Shadow Fall (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  “How did you acquire this information?” Soran asked.

  “Multiple local sightings, compiled by an operative from the governor’s—the old governor’s—Special Intelligence Unit. We were lucky he happened to be in the area.”

  There was no tinge of doubt in her voice. Soran nodded. “Go on.”

  “Based on that information, plus unconfirmed sightings here and here—” She jabbed at two points, creating a line leading away from Highgarden. “—we’ve begun compiling a list of possible targets. Strategic outposts they might be moving to attack or occupy.”

  Yadeez tapped a button and twenty new dots flashed into existence, each labeled with a name and a set of coordinates. Soran wished he possessed the expertise to make immediate sense of it all. If Syndulla was still alive, he thought, she surely knew exactly what she was doing; and while he believed he was the superior pilot, he had no doubt she was the superior general. Add to that her familiarity with the terrain, and he would consider himself lucky if she’d died with the Lodestar.

  “Tell me about them,” he said. “All of them.”

  Yadeez did. For thirty minutes, Soran listened intently; he was broadly familiar with many of the targets from his earlier studies of the planet, but Yadeez’s insights were useful and he needed time to process what he was seeing. As she described the significance of the Hoorn Skyway, however, and the possibility that the New Republic hoped to seize control of transportation infrastructure, his eyes roamed to a distant light on the map. He kept half his attention on Yadeez as he pulled up files, finally seeing fit to interrupt her with: “What about the mining facility?”

  “Core Nine?” Yadeez paused and did not adjust the map. “It’s the least likely of the targets, but it is potentially accessible to the enemy. There’s not much they could do there, though.”

  “But it’s functional?” Soran asked. He tapped the screen he’d been eyeing a moment before. “The New Republic could be after the equipment there, believing it’s unguarded.”

  “It was never decommissioned. I don’t know how much is online.”

  Soran nodded. Yadeez was watching him, openly curious. He wondered what she thought he was thinking.

  “We can return to it later,” Soran said. “Apologies—continue with the skyway.”

  Yadeez did. Soran gave her his attention again. But in the back of his mind he explored possibilities.

  Whatever the New Republic intended—whether they were after the Core Nine megafacility or another target—the mine was a solution to all of his problems. It had everything the 204th required. He would reprioritize accordingly.

  It was unfortunate that he would need to betray the governor. But Colonel Soran Keize had pledged to serve his people first.

  CHAPTER 16

  DEEP BEYOND DAY

  I

  Time was oblique to them. The droid’s internal chronometer was unreliable due to damage. Yrica Quell had carried an emergency timepiece but it had shattered in the crash and she’d abandoned it in the freighter. The rising and setting of the Cerberon black hole over the planetoid’s horizon made a mockery of night and day; the light of the burning iris was bright enough to make travel easier, yet without knowing the planetoid’s rotation period it told them nothing about how long they’d been stranded.

  Even the rhythms of their bodies were deceptive—Quell and Adan’s injuries forced them to rest often and denied them deep sleep. They made camp when they felt unable to go farther and resumed their journey when frustration and anxiety drove them onward.

  IT-O had said that it had spotted something—a shadow, perhaps only a mountain or a chasm, or perhaps a structure—during its fall. The direction correlated with what Quell and the droid could remember of the energy reading’s location. So they trekked east, hoping to come upon something that would save them before the planetoid was torn apart by the black hole.

  “If it’s true that my captors were here,” Adan said, “it doesn’t seem likely we’ll find anything worthwhile.” They slogged through a wide valley, ridges towering over them. The sand was looser and offered less traction than before their descent—the gravel had disintegrated and only dust was left. “If there was a base or a communications outpost, they would have stripped it bare.”

  “We don’t know that,” Quell replied.

  “We don’t know there’s anything here at all. But why else would they have come in the middle of a war?”

  It was a reasonable question, yet it made Quell want to shove Adan’s face into the sand until he choked.

  “What if it was the Empire that knocked the planetoid out of orbit?” she asked. “What if they wanted to destroy what was here and make sure no one could recover it?”

  Adan twisted his neck, staring at her a moment before looking back to the sand. They trudged forward and when Quell began to believe the conversation was over Adan said, “There were reports of secret vaults and laboratories targeted for destruction after Endor, supposedly on the orders of the Emperor himself. That was the less glamorous part of Operation Cinder, but it was still a part.”

  The wind rose. Quell felt cold. Adan was mocking her, she thought. Maybe she deserved it.

  “If she’s a spy, she’s not an especially good one,” the interrogation droid said.

  The unit floated a short distance behind them. Both Quell and Adan turned. Its primary manipulator arm twitched and its photoreceptor was dilated. Then it seemed to steady.

  “Apologies,” it said. “My memory circuits are faulty. I was momentarily confused. Please continue.”

  They walked on.

  * * *

  —

  They did not return to the topic of what they might find at their destination. They marched between the cliffs, trudging through sand like ashes under a star-bright sky blotted with the flotsam of the debris field. Cerberon, forever ravenous, rose overhead and the wind howled and dust danced.

