Quell swiveled her neck and saw the intelligence officer leaning heavily against the doorframe behind IT-O. He looked as bruised and gaunt as the last time she’d seen him, but his expression was focused and alert. “You were supposed to be gone,” she said, and her voice sounded like a child’s.
“I’m not,” Adan said. “Tell me what’s happening.”
She delayed answering long enough to bring the ship around, attempting to position the Lodestar between herself and the Star Destroyer. Replies flashed through her brain and she struck them down one by one. Adan didn’t need to know about Lark and Chadic and Tensent confronting her in the hangar. He didn’t care about her, or what was going to happen to her in the New Republic.
“It’s Shadow Wing,” she said, eyes on the viewport. “I’m not sure how or why, but they’re attacking Cerberon. They ignored the trap. I think I can find their weak point.”
She wondered if he would ask more. It told her something about the severity of his pain when he didn’t. “Fine,” he said. “Do what you have to. I’ll see if I can get an escape pod working.”
I doubt it, Quell thought. She considered arguing, asking if he wanted to return to the Lodestar, but Caern Adan had never been shy about demanding what he felt he deserved. Half delirious or not, he’d made his choice.
She heard him shuffle back into the access corridor. The hum of the interrogation droid remained. “If you want to help me, then help,” Quell snapped. She thumbed a switch on the console, flipping it up and down until the secondary display came to life. “Otherwise, go.”
The interrogation droid went.
Quell brought up a system chart and adjusted her heading again, accelerating until she was en route to the debris field and away from the clashing battleships. Warning lights appeared periodically, but they were nothing she hadn’t seen during the flight to Catadra.
Two minutes later she glimpsed TIE squadrons heading her way from the debris field. She wasn’t surprised at all.
II
Chass na Chadic stared into the burning eye of Cerberon as high-pitched scatterbop played and her B-wing drifted through the debris field. (No, she corrected herself, not through the debris field. We are the debris now.) She fingered her weapons trigger, waiting for the battle to return to her; for a TIE fighter to fly into her field of view.
No TIE fighter came. Her fuel meter did not change.
Her breathing quickened. She began to wonder what would happen if the New Republic lost and no one came to find her.
III
The TIEs swept in without a battle cry or a cold wind to herald their approach. They were dozens strong, turning the Lodestar like it was a sailing ship caught in a current, forcing it to expose its weakened screens to the full fury of the Star Destroyer lest it be vivisected by the Imperial squadrons. The TIEs cut down X-wings and chased Wyl Lark through the battleships’ killing field, forcing him to abandon Nath Tensent in order to buy a few more seconds of life. Shadow Wing had finally shown itself and the fight that had seemed bound for a straightforward New Republic victory was now a desperate struggle for survival.
“Nath!” Wyl cried. “Can you hear me?”
The enemy had dropped the jamming field seconds after the TIEs’ arrival. With the Shadow Wing squadrons active there were no more secrets to hide.
“I can hear you,” Nath answered. Wyl felt the strain and irritation in his voice. “Got your last message. Guess they didn’t take the bait, huh?”
“No,” Wyl said. A cannon volley flashed across his canopy, close enough to send his deflectors cascading through the visible light spectrum. Two TIEs pursued him and he raced toward the beams of the Star Destroyer in the hope of forcing them to fall back. “I don’t know if they realized the asteroid was a trap, or—”
He cut himself off as overlapping voices crackled through the comm speaker—a desperate plea for help from one of the X-wings overlaid with a message to stand by from the Lodestar. Wyl listened to the din and added to it: “New Republic forces, this is Wyl Lark of Alphabet Squadron. The enemy fighters are from an elite unit and should be treated with—”
He broke off for the second time as he was forced to navigate the gap between turbolaser beams—one from the Lodestar, one from the Destroyer. Sweat crept around his left eye and slipped under the lid, stinging, but he didn’t dare blink it away. His pursuers fell back.
