Victory's Price (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  Quell heard the attack coming. She was breaking camp in the sunless morning when Kairos leapt up and turned down the tunnel they’d arrived from. There was a susurrus-like wind among leaves; then Quell noticed the undertone of bells, of metal sliding melodiously across metal, and the abomination came into sight.

  It was like a storm of serpents, their winding bodies entangled as they slithered through air—or perhaps there was only a single, endless body, for Quell saw no head or tail. Its black scales glittered in the light of the glow rods, and when Kairos sprang into the mass the metallic ringing deepened as she grasped at writhing cords. A dull white seam ran down the thing’s underbelly, and at a hundred points along the seam the thing’s flesh parted, splitting wetly to reveal curved teeth.

  As Kairos tore the thing with her hands, Quell squatted on the ground and searched for a weapon. All she could find was the glow rod, and she was ready to smash it against a rock and expose the energized circuitry when a tendril sprang at her from the cloud. Its end bloomed into a dozen wriggling worms, and at the center of the bloom was what might have been a cyst or an eye.

  It would’ve reached her if red lightning hadn’t flashed past her shoulder and into the outstretched tendril. A hundred mouths screamed together and the thing reared even as Kairos ripped one length of its body apart, then another. Its rustling ceased, and at once it fell to the ground in a heap.

  Quell turned to see Chadic standing above her, blaster still pointed at the creature. The Theelin met Quell’s gaze, and Quell was certain she saw worry in the woman’s expression before Chadic muttered: “Don’t know why I even bothered. Not like you’re useful to us alive.”

  Quell shuffled to her feet. Kairos was stepping out of the dead mass as if nothing extraordinary had occurred.

  “Was that one of the ‘other things’ we took the tunnels to avoid?” Quell asked.

  “No,” Kairos said. “This planet contains greater dangers.”

  “Well, I feel better,” Chadic said. “Let’s get moving and kill some Imps.”

  * * *

  —

  They emerged from the tunnels hours later, into the jungle under a sky now the blue-gray of Troithe’s oceans. They could see the Imperial outpost protruding from a rock abutting the cliffs: a two-level prefab landing tower and command post, the sort Imperial engineers could’ve assembled in a matter of days. Small enough that Quell expected it would be staffed by no more than a dozen personnel and guards; she told Chadic as much as they hiked.

  “You going to help us take it over?” Chadic asked.

  “Are you going to give me a weapon?” Quell returned.

  Chadic only snorted. Part of Quell felt injured, and she was surprised by her own reaction.

  When they arrived at the tower’s base, they saw no movement, no ship, and no lights. Fueling cables hung off the upper platform, their ends severed. Kairos scouted the perimeter and found no signs of life, so they proceeded closer. Still there were no alarms, nor any indication of activity.

  One of the generators appeared to have failed violently, leaving scorch marks across the lower platform on which the barracks, command station, and supply centers sat. Chadic led them into the supply shack nearest the generator and found broken crates full of torn nutrient packages. “You figure one of those things we saw back there scared them off? Not smelling any bodies around.”

  Quell shrugged and looked to Kairos. “Before Endor, I’d have said no. Imperial discipline wouldn’t allow it. Now? Anything’s possible.”

  Kairos touched a finger to the metal wall and pulled it away as if shocked. “Maybe. This is not a safe place. Many would run.”

  “Lucky us, I guess,” Chadic said. “Let’s go through building by building. Search for any parts we can use on the U-wing. Or—” She looked pointedly at Quell. “—anything we can use to get a signal offworld. If we yell loud enough, maybe someone out there will give us a ride.”

  It was a reasonable plan, Quell thought, and she participated as much as Chadic allowed as the afternoon sun bled into the sky. They began together, searching through storage compartments and speeder racks and tossing anything with potential—anything that could be broken down into wiring, control chips, or circuitry—into a pile. When it became clear there was no power to the central transmitter, Chadic told the group to split up, and Quell took the barracks for herself and began dismantling one of the consoles. Chadic and Kairos could handle salvaging the heavier equipment, but repairing the navicomputer would take a discriminating eye.

