Shadow Fall (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  —

  The singing was real. She jerked upright and found herself wrapped in a musty linen cargo pad on the floor of a starship’s gun well. The cannon itself was gone, and most of the viewport was covered in colorful drapery and cloth scrolls proclaiming THE FORCE IS LIFE and FELLOWSHIP IS CREATION. Her mouth was dry and her lips felt tacky but she was surprisingly alert for someone who should’ve been dead.

  The singing—chanting, really—was tinny and garbled. Chass unrolled the cargo pad, wobbled to her feet, and followed the sound down a short hallway. Through an open hatch, she spied a circular command center decorated in the same style as the turret and occupied by three crew members gathered around a hologram.

  The chanting ended. The holo showed a middle-aged humanoid woman whose skin was covered in colorful blotches of fungal growth—dozens of tiny mushrooms fruiting from shoulder and cheek and ear like patches on a threadbare uniform. Chass was seized by competing urges to look away in disgust and to stare in awe. There was something inherently compelling, if not commanding, about the woman’s serene and tolerant expression. Something familiar, as well, and it was when the woman began speaking that Chass recalled where she’d seen her before.

  “For this lesson, we will speak of fellowship and technology. You may have asked yourself, Why do the Children of the Empty Sun reject droids? I’d much rather have a machine haul water or repair a comm system than do it myself…”

  Chass swore softly. The cultists in the Troithe refugee camp had stared at holos for hours on end, too.

  “Our guest is awake, eh?” one of the crew called, and paused the recording. He, too, was familiar—the burn scars across his cheeks and scalp and the colorful swatches of his outfit brought her back to a hazy night at Winker’s. It was the man who had saved her from the Vurk and tried to recruit her.

  “Where am I?” Chass snarled. She reached for her sidearm and found nothing on her hip.

  “We call this vessel Gruyver’s Skiff, because I’m Gruyver and this is my solar skiff. She—it used to have another name, before I walked the path, but what good is treating machines like people if it leads to treating people like machines?” He rose from his seat, saw Chass tense, and settled again. “We found you floating in space. You’re lucky we got there when we did.”

  “You found me?” Competing questions fought through Chass’s brain, and she asked the one whose answer would be easiest to bear. “You mean you tracked me. You been following me since Winker’s?”

  “There’s little coincidence in a universe directed by the Force,” Gruyver said. “But that’s an awfully suspicious leap.”

  You’re not denying it, Chass thought. She swore again and marched into the room, shouldering a white-furred woman with horns and fangs away from the comscan terminal. The readouts showed little except the ship’s rapid approach toward Catadra. “What happened with the battle? The carrier, the Star Destroyer—”

  “No long-range scans on a solar skiff,” the furry woman sneered in a nearly impenetrable accent.

  “Nor lightspeed, nor guns, nor hypermatter reactor,” Gruyver added, “which is probably why the TIEs haven’t stopped us. I’m sorry, lass, but by all accounts the New Republic’s lost. We heard that battle cruiser of yours went down over Troithe, and there’s been only Imperial transmissions since then.”

  Anger flashed through her. She thought about how her comrades might have died—swift exposure to vacuum, annihilation by particle bolts, incineration on reentry—then reminded herself: Put them away like Hound Squadron. Like the Cavern Angels. None of this is new to you.

  “How long was I out?” Chass asked.

  “Been perhaps a day since the battle. We’ve been out salvaging scrap. Now we’re heading home.”

  “You’re lying,” she said. Nothing he said was implausible—it wasn’t as if Shadow Wing hadn’t beaten the New Republic before—but the reply ripped through her anyway. “Where’s my ship? Where’s my B-wing?”

  If she could drain the skiff’s fuel supply she could head out, hit Shadow Wing with the advantage of surprise. Bring down the cruiser-carrier, get revenge for her squadron, and set everything right.

  “Too big for the skiff to haul,” Gruyver said, and looked almost sincere in his sympathy. “I am sorry.”

  Chass parted her lips but found nothing to say.

