“Thank you,” she said, and left his bedside at last.
II
Nath Tensent had flown two Y-wings in his life. The first hadn’t lasted long—a bad landing on Baradas had torn off the underside and one of the nacelles, and everything left had been destined for the scrap heap. His second Y-wing had seen him through the war and out the other side, and he knew its guts better than any other piece of machinery he’d owned, astromech included.
The bomber had returned from Chadawa hurt, and he’d let the ground crews patch it as best they could. For the past hour he’d been crawling over and under the Y-wing, checking every welded armor plate and swapped power coupling, and he could admit that Ragnell and her people had done good. But his ship was still the only thing keeping him from dying in a thousand ways, and if he had a list of other things he should’ve been doing, so what? If Jaith Omir had double-checked all the safeties on his torpedoes, maybe he wouldn’t have blown up midway to Chadawa. Maybe if Nath hadn’t retuned the backup stabilizers a week earlier, he’d be a frozen piece of meat above the planet now.
T5 squawked as Nath crouched beneath the cockpit and eyed the slapdash spray of thermal resin around the cannons. “Because it’s soothing, all right?” Nath snapped. “Besides, there’s nowhere to meditate on the blasted Star Destroyer.”
The droid kept squealing. Nath barely bothered to grunt in argument. Complain all you want. I’m not walking away until I’m done.
Only the last of the droid’s noises demanded an answer. “Doesn’t matter,” Nath said. “No one’s seeing Quell until the general’s done with her.” He scowled, dug a fingernail into the resin, then looked to the droid sitting a meter away. “But yeah, I’m glad she’s alive.”
He didn’t plan to admit his complicity, yet the truth was Quell had gotten a raw deal. He’d known, same as Adan, about the crimes she’d committed at Nacronis; and same as Adan, he’d kept it to himself. Maybe he could’ve done more to smooth things over when the squadron had learned the truth. He probably would’ve, if Shadow Wing hadn’t picked that moment to attack.
So far as he could tell, she hadn’t tried to kill him or Alphabet since leaving the New Republic. He had no beef with her. Hell, he thought, the woman has a wicked sense of humor when she lets her guard down.
“Going to make things complicated, though,” he said aloud. “Going to throw Wyl and Chass off their game.” Neither seemed emotionally prepared for Quell’s return, no matter what Syndulla did with her.
T5 chittered and he nodded reluctantly. “That, too. Guess I do owe Chass a visit.”
He made one more cursory inspection of the bomber, trying not to think about everything he might’ve missed and everything that might’ve saved the rest of Hail. Finally he stowed his tools and headed toward the hangar entrance, waving at one of the ground crew. “Hey! You seen Chass na Chadic?”
“Chadic?” The woman looked at him from where she was decoupling a fuel hose. She spoke with the electronic whine of a vocabulator. “She was here to review the B-wing’s repair plan. She left to—and I quote—‘go shoot something.’ ”
“Sounds like her. Thanks.” Nath paused and frowned. “Keep spotting you, but we never got introduced. You’re from Cerberon, right? What’s your name?”
“Caulra Spring,” the woman said. She didn’t smile.
“Nath Tensent. See you around.”
He left T5 with the Y-wing, departed the hangar, and took the long route to the practice range. He found a few pilots and crew snapping off particle bolts at holograms, but Chass wasn’t there and his inquiries suggested she’d never turned up. Under other circumstances, that would’ve been the end of it, but he’d resigned himself to the conversation and he was determined to find her.
He made three other stops before finding Chass in the sanitation ring, shooting junk on a conveyer belt leading into the garbage compactor. The chamber smelled like rusted metal and rotting food and ionized blaster trails. “Range not good enough for you?” he called over the machinery.
Chass didn’t even look his way. “You ever notice all the targets on the range are nonhuman?”
“Can’t say I had. Good old Imperial programs.”
“Right,” Chass said. She tracked a lump of stained and shredded cloth down the conveyer with her blaster but didn’t fire; then she dropped her arms to her sides and turned to Nath. “Good old that. You want something?”
