Even in its native era, the freighter had been nothing worth flying—a low-cost model for in-system hauls, barely cheaper than the more sophisticated models it had been built to imitate. It was a machine reliant on the ignorant and the desperate to earn its keep. She felt a certain kinship with it.
Adan made a sound not quite like words. She saw he was turning his head and she fetched a pouch of water. She held it to his lips, started to tip it back, but he took it from her with shaking hands and managed to drink on his own.
“Quell,” he pronounced, as if testing the name.
She wondered if he was aware of IT-O hovering three meters away.
“Yes,” she said. Then a moment later: “You’re safe.”
He didn’t seem able to hold himself upright. He lay rigidly on the bunk’s thin padding, voice ragged as he asked: “What happened to Kairos?”
Her shoulders stiffened. It wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear, though she couldn’t have said what she did want. “She’s alive. She’s with the medics, but not awake.”
IT-O floated behind her. Adan’s whole body began to tremble, as if in harmony with the droid’s low humming. Then he stilled and whispered, eyes closed: “I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell them about the mission. I told them about the Lodestar and the squadrons but they never asked the right questions—”
“The particulars can wait,” IT-O said. “Rest.”
Adan looked as if he wanted to protest, but did not.
They flew on. Quell remained at Adan’s side, watching him breathe, watching his antenna-stalks gradually uncurl like arthritic limbs finally relaxing. She absently drank the rest of the water pouch and remembered to replenish it afterward. Eventually Tensent emerged from the cockpit, surveyed the room, and seemed satisfied, returning without any questions.
Quell was surprised when she heard Adan utter her name again. She’d thought he’d fallen asleep. “I’m here,” she said.
Adan moistened his lips several times before he asked, clearer than anything else he’d said since his rescue: “How long has it been? Since they took me?”
She gave it thought. “A week now. A week exactly.”
Adan exhaled rapidly in either a cough or a laugh. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Quell had no idea what he meant, and he didn’t speak again.
IV
Two men escorted the black cylinder, one in front to guide its path and one in back steering the repulsorlift controls. Within the antigravity frame the cylinder itself was unmarked, its surface flat save a single panel the size of a human palm. Its edges gleamed like glass, but its surface was unreflective. It reminded Wyl Lark of images he’d seen of pallbearers ushering coffins into graves—the burial rites of strange cultures.
The men were not pallbearers, however. They were healers, medics of the New Republic, and they deserved better than his cynicism.
Go to them, he thought. Tell them of the cures of the Sun-Lamas— But he banished that thought. He had nothing to share that would be of use.
He hoped the specialists aboard the medical transport Bright Vigil would serve Kairos better when they arrived. The droids would tell Wyl nothing of her condition other than that applying bacta—the miracle fluid, capable of everything short of resurrection in a hundred species—had failed, and that keener minds were required. The black cylinder was a suspension tube meant to arrest Kairos’s decay until she could be examined on Chandrila, where the Bright Vigil was bound.
“May the Force be with you,” Wyl whispered as the cylinder disappeared past a row of airspeeders. “May your breath be the breath of the wind.”
He glanced about one last time, distantly hoping to spot Nath or Quell or Chass hurrying down the tarmac. But Nath and Quell were hunting for Adan and Chass was…somewhere.
Wyl was late. He heard an engine loud enough to shake the tarmac and ran until his breath felt like shrapnel and his underarms were soaked with sweat. He leapt onto the Lodestar’s loading ramp moments before it began to retract. One of the engineers cursed at him in disapproval. Sergeant Borys, chief of the ground crews while Ragnell was on Troithe prepping the newly assigned fighter garrison, laughed uproariously.
“You know we’re just moving into orbit?” Borys called from across the bay. “We’re running shuttles to the planet three times daily.”
“If they catch me riding a shuttle, my squadron’ll never let me live it down,” Wyl said. He spared a smile for Borys, then turned to the boxy olive droid rolling his way. T5 belonged to Nath, but the churlish astromech rarely let Wyl pass without a friendly greeting.
