Space engulfed her. The last remnants of oxygen hissed away as Chass gripped her control yoke and floated free. She instinctively breathed faster; then she forced her respiration back to a steady rate and let go of the yoke with one hand, wrapping gloved fingers around the canopy’s empty channel.
Slowly. Slowly.
Hand-over-hand, she pulled herself out of the cockpit proper and over the edge. Her legs swung away from the ship, and she twisted and kicked, using her grip on the hull for leverage until her feet awkwardly hugged her primary airfoil beneath the cockpit pod. She wouldn’t be able to cling to it all the way, but momentary security was better than none at all.
She’d seen comrades sucked into space through holes blown in battleships. Some spacers developed phobias after sights like that, but Chass had only found it ugly.
Maybe that’s what happened to Quell when the Destroyer met the Lodestar.
She crept along the exterior of the pod, reaching out her left arm half a meter, finding a hold, pulling partway, and crossing over with the right arm. Grips weren’t difficult to find near the canopy but soon she was forced to stretch, to cling to jutting metal knobs or squeeze airfoil ridges with her knees. If her neck tilted back too far she was confronted with the infinite darkness that made stillness feel like falling. When she caught a glimpse of the burning eye of the Cerberon singularity, its gaze was almost a relief. If it was down, the rest of the universe was up.
Slowly. Slowly.
It couldn’t have taken more than five minutes to reach the rear of the ship but it felt like an hour. She gripped the gyrostabilizers with one hand as she eyed a scorched and cratered hull panel. She’d tucked a multitool into her flight suit but she didn’t think she’d need it now—she reached into the burnt hole and tugged, working the whole plate free. The metal was still warm beneath her fingers.
She let go of the plate and allowed it to float away. Inside the compartment, wires and tubing packed every centimeter not occupied by the two rust-colored liquid oxygen tanks. The tanks appeared unharmed; when she ran her hand over the metal, she felt no seepage or fractures.
Sensor fault. Has to be.
She let out a breath and felt moisture accumulate around her lips inside the rebreather tube. If she died today it wouldn’t be by suffocation after all.
Then the wires flashed silently. A spark burst from the compartment. Unthinking and surprised, she pushed away from the ship and the danger.
She realized her mistake almost in time to correct it, but the B-wing was out of reach in an instant and she was languidly drifting backward. She glanced about as if she might find a convenient tree branch or scaffold to catch, but there was nothing. She kicked against vacuum, tried to stretch out her arms as her ship and her life pulled steadily away. She’d been taught about zero-gravity maneuvering but that had been ages ago and panic flooded her brain.
Start simple: If nothing stops you, you’ll float in the same direction forever.
She remembered the multitool. Throw it! she thought. If she hurled it away from the ship it would push her back toward the B-wing. She managed to fumble it out of her suit but she struggled to spin around. When she finally tossed the tool away it barely slowed her.
Meter by meter, the distance between Chass and the B-wing increased.
If she’d brought her sidearm she could have fired it—that would’ve been enough kick to carry her back. She checked her suit pockets but the weapon was still in the cockpit. If she’d been in an X-wing or a Y-wing—a starfighter with an astromech—she could’ve asked her droid to pilot the ship to her. She ran through scenarios as her mind screamed: Think faster!
She only had a few minutes of oxygen in the rebreather. Maybe she’d be suffocating after all.
The B-wing wasn’t far. On the ground she could’ve reached the cockpit in seconds. She almost wished it would disappear into the distance; it would’ve felt like less of a mockery.
If your death had to be pointless, you could’ve at least died in battle.
She drifted and breathed and was surprised to feel her eyes water. This wasn’t how she’d ever wanted to go—not in her darkest moments, not when Shadow Wing had taken everything from her or when she’d been lost on Uchinao or when she’d first broken free of the wretched life her mother had given her.
She wondered how long it would be before her corpse joined the debris and fell, burning forever, into the eye of Cerberon.
As her vision shivered and oxygen deprivation ate her brain like an acid-packed bullet, she thought she saw lights.
III
The freighter cockpit was cold but Quell was sweating. Every muscle had begun to cramp, and her fingers and wrists had settled into the liminal space between numbness and agony. For five hours she’d sat hunched in her seat, metal frame digging into her back and bottom through threadbare padding, attempting to navigate the debris field with a single maneuvering thruster.
She had no repulsors. No primary jets. She could nudge the vessel to port and she’d done so repeatedly as the ship had drifted into ever-denser rock clusters. Now whirling stones spun around moon-sized asteroids and she rationed her thruster usage in concession to the screaming red warnings that appeared with every ignition. She couldn’t turn around, and the tides of gravity had put her on a course for the black hole at the heart of the system.
She should have been worried about that. But every minute she avoided a fatal collision was a victory, and exhaustion guaranteed that she would make a mistake long before the black hole became a problem.
During the brief, unnerving periods when no rocks hurtled toward her, Quell thought about Major Soran Keize. The freighter’s flight recorders were damaged beyond repair and she had no way of reviewing the footage of the TIE fighter that had crippled her. Yet she had an excellent memory and she replayed the TIE’s maneuvers in her mind, finding no other conclusion than that her mentor had rejoined Shadow Wing.