“They’re not listening to you, brother,” Nath said. “You got a plan, though, I’d love to hear it.”
“Not a plan, exactly.” Wyl spared his scanner a glance, saw a gap in the swarm of TIEs, and rushed into the blackness. He’d lost track of whether the Star Destroyer was above and the Lodestar was below or vice versa. “That Destroyer—you seen it hit anything but the Lodestar yet?”
“Don’t think so. Why?”
Wyl cleared the corridor between the two ships and spotted a trio of TIEs harrying an X-wing. He loosed a flurry of particle bolts, none of which he expected to hit their targets at such a distance. But the shots bought the X-wing room to maneuver, and he wished the pilot well before veering to port, trying to shake a missile lock.
“Enemy point-defense weapons,” he managed to breathe. The Lodestar suddenly filled his view and he pulled up. The missile behind him detonated against the battleship’s hull, and he forced down an apology. The armor should hold, he told himself. “The Star Destroyer’s targeting is way off, and I don’t think it was the jamming.”
“Could be. Let’s say only its turbolasers are fully functional. What do we do about that when we’ve got fifty TIEs on our tails?”
Wyl tried to focus, thinking back to fights over Pandem Nai and in the Oridol Cluster. Thinking of Endor, when the rebel fleet had tangled with Imperial Star Destroyers rather than face the firepower of the Death Star. “Close distance, near as we can get, and concentrate on pummeling that Destroyer. Maybe the TIEs will go a little easier on us when they risk blasting their own ship.”
He heard Nath’s laugh overlap with another panicked cry from an X-wing. “Or maybe the TIEs will switch focus to the Lodestar,” Nath said. “Or maybe the Destroyer’s point defenses are just fine after all.”
“Maybe,” Wyl agreed. “Are you with me?”
He finally located the Y-wing on his scanner. Nath was skimming the surface of the Lodestar, adjusting course to return to Wyl’s side.
“I’m with you,” Nath said. “Let’s grab some friends and blow that monster.”
IV
Quell had passed through the outermost edge of the debris field, penetrating thousands of kilometers into the vast cloud band spiraling into the Cerberon black hole. But her freighter’s scanners were active again, and despite the chaos of the field and the poor calibration of her instruments she was able to identify her target. She’d already traced back the relevant trajectories and knew where to look.
The cruiser-carrier was keeping its distance from the battle, but it wasn’t hiding.
She’d pieced Shadow Wing’s attack plan together en route, for all the good it would do her now. The Star Destroyer was a decoy—barely armed, most likely, certainly undercrewed, and probably rescued from New Republic forces in a battle somewhere along the galactic Outer Rim. (Quell wasn’t privy to every intelligence communiqué that made it to Cerberon, but she’d have heard if a captured Destroyer had been retaken from a New Republic shipyard—that would’ve raised alarms.) The Destroyer had been sent against Troithe to busy that planet’s defenders while the cruiser-carrier took the long way around the system, picking off divided New Republic forces and approaching from a position of strength to unleash its fighters upon a weakened Lodestar.
That much was obvious now. The fighters had ignored her as they’d sailed past, rightly prioritizing Troithe over her sputtering freighter. What the 204th intended to do after the Lodestar was obliterated, however,
was beyond Quell. The fighter wing didn’t have the firepower to take down Troithe’s defenses, though a second wave of Imperial attackers wasn’t out of the question. If Shadow Wing was able to sabotage Cerberon’s remaining long-range comm stations, that second wave wouldn’t even need to hurry; Cerberon would remain vulnerable indefinitely.
Or maybe Shadow Wing had come for revenge, to wreck the Lodestar and return home. That wasn’t a plan Grandmother would have approved—Quell doubted it would have occurred to the woman, so utterly practical in her devotion to the Empire—but she didn’t know who was in command nowadays. The attack on Cerberon was the sort of aggressive, wild ploy she’d have expected from rebels during the worst days before Endor; it was hard to imagine Major Rassus or the other command candidates concocting it. It was hard to imagine any Shadow Wing pilot agreeing to it.
