Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  “What are you wearing?” Quell asked.

  Chadic scrunched her face and glanced down at her asymmetric leathers. Quell wasn’t sure if they qualified as fashionable, cheap, or both—she hadn’t owned much in the way of civvies for a while.

  “Clothes?” Chadic tried. “I’m wearing clothes. I thought we weren’t trying to draw attention.”

  Quell looked at the navy blue of her own flight suit. “The New Republic saved this planet. We’re more likely to get what we need like this.”

  Chadic parted her lips as if ready to laugh, then shook her head. “Let’s go, New Republic lieutenant.”

  Quell tried not to bristle. She’s egging you on. Respond and you’ll just encourage her. She felt like a child again, suffering her brothers’ torments aboard Gavana Orbital. Only it wasn’t, she realized as Chadic strode away, her brothers that the Theelin reminded her of—

  Shoot down that thought. Burn it. Focus on the mission.

  They swiftly moved from broad boulevards into narrow alleys so packed with pedestrians that Quell often lost sight of her companion. A faint odor of vanilla and dust and fresh paint pervaded the city—the natural musk of the Abednedo people, perhaps—and up close, Quell could see that Neshorino hadn’t been unscathed by Operation Cinder after all. Scaffolds shored up cracked cliff faces and statues the height of skyscrapers stood battered and beheaded, cordoned off and surrounded by rubble. In a plaza walled on one side by a mound of boulders, thousands of gemstones painted like beetles had been placed delicately on the ground; Quell knew nothing about the culture of Abednedo, but she recognized a memorial when she saw one. She thought of the cargo bay aboard the Pursuer, converted to honor the victims of the terrorist attack on the Death Star.

  They moved on into Neshorino’s House of Strangers—the sector of the city reserved for the use of non-Abednedos, full of travelers’ lodgings and cantinas enclosing micro-atmospheres. Quell paused long enough to contact D6-L through her comlink and confirm her destination, then led Chadic back into the maze of alleys until a staircase took them away from the crowds and into the rock of the mountainside. There, holographic flames set in crystal chandeliers lit the way to an intersection of eight narrow stairways like wheel spokes. Above the intersection hung an incongruous tarp, covering whatever ancient painting or mosaic had once looked down on pilgrims.

  “Here?” Chadic asked.

  “Here,” Quell said.

  They waited. Quell signaled the rest of the squadron and received short replies indicating that nothing of consequence had occurred.

  They waited longer. Quell began to wonder if their contact wouldn’t show when a figure emerged from one of the passageways and hobbled toward her. The newcomer’s most prominent features were the bulbous, compound eyes set in its insectoid skull, and Quell tried to recall what she knew about the Verpine people—a clannish, intelligent species with a reputation for technical aptitude and an esoteric language.

  The Verpine adjusted the layers of scarves around its face and made a chittering, squealing noise. It jerked up its left fist and uncurled two of three fingers to reveal a comlink, from which a voice declared, “You identify Republic not Abednedo. Commiserations and deals to be made?”

  Quell grimaced. A street trader with a broken protocol droid. “We’re waiting for someone. Move along.”

  The Verpine chittered again. “You identify Republic,” the comlink repeated, and the insectoid jutted its right hand at Quell’s flight suit. “Responding communication?”

  Chadic was pacing the enclosed space and peering down the connecting passages. “What communication?” she called.

  “Communication of Mission Ember. Confirmed?”

  Operation Cinder.

  “Confirmed,” Quell said. It was suddenly cold beneath the mountain.

  “Deals to be made,” the Verpine said again. “Initial transaction to be confirmed. The Republic is understanding and the moneys?”

  Quell amended her mental image of the Verpine: a street trader with a broken protocol droid and a handful of New Republic security clearances. Just because the Verpine had sent a coded signal didn’t mean it had anything worth selling.

  This was a situation she hadn’t prepared for. She’d expected a member of a local rebel cell at best, a paranoid informant at worst. Once again, she was playing the role of a spy instead of a pilot and she felt paralyzed.

  Chadic must have seen her hesitancy. The Theelin moved between Quell and the Verpine. “Plenty of noise but no one’s hollering. You want a deal? You give us something to work with. Give us proof, we give you moneys.”

  The Verpine clacked and shook in reply. Quell half expected to see it sneeze, or maybe to see another creature crawl out from between its chitinous plates. Instead it rapidly squealed and chittered into the comlink—it seemed to hold a whole conversation—before the machine said, “Merchandise samples provided. Goodwill indicative to Republic government.”

  Merchandise?