“Maybe I just wanted to see how you and Kairos are doing after your excursion?”
“Huh. Just fine so far. Syndulla hasn’t taken us into custody, but I figure that’s because she’s short on pilots.”
It shouldn’t have hit home—it was the sort of cynical joke Nath had made himself a hundred times—but the depleted roster of bomber pilots burned in his brain.
Just because it affected him didn’t mean he had to show it, though. “You may be right,” he said. “My sense is the general’s got enough on her hands between Quell and the war as a whole. She’ll put off disciplinary actions, at least awhile—expect you’ll get a note attached to your record and a few weeks of docked pay. Maybe worse, but you’re not getting kicked out.”
“Thank the will of the Force for other people’s desperation, huh?”
“That, and the fact your wing commander’s in the medbay.”
Chass had the decency to look embarrassed. “Yeah. We weren’t trying to leave you and Wyl in the lurch. Glad he’s okay.”
Nath nodded carefully. He tried to imagine if things might have gone any differently if Chass had been with the Y-wings hunting the Raiders. Maybe she’d have died instead of one of the Hail pilots; maybe one more ship would’ve made it go easier. It wouldn’t have changed the duel, certainly.
He owed her payback, but he’d also made a promise to Wyl and he couldn’t blame her for the worst of his troubles. He figured he could find a workable compromise.
“Forget it,” he said, and grinned wide enough to show teeth. “Let’s get a drink.”
She was sensible enough to be suspicious. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Jaith Omir had a contraband stash, and someone’s got to do the tough job and get rid of it.”
She was sensible enough to be suspicious, but not sensible enough to say no. It was one of the things he liked about Chass—once you had her figured out, she was always reliable.
* * *
—
Nath hadn’t decided on his approach beforehand—he’d tossed around options and then, as usual, figured he’d get a read on his target when the time came.
The answer seemed obvious now, as he sat across from Chass in the maintenance room outside the Star Destroyer’s secondary cooling plant. Gurgling sounds escaped from the hatch to their right, and crates full of tools and obscure replacement parts served as chairs as they drank from two putrid bottles of Corellian ale. Nath had managed not to complain about the taste as Chass had gone on about how she’d stolen back her B-wing, then segued into some story about robbing a casino with the Cavern Angels. He’d forgotten she could get chatty when she drank.
When a lull came he took his shot. “You know I don’t care a whit about your religion, right?” he said. “All that chanting you’ve been doing in the cockpit, the weird medallions…I grew up next door to a Singing Disciple of the Gap. Takes a lot to get on my nerves.”
Her body went rigid, and she fixed cold eyes on him even as she sipped. “So why’re you bringing it up?” she asked.
“Because—come on, sister—you’re smarter than you pretend, and I know a job when I see one.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, and with that Nath knew she was his. If she’d been going to break a bottle over his skull, that had been her opportunity.
“Sure I do. I’ve got my fingers in all sorts of places now. Pulled up the New Republic I
ntelligence files on that cult of yours, along with their leader—what’s-her-name, Let’ij?”
“What about her?” She was feigning boredom and staring at the tool shelf behind Nath’s head.
“New Republic’s finally getting its hands on some of the old security databases—the ones the Empire didn’t purge, anyway. Visual search matches Let’ij’s face, a few alterations aside, all the way back to the Old Republic. Woman’s lived a busy life. Done everything from running speakeasies to counterfeiting to acting as an unlicensed advocate. Must’ve ended up at Cerberon not too long ago, decided founding a cult was her latest scam.”
Her head started to swivel back toward him and he cut her off before she could speak. “Look, I know you know all this—maybe not the particulars, but you’ve seen too much of this garbage to delude yourself. You’re sticking with the cultists because you figure it gives you options after the war’s done, right? Maybe a place to squeeze out a few credits? I get it, believe me, but—” He leaned forward and put his bottle on the crate between them, lowering his voice. “—Let’ij doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to follow-through. If she did, she’d be rich by now instead of caught six times over.