He let T5 babble awhile, and stopped to chat with Sergeant Yava-Thine and her nestmate P’i on his way out; he ran into three members of the Lodestar’s bridge crew with whom he exchanged good wishes and news of the war. By the time he made it to his billet he hadn’t forgotten Kairos but his mood had lifted considerably. The galaxy had reminded him that, even without his squadron, he wasn’t entirely alone.
As he sat on his cot he saw that the message light on the console beside his bunk was blinking. He hit a key and checked the display and was surprised to see the sender designated as Caern Adan. The message proper was prefaced with a lengthy set of technical headers:
SECURE (MULTISYNC TYPE 7) ENCRYPTION / TIME-DELAY TRIGGER (SYSTEM LOGIN OVERRIDE / 170 STD HOURS / AUTH LEVEL 5 TO DISABLE) / RECIPIENT LIST HIDDEN
Wyl puzzled over the codes and moved on to the opening text:
TO BE DISTRIBUTED IN THE EVENT OF THE DEATH OR DISAPPEARANCE OF CAERN ADAN, CONCERNING NEW REPUBLIC INTELLIGENCE ASSET YRICA QUELL.
He read on, feeling somehow that he should not.
CHAPTER 9
HIGH-VELOCITY IMPACTS ON A PITTED SURFACE
I
The freighter took two hours to reach Troithe on its voyage from Narthex, moving at a fraction of its top speed in order to avoid straining the wounded Caern Adan. Tensent had argued briefly with IT-O about just how carefully they needed to fly, but Quell recalled being moved to nausea by the shuddering deck plating and agreed that reducing velocity was wise.
She had taken the copilot’s seat by the time they approached planetary orbit and was surprised to see a capital ship register on the sensors. Then she recalled the Lodestar’s scheduled departure from the planet surface. “Hope you remembered to say goodbye to our friends below,” Tensent murmured.
“Why say goodbye when we’ll always stay in touch?” Quell asked. Her mother would have scolded her for the sarcasm but Tensent only laughed.
She contacted the Lodestar and arranged for landing clearance. The flight officer hesitated when she gave her codes—Quell surmised that no one had registered the freighter with the battleship’s crew—but hastened to grant permission once Tensent chimed in and mentioned Adan’s presence. “Sorry for the delay,” the officer said after another pause. “Mister Lark asked to be notified as soon as you returned.”
“Mister Lark,” Tensent echoed. He shook his head as they brought the freighter in. When the vessel had alighted, Quell led the way to the boarding ramp. IT-O remained with Adan, who still slept in the darkened crew quarters.
The hangar was largely empty of Lodestar personnel, except for a ground crew refueling one of the Meteor Squadron X-wings remaining after Syndulla’s departure. Waiting at the base of the freighter’s ramp, however, were Wyl Lark and Chass na Chadic. Both wore civilian attire, which suggested to Quell that whatever was going on lacked real urgency. But Lark’s expression was guarded—almost unthinkably so for the normally animated boy—while Chadic stared toward Quell and Tensent with fatigued eyes, drawing breaths that caused her chest to visibly rise and fall.
“What’s the word?” Quell asked. She saw the tension. She didn’t understand it.
“How’s Adan?” Lark asked.
“Stable,” Quell said. “He’ll need a medical team, but Ito thinks he’ll recover.”
Tensent jutted a thumb toward the ship. “It was exactly what you’d figure—Imps nabbed him. Says the plan’s still on, though.”
“Good,” Lark said. “Good.”
Neither Lark nor Chadic stepped aside when Quell reached the bottom of the boarding ramp. Quell glanced back at Tensent, who shrugged and remained a meter behind her. She looked at Lark and waited.
Chadic uttered a syllable that Lark spoke over. “We know about Operation Cinder,” he said.
“Forget that,” Chadic spat. “We know about Nacronis.”