  But she didn’t have to ask. Shuffling footsteps echoed from one of the stairways, and the Verpine pointed a trembling finger at the two individuals who descended. The first was an Abednedo, burly and simply dressed as he escorted the second: a pale man in bone-white armor, his eyes wide, cheeks bruised, and hands cuffed together. He looked horrifyingly young under the dried blood that framed his mouth. On his shoulder was the white pauldron of an Imperial stormtrooper sergeant.

  “Merchandise sample,” the Verpine said. “Take? Take.”

  The stormtrooper’s eyes locked onto Quell’s flight suit and didn’t stray. She looked at the grime and scars beneath the fuzz of his hair. He was bent forward and seemed unable to straighten.

  Chadic swore and looked to Quell. Quell clenched her fists, trying to will herself not to tremble and to focus on her job. She moved until she was close enough to the stormtrooper that he could have torn her throat with his teeth.

  “Operation Cinder,” she said. Nothing more than that.

  Quell had never been adept at reading body language; never known how to ask the probing questions an interrogator might. But she recognized the flash of uncertainty in the sergeant’s face. The look that said: It’s classified, and anything I say could get me tossed into the brig.

  “More merchandise for moneys-purchase,” the Verpine said. “This one take. Goodwill.”

  “The rest of the merchandise,” Quell said. “You can show me?”

  “Ready. Yes? Ready to show.”

  Quell stepped away from the stormtrooper and gestured Chadic to one side. “Kairos is waiting,” she murmured. “Get this—” She shifted a shoulder in the stormtrooper’s direction. “—this prisoner to the U-wing. I want to see what else is for sale.”

  “You don’t want backup?” Chadic asked. She was more focused on Quell than on the stormtrooper. There was no concern in her voice, which might have hurt under other circumstances.

  “I want to get out of here with a win. Even if that’s just our—” Our free sample, she thought, but the words tasted bilious and she didn’t complete the sentence.

  Chadic patted the pistol strapped to her side as if reassuring herself. Like her clothing, the weapon was irregular—some sort of exotic slugthrower—and, Quell guessed, as illegal under the New Republic as under the Empire. “I’ll handle it,” Chadic said.

  Quell nodded to the Verpine and left Chadic, the stormtrooper, and the Verpine’s assistant as the Verpine led the way down a staircase and through another tunnel. “You want to tell me where you found the merchandise?” she asked.

  The Verpine chattered into the comlink until the droid echoed back, “Profession is traveler. Transporter. Merchandise requests secret nonstandard transport offworld.”

  “The merchandise requested transport?”

  “Nonstandard transport. Nonstandard is spe
cialty.”

  They passed under an archway and onto a battered stone bridge spanning the chasm between two cliff faces. Airspeeders hummed above, and the stench of dust and rot rose from below. Quell looked down onto a massive rockslide being picked over by droids and Abednedos.

  More signs of Operation Cinder, perhaps. She tried not to think about it.

  “Nonstandard transport,” she said. She wasn’t sure if it was a euphemism or a poor translation, but either way she guessed it meant “smuggling.” “You were contacted by the merchandise, and…?”

  They passed into another tunnel and up a staircase, arriving in a broad cavern open to the sky. In the cavern’s center sat a Ghtroc 690 light freighter, filthy and dented as if it had flown through a sandstorm. Quell recognized the vessel from her youth, and tried to think about the agri-hauler who’d often dined with her family instead of the realization crawling up her spine.

  “See? Look now. Look.”

  The ship’s loading door slid open, rattling and hissing, and her eyes adjusted to the darkness inside as a reek of sweat and waste mingled with the sickening sweet scent of infected wounds. Scattered around the ship’s hold like crates of unsorted salvage were a dozen or more figures in once-white armor encrusted with stains. Like the sergeant, each was cuffed, hands behind his or her back. Unlike the sergeant, these were gagged and tethered to support struts and cargo anchors. Many were motionless, asleep or unconscious on the metal deck. Others raised their grimy heads and squinted into the light of the cavern. A green-eyed woman shook hard enough that her cuffs rattled. A gray-haired man shifted protectively to block Quell from the prone figure beside him.

  In the 204th, Quell’s squadron had once disabled a slaver ship. The conditions there had been no worse.

  These were the holdouts of Abednedo. The survivors of Operation Cinder, desperately seeking a way offworld. They’d turned to a smuggler for help, tried to flee, and instead the Verpine had chosen to sell them out to the New Republic—

  Quell felt her heart rate accelerate. Her breathing turned shallow. She shuddered, every instinct telling her to draw her sidearm and bring the Verpine to justice for reducing brave stormtroopers to terror and humiliation.

  But she was the New Republic now, and these troopers had attempted to commit atrocities.

  This was necessary. This would lead to Shadow Wing.

  “What’s your price?” she asked.

