“We cross-referenced all known worlds under Imperial control with the Yadeez’s last known heading,” Hera said. “They’ve been weaving through this sector for a while—we figured their target had to be close. Best guess is Chadawa.”
Nath started to lean back against the Y-wing, wondered if he risked a scolding, and decided to chance it. He vaguely remembered Chadawa from target lists New Republic Intelligence had drawn up. “That’s the one with the phenomena, am I right? Doesn’t seem ideal for a fight.”
“That’s the one. It’s also got a civilian population of half a billion,” Syndulla said. “It’s unlikely we’ll intercept Shadow Wing before they arrive. That means our priority is to figure out a way to stop them in-system as soon as—”
“Quell,” Chass said. Her voice shook with effort. “You heard her.”
“Our priority,” Syndulla repeated—more gently now, less disciplinarian and more concerned medic—“is the lives on Chadawa that Shadow Wing intends to snuff out. Alphabet knows the enemy better than anyone else here. I need to know you’re with me.”
“We’re with you,” Wyl said. “We’re here to save people.”
“What about Quell?” Chass asked.
Syndulla seemed to fight through exhaustion and her own emotions and said, simply, “If we stop Shadow Wing, we find Quell, too. We all have to believe that.”
Chass stared at the general awhile. Then she took a single step backward until her spine was against one of the Y-wing’s landing struts and tossed her head back, striking her scalp against the metal.
“Right,” she said. “Fine.”
Kairos remained frozen, gaze seemingly fixed on a cluster of wires dangling from a loadlifter toward the back of the hangar.
“Okay,” Syndulla said. “Wyl? Nath? You’re with me for a planning session. Chass, Kairos—we’ve still got time before the next fight. Get yourselves rested. We need you at your best.”
She turned away after that. Nath looked about the group and shrugged, meeting no one’s eyes. The pain in his chest hadn’t gone away.
“Come on,” Wyl said. “You heard the general.”
II
The helmet seemed to adhere to her flesh, gripping her skin and suckling the neck of her suit. In a mad vision she saw herself tearing it off in pieces, ripping away chunks of rubbery armor to reveal blood beneath; but then the helmet came loose and Yrica Quell tossed it away. It snapped back, dangling from her chest on its breathing tubes. She gasped for oxygen and ran gloved hands through slick hair, listening to the cheers of her colleagues and wondering if she would vomit.
“You got better,” a voice said. Quell turned her head to Fra Raida beside her, also in a black flight suit. The other pilots and crew past Raida were an undifferentiated blur.
Quell blinked away the sweat in her eyes but not the haze of vertigo. “What?”
“You heard me,” Raida said. “Never saw you fly like that in the old days. Guess you needed motivation.”
“I had to do it,” Quell said, to herself as much as to Raida. “Someone had to do it.”
Somebody—it might have been Commander Broosh—called for the pilots to clear the hangar. Figures swept past Quell and gloved hands clapped her shoulders. She should’ve felt honored—some cancerous part of her was honored—to be feted like an ace.
She’d played games with a New Republic Star Destroyer, tricked General Syndulla and Alphabet Squadron, and helped the Yadeez escape without damage or casualties…
Because you had to do it. Because it was necessary.
If she hadn’t, Shadow Wing would’ve engaged Syndulla’s forces. The Yadeez would’ve struggled to escape and the asteroid field would’ve devoured fighter after fighter on both sides, gnawing and eating and doing more damage than particle blasts and torpedoes. In the end the Yadeez would’ve escaped anyway and those deaths would’ve meant nothing. Syndulla’s forces would’ve been left weakened. The next fight would’ve been bloodier still.
There would be another opportunity. A cleaner opportunity to wipe out the 204th with certainty.
“You’re kind of a mess,” Raida said.
Quell hadn’t realized the woman was still present. Raida was rolling her boot over a fuel line as if massaging her heel. “It’s been a while since I flew,” Quell said. Her voice sounded too hoarse; she tried to correct it, but she couldn’t recall what normal felt like—where to put her tongue, how to shape her lips. “Must be out of shape.”
