Victory's Price (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  It was all swagger, but it kept her mind off her friends. She’d bitten into the pill. Now she just had to swallow it.

  IV

  Wyl Lark gripped the blast door override until his arm was shuddering, watching half a dozen gunners stumble out of the smoke. They stank of acrid chemicals and melting lead, and when one threw him a hand signal he released the lever; it snapped into position and the door closed with a mechanical wheeze. The gunners coughed and staggered down the corridor without a backward glance.

  He wasn’t sure how long the Deliverance had been under fire; he didn’t know where the ship was or the state of the battle. He’d been on the move for what felt like hours, ricocheting from trouble to trouble, spraying sealant on sparking conduits and escorting injured crew to the medbay—nothing a droid couldn’t have done, but there weren’t enough droids to go around. He was sweating profusely and his soles hurt, yet he wasn’t tired so much as light-headed. Maybe it was the toxins he’d breathed; maybe it was a sense of purpose.

  He was certain of the things he did. It had been a long while.

  He left the burning gunnery station at a jog to head to the navigational deflector—someone had called a fire control team to the power chamber earlier, and while the Deliverance was holding together it was accruing damage faster than it could be repaired. He’d find a way to help.

  As he went, he passed viewports and glimpsed cannon fire and TIE fighters and troop carriers against a background of carnage. He paused more than once, and every time his spirit sank, his body shook, and he considered racing to the hangar. Each explosion was a death; each wrecked fighter could’ve been a friend; he could’ve joined his comrades, tried to protect them, but that wasn’t his role. He’d already done more than they knew, and his actions might yet make a difference.

  He’d stifled his doubts by the time he was dashing through the reactor tunnel leading to the Destroyer’s bow. Subgenerators on either side shivered and clanged, and he felt the hum of the deflectors in his teeth. If he’d still been preoccupied, he might not have noticed the woman sandwiched into a maintenance alcove, squatting in the shallow pit leading to the crawl space under the deck. As it was, he was three meters past when his mind registered her, and he nearly fell as he pivoted and retraced his steps.

  “You all right? You need a hand?” he called as he caught his breath. No one should’ve been in the reactor tunnel alone—if a problem there was critical enough to be worth attention, it was critical enough to deserve a full engineering team.

  The woman looked up from the pit and past the tool bag balanced on the deck’s edge. Wyl recognized her as one of the recruits they’d picked up before leaving Cerberon—a ground crew member assigned to Hail with a shock of orange hair and a medical vocabulator. He couldn’t recall her name; she’d always kept to herself and they’d never been introduced.

  “Fine,” she said. “Finishing up.”

  Her expression was resolved and fearless and hard. There was something discomfiting about her voice, like her words had come from someone else entirely. Wyl found himself second-guessing his own reaction, though, wondering if it was simply the strangeness of the electronic vocabulator.

  “You’re sure?” he asked, and it was a stall. His eyes swept around the tunnel, flickered from the pit to the tool bag. In a moment he’d leave; in a moment he’d forget the strange encounter; but not without giving the universe a chance to prove his instincts right.

  He wasn’t prepared when the woman launched herself over the edge of the pit, past the tool bag, and somersaulted toward him. He was shifting his balance when she swung an arm around and smashed something narrow and metallic—maybe a socket spanner or an arc wrench—into the back of his heels. He toppled backward, feet in the air, and his skull hit the deck.

  The woman scuttled above him, though he saw only a hazy silhouette. Pain spiked from the back of his head into his eyes. She raised her hand and brought the tool down like a knife. He twisted his body, avoided the blow; twisted a second and third and fourth time as she wielded her improvised weapon with the expertise of a murderous artisan.

  He thrust his body upward with all the strength he could muster, trying to throw the woman off. If she’d been a kilogram heavier the move might’ve failed—he was unsteady and still half blind—but she stumbled backward into an upright position. Wyl staggered to his feet and tried to see her face.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. It was stupid, but it was honest.

