Wyl knew only slightly more about hyperspace navigation than he did about sailing, but he trusted Kreskian’s judgment. The captain had survived years of civil war, and there were few of the oldest rebel veterans left.
After Sonogari’s funeral, the off-duty pilots retreated to the morgue. The Dare had been a medical ship before being repurposed as a carrier; now the morgue served as clubhouse and pilots’ ready room. Long metal benches sat next to tactical boards. Cold chambers served as equipment lockers. Sata Neek croaked out a story that had begun as an ode to Sonogari’s keen literary tastes, slowly transformed into a series of jokes about flatulence, and now recounted Riot’s transfer to the rebel base on Kalarba.
“…six hours, we spent looking for our own hidden base. So impressed we were, at first! Then concerned—had something happened? Had our comrades been forced to abandon Kalarba before we’d even arrived? Were we to be ambushed by Imperial forces lurking, lurking, lurking?”
“Just tell the story, frog-beak,” one of the Hound Squadron pilots said. Wyl remembered her name: Fadime, the Nikto with reptilian skin and facial fins.
“Six hours!” Sata Neek flexed his claws dramatically. “At last, Creel—dear Creel, our first commander—began attempting to decrypt the orders he had received using different codes, different protocols, looking for some concealed set of instructions…only to realize that the message had never been encoded in the first place. He had simply assumed his computer had done the decryption for him!
“So where did our redeployment orders come from, you ask? Somehow our dear Creel had downloaded the contents of a flight simulator mission and mistaken them for reality.”
Sata Neek’s audience burst into good-natured laughter and mocking applause. Wyl looked from the grinning Hound pilots to his own comrades. Kamala winked at him, and he could almost hear her declare: None of that ever happened.
“Before my time?” Wyl asked Sata Neek.
“Most assuredly,” Sata Neek answered.
Quaysail was the next to tell a story. The four-eyed Ualaq spoke in a lilting accent Wyl found difficult to understand, but he listened politely as she described the formation of Hound from the surviving ranks of two squadrons decimated during the dark months after the Battle of Hoth. Twice, Wyl nearly hurried her on; he saw the strained expressions of his companions, recognized their irritation at Quaysail’s endless tale of internal Rebel Alliance politicking. Instead he took to coaxing and prompting Quaysail gently, drawing out the highlights of her story and moving it toward its conclusion.
When she was done, she stood and bowed. “We should all get some sleep,” she said. “There may yet come another attack. If not, we will be called to escort duty soon enough.”
The others smiled and nodded, and when Quaysail had shuffled out Kamala said: “The Force is with you, Wyl Lark.” Then Sata Neek insisted that they not sleep yet, and they fell back into conversation—eight of them, too wound up by the events of the day to leave and none, Wyl thought, ready to lose the sense of camaraderie that arose from tragedy.
It was Rawn, youngest of the Hound Squadron pilots—younger than Wyl, with lips tattooed blue and dots painted on the cartilage of his ears—who suggested they play Who? What? Where? Wyl objected in the friendliest terms and was promptly outvoted.
“Who?” Sata Neek croaked. “My six nephews on distant Tibrin, each more cunning and charismatic than the last. Inform them before anyone. What? Overexertion during the course of a vigorous-yet-tender romance with a woman—”
“Specifics!” Fadime shouted, and Sata Neek waved her off.
“—who is an Imperial admiral, and is drawn to me by my incomparable skill in the art of flattery. Where? Let us say…Coruscant, after I have reclaimed our galactic capital for the New Republic.”
“Hold on,” Rawn said. “Are we playing what we want to kill us? Or what we think will?”
“Our most accurate predictions,” Sata Neek said, and even Wyl couldn’t hold back his laughter.
They went around the circle. Fadime’s answers were darkly plausible: “Who? The rest of my squadron. You get the news first. What? I blame Rawn—he catches me in the crossfire with my shields down. Where? The Oridol Cluster, if things don’t improve.”
