Shadow Fall (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  The cruiser-carrier made no attempt to fire as she gained distance. She suspected the crew no longer considered her a priority. The portions of her console still functioning displayed nothing but red yet miraculously, nothing aboard the freighter appeared catastrophically damaged—the engine was intact and her life-support systems were functional, albeit unlikely to remain so forever.

  “Adan?” she said into the comm. “We’re clear.”

  She was urging the freighter to reenter the labyrinth of asteroids when a new alarm rang. Her scanner showed a ship in pursuit—based on its size, a single TIE fighter.

  She breathed through parted lips as she reactivated the turret gun. She briefly wondered if the carrier had launched a full squadron, but more likely the TIE was a stray, following its mother ship from Catadra and arriving late.

  Her forward deflector was dead but she diverted enough power to her rear screens to spark them back into existence. The freighter wouldn’t be able to outmaneuver the TIE in the best of circumstances yet she had enough thruster control to make a nuisance of herself. She tapped a button until the turret’s targeting screen flickered online and gave her a view of the attacker.

  One shot was all she needed. She didn’t have to destroy the TIE—just clip its wings and persuade it to return to the carrier.

  The range indicator counted down. Her hand felt slick with sweat around the control stick. She split her focus between the debris ahead and the TIE fighter behind, aware that either could kill her in an instant. For all her disdain of Tensent, he would’ve been a useful copilot.

  The targeting computer chimed and she squeezed the turret trigger as she banked to port. She expected the TIE to drop away or detonate in a cloud of burning gas and metal. Instead it spun laterally, one way and then the next, using impossibly precise thruster blasts and repulsor emanations to weave a chaotic web. Quell had no chance to compensate before the freighter screamed, particle bolts ripping apart its surviving wing and one of its maneuvering thrusters. Sirens went off as metal cracked open and exposed the interior to the vacuum of space.

  As the freighter spiraled through the debris field, the TIE flashed past. The pilot didn’t pause to finish his kill; he redirected his ship toward Troithe and left Quell and the freighter behind.

  She stared after him, replaying the TIE’s maneuvers in her mind. She knew the technique, had seen it played out hundreds of times. She’d studied videos and spoken to the pilot responsible, but she didn’t comprehend how she was seeing him here and now.

  Major Soran Keize, her mentor, was alive.

  He’d broken his promise to leave Shadow Wing.

  He’d broken his promise to Quell, and now he’d left her behind for a second time.

  V

  Soran Keize sped through the debris field, leaving the crippled freighter to careen among the rocks until it met its end. That enemy pilot would do no more damage. The casualties aboard the Aerie consumed a greater portion of his thoughts, but they could be mourned at another time along with Seedia and Bragheer. His wingmates had fallen with the drones over Catadra; he would weep when no other member of the 204th was at risk.

  With the Aerie grievously damaged, Shadow Wing would be trapped in Cerberon unless Soran could find another way out. The responsibility enveloped him, clinging tighter than his flight suit. He wondered if he’d led his people to their doom and forced the thought from his mind.

  “Colonel?” The comm unit inside his helmet buzzed. Soran recognized the voice of Major Rassus, stoic as always.

  “Report,” Soran said. “Status of the Aerie?”

  “Reactor meltdown has been averted, but engineering reports that the hull damage cannot be patched with the materials at hand. We’re going to rapidly lose air over the next hour.”

  Soran frowned, checked his scanners, and adjusted his heading to circumnavigate a shard of broken moon covered in primitive vegetation. “How is that possible?” he asked.

  He knew it was a foolish question, particularly when time was short and the transmission was already growing distorted with distance. But losing oxygen aboard a ship the size of the cruiser-carrier was such an archaic concern it left him as stunned as if Rassus had worried about a tattered sail or a broken wheel.

  Rassus didn’t hide his own distaste. “The primary magnetic field has been badly breached, as you know, and we’re unable to seal off the damaged compartments. Insulation foam should be pumped into all gaps to compensate automatically, but we’ve been running short since the Oridol Cluster. We don’t have enough for more than seventy percent coverage.”