  They didn’t speak again of Operation Cinder, yet they broke their collective silence more often. Adan asked what had happened during Shadow Wing’s attack and Quell explained all she knew in a monotone, from the arrival of the Star Destroyer and the cruiser-carrier to the deployment of New Republic ships to Catadra and the interception over Troithe. When Adan asked why she hadn’t led Alphabet herself, she told him, “Because they got your message.” He didn’t reply to that.

  Later, when he asked how she knew it was Shadow Wing, she told him about Nath Tensent’s signal.

  “It’s possible,” he said when she was finished, “that it never was Shadow Wing. Tensent could’ve gotten it wrong.”

  “He wasn’t wrong,” she said. “I saw them.”

  “Obsession might have colored your opinion.”

  I saw Major Keize, she thought. My mentor shot us down. There’s no one else it could have been.

  But she didn’t say it. She had told Adan that Keize died on Nacronis, and telling the truth now would raise subjects she had no desire to address. Instead she shrugged away his doubt and took the offensive.

  “If you’d done your part,” she said, her voice low and steady, “they would have taken the bait. They’d be on the asteroid right now, waiting to be ambushed by the Sixty-First.”

  Adan swore softly and said something Quell couldn’t hear. She knew what he meant all the same.

  The interrogation droid said nothing. Quell had always thought of IT-O as a peacemaker; but Adan was its master, and maybe she should’ve been grateful it wasn’t taking sides.

  * * *

  —

  The valley twisted so often that, after the black hole fell below the ridgeline, Quell no longer knew in what direction they traveled. The cliffs had become increasingly steep over the course of the day (or eternal night, or whatever it was) and climbing, injured as they were, was out of the question. �
�There’s no point going back. We’ll keep moving until we find a way out of the valley,” Quell said, and Adan did not argue.

  They didn’t find a way out. The wind changed with the disappearance of the black hole, lashing them in cutting ribbons edged with particles of sand. They strayed to the cliff wall for shelter, but it wasn’t enough—when a whip snapped across Quell’s legs and dropped her to the ground, she loosed a frustrated howl and called for a halt. Adan voiced agreement, and she noticed for the first time how his face glistened with sweat. Forcing down her resentment, she offered him the day’s accumulation of water from the vaporator. He drank most of it and handed back the canteen without thanks.

  They found a hollow in the cliff where they made camp. It extended no more than five meters past the broad, jagged cave mouth, but it was oppressively dark and Quell wished for a glow rod or anything brighter than the droid’s indicators. IT-O reported that it found nothing concerning during its full-spectrum scans, and they settled in to rest.

  At least we’re out of the wind, Quell thought before falling into a sore and troubled sleep.

  It was black as ever when she woke. She didn’t know if she’d rested for one hour or eight, though she felt not at all refreshed and her head throbbed from dehydration. The sound of the gusts outside was faint but the cave echoed with a lower keening. Quell worried it was the droid’s repulsors malfunctioning but she didn’t see the unit’s lights.

  As her eyes adjusted she saw Adan standing above her an arm’s length away, staring at the cave wall and moaning. His antenna-stalks were half raised, though one was still unnaturally bent from his captivity.

  The moaning stopped as Quell shuffled to a squatting position. “I need a drink,” Adan said.

  “I’ll check the vaporator,” Quell said.

  “I need a drink,” Adan repeated, and twisted to look at her with a fury that burned hot enough to show in the dark. “I need a decent night’s sleep. I need to get out of here.”

  Quell flinched and slowly rose. Adan was a silhouette against the lighter shadows of the cave mouth. “If you have a suggestion, I’m glad to listen. You’re the one in control of the working group. You’re—”

  “There is no working group!” Adan cried, half laughing. “There’s only you and me, and enough chemicals to make my blood catch fire. What do you want me to tell you?”

  Quell mouthed the words to make sure she’d heard them correctly. “You’re not making sense.”

  “I am the only one making sense! They all need me, you understand? I do everything I can—” He stepped forward, and Quell saw something feral in his expression. He sweated despite the cold air, despite dehydration, despite their rest. “—and you’re the one who ruins worlds! Who kills families!”

  She should have felt compassion. He was clearly hallucinating. Maybe one of his wounds had been infected—he smelled foul enough—and that infection had spread to his blood. Maybe it was simply the pain he was going through. But she felt nothing for Adan, and when he lunged awkwardly she dug her heels into the rock and braced to push him backward instead of stepping aside.

  He was stronger than she’d expected. He bowled into her with enough force to make her right heel slip and her knee strike the cave floor. Pain flashed up her thigh and she shouted, feared a fracture, and abandoned all gentleness as she shoved Adan away. Adan wobbled but caught himself against the cave wall.

  He wasn’t armed. She was confident in that. But neither was she, and she’d never been any good at hand-to-hand fighting. She could stop him, but she wasn’t certain she could do so without accidentally cracking his skull or breaking one of his legs.

