Someone from the 204th would teach him the name soon enough.
The shuttle pitched upward into the churning ocher clouds. It would be some time—Shakara hoped, at least—before she saw the sky from this angle again. She’d spent the last three days hopping from surface settlement to surface settlement, meeting with the planet’s civilian leadership and inspecting the Empire’s scant few ground-level installations. All told, she was satisfied with the results. The general populace showed no signs of rising up, and they lacked the weaponry to revolt at scale; the Imperial infantry forces were pledged to her command; and the discussions of gas processing quotas and transport safety protocols had gone well—if she could increase the orbital mines’ Tibanna extraction rate, the surface processing facilities could adjust accordingly.
She should have felt victorious. Instead she couldn’t help but think of how wrong it all had gone to bring her to this point. To transform her into an industrial administrator.
“Colonel?” The pilot’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Incoming message from Orbital One. Squadron Four has returned. They report no losses.”
She gestured dismissively. “It can wait till I arrive.”
Wisps of gas meters long and thin as thread unraveled about the cockpit as they ascended, and the clouds’ coloration changed from ocher to tawny orange and finally to scarlet. With the change in tincture came thicker strands of the densest gas, lengthening from meters to kilometers. Under better circumstances, Shakara might have been moved by the beauty of the blood-lit sea; but not today.
She was lucky to have found Pandem Nai at all. After Operation Cinder, the 204th had been left without orders. Their Star Destroyer, the Pursuer, had sought out targets of opportunity while Shakara had desperately attempted to locate and contact a centralized authority within the vulnerable Empire. But she had been able to reach no one—no admiral competent enough to understand what the 204th could offer—and so she’d waited too long. The Pursuer had accrued too much damage, and she’d advised the Destroyer’s captain to fall back, make repairs, and regroup.
They’d chosen Pandem Nai half expecting to find it overrun by local revolutionaries. Somehow, however, the governor had maintained control of a world rich in resources and uniquely positioned to defend itself. True, there had been desertions, but the orbital gas mining facilities had been largely automated anyway and processed Tibanna gas was vital for the proper functioning of heavy weaponry. An Empire without Tibanna mines—or without suitable substitutes—would be unable to wage war for more than a few months.
The shuttle emerged from the scarlet clouds. A cloak of darkness fell across the viewport, and the stars came into sight. The ship swept across the surface of the atmosphere, sending ripples like foam in its wake.
“Descending now, Colonel.” The pilot hesitated, then asked, “Would you, ah, like to do it yourself?”
Is he truly incompetent? Shakara looked toward the man, bewildered, then realized he was attempting generosity. “No need,” she said. “I’m content to enjoy the view.”
They plunged back into the red and wove among the massive mining stations laden with gas pods; past gleaming colonies, their durasteel spirals buoyed by enormous antigravity repulsors and lit by a thousand habitation lights. (So much more civilized, Shakara thought, than the rude ground-level settlements.) They flew alongside tankers and cargo haulers and slipped into the current.
There were other worlds rich in Tibanna gas. But it was Pandem Nai’s atmosphere that made it exceptionally useful to the 204th. The thick cloud cover was not only minable but explosive; there, any weapon larger than a cannon was prone to backfiring. A battleship bristling with turbolaser batteries was more apt to damage itself than its foes, and when the Separatists—or the Rebel Alliance, or the New Republic, or whatever the galaxy’s anarchists called themselves nowadays—finally came, starfighter superiority would determine the victor.
The local governor and the Pursuer’s former captain had put up only cursory resistance when Shakara had assumed control and begun fortifying the planet. She’d scraped together three cruiser-carriers to transport select TIE squadrons wherever they were needed, and neutralized half a dozen attempts at enemy reconnaissance. She’d begun outreach to other Imperial survivors, using Colonel Madrighast as her first go-between to offer Pandem Nai’s resources to whatever convoy could reach her. She’d inquired about enemy weapons powerful enough to ignite the atmosphere from orbit—Shakara put no faith in the foe’s claims to value civilian life—and been assured the risk was minimal unless the enemy built their own Death Star.
She was ready for a siege. Ready to face the next stage of the war. She’d adapted herself and her people to the course of events, no matter the inconvenience.
Orbital One came into sight through the viewport. It was not a battle station, but embedded within the ring of the outer mining facility was a militarized stronghold established by Imperial forces long ago. Two main hangars sufficed to house Shakara’s TIE squadrons, along with a small fleet of shuttles and maintenance drones. Within a few short minutes the cargo shuttle had swept under the hangars and to the smaller executive docking bay, where Shakara disembarked onto a perfectly polished floor marred only by thruster scars and the boot scuffs of the officers awaiting her.
She left Ensign Casas to tend to the shuttle and strode toward the central access corridor. Three officers trailed her, each rapidly dispensing a series of updates she forced herself to care about: complaints about the orbital gas mining operations (the civilian workforce was stretched thin after doubling output, and tighter security was reducing productivity); shortages of equipment requested by the tankers; updates on the personnel reauthorization initiative she’d requested to weed out infiltrators. Mixed in were reports more relevant to her military experience: Squadron Four’s summary of its mission to Vnex; fresh charts from the minelayer operating outside Pandem Nai’s orbit; Squadron Five’s repair and readiness update. But even these came with a reminder of the war’s toll and the roles she and others had been forced to assume. Mere weeks ago it would have been Major Soran Keize who saw to the squadrons’ readiness and morale. And it would have been Keize who met her in private afterward and allowed her to speak grimly, frankly, about how dire their circumstances were.