  “You don’t know me, do you, Wyl Lark?” she asked.

  Once again, the voice felt displaced. He recalled the rattle of his A-wing’s cockpit; a resonance of hope mixed with uncertainty and fear.

  “My name,” she said, “is Lieutenant Palal Seedia, of the 204th Imperial Fighter Wing.”

  He stopped trying to see her face. He imagined the buzz of the medical vocabulator interwoven with the static of a comm call.

  “You and your friends?” Palal sneered. “You called me Blink.”

  I don’t understand, he wanted to say again. But it would’ve been a lie.

  V

  She could hear them fighting.

  Real cocky, thinking she can advise us half a galaxy away.

  Woman always had her blind spots—

  The voices of Alphabet Squadron came through Yrica Quell’s cockpit speaker, tinny and indecipherable except for garbled fragments. She wasn’t sure she was supposed to be receiving, wasn’t sure the pilots even knew; maybe someone had routed the comms incorrectly. She wasn’t sure if the distortion came from Coruscant, Jakku, or the hyperspace relays in between. But hearing Nath Tensent and Chass na Chadic left her smiling tightly as her X-wing struck atmosphere and her deflectors shucked heat. She heard cannon fire overhead and hoped the sounds were drowning out Wyl Lark’s voice, explaining why she couldn’t hear him alongside the others.

  Tell her she’s getting soft, Tensent had declared earlier. Maybe he was right. She couldn’t afford distractions.

  “Kairos?” she asked. “What’s your status?”

  “I am well,” Kairos answered. “Go.”

  Quell checked her scanner. The ghost images were beginning to fade, and if she read the flickering marks correctly Kairos was a kilometer behind, swarmed by half a dozen TIEs. She wanted to urge the woman: Be careful. But Kairos couldn’t afford distractions, either.

  Wisps of light rose from the unseen city, soaking through layers of clouds to create the illusion of luminescent foam. Wind roared louder than her engines and Quell applied her repulsors to reduce her entry speed, uncertain how soon she’d need to pull up to avoid colliding with Coruscant’s towers.

  She saw no sign of planetary defenses or TIE patrols. Her sensors picked up nearby satellites, but if they were armed they didn’t fire on her. Unless Coruscant’s fortifications were in worse condition than she’d expected, it was entirely possible Soran Keize had cleared her path—she imagined she was still following his course toward the Imperial Palace.

  What would she find when she caught up? A cluster of enemies tearing Keize to pieces, completing her mission for her?

  Her comm gibbered static. Now and then she thought she could make out a word, though it could’ve been her imagination.

  “Quell to Deliverance,” she said. “Keize is not on scanners. Proceeding through cloud cover and beginning search.”

  She wondered if she should have said something more intimate; more encouraging. Then the fog lifted from her cockpit as if someone had ripped away a tarp and she saw the city stretched before her. Towers like mesas rose from an abyss cluttered with skywalks and trams; needlelike luxury buildings stood atop domes; metal platforms extended from central hubs, broad enough to carry whole city blocks but somehow suspended over the city’s lower levels.

  No, she corrected herself—not the lower levels. She was seeing the
surface of the city, but below were thousands of occupied layers. The structures went on endlessly, largely dark except for a frosting of illumination, and here and there a black chasm gouged the city and hinted at chthonic depths.

  It was wondrous. She’d seen holos of it before, but she’d never understood Coruscant’s beauty or its weight. She realized instinctively why the New Republic had left it to the Empire all these months; a single stray bomb or turbolaser blast might kill millions.

  Would Keize kill so many? She wanted to deny it, yet it would be a rounding error in the tally they’d murdered together.

