“Any chance I can visit?” she said.
“Once she’s healed, I think,” Gruyver replied.
“Great. So what were you asking about? You said you’d never seen a real sun before…?”
* * *
—
Each day for the next three days, Gruyver found Chass after morning prayers and introduced her to cultists she’d previously managed to avoid. A Twi’lek woman whom Gruyver called his niece had a love for speeder bikes that she communicated passionately, if not articulately; she exchanged stories with Chass about repairing engines and the joys of speed. A Clawdite changeling admitted to once imitating Let’ij, and being caught by the cult leader herself. Most of the cultists were Catadran natives but a few were migrants—one, Chass was convinced, had been a notorious bounty hunter from the Meridian sector before taking up with Let’ij and her crew. Another, calling herself New Dawn, had spent a month on Jedha and spoke at length with Chass about the hundred sects she had encountered—how they were similar and how they were different and how many were lost when that holy world had been destroyed.
The cultists told Chass about their hopes to expand and build and plant gardens in the city to feed thousands. They spoke about it like it was a normal thing to want. Like dreaming of a future outside war and chaos was something that people did.
Chass hated how it made her feel, but the comforting presence of her hold-out blaster made it tolerable. She had a way out if she needed it.
She located the medical suite on the first day but it wasn’t until the evening of the third that she was confident enough in the medics’ schedule to slip inside. She strolled past empty cots and over to the private rooms, peering through a small window into each.
She nearly missed the prisoner. In the fourth cell, in the corner next to a cot, was a humanoid form. Under the dim light, Chass was confused by how dark the woman’s body appeared in contrast with the pale, bruised face. Then she realized it wasn’t the body that was dark but the figure’s clothes: black cloth and leathers specked with badges and patches and tubing.
Tubing?
Chass’s eyes fixed on a white symbol on the shoulder: the six-spoked crest of the Galactic Empire.
“You’re Shadow Wing,” Chass said.
The woman in the Imperial flight suit raised her eyes to the window but didn’t move.
“Give me one reason I shouldn’t kill you,” Chass said.
“New Republic?” the woman asked. Her voice was hoarse and barely decipherable.
Chass nodded.
“You want to get off of Catadra as much as I do,” the woman said.
Chass raised the blaster and fired through the window. The woman screamed and clapped a hand to her arm where the leather of her flight suit had melted. The medical suite’s alarms whined and trilled. “Never try to manipulate me,” Chass said.
The woman’s lips curled into a snarl. Chass ran for her life.
III
Easy, now, Wyl Lark thought, skimming fingertips over the console as if tickling the down of a sur-avka. I’d trust you to fly blind, and it’s not really so dark down here.
But he didn’t say the words aloud, because his comm was still open and the pilots at the other end of the transmission wouldn’t put faith in a man who spoke to his ship. Instead he declared, “Fifteen kilometers—we’re making good progress,” and felt like a child unsure of his role.
“Who’s fast and maneuverable now, huh?” Nath replied. “That A-wing of yours suddenly ain’t worth much.”
The other pilots’ laughter followed. Wyl was grateful.
There were no stars outside his cockpit—not even the false stars of city lights. The only illumination came from his own vessel’s emergency beams, painting swaths of rock and stalactites and revealing crevices that seemed too narrow to pass through until, upon approaching, they shucked the illusions of distance and widened to great maws. The tunnels honeycombing Troithe were as broad and straight as avenues and as slender and winding as a battle cruiser’s maintenance shafts. Wyl flew at speeds a landspeeder could have surpassed, giving himself enough reaction time to dip beneath stone curtains or sweep around crystalline pillars.
Crashing wasn’t his biggest worry, though; more likely was choosing a tunnel so narrow that he’d be unable to turn around. Wyl didn’t consider himself claustrophobic, and he’d gone caving more than once among the cliffs of Home; but the weight of a planet was pressing down above him. He had no desire to face Troithe’s underworld alone.
He had no desire to abandon his new squadron and leave them unprotected.