  Damnation, Soran thought, and was grateful he didn’t say it aloud.

  “Escape pods and sublight drive systems?” he asked.

  “Ready and functional, respectively. We can limp most of the way to Troithe, but we can’t join the battle.”

  “Understood,” Soran said. “Get as far as you can before evacuating. After that—” What? He’d led Shadow Wing to Cerberon for revenge. Instead, the Aerie’s escape pods would fall into New Republic hands; the soldiers he’d worked to win over, to inspire, would all rot in the new government’s prison camps. “—await orders as long as possible. If the worst comes to pass, remember that the first responsibility of a prisoner is to escape.”

  There was no use obfuscating the truth.

  Rassus signed off. Soran was approaching the edge of the debris field now and he peered at his scanners as the Edict, the Lodestar, and the starfighters blinked onto his screen. He studied the patterns, watched the tactics used by friend and foe, and even before he had accessed the squadrons’ comm frequency he was confident that the battle was playing out as designed. Broosh, Gablerone, and the other squadron leaders were operating conservatively, protecting their own against the enemy fighters and focusing their attacks on the Lodestar’s point-defense systems. The New Republic, meanwhile, had realized that the Edict was vulnerable to concentrated attacks and was focusing its efforts there.

  For the moment the Edict was still intact. Soran had the option of ordering a retreat—sending the fighters aboard the Star Destroyer and hoping it could extract itself from the battle long enough to jump to lightspeed. It wasn’t an impossible task, but the crew of cadets didn’t give Soran confidence. Even if the ploy proved successful, it would mean a total failure of the mission: The Lodestar would be left unbroken, General Syndulla would be left alive, and Soran would have abandoned the crew of the Aerie and sacrificed at least two soldiers for naught.

  There’s no purpose in fighting an unwinnable battle, he reminded himself. Don’t fall prey to the same desperation that brought the Empire to this point. Don’t become Colonel Nuress and lead your people into fire because you can’t accept that the war is over.

  He could see the gleaming streams of turbolasers when he realized that one alternative remained.

  “Colonel Keize to all forces.” He heard none of his anxiety reach his words; a decade of combat experience had given him that much. “Redouble your efforts against the Lodestar but give it a clear line of retreat. When it begins to move toward Troithe, stay with it. Stay close.

  “I will join you presently.”

  VI

  Waves of ion energy rippled across the Star Destroyer’s hull where Nath’s torpedoes had impacted. Wyl admired the sight—like cloud formations, he thought, even as he recognized that the Destroyer was nearly finished, smoking and sparking from a dozen sections. Most of all, he focused on drawing the TIE fighters’ fire away from Nath’s Y-wing as the bomber completed its pass.

  Yet as he whipped over and around and above the Y-wing, he was surprised that no particle bolts crossed his field of vision. He glanced toward his scanner and saw the nearest TIEs retreating toward the Lodestar.

  The Acclamator-class battleship had stopped broadcasting minutes earlier after its comm array had been d
amaged, but it was obvious at a glance what was going on. Hard-pressed by the enemy fighters, the Lodestar was moving toward Troithe and would arrive in orbit in under a minute. “Keep those TIEs off the Lodestar,” Wyl called. “Orbital defenses will take care of the Destroyer, but our friends are done for if we don’t help them.”

  One of the surviving X-wing pilots signaled an affirmative. Another asked, “Any word from Meteor over Catadra?”

  “If they were coming,” Nath answered, “they’d have gotten here by now. Listen to Lark and form a defensive globe around the Lodestar!”

  For tantalizing moments, Wyl flew through open space without fearing for his life. The Star Destroyer had almost entirely ceased its volleys, reluctant to unleash its turbolaser blasts while the TIE fighters swarmed the Lodestar; its role was one of stalking predator, chasing the enemy to Troithe’s shelter. The TIEs had already left Wyl’s vicinity. He breathed deep and let the void of space stream around him, reveled in the directionless nothing surrounding him and his ship.

  Then he plunged back into the fight.

