Victory's Price (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  Her dizziness had passed. Her heart rate had decreased. She left the turbolift and walked into the hangar bay, where half-dismantled TIE racks hung like abstract sculptures in a corporate lobby and the ground crews scurried around New Republic starfighters. Sergeant Ragnell yelled something in Chass’s direction—a warning, maybe?—and Chass sidestepped a loadlifter before reaching her destination.

  The hangar wasn’t private, but the cockpit of her B-wing was. She ascended the ladder, dropped into the frayed seat, and closed the canopy above her. The chatter of the ground crews and the hum of the Deliverance’s machinery was suddenly muted along with the perfumed voice in her head. Chass became attentive to the wheeze of her breath and the pop of her joints as she slumped. Shadows danced as curios swung from bolts in the canopy frame: a copper, ring-shaped medallion from the Church of the Force, stolen from one of her bunkmates; a plastoid star she’d found in a burnt-out apartment on Troithe while they’d awaited a new flagship; a handful of amulets from a faith healer at the Circus of Mortal Appetites.

  After she’d calmed, Chass’s right hand found the metal case tucked beneath her seat. She popped the lid, pressed calloused fingertips against sharp edges, and extracted an audio chip. She had to squint to read the label: Lesson 17.

  Once, she’d had a music collection. She’d spent years snapping up recordings forgotten by time or banned by the Empire along with pop hits known to half the galaxy (because they were good, and even the idiots on Coruscant recognized a decent beat now and then). She’d owned six hours of earsplitting Zabrak conserlista and every song recorded by Yatch Corzum, Queen of Echo-Wave (except maybe “I Hate the Reefs [and You, Dearest Ex],” but that was probably an urban legend). The collection was lost now, likely drifting through the debris field of Cerberon, replaced by the lectures of the Children of the Empty Sun.

  They were the parting gift of a cult that had held her (no, she’d infiltrated it as Maya Hallik, she’d never been a prisoner) while Wyl and Nath had built their own special squadron on Troithe. The gift of Let’ij, a power-snatching creep with a face hung with fungus who extolled peace and community while stockpiling weapons and gathering blackmail on her followers.

  The cult was an abomination, but it had felt almost like home. If nothing else, it was far from Star Destroyers and galactic genocide.

  Something rapped on the side of her ship. She dropped the chip and twisted to see what. Wyl Lark stood below her cockpit; his lips moved and she faintly heard him say, “Chass? Can you talk?”

  “I can’t hear you!” she yelled, and gestured to her ears before facing the console again.

  She didn’t expect it would stop him. It didn’t, but it bought a few seconds of satisfaction before Wyl rapped on the hull again. With a grunt, she waved him up the ladder and retracted the canopy. “Yes, sir, Commander?” she asked. “Something I can do?”

  “I’m not here as your commander,” he said, smiling in his soft, insufferable way.

  “In that case—”

  She hit the toggle to close the canopy. Wyl grasped the transparent shell with one hand, unable to stop it as it began sliding into position. “Come on,” he tried. “Five minutes?”

  She sighed and hit a button, freezing the canopy halfway. Wyl needed to be put in his place from time to time—needed a reminder that they’d never been as close as he wanted to think—but he was decent, in his way.

  She’d been surprised to find he was a decently effective squadron leader, too. Not clever the way Quell had been, not as efficient as Stanislok with Hound Squadron or as ruthless as the parade of Cavern Angel commanders, but people listened to him and he listened back, and somehow the whole wing of starfighters Syndulla had packed onto the Deliverance ended up working together better than they had any right to. The band he’d built deserved him (probably more than Alphabet did).

  “Fine,” she said. “What do you want? I’m—” She half snorted, half laughed as she finished the obvious lie. “—busy.”

  Wyl’s eyes flickered to the trinkets swinging from the canopy frame. “Obviously, and I wouldn’t want to get in the way. But you rushed out of there pretty fast, and I wanted to see how you’re doing.”

  She echoed the words. “How I’m doing?”

  Your community! Let’ij’s voice said in her mind. She was cackling. Chass ignored her.