“The brittle bone thing?”
Quell felt surprise, but she shouldn’t have. Shadow Wing knew her—not because they’d read a dossier but because they’d trusted her once. She’d trusted them. “Low-gravity childhood. Plus I broke my nose the other day.” Saying the words triggered a spike of pain.
“Gives you character. Come on, we’ll get you changed.”
Why are you being kind to me? Quell wanted to ask. She nodded instead.
Ten minutes later she’d managed to remove the flight suit without taking a knife to it—shed a skin that, rather than belonging to her, had seemed to own her. She wanted to weep when she was showered and back in her civilian gear but Raida was still there, pulling on her shirt a meter away. Quell excused herself and walked lead-footed through the Yadeez, searching for a place to hide.
Unthinking, she ended up back at the reactor level, squeezing her body between a bulkhead and a cooling tower. Her comm array was gone—there was nothing for her to do there, nothing for anyone to find—but the rattle of equipment and gurgle of pipes helped to drown out the universe.
She’d announced herself. She’d revealed her survival to Syndulla and Wyl Lark. To Kairos and Nath and Chass, if they were alive. She’d done it to win a petty victory that never should’ve been at issue in the first place.
You should’ve killed Soran Keize a long time ago.
The thought rose in her without cruelty or vindictiveness. It was the practical part of her brain—the part that planned missions.
You could kill him today. He’d let you get close enough. You have a blaster. Walk up and do it, or—you’re worried the 204th will continue without him? Kill him and Broosh both. Murder all the squadron commanders. There’s always a way.
You have access to the reactor right now. Blow up the freighter. You have a chance to pull it off.
But if she didn’t pull it off, her cover would be blown. Her mission would be over.
Was that an excuse for cowardice?
She thought all this and hunched her shoulders and hoped the vibrations of the ship would lull her to sleep. She wished dearly that IT-O were still operational, so that she could have talked matters over with her therapist.
The comlink summoned her to the bridge too soon, though she wasn’t sure how much time had really passed. Her hair was still wet from the shower—the stiff strands tickled her neck and she smelled of disinfectant—but she’d become hyperaware of her body. No one else would care.
She froze the moment she emerged from the bridge hatch. There was no hushed chatter among the crew or the usual clatter of controls. Keize’s voice dominated with the unnatural calm he exuded when pronouncing a planet’s execution: “—either way, Chadawa must die. Refuse, and you will die with it.”
Then his timbre thawed. “But I suppose you knew all that,” he finished.
“Your reputation precedes you.” The worn, middle-aged face of an Imperial colonel stared out the viewscreen from the bridge of a Star Destroyer. He spoke without humor in a thick colonial brogue. “Admiral Sloane has little tolerance for rejection, eh?”
“Sloane is no longer among the Empire’s leadership—but your point stands,” Keize said. He sighed gently. “You were supposed to have joined us, Colonel Madrighast. You were the one who invited me to rendezvous with the fleet after Pandem Nai—”
&nbs
p; “That invitation was sincere, as was my warning that it would not be easy.” Madrighast snorted. “We attempted to make the rendezvous, but rebel forces drove us off course. Just a bit at first, but the damage began to mount, we encountered blockades too strong to penetrate, and—well. We were waylaid. After two weeks of evasive action and enough lost ships to make a junker world rich, I suspected Sloane and her fleet were no longer patiently waiting.”
Quell observed from the hatch and clung to the distraction the conversation provided. She tried to recall what she knew of Colonel Madrighast. The 204th had operated alongside his unit years before, under the luminous amber skies of To’hok Neige. He’d been rewarded with a Star Destroyer, though its name eluded her—the Arbiter? The Immortal?
“I imagine you were correct,” Keize said. “But Chadawa, Colonel?”
The Unyielding! She almost laughed.
