Shadow Fall (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  Quell nodded and stepped around the body. She scanned the sand for a rifle or anything else useful the dead man might have carried. There was nothing.

  “What was here for them?” Adan asked.

  Irritation flared inside her. “Why would I know more than you?”

  “You might have seen something during the approach,” Adan said. “During landing.”

  The irritation remained, though Quell could admit that Adan’s reasoning was sound. “Some sort of energy reading coming from the planet. I didn’t have a chance to examine it. I doubt the ship’s sensors could have given us much more anyway.”

  “An energy reading,” Adan repeated. He knelt, but he was more than a meter from the body—too far to examine it with any real scrutiny. “Assume they were here for the source, then. To retrieve it? To plant it?”

  “How about this?” Quell countered. “Who died, and how?”

  Were there other bodies to be found? Would they all be shot in the back?

  Maybe the stormtrooper refused to go along with a mission he couldn’t abide.

  She started to laugh before the ground began to quiver. The tremors weren’t enough to unbalance her but they were impossible not to notice. Then after several seconds the quivering ended with a jolt that sent the sandy caps of dunes rippling down slopes.

  Quell looked to Adan. He had his hand pressed to the ground for support, but now he rose again.

  They resumed their walk.

  * * *

  —

  Quell found her mind drifting as if she were on the verge of sleep—as if she were half dreaming, with logical throughways replaced by a labyrinth of symbols and preoccupations. She trudged through the desert and thought about Shadow Wing and what had gone wrong with the trap she had set to lure the unit to asteroid CER952B. She thought about Major Soran Keize, and fought to remember whether his promise to leave the 204th had been a figment—whether her departure was a figment, and she had come to Cerberon with her Imperial comrades and captured the New Republic Intelligence officer Caern Adan. She thought about Chass na Chadic and Wyl Lark and Nath Tensent and imagined them fighting Shadow Wing, being picked off one by one.

  Every time they’d fought Shadow Wing without her, they’d lost. Why would now be any different?

  The eye of Cerberon was high in the sky when it occurred to her to worry about her own mental state. Maybe it was her injuries—concussion or blood loss or both—that disoriented her. Maybe it was the planetoid’s atmosphere—she didn’t know how safe it was to breathe.

  She tried to focus on surviving after that. Whatever was going on, she had enough problems without worrying about matters far outside her control.

  * * *

  —

  They encountered fragments of the freighter buried in the sand—broken sections of bulkheads or scorched hull plating; once, a landing strut standing erect atop a dune like a flagpole—but nothing intact. Nothing salvageable. There was no sign of the interrogation droid.

  Quell and Adan still did not speak, but Quell stayed nearer to Adan than she had for most of the morning and recognized that he was slowing. She heard him begin gasping with every step and suppressed her annoyance. He’s not doing it to irk you, she told herself, though she wasn’t totally convinced.

  They found a half-cylinder wall from the freighter’s access corridor and rested in its arc, protected from the wind. They shared another ration bar and what water the vaporator produced. Afterward, Quell was ready to continue the hike.

  Adan’s head lolled against the metal plating, his eyes half closed. If he hadn’t been breathing Quell would have thought him dead.

  “Adan,” she said.

  The man did not respond.

  “Caern,” she said.

  He groaned and lifted his eyelids, squinting at Quell. “What is it?”

  You’re hurt. Maybe you’re dying. We need to assess your wounds and discuss what to do if you can’t keep walking. Whether I should leave you behind.

  “You’re slowing down.”

  Adan grunted and closed his eyes again.

  He would slip away if she didn’t act.

  Is that what you want?

  “Why are you so worried for Kairos?” she asked.

  It wasn’t the question she’d planned, but it had seemed safe in the moment. Unlikely to draw Adan’s ire.

  “Why does it matter?” he said.

  Quell shrugged. The motion hurt dully. “Tell me or don’t tell me.” She squatted in the sand and shifted on her heels, preparing to rise.

  Before she could stand, Adan said “Wait,” and she lowered herself again.

  She waited a long time for him to speak.

  This is the story he told.

  * * *

  —

  “We met in the camp,” Adan said, and though Quell didn’t ask what the camp was she thought first of Traitor’s Remorse and then, reluctantly, of the holding facilities and labor outposts she’d often seen listed on Imperial military star charts. She thought of the rebel recruiting videos she’d watched at the age of sixteen—grainy holo-footage of electrified fences and emaciated alien bodies.

  “I’d been held for maybe three months. Just long enough for me to realize that I was going to be there a lot longer; that my employers had given up on me or been shut down altogether; that my captors had gone from imprisoning me because I was suspicious to being suspicious because I was imprisoned. I decided my best hope was to wait for a new warden to arrive and audit the entire facility. Maybe some freshly appointed Imperial overseer wouldn’t lose face for tossing me back to the streets of Koru Neimoidia.

  “It wasn’t a stupid hope. Thinking I could last the five, ten years it might take before a change in management, though? That was stupid.”