  Wyl shrugged. “I don’t know if you believe what you said—”

  “I do.”

  “—about the civilians, the families of those Imperial troops. I know what I think, and I know I’m terrified of what’s happening, but—” He sighed a little. “I’m not asking how you feel about what’s going on. I’m asking how you’re doing. Generally.”

  She narrowed her eyes. His fingers were curled over the rim of her cockpit. “Why wouldn’t I be doing fine? Generally?”

  “For one thing, you haven’t punched anyone since Cerberon.”

  She laughed. She didn’t mean to, but she laughed. “Thought you’d be better at a heart-to-heart,” she said. “Ambushing me at my ship? At least get me drunk or something, yeah?”

  “I’m pressed for time,” he said, and sounded utterly sincere.

  How generous, Let’ij said, though the real Let’ij had never been sarcastic. I don’t remember Gruyver hurrying through conversations with you, when you sat together for hours, or—who was the child who made you those little toys? She was always in a rush.

  Chass growled and threw her head against her seat. “I’m clean, right? I fly when I’m told to fly, I shoot who I’m told to shoot.” She kept talking, more to keep Wyl and Let’ij from saying anything than because she had something meaningful to add. “You’re doing great. I’m doing great. You’re going to complain about that?”

  “Are you doing great?” he asked.

  She wanted to glower at him but she didn’t have the strength to turn her head.

  “Cerberon was hard for all of us,” he said. “We’re walking into something big, when none of us are really recovered—”

  “Screw you,” she muttered.

  She hadn’t talked about the Children of the Empty Sun with anyone. She’d mentioned them—it was simpler to admit a sliver of truth than concoct an elaborate lie—but she hadn’t talked about them. Now she knew how the rest of the conversation would play out: Wyl would sniff something, and he’d push, and she’d feel guilty, and she’d have to tell him something more or else bash his skull in out of frustration.

  Before she could decide whether to assault her superior officer, another voice cut in.

  “Commander Lark?”

  Chass followed Wyl’s gaze to the hangar floor, where one of the Deliverance’s crew waited patiently with upturned eyes—a Cathar girl who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, mane in knots around the fur of her face and missing three fingers on her left hand.

  “Yes?” Wyl said.

  “You asked for a long-range comm channel. It took time to align the signal relays, but we’re ready to go.”

  “How long will it stay open?” he asked.

  “Not long. We’re lucky the beacons are syncing at all.”

  Wyl looked from the girl to Chass, who shrugged. “Go,” Chass said. “Pretty sure we were done here.”

  Wyl parted his lips, hesitated, and said: “You can always find me.” Then he was down the ladder and gone.

  Bastard, Chass thought.

  She wondered for an instant what was so very important about the call, then rejected the thought. Wyl could do his thing, and she would do hers. She scuffed her boot around the cockpit floor, searching for the datachip she’d dropped earlier, and felt a slight resistance against her toe.

  She rolled the chip beneath her foot as if tormenting a bug. When it rested beneath her heel, she applied gentle force and felt the chip sink into the thin mat over the
metal plating.

  She gasped audibly, like a fool. She lifted her foot and snapped up the chip, turning it between her fingers like it was as precious and destructive as a death stick.

  When the cockpit canopy was closed again, she plugged in the chip and listened to the chanting of cultists. One by one, every voice and every worry—all the thoughts of Wyl Lark and Shadow Wing and burning families and Colonel Keize (and Quell, don’t forget Quell, never forget Quell and everything she did)—withered away and drifted out her ears. Even Let’ij’s voice in her mind evaporated to make room for the Children of the Empty Sun.

  III

  Nath Tensent fancied himself a lazy man, but achieving true idleness took more effort than he cared for. Instead he settled for tolerable work and enough luxuries to take the edge off. When he’d served under the Empire he’d found joy in plunder and a thrill in exploiting weaknesses personal and systemic; in the Rebel Alliance he’d earned a fraction of the credits but he’d been smart enough to avoid a position of authority, thus enjoying periods of languor between missions.