It was Keize who had told her to leave after Nacronis—ordered her to leave, and he’d promised he would follow. Had he betrayed her? Had he lied to her to ensure that she did as commanded? Did it even matter anymore?
Had she betrayed him?
A scream came from the access corridor, hoarse and short-lived. The interrogation droid had taken to injecting its patient with stimulants to keep him alert. Quell was growing used to the sounds.
She’d asked the droid to make repairs to the vessel; to calculate some escape from the debris field; to take a fraction of the burden of rescue from her. But neither the droid nor Adan had any skills she could use. They’d applied emergency sealant to two gaping holes in the hull but the droid knew less about fixing drive systems than Quell did. Even if Adan had been healthy she doubted he’d be any better equipped.
She looked between the viewport and her sensors as the ship approached another asteroid. She gave the maneuvering thruster a two-second burst of power and sidestepped death. No new warning lights flared; the ignition jets would last her a little longer yet.
As she scanned for the next obstacle a sensor readout caught her attention. “Ito?” she called. “Get in here if you can leave your patient.”
A minute later the droid’s soft hum joined the uneven throbbing of the engine. She didn’t dare turn around but she flapped a hand at the console. “There’s an energy reading. Looks like it’s coming from a planetoid, faint but steady. You recognize it?”
The droid floated over the console, edging into Quell’s peripheral vision. “I do not,” it said. “But I recognize the region.”
“So do I.” Quell forced herself not to look over—she couldn’t read the droid’s expression anyway and she wouldn’t allow herself to be distracted. “Adan’s captors were charting this area of the debris field. Or they’d been here. Or were planning to.”
“I agree it has some signi
ficance, given the energy reading. But we are too far outside my specialization for me to speculate further.”
“It’s something, though,” she said, almost whispering. “It’s something.”
“Adan is awake.” The droid’s hum fell in pitch. Quell wondered if it was trying to calm her. “Given what he’s said, I find it unlikely that he has any information about his captors’ interest in this region. However, I will inquire if you wish.”
Quell tapped at the console, calculating potential approach vectors and liking none of them. “No point. If I’m going to get us there, I need to adjust our angle now.”
“You intend to land on the planetoid?”
She laughed through dry lips. “It’s that or keep floating until we hit something. But I’m not sure I’d call what we’re about to do landing.”
The droid floated in the direction of the access corridor. “I’ll secure Adan and myself. What do you expect to find?”
Quell shrugged. “I don’t expect anything. A ship if we’re lucky. A fading nav beacon if we’re not.”
If the droid replied she didn’t hear it. She ignited the maneuvering thruster, watching heat and power readings spike and course projections alter on her flickering display. The freighter roared in protest and Quell bounced in her seat. But this wasn’t the challenging part—if she timed the ignition burst perfectly, aligned the ship’s vector with what she’d plotted on the computer without destroying her drive system entirely, she’d go racing directly for the planetoid with no way to stop, no way to slow down except whatever atmospheric friction she might encounter.
She checked her harness and leaned back in her seat for the first time in hours.
Relax, she told herself. It’ll probably be over soon.
CHAPTER 14
THE JOYOUS TOGETHERNESS OF SHARED SUFFERING
I
Colonel Soran Keize walked through the dim corridors of Raddakkia Plaza communications center with his flight helmet under his left arm and his blaster comfortably gripped in his right hand. Through the floor plating—the dark, burnished durasteel common to Imperial facilities everywhere, unable to entirely cover the stained wooden floorboards prized by aristocrats from an earlier era—he felt the rumble of proton bombs detonating kilometers away. As he walked, he hummed; then, prompted by his own humming, he began to sing softly.
Tack into the danger, boys
Onward through the night
Upon the morrow we’ll hoist our flag
And set Queen Gann alight
It was a Corellian traders’ song, one that went back centuries and whose lyrics were full of nonsense words—references to mizzens and marlinspikes and anchor rodes. The song recounted a perilous voyage, and when Soran realized why he was singing it he stopped abruptly.
It had been Captain Gablerone’s favored drinking song.
Soran had never liked Gablerone, but they had been comrades for an eternity. Now Gablerone was dead, incinerated at some point during the final battle above Troithe—when and how, Soran had yet to learn. Gablerone was not the first casualty of the assault on Cerberon; nor, Soran was sure, would he be the last.
He resisted the urge to kick the door panel as he arrived at the entrance to the control chamber. He smoothed out his breathing, tapped the trigger, and stepped inside to join his people.
He’d chosen Raddakkia Plaza as a landing zone and temporary operations hub based on what he recalled from his studies of Troithe prior to the attack. (Soran had never considered himself studious or possessed of a particularly keen intellect—he thought of Lieutenant Quell’s obsessiveness—but a soldier survived by preparing for contingencies.) The comm center had been abandoned soon after Endor when the governor had ordered the redeployment of all planetside troops; yet it was deep within territory historically friendly to Imperial rule.