Quell laughed breathlessly. Earlier, she’d thought that the unit had come to reclaim her. To take her home. But even Shadow Wing had changed beyond recognition.
She refocused on her flight as the cruiser-carrier drew nearer on her scanners. The Star Destroyer was a decoy, undercrewed and damaged. The Lodestar and the remaining fighters were strong enough to take it down, and Shadow Wing was willing to sacrifice it. That meant the cruiser-carrier was the 204th’s escape plan—the only way the TIE fighters could jump to lightspeed and depart the system.
It meant the carrier was a vulnerability. According to her readings, the vessel was undefended.
She attempted to send an encrypted transmission back to the Lodestar with coordinates and full data on the cruiser-carrier. She wasn’t certain whether it would get through, given interference from the debris field and the battle itself—or, assuming it did get through, whether the bridge crew would even listen. At best, reinforcements were minutes out; enough time for the carrier to adjust its strategy once it spotted Quell.
All right, she thought. What does this junk heap have for weapons?
She powered down the ship’s noncritical systems as she studied the displays. The cruiser-carrier was massive enough to be easily distinguished from the asteroids, but the freighter might float well inside the enemy’s sensor range disguised as space junk. Yet if Quell got close, what then? A rotating single-cannon turret topped the freighter and appeared to function. Two forward guns were listed as inactive, which might indicate a connection fault or might mean the barrels had been sold off for scrap a decade ago. The freighter had no missiles and its shields were built to protect against radiation bombardment in high-energy star systems, not particle bolts. As a combat vehicle it was suboptimal.
A red line at the bottom of one of the system readouts caught her eye. She flipped a pair of switches on the console’s underside and redistributed power until the red line turned green.
The tractor beam was now operational.
Quell allowed herself a smile. You’re a disaster as a combat vessel, she thought. As a freighter, though? You’re better than you look.
She activated the internal comms. “Adan?” she said. “If you want to try an escape pod, you’ve got thirty seconds before I start my run.”
She ignited the freighter’s thrusters in short bursts, maneuvering toward a chunk of spaceborne ice twice the size of the ship. Scanners indicated the meteoroid had a metallic core—ideal for what she had planned.
Quell had the tractor beam powered by the time Adan replied: “The escape pod doesn’t even have a door. We’re staying.”
The freighter jerked as she activated the beam and sought to capture the meteoroid without being dragged in its wake. “You’re sure?” she asked. She spoke softly enough that she barely heard the question herself, but there was no softness in her tone.
“Are you planning to die?” Adan asked.
“No.”
The comm went silent.
Not that I have a plan to survive, exactly.
She became acutely aware of the tension in her shoulders and arms, the pressure with which she gripped the freighter controls, and how her hips dug into the metal of her seat. She lit her thrusters again and tugged the meteoroid through the debris field until she had a direct path to the underside of the cruiser-carrier. The Imperial vessel made no adjustments to its course and did nothing to bring its weapons to bear.
“Check your harness,” she said into the comm. “Ito, make sure you’re secure.”
The freighter juddered and lurched as she increased power to the thrusters. Her instinct was to accelerate rapidly but she couldn’t risk letting the tractor beam tear the freighter apart. Instead she focused on keeping the ship steady, adjusting energy distribution with one hand as she steered with the other.
A Quasar Fire-class cruiser-carrier incorporated four starfighter hangars into its undercarriage below its main reactor. Quell could see the ship’s interior lighting past the hangars’ magnetic fields—removed from the battle near Troithe, ready to take the TIE squadrons aboard in case of emergency or retreat, the crew had chosen not to shut the bay doors. Under ordinary operating conditions, the decision would have been reasonable.
As the freighter surged forward, Quell redirected the ship’s power from thrusters into deflectors. Inertia would carry her most of the way to her destination. She toggled off port, aft, and rear screens until her forward shields channeled every erg of power the engine could provide.