  She skimmed above the towers and saw few signs of inhabitation. The city was locked down as Troithe had been, its trillions of residents hidden and its skyways free of cloud cars and speeders. She adjusted her comm, scanning frequencies for any sign of her quarry or an emergency broadcast. She picked up nothing on the public channels except for a weather report and an offer of rewards for information on rebel cells. The encrypted frequencies would have news from the blockade, she was sure, but she had no way to access them.

  She checked her console and reconfirmed the coordinates of the Emperor’s data bank. Even slowed by atmospheric flight she wasn’t more than a few minutes away. She altered course and adjusted her comm yet again, tapping in the 204th’s transmission codes.

  “This is Yrica Quell to Colonel Keize,” she said. Her voice was steadier than she’d expected. “Do you read me?”

  There was no answer. She repeated the message, then: “I’m on my way.”

  The cityscape transformed as towers blurred beneath her fighter. Bright domes and arches flattened, becoming stark metallic cubes; the organic growth of skyscrapers turned from a jungle to a well-pruned garden. Coruscant had been remade by Emperor Palpatine, and she was entering the heart of Imperial power. She dropped one hundred, two hundred meters, bringing herself below the tops of the taller structures—she couldn’t believe the Imperial Palace lacked aerial defenses, and the buildings would help hide her from scanners.

  She glanced above her, searching the clouds for flashes of cannon fire. She saw nothing.

  Kairos doesn’t matter, she reminded herself. Chadic and Lark and Tensent don’t matter. None of it affects you and Keize.

  “Foree?” she said. “Make sure I hear if any messages come in from the Deliverance.”

  The droid chimed in acknowledgment. She kept her comm tuned to Shadow Wing’s frequency and flew on.

  She was, according to the maps she’d reviewed in hyperspace, in the Federal District—a rough circle with the Imperial Palace at its center. The Verity District, where the bulk of the data bank was housed, was on the opposite side of the palace from her present position, radiating into commercial and residential areas of the city. She curved away from the Palace proper, down a broad skyway serving government spaceports, then dipped lower into a narrow gap with support struts above and energy conduits below.

  There was little room to maneuver, but Troithe had trained her for that and she was confident there were gun emplacements ready to blast her if she stayed in the open. With strike foils closed her X-wing slid easily through narrow spaces. Twice, she had to spin so that she was perpendicular to the planet’s surface; she grunted in displeasure each time, remembering why she preferred spaceflight over atmospheric exercises. She skipped over a pedestrian bridge and under a docking ring, and soared skyward when the gap ended abruptly at the façade of an embassy.

  As she ascended, her scanner blinked and three TIE strikers swept out from surrounding skyways. She wasn’t sure if they’d been stalking her or whether they’d only now arrived; it hardly mattered, and she cut power to drop rapidly as streams of emerald fire crossed above.

  She heard the TIEs’ ion engines scream as she slapped at her console, trying to spread her foils while she determined where to head for cover. She accelerated again, hoping to build enough distance to give herself options.

  Then a fourth engine joined the chorus and she saw a flash overhead, felt the shock wave as one of the strikers died. She rode the blast of burning air as her strike foils locked; she was nearly incinerated by three more volleys—precise, clipped barrages that destroyed a second striker attempting to drop toward her position.

  She recognized the newcomer’s maneuvering and firing style without needing to see his craft. She understood that he wasn’t rescuing her, no matter if he’d saved her life; he’d known she was coming and used her as bait to draw out his enemies, then eliminated two in a matter of seconds.

  She had found her mentor—and with him, a reminder that Soran Keize, ace of aces, had always been a better pilot than Yrica Quell.

  “Lieutenant,” he said. “It’s a privilege to see you, as always.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THE ENDLESS NIGHT

  I

  “How are you here?” Wyl asked. It was all he could think of as his vision cleared and his eyes refocused on the woman who’d called herself Palal Seedia. The woman who’d called herself Blink.