  The third crew member, who hadn’t spoken prior, rotated its jelly-stalk of a head and squealed something. Gruyver nodded and declared, “Good—radio the planet and tell them to prepare housing for another guest.”

  Chass was barely listening. The sound of the chanting lingered in her ears and she went from thoughts of revenge to thoughts of music, and the realization that if her ship was lost, so was the collection she’d accumulated. Rare songs. Banned songs. The work of dead singers and dead civilizations. Some of the recordings, she suspected, were unique in the galaxy…

  They were gone like Wyl and Nath and Quell.

  “We’ll get you to Catadra,” Gruyver said. “Clean you up, feed you. Figure out where to go from there, eh?”

  “Am I a prisoner?” Chass asked, her voice dull and distant. “Hostage of the cult?”

  “You’re whatever you want to be, and whatever the Force desires,” Gruyver said, which was a clear enough answer to Chass.

  For a zealot, the Force desired whatever the believer wanted.

  * * *

  —

  She’d flown to Catadra on over twenty bombing runs, but the solar skiff was slower than an assault fighter and she watched as the band of temples and palaces and bridges and stairways around the mountains came into sight. Gruyver brought her tea and spoke platitudes as they flew, and Chass considered grappling with him and trying to take control of the ship. She was outnumbered, though, and she saw no weapons—not a blaster, not a knife, not even a hydrospanner or a wrench heavy enough to brain a man.

  That meant she was dealing with low-level cultists. She didn’t know much about the Children of the Empty Sun, but all cults were alike: They preached peace and armed their leaders well.

  Midway through their descent, the jelly-stalk crew member squeaked a warning; an instant later the skiff lurched and made a sound like lightning striking a dead tree. Chass felt herself float for a fraction of a second before she dropped hard onto her knees and caught a glimpse of emerald outside the viewport.

  Then smoke filled her vision and Gruyver shouted, “Abandon ship!”

  The Gruyver’s Skiff was going down. Chass wasn’t about to grieve, and she might’ve laughed at the idea of dying so soon after her rescue if she hadn’t started choking. One of the cultists—the furry one, by the feel of the hand on Chass’s neck—pushed her forward and through a hatch barely large enough for one body. Yet the woman wriggled into the compartment alongside her, and Chass breathed in ashes and the odor of unclean hair.

  “Go! Stupid thing! Go!” the woman cried, pounding her palm against the walls of the narrow compartment.

  The skiff lurched again and Chass wrenched her body, positioning herself so she could see through the hand’s-width viewport centimeters from her nose. The universe was spinning and the compartment was tumbling and she understood that she was in an escape pod, ejected from its parent vessel and falling toward Catadra. She caught a glimpse above of a single TIE racing away from a burning, plummeting ovoid with metallic solar sails painted in cacophonous hues.

  Her hands slid across the pod’s instrumentation. Her companion yelped as Chass dug her elbow into its fur. Chass ignored the woman and found a primitive control yoke—the pod lacked a true engine but it had maneuvering thrusters, and by shifting her weight and wrenching at the yoke she found she could adjust her angle of descent. The light of the solar projectors painted a clear image of the land below—the ancient stone buildings built into the mountainside and the dark vegetation
on the far slopes.

  It looks different when you’re not being shot at, she thought.

  She resolved to choose a landing site and deliver the escape pod like a bomb. She’d bombed Catadra before. She knew how to hit a target.

  She spotted a crater where a turbolaser emplacement had formerly stood between two granite towers. “Hit you once already,” she muttered, and felt her skin tingle as the pod’s electromagnetic brakes kicked in. She tuned out the chanted prayers of her companion and braced for impact.

  * * *

  —

  Chass survived the fall. Her companion didn’t. After the crash the woman with fur and fangs lay beneath Chass with her head unnaturally twisted. The body was still warm, and close enough that Chass would’ve felt a heartbeat if she’d survived.

  Chass very nearly felt pity. She very nearly whispered a prayer of the Inheritors of the Crystal, to commend the dead woman to the Force. Instead she climbed out of the pod as swiftly as she was able and studied the city around her.