  If not for the shining orb of Troithe below, he would have believed himself back in the Oridol Cluster. He remembered the last battle against Shadow Wing there—TIE fighters swarming around a New Republic carrier ship (the Hellion’s Dare then, the Lodestar now), spiraling around it from head to tail and raking its hull while picking off the remaining New Republic starfighters. Wyl hadn’t been able to mount a defense of his mother ship then and he wasn’t sure this time would be any different. Already another pair of TIEs had locked onto him, chasing him across the Lodestar’s wedge-shaped body.

  The other New Republic pilots—Wyl counted six of them, including himself and Nath—called out updates and targets and damage reports. This, too, was a difference from Oridol: There he had known each and every pilot and held back tears as they’d died. Now he was among strangers. He’d barely bothered to get to know Meteor or the pilots assigned to Troithe. Chass and Quell and Kairos, all of whom should have been with him, were gone.

  “Star Destroyer’s not stopping!” Nath’s voice boomed through the comm. “Got to be coming into range of the satellite defenses by now!”

  The hull of the Lodestar sped above Wyl and particle bolts splashed against plating as his pursuers narrowly missed him. He could’ve raced toward the planet but that would’ve left the TIEs free to molest the battleship. If he slowed to allow Nath a chance to intercept, the TIEs would flank him and catch him in their crossfire. He scanned the horizon and spotted a billowing inferno spilling from the Lodestar’s ventral power distributor—a poor omen for the battle but his best hope. He braced against the g forces and made for the flames.

  The inferno burned blue-white, fed by gases from the battleship’s interior and hot enough to turn hull plating molten. Wyl didn’t know how his shields would fare but he was confident the TIEs would suffer worse. The light blinded him as he plunged in and he felt his canopy grow warm; still, he dropped his speed, staying within the chemical furnace and praying the TIEs would outpace him—that if he survived the fires he’d find the enemy waiting on the other side, perfectly positioned ahead of him as targets.

  He hoped neither of them was Blink.

  He burst out of the fire, spotted the TIEs, and squeezed his trigger. His shot went wide—wide enough that he wondered if he’d damaged his cannons in the flames—but his foes veered off in response. He had time to feel half a second’s worth of hope.

  Then the Lodestar’s hull erupted in three places, shards of metal ripping free and expanding like halos around shafts of emerald light—turbolaser beams that had pierced the great battleship and washed the galaxy in their sickly hue. A shock wave of oxygen and debris struck Wyl’s A-wing, and he attempted to wrest control as he tumbled away. He heard oaths and curses over the comm and heard a woman cry, “Lodestar down! Lodestar down!”

  He knew it was true.

  The Star Destroyer was out of sight above the battleship. The combatants had crossed into Troithe’s upper atmosphere during the fight, and the etched patterns of cities decorated the continent far below. The tug of gravity was weak but it was enough to cause the broken Lodestar to dip, coaxing the massive vessel toward the planet.

  Wyl fought away a haze of uncertainty. He didn’t know what to do but Nath was still alive, fighters were still active; he picked the nearest target on his scanner and swept in to engage. The TIEs were staying close to the Lodestar as it fell, and he didn’t understand why; nor did he understand the bright flares far above him, past the Lodestar, too brilliant to be starfighter weaponry.

  “She’s been avenged,” Nath said, steady through the comm.

  “What?” Wyl asked.

  “Orbital defenses hit the Star Destroyer. Got too close while dealing the coup de grâce to the Lodestar. Going down.”

  Wyl mindlessly shot at a TIE and imagined the two warships plummeting to the surface of Troithe. It’s happening again, he thought, and felt as much as remembered the gas mining stations dropping to Pandem Nai; the cities endangered because of the squadron’s vendetta against Shadow Wing. He envisioned Lodestar and Star Destroyer burning through the atmosphere and demolishing kilometers of skyscrapers and housing blocks and cultural centers.

  Next, he remembered the shields.

  Troithe was not Pandem Nai. It was built to repel orbital bombardments. Adan’s whole plan had relied on it.

  Wyl didn’t know if that meant the shields could survive the fall of two capital ships. But he could hope.

