Victory's Price (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  “Say hello to Kandende on your way out!” the Surgeon called. “But probably don’t tell him your secrets. Not a man I’d trust to understand.”

  * * *

  —

  Quell did say hello to Kandende on her way out—he was standing guard in the waiting room and appeared unharmed, and he wished Quell well in a voice that suggested he hadn’t slept the night before. When she asked if he had a message he wanted to convey to anyone, he shook his head and told her, “Tell the unit I did my duty.”

  She promised she would, knowing she might well betray that oath.

  Brebtin and Rikton met her outside. “Mirro called,” Brebtin said. “Said to meet him and Raida back at the apartment—they wouldn’t say why on an open channel. You get what we need?”

  “Yes,” Quell said. “All right. Apartment first, then we get to the ship.”

  The walk went without incident. Quell considered how to proceed next, barely noticing Brebtin and Rikton at her side. Until she saw what was on the chip—until she was certain of what Keize had sent her to recover—she couldn’t be sure whether she would return to Shadow Wing at all. And if she chose not to, what then? She could slip away from her team, take off without them; but where could she go?

  She’d just stepped through the apartment door when something jabbed her side and the convulsive pain of a shock rod short-circuited her thoughts and her brain. She blacked out before she hit the ground.

  * * *

  —

  Quell heard voices in her dreams. Some were frightened or protesting, some outraged. One expressed an awe that troubled her, though she didn’t know why. When the darkness receded and she could distantly sense her limbs—heavy, numb, prickling where they felt anything at all—she looked up into her own face as a voice said, “The truth.”

  She stared into the cracked plate of the Messenger. Hands turned it over, then put it away. “The truth,” the voice repeated.

  She lay on the floor of the apartment. The remainder of her team stood around the room: Brebtin with her rifle pointed toward Quell; Rikton looking off to Quell’s side, expression distressed; Mirro looking at the bed, where someone had laid parts of the Messenger beside the duffel; and Raida closest to Quell, looking down at her and trying to conceal the emotions rapidly passing over her face.

  “I don’t know—” Quell began, and hated herself for the fear she heard. The toe of Raida’s boot slammed into her side, nearly rolling Quell over. The others shouted and Raida took a step back.

  “There’s too much going on,” Quell wheezed, trying to sound authoritative and wondering if she’d broken bones in the fall or from the kick. She didn’t think so. “Trust in the colonel.”

  “Was it the colonel who decided to destroy the Emperor’s legacy?” Brebtin asked.

  “Whatever it knew—whatever it was waiting for all these months—” Mirro glanced at the others. “It can’t be repaired now.”

  “Trust in the colonel,” Quell repeated. She understood her team. She’d known them, most of them, since before Endor. They were Imperials and they would bow to authority if only she could find the proper words, issue the right commands.

  They were no better than she’d been, no less servants of hierarchy, and she would never have committed mutiny.

  “If it were just—” Rikton jerked a hand at the machinery on the bed. He looked close to tears. “—we would. We would, you know? But she says she heard.”

  “Who heard what?” Quell asked.

  Rikton and Brebtin looked to Fra Raida. Raida folded her arms across her chest and shook her head. “You filth. You absolute—I heard the message from Alphabet Squadron. Before you started jamming it, I was on the headset. I heard that pilot say she knew you!”

  Quell parted her lips and tried to find words.

  I didn’t betray you, she wanted to try, but she’d never been a good liar. (Even though she hadn’t betrayed her team on this mission, not yet.) It’s not what you think was true, but also cowardly; it would do nothing to soothe the hurt Raida and the others were nursing.

  They didn’t know the extent of her treason—her leadership of Alphabet, her choice to guide Syndulla to the Yadeez over and over. Quell was sure of that, because they’d have killed her already otherwise. The fact she was still alive—

  They wanted to believe her. They wanted an explanation. She had to find one.

  “What exactly did you hear?” she asked. She needed time to think.