His comm crackled. “There are houses here. Whole villages preserved in stone!” Wyl recognized the voice of Denish Wraive—two centuries old, eighty years since he’d flown in combat, but as enthused to pilot his souped-up airspeeder as any child of Home climbing onto his first mount.
“They say there’s ghost civilizations buried below the city foundations,” Gorgeous Su replied through static. Wyl guessed she was passing through a distant tunnel. She was the most eager of his scouts, too quick to seek shortcuts without asking permission. Sister to the Houk he’d met among the infantry commanders, her massive frame had barely fit inside the Humble HoverCat’s cockpit. “Probably a lot of superstitions we should be glad we don’t know about.”
“Ignorance as a defense against local culture,” Ubellikos sniffed. The young human spoke with the stentorian articulation—and accent—of a Hutt. His confident indignation reminded Wyl of Chass. “Such an Imperial way of looking at things.”
“Yes,” Prinspai agreed with an insectoid chitter and click.
“Works well sometimes, though,” Nath said, and the others laughed again.
They were Wyl’s squadron now. He barely knew them, but they were his.
* * *
—
None of them had slept much since descending beneath the city. The Sixty-First Mobile Infantry had loaded into unarmed rumblers, tunnel-tanks, mining transports, and repulsorcars. Those ground vehicles stayed in constant motion, their drivers operating in shifts drawn up by company commanders. The resulting caravan slithered on its long journey toward the Scar of Troithe.
Wyl had been among those who’d approved taking the underground route—it was, according to the charts, far quicker than an overland passage and less likely to draw attention from Shadow Wing. But the unit had quickly discovered that the charts were out of date, and the aircraft were pressed into service mapping tunnels and caverns. Like the ground vehicles, the aircraft rarely stopped—the mining transports could carry two ships during the pilots’ rest periods, but no more.
Wyl slept least of all. When he wasn’t able to play scout he was running the pilots through drills, lecturing them about past encounters with Shadow Wing, or drawing up tactical maps. There wasn’t space in the tunnels to train properly, so they trained improperly at slow speeds or at distances measured in meters instead of kilometers.
Even when Wyl’s A-wing was docked with the caravan, he was busy discussing plans with Carver or checking the progress of the infantry’s engineers. Two additional craft were still being refurbished—a repulsorcraft Wyl doubted could ever be upgraded to suit his squadron’s needs, and a rusting Clone Wars starfighter Nath had called a V-wing. The latter resembled the mangled child of a TIE fighter and Wyl’s own A-wing and he’d promised it to Sergeant Vitale, if it could be made to work.
He was flying alongside the caravan while most of the others were on recon duty. Their sensor pings painted a tunnel map onto his screens, and he felt his eyelids flickering when Gorgeous Su declared: “Game time.”
Wyl snapped to alertness. “Enemies?” he asked.
Nath snickered. Ubellikos groaned with a rumble. Vitale, who was serving as the caravan’s liaison to the squadron, said, “You mean a proper game, right?”
>
“Who? What? Where?” Su said. “Bored to tears, might as well.”
Stay focused, Wyl wanted to say, but only because it was the sort of thing Quell or Rununja would have said to Alphabet or Riot Squadron. They all needed a distraction. The right thing to do was to let them have the game.
So he did.
“Just keep half an eye on your scanner, okay? If anyone crashes I’m going to get the blame.”
The pilots and Vitale debated who would go first. They nominated Nath, who seemed disinterested but good-humored. His Y-wing stayed four hundred meters ahead of the caravan. “Who hears about my death first? Anyone who owes me credits; might as well make their day. What’s the cause? Some punk with a vibroknife who wants to make a name for himself. Where does it happen? One of the Echo systems. Always pictured myself retiring to a tube-yacht there.”
T5 chimed in the background, Vitale contended that Nath’s What? was insufficiently specific, and Su and the others argued who would go next. Wyl thought of the last time he’d played, with Riot aboard the Hellion’s Dare; they’d been on the run from Shadow Wing then, too, and he’d found the game at least as distasteful.
