Victory's Price (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  “Or both,” Ackbar said. Nath backed out of sight again. “The Deliverance and its squadrons will join the attack, but I want you prepared to counter the 204th if they are present. You’ve proven more than once that they’re dangerous; let’s make sure any damage they do is contained.”

  “Yes, Admiral,” Hera said, and felt a mix of anticipation and concern as Ackbar went around the room giving the individuals who’d waged war across the galaxy their assignments.

  Victory was in sight. Victory over the Empire and victory over Shadow Wing.

  Victory always had a price.

  IV

  Yrica Quell lay on her bunk in the brig, clean shirt and bandaged arms stenciled by the lighting strips overhead. If she looked to her right, she could see the black door to the cell and the control panel indicating the door was unlocked. If she opened the door, she knew she would see an empty corridor leading to a guard post with no one on duty.

  She was alone. She had her freedom if she wanted it. It might have been a test by General Syndulla, but more likely it was a message: You’re trusted, but don’t forget your position.

  Nonetheless, it was difficult for Quell to see her circumstances as anything other than symbolic. She was trapped, held captive only because she hadn’t escaped when she’d had the chance; the victim of nothing more terrible than her own choices. She was aboard a New Republic Star Destroyer, trying to determine what she owed her comrades and her mentors: what she deserved, and what they deserved, and what the 204th and the Empire and the dead of Nacronis deserved.

  She hadn’t moved from her cot in hours, feeling coarse cloth against her arms and hearing the distant hum of the engines. She could do nothing but think and she still felt overstimulated. There were too many threads to untangle, too many decisions that would impact other people. IT-O would have helped her—the torture droid probably would’ve known the answer and refused to share, but it also would’ve reasoned with her for hours or days if she’d asked.

  She’d always tried to avoid sessions with the droid. Now that she wanted to see it, IT-O was gone. She’d brought its data core out of Cerberon but the damage had been too great to repair. All she had left was her memory (though she had an extremely good memory).

  “You aren’t going to help me, are you?” she whispered, if only to hear her own voice.

  The first time she’d met IT-O had been in a converted shipping container in Traitor’s Remorse. She’d had to wrap herself in a poncho to ward off the cold, and she’d sat on a low stool against the container’s corrugated metal wall. “You are Yrica Quell?” the droid had asked, and she’d said yes, she was, and it had gone on to apologize for its appearance.

  “I assure you I have been programmed with an abiding respect for living things,” it had told her, “as well as multiple texts on medical ethics and the treatment of psychiatric disorders. I do not ask that you believe or respect me at this time; only that we begin our relationship without preconceptions and work toward the shared goal of your treatment and release.”

  “You must say that a lot,” she’d said.

  “No,” the droid replied, “but I opt to.”

  At the time, she’d thought the comment the result of the exasperating literalness of droids. She wondered now if it had been humor.

  What would you have told me if you’d known the truth then?

  No one had ever called Quell imaginative. She knew her strengths. But she tried anyway, squeezing her eyes shut and holding on to the image of the shipping container, smelling the rust and adhesive. She pictured the droid’s photoreceptor dilating as it stared at her.

  “You’re troubled,” the droid said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t know what to do.” She wanted to stop there, but IT-O wouldn’t have allowed it. In reality she might not have trusted the droid enough to speak; yet this wasn’t reality, and she had learned in Cerberon to be honest with herself.

  “I knew what I was trying to accomplish when I rejoined Shadow Wing,” she said. “I tried to stop them as well as I could, I swear. But I’ve made a lot of bad calls in my life, and they’re not monsters, and Keize was the one who saved me in the first place—”

  “Pause, Yrica Quell. Breathe.”

  She did, in reality and in her imagination.

  “What happened,” the droid asked, “when you left Cerberon?”

  She nodded in the shipping container and disciplined her thoughts. She wouldn’t have said any of that to IT-O anyway. She’d always been more precise.

  “I rejoined Shadow Wing to destroy it. I thought it would be straightforward. I’ve killed a lot of people before.”

  “It wasn’t straightforward, though.”

  “No. I got confused.”

  “How?”

  “Keize was just trying to keep his troops alive. Give them a future. And I—” She paused again for a long time. “I started to think maybe they didn’t deserve dying. Even as I watched them murder planets, I started to think of them as—not good people, not decent people, but people. My friends.”

  “That was inevitable,” the droid said. “The moment you left Cerberon, it was a necessary outcome.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—” The droid stopped. She stopped, trying to answer her own question in the droid’s voice. “—when you accepted that you were worthy of existence, worthy of moving forward as you’d decided you would, you could no longer deny your former comrades the same worth and dignity. It merely took you time to see the logical conclusion.”

  “I don’t get to place myself above them.”

  “Somewhat reductive—but in a sense, yes.”

  “Plenty of people who don’t deserve to die still have to, in war.”

  The droid had no answer to this. Maybe the real droid would have, but not the one she imagined.

  “Why are you coming to me now,” the droid asked, “when everything you’re telling me has distressed you for some time?”

  “I have a choice to make,” she said.

