Shadow Fall (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  One hundred forty seconds to release the entire wing, minus the time for the squadron escorting the cruiser-carrier. She mouthed the words but didn’t say them aloud. There was no guarantee of a full complement, either—everything had changed after Endor—and the presence of bombers and interceptors would alter the timing, too.

  “Shall we attempt to close, sir?” This from a woman at the nav station. “If we intercept before they reach Troithe, we can prevent the TIEs from moving against the planet.”

  “We would also be out of range of Troithe’s defenses,” Captain Giginivek said. He scratched his gullet with short, chipped talons. “Better to sit and wait? Better to sit and wait and fight?”

  Quell didn’t know the captain well—General Syndulla had expressed her fondness for him to Quell, but Quell had never spoken to him directly. She wasn’t entirely sure he would recognize her on sight—which would be to her advantage if Adan’s revelations had reached him, and an impediment otherwise.

  “Whoever’s commanding that Destroyer isn’t a fool,” she said. She stepped out of her corner, shouldering her way through the crowd with sharp, brittle joints. “He’s got to know about Troithe’s defenses, which means if he’s closing he’s doing it for a reason.”

  The captain twisted his neck ninety degrees without rotating his body. One pupil contracted as he focused on Quell. “How do we know he’s not a fool? Hmm?”

  She heard one of the bridge crew muttering her name into a comlink. Someone who had been informed about her? She remembered Lark’s request to the bridge that he be notified when she landed and wondered if he’d said anything more. “He’s survived all these months since Endor. He can’t be a fool,” she said. She smiled mirthlessly. “He could be suicidal, but not a fool. The longer we wait, the more we allow him to set the terms of approach.”

  “I—” The captain twisted his neck to face the nav station again. His beak opened and closed several times before he finished. “—agree. Take us out, Lieutenant. I doubt Troithe’s shields will collapse easily, but I’d rather not risk the Destroyer concentrating fire and punching through to the city. One block destroyed could mean millions lost.”

  That, too, Quell thought, and shrugged away the shame that crept over her.

  The deck juddered more fiercely as the Lodestar left orbit. “To these coordinates,” the captain said, gesturing at one of the tactical maps. “If required, we can retreat back to Troithe and gain the assistance of the planetary defenses.”

  It was a good plan, Quell thought. A prudent plan. Though there were no guarantees in war.

  The crew resumed plotting, now attempting to calculate an intercept course to reach an enemy whose trajectory they couldn’t map with certainty. With scanners still down, point-defense turrets were repurposed as scopes to watch in all directions for approaching ships. Someone announced that, if previous estimates held true, the cruiser-carrier had engaged Meteor Squadron over Catadra.

  A few seconds later, another crew member called: “Troithe starfighters are in the air, coming our way—” Quell frowned, trying to remember how many fighters Syndulla had left behind as a planetary garrison. Certainly not many. “—and two allied ships incoming from Catadra. An A-wing and a Y-wing.”

  The captain snuffled in curiosity but asked no questions.

  Nath Tensent and Wyl Lark, Quell thought. She parted her lips to speak to the captain, but wasn’t sure what to say.

  Something about the battle was strange. Everything about the battle was strange.

  What was she missing?

  V

  Everything goes according to plan, Soran thought. But then, everything always does at the beginning.

  His TIE fighter led the squadron through the Aerie’s wake, his engines’ comforting scream resonating through the craft’s frame. Cold air circulated through his helmet’s oxygen dispenser and condensed moisture in his nostrils. He smelled a faint odor of mildew—he’d forgotten to sanitize the tubes after his last flight.

  Before Devon, he’d never forgotten anything so routine.

  Then again, maybe Devon didn’t deserve the blame. It was Colonel Soran Keize who’d become distracted.