“You want a good scam, though? You let me know, and I can find you some great ones—”
He’d pushed hard enough, and Chass brought her bottle down, swinging it wide to knock his bottle off the crate. The fallen container cracked without shattering, bleeding a trickle of amber onto the deck. “Really don’t need your advice,” she muttered. “But yeah, never meant it as a permanent thing. Wasn’t right for me anyway.”
Her hand was shaking. She wiped it on her knee to hide it. Nath felt a petty pleasure at her discomfort. “Didn’t mean to stick my nose in,” he said with a shrug. “Plenty of other options for a wily Theelin.”
“Yeah,” she repeated. “Maybe I can get a pilot job working for some rich guy who wants an ‘exotic’ species to show off.”
“Sure. Fits your temperament. Or open a veterans bar somewhere like Troithe—place that saw plenty of action, messy enough to be cheap?”
“Animal wrangler. Beastmaster. I’ve got tough skin.”
“Join a crooked circus.”
“Learn plasma-eating. Rob people after shows.”
“Lots of options.”
“Lots of options.”
Her words came rapidly. She didn’t smile through any of it.
“Hell,” he said. “I don’t think any of us really know what we’re doing after. Anyone who says different is deluding themselves.”
She shrugged. “Well…maybe we won’t have to worry about it anyway.”
He almost replied. Then she was standing, trying to pick her way through the debris on the floor to reach the door. “I need to sleep, okay?” she said. “Been a long trip.”
He could’ve left it there. He’d done his job, given her the nudge she needed, and it had been easier than he’d expected—like she’d been right on the verge already. But some days his capacity to read people felt like a curse, and he heard a harshness in her voice that reminded him of the woman he’d met before Pandem Nai. He wondered if he’d overcorrected; he didn’t think so.
“Hey,” he called, as she stepped into the doorway. He was operating on instinct now, conscious mind two steps behind. “That pilot shortage you mentioned? Don’t get yourself killed before the next mission is over. Going off with Kairos, you owe me, you owe Wyl.”
“Screw you, hero.”
She was out of the maintenance room and the door was sliding shut. He called, “You know it’s true. You hear me?” He clambered to his feet and held the door open. “You need someone to shoot you, you come to me after. But you owe me a replacement bomber pilot!”
He heard her cursing as she walked away. Nath sighed and began cleaning up the spilled ale.
He’d done his job. It wasn’t his fault if killing Chass the Cultist brought the return of Chass the Martyr. Though like everything about Alphabet, it might end up his problem to solve.
III
“The Imperial fleet,” Admiral Gial Ackbar declared, waving a holographic fin at the galaxy in the room’s center, “is here, in the Jakku system. This information has been confirmed by our most trustworthy sources within the past twelve hours. An opportunity to stop the enemy forever is at hand.”
There were no hushed reactions from the members of the war council digitally gathered in the assembly room. The lot of them were too jaded for that. But Hera felt her heart rate increase. She heard tapping from several quarters as off-holo aides pulled up information on Jakku and New Republic battle groups. Stornvein wordlessly passed her a datapad, and she pretended to read it as she assessed her own emotions. The initial wave of excitement passed and she was steady.
You’ve known this was coming a long time. You’ve even been through it before.
She skimmed a summary of the Jakku system’s points of interest: only one planet of even borderline significance, and that a nearly uninhabited desert. It seemed an unlikely place for the Empire’s last stand, but like Hoth or Yavin 4 or Mako-Ta, it was a forgotten place outside the boundaries of civilization—one that could be hidden, defended, or abandoned according to the needs of its occupiers. There were many lessons the Empire had failed to learn from the Rebellion, but maybe some were sinking in.
“So far,” the admiral went on, “the Senate has refused to authorize invasion, but Chancellor Mothma is confident such authorization is forthcoming. She has tasked us with assembling a strike plan.”