Rep Boy, who had stretched out on his bench to half sleep through the game, gave his answers in a dreamy voice: “Who? My son—don’t have him yet, but I’ll get one someday and I’ll want him to know. What? Heatstroke. I’m an old man when I die, and my body can’t take much. Where? The beaches of Alakatha, long after we’ve all forgotten this war.”
Kamala pressed her fingertips to her forehead as if summoning a vision of the future. “Who? Wyl, you remember that Twi’lek on Skorrupon?” Wyl did, and he nodded. The others looked perplexed. “Him, or Skywalker. What? You’ve all seen my fighter break down before, so let’s assume I slam into a Star Destroyer or something by accident. Where? Somewhere there’s still a Star Destroyer, I guess.”
Wyl was next. He didn’t like the game but he wasn’t about to spoil the evening. “Who? Len Okero. She’s one of the elders back home; she’ll tell anyone else who needs to know. What…” Where who had been easy, what was more distressing, and he sought an answer that was both humane and honest. “Falling,” he decided. “Falling while in flight, from somewhere very high.”
The answer elicited a few gentle smiles, but no laughter.
“You didn’t say where.” The correction came from Chass, the lime-haired Theelin who had called Wyl a coward on Jiruus and interrupted Nasi’s funeral.
Wyl just smirked. “I said where. Very high.”
Chass snorted. Sata Neek cackled. They moved on around the circle.
Heater was the newest of Riot’s pilots, a distant cousin of Kamala’s who hadn’t often joined the squadron for nights like this one. Wyl nodded encouragement his way. Kamala smacked his shoulder. “Who? Colonel Barson Nestroph, Imperial Army. Let Papa know I made something of myself. What? Bounty hunter, months after the Empire surrenders—I’m a hero and a target. Where? The University of Cadomai, where I’ve gone to teach fine art.”
Only Chass and Skitcher hadn’t gone. Kamala whispered something to Heater, and her cousin broke into a rare grin.
“My turn,” Chass said. She leaned forward, both her hands on her knees. “Who? Chancellor Mon Mothma. What? Reactor core explosion. Where? Death Star Three. Put the pieces together—they’re going to remember me after the rest of you are long gone.”
Sata Neek hooted the loudest. Skitcher shook his head. “I think she wins,” he said, and the group settled into conversation and laughter once again.
But Wyl couldn’t help but hear Chass’s words echo in his brain. There was an intensity to them, an insistence and certainty that troubled him—as if she had just proclaimed his doom, or her own.
* * *
—
Wyl stayed for another hour before making his way to the berthing compartments. Asleep in his bunk, he dreamed of flying—not his A-wing, but one of the great beasts of his homeworld. He could smell his mount’s down feathers like hot dust in his nostrils; feel its leathery skin under his hands, the tension in its muscles between his legs. He leaned forward until his chin touched tufts of plumage and he felt the creature dive, felt the wind blast his hair and leave him deaf. Only his grip kept him from separating from the beast and floating among the clouds.
In the dream, he whispered the beast’s name. It was not a name he knew.
How long had it been since he’d ridden a sur-avka? A starfighter seemed clumsy compared with the magnificent creatures of Polyneus. (No, not Polyneus—Home. Only outsiders called it Polyneus.)
He dreamed of befouled air and flying through clouds that left his skin red and peeling, his lungs burning. He dreamed of looking toward the sky and seeing dark, rigid forms—great metallic scaffolds pumping f
ire and smoke into the gray expanse. He dreamed of walking down the ancient streets of his cliff-carved city and seeing a hundred of his kinfolk hidden in shadows cast by the Empire’s creations. He dreamed a mixture of truth and nightmare.
He dreamed of the proclamation: the word that spread among the communities of Home, an edict issued by the Sun-Lamas but never written down so that the Empire would never know. Let every village send a warrior, for the battle against the Empire has become our battle; and no people in the galaxy fly as the people of Home fly. He heard the whispers of youths from River and Branch seeking passage offworld. He did not wish to leave Home, but he knew his role.