  With the Edict’s jammers at full power, he was limited to optical communications. The nine training drones operating in sync behind him were programmed to follow his engine trail and receive orders by blaster cannon burst pattern. Once the battle began, there was a risk they would become separated as their combat programming took precedence—the computers would still be able to identify Soran as the squadron commander, but only if his ship moved through their field of vision. Lieutenants Seedia and Bragheer, on loan from their respective squadrons, would be necessary to herd the machines into position once the chaos began.

  They were good soldiers, both of them. Bragheer hadn’t hesitated when Soran had warned him that the mission was very likely to end in his death. Seedia had paused, but had asked no questions. She reminded him of Yrica Quell, that way.

  The pale orb of Catadra grew large past the wedge of the Aerie. He scanned the darkness encircling the planet, trying to pick out the glimmer of New Republic reinforcements en route from Troithe. Before activating the jamming signal, the Aerie crew had transmitted estimated enemy arrival time and vector, and Soran processed the data through his targeting computer to narrow his search. He recalled stories from his childhood about ancient astronomers marking off sections of sky with their telescopes as they hunted planets and stars and comets.

  Enjoy flying without scanners or comms, he told himself. Enjoy the peace before the battle. This is the only reprieve you’ll get.

  He almost laughed. The idea appealed, but meditative reflection wasn’t easy to come by.

  He spotted the flash he was looking for—a faint glimmer in the target sector—and gently steered his TIE toward it while the Aerie made for Catadra. He brought up the view from the rear recorder cam on his console, noted with approval that the drones were maintaining formation, and increased speed. It had been some time since he’d needed to calculate distance visually, but he guessed he had half a minute before reaching the enemy position.

  There was a great deal at stake. Yet Soran Keize, ace of aces, had learned after many years how to let the fear of death and failure and responsibility wash off his body and atomize in the stellar radiation of deep space—a lesson he’d often tried to impart to his officers, with varying degrees of success. Gradually he relaxed in his seat. He gripped his control yoke in one hand while the other rested at his side.

  The orders have all been given. You are no longer a commander. You’re merely a soldier, and you know how to fight.

  The thought was unexpectedly pleasing.

  The enemy came into view—not even a full squadron, which was unexpected and suggested three possibilities: The enemy was lying in wait, preparing an ambush somewhere; General Syndulla’s battle group had reduced the size of its fighter complement since Pandem Nai; or the general had retained more resources to protect Troithe than anticipated.

  The last could pose a problem. But if adjustments needed to be made, he would adjust.

  The specks of enemy starfighters became burning sparks, then grew rapidly until he could make out the familiar profiles of X-wings, strike foils spread. They’d seen him and were preparing to break and flank his squadron. He angled to starboard, trusting that the drones would follow, and set course to pass the enemy X-wings at a tangent.

  Had his foes possessed functional scanners or communications, he might have chosen otherwise. But their reactions were uncoordinated—not clumsy, not undisciplined, but imperfect and imprecise. As Soran skirted the enemy formation he saw the lightspeed-swift indecision of the nearest fighter as the pilot debated whether to move against Soran or split away. Soran recognized his opportunity. He ignited thrusters, powered up repulsors, and he felt the crush of g
forces as his TIE turned ninety degrees. He squeezed his cannon trigger, releasing a burst that tore into the enemy X-wing; the nova that followed—that burned a cyan splotch into his vision—assured him that the foe had been destroyed even as he dived.

  The battle was joined.

  Four seconds later he earned his second kill.

  For the first time in months, he had truly returned to the fray.

  CHAPTER 11

  BEHEMOTHS DANCING LIKE PLANETS

  I

  Nath Tensent watched the two battleships arc toward one point, each vessel the shape of a dagger and each powerful enough to polish the surface of a moon. Space distorted all scale, and the Lodestar—positioned so that Nath could see only its narrow edge—seemed little smaller than the massive Star Destroyer stacked with command modules and deflector globes; yet only one of the ships could be numbered among the most technologically advanced weapons in the galaxy. Nath watched the faraway exhaust trails of missiles tearing out of the Destroyer, moving at incomprehensible speeds across the gap between the vessels. He worried the fight would be a lopsided one.