  * * *

  —

  The TIE flitted across the Catadran sky for nearly an hour, occasionally dipping low enough to spew emerald fire at a structure and obliterate it as thoroughly (if not as rapidly) as any proton bomb could. Chass kept watch as she trekked through the streets, allowing the current of the crowds to determine her direction. Packed shoulder-to-shoulder with fleeing locals from a hundred species, she managed to blend despite her New Republic flight suit. No one noticed in all the chaos.

  She was confident the TIE was targeting communications stations and landing pads—cutting off Catadra from the rest of the Cerberon system and the rest of the galaxy. On foot, unarmed, and ignorant of the planet, there wasn’t anything Chass could do to interfere. But she still had a working brain, and she figured that if Shadow Wing had only sent a single TIE it meant the Empire’s grip on Cerberon wasn’t secure. It meant the enemy was afraid of a counterattack, or of anyone fleeing with a call for New Republic reinforcements. If nothing else, Chass thought, it was invigorating to smell fear.

  She needed a ship. Whatever she planned to do next, she’d need a ship for it.

  As she passed beneath a line of battlements, she heard shouting above. Stained and yellowing stormtrooper helmets rested in the gaps of the crenellations—trophies or warnings or both from the days after the Empire had fled. Catadrans grabbed the helmets up by the armful.

  Not a forgiving people, but they’re not stupid. Not the display you want if the Empire’s coming back.

  Assuming she found a ship, could she drive Shadow Wing off single-handedly or get a message to General Syndulla? The old instincts returned to her—the anticipation of dying gloriously to defeat an enemy who’d devastated her squadron, screaming a song as she flew into the heart of a carrier—but the taste was sour. It was Alphabet that had lured Shadow Wing to Cerberon in the first place, at the behest of a genocidal traitor named Yrica Quell; and the war was too close to its end for a glorious sacrifice to mean anything.

  She’d probably survive anyway, and then she’d be in the same predicament as always.

  Half a dozen screaming humans leapt across a gap in a broken bridge ahead of her, calling out something about hidden heretics. Chass wondered if there was anywhere she could get a drink and waited for the current of the crowd to bring her to a cantina.

  * * *

  —

  By midnight she’d decided, after her third bottle, not to drink after all. She wasn’t an addict, she told herself—she’d gotten in the habit of filling her downtime with diversions, but she didn’t need a diversion tonight.

  She found another customer at the cantina willing to trade a drab olive shirt and engineer’s trousers for her flight suit, and she began asking questions about Catadra’s local power players. Of the half dozen cults to come to sudden prominence in the months since Endor, the Children of the Empty Sun was the largest. “Mostly,” a long-beaked Ishi Tib told her, “because they distribute food through the settlements, assign refugees to wrecked old palaces for housing—I wouldn’t trust them, but if someone’s going to govern? Better the Children than the Devourers of All Light or one of the other freak shows.”

  Chass nodded and tried to concentrate on the words instead of her memory of the last Ishi Tib she’d known. She really had liked Sata Neek.

  Put him away like Hound Squadron.

  When she left the cantina, she was halfway to forming a plan. Sometime after her first bottle she’d remembered what Gruyver had said aboard the skiff: Tell them to prepare housing for another guest. It wasn’t proof that the Children had taken other New Republic prisoners, but it was a possibility and a second set of hands would be one more set to help strangle the Imps. So Chass strolled through the crowds (thinner in the early-morning darkness, camped around portable heaters and vaporators in the streets) until she reached the white-and-azure-tiled palace the Ishi Tib had told her about.

  A man in sallow robes stood under a four-meter archway inlaid with flying-serpent mosaics. Chass noted the rifle-shaped bulge under the robes without surprise.

  “No more food tonight,” the man said. “Come back in the morning.”

  “Don’t need food,” Chass said. “My name’s Maya Hallik. I’m spiritually lost. Really at loose ends right now. Figured I’d find guidance here, so I want to join up.”