She missed that man. She was a good commander, where Soran had been a great leader. And she had trusted him.
She would endure.
She allowed the reports to continue, relying on her subordinates’ ability to prioritize, until she reached the turbolift to her living quarters and cut the conversations off there. One last question reached her before the door slid shut: “People are asking, Colonel—any word yet from above?”
This from Lieutenant Preartes, who had been aboard the Aerie when it had pursued an enemy frigate through the Oridol Cluster. He’d taken the escape of two of the frigate’s starfighters personally and was eager to redeem himself. So far as Shakara was concerned, the Aerie had done well under trying circumstances; she was content for Preartes to punish himself.
“I’m going to speak to my source presently,” Shakara said. “You will know when I have an update.”
Her source was waiting for her in her cabin when she emerged from the lift.
It stood silent by the door, floating noiselessly and cloaked in red leather and delicate fabric. It possessed the shape of a human but there was nothing human about it—it was a mockery of life, and the faceless black glass that stared in place of a face was without soul or spark. It was a wraith: the echo of a man who had died not long ago and haunted what remained of the Empire.
“Well?” Shakara asked, turning to stare into the faceless mask. “Do you have new orders?”
It said nothing. She’d have started if it had.
But she’d seen it speak once. A short while after Endor, when the chaos ran rampant instead of simmeri
ng and the Pursuer had fled purposelessly through space while the Separatist Rebel Republic took world after world. The wraith, the Messenger, had found her (not the Pursuer’s captain, but her) and demanded her blood to prove her identity.
She’d given it what it wanted. She still had the scar. Then its faceplate had shimmered with the static of a hologram and Emperor Palpatine had looked upon her for the first and last time.
Operation Cinder is to begin at once, it had told her in the Emperor’s voice, and she’d obeyed.
She had found the operation distasteful, but she hadn’t questioned it the way a handful of her pilots had. The Emperor had given the 204th purpose from beyond the grave—honored the fighter wing, along with other units across the galaxy—and set them on their course. Nacronis had not deserved destruction, but she trusted the Emperor’s Messenger that such destruction was necessary.
Decades ago, during the Clone Wars, it had been the Republic losing its fight against Separatist aggressors and Supreme Chancellor Palpatine who had ordered distasteful but necessary deeds. He had identified the corruption at the Republic’s heart—the religious zealots who called themselves peacekeepers—and expunged them. He had transformed the Republic into an Empire and maintained order for over twenty years.
She would fight on as long as she could. She would ready Pandem Nai for battle and offer aid to the scattered Imperial armadas. She would take the role of bureaucrat and charismatic leader and mass murderer if that was what victory demanded.
If that was what she had to do to survive long enough for the Emperor’s next orders to come.
“No one else understands as he did,” she said to the Messenger. No admiral had managed to unite the divided fleet with a plan to save the galaxy. No successor had emerged to take the Emperor’s throne. “We will need more guidance, sooner or later.”
It said nothing.
She wondered how much farther the Empire would fall before it began to win again.
CHAPTER 9
DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR
I
The planet-killer filled the viewport: a world’s worth of ashen metal and mad weapons that dissolved in streaks around the edges like a smudged painting of a battle station. Even unfinished, it was an obscenity—an utterance screamed by a murderous Emperor at a galaxy that dared defy him, and a rebuke of the rebel blood shed to destroy the first Death Star. Chass stared at the abomination and felt rage mingle with disgust.
“The objective is inside the superstructure. The shield is down. Kairos will deliver the payload.” Quell’s voice came through the comm, crisp and passionless. Chass was starting to get used to that tone from her new commanding officer—not Hound Leader’s masked fear or Rununja’s cult-leader egotism, but a machinelike determination to see the mission through.
“Shield’s not supposed to be down,” Chass said. “Ask Wyl.”
“It’s down now,” Quell replied. “Go!”
Chass’s B-wing rattled as she opened the throttle, though it rattled wrong—her seat heaved instead of trembling, and there was no ringing-glass trill from the panel behind her head. If she’d had her music, she could have ignored the flaws, but the simulator didn’t permit music. (Quell probably didn’t permit music, either, but Quell didn’t have to know.)
“She’s right,” Wyl said. His voice was distant, lost in a memory he didn’t deserve. “It wasn’t like this.”
“Count ourselves lucky, then,” Nath returned. Chass had recognized the sort of man Nath was the first time he’d grinned at her; she hadn’t had a reason to reconsider yet.
They flew in a wide formation into the heart of the conflict. Emerald and crimson particle bolts streamed across Chass’s field of vision, punctuated by the flickers of distant explosions as rebels died and died again (or would have, if those deaths hadn’t been cheap imitations of something meaningful). The planet-killer’s superlaser erupted and the whole universe turned a pustulent green. Chass flew to the beat of her pulse, letting the rhythm tell her when to veer and when to rotate the gyroscopic body of her craft. TIE fighters flew in masses toward her and she fired restlessly into the swarm. These TIEs died more easily than the ones that had chased the Hellion’s Dare, and she found only a dull satisfaction as they burst into component molecules.
