smash through the far lens. Then she donned her own respirator and activated the release switch, listening to the calming aerosol hiss.
Moments later someone attempted to open the door. The explosive activated automatically and the second stormtrooper died with a face full of shrapnel and a charred torso.
Tensent was firing as Quell slid off the roof to the side of the door. She spun, aimed her weapon, and shot two unarmed stormtroopers still attempting to secure their helmets. The remaining soldiers were clad in nightshirts, crawling toward the ruined doorway through the cyclo-dioxis haze if they were moving at all. Quell looked into their bloodshot eyes, their cheeks gaunt with malnutrition, and executed them one by one. She found two more asleep on cots in the first alcove, bandaged skin stinking of rot and unguents. She shot these, too, ignoring the shaking in her hands and knowing that General Syndulla and Wyl Lark and maybe even Chass na Chadic would have done otherwise.
They didn’t have the secrets she did.
When she sensed a presence behind her she barely thought to move. Instinct saved her from a rifle smashing her scalp; instead the heavy barrel smacked her shoulder, pumped her arm full of pain, and she dropped to her knees. She pivoted as fast as she could, hoping to catch her foe by the knees, but she barely tapped white-clad shins.
Above her was a stormtrooper—unhelmeted, but wearing a respirator mask. The woman was aiming her rifle at Quell; Quell fell back and fired as her enemy did. She felt heat and smelled her own burning hair as a particle bolt impacted to the right of her head. Her pistol pulsed in her hands as she fired wildly. In another instant the stormtrooper fell forward onto Quell, and Quell lay beneath the corpse, breathing heavily.
When she managed to stand, she found Adan unconscious on a cot in the second alcove. His lips were crusted with blood, and a bruise rendered the left side of his face almost unrecognizable. One of his antenna-stalks was extended farther than the other and was bent crookedly. Quell found her eyes growing wet and wiped the moisture away, fearing its interaction with the cyclo-dioxis gas.
She
left Adan where he was and checked the portable computers in the main room. She could access only one—the others were locked or damaged—but all she found were maps of the innermost sections of the Cerberon debris field. She recognized none of it, could make no connection to the CER952B asteroid or the trap set for Shadow Wing.
She laughed, nearly choked, when her first instinct after reviewing the files was to shoot the computer screen. She wondered if that was the way of all troops on the ground, or only the amateur murderers.
* * *
—
The droid arrived five minutes after the shooting stopped. It hovered over Adan attentively as the gas cleared and Nath Tensent flew the freighter closer to the observatory. Between Quell and Tensent they managed to carry Adan without much jostling. They set him gently in one of the bunks in the freighter’s crew quarters.
Tensent had said nothing about the bloodshed in the observatory and now said only, “I’ll get us moving. Man probably needs more attention than we can give here.”
“I can identify no internal injuries,” the droid said. “I believe his interrogators saw value in preserving his life.”
“You’d know,” Quell said.
Tensent shrugged and sauntered into the access corridor, heading for the cockpit.
She knelt by Adan’s side as the deck shuddered and the freighter lifted off. The droid injected him with a series of watery mixtures and subjected him to sonic pulses that had no obvious use but caused the intelligence officer to groan in his sleep. “His bioreadings are stable,” the droid eventually announced. “He is malnourished and dehydrated but his injuries are not life threatening.”
“I think they were all malnourished and dehydrated,” Quell said. She wondered how long the Imperial unit had been on the run. Certainly the moon hadn’t had much to offer in the way of supplies.
The droid did not speak. Quell felt the freighter exit Narthex’s atmosphere—felt its trembling even out and heard the engine whine downshift to a groaning pulse as the vessel diverted power from heat shields to thrusters. Somewhere, a sealing bolt dropped onto deck plating.
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