  “And that choice is…?”

  That part was easy. Admitting it was harder.

  “I don’t know whether to tell the others what Keize is planning.”

  “Because? In the simplest terms you can.”

  She returned to the words she’d spoken to General Syndulla. “Because I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t trust my own judgment.”

  The droid adjusted the frequency of its hum, first to a buzz-saw whine then to a heartbeat throb. Quell’s breathing slowed; she hadn’t realized it had quickened.

  “I understand your doubt. You’ve made decisions in your past that led to unfortunate consequences. Nacronis is the obvious example, but there are others.”

  “Like joining the Empire so I could learn to fly and join the Rebellion, and then never doing it? Like lying about Cinder and losing my squadron? Like—”

  “Yrica,” the droid said. “We are both aware of your failings. Recounting them now will not help. Consider this, however: The consequences of those past decisions were never unpredictable. You understood the likely outcomes of the choices you regret the most.”

  “I know that—”

  “Then use that knowledge. Act on what you know now.”

  The image of the shipping container frayed at the edges. Her imagination was failing her. “Just tell me what to do,” she whispered in her mind and aloud.

  “What is it that you want?” the droid asked.

  The words sent her into confusion again, entangling her in a thousand futures for herself and Alphabet and Shadow Wing and the galaxy. But the droid had urged simplicity. She sought an anchor, focused on the question.

&nb
sp; “I want to save lives,” she said.

  “Then start there,” the droid said, “and concern yourself with the next question once it comes.”

  IT-O was gone then, and she blinked away the sting in her eyes as she lay on her bunk and listened to her breath and held fast to the images until they dissolved, dreamlike, leaving her without even a proper memory—just the traces of thoughts that had come and gone and a sense of grief and affection.

  She studied the answer she’d found, reexamining it, then forced herself to stop; she couldn’t begin the spiral of confusion again. She forced herself to stand from her bunk and exit the cell too fast, head swimming, and she walked down the corridor on unsteady legs until she spotted a security cam.

  She looked up and said: “Tell General Syndulla I want to talk to Alphabet Squadron.”

  CHAPTER 18

  CALL TO THE PLACE OF JUDGMENT

  I

  “It’s idiotic. We’re flying top speed into a trap.”

  “That’s always the way, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s just the most fun…”

  If Yrica Quell ignored the obsidian décor of the conference room, ignored Kairos’s unmasked face and the absence of Caern Adan, it was almost like being aboard the Lodestar. Chass na Chadic sat at the far end of the table, cocksure with arms tight across her chest; she was teasing Wyl Lark, seated to her right, whose bacta treatments had scrubbed away any sign of injury.

  “Endor wasn’t as fun as you’d think,” Lark said with a smile. Quell was certain she heard something other than humor in his voice; something strained and secret, as if he, too, were pretending they were the people they’d been months ago.

  Kairos wore a loose gray poncho—wherever it had come from it fit better than Chadic’s flight suit—and had taken up her station in the corner of the room. There were no shadows there to obscure her, but Quell noticed the slight movement of Lark’s hair, the feel of air over her own skin, and realized Kairos had positioned herself away from the ventilation ducts. The woman was still hesitant to touch the alien world she occupied.

  Nath Tensent ambled away from Lark and Chadic (who kept talking) and joined Quell near the front. He dropped his bulk into the seat beside her and leaned back. “Guessing you’re bringing trouble?” he asked with a grin.

  “You guess right,” she said. “Doesn’t seem like much next to the end of the war, though.”

  “What, the business with Jakku?” Tensent shrugged. “You’d think everyone would know better than to get excited, but they’re acting like we just blew up a Death Star.”

  “Instead of about to attack one?”

  “Exactly. Caught some of the Wild Squadron boys looking for watering holes near the Jakku system where they can celebrate after. I understand the sentiment, but…” He shook his head.

  As with Lark, there was something in Tensent’s voice that had changed. He was concealing something—not the way he’d always concealed things, but concealing something badly. Like the grinning pirate was facing execution at last.

  Or maybe Quell just didn’t know her people anymore.

  “How are you holding up?” Tensent asked. “Heard from Syndulla about what you’ve been through, but she spared the details.”

  “I’m fine,” Quell said. As she watched Tensent sidelong she knew she owed him more. She’d never been as close to him as to Chadic, yet he’d stayed by her when she’d gone hunting for Adan and steered her right aboard the Buried Treasure. “I’m a wreck, but there’s enough to salvage, and I can do the job.”

  Tensent laughed, loud enough that Chadic and Lark glanced his way before resuming their discussion. “I don’t doubt it,” he said. He lowered his voice and his smile faded. “You’re a survivor. Always admired that about you.”

  Quell nodded, not sure what else to say.

  The door slid open and General Syndulla stepped into the conference room. The pilots rose together and Tensent slapped his hand between Quell’s shoulders, hard enough to jolt her.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Syndulla said, and waved them all to their seats. Quell remained standing. “You all know as much as I do at this point. Yrica Quell remains in our custody but given all she’s done for us—including stopping the second Operation Cinder and saving Chadawa—I think she deserves some leeway. She wanted to brief us as a group, we’re going to listen.”

