Shadow Fall (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  The next cycle or a hundred cycles later, after seeing fresh horrors and waking drenched in sweat, Yrica Quell scuttled away from the tower. Driven by instinct to leave the site of her misery, she crawled until she reached the edge of the mesa and thought for a moment of pulling herself over. Not to die—she had no conscious urge for death—but because she wasn’t finished fleeing. She let her chin droop over the cliffside and breathed slower as the cool wind washed over her, calming her.

  The droid’s words floated down. “We must return. You cannot ignore what you see.”

  She sounded petulant as she asked: “Why?”

  “Because it is your only escape off this world.”

  The voice was the voice she had come to know since Traitor’s Remorse, but there was a wrongness to it that made her shudder. She eased back over the cliff’s edge and turned to look at the floating sphere.

  “My only escape?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the droid replied.

  She repeated the words in her mind, and it felt like another vision. Another horror.

  “Why do you care whether I escape?” she asked.

  “Because you are my patient.”

  She climbed to her feet and reached out to the droid to steady herself. The metal of its chassis was too warm, as if its components were overheating. “Fine. But I need to walk it off, or I’m not going to survive to see the lens again.”

  They moved along the cliffside. Quell did not turn her head to look toward the tower. “Can I ask you something?” she said. “About you?”

  “We are not here to talk about—”

  “I know. But sometimes it’s easier to talk about someone else. Even if I’m not talking about someone else. You know?”

  It sounded like the sort of thing the droid would want her to say. Too much so, perhaps, but she hoped the hoarseness in her voice and the lurch in her step would give the words the required innocence.

  “Very well,” the droid said.

  “You remember what you were? Before you had patients?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you go from that to—what you are now?”

  “I was reprogrammed.”

  “By who?”

  “No one whose name would have meaning to you.”

  “Where?”

  “At an Imperial transitory holding facility in the Colonies.”

  “And you were reprogrammed? And escaped there alone?”

  “Yes.”

  She walked on until she felt a chunk of stone catch the toe of her boot. She dropped to a knee and brought her hand to the errant shard. It was in her pocket by the time she was upright.

  She hesitated to ask the next question. She didn’t want to know the answer.

  “Do you know anyone named Caern Adan?” she asked.

  “No,” the droid said.

  She felt the pull of the black hole as if it were looming above her. She thought of the kindness the droid had shown her over the past months; the evening of the victory party after Pandem Nai’s fall, when it had called itself her friend.

  “Your memories are gone, aren’t they? Wiped or corrupted?”

  Neither of them moved anymore. She faced the unit’s photoreceptor, watched the droid tilt on its axis and then, with a twitch, pull itself level again. “The damage is significant,” the droid said.

  “You’re a torture droid again, aren’t you?”

  She wished she had her sidearm, or a vibroblade, or even an arc welder. Her hand cupped the jagged stone in her pocket, but next to the machine’s serums and sonics and chemical torture turret she was sorely outmatched. It didn’t matter that the droid was damaged—she was damaged, too, and probably worse.

  The droid’s voice was lower, taking on a tone of warning. “I no longer serve the Empire, and that is no longer my purpose.”

  “Then why are you torturing me?” she cried, louder than the wind. As if in reply, the planetoid rumbled as a quake shook the ground.

  “Because although I am not a torture droid, I see no reason not to use the tools at my disposal—”

  “You mean no reason to regret?”

  “—nor any reason not to punish an Imperial war criminal for the acts she has committed.”

  Quell screamed without words as she lunged for the droid. Its humming dropped to a motorized growl and it descended half a meter, causing her swing of the stone to cut through air. She felt a numbing sonic pulse pummel her right leg and couldn’t prevent herself from collapsing but she fell forward onto the machine, wrapping her arms around its chassis as it attempted to wriggle free. The fingernails of her left hand scraped metal and found one of its scars; her right elbow locked around its secondary manipulator as her right hand brought down the rock, striking at random.

  She heard a crisp shattering sound and felt something sting her wrist—she suspected she’d smashed the droid’s syringe and been stabbed by the glass. The droid became suddenly slick; her fingers lost their grip on frictionless metal as it exerted its repulsors and rotated its body. A moment later she felt something burning her left calf and smelled a stench like melting plastoid.

  She released the droid and saw her pant leg boiling away. She didn’t want to think what the skin beneath might look like, but if she was lucky the garment had taken the brunt of whatever the droid had sprayed her with. The machine was ascending again, attempting to move out of reach, and she knew that if it rose overhead she wouldn’t catch it. She forced herself past the agony in one leg and the numbness in the other to leap, to grasp the droid by a manipulator and yank it back toward the ground. Halfway to the sand the droid rebounded in midair, and they bounced together toward the edge of the cliff.

  The droid was saying something but its voice was distorted, rapidly changing pitch. It dragged her through the dust and she wrestled it downward, digging her trembling knees into gravel. She struck it with her rock again and drew sparks, struck it once more and saw a panel pop open.