Quell flattened her expression, burying whatever reaction she’d begun to show. Her field of vision seemed to narrow, darkness encroaching around the edges. “What about Nacronis?” she asked.
“I’m with her,” Tensent said. She heard his feet impact the deck as he hopped off the boarding ramp and stepped to one side, outside the field between Quell and the other two. “What about Nacronis?”
Lark seemed to struggle to look away from Quell. He did so only for an instant, glancing at Tensent in acknowledgment before focusing on Quell again. “She destroyed it,” he said.
“Way I recall,” Tensent replied, casual as a promise, “she tried to stop it.”
Chadic snorted. “Check your messages. Adan rigged a file to go out in case he disappeared—probably because he was afraid she’d shoot him in the head. She wiped out the whole damn planet and lied to us about it.”
“Unless she didn’t,” Lark said. “Unless there’s another explanation.”
All of them fell silent. Quell perceived an opportunity to answer—to explain away her crimes, to use words to suture the weeping wound in her squadron. She searched and found nothing. The opportunity was real, yet she lacked the spirit or mind to take advantage of it.
The moment passed. She said nothing.
Chadic yelled: “She did what the Death Star did—she killed a planet!”
Quell flinched and rocked on her heels. She didn’t step back. Chadic kept talking, her voice hoarser than usual, the hint of a lisp in her inflections. “She smothered whatever-million people in silt, crashed her ship, then pretended to be a defector. She offered to go after her old unit because she thought it would let her get away with it. She should be in prison.” Chadic’s head twitched, like she was impaling an insect on her horns. “So should Adan, probably. So should anyone who signed off on her running a squadron.”
“Adan didn’t know.” The voice was Quell’s, and it took her by surprise; she comprehended the idiocy of her statement. “General Syndulla didn’t know.”
Though maybe she does now.
“Adan should rot,” Chadic cried. “The whole corrupt New Republic can rot if this is how it treats mass murderers.”
The Meteor Squadron ground crew was watching them now, no longer even feigning interest in the refueling operation. If Quell’s shame hadn’t been broadcast to the entire ship yet, there would be no stopping it now. She sought words and seemed to choke on her breath, managing only: “I left, though. I did leave.”
That, too, was a lie by omission.
Lark’s expression remained frozen. “Are you still loyal to them?” he asked. “To Shadow Wing?”
“No,” Quell said. It sounded weak and confused.
“What about at Pandem Nai? When we almost burned away the planet? Did that have anything to do with—”
“No,” she said again, not understanding what he meant, where the question had come from.
“Did that have anything to do with Nacronis?” Lark tried again. “Or with the lies, or with Adan?”
“No,” she said for a third time. “No.” The darkness at the edges of her vision was creeping inward. She thought about Pandem Nai, cringed at the memory, and found the confession she hoped Lark wanted. “It was just a stupid mistake. All of it was a stupid mistake.”
Chadic loosed a sound between a snarl and a laugh, twisting her head away. Lark breathed deeply and asked, “Including Nacronis?”
“Yes,” Quell said.
She heard Tensent murmur Lark’s name, but the boy didn’t seem to hear. His voice broke as he asked, “What if it hadn’t been Nacronis? What if it had been Troithe? Or your homeworld?”
I don’t have a homeworld. I grew up on Gavana Orbital. You know that, she thought, though she recalled their dinner when Lark had claimed she had never talked about her family.
He didn’t wait for an answer. Quell barely heard him as he asked: “What if it had been Polyneus?”
His homeworld.
“Nacronis was the only target,” she said. “No one had even heard of it before the orders came.”
“Maybe,” Tensent said, steadier than Lark or Chadic or Quell, “you should tell us something about why you finally did defect. Adan must’ve trusted your reasons. Or at least the torture droid did.”
Chadic shot a glare in Tensent’s direction. Lark nodded slowly.
“Hell,” Tensent continued, “your motive for jumping ship might’ve been purer than mine. We’ve all got our stories.”