  But that wasn’t his biggest concern. He was thinking about Wyl’s last message.

  T5 had somehow picked up Wyl’s signal through the jamming field (the droid was more talented than Nath liked to give it credit for), and after Nath had spotted the boy’s course change and followed him away from Catadra, T5 had worked furiously to decipher the garbled transmission. Halfway back to the Lodestar, Nath had heard the words:

  Shadow Wing is here.

  They didn’t explain what Wyl was planning—if Wyl was planning anything—or why the boy had decided to leave Meteor Squadron and Chass to return to Troithe. Nath didn’t understand how Wyl knew or what the implications were.

  Shadow Wing wasn’t supposed to arrive for days. So had Adan spilled his guts and revealed the trap after all? Had Shadow Wing come, taken a look at asteroid CER952B, and decided This looks suspicious, let’s just fight? The whole idea had been to avoid facing Shadow Wing in ship-to-ship combat.

  Alphabet had held its own at Pandem Nai. But this felt too much like the first time Nath had encountered the 204th, at Trenchenovu. The time they’d ambushed him and slaughtered Reeka and Mordeaux and Piter and the rest of his squadron.

  It wasn’t an outcome he cared to see twice.

  The Lodestar and the Star Destroyer now dominated his field of vision, each ship loosing turbolaser salvos as it passed alongside the other. The battleships hadn’t reached optimal firing range—the emerald laser streams did little damage through the vessels’ screens and neither ship had brought point-defense weaponry into play—but that wouldn’t matter if Nath and Wyl got between the behemoths. What an Acclamator-class could shrug off could disintegrate a starfighter.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised: Wyl was heading straight into the cataclysm.

  Nath cursed, slammed a fist against a panel slowly rattling itself loose, and considered his options. Whatever was going on, he didn’t have enough information to make a plan. Even loaded with ordnance, he didn’t have enough ship to make a difference in battle. T5 was shouting warnings and the jamming field was still active.

  “Tensent to Lodestar!” he called anyway, thumbing the comm. “Shadow Wing is here. Repeat, Shadow Wing is part of the enemy force.”

  But T5 had been lucky to catch Wyl’s signal from half a klick away in a noncombat situation. With radiation flooding the area from the particle blasts and active deflectors, there wasn’t a blasted hope that the Lodestar would catch his message.

  And though Nath was loath to admit it, Quell was the person he trusted most to figure what Shadow Wing was up to. He wasn’t sure where her brain was at after she’d had her secret exposed, but he needed a way to contact her.

  “All right,” he said, and growled as his aging ship shuddered under his aging bottom. “Get ready, droid. We’re going to try something idiotic.”

  II

  “What the blazes is he doing?”

  Quell wasn’t sure which of the two dozen officers crowding the bridge had spoken, but whoever it was spoke for them all.

  Shortly after the Lodestar had exchanged its first volley with the Star Destroyer, Lark and Tensent’s approaching vessels had veered onto different trajectories. While Lark had gone weaving between particle blasts and begun shooting down enemy missiles, Tensent had closed distance with the Lodestar and was now skirting the battleship’s surface with barely two meters of clearance. The scanners were still inoperable but the cams had tracked him until he’d swept dramatically over the bridge viewport, firing his dual laser cannons three times into the void.

  It was a stunt, and a dangerous one. Tensent was staying well away from the incoming particle fire, but if the Lodestar shifted unpredictably Tensent’s Y-wing would be dashed against the hull. And for all his bluster Tensent wasn’t a man prone to pointless stunts. He had a very good reason for what he was doing.

  So what was it?

  Captain Giginivek was crying out orders as the Lodestar completed one pass and began another, sweeping closer to the Star Destroyer. He’d ordered his comscan officer to find a way to cut through the jamming and contact the Y-wing, but Quell had been among the rebels long enough to recognize rebel thinking—always attempt the impossible, hoping you would somehow succeed. It was a fine ideal but a wasteful plan.