It was not safe—only a fool would call it safe—but it was a better location than most to regroup.
The pilots already inside came from every squadron in the 204th. Their TIEs had been damaged or required refueling and repair; while their comrades continued bombing runs over the city and harried New Republic forces, those who were grounded took on the tasks of the Edict and Aerie crew whose escape pods had yet to be located. Six young women and men moved among the control room terminals, trying to bring neglected systems back online. Three more stood guard over the TIEs in the plaza while another two attempted to patch simple damage to the ships. All of them sweated in their flight suits as they worked, though many had stripped off helmets and gloves as they rewired connections and called to one another over the holographic display table.
None of them were meant for the work before them, but a TIE pilot was trained to be able to reassemble an ion engine, reprogram a targeting computer, or build a distress signal from the wreckage of a skyhopper. Pilots couldn’t replace the command staff or ground crew of their carrier ships, but they were far from helpless.
“Do we have a data feed yet?” Soran asked.
Lieutenant Nord Kandende—Gablerone’s troubled officer, whom Soran had caught offering blood to the Emperor’s Messenger aboard the Aerie—rose from his station and waved the others back to their tasks. “We have a feed,” Kandende said. “Not a lot of data. We’re merging sensor readings from all units in communications distance—they’re chaining transmissions for extra range, though Squadron Three keeps straying too far out.”
“Good enough for now,” Soran said. He moved to the holotable’s edge and adjusted controls until the display flashed into life. “But I want the plaza’s main transmitter operational by sunset.”
Kandende hesitated then hurried back to work. Soran had no idea whether a sunset deadline was remotely achievable, but he guessed Kandende didn’t either. Sometimes that was motivation enough.
* * *
—
He stared into the shimmering holographic cityscape for over an hour, watching the firefly glow of TIEs crossing the map of Troithe. There were few non–Shadow Wing ships in flight when he began his vigil; by the end, there were none. Virtually no civilian vessels remained in Cerberon, and the governor’s forces had been decimated over the previous months. That left only the survivors of General Syndulla’s battle group, and they had gone into hiding at low altitude or left the range of the TIEs’ patrol patterns.
For the moment, then, Shadow Wing was Cerberon’s predominant air and space force. For the moment, its advantage was overwhelming. Even taking into consideration Syndulla’s ground troops and assuming negligible aid from local Imperial loyalists, the 204th could lock down Troithe. As the situation became clear, Soran designated targets and spoke tersely over a comm frequency that made all his pilots sound like droids; and when the immediate threats had been destroyed—when the best-fortified New Republic outposts had been hammered by TIE bombers and the scattered anti-air cannons obliterated—he recalled two squadrons and organized a unit rotation to allow his fatigued people short rests.
That was the greatest reprieve he was comfortable offering. Ending the patrols altogether wasn’t an option, given how rapidly enemy ground forces could potentially regroup. Troithe was a planet already exhausted by war, but exhaustion could resemble fortitude in extreme circumstances; Shadow Wing could not afford to become complacent.
A proper casualty report was assembled at last and Soran learned of three more pilots killed in the fighting. Two he had known: Thrail LeNorra, a serious young recruit from an agriworld who’d joined the wing shortly before Endor, whom Soran had needed to coax into asking advice when required (“Inexperience is not failure,” he’d coached the boy while trying not to smile); and Wilhona Breathe, the gentle patriot whose infant nervous system had been afflicted by Separatist toxins in the Clone Wars, guaranteeing her a protracted death by the age of forty (they’d never spoken directly of this—the note was in her medical f
ile and Soran had said nothing, taking quiet pleasure as she bonded with her squadron mates and confessed her secret to one after the next). The third casualty was Bangroft Casas, an ensign from Pandem Nai who had served as Grandmother’s shuttle pilot and been promoted to TIE duty after her death; Soran had meant to meet with every new addition to the wing since his departure, but time had slipped away—
Make no excuses. Focus on the question at hand.
What do you do now?
He had no way out of Cerberon without a carrier ship. He’d never intended to risk his people’s lives capturing the planet. His mind oscillated between self-recriminations and a need for movement—a need to march out of the communications center, take off in his TIE fighter, and rush to the defense of those pilots still on patrol.
You’re falling apart, Soran. This would never have happened before Devon.
“Sir?” a voice asked.
He whirled and heard himself say in a harsh voice that inspired neither calm nor confidence, “What is it?”
He stared across at a young woman with fresh burn scars covering her face and one arm in a makeshift sling. She still wore her pilot’s uniform. He dredged a name from the depths of his memory: Lieutenant Falshoi. She didn’t flinch at his unearned anger; she looked too weary and broken to flinch.
“Broosh and his people are back from the supply run,” she said. “They’ve got a makeshift galley in one of the conference rooms. You should eat—I can bring you something.”
“Of course,” he said. “Thank you.”
He returned his gaze to the hologram and counted up the dead. He’d lost more people in a day than he had in a month prior to Endor, and the war for Troithe was only beginning. The melody of Gablerone’s drinking song came back to him, and Soran imagined the captain looking at him with a mix of disdain and good humor.
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