He did not dream of meeting with the elders who, in reality, had blessed his mission. Instead he walked the city streets and found his siblings gone—not the few with whom he shared blood, but the many he called family. He searched cracks in crumbling stone and screamed for them but he could not remember their names.
All he could remember was Sonogari, Nasi, Aries, Nex. The names of Riot Squadron. The names of the dead.
* * *
—
The third battle began in the middle of the night. By the time Wyl was awake and in flight the skirmish was nearly over—he only had time to squeeze his trigger once, sending red lightning roiling through the dust clouds of Oridol before the Hellion’s Dare and its escorts fled to hyperspace.
This time, it was Rep Boy who was left behind. No one doubted that the enemy was deliberately picking off starfighters as they attempted to jump away, but neither did the Dare’s defenders have a strategy to counter the tactic.
The fourth battle, by contrast, was an extended, chaotic melee. The Dare had arrived in a system so thick with cosmic dust that visibility was almost nil. Clusters of dark particles resembling eyes peered out from the clouds, observing the Oridol Cluster’s visitors. Wyl was on patrol near the frigate when a very human cry of alarm came across his comm and the fight began. TIE fighters burst from the fog like ghosts to strafe the Dare and eliminate targets of opportunity. Only the flashes of cannon fire gave away a ship’s position in the soup; hiding was as simple as altering course.
No member of Riot Squadron died in the fourth battle. Among Hound Squadron, Quaysail, Togue, and Ansil were lost.
In the aftermath, Heater begged Rununja and the captain to tell them why the Empire was chasing the Dare. Had a scout found a third Death Star, like Fadime had joked? Was it a muster point for the lost Imperial fleet? They all wanted to feel the mission was worthwhile, yet if the captain knew anything he didn’t say.
By the fifth battle, Wyl and the others had begun to recognize and name their foes. Tails was a TIE fighter whose ion trail lingered and glittered, likely due to a malfunctioning heat exchange; the pilot was given to sharp turns and wild firing patterns. Char was a TIE so black with carbon scoring that it resembled something haunted; Char flew without a wingmate, venturing solo into the fray, and it was the pilot’s apparent vulnerability that had lured Rep Boy to his death. Blink had only a single functioning laser cannon thanks to a glancing hit from Wyl; the pilot spun and danced like a fluttering moth.
But naming the enemy didn’t make victory come easier, and Riot Squadron lost Kamala in the fifth battle. At the funeral, the Dare’s chief engineer swore to discover how the enemy was pursuing them—the crew had found no tracker aboard, no record of secret communications. None of the pilots appeared to take comfort in his reassurances, and some began murmuring about an intelligence in the Oridol Cluster and the notion that they were intruders in the realm of something troubling and alien. Maybe, Skitcher said, the cluster itself was pitting Empire and New Republic against each other.
The sixth battle began in a sea of churning blue-green gases, where fractal jewels floated like snowflakes and shattered brilliantly upon impact with a starfighter’s hull. Wyl could have watched the manifestations for hours; instead, when the cruiser-carrier and its cargo of TIEs leapt into the system, Wyl followed the Hellion’s Dare as it skipped across the atmosphere of a frozen planet.
Captain Kreskian had decided that speed might save them this time. Aboard the bridge of the Hellion’s Dare, three droids furiously calculated the approach vector for the Dare to take maximum advantage of the nameless planet’s gravity well—to slingshot the frigate around the orb and outdistance the Dare’s pursuers. The fact that the Dare could potentially outdistance its escort fighters, too, was the plan’s greatest drawback; Hound and Riot would need to pour every erg of power into their engines to keep up, and any pilot who lagged behind risked being swallowed by the swarm of TIEs.
Wyl felt the pressure of acceleration as he chased after the frigate. He sweated, spine pressed into his seat and vision glimmering with spots unrelated to Oridol’s dust. His ship’s shields were disabled to conserve energy, leaving him as vulnerable as the shieldless TIE fighters pursuing him. Riot Leader called out course adjustments on the comm and Wyl strained to obey.