  She edged over to one of the monitor stations and adjusted the controls. A panel barely the size of her palm, intended for internal security monitoring or hull temperature readings, flickered and showed Tensent’s Y-wing as he continued racing across the Lodestar. Again, he fired into nothingness, this time as he passed the forward observation deck. Again, it was three shots—a burst from both cannons, a pause, then two more bursts.

  It was the same timing as the first shots, down to the second.

  The cannon fire was the message, then. Quell dredged the depths of her mind for Imperial codes, rebel codes, means of translating ones and twos into letters or signals. She thought about the system she’d created for Kairos to communicate with the rest of the squadron. (She tried not to think about Kairos.) She concocted a dozen possible interpretations of the message and none of them rang true.

  Tensent moved away from the Lodestar and out of the field of fire. Quell replayed the recording.

  Then she saw it.

  Not one blast followed by two—two particle bolts, one from each of two cannons; then a pause; then four bolts.

  Two-zero-four.

  She straightened, bracing herself on the console as vertigo sought to send her tumbling. The reprieve she’d found from the day’s nightmare in tactical analysis and amateur cryptography was past, and the turn of events that had begun in the hangar seemed to crush her ribs, force out her breath. She drifted through the bridge anyway, crossing toward the captain. “It’s Shadow Wing,” she called. “Tensent is telling us it’s Shadow Wing.”

  Captain Giginivek peered at her, beak hanging open dumbly. She stared back, waiting for a question: What does that mean? or How do you know? or even How do we fight them?

  Instead he said, “If that’s Shadow Wing out there? Then where are the TIE fighters?”

  Quell had no answer.

  III

  What does Blink want?

  The thought echoed in Wyl’s mind, recurring like the chorus of one of Chass’s songs. His A-wing dipped and looped around turbolaser volleys bright as suns; he spun and raced between the land that was the Lodestar and the sky that was the Destroyer; he channeled power from deflectors to thrusters until he felt light-headed from the g forces. He watched the telltale exhaust trails of the Destroyer’s missiles and followed them, squeezing his trigger despite the numbness in his fingers and pulling up, fast as he could, when the warheads detonated beneath him.

  Through it all, he thought
of Blink and the Shadow Wing pilot’s message: You need to turn around and get back to Troithe.

  What did Shadow Wing intend? Whose side was Blink on? What does Blink want?

  He’d chosen to defend the Lodestar because he had nothing else to do. There were no orders forthcoming through the jamming field, but protecting lives was never a mistake; he could do that much.

  And when the missiles stopped coming, as they would soon? When the Lodestar and the Star Destroyer clashed with energy weapons alone, or when the Destroyer finally unleashed its TIEs? Would he know what to do then?

  What does Blink want? Was Blink aboard the Destroyer?

  The brilliance of the turbolaser volleys faded as the two battleships completed one pass and reoriented for another. Wyl steadied his breathing, tensed and relaxed his muscles, then stroked the console as he scanned the darkness. He spotted a glimmer he expected was Nath, but then saw another glimmer behind it, and a third, all coming from the direction of Troithe. The planetary garrison had arrived.

  Wyl swung his ship wide and spotted the crisper profile of Nath’s Y-wing, intact and unscarred. Wyl took comfort in the man’s survival—but most likely, Nath was looking to Wyl for direction.

  “All right,” Wyl murmured. “All right. We’re going back in. We promised to protect them, to see the war through to the end. And we’ll do it.”

  He opened his throttle and pitched upward, flipping and spinning until the Star Destroyer was centered in his view.

  IV

  The TIE pilots weren’t good but they were smarter than most. It wasn’t just the pounding in Chass’s head that made them seem competent, either—even outnumbered, they were putting up a decent fight against the X-wings of Meteor Squadron, using superior speed and maneuverability to break apart New Republic flights and isolate individual opponents. For every TIE that went down (and Chass had taken out two herself—assisted with two, anyway, by strafing the battlefield with all guns alight), an X-wing was torn up alongside.