  She might’ve been more convincing if she’d bothered to work on her story, but she’d never met a cult keen on turning recruits away. She doubted the Children of the Empty Sun would be any different from the mix of con artists and fanatics and pathetic seekers she’d met so many times before.

  She swallowed her distaste and smiled brightly, showing her teeth.

  II

  Yrica Quell couldn’t remember dreaming, but she rose in the red desert more unsettled than when she’d fallen asleep. She recalled waking periodically to the sensation of tremors—quakes she could only feel with her cheek pressed against the tarp. Occasionally she’d also half-consciously repositioned herself to alleviate pain in her spine. Otherwise, her rest had gone undisturbed.

  “This shouldn’t be here,” she said—to herself as much as to Adan—as she dripped water from the portable vaporator into their canteen. They breakfasted together on a single ration bar Quell had broken in half.

  “What shouldn’t?” Adan asked. He sat on the tarp with his back against the ship. They’d taken down their makeshift tent; the wind seemed quiescent in the morning dark, as if intimidated by the rising eye of the black hole.

  “The water. The atmosphere shouldn’t have so much moisture. There shouldn’t be an atmosphere this dense at all on a planetoid so small.”

  Adan stared across at her. She noticed that he’d barely eaten from his portion.

  “Does that mean anything?” he asked. “Aside from proving that the universe is full of wonder?”

  There was no humor in his voice. Quell didn’t laugh.

  “No,” she said, and took a swig from the canteen.

  Quell ate her tasteless, stale meal with the mechanical discipline of a pilot taught never to allow her feelings to interfere with nourishment. Adan took imperceptibly small bites, but in the end his half bar was gone, too. Quell briefly wondered if he’d tucked away the remainder but decided it was his meal; he could eat it when he wanted.

  After breakfast they performed another cursory search of the wreckage (finding nothing new) before Quell attempted to reconstruct the final flight and disintegration of the freighter, drawing trajectories in the dust to estimate where the other half of the ship had fallen. She and Adan agreed without discussion—without actual agreement—to go look for whatever might have survived. Quell had little hope that the droid was still intact, but perhaps there would be something more: the ship’s long-range comm unit, or a portable scanner they could use to locate the energy reading
s that had led them to the planetoid in the first place.

  They didn’t have packs or satchels. That was fine, Quell thought, because there wasn’t enough of anything to pack.

  The journey through the desert was slow going. Although the hard-packed sand offered a measure of traction and the dunes were low and gentle, their injuries made each step effortful. Adan fared worse than Quell, and while they started side by side she left him a meter behind, then ten, then twenty as the morning wore on. When he diminished to a dark silhouette on the horizon she was tempted to increase her pace; she envisioned Adan’s plodding steps taking him deeper into the dunes until he was buried neck-deep, until the wind rose and the sand flayed him alive.

  The gruesomeness of the image surprised Quell. Morbid fantasies had never been her vice.

  She waited for Adan awhile. Then she turned and crossed the distance to him. “You need to rest?” she asked, but he shook his head and they continued together across the endless plain of red.

  * * *

  —

  They spotted the corpse from afar but until they were closer they didn’t recognize it for what it was: the body of an Imperial stormtrooper swaddled in dust. Patches of white plastoid armor uncovered by sand stood out like bone.

  “Dead,” Yrica Quell said—the first word either she or Adan had spoken for nearly an hour. She nudged the corpse with a boot and sent an avalanche of sand tumbling from its back. A plume of finer dust rose like smoke from the scorched hole between the trooper’s shoulders.

  “For how long?” Adan asked.

  Quell shrugged. “You tell me.” She waited for Adan to answer, but he stared in confusion and she elaborated: “The place we found you. The Imperial hideout on Narthex. The unit there had charts of the debris field, like they’d been here before.”

  “This is one of them?” Adan asked. Before Quell could reply he shook his head. “No. It’s possible but I don’t remember much. If they were out here it was without me, and most likely before I was kidnapped.”