  He wondered now whether he’d miscalculated by accepting the job of Intelligence liaison. His day so far had been a string of conferences broken up by cursory reads of classified files; the highlight had been catching General Syndulla off guard regarding her operation’s authorization. But where he should’ve seen to his squadron after the meeting, instead he’d spent the afternoon speculating wildly about Shadow Wing’s next target with Nasha Gravas and her band of spies over garbled comm intercepts.

  “Seems like a lot of misplaced effort,” he said as he walked out of the maintenance bay, T5 rolling behind him. The drab-green astromech had blown a motivator almost a week before; it had taken that long to find replacement parts for the aging machine. “Shadow Wing’s not doing us any harm, and we don’t exactly have an unblemished track record against them.”

  T5 squealed with disapproval, and Nath laughed. “Real helpful. If you’re tagging along, run diagnostics or something? Pretend to be useful.”

  He cataloged the tasks awaiting him as they entered the mess hall and got into line behind a trio of Hail Squadron pilots. General Syndulla would want a summary of everything he’d discussed with Intelligence, but that could wait until morning. The Y-wing needed its torpedo launchers recalibrated, but T5 would take care of that. Then there was Wyl—someone needed to talk to the boy after all that had happened at the meeting with Syndulla, though Nath wasn’t sure he was right for the job…

  Admit it, he thought. You’re afraid to talk to him.

  He’d protected Wyl on Troithe—averted the boy’s suicidal attempt to strike a deal with Shadow Wing—and Wyl hadn’t forgiven him. Not that Wyl was ever rude, but they’d barely spoken in weeks. Even though Nath had later put himself in the line of fire, nearly died to save that rusting blight of a world, the tension was still there.

  Maybe it was for the best. Maybe Wyl would come around.

  Boy still needs you, even if he doesn’t realize it.

  Somehow, while he’d been immersed in thought, he’d ended up in conversation with the Hail pilots. His mouth was flapping on autopilot, and they were laughing about some fool story Nath had told about searching for an ejected X-wing pilot only to tow a Hutt in an escape pod. “You seen Wyl Lark around, by any chance?” he asked when the laughter died down.

  “Not since this morning. Think he’s running Flare Squadron through the Shadow Wing drills,” one of the pilots answered. “I know T’oknell said something about meeting with him.”

  So Nath wasn’t resolving things with Wyl tonight. He tried not to feel relieved.

  He settled at a table with a tray of gray meat braised in orange sauce. The meal smelled like wilted vegetables and tasted like cleaning fluid. T5 rolled awkwardly through the mess as more pilots and crew drifted in off their shifts, and a dozen gathered around Nath to hear more from the Hero of Troithe. He had the routine down, though it hadn’t been how he’d wanted to spend dinner.

  “You want to know what I think about Shadow Wing running around burning planets?” he offered when they prompted him. “Hell, I think they should’ve stayed in hiding. Now we’re going to come down on them hard…”

  They cheered and asked him for more, and he made them all feel like galactic saviors. He tried to wrap up until Genni Avremif—a good kid, a decent bomber pilot—asked, “You met the new ground crews yet?”

  “The ones from Troithe?” Nath shook his head. The destruction of the Lodestar had left Syndulla short-staffed, and they’d hired as many locals as they could find for the Deliverance. “Just a few. Why?”

  Avremif gestured to the entrance to the mess, where one of Ragnell’s minions was arguing with a pair of waist-high Ssori mechanics while a slender, aristocratic woman with a shock of orange hair looked on. “Bet they’d love to hear about how you saved their planet.”

  Nath laughed and read Avremif’s expression and the flicker of the boy’s eyes. You want my glory to rub off on you…mostly because you’re into the woman with the cheap orange wig.

  “Let’s make it fast,” he said.

  Sometimes he enjoyed his celebrity.

  The Hail pilots did most of the talking, turning Nath into the man single-handedly responsible for driving Shadow Wing out of Cerberon. The orange-haired woman didn’t breathe a word, but the Ssori grew increasingly excited until they revealed that Nath had saved their district during a routine mission. They pledged to care for his bomber and his droid, said they could never repay what he’d done, and the sincerity of it all exhausted Nath until he excused himself, strolling away from the mess hall.