  Adan had been a financial journalist in his former life, he told Quell. It was the first time he’d told her anything about his existence before the Rebel Alliance. He’d been detained after publishing a story about droid production forecasts on Kol Huro, though he still didn’t know why.

  “They asked about the article. They asked about a lot of things I’d written.”

  But it was after that third month that he’d been transferred from the outer sections of the camp to the inner compound. He’d gone from a bunk room shared with five other prisoners to a private, windowless cell barely wide enough to sit with legs outstretched. He’d lacked any way to tell time—his meals came inconsistently and the compound lights were kept at the same dim levels at all hours. With his antenna-stalks fully extended he could hear voices from the cells above and below his own, but fear prevented him from attempting to make contact.

  “I thought they’d amputate them if they caught me,” Adan said, gingerly touching his scalp where the stalks were retracted. “If they knew I was listening. So I listened less and less, even though it was my only way of connecting.”

  He only left his cell for two reasons. Sometimes—it might have been once a week, but it felt random—a stormtrooper would escort him to the duracrete pit in the complex center for exercise. The pit was five meters deep and it was almost always cold, but it was broad enough to let a person pace and even run for as long as the troopers permitted. “You could see the sky, too,” Adan said. “Sometimes I just sat and watched the sky.”

  The other reason he left his cell was for interrogation. “Making us walk to the droid instead of the droid coming to us—that was part of the process. That was to intimidate us.” He hadn’t seen a living interrogator since being moved into the compound; more evidence that he no longer mattered.

  “But sometimes, when we were on our way or coming back to the droid? That’s when we saw someone else in passing, coming back or going to their own session. We’d cross paths. We’d walk within centimeters of another person—so
meone who wasn’t locked in a stormtrooper’s helmet.

  “There were three of us whose schedules matched up. I don’t know how many in the camp, but there were three of us who saw one another walking to interrogation.

  “That’s how I met Kairos.”

  The moments of connection gave Adan no hope, but they gave him something to look forward to. Something to help chart the passage of time. Every time he saw Kairos he saw how she’d changed, what she’d suffered, and he knew that she saw the same in him. Quell strained to understand what that meant—what Adan had seen in the strange, silent woman; whether she’d been unmasked; how she had changed—but Adan said nothing more and Quell felt asking would have been obscene.

  Yet Adan spoke freely of the last member of their trio. “Ver Iflan. You could see the defiance every time.” The way he spoke made it seem to Quell like he was lying. “He was the one who figured out how to communicate—he’d known another man of my species, understood what we could sense, and he spoke to me from his cell. I don’t know how many months after they put me in the compound, but I started to listen again.

  “Ver Iflan made a plan. He spoke to me even though I could never speak to him. He started the work and he didn’t get to see the end, but we did—I did, and she did.”

  Adan did not speak again for a long while. Quell finally asked, “How did you escape?”

  Adan groaned softly, as if he were too weak to shrug and the sound was all he could offer. “How do you think?” he said next. “We made a new friend. Ver Iflan was gone, but he worked miracles with machines. We became three again.”

  “The interrogation droid?”

  “Reprogrammed. Yes. Caern, Kairos, and Ito.”

  Quell said nothing. There was no comfort she could offer. There was no question she believed he would answer.

  “You asked about Kairos,” Adan eventually said, and sat up rapidly for a man in his condition. He opened his eyes and looked to Quell. “What matters is that she saw me and I saw her. We three were bound together. Now I may be the last of us alive.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said.

  “I know it’s possible,” he said. “So do you.”

  She stood and offered him a hand. He looked at her knuckles, covered in dried blood, with disdain, but pulled himself up by her forearm anyway.

  * * *

  —

  The eye of Cerberon was setting behind them when the ground began to slope downward and red cliffs rose in the distance. They encountered fragments of the freighter less often, but still spotted the occasional reflection off a hull plate or the serpent’s spine of a cable rising from sand.

  Quell was considering how to proceed if they reached the edge of the wreckage—whether to return to the ship or continue on into the unknown—when the quaking returned. This time the tremors were enough to kick her forward; she doubled over and swept her fingers through the sand before regaining balance. Adan remained standing, though she heard his breathing become rapid and shallow.

  Instead of calming, the tremors intensified. Quell grasped Adan by the forearm, as much for her sake as his, and they stumbled headlong. They ran to keep from falling on the downward slope, and a wind rose as the quake propelled them. A few seconds later a crack entirely unlike thunder resonated through the valley and darkness stained the sand. Quell feared a chasm was forming until the darkness leapt up in thick, jagged ridges. Black stones tore from the ground like the disease-racked bones of the planetoid.

  The megalithic boulders were tall as Adan, and they plagued the valley at random—few were clustered close together, but Quell pulled Adan along as though the rocks were liable to impale them both. Fear incited her, and after the quaking began to subside it was only Adan’s weakness that dragged her to a halt. They both fell to the ground, and Quell felt her knees scraped raw by the sand.

  The last tremors died away. Quell stared at the ground, trying to steady her breathing.

