Shadow Fall (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  She swore as the TIE wave crested again, filling the gaps between her ship and the nearest Meteor craft. She squeezed off a shot then loosened her grip on her trigger—without scanners, deep in the melee, she was as likely to hit friend as foe. One TIE nearly sheared off her port ion cannon as it passed; another seemed to defy all laws of inertia, making lateral leaps to blast at one X-wing, then another. Particle bolts splashed against Chass’s nearly extinguished deflectors. With a groan, she rotated her foils to try to throw off enemy targeting and dived out of the worst of the fracas, hoping she didn’t pull a TIE on her tail.

  A lilting, unaccompanied voice sang discovery and delight through her speakers. Chass growled and kicked her console; she wasn’t in the mood. Light spilled over her shoulders as a fighter exploded behind her.

  Probably a TIE. Maybe a TIE.

  She wished for once that she could talk to Wyl or Nath, or even Quell. The TIE pilots were mostly rotten technical fliers yet still made the right moves. She’d spotted one of the enemy ships claim multiple kills and wondered if that was the foe’s weak point—if one pilot was carrying a unit full of morons—but she couldn’t track any single ship through the jamming field to be sure.

  Three warning indicators lit on her console. One immediately winked out (rear deflector screens were trashed), one stayed steady (fuel reserves creeping toward zero), and one Chass scrambled to fix (starboard foil distributor was running alarmingly hot). Her ship had seen better days.

  Maybe none of it mattered. Troithe and the Lodestar would take down the Star Destroyer, and Catadra—

  Maybe Catadra was where Wyl and Nath had gone.

  She was pulling up, orienting herself to return to the battle and swallowing bile, when she spotted the cruiser-carrier. It had continued on its course toward Catadra when the fighters had split off to intercept Meteor, but it appeared in no danger of entering atmosphere. Instead, its thrusters burned bright and its path would take it past the planet toward the Cerberon debris field.

  Chass looked above her and saw the ongoing explosive furball like a fireworks display. “You all have fun—you don’t need a bomber to protect, so I’m taking the carrier,” she said, realizing a moment later that she’d failed to thumb the comm controls.

  You really are too much of a mess to fly, she thought.

  But it didn’t matter.

  She settled back, diverted power to her thrusters, and pushed the B-wing in pursuit of the cruiser-carrier. Starlight reflected faintly off Catadra, gently caressing her cockpit with blues and greens. The music changed to a cryptosymphonic house jam using an old Corellian folk tune as a bass line. Chass grudgingly approved and rocked to the beat as she leaned forward in her harness, trying to get a better look at her target.

  A sense of familiarity hit her, as if she’d lived through the fight before—rocketed after the same cruiser-carrier and blasted it in a dream. She swiveled her head, reassessed the situation in confusion, then allowed her eyes to alight again on the carrier.

  She recognized the shattered hull plates over its engines. She recognized the missing turrets and the heat-accelerated discoloration.

  She knew this ship. She’d bombed it in the Oridol Cluster and found it again over Pandem Nai.

  Her jaw ached and she realized she was grinding her teeth. She ignored the fuel warning and boosted thruster power further as the cruiser-carrier sped away. Nothing that was happening seemed right—none of the tactics made sense, none of her enemies seemed real, and Shadow Wing’s carrier shouldn’t have been there at all.

  But though she was short on fuel and shields she hadn’t fired a torpedo today. Sometimes simple answers were best.

  V

  The dance went on. The Lodestar crept closer to the Destroyer with each pass, bringing its point-defense cannons online and loosing sparkling trails of ion light beside denser turbolaser beams. The bridge shook steadily under unrelenting enemy fire, and many of the crew had departed for battle stations elsewhere or harnessed themselves to their stations. Occasionally a New Republic starfighter would flash across the main viewport, navigating the particle storm on its way to target the Star Destroyer’s weaponry.

  The enemy still had not deployed its TIE fighters. Had not deployed Shadow Wing.