  “Thank you,” Quell said.

  Syndulla slid into a seat opposite Tensent and nodded to Quell. “It’s your show.”

  Quell moved to the holoprojector controls and skimmed the buttons with her fingertips. She’d prepared nothing, but it bought her time to compose herself, to remember why she’d chosen this.

  I want to save lives.

  “I know what Soran Keize is planning,” she said as she faced the group. “It has nothing to do with Jakku or the Imperial fleet—I don’t have any information on what will happen there and I can’t help you win the war. But what Keize is doing will be critical in the aftermath.

  “Keize and I—I know him. We spoke a lot when I returned to Shadow Wing, in private away from the others. He wanted to know my opinions, hear about my experiences as a New Republic captive. He’s believed for some time that the war is a lost cause—that at most, the Empire can drag out the fighting, hold on to some sectors under siege—and that his obligation isn’t to Imperial leadership, but to his people. To every soldier fighting for the Empire.”

  They were watching her, but none of them understood. She went on, keeping her voice steady as she could.

  “Based on everything he’s seen—based on what I’ve seen, too—we agreed that there’s no place for Imperial veterans in a galaxy dominated by the New Republic. After the war, the best outcome anyone from the 204th can hope for is a life in hiding; more likely a long prison sentence.”

  Chadic snorted. Quell could hear her thinking: Sounds pretty soft to me. Tensent arched his brow. Lark said quietly, “You don’t know that.”

  “I was at Traitor’s Remorse,” she replied, and tried to shed the harshness in her response. “It wasn’t good, and we were the lucky ones. Keize wanted to disappear and live a life on the fringes, and he was hunted down. There are millions of Imperials still out there, still fighting since Endor, and a hundred times that who haven’t formally surrendered. They—”

  “We don’t know what will happen to them,” Syndulla said, firm but without aggression. “The Senate hasn’t made any final plans.”

  Quell wanted to close her eyes and retreat into herself. She met Syndulla’s gaze instead. “I realize that. Right now, though, it doesn’t matter what you or I believe. It matters what Keize believes, and I’m telling you: He thinks the soldiers of the Empire are doomed whether they surrender or stay. And he thinks they deserve better.”

  “Understood,” Syndulla said. “So what does he plan to do?”

  Nothing she’d said so far was a breach of trust. None of it revealed anything they could use.

  “The Emperor’s Messenger,” she said. “The machine that delivered the orders for the first Operation Cinder. Keize wondered how it selected the people it did—the people likely to go along with genocide even after the Emperor’s death. He reasoned it had to have access to some kind of massive military data bank.

  “He was right. I had a Messenger’s programming analyzed, and we discovered it was sorting through profiles of everyone who ever served the Empire. Billions of people, and it was looking for the ones who—” Who wouldn’t hesitate to commit atrocities. “—who suited its purpose.

  “But it wasn’t just checking psychological evaluations or combat records. It checked information none of us knew had been recorded—family histories, hobbies, cultural background. Whether we stood straight enough for the Imperial anthem when it played. That’s just the trivial stuff, though, it also—”
r />   They didn’t understand. She had to explain it clearly.

  “The data bank it accessed…it cataloged everything. Every awful thing we did, every massacre, every time someone bombed a civilian apartment we’d thought was a rebel hideout and every time a stormtrooper threw someone innocent against a wall. Every vile act, authorized or not. The stuff we sanitized in official reports, because we didn’t want to admit it and it never seemed important to our superiors.

  “Maybe you think that doesn’t sound special. Most of you never worked for the Empire, but you couldn’t—” She heard her own anger, tried desperately to control it. “—you couldn’t work as a damn file clerk without being complicit in something. That’s how the Empire worked, how it was meant to work. You serve, and sooner or later everyone does something to stain their conscience.

  “The Emperor was collecting all of it. He was tracking how far we’d all fallen.”

  The room was silent awhile. Lark was the one to ask: “Why?”

  Quell shrugged. “Because that’s who he was. Maybe he thought it would ensure our loyalty. Maybe he was a petty sadist.”

  She caught Tensent’s gaze. He’d understand better than the others—he’d served under the Empire long enough to know no one got away clean. But he didn’t show any emotion as he said, “No way this Messenger could’ve carried the data bank with it. Where’s it located?”

  “Where else?” Quell asked. She’d seen the coordinates in the Surgeon’s report, confirmed them aboard the U-wing. “It’s on Coruscant, stretching underneath the Imperial Palace all the way to the Verity District.”

  Tensent whistled. Quell ignored him. “If the Empire falls at Jakku,” she said, “Coruscant can’t stand alone. The regent there is a figurehead and its defenses are decaying; it’ll surrender or it’ll be conquered. The New Republic will gain access to the Emperor’s data bank and it’ll have the tools to chase, prosecute, imprison, execute, or ruin everyone who spent more than a day in Imperial service. Because I guarantee you, everyone will have something the New Republic can demand justice for.