  “Are you all right?” Adan asked, soft and anxious.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  When she looked up, she saw he hadn’t been talking to her.

  A dozen paces away floated a metal sphere festooned with sensors and surgical manipulators. Gouges marred its black paint and several of its indicators were dimly lit, as if the interior bulbs were broken; but the red glow of its photoreceptor was undiminished. Its underside was caked in sand, and it hummed low enough that Quell felt her teeth buzz.

  “I am functional,” IT-O said. Its servos whirred and Quell realized its axis was slightly atilt. “I have been unable to access my full diagnostics suite, but my programs and memory are within acceptable parameters for emergency operations.”

  Adan smiled tightly and bowed his head, swaying slightly as he stood. Quell brushed herself off, rose, and asked, “Where have you been? Did you see anything?”

  “I was pulled into the engine compartment when the hull was breached. I fell to ground near the cliffs north of here and only reestablished full movement a short time ago.” The droid paused. “While I charged my repulsors I had time to analyze the tremors along with the readings we took during our approach.”

  Adan massaged his hip but didn’t look away from the droid. “Good news, I assume?”

  “For someone, no doubt,” the droid agreed. “Although the higher math eludes me, I believe this planetoid’s orbit was recently disrupted. It is moving rapidly toward the black hole at the center of the system.”

  The wind rose up again. Quell tasted dust between her teeth. She was tempted to spit it out but choked down the grit instead; she didn’t have water to waste. “How long do we have?” she asked.

  “I’m not certain,” the droid said. “But the planetoid is not massive. It will disintegrate long before we reach the black hole. I estimate no more than a few days.”

  Neither Adan nor Quell spoke for a while. They did not look at one another.

  “We should get moving,” Quell said, though she didn’t know where they should go.

  III

  The Y-wing descended over the district locals called the Web, and Nath Tensent cursed his droid with every centimeter. The vessel swung to and fro on the breeze, its thrusters offline, carried only by repulsors in the hope of avoiding detection. Any miscalculation could prove fatal, Nath knew, as they passed through the gaps between duracrete tubes spanning the district like spider’s silk.

  “You get us killed,” Nath said, “you and I are going to have a talk.”

  The droid squawked an irritated reply.

  “Well, that boy of yours will be annoyed if you come back without me.”

  The tubes—closer to sewers than skyways in breadth and odor—connected the district’s aging factories. Nowadays most of the factories were decommissioned; the district’s population resided almost entirely inside the tubing. Some were brightly painted with murals or flags, while more were stained with an orange moss that ate away at the rough surface like acid.

  Two proton bombs and this whole place will fall apart, Nath thought, though Shadow Wing patrols hadn’t been seen in the area for a while. Even elsewhere, the bombing runs seemed fewer than earlier; Nath suspected they were conserving ammunition.

  A sensor sweep revealed his destination: a broad tube decorated with crude images of tooka-cats. The Y-wing crept forward and a metal hatch swung open, giving the ship no more than half a meter’s clearance on any side. Still, Nath managed to creep forward—T5 did most of the work, but he kept an eye on his instruments—and he waited for his vision to adjust to the dim lighting within.

  Gathered in the tube were several dozen ragged civilians packed among tents and semiportable generators and heating units and strings of glow-bulbs. They parted to make room for the Y-wing as it settled. The residents were humans, mostly—the descendants of noble and merchant families fallen
from grace long ago—though many had been altered or augmented. Nath spotted cybernetic interface plugs and surgical appetite limiters, and experienced a cocktail of nostalgia and disdain for the gangs of his youth.

  The ship lurched onto its landing gear. Nath gripped his sidearm as the crowd pressed in. He’d been told to find his contact here—that the residents had loathed Governor Hastemoor and saw the New Republic as a chance to permanently improve their circumstances. But he’d expected subterfuge, not a public confrontation with a crowd ready to riot.

  They roared as he popped his canopy. He stood from his seat, squinted into the darkness, and grinned toothily at the locals in their starving, pathetic glory. Their cries were almost buoyant, and Nath thought back to the initial campaign for the planet—all the times he’d returned from a mission to the applause of infantry or refugees. He’d expected opinions to sour with the arrival of Shadow Wing, whereas instead the civilians’ despair was cut with the manic hope he associated with the Rebel Alliance.

  This time, their hopes were pinned on him.

  Be careful. You’re getting used to the attention.

  He dropped out of the Y-wing and was caught by two burly men with painted faces. A greasy-haired brute held a child above the crowd, and out of irrational instinct Nath slapped a ration bar into the kid’s hand, knowing it would either encourage the crowd or send them tearing at his flesh for more.

  They called out questions:

  “What’s going on in Thannerhouse?”

  “When is the Empire landing ground troops?”

  “Is it true the governor is alive?”

  He shouted in a booming voice that echoed in the vast tube. “Hey! We’re going to talk about all that. Anything I can answer before I have to head back, I’ll answer. But first you need to help out my pals.