  Fra Raida blinked, but tears escaped her anyway. “I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t going to say anything, until Kandende and—” She gestured limply at the bed and Quell finished the thought: Until the evidence accumulated, piece by piece, and you couldn’t give me the benefit of the doubt anymore.

  “I liked you,” Raida said.

  Quell perfectly recognized the character of Raida’s pain; she recalled the moment she’d been confronted by Lark and Chadic and Tensent in the hangar of the Lodestar, when they’d accused her of lying to them about Nacronis. She hadn’t known how to act then, either.

  “We need to talk,” Mirro said, and waved the rest away from Quell. Brebtin held her rifle ready awhile longer, before gesturing Quell to her feet and locking her in the apartment’s bathroom. Quell started to think maybe one of her ribs was broken, but it was a disinterested thought, as if she’d noticed a stain on her sheets that would wash out in the laundry.

  * * *

  —

  The bathroom had a single window roughly the width of Quell’s shoulders. It overlooked a narrow alley from a height of five meters and the pane appeared cheap and thin—some sort of plastoid or even glass rather than transparent metal. Quell thought that given time and a means to muffle the noise she might be able to break through. She expected she had neither.

  She worked on her story instead. It was elaborate and implausible, and involved her operating as a mole inside the New Republic at Colonel Keize’s behest. The others wouldn’t be able to disprove it, but at best she’d be returned to Shadow Wing bound and gagged. There Keize would take the information from the Messenger, and Quell’s fate would be up to him. More likely, though, the team would shoot her in the apartment and leave her corpse to the droids rather than risk transporting a prisoner. They weren’t equipped for that, and they would see the key flaw in her tale:

  No one in the galaxy would select Yrica Quell for an undercover mission. Except, apparently, her own idiot self.

  She pushed her forehead to the door and laughed awhile when that occurred to her.

  From that position, she did her best to listen to the debate occurring in the main room. Raida was passionate but wouldn’t argue directly for Quell’s death. Mirro, to her surprise, did; not with any bloodthirst but with a resigned certainty. “It’s the cold logic of the thing,” she made out. “We’re not machines—but to survive, sometimes we can be no better.”

  They kept arguing. Someone brought up Kandende, and they repeated his name again and again. “I don’t know!” Brebtin snapped, and then, inexplicably, “Get it slowly.”

  That’s when the shooting started.

  The sound was unmistakable. The electric snap of blaster bolts and the shattering of furniture and walls drowned out individual words, but Quell could still hear shouting. Her instinct was to enter the fray—on which side, she wasn’t sure—but when she tried to open the door she found it still locked.

  She slammed her body against the door and felt a pulse of pain and nausea. The door hadn’t shifted. After a moment of indecision she went to the window, shoving aside her guilt. They were going to kill you, and you’d always planned on killing them. It’s why you came to Shadow Wing.

  She pulled off her outermost layer, leaving only a white undershirt to ward off the cold. She wrapped the cloth around her hands before slamming both fists into the pa
ne. The first blow resulted in a spiderweb of cracks; it took five more before the window shattered. She ran the shreds of her outfit along the frame’s edges, knocking away shards as well as she could before listening again.

  Something was burning. A rifle—probably Brebtin’s—was spraying particle bolts. The shouting had stopped.

  In a sudden panic, she slapped her hand against her hip pocket. The Surgeon’s chip was still there, too innocuous or too small to have attracted attention from her team. They hadn’t known what her mission was. She hadn’t lost the Messenger’s secrets.

  She wriggled out of the window feetfirst, face toward the bathroom floor, feeling the bite of the pane’s remaining slivers all the way. She had to work her shoulders through at an angle but at last she was able to dangle halfway down the wall to the street, holding on to the window frame before dropping the rest of the way to the main platform. The kinetic pulse ran from her soles up her body, and it aggravated every bruise and scrape she’d earned so far; but she was alive and free.