She wondered if that would suffice. She thought of her squadron: Lark, Tensent, and Chadic battling an enemy they’d never beaten in a fair fight; Kairos in a suspension tube. Quell’s relationship with the lot of them was over, all ties severed by the blade that had hovered at her throat since Traitor’s Remorse.
Still, she had been their commander. They deserved a chance more than she did.
The sky became the gray of Imperial hull plating—or the gray of storm clouds on Nacronis. The glow of the open hangar bays was Quell’s guide beacon, and she wrestled with antique controls—attempting to correct miscalculations without overshooting her target, tapping analog levers and wrenching the control yoke. She returned her right hand to the tractor beam interface every two seconds, correcting for a power imbalance caused by an obvious malfunction she had no time to fix. Delicate adjustments became impossible as the ship bucked wildly, yet she had no choice but to try.
She saw a flash of weapons fire. But it was too late for the cruiser-carrier to stop the hangar bay from filling her vision, consuming her like the maw of a titanic beast.
The freighter struck the magnetic screen. It was more like slamming into water from a ten-kilometer fall than like ramming durasteel—there was give to the field, yet at high velocities that fact barely mattered. The sound was overwhelming, a low boom of pounding metal combined with higher shrieks and the crackle of energy across the hull—the electric popping of overstressed power conduits and shield oscillations. The console showed nothing but alerts and warnings. Convulsing in her harness, Quell couldn’t see the status indicators for her deflector but she knew it remained intact—it was the needle she used to penetrate the magnetic field, an energy weapon that served as well as any particle cannon.
She clutched the controls, the tactile sensations barely reaching her brain as her head whipped forward and back. In another second she’d know whether the freighter would survive the initial impact, but by then further course adjustments would come too late. She had to match the level of the hangar bay or she’d slam into a bulkhead, and she looked out onto the polished black floor and past the TIE deployment racks to judge her next move. She deactivated the tractor beam and struggled to correct her pitch.
The sound of coruscating energy ceased. A gale buffeted her ship. The magnetic field had broken and the air of the cruiser-carrier was escaping into vacuum.
The next part, she thought with the lightspeed efficiency of neural connections, will be difficult.
The magnetic field and the gale
had cut her velocity to near-manageable levels. She swung ninety degrees, skimming the deck of the hangar with one wing—using it as a brake to slow her further. Pounding metal was joined by a grinding noise and she spotted sparks out her viewport as she slid toward the hangar’s rear wall. She risked taking a moment to slam a palm against the weapons controls, sending the freighter’s gun turret spinning. It strafed the hangar, pumping particle bolts into bulkheads and heavy equipment at random. The console no longer displayed readings from most of the ship and she was sure she’d torn off part of her sensor array, but that didn’t impede her from completing her turn, orienting the freighter toward the open bay doors just as the meteoroid she’d been tugging came into view, following her like a bullet from a slingshot.
She ignited her thrusters.
The bedlam that followed made her crash through the magnetic field seem orchestrated as a symphony. She heard only a roar. She saw only darkness pierced by flashes of light. As much as she could, she steered to favor the dark, hoping that it would resolve into the comforting emptiness of space rather than the claustrophobic blackness of matter. Her body went numb from the ship’s trembling.
She’d done well. She’d completed the mission. Anything else was optional.
She thought of her squadron: of Lark and Tensent and Chadic and Tonas and Barath and Xion. She closed her eyes.
The freighter’s convulsions settled.
When she looked out the viewport again, she was free of the cruiser-carrier. Firelight shone from above where explosions racked the enemy vessel. She couldn’t tell how much harm she’d done—she doubted she’d inflicted fatal damage but, as she brought the freighter around in a wide arc and peered upward at the ruin of the hangars, she felt confident that the cruiser-carrier was in no condition to jump to hyperspace.
She hadn’t saved the fighters over Troithe and Catadra, but she’d disrupted the enemy’s plan. That was worth something.
Shadow Fall (Star Wars) Page 19