  The rote work was almost soothing, yet often a sound came from the jungle—a metallic chiming or a low hum—that made Quell tremble before she returned to work. Other times she glimpsed shadows on the cliffside that moved out of time with the sun. The darker the afternoon became, the more the outpost seemed haunted, and Quell found her thoughts drawn to the troubles awaiting her. Once she left—if she left—where would she go? What would she do with what Keize had given her? What had become of Shadow Wing and General Syndulla and Chadawa?

  Kairos and Chadic appeared locked in their own private wars. Quell caught a glimpse of Chadic (when the Theelin clearly believed no one was watching) with head bent and hands clasped over her ears as she whispered something. Kairos barely worked, intent on tracking movements in the jungle that only she could see.

  At night, they gathered in the command center rather than the barracks—both for security and, Quell suspected, because no one cared to sleep in the bunks of lost Imperial soldiers. They ate in silence on the floor, and when they were done Quell asked, “Should we post a sentry? Without power, we’re pretty vulnerable.”

  “Probably,” Chadic said. “Should have a good view from either platform. Wish the alarms were working, but we can take turns—”

  Kairos had withdrawn to the corner of the command center, perching atop a console in the deepest shadows. She spoke in a hollow voice. “I cannot.”

  Chadic squinted into the dark corner. “Cannot what?”

  “Leave here. Not at night.” She made a small gesture, seemingly indicating the command center. “I cannot.”

  Chadic glanced to Quell. Quell shrugged. It was no use pressing Kairos. “I can take first watch,” Quell said. “I won’t ask for a weapon.”

  Chadic looked ready to agree before Kairos interrupted again. “No,” Kairos said, her voice sharp and wavering.

  “You want to just tell us what we’re allowed to do?” Chadic asked.

  Kairos sat on the machinery like a guardian on a temple lintel. “She cannot go,” Kairos said. “If danger comes, she cannot—” She clasped her hands together, flexing them as if the motion would draw out more words.

  “What?” Quell said. “What is it?”

  Kairos looked at Chadic as she answered. “We abandoned the others to come. To find her. To judge her for her wickedness, the deaths of worlds—” With a swift turn of her head, Kairos leveled her gaze at Quell, then returned her attention to the Theelin. “She was given life by Adan and IT-O, and succeeds them by blood. They are gone, and I remain, and we are bound. She cannot—she must be kept close.”

  Quell felt the scars on her arms burn, as if Kairos’s stare had inflamed her wounds. She shifted awkwardly on the cold metal floor and wanted to protest: Adan and Ito didn’t give me life. They died and I couldn’t stop it, and whatever bond they had with you isn’t mine to take.

  But Chadic stood with a grunt and a look of disgust. “Fine,” she said. “I guess I’m taking watch.”

  This time, Kairos did not object.

  CHAPTER 16

  DENIAL OF UNACCEPTABLE TRUTHS

  I

  Nothing lurked in the night but shadows. Chass na Chadic paced the edge of the lower platform and later dozed against the wall of the barracks. She was aware of movement from the cliffs and the jungle but unable to spot
a source. She heard chittering noises that might have been insects and low tones that could have been flutes; once, she smelled something like smoke and incense, but saw no light except starlight.

  Your comrades sent you away, Maya, the voice of Let’ij told her, though the imagined sound was distant and tinny. First Wyl and Nath, who wouldn’t help you when you picked your mission. Now Kairos, who would rather see you devoured than Quell, the woman who betrayed you both. Quell, who also did nothing to keep you from facing the night alone, very possibly because you beat her half to death…

  It was all true, Chass knew, and she knew also that the Children of the Empty Sun would never send her away, would never argue and prioritize their personal concerns over their shared allegiance to the cult. They’d never send her to patrol alone at night or grow tired of her complaining or expel her for fighting. She’d nearly killed Let’ij once, and the woman was waiting to take her back.