“Tensent, where are you?” Quell called.
Chass didn’t see Nath on the scanner. Wyl was weaving around her, his faster A-wing circling like a hound protecting its master. She tried to pull away. Kairos lagged behind, exposed to an attack from the rear, but—well. Quell could deal with that. What was the point of the exercise if it wasn’t challenging?
“Tensent!” Quell yelled again.
“Trust me!” Nath said.
Chass could see the surface of the battle station now. The details weren’t perfect—identical chunks of weapons towers and sensors and deflectors repeated over and over—but as fire raged around her she tried to imagine how it had really been, for pilots like (don’t think about Wyl) Sata Neek. She tried to place herself in the battle, fighting the same abomination that had risen once before; fighting the monster that heroes at Scarif had sacrificed everything to defeat.
She couldn’t do it. The battle was a lie. The particle bolts flickered in and out, transparently false. TIE fighters ceased to exist. Her ship whined in ways a real B-wing never would. She screamed in frustration as Wyl made confused sounds and Quell shouted pointless orders.
Her ship was enveloped in fire. She’d been hit but she didn’t care. The viewport went white, then black, and Chass was sitting in the sphere of a simulator pod.
“The hell was that?” she asked.
“Call it a win,” Nath said over the link. “The Death Star’s gone and only one of us died.”
* * *
—
Nath had broken the simulation. Whether he’d cheated was open to debate. The program wasn’t meant for anything as complex as the Battle of Endor, and Nath had increased the complexity by straying from the planned flight path. “More than one way into the reactor,” he’d explained afterward, “so why go the route the enemy’s prepared for?”
The computer, desperately trying to calculate the positions of hundreds of TIE fighters and thousands of particle bolts in proximity to all five living participants, had reduced the TIEs’ already dim artificial intelligence, stuttered as it tried to maintain fidelity, and finally crashed outright.
But if breaking the program was Nath’s fault, it was Wyl’s fault they were stuck with simulators in the first place. Wyl was the one who’d gotten his ship busted at the minefield. His idiocy had persuaded General Syndulla that the squadron couldn’t be trusted in the field; and Quell had gone along with it.
We wouldn’t be here if not for Wyl, Chass thought. It was true in so many ways.
They stood together under the black spheres of the simulator pods in the Lodestar’s repurposed clone trooper barracks. Quell’s face twisted with Imperial arrogance as she barked, “Are you clever? Yes, you’ve all proved it. But the point was to show we could complete this the right way.”
Nath stood at ease, observing Quell with what might have been a sympathetic smile. “In that case, Battle of Endor might’ve been ambitious. The right way needs a different squadron makeup, and we can all tell those TIEs aren’t real. Chass shot them down like decoys, and Wyl was playing to the pre-programmed blast patterns—”
“I wasn’t,” Wyl said, surprised.
“Sure you were,” Nath said. “Maybe it was instinct, but you saw what was random and what was repeating. You could’ve kept that up for an hour.”
Quell scowled at Nath, staring up at the taller man. “I take your point, but I still can’t take these results to General Syndulla—and I don’t need your suggestions. Not now.”
Chass snickered. Quell didn’t look at her.
“We’re done,” Quell said. “I’ve booked another run in the simulator tomorrow. Expect an operational summary tonight; preflight briefing starts at oh nine hundred.”
“Ma’am, why—” Wyl’s back was straight and his eyes were on Quell. Chass saw him struggle with how to treat his commander; he wasn’t used to so much formality, but he was mirroring her demeanor as best he could. Calming her, intentionally or just by instinct. “We’ve been working hard on the 204th tactical analysis. Why aren’t we simulating them?”
It wasn’t a bad question. How many hours had Chass spent locked up with Wyl and Quell and Nath talking about the Shadow Wing capital-ship-spiral-of-doom and Char’s habit of flying solo? She could replay Nath’s fight at Trenchenovu in her dreams.
“I’ve been working on a program,” Quell said. “It’s not good enough yet.”
“We have to learn to fight them,” Wyl said.
Quell was a statue. A wind could have eroded her features. Then: “I’ll send you the profiles I’m working up. Personnel files on everyone I can remember. They’re not finished—some are just names, some don’t have anything on flying technique. I don’t know who Blink is. But it’s something to study.”
Quell left without another word. Kairos followed a moment later. Chass hadn’t spoken much to the strange woman in the cloak and visor, and Kairos hadn’t given her more than a glance. Chass was leaving, too, when Nath reached her side and said, “You doing anything?” He wore the cocky grin of a boy half his age, and almost pulled it off.
“I’m getting out of here,” Chass said.
“So grab a shower,” Nath said, “or not, and then let’s drink until we get our new reading material. Found the place to be after hours, and no one will say we didn’t earn it.”
“Quell wouldn’t say we earned it.”
“She won’t know, will she?”
Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars) Page 20