  “Kairos still sleeping on the U-wing, last you heard?” he asked T5. It wasn’t his job to crawl inside her brain, but someone had to and she’d help him forget the image of Nath Tensent, Brave Hero of the Ssori.

  The droid gurgled ambiguously. The deck plating jumped as the Deliverance emerged from hyperspace for a scheduled course correction. He was trying to remember which branch in the hallway to take—everything on a Star Destroyer looked the same—when the wail of an alarm shredded his ears and he felt the deck juddering harder.

  “The hell is going on?” he asked.

  The alarm was joined by the steel-drum roar of tearing metal and the sensation of a gentle breeze.

  Hull breach. Well, damn.

  Nath knew now what was going on but not why, and he didn’t have a moment to work through it all before he heard a scream down the corridor. He ran toward the sound as the deck steadied. Not twenty meters away he spotted Syndulla’s aide—Stornvein, he thought, his name’s Stornvein—on the floor, clutching his arm and staring at the bulkhead in horror. Sparks rained from a glowing crack in the metal, but almost none touched the man—the bright motes were swept back up by the wind and splashed against the cracked wall.

  T5 issued a series of bass warbles. “I know!” Nath roared.

  His legs were pumping again. He felt out of shape from weeks aboard the Star Destroyer sitting in stiff-backed chairs; the skirmish at the Circus of Mortal Appetites was the most active he’d been in ages. But he slid to one knee like a smashball player, gliding the last meter to Stornvein on the polished deck. He was up again in nearly the same motion, hauling the man to his feet and swerving away from the spark-belching wall.

  “Go!” he hollered.

  He swung the man around with both arms and hurled him toward a blast door irising shut a dozen paces away. The blast door would seal off the compartment and stop the oxygen loss, which was good—and it was a good sign that it was still functioning—but it would also seal Nath and Stornvein into an airless tomb if they weren’t quick.

  T5 squawked a warning. Nath felt a blast of sparks against his cheek and stumbled away from the bulkhead even as the breeze became a gale. He let the air turn his head—Stupid! he thought, don’t look at the s
parks!—and saw that the crack in the metal had widened to a rift framed by jagged molten cuts.

  From the center of the rift stared a single crimson eye surrounded by concentric metal rings. The rings spun; lenses adjusted; and for an instant Nath felt like he’d returned to Cerberon, gazing again into the black hole looming over that wretched system.

  He brought up his blaster and squeezed three times without aiming, feeling the weapon pulse and jerk. The flare of the bolts would’ve blinded him if he hadn’t already been squinting against the sparks; as it was, his vision was spattered with blotches that only occasionally afforded him a clear view. But he heard a garbled, electronic noise and smelled something like melted plastoid as he whipped back around, racing into the wind.

  He wasn’t dead. He hoped that meant he’d hit his target.

  The blast door, from what he could see of it, was nearly closed. He tried to remember the particulars of a Star Destroyer’s safety features: If he got caught in its grip, would it release him or crush him into a bleeding mess? He prayed for strength as he lunged. He felt his feet leave the deck, his head clear the door as durasteel closed on all sides.

  He crashed onto the floor, his ribs aching and his tongue bleeding and his chin bruised against the deck. The noisy rush of oxygen ceased. For the moment, he was safe.

  A hand helped him up. T5 was beeping irritably. Nath swayed as Stornvein asked, “You all right, Captain Tensent?”

  “Fine,” Nath said. “Looks like sabotage droids.”

  “Stay put, catch your breath.” Stornvein was sweating, and Nath saw now that the sleeve of the man’s left arm—the arm he’d been clutching—was blackened and torn. “I’ll see what I can find out—and thank you.”

  The man crossed to an emergency terminal down the corridor. Nath thought of following and leaned against T5 instead. He’d been stupid, going in after Stornvein. In ten seconds he’d nearly been suffocated, incinerated, and chopped in half. He’d gone in ignorant and unprepared.