  She wobbled as she turned and stumbled toward the alley mouth. Her ears roared with echoes of blasters and flame and the pumping of her blood. She didn’t see the man in her path until it was too late to stop, and she bowled into him, grabbing his shoulders as she did. They went down together, Quell twisting her body and rolling away when they hit the ground.

  The metal platform felt like ice on her bare arms. The man rose to his knees and reached for a blaster on his hip. Quell got there first, shoving him back down with one hand and seizing the weapon with the other. She pointed it at his chin. She’d never been a great shot with a pistol but she couldn’t possibly miss Rikton now.

  Rikton.

  He was shaking, but he stared at her. His eyes were hard.

  Killing him was the smart move. Whatever was happening, Shadow Wing wouldn’t forgive her. She’d rejoined the 204th only to betray them anyway—she’d accepted that General Syndulla might slaughter them all…

  Quell rose and ran, cursing herself.

  What right did she have to judge them, when she’d needed Soran Keize to send her away after Nacronis?

  II

  Once, years ago, she’d said, “Surprise beats a plan any day,” but she was finally starting to doubt it.

  The pistol burned in her hand, the heat from the barrel and battery pack forcing her to grip tighter or risk reflexively dropping the thing. She kept it steady as she fired through the burning doorway, but she missed her slugthrower—the acid rounds would’ve bored straight through walls and skin and armor.

  You’re an idiot, Chass na Chadic.

  She thought briefly it was Let’ij’s voice in her head, but the cult leader had been quieter than usual since Chass had come to the outpost. The rebuke was her own.

  Kairos had disappeared, seeking a back way into the apartment while Chass held the front. They still didn’t know for sure they were in the right place—a Houk at the docks had identified Quell’s ship, and one of the cam drones had been surprisingly helpful. But neither had seen Quell, only a bunch of Imperial-looking travelers armed with at least one assault rifle.

  Chass squatted in the short hallway leading from the frigid building exterior to the apartment entrance, edging back around a corner as return shots incinerated cheap siding. She sucked in a breath, took in the bouquet of toxic fumes, and spoke into her comlink: “Kairos? You coming back anytime?”

  If the woman responded, Chass couldn’t hear. She fell backward on her heels as a figure rushed through the apartment door. The Imp swept her pistol in a wide arc, firing with both hands as she headed for Chass and the exit. Chass felt bolts singe her scalp as she shot back, spitting lightning into the woman’s chest. Her target stumbled and fell. A pit of fire burned where the woman’s heart had been.

  “Kairos?” Chass tried again.

  A second figure stepped through the doorway. Chass prepared to fire again but it was Kairos, her bowcaster clutched tight and her whole body trembling. Chass thought for a moment that she’d been wounded, but she saw no injuries—just a lot of soot.

  “Away,” Kairos said. “Too swift, all in different directions. This one must have stayed—” Kairos lowered her weapon, aimed at the woman on the floor.

  “Don’t!” Chass snapped. “Second story, remember? Unless you want to drop us through the ceiling.”

  Kairos brought the bowcaster back to her chest as if cradling a child.

  On Abednedo, Kairos had saved Chass’s life. Chass had been awed and terrified by the woman at the time—Kairos had executed half an Imp squad with exquisite, bone-crushing violence, unaffected by the bloodshed and unafraid of anything.

  Kairos still looked like she could murder an army. But she also looked ready to burst into tears.

  “Okay,” Chass said. “Okay. New plan. We split up—”

  “You cannot track them.”

  “I blasted well can—just not the way you do it. We split up, I track, you go back to the U-wing.”

  Kairos stared at her with eyes that seemed to absorb the light of the flames. “Why?” she asked.

  “You don’t want to be here,” Chass whispered, but the woman kept staring and Chass continued louder: “If you’re on the U-wing, you can stop them if they try to take off. Or worst case, you blast the whole outpost—pick a fuel depot, start there, and watch it all burn. They’ll all be caught up in it somewhere.”

  This appeared to reach Kairos. “Will you go to their ship?”