  VII

  The TIE fighters had entered atmosphere, and a steady rain of trailing embers and smoking metal fell from above. Soran had flown through worse conditions but not often, and he had to grip his control yoke tighter than he’d like against the violent shaking of his vessel. A TIE/ln’s hull plating and viewport were less a barrier to open space and more a membrane surrounding their pilot—that was the beauty of the ship that no rebel starfighter could match, and as good a reason as any why Soran had never accepted permanent assignment to a more powerful TIE interceptor. The standard-model TIE was a weapon a pilot wielded as he soared through the sky. Yet there was no escaping the disadvantages when an environment became hostile.

  “Keep your fighters steady,” he said, and suppressed a groan as his vessel bounced and he nearly bit off the tip of his tongue. “Remain in position relative to the warships.”

  The squadron commanders acknowledged one by one. The voices of Broosh and Gablerone, Darita and Phesh, Hussor and Wisp came through, each giving Soran strength to continue; a cause worth hoping for. Each voice deepened his fear that he was only digging their graves.

  The Edict burned above him, the Star Destroyer’s thrusters failing and its repulsors struggling to keep it aloft in atmosphere. Styll had led Nenvez and his cadets through the battle and performed better than Soran had ever expected, but heroic efforts couldn’t save the vessel now. As its deflectors and heat shields failed and hull plating tore free to expose internal machinery, its decay accelerated to unthinkable speeds. Soran had authorized the crew to evacuate, though he suspected Styll—who had sacrificed the cruiser-carrier Allegiance to permit the Edict’s rebirth and who would have no role to play if they survived Cerberon—might insist on staying till the end. He hoped the man did not.

  Below Soran was the Lodestar, launching escape pods like missiles as it, too, burned. The Acclamator-class battleship had not only suffered thruster failure but lost one of its drive modules as the vessel crumbled to pieces. Soran did not imagine that General Syndulla would go down with her ship as Styll might with his. Maybe during her rebel days, he thought, but not when she could find a command anywhere in the New Republic fleet.

  Between Lodestar and Edict was the TIE swarm, still under periodic and futile attack by the New Republic starfighters. Those enemy craft were an inconvenience more than a serious threat, but
even an inconvenience could prove fatal in trying circumstances.

  “Lodestar approaching planetary shield, sir!” Hussor called through the comm.

  Soran checked his altitude before peering out the viewport. He could see a faint shimmer of distortion extending across the glittering darkness of the cityscape. He tried to recall the technical specifications of the Troithe shields—he’d spent hours culling through reports and manuals as they’d planned the mission, learned exactly what sort of bombardment they could sustain. But he was guessing now at the payload: the mass of the Lodestar, multiplied by its velocity as derived from Troithe’s gravity and the counterforce of the repulsors and the distance it had already fallen…

  Someone could have run the numbers. Soran couldn’t. Not in the moment.

  An X-wing flashed toward him, firing its four cannons as its bulk spun and hopped in the gale-wake of the Lodestar. With a grimace of annoyance Soran opened his throttle, fought inertia and atmosphere to rotate the TIE toward his foe, and dispatched the enemy.

  Add the X-wing to the payload.

  When the Lodestar hit the shield seconds later, Soran felt the sonic shock wave through the membrane of his ship, through flight suit and flesh. His TIE was forced upward as a caldera of flame and smoke and metal (and, a part of Soran’s mind reminded him, organic matter) rose and expanded with the liquid motion of a raindrop striking a cockpit canopy and the destructive might of a plasma bomb. He spared a glance down as his ship tumbled and saw the flames washing across air; the dark central mass of the battleship fixed in place while smaller sections skittered across the dome of the planetary deflector.

  It’s holding.

  “Now,” he cried, no longer concealing the urgency or desperation in his voice. “Go!”

  The sky fell as the TIEs scattered. In the eternal night of Cerberon, the plunging Edict cast no shadow. Instead the fiery light from below reflected off the Destroyer’s hull, bathing the world in infernal radiance. Was this what Pandem Nai was like? Soran wondered as he sped after his comrades, clearing the area for the second impact.