They’re bonding. Let it happen. Be part of it.
“Who?” Vitale said. “My nephew back on Corellia. Good kid, and I’d like him to remember his aunt. What? Imperial Vizier Mas Amedda’s personal guard detail. Where? Coruscant, obviously. We survive this mission, we’re headed there sooner or later.”
Su was next, and she hit her notes with practiced flare. “Who? My husband and love, Thage Howless, wherever his black heart might be. What? Whatever Shadow Wing’s using for a command ship when I ram the bridge with an airspeeder packed full of armed warheads. Where? Someplace along the Rimma Trade Route, as we chase those bastards out of the Core.”
“How exactly do you intend to fly a Humble HoverCat out to the Rimma?” Denish Wraive asked.
“I hate calling it that,” Su answered. “I’m flying a child’s toy.”
“Besides,” Vitale called, “Alphabet’s got dibs on the Shadow Wing grudge.”
“We can share,” Nath said.
Vitale laughed. “What do you say, Wyl?”
He heard the playfulness and remembered their dinner with Alphabet among the refugees. “Plenty of grudge to share. But let’s hope we don’t have to, huh?”
Ubellikos made a rude noise of disapproval, Vitale laughed, and the game went on. Wraive was next, and he composed an intricate, minutes-long tale of his death from heart failure after saving his great-grandchildren in the final days of the war. Prinspai clicked briefly about an oxygen overdose. Wyl knew his turn was rapidly approaching, and he made an effort to find something to share—something disarming and honest instead of bleak—and all he could think of was: I’m not planning to die. I’m not planning to let any of you die.
A proximity alarm saved him from an answer. He checked his scanner and saw a mark moving through a side tunnel.
“Enemy!” Vitale called. “Game time for real!”
The TIE fighter flashed ghostlike above the rumblers and repulsorcars, pale in the illumination of its running lights and trailing the afterimage of its ion engines. Its scream echoed through the caverns, magnified and distorted, and Wyl found himself transfixed for precious seconds before he opened his throttle and gave chase. “One TIE,” he called. “Probably a scout. Attempting to pursue—do not fire in the vicinity of the caravan. Last thing we need is a cave-in.”
“Last thing we need is thirty more of those guys,” Nath corrected.
The TIE pilot must have had the same concern—it did not fire as Wyl chased it past repulsorcars and Nath’s Y-wing. A few of the infantry shot low-powered particle volleys, but aside from wrecking Wyl’s night vision they had no effect. He shifted his eyes to his scanner until he readjusted, following the TIE into another tunnel branch.
He wondered if he’d met the enemy pilot before. Blink would have recognized him and made contact. The others he’d known best by their ships’ damage and their fighting styles, neither of which applied today.
“How did they know where to look for us?” Ubellikos asked.
“Someone must’ve seen the vehicles we nabbed,” Nath said. “Sort of implied we’d be going underground.” His voice gave way to distortion as Wyl’s distance from the caravan increased.
The A-wing could easily keep pace with the TIE, and Wyl rarely lost sight of his quarry’s lights. But the TIE pilot was skilled and—Wyl suspected—better rested, making frequent last-second course changes and descents into whole new strata of the underworld. In one narrow passage, Wyl had to tilt his fighter oblique to the rock or risk clipping his wings. The TIE was barely more slender than the A-wing but barely was enough to give it an advantage. Wyl shifted his body in his harness as if his own weight would provide the extra tilt he needed.
His deflector screens shimmered as the electromagnetic field intersected the wall. The A-wing trembled and jostled within the shield bubble. Wyl smelled burning wiring and shut off his deflector screens altogether. Now we’re even, he thought, watching the TIE.
He saw his chance when they emerged into a broader cavern. The TIE spun and juddered, attempting to force Wyl to fly past into its field of fire. He retained his relative position and fumbled with his comm. “TIE fighter,” he called. He should have jammed all signals but the fighter hadn’t attacked—it galled him to take the first shot unprovoked. “Reduce speed and surrender immediately.”