Madrighast lifted his chin, though his eyes showed no pride. “Governor Bordanivaux is no patriot, and her decision to take Chadawa rogue was misguided at best. I have no love for the woman. But she gave us refuge when no one else would, and my people understand loyalty.” He drew a breath and seemed about to smile; his lips merely trembled a bit instead. “We made our choices months ago. We will fight the 204th to protect Chadawa.”
“I understand,” Keize said. “Until then.”
He raised a hand to cut the signal; but Madrighast spoke again. “It’s a pity you didn’t accept my invitation,” the colonel said. “With the 204th alongside us, maybe we would’ve made it to Sloane’s rendezvous together.”
“Perhaps,” Keize replied, and the image on the viewscreen warped and vanished, replaced by the storm of hyperspace.
The bridge crew’s voices rose and the clatter of controls resumed. Captain Nenvez leaned heavily on his cane—he was no longer keen to pace, since his earlier fall—and called for an update from the nav station. Quell stepped to Keize’s side and saw him still gazing at the screen. “Everything all right?” she asked.
Keize smiled wearily. “I’d have preferred that had gone differently,” he said, too quiet for anyone but Quell to hear. “I’ve come to like that man.”
She nodded carefully. There was nothing to say. At least the call had given her time to compose herself; she had smoothed out her distress to an imperceptible layer beneath her usual mask.
Keize waved her toward the hatch, and they stepped away from the crew. “You did well today,” he said, voice still low. “I know it was difficult, given the last time you flew.”
The time we killed Nacronis? she thought. You can say it. She merely nodded again.
“I need you for another task,” he said. “There’s a crisis approaching—Chadawa and Syndulla intersecting—but we have an opportunity as well.”
She was his pilot now, she realized—his personal assassin, to fly when he gave the order. “What opportunity?”
“The one we’ve been searching for,” he said. “Some cultures foretell the future in animal entrails. We’ve been doing the same with the Emperor’s Messenger—and though we may not be able to change the inevitable, knowledge may let us mitigate the worst of what’s to come.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” she said.
“Do you care for your unit, Lieutenant?”
She inclined her head so she wouldn’t have to lie.
“As do I. Whether we win or lose this war, we need to know everything that’s locked in the circuits of that machine. It will either prove my fears correct or save us all.” He gestured for her to leave the bridge. “Come, and we’ll talk.”
III
Get yourselves rested, Syndulla had said. We need you at your best, she’d said. Syndulla wasn’t her mother, though, no matter how much she playacted the part, and Chass na Chadic had never liked her mother anyway.
Yrica Quell was alive, and Chass shouldn’t have cared. Yet as she stalked the corridors of the Deliverance she could smell the woman—not a good smell but a thoroughly human one, like underripe fruit. Chass fought to push away memories of what had gone down at Cerberon (the good and the bad—the night they’d gotten drunk in the refugee camp and stumbled all the way home; that last confrontation, with Quell staring blankly when confronted with her crimes), but the thoughts kept surfacing no matter how many Chass rejected.
She doesn’t deserve your attention, Chass told herself. She betrayed you a long time ago. Even that rebuke only summoned the memory of Quell throwing her against a bulkhead aboard the Lodestar.
Chass rubbed her eyes with her palms and mumbled a prayer. Maybe it was one of the Children of the Empty Sun’s; maybe it was one she’d learned earlier in life, from the Inheritors of the Crystal or the Unignited. She didn’t care anymore. All cults were the same cult, offering mantras and routine and obedience to fill the cracks in a person’s consciousness; to keep out the emotional turmoil that might otherwise creep in like a swarm of insects, scuttling and eating away at the soul’s foundation.
She’d been performing the role of cultist a lot lately, echoing Let’ij to irritate Syndulla and the pilots and the ground crews. But she hadn’t believed enough, hadn’t become that performance enough, to keep Yrica Quell from crawling through her brain.
Maya Hallik, you poor deluded thing. The answer is waiting for you.
“Chass?”
In her blind wanderings she’d arrived in a hydroponics lab—a storeroom, really, lined with little jars and tanks growing withered plants. Wyl Lark stood beside a tube compressing an ebony thorn tree, splashes of green leaves pressed flat against the glass.