  “Divert all shield power to our port screens,” the captain cried. “We can’t sustain this hammering for long.”

  “Sir, if another ship appears or they launch homing missiles—” This from the woman at the nav station. Not your place to speak up, a dull voice in Quell’s mind scolded.

  “If either of those things happens we’ll shift the power right back, hm?” Captain Giginivek waved a talon in the air and stuck his head toward the viewport.

  The captain didn’t care about Shadow Wing. No one but Quell seemed to realize that the battle they were fighting wasn’t the battle they needed to win. If Tensent was right, if the 204th was involved, what they were seeing from the Destroyer was nonsensical—a waste of resources, unless it was something more sinister.

  There were questions in her mind: Why had Shadow Wing come? How had Tensent known? Where were the fighters? But those questions, like the voice that had rebuked the nav officer, were passionless when they should have been insistent.

  Instead, thoughts of Shadow Wing led to the irrational certainty that they had come for her. That her comrades had come to retrieve her now that her secret was revealed and she had no place in the New Republic outside a prison or a tribunal courtroom. Shadow Wing would take her away, return her to the life of duty and family and horror she had escaped, and—

  It even made a sort of sense, if Adan had told them everything.

  —and she would fight with them for the rest of her days, engaged in pointless slaughter until she met her doom.

  “If you’re not going to help, get off the bridge!” someone snarled, shouldering her aside. The metal of the Lodestar groaned and the deck tilted. She fell to her knees and her fingers smashed against a control panel.

  “We may be smaller, but our targeting systems appear superior—they must have sustained damage before the fight,” the captain said. “However, they will still outlast us. Sooner or later we’ll need our fighters back from Catadra or we’ll have to withdraw to Troithe.”

  The pain in her hand drove away the worst of the self-indulgent thoughts. She managed to suppress the rest, and thoughts of Shadow Wing’s plan rose up. “What is happening at Catadra?” she asked. “Do we have any information? Can we get a scope—”

  “Star Destroyer is struggling to hit the X-wings from the Troithe garrison, along with the A- and Y-wing.” The speaker held one ear to his headset; he was linked into the tactical center but ignoring Quell. “If we can give the fighters an opening, they might be able to concentrate fire. Do some real damage.”

  You’re fighting the wrong battle, Quell wanted to tell them, but the captain was replying to the tac center relay and she realized she couldn’t blame him. Her insistence that Shadow Wing was manipulating the situation had little credibility and, worse, little obvious relevance. The Star Destroyer had to be the Lodestar’s focus, because—with all sensors flooded by jamming signals—there was no other focus to be found.

  Unless she could find it.

  She nursed her hand and looked from monitors to system charts to the captain. No one seemed to notice as she hurried off the bridge and headed back toward the hangar.

  VI

  “Congratulations,” Nath Tensent called as two torpedoes struck the Star Destroyer. The destructive cascade of flame that followed lapped at the hull and broke against the command module like waves against a lighthouse. “You win—shields were breaking there after all.”

  The droid squealed in reply. Nath didn’t smile as he dipped his starboard side and surveyed the devastation. He’d done a lot of damage, sure, but a Star Destroyer
was a lot of ship and this Destroyer was in no danger of going down. “We’ll make another pass when you find me another weak point,” he said. “And the kid should be watching out for us, not the other way around.”

  He put his strength into the control yoke, coaxing the obstinate Y-wing away from the enemy vessel. A point-defense cannon flashed and left a trail across his vision, but it was so far off the mark that it seemed impossible he was the target. The enemy’s gunnery was another aspect of the fight that wasn’t quite right—one of too many to add up.

  The droid stuttered an alert. Nath looked above and saw Wyl’s A-wing gliding into a protective position. “See?” he said. “Wyl’s off his game but he still knows his job.”