  Chass thought it over and shook her head. “Nah. They know we’ll be watching it. Might try to hijack another to avoid us. They’ll probably go dark, regroup in a few hours, then make a run one way or another. Best bet is to stop them from regrouping in the first place.”

  “Okay,” Kairos said. “Find her.”

  She turned, crept to the exterior doorway, and departed the building. Chass released a long breath and checked her blaster.

  Now she was alone. She had no plan and she’d lost the advantage of surprise. But she pictured Quell’s face and felt her muscles tense with determination.

  She hoped that would be enough.

  III

  “They’re really doing it,” Wyl said. “I don’t know why I thought they wouldn’t.”

  He leaned over the conference table, staring into the familiar hologram of Chadawa. The individual satellites composing the planet’s rings were represented by particles like dust motes, thousands of them glimmering. As he watched, one flashed brighter than the rest and spiraled downward toward the planet.

  “They’re timing it carefully,” Syndulla said. She stood beside Wyl while Nath, Captain Arvad, and several of Syndulla’s aides encircled the rest of the table. “Sabotaging the satellites so they absorb as much radiation as possible, then dropping them onto the planet where they’ll render whole sectors uninhabitable. They’ve hit mostly ocean so far, but one of the islands has already evacuated. That won’t do much good if Shadow Wing irradiates the entire planet.”

  “How long do we have?” Arvad asked.

  Syndulla made an ambiguous gesture. “We have to assume they’ll get faster as they go, but it’ll take at least another day. I’d rather not wait until half the planet is a wasteland, though—we’re moving as soon as we’re at low tide.”

  “Half an hour?” Nath asked.

  “Half an hour,” Syndulla said. “It’s going to be messy, and we need to get aggressive. Otherwise civilians start dying.”

  Wyl listened as Syndulla summarized the plan they’d spent the past hour preparing. The fundamentals were simple: It was the Yadeez’s Raider escorts that were reprogramming and dropping the satellites, so Wyl would lead Flare and Wild against the TIEs while Nath took the bombers on a roundabout path to hit the Raiders from a surprise angle. The Yadeez, its gunship escort, and the surveillance ship were to be
engaged by the Deliverance itself. It was a decent strategy, Wyl told himself—dangerous for the New Republic fighters keeping the TIEs distracted until the mission was done; more dangerous for the bombers, who would be unprotected; but with a good chance of success nonetheless.

  Yet he thought of the past day of comm chatter, and the way Ragnell had begun to bond with the man claiming to be a Shadow Wing squadron captain. He thought of Lieutenant Itina—Wild Eight—and how she’d swayed a handful of enemy pilots into playing cards.

  Nath asked why he was in charge of the Hail Squadron bombers instead of Hail Leader. “You know Shadow Wing,” was Syndulla’s ready answer. Arvad had concerns about bringing the Deliverance so close to Chadawa, where the more maneuverable Yadeez might hide in the atmosphere. “We’re not out to destroy the Yadeez,” Wyl roused himself to say. “All we need is to keep it out of the way of the squadrons. If we’re very lucky, we might get an assist from the Chadawans.”

  Mostly, though, Wyl thought about war and the people who fought wars. When Syndulla called an end to the conference and took Wyl aside, she said, “I know what’s bothering you.”

  “I didn’t mean to be obvious.” He gave a small smile. “It won’t be a problem.”

  “You’re sure?” Syndulla asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  He believed it, and that was the worst part: They’d spent so much effort reaching out to their foe, made inroads he’d never expected, and now the whole affair was fading like a dream. It felt natural to lead the squadrons into battle again. To begin the killing again. The conversations over the comm would be forgotten easily enough.

  “You need anything from me?” Syndulla asked.

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Talk to your people. Let them know you’re behind the plan. Remind them of the stakes but don’t distract them from their immediate objective. Once you’re out there you’ll want to fly in tight formations—” Syndulla stopped abruptly and shook her head with a laugh. “Sorry. I’m being overbearing.”