  “Same as you,” Palal said. She twirled an arc wrench in her right hand, then transferred it to her left as she shifted her footing with the grace of a duelist. Half a meter behind her lay her tool bag, still teetering at the edge of the deck plating and creeping toward the maintenance pit every time the Deliverance shook. “My father spent several intimate minutes with my mother, and drowned neither me nor my sister when we were born.”

  “How are you here?” Wyl repeated. “What happened to you? What—”

  He tried to remember what he knew—actually knew, not what he’d fantasized—about Blink. She had spoken to him in the Oridol Cluster when he’d first reached out to Shadow Wing—spoken to him and seemed receptive to his outreach until she’d threatened him with death.

  After that, after Pandem Nai, he’d spent weeks writing and recording messages to Blink. He’d never sent those messages, and hadn’t heard from the pilot until Blink had warned him about the Cerberon attack.

  “They caught you, didn’t they?” he said. “Shadow Wing caught you warning us over Troithe, and you escaped and found your way to us.”

  All the pieces fit but one: If she’d really betrayed her unit, what was she doing now? Wyl clung to the thought until he saw her face twist into a vision of bewilderment and scorn.

  “You idiot. Simpleton! I sent the message at Cerberon to distract you. To divert your attention from—” She shook her head. “I’m not revisiting this now.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  She looked torn between frustration and self-righteous fury. She straightened her back, shifting from a combat stance to something prouder. “I hunted Chass na Chadic on Catadra. I infiltrated your ship when the Deliverance came recruiting. I sent messages to the 204th warning them of your actions.” She sounded smug—or made an effort at sounding smug—as she added: “Whatever my failures, I take credit for every death the sabotage droids caused. Does that explain things, Wyl Lark?”

  There had been only two deaths, Wyl recalled. One of the engineers and the captain of the Deliverance.

  “You didn’t have to do it,” he said. He’d meant to sound placating, but it came out a whispered plea. “You could’ve just…joined us, and no one would’ve known.”

  Somehow her rage grew. “I have a duty to fulfill. I have—of course you don’t understand. You abandoned your colleagues because you found violence distasteful, and that selfish instinct is going to get them killed. All of them. You’re going to lose.”

  She swung her left arm and let go of the arc wrench, sending it whirling through the air with enough force to crack open his skull. He barely flinched in time, and it bounced off his shoulder and rang off the deck behind him. The pain sent an electric buzz all the way to his fingers.

  She was diving for the tool bag. Wyl glimpsed vibro-cutters and plasma to
rches, and among them something wrapped in wires and switches. He wasn’t sure what she wanted but he tackled her anyway; they hit the deck together and rolled as one, each trying to get leverage over the other.

  Palal tried to slam him against the bulkhead with a palm above his nose. When he resisted, her fingers slid to his eyes. He cried out as she skimmed his corneas with blunt nails but caught her wrist, forced it back a centimeter, and tried to think of what to do next. In all his life, Wyl had fought hand-to-hand—really fought—only once before.

  Shaking, he brought his free hand to the woman’s throat and closed it over warm skin and her vocabulator’s cold metal. It felt like the start of a murder.

  Then Palal’s free hand boxed his ear and he rolled away. She was up and kicking a second later, driving a metal-toed boot into his ribs and then, as he tried to bring his knees to his chest, slamming her foot down on his head. The pain was excruciating, radiating into his brain and nose and the back of his skull; he feared he would black out, and he distantly heard his foe’s electronically modulated voice say: “They had names! Not ‘Puke’ and ‘Snapper’! Hirodin Nasli. Garl Lykan. Say the names of the people you killed!”

  The deck bucked beneath them and the Deliverance thundered. The whine of the reactors diverting energy to the shields drowned out Palal’s speech; she stumbled back and Wyl pulled himself upright, leaned against the bulkhead for support. He raised his hands, trying to protect himself from the flurry of punches that followed—he could see the woman mouthing name after name, and he wondered how he could’ve ever killed so many people.

  She was a madwoman. She was his enemy. She was scared and mourning her friends.

  She was Blink.