  But then her knees were dangling in the air and she was slipping over the cliff’s edge. She tried to scale the machine and pulled it closer instead; then one of her arms slipped, the rock fell from her grasp, and she flipped onto her back. Her shoulders and head dangled off the side of the mesa and the torture droid loomed over her, still clasped by one arm, its red photoreceptor staring at her like the burning eye of Cerberon.

  “Adan,” she gasped. “Kairos. Nothing?”

  “Nothing that would excuse what you’ve done,” the droid said, and its voice fluctuated from masculine to feminine with each word.

  Quell raked her nails over metal as blood rushed to her head. She felt an open socket where the panel had been pried open and tried to hold on as the machine aimed its chemical turret at her face. Something slapped at her nose, and she feared it was the first blast from the turret; then she saw a dark rectangle flash through her field of vision and she realized that it was a chip hanging from a short metal chain around her neck.

  She had moments to act. She used them.

  She lifted her torso, fighting gravity and her wounded body’s weight, and brought herself as close to the droid as she could. She gripped the back of the sphere with one hand as if pulling it in for a kiss and snagged the chip with the other, yanking the chain forward and plugging the chip into the droid’s open socket.

  IT-O made a noise like a thousand voices overlapping.

  Quell shimmied forward underneath the machine, letting the chain slip over her head as she returned to the mesa and crawled a meter from the edge. The droid emitted bursts of static and rotated in the air, working its way toward Quell in periodic bursts of speed. Its motions might have been comedic if the unpredictability hadn’t been so startling, the implications so horrifying. She had no idea what was occurring in its synthetic brain—whether D6-
L’s memory chip was downloading files like a virus or whether the broken chip had caused a hardware malfunction the torture droid couldn’t circumvent. She felt no triumph at the thought of her old astromech saving her one last time.

  IT-O fell to the dust. Its manipulators twitched like the legs of an overturned beetle. A muffled sound played from its speakers: fragments of her own voice, as if it was searching recorded conversations for…what? Some last jab at her? A plea for mercy? An indication of regret?

  It had forgotten regret and mercy when it had forgotten Kairos and Caern Adan.

  She thought of kicking it off the side of the mesa. The fall would destroy it for sure.

  She turned away. She hadn’t forgotten.

  * * *

  —

  She made it to the cave before the next sunless morning. Both her legs were lanced with anguish, but so far as she could tell the actual damage was superficial. Quakes struck the planetoid twice during her travels, and each time the shaking seemed to drive the pain deeper—yet the effect barely slowed her. She’d suffered enough over the past days. She felt no need to linger on misery anymore.

  Adan was where she’d left him. His cheeks were puffy—not gaunt like she’d expected—and his brow was damp with sweat. Wrappers from meal packs danced around the cave in the breeze. She could hear him breathing from several meters away, but she thought he was sleeping until she knelt beside him and he, barely cracking open his eyes, said, “You’re back.”

  “Disappointed?” she asked.

  “Perpetually,” he said. She scowled and he smiled. “But that’s my fault. Not yours.”

  He sounded lucid, unlike the delirious man she’d left behind. She wondered if the droid had been responsible for that, too.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked, and hoped he saw the compassion in the question instead of the inanity.

  “Pretty sure I’m dying,” he said.

  She took one of his hands in both of hers and lay beside him.

  They talked.

  Adan was dying, she agreed, though for a while she tried to convince him otherwise. His injuries from the crash—or from before the crash—had been infected, and the infection had spread to his bloodstream as she’d earlier feared. His organs were failing. Quell knew little about Balosar anatomy, but she felt confident in that and she had nothing with which to treat him. Nonetheless, Adan was composed and, if not at peace with his death, resigned to it.

  They talked, and when his speech became angry the anger wasn’t directed at her. He fumed about the unfairness of his demise, and what it would mean for New Republic Intelligence and the peace to come—when men like him would be needed to secure the galaxy against the inevitable guerrilla threats and terrorist movements. He complained that he should have been safe on Troithe, and that the military should have protected him from capture. She saw him blink away tears when he spoke about Kairos and she realized he felt responsible for her injuries; and when he asked about Shadow Wing, tried to comprehend how their trap could have gone wrong, she played the role she knew he wanted and offered speculation and tactical analysis as if they were back aboard the Lodestar with General Syndulla.

  “Sometimes I wonder why we put in so much effort,” he mumbled. “Are they so much worse than the other Imperials out there? They’re not the only ones who were part of Cinder—maybe we had them broken after Pandem Nai and should never have lured them here.”

  “I don’t think they’re worse,” Quell said. She wasn’t sure it was the answer he wanted. “But it’s not about punishment, is it?”

  “No,” Adan agreed. “It’s about prevention. Because they won’t stop killing people until someone stops them, and no one but us is liable to do that.”

  “I’m sorry we didn’t manage,” Quell said. Their faces were centimeters apart, and she could smell the disease in his body. She didn’t meet his eyes.

  “Well,” Adan said, not hiding the bitterness, “no one can say we didn’t try.”