  She knew it all, but Chass couldn’t fully remember what the cult leader sounded like anymore, so the words stopped being Let’ij’s and started being her mother’s, and then for a while General Syndulla’s. If Chass had had her audio chips she would’ve played back one of the cult’s lectures; as it was she had to bring the teachings to her mind through force of will, and that was more effort than she had in her.

  The next morning Chass found Kairos and Quell safe and well rested in the command center. She’d gotten maybe two hours of sleep and figured she’d earned a nap after breakfast when the others got to work, but her attempt was made difficult by the sunlight seeping through the doorway and the noise of Quell and Kairos sliding heavy equipment across the platform. She wrapped the thermal blanket around her head until she could barely breathe and finally passed out.

  * * *

  —

  When she woke, she was soaked in sweat and had a pounding headache but otherwise felt better. Her mind flitted among thoughts of Imperial satellites and the U-wing and whatever Wyl and Nath and Syndulla were up to (whether she’d feel guilty if they’d been killed; whether she’d feel guilty if Chadawa died), and she ate a ration bar and looked across the platform to Quell and Kairos. She couldn’t identify what it was they’d disassembled—maybe a generator—but its parts were spread across thirty square meters, neatly arranged in some spots and a garbage heap in others.

  Quell and Kairos worked opposite sides of their grid, dismantling smaller components and sorting wires and computer chips. Chass wandered out to Quell, who looked at her with a furrowed brow—concern, or maybe Chass was just standing in front of the sun.

  “You holding up okay?” Quell asked.

  “Sure,” Chass said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Quell started to answer, then crouched to return to her pile. Chass felt a swell of petty rage at being ignored. It felt justified: Quell had barely spoken to Chass since Chass had found her; never even tried to apologize for everything she’d done; treated Chass like a New Republic stooge, a stranger, instead of someone she’d personally betrayed.

  “When are you going to tell me about your mission?” Chass asked, as stern as she knew how. If Quell wanted to play captive-and-captor, she could, too.

  “It went all right,” Quell answered without looking up from her work, “until the end.”

  “Funny. You’re funny.”

  Quell shrugged. “There’s nothing you can do about it now. Nothing either of us can do. Until we’re off this planet, does it matter?”

  “If you told me the truth, I might be able to answer,” Chass snapped.

  Quell turned around, still low to the ground, and looked up at Chass. “It doesn’t,” she said. “It doesn’t matter here.”

  Chass scuffed one boot backward, ready to kick at a lineup of bulky metal screws, then thought better of it. “Hey!” she yelled toward Kairos. “Are we going to get that thing flying again?”

  Quell shifted as if she wanted to answer. Kairos looked toward them, confused or distracted. “Yes,” Kairos said. “I think so.”

  “Great,” Chass said. Then quieter, only for Quell: “So maybe it’ll matter soon.”

  Quell had the audacity to laugh, soft and hoarse. Chass spat on the metal platform and stalked away.

  When she’d put some distance between herself and Quell, her mood improved marginally. She walked along the platform’s edge, looking down over the steep rocky slope and into the jungle, creeping closer to the drop-off with every step until she was placing right foot in front of left, half her soles hanging in midair. This, too, seemed to brighten her mood—or if not brighten, at least sharpen her focus on the present. The Children of the Empty Sun felt as far in the past as Hound Squadron or the Cavern Angels; as all the comrades she’d seen die over the years.

  She was placing her right heel when a motion at the edge of the jungle caught her attention. She looked to where trees met rocks and saw a distant shape wrapped in fabric, staring up at her without a face. Instantly she recalled the effigies in the caves.

  Her heel slipped and her weight shifted onto air. For a moment falling seemed a certainty; then she was toppling backward onto the platform, instinctively throwing herself away from the drop and smashing her elbow into the metal as she crashed. She scrambled upright after a second and looked down but the figure, if it had been more than her imagination, was gone.

  * * *

  —

  The afternoon was more difficult. Chass knew she should’ve seen it coming, but sometimes she was oblivious to the obvious.