It wouldn’t work. It didn’t work. He reduced power to his weapons (bypassing a malfunctioning capacitor to do so), attempting to find an intensity that would damage the TIE without causing an avalanche if he missed.
The TIE fired before he could. It bobbed upward, raking the cavern roof with particle fire an instant before its thrusters blazed—it was attempting to crush its pursuer and outrace the cavern’s collapse. Wyl applied retro-rockets and repulsors to brake and squeezed his trigger as g forces squeezed him into his seat. He saw dust and the flash of his blaster cannons and veered starboard as the world fell and rumbled, trying to cut his velocity further and strike the avalanche sidelong instead of headfirst. Shouldn’t have dropped your shields after all, he thought, and smiled and winced together.
He heard stone striking metal and the less melodic crack of debris against his canopy. A rain of boulders filled his peripheral vision; inertia carried his port wing dangerously close to the destruction. He attempted to roll onto his starboard side, buy himself another meter of clearance, but he didn’t know whether he’d succeeded until his stabilizers kicked in and he realized he was hanging in his harness.
The rumbling stopped as the cave-in ceased. Dancing sparks illuminated the broken wing of a TIE fighter in the dark. The pilot’s ploy had failed.
He’s bought the caravan some time, he thought, as sweat rolled down his cheek and dripped onto the side of his canopy. But if Shadow Wing had found them once, Shadow Wing could find them again.
His squadron wasn’t ready.
* * *
—
There wasn’t much to do. Splitting the caravan wasn’t an option—it might keep a sizable number of soldiers safe from attack but the ground vehicles would never reach the surface without aerial scouts. “We could park down here, fortify and prepare,” Twitch suggested when the commanders assembled via comm, and even she laughed at the idea. “Get all crushed when the foe drops one bomb, but we’d be fortified and prepared for it.”
“We keep rolling,” Carver said. “Get distance from where they found us and hope we reach the surface before long.”
It wasn’t a plan but it was a declaration of intent, and Wyl didn’t have anything superior to suggest. (Quell would have had a superior idea, but Wyl wasn’t as clever as Quell or as experienced as Rununja.) He explained the situation to his pilots, trying to mix comp
assion with determination as he finished:
“For now, our job isn’t to beat Shadow Wing or retake Troithe. It’s to protect the rest of the troops. We’re all tired, but we can do that much.”
Gorgeous Su, Denish Wraive, Prinspai, Ubellikos, and Nath Tensent acknowledged the situation one by one. Wyl gave them their scouting assignments and was preparing for his own recon run when Nath asked, “Your cockpit smell like sweat and piss as much as mine does?”
Wyl laughed despite himself. “Probably. I’ve been trying not to think about it.”
“When’s the last time you climbed out, got some fresh air?” Nath paused. “Fresh as it gets down here, anyway.”
“Been maybe eight hours. I am taking care of myself, Nath. Thank you.”
“There’s perks to being commander. No one’s stopping you from taking four hours to land on one of the rumblers and get some sleep.”
“That what you would’ve done, when you had a squadron?” Wyl asked. He tried to keep judgment out of his voice. In truth, he did wonder how Nath would handle the situation.
“Doesn’t matter what I would’ve done. Just telling you what I figure.”
Wyl drummed his fingers on his console and nodded. “Nath?”
“Talk to me, brother.”
“Look out for the others, too. The way you do for me? They could use it. I could use it.”
“The others haven’t been through what we’ve been through. I’ll do what I can, but—”
“The 204th hit all of us. They’ve been through enough. Please.”
Nath didn’t say anything for a long while. Wyl thought he heard T5 burbling in the background alongside static and engine noise. “I’ll do what I can,” Nath finally said.
Please, Wyl thought, but he didn’t say what he wanted to say: that in their game of Who? What? Where? only Nath had been bold enough to imagine a life after the war; that the others needed hope, no matter how cynical, and they would listen to Nath more than they would Wyl.
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