  Adan came at her again, shouting incoherently, and she rose in time to catch him and spin with the momentum. They whirled together and she drove her left knee into his groin, shoved him off her once, then twice. She prepared to punch him when he staggered backward with eyes wide.

  He dropped to the ground, catching himself on his hands. Behind him, in the dark, floated the red bead Quell recognized as the interrogation droid’s photoreceptor. She couldn’t see the needle in the droid’s manipulator, but she knew it was there.

  Adan shuddered and fell.

  “The sedation should last several hours,” the droid said.

  “Where were you?” Quell asked. She sounded hoarse and she breathed heavily.

  “I decided not to power down while you rested—the odds that I would fail to awaken seemed low but not nonexistent, given the damage I’ve sustained. I thought I would scout ahead rather than waste battery power in the cave.”

  “Warn me next time.” Quell knelt beside Adan, and the droid descended over his body. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “The list of his injuries is extensive. You’re asking about the delirium?” The whine of the droid’s repulsors rose to an insectoid buzz. “I do not detect any infection. It may be an aftereffect of medication in combination with anxiety and malnutrition. I believe it will pass if he can be restored to bodily health.”

  She met the machine’s gaze. “What do we do?”

  “We must remove him from this planetoid as swiftly as possible. In the meantime he should not be forced to travel—it will only worsen his condition.”

  Quell wanted to sit on the stone next to Adan. Instead she stood. Once again, she wondered how long she’d managed to sleep. “I’ll keep going. You stay with Adan.”

  She began sorting her belongings and dividing the remaining stores of food and water. Behind her, IT-O said, “I’ll accompany you.”

  “Adan needs someone to care for him.”

  “I believe he can care for himself, and my supply of medication is nearly exhausted.”

  “Care for him anyway.”

  “Yrica.”

  The droid said her name and she turned, shoulders tight. “What?”

  “I found something while scouting. You need to follow me.”

  * * *

  —

  The black hole was out of sight as Quell marched across the red wastes, eternally one step behind the interrogation droid. The valley was now narrow enough to be called a canyon, and as they traveled it split once, twice, three times. Always they followed the left-hand path, though the branches all looked the same to Quell.

  Eventually the ground sloped upward and they came onto a mesa overlooking the fractured lands, unnaturally topped with sand that billowed at every breeze. Quell climbed dunes and pulled her shirt over her mouth and nose, wishing she’d brought her flight helmet.

  The tower formed gradually out of the night, taking shape where stars were absent against the sky. From a distance, it might have been a natural obelisk—a gargantuan version of the black stones that erupted during the worst of the quakes. As Quell’s eyes adjusted and she strained to take it in, however, she saw that the top of the tower was ornately forked—two individual spires rising from the central mass, arcing and coming together to frame an opaque lens that dully distorted the stars behind it.

  There was nothing Quell could see at the base of the tower. There was no path through the sand, or even the corpse of another stormtrooper to indicate the location had significance.

  She thought of what Adan had said about sites targeted by Operation Cinder.

  “Do you know what it is?” she asked the interrogation droid.

  “This is as close as I came,” the droid replied.

  She wished she hadn’t spoken. Speaking aloud felt profane.

  Closer to the tower, she could see that it had indeed been carved of the quake stone, apparently from a single piece. Its surface was broken by a circuit maze of shallow, nearly imperceptible grooves. Inset in the tower base was a massive rectangular door formed from a metal the same color as the rock, distinguished only by its marginally more reflective luster.

  The tower’s antiqui
ty was obvious from the weathering of the stone. What had once, Quell suspected, been perfectly square corners were rounded from centuries—from millennia, perhaps—of wind and sand. Quell felt instinctively certain that the tower was older than anything on Catadra. Her memory drifted to the Jedi temple she’d visited on the Harkrova moon, and that memory led to a vaguely recalled word she’d encountered somewhere among rebel propaganda videos: Sith.

  She couldn’t recall the word’s meaning, though she tried.

  * * *

  —

  The tower door was sealed and did not acknowledge Quell’s presence. She saw no way to open it—she found no controls, and when she leaned into the icy metal with her shoulder it did not give. She circled the tower three times as the black hole crested the horizon and found nothing of interest nearby.

  The droid did not follow her, instead remaining near the entrance. “There is machinery concealed here,” it announced when she returned. “Sophisticated biosensors installed within the edifice.”

  “What does it do?” she asked.

  “The equipment could be programmed to scan for a specific biophysical signature—that of an individual, a bloodline, or a species. Given the location, perhaps this is the locking mechanism.”

  “The door automatically admits anyone coded for access?”

  “It is possible. Alternatively—” The droid hesitated and hummed. Quell wondered if it was analyzing gathered data or simply deciding what to tell her. “—the equipment is significantly more advanced than required for a baseline genetic reading. It could be calibrated to read physiological responses.”