“How long has the Empire been at Jakku?” General Ria spoke with the confidence of a woman who understood exactly what she needed. “How well entrenched can we expect them to be?”
Chief of Intelligence Cracken was the one to answer. “Estimates say three to six months. Specifics on the enemy’s fleet strength are forthcoming—”
“—yet we must be prepared to move quickly,” Ackbar added. “I know some of you will assume that time is on our side—that if the Empire has already had ample time to prepare, our best option is not to rush in but to spend weeks preparing a grand siege. I tell you—”
Hera heard the assembly room door open and saw Nath Tensent take his place near Stornvein—out of view of the holocams but close enough that she could speak to him. It was Wyl Lark’s place, rightfully—Alphabet Leader’s place—but she wasn’t ready to return Wyl to active duty and Nath had attended a war council before.
Nath nodded in her direction. His expression was distracted. Hera hoped she hadn’t made an error.
Ackbar was still talking. “—Mothma believes that even the senators in support of a strike will be reluctant to deploy so many ships far from our member worlds for a lengthy period; they fear it would leave us vulnerable. And I believe that the Empire is not fully ready for our attack, not yet—”
“What if it’s Endor all over again? A way to lure our forces out and destroy them?” Admiral Ho’ror’te asked.
Cracken began arguing that, unlike at Endor, his sources and methods had not been compromised. Hera only half listened, and tilted her head as Nath leaned in. “Trap or not, you can be blasted sure they’re expecting us,” Nath said. “Sounds like the chancellor’s lost control.”
“Maybe,” Hera murmured, and wished Mothma were in attendance—the chancellor understood both politics and war, and Hera had learned to trust the woman implicitly. “How soon can the squadrons be ready to fight?”
“Flare and Wild are in decent enough shape, but we’re real short on bombers. That’ll cause problems unless we can get reinforcements. Any idea if Vanguard Squadron could—”
Hera raised a hand to cut off Nath. Cracken was finishing and she stepped forward, drawing the room’s attention. “We can be confident this is a trap, at least in part,” she said. “If the Empire’s had this much time t
o prepare, they’ll have a plan ready. But I agree with Ackbar and the chancellor—if we have an opportunity, we should take it. We should hit faster than the Empire expects and harder than they can withstand, and we should do it—” She paused and looked at all the attendees, real and holographic. She thought of the campaigns Ria and Ho’ror’te had endured, and couldn’t begin to imagine the task Cracken faced. She looked at Nath and Stornvein, and saw the lines in their faces—the exhaustion all of them now took for granted. “We should do it because we’ve been promising an end to this war for a year, and I don’t know if anyone has the strength to fight for another. We do this while we have the heart, and while we have a real chance at victory.”
It wouldn’t end the argument behind the scenes, but it sufficed for the moment. Ackbar saw his opportunity and looked to Hera. “Thank you, General,” he said. “Regarding your status—I understand Chadawa is secure?”
“Secure, if not stable,” she agreed.
“General Cracken believes the Empire is recalling its remaining mobile battle groups to Jakku. It’s safe to assume they recognize a need for urgency. Do you have any reason to believe they would not recall the 204th Imperial Fighter Wing?”
“We’re—” She’d told no one of Quell’s capture. She hadn’t had time—and in truth, she’d wanted a better sense of who Quell had become before putting her fate in the hands of the New Republic bureaucracy. She considered her phrasing carefully. “—still analyzing some data that’s just arrived. But Chadawa appears to be the last Cinder target in this region. It’s entirely possible Shadow Wing could be recalled.”
She glanced at Nath as the man shifted restlessly. He’d been liaising with Intelligence, and he knew the 204th as well as she did. She motioned him forward; he hesitated, then stepped into view of the holocam.
“The 204th has built a unique little unit,” Nath said. “If they’re returning to the fleet, they’re not going to coordinate well with the rest of the Empire. Either they’ll end up a weak point or there’s something special planned for them.”
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