  Another point-defense beam tore through ether nearer his ship. He winced and swung the Y-wing drunkenly from side to side, attempting to prevent the Destroyer from locking on and obliterating him in a clean burst. The strangeness of the battle wouldn’t save him from a well-timed shot.

  He considered his next destination. He’d done his part communicating with the Lodestar, though he couldn’t be sure his message had reached Quell. He’d stayed with Wyl all the way back from Catadra. He could flee now with a clear conscience, and it didn’t seem a bad idea—he could fake a malfunction, get somewhere safe, and let the rest of the battle play out as it would.

  Grandmother was dead. The people who’d slaughtered his old squadron were dead. If he stuck around for more Shadow Wing, he’d be likely to join Reeka and Piter and the others.

  He had a course back to Troithe plotted and had decided what subsystems to ask T5 to “mysteriously” disable when he saw Wyl’s A-wing dip a wing in his direction and begin turning back toward the Destroyer. The boy was moving slowly—slow enough to make him an easy target but also slow enough for Nath to follow.

  The Y-wing was over a decade old, with half its parts dating to the Clone Wars and the other half salvaged from airspeeders and junkyard freighters, modified by Nath’s own hand. No one would find it implausible that a cooling leak took Nath out of the battle. Even Adan wouldn’t dock his pay for that.

  “One more round,” he muttered and turned to pursue Wyl. “Then we’ll see.”

  VII

  She’d left Meteor Squadron behind. The starfighters had become sparks leaping and spiraling in the distance; then the sparks had faded, with only the occasional flash to suggest at least one combatant on each side remained.

  Then the flashes stopped altogether.

  Chass na Chadic should’ve cared what that meant, but all that seemed to matter was that she could quit checking her aft cam and focus on pursuing Shadow Wing’s cruiser-carrier.

  The enemy vessel’s thruster burn was enough to navigate by, though the craft gained distance from the B-wing with every moment that passed. Truth was, a lumbering assault fighter’s engines weren’t equal to a cruiser-carrier’s. Chass had already closed her strike foils to conserve power and ameliorate heat buildup. She’d shut down the safety warnings on her console. She’d even considered ejecting ordnance to reduce the ship’s mass—rejecting the plan only because, in some dusty corner of her mind, she had a memory of long-dead Fadime telling her in similar circumstances that the math wouldn’t add up.

  Nath had accused her of not wanting to face Shadow Wing. Maybe that was true—she wasn’t ready for Alphabet to win the war and be forgotten like everyone else—but she was absolutely ready to catch her target and spit out enough firepower to smash a small moon.

  She’d had a rotten day. She’d lost what few credits she’d scraped together at Winker’s. She’d been abandoned by her own squadron mid-battle and she still didn’t know why. And Quell—

  Screw Quell. Pretend she’s on that carrier with the rest of the Death Star brigade.

  She increased the volume on her sound system as a Weequay screamed a ballad about living as a Hutt laborer. She’d heard a rumor that the song was a true story, and the Weequay’s last act before his own execution had been to record the tale. Part of her preferred to think of it as a lie.

  The thrusters of the cruiser-carrier were getting brighter again. Somehow she was closing the distance.

  She leaned into the pressure of acceleration, scanning her console for anything that might tell her how she’d managed that particular miracle. Her engine output hadn’t changed. Jammed scanners still showed nothing about her foe. She squinted and tried to make out the shape of the enemy ship beyond the thrusters themselves, and tasted her lip with her tongue as she realized what was happening. She fell back into her seat and gripped her control yoke.

  The cruiser-carrier had hit Cerberon’s debris field and had decelerated in order to maneuver among the asteroids and lost comets and shattered worlds. All Chass had to do now was not slow down.

  Thirty seconds later she was speeding beneath a jagged hunk of metallic rock that reflected the radiance of the Cerberon black hole. Chass shielded her eyes and didn’t stop, didn’t adjust her course as the asteroid flashed past. Her deflectors flickered as she passed through a dust band, microscopic particles bouncing off her screens or converted into crackling plasma. She barely rotated her airfoil in time to avoid scraping a hunk of yellow ice barely larger than her ship; steering out of the way properly would have cost precious seconds.