He felt something jolt under his seat and he whispered soothingly to the console, “Close your eyes. Close your eyes and I’ll guide you.”
A crack tore through the cockpit and the canopy trembled. A jagged scar marred the transparent metal. He’d struck one of the fractal formations dead-on.
“I’ll guide you,” he promised.
Emerald particle bolts illuminated the gas clouds. He saw the TIEs on his scanner. Five fighters closed the distance as the New Republic vessels raced away. He couldn’t guess how these five TIEs had caught up—maybe they, too, had calculated a mathematically perfect trajectory—but it hardly mattered. They would enter optimal firing range in twenty seconds.
Wyl jabbed his comm with an index finger. “Riot Three here. Five marks on approach. What’s our time to jump?”
Riot Leader’s voice came through, steady as ever. “Dare is replotting an emergency short-distance hyperroute. Won’t get us far, but ready in under two minutes.”
Nowhere close to soon enough. Wyl saw the gleam of the Dare ahead; the dozen allied fighters spread around him like flashes of rain. His was the vessel closest to the TIEs. He would be the first target.
“Copy, Riot Leader,” he said. “Preparing to engage.”
More chatter followed. Riot Five—Sata Neek—agreed to fall back beside Wyl. When the TIEs came into range they would abruptly split apart, decelerate, and allow the TIEs’ momentum to sweep them into the gap where Wyl and Sata Neek had been. From there, the A-wings could close, flank, and catch the enemy in a crossfire.
It was a fine plan, unlikely to bear any resemblance to reality. Still, Wyl thought, better to aspire than to have no plan at all.
The TIEs entered visual range. Wyl called a signal to Sata Neek and they simultaneously cut power to their thrusters and slammed their rudder pedals, veering in opposite directions. Wyl watched his scanner as his body seemed to float. The dots of the TIEs remained exactly where they had been.
That was wrong.
That meant the TIEs hadn’t moved relative to Wyl’s position. They hadn’t rushed forward, hadn’t split up to chase the two A-wings. They’d decelerated right along with Wyl and Sata Neek and pursued Wyl as a unit—
Energized particles flared past his canopy. He swung away but the TIEs were surrounding him, caging him. He tried to jerk free, to shake his pursuers, but the moment he adjusted his course streams of cannon fire forced him back to his original bearing. He decelerated again and swore as the flight of TIEs matched his speed, save for one—a single TIE that took position ahead of him, just out of firing range.
“This is Riot Three. I’m surrounded—” Wyl felt his heart rate increase, tried to even out his breathing. More streams of emerald ripped through the fog above, below, to either side, rendering his path narrower and narrower. “—and can’t maneuver.”
But he wasn’t dead.
He should have been dead. The enemy h
ad locked onto him. He had nowhere to go. They just weren’t firing.
A volley of particle bolts tore through his port side. His fighter jerked and his instruments turned red as he tried to stabilize the vessel. He’d lost power to one cannon and his canopy was rattling worryingly—the scar was growing longer, creeping downward.
“Okay,” he murmured. “They’re firing. But they’re not trying to kill you yet.”
The comm crackled. “Counting down to lightspeed jump,” Riot Leader announced. “Dare transmitting coordinates in ten, jump in fifteen.”
“Riot Five to Riot Three,” Sata Neek called. “Can you get free?”
Wyl’s hands were trembling but his voice was calm. “Negative. Can’t even jump.” The TIE in front of him would make sure of that. “Can you cut through the net?”
Sata Neek’s clacking sounded like static. “I will try.”
Wyl wasn’t afraid of death. He didn’t welcome it, but he was at peace with his choices. What scared him was dying, and that had rarely been a factor during his time at war—for a pilot, death came quickly, delivered by the enemy you failed to spot.
“We have to get out,” he whispered to his ship. “I promise to protect you.”
“Riot Leader to all fighters—coordinates transmitting. Ready to jump!”
Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars) Page 8