  They were silent for a while. Adan slept for a while. When he woke he told her he wasn’t worried about his analysts. He talked about Nasha Gravas, and how he was certain she’d found a way to keep the others safe. From there he segued into conversation about the rest of the working group—asking if she thought Chass na Chadic was alive, and Wyl Lark, and Nath Tensent. She didn’t know, and she realized he was building up to a question he’d been holding back for hours.

  “Where’s Ito?” he asked.

  She had an answer prepared. She discarded it for another. “Its power cells ran dry. The damage was worse than it wanted to say.”

  She watched Adan swallow. He’d wept enough already that she couldn’t tell if the tears were new or old. “Good droid,” he said. “Good droid.”

  Once again, they lapsed into silence. Adan’s breathing was louder than the wind in the small cave, and Quell could feel the moisture from his rasps against her neck.

  The man was dying and would soon be dead. She’d found him insufferable for most of the time she’d known him, but still, she believed he deserved a peaceful end. It’s why you’re here, she told herself. Not for you. For him.

  But the pressure built inside of her, and Adan said nothing to bring a new topic to mind. Finally she said, “I want to tell you something.”

  “Tell me,” Adan said.

  She confessed what she’d been unable to confess to IT-O.

  “After Nacronis, they pushed me out.”

  Adan watched her but said nothing. She wasn’t sure he’d heard, or if he’d heard whether he understood.

  “I didn’t leave by choice. I left because I was told to, because someone saw that it was killing me and I wasn’t brave enough to leave on my own.

  “It’s the same reason I didn’t leave years earlier. Because I’m a coward.”

  Adan’s nostrils flared. His face seemed to contort and he began to laugh. She didn’t think it was funny, but she didn’t protest—she hardly had the right—and the laughter turned to sputtering and coughing and he said, “Aren’t we all?”

  “What does that mean?”

  He shrugged as well as he could in his condition. “Every day, I think about the people I abandoned in the prison camp. Kairos and Ito and I—we left how many hundreds behind? We left Ver Iflan, who saved us, behind.”

  “You weren’t killing people,” she said. She felt a flash of anger at the comparison, as if Adan were claiming a shame he hadn’t earned. “You left people behind in a desperate situation—”

  “I didn’t kill people,” Adan agreed, brusque as he’d ever been. “You’re right—you did more monstrous things than I could dream of. But my conscience bothers me just the same.”

  She saw no mockery in his eyes.

  “Why else,” he asked, “do you think I kept a torture droid around? You figure I enjoyed the reminder of my past?”

  Adan shifted his body as if attempting to roll over and turn away from her. But though he wriggled he did not turn, and his gaze held on her until she allowed herself to recognize compassion in the man’s face, and defiance, and humor and guilt together.

  “How do you stand it?” she asked. “Knowing what you did?”

  “I drink. I work. I do what good I can in the galaxy. I manage, Yrica Quell.” He snorted, or tried to snort—the sound she heard involved fluid in his nostrils, if not his lungs. “I move forward, because dwelling on my shame doesn’t help anyone.”

  Quell heard the words. You haven’t done the things I’ve done, she wanted to protest, but she’d said it already and it hadn’t fazed him at all.

  Lying beside the man who’d rescued her and berated her and for a very short while been her friend, she fell asleep.

  * * *

  —

  She woke on and off to Adan’s strained breathing. He whistle
d as he sucked in air, and at times he sounded like he was accompanying the wind in some alien orchestra. His condition was degenerating, and he seemed to struggle more with each hour that passed.

  Once, when he was whimpering in misery, she stroked his arm and whispered, “I’ll remember you.”

  He laughed and coughed. “I know what you think of me,” he said.

  Quell shrugged.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Leave me behind. You’re carrying enough with you.”

  * * *

  —

  He died not long after that. His breathing became more strained, then softer, then ceased altogether. Quell considered whether to bury him but the planetoid would come apart soon enough and, along with the rocks and the tower and the wreckage of her ship, Adan would burn away in the ring of fire surrounding the black hole.

  She doubted he would have expected a burial anyway.

  She sat with him for a spell before cataloging the few supplies remaining and wondering what to do next. There was no one to rescue anymore, no reason for escape except to survive or to complete the mission she’d begun with; yet she did desire to escape, no matter that she lacked the means. She considered forgetting the tower and wandering the wastes in search of another answer—another structure or a hidden ship, a miracle buried in sand.

  She had no wish to return, nor any reason to expect the tower would ever unlock for her.

  The tower was still her best chance.

  She sighed to herself, took one last look around, and departed the cave. She felt drained, as if some inner fire had consumed all its fuel and dwindled to embers, and she allowed her mind to wander as she trekked. The 204th Imperial Fighter Wing seemed farther away than ever, though when she thought about the unit the memories came easier and clearer than they ever had. Not only the memories the tower had shown her, but the joyful ones: memories of laughter and friendship and the thrill of flying at incredible speeds. She took bittersweet pleasure in these.

  The memories of Shadow Wing came as easily as the memories of Alphabet Squadron. As easily as the memories of IT-O and Adan.