Chass stepped backward, as if Wyl might forget she’d been there if she exited quickly enough. He didn’t say anything—just watched her with a half smile so pathetic that it slowed her; and when she was out the doorway, and he still didn’t stop her, she paused.
He looked tired. He’d looked tired for days—weeks, really—but now he wasn’t hiding it, slumping boyishly and sliding his fingertips down the vegetation tube.
“You, too?” she asked.
That made him laugh, and Chass felt a tiny surge of satisfaction. “Wrapped up with the general a while ago,” he said. “Couldn’t sleep. Were you—”
“I was looking for a shooting range.” She paused and reentered the room. “You think anyone would miss the plants?”
“Yes,” Wyl said. “Plus, they’re a good backup in case we run out of food and oxygen.”
“You’re a good backup in case we run out of food,” she muttered. Wyl pretended he didn’t hear. She found an empty shelf and hopped up, wedging her bottom into the socket meant for a water purifier. She searched for something to say, but none of the subjects that occurred to her were ones she wanted to discuss.
“You know you left fingerprints?” Wyl asked. He was smiling more warmly now.
“What?”
“When you climbed through the particle flow tube, during the sabotage droid attack.”
She frowned. “Okay. So?”
“So apparently that equipment is surprisingly sensitive, and the oil from your skin caused an internal sensor error. The maintenance droids aren’t good enough for the work so someone had to scrub the tube manually.”
Chass snorted. “These are the sorts of conversations you have as a commander, huh?”
“Yeah,” Wyl said. “Biggest thing I’ve learned? No one really likes pilots. They just put up with the trouble we cause, since someone has to fly.”
“Sounds right to me. Must be heartbreaking for a man who desperately needs to be liked.” She smirked as she leaned against the bulkhead. “Back on the Hellion’s Dare, you’d have a dozen friends around you. On the Deliverance you’re stuck with me.”
“On the Deliverance I’m stuck with you,” he agreed, and he didn’t sound bothered by the notion.
They watched eac
h other, bonded by a thread she hadn’t been aware of in a long time.
Eventually Wyl said: “I knew you were in there somewhere, Hound Three.”
She might’ve punched him for saying it—for suggesting that everything she’d been lately wasn’t real, that only he was keen and kind and smart enough to excavate the true Chass na Chadic. It was all real, even the part that was performance—but she knew what he meant.
“Screw you,” she said without anger. “I do kind of expect to see Fadime walk in.”
“Or Sata Neek.”
“Right. I liked the bird-frog.”
She really had. She wanted to ask Wyl: Why isn’t Alphabet like that? We were kin on the Hellion’s Dare—in Hound Squadron and the Cavern Angels—so why not here?
But she knew the answer. Hound Squadron and the Cavern Angels (and Riot Squadron, too) had been fighting an endless war. The squadrons had been their whole world, their existence, and life beyond that had been a dream. Now everyone (everyone except her) had more to look forward to, and the war and the squadrons were obstacles to those dreams coming true.
Plus, Alphabet’s leader had turned out to be a war criminal who faked her own death. That made a difference.
“Things changed at Endor, didn’t they?” she asked.
She didn’t expect Wyl to understand, but he nodded. “For everyone. They really did.” They were both silent again before he added: “There’s—can I tell you a story?”
“About Endor?”
“Yes.”
She hesitated. Then she nodded.
Wyl sat on the floor, and his eyes focused past Chass’s shoulder on the joint between ceiling and wall. “You know I was there. You know—I almost said, You know what Riot went through, but we got off light compared with other units. We lost three, out of probably hundreds of rebel dead. Thousands. It wasn’t sad, though, the mood afterward. We’d just won the war, we couldn’t be just sad.
“Riot was allowed to land on the forest moon. The locals didn’t speak Basic but they were kind, and they’d taken their own losses. The celebration went on for hours, and we’d go from crying to cheering to just sitting with one another and looking at the stars.
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