  The cruiser-carrier blossomed against the darkness until its thrusters became her sun. Without scanners she had no way to know for sure when she was in firing range, but she armed her warheads and respread her strike foils in preparation. She tried to remember the optimal range of a Quasar Fire-class vessel’s turbolasers—not too much farther than the B-wing’s proton torpedoes, she thought.

  Her breath quickened when the first flash of emerald ripped across her vision. The Weequay was singing the final verse of his story. The carrier’s rear guns fired again, releasing enough energy to vaporize her through her soap bubble shields. She didn’t die. Close enough, she decided. Close enough.

  The B-wing jolted as she loosed her torpedoes, the kick from the launch battling its continued acceleration. She fired a second volley and her head whipped hard enough to lash pain down her spine. As she fired a third time she pulsed her ion cannons and watched the radiant energy clusters speed toward the cruiser-carrier.

  She was drifting aport from the off-center recoil and she strained against her harness, looking out the canopy, waiting to see the carrier ignite and its thrusters go dark.

  Her console screeched at her. She smelled smoke and grease as her acceleration dropped to zero.

  The torpedoes and ion blasts sailed beneath the cruiser-carrier and did no damage.

  Out of fuel and out of chances, Chass na Chadic stared into the debris field as her B-wing floated uncontrolled among the junk of the Cerberon system. She screamed louder than her music and pounded her fist against the canopy as a TIE fighter raced by on its way to rejoin its mother ship, too busy to put a lone New Republic pilot out of her misery.

  CHAPTER 12

  LONG SHADOWS OF ASTRONOMICAL OBJECTS

  I

  Quell took long strides through the hangar but didn’t run. If she ran, she would be noticed. If she ran she would tumble onto the deck, skidding and bleeding as the Lodestar shook from turbolaser blasts. She circumvented loadlifters and fuel pumps, remembering a boy she’d once seen crushed in an accident aboard the Star Destroyer Pursuer after rebels had blown a passing asteroid, launching fire and debris into the hull. If she was going to die today—and the odds of that were increasing steadily—she hoped to die a pilot.

  She mounted the boarding ramp of the rusty freighter, hurried through the access corridor to the cockpit, and performed a cursory preflight check before igniting the engine and activating repulsors. With its squadrons already in flight the Lodestar’s hangar doors had been closed for combat, but as a squadron commander Quell had the codes to open them. She inputted the sequence an
d watched with satisfaction as the armored gates slid away to expose the void of space.

  In the Empire no one would have waited to nullify her clearance after an accusation like the one Adan had delivered. But for all the New Republic Navy’s official embrace of rules and protocol, the Lodestar was crewed by the same rebels as always. For once, that fact was in her favor.

  The battleship quaked. The freighter jerked in response, its repulsors whining as Quell attempted to keep it from smashing directly into a bulkhead or, worse, something liable to explode. She smelled ozone—power cells overloading—and ignored the odor, ignited a single thruster and maneuvered the vessel through the aperture and into open space.

  The bay doors were shutting behind her as she set a course away from the Lodestar under the sickly light of turbolaser fire. She was intent enough on her task that she started when a voice asked, “Where are you taking us, exactly?”

  The interrogation droid floated through the cockpit doorway. She’d forgotten about the machine—she’d assumed that it had accompanied Adan to the Lodestar’s medbay. “I have a mission,” she said, which was neither true nor an answer to the question. “Why are you still here?”

  She banked hard, attempting to elude any enemy targeting sensors operating on visual input. The freighter had exited the Lodestar outside the Star Destroyer’s primary field of fire but an eager gunner might still find it. She heard the droid’s servos whirring in midair, then a thud and a harsh, low cry of pain.

  “We’re still here because I was told I shouldn’t walk to the medbay,” Caern Adan hissed.