Quell recognized what he was attempting. He’d stepped in to save her once before, long ago, when Adan had threatened to throw her out an air lock. Yet whatever Tensent had learned about her, he didn’t understand how abominably flawed her motives really had been. How it was Major Keize’s decision, not her own, that had saved her from living and dying in Shadow Wing. How she hadn’t been strong enough to continue killing or to walk away.
She gave her head a small shake. Tensent stood watching, prompting her with a stare that became increasingly less subtle until he finally sighed and stepped around Lark and Chadic, taking a place behind and between them.
“Nothing to say, then.” Tensent looked between his two companions. “Sorry, Lieutenant. Silent isn’t guilty but it sure doesn’t look good.”
“You should probably go to the brig,” Lark said softly.
“Why?” Chadic asked. “The New Republic is fine with it all. They’ll probably have us arrested for reading Adan’s message.”
Quell idly wondered about the recipients of Adan’s communiqué. Had he included Syndulla? Would the general come riding back from the Bormea sector, ready to take Quell away to face justice while expressing grave disappointment? More likely, Quell thought, she’d never see Syndulla again—the general would write her off as a mistake and abandon her like garbage jettisoned prior to a lightspeed jump.
“You can summon security if you want,” she said. She reached for the blaster on her hip and spotted Lark tensing as her fingers curled around the grip. She lifted the weapon without bringing it into her palm and tossed it onto the deck, where it clattered loudly. “Not much point in fighting, is there?”
“Probably not,” Tensent agreed. “We’ll sort it all out and see how it looks tomorrow.”
Quell was confident she knew how it would look. Her sins had caught up with her and her life in the New Republic was over. The only question was whether anyone was so horrified by her actions, felt so personally aggrieved, that she could expect to be assassinated while in custody.
She might well die in prison. She decided she wouldn’t go down easily.
She looked from Chadic to Lark to Tensent. She wondered how they would react if she said: I’m sorry.
“The plan will still work,” Quell said instead.
Then sirens began to wail, and no one was paying attention to Quell any longer.
II
Colonel Soran Keize of the 204th Imperial Fighter Wing stood aboard the bridge of the Star Destroyer Edict and watched the whirling cerulean funnel of hyperspace rip away as reality re-formed. The stars that fell into place beyond the viewport seemed strangely bright—he realized they were closer than he
was accustomed to, thanks to the remarkable stellar density of the galactic Deep Core—and the experience as a whole was the opposite of what he had anticipated. The dark heart of Cerberon, the singularity at the center of the system, was visible even from the Edict’s position; but it was not the most magnificent sight in the heavens.
“Scanners have locked onto the Aerie,” Styll declared. The former captain of the Allegiance stood proud beside Soran, as if command of the Edict were an honor—as if the Star Destroyer hadn’t cannibalized his beloved vessel and as if his crew were proven warriors instead of cadets. Soran admired Styll’s spirit and hoped his officers felt the same. “Arrival coordinates are within tolerances. We are thirty seconds behind them.”
“Good,” Soran said. “Proceed with the plan. I’ll expect updates beamed to my ship as long as possible.”
“Understood,” Styll said.
Soran surveyed the bridge once—observed the cadets intent upon their consoles and Nenvez, their instructor, pacing and barking commands; observed Styll fixed in the center, like a mass around which all else orbited; observed the bright stars and the glimmer of planets and the Aerie’s burning ion trail.
Not many days before, he would have heard muttering or been sneered at as a mere adviser to the people he loved.
Godspeed, he thought, and did not say it aloud. He had given his people their mission. He had prepared them. For now, he could give nothing more.
He marched into the turbolift, counting down the seconds. He’d need to maintain a brisk pace to launch on schedule—there were three hundred meters of unpowered, airless deck sections for him to traverse between the Star Destroyer’s bridge and hangar—but he was already in his flight suit and the rest of his squadron was in place. He adjusted his comm system and locked his helmet. “Lieutenant Seedia?” he said. “Is everything set?”
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