  It started with a nervous tremble in her hands as she dismantled computer consoles for Quell’s collection. She stripped a few bolts and singed a bundle of wires with a laser cutter, but she explained the mistakes away as a side effect of hunger or the headache that had only gotten worse. She snapped at Quell a few times when the woman came to check on her, but Quell deserved that.

  Later, though, her mind began to wander. Thoughts of the Children of the Empty Sun—of Let’ij’s lectures, of the ecstasy of being embraced by the crowd at disquisition, of the taste of stewed fruit pits and flatbread—washed over her like floodwaters, smashed through the mental barricades she’d tentatively erected. She’d dwelled less and less upon the cult since leaving her B-wing, since finding Quell, but it returned now with a vengeance.

  She was alone.

  Detoxing was always harder alone.

  She’d been through it before, seen it in spiceheads and nervejackers torn from their favored addictions. It wasn’t the same with Let’ij and the cult but it was close enough. In her lectures she’d been given a way to soothe herself, to push away everything she loathed about existence, and now that soothing mechanism had been snatched from her.

  Besides the cult, the only things her racked brain let her think about were the weird sounds of the jungle and the faceless gaze of the effigies. Those weren’t really improvements.

  * * *

  —

  Evening came, and Chass ate without appetite alongside Kairos and Quell. No one had to ask her to take watch, and she was glad for the breeze on her scalp and horns as she patrolled the platform under a dark sky cracked with rose. She touched the blaster at her hip often and rolled the heel of her hand across her forehead to try to massage away her worsening headache.

  The distant fluting began again and Chass saw flickers in her peripheral vision, tiny flashes in the jungle and on the cliff, which she attributed first to the pain in her head. They disappeared whenever she looked their way. The wind stiffened and the platform groaned, the upper level swaying on its pylons. Whenever she looked above her to see if the entire structure was about to come crashing down, she caught another glimpse of movement.

  She became convinced that the flashes, the movements, were coming nearer. The darkest hours of night came and she could no longer see the command center or the upper platform, but she saw something in
the blackness. Alongside the fluting came a sound like viscous droplets pulling away from a gelatinous mass and dripping onto a wooden surface. Chass hated the sound and the sporadic timing of its assaults, and she grew to hate the planet and all that lived on it.

  She saw one of the effigies as she turned at one corner of the lower platform. The figure stood on a ridge extending from the cliff, and it was looking toward her. She raised her blaster and fired. The night air was bathed in crimson as two particle bolts rippled and burst against the cliffside. Chass screamed at the figure but when her vision recovered from the flash it had disappeared.

  The wind lashed her. The air was full of an odor that brought to mind Let’ij’s attar-and-petrichor perfume. Chass cursed not just the planet and her foes but Kairos and Quell and then, one by one, every member of Riot Squadron. Shadow Wing deserved her spite, too, but they seemed beyond reach in a way the dead did not. She cursed Wyl and Nath, though, and wondered again what had become of them at Chadawa.

  For a moment, with her arms folded across her chest and her body facing the wind in defiance, she felt very cold and wanted to cry.

  “Chass?”

  She wrinkled her nose and turned around. Quell stood a meter away, barely shivering despite the lashing wind and her short sleeves.

  “Kairos release you for good behavior?” Chass asked.

  “She’s not watching.”

  Chass grunted and glanced over her shoulder, as if whatever lurked just outside her sight might have moved closer while she hadn’t been looking.

  “There’s something I wanted to say,” Quell said. “It’s not important. But I was awake.”

  Chass returned her focus to Quell. “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “You said the other day you joined a cult? When everything that happened at Cerberon…happened.”

  “Yeah.”

  The wind sifted Quell’s ragged hair so that she looked through the veil at Chass. The scars on her arms looked like red rain streaking in the wind. “I’m glad for you,” Quell said. “I know you don’t—you don’t join up with just anyone. That’s my sense, anyway. So I figure they’re doing right by you somehow.”