  II

  Chass na Chadic didn’t care for stormtroopers, but the sergeant didn’t give her an excuse to exercise her aggression. He walked at the pace she set, never turned to face her or spoke in defiance. He was, if not broken, beaten.

  Chass could settle for that.

  She hadn’t thought much about Operation Cinder. The Hellion’s Dare had been too far from the worlds that suffered, receiving only snippets of news about slaughters carried out by the retreating Empire. She’d felt a reflexive anger, a surge of rage, that had quickly melted into the sea of affronts the Empire had committed. It hadn’t been the Empire’s first genocide, after all; just the most petty.

  So it wasn’t Cinder that made her loathe the man stumbling in front of her. It was the smaller indignities—the scandoc checks and extortion rackets and beatings she’d suffered back when. Maybe the sergeant was one of the good stormtroopers who never left a Rim rat with broken ribs because she looked at him wrong—but what did it matter? He’d chosen to support the Empire as it was, and every stormtrooper was complicit in something.

  She was out of the House of Strangers and proceeding down a high-walled alley when she halted. She couldn’t have said what triggered her wariness; maybe it was just being trapped between two stone barriers.

  “Stop,” she said. The sergeant stopped. “We’re turning around.”

  The stormtrooper began to run. Chass cursed. Then she saw a flash of red light, smelled vaporized atmosphere, and felt chips of stone slash her cheek.

  She didn’t see the shooter. Shooters. Whoever it was wasn’t at ground level, and there were enough windows and balconies built into the alley walls that there was nowhere she could be sure was safe. She sprinted forward, pumping her legs and feeling the stiffness in her thighs—she’d spent too much time flying and not enough on her feet over the past month—and rapidly overtook the sergeant.

  She didn’t assume the shooters wouldn’t kill him, but she expected she could use him as a shield. He put up an anemic struggle as she wrapped her arms around him, yanked him backward, and put her spine against the wall. Particle bolts scorched trails through the air, and when the sergeant went slack Chass drew her weapon—a KD-30 pistol more expensive than anything else she’d ever owned—and scanned for a target.

  She didn’t find one. A blaster bolt struck the rock half a meter from her foot. She suddenly regretted drawing her weapon. With one arm around the sergeant, she had no way to reach her comlink and call for help.

  This wasn’t how she wanted to die. Not murdered by stormtroopers on a pointless mission on a nothing planet. She was shaking from the surge of adrenaline—the mix of thrill and frustration.

  “We go,” she snapped, and shoved the sergeant forward. She didn’t look back, didn’t focus on anything but pushing down the alleyway. She panted for breath, mouth hanging open and body cold with sweat. By the time she emerged into a broader boulevard packed with Abednedo pedestrians and merchant stalls, her vision was blurred from exertion and the rush of blood.

  She was still alive, though.

  The pedestrians shouted and scattered like startled birds. She didn’t understand the language but she could guess the meaning of the cries. Half a dozen humans (almost always humans, with the Empire—that fact was enough to make Chass proud of her Theelin blood) rushed out onto high stairs and landings overlooking the plaza, each in civilian attire and carrying a blaster rifle. Even at a distance, Chass recognized the weapons as E-11s. Stormtrooper gear.

  Chass took the first shot. She missed. Smoke curled up from the stonework beside her target: The KD-30 fired custom rounds instead of particle bolts, each loaded with a virulent acid that could dissolve almost anything. Not even a Hutt, layered with oil and fat, could survive a shot from the KD-30. But a Hutt was easier to hit than a stormtrooper, and Chass only had nine rounds left.

  She took another shot. This time a stormtrooper howled in agony, but the Imperials were already maneuvering to pin her down. She couldn’t run again—a dash across the boulevard would require moving through the kill zone—unless she abandoned the sergeant. Quell wouldn’t be thrilled with that outcome, but Chass wondered if it was her only route to safety.

  She heard a scream. She hadn’t fired her next round. Then another scream, and she risked a glance toward the sounds.

  Kairos stood on one of the overlooks, lifting an Imperial by the head with both hands. The man writhed in her grip, then sagged. Chass couldn’t see what Kairos had done—snapped his neck, she hoped, though there were more nightmarish possibilities—but when Kairos dropped the body off the edge of the staircase it hit stone with the limp thud of a corpse. The man’s pain hadn’t lasted long.

  The attackers turned their weapons on Kairos. Kairos moved through the red storm of bolts like an assassin, freezing and then dashing forward, hurling an enemy into a current of blasterfire or shooting a foe from across the boulevard with the weapon slung around her torso. Chass tried to recognize it between quick shots: a bowcaster, maybe?

  There was something savage about Kairos’s attacks. Chass realized what when she scanned the corpses around the boulevard and saw that nearly all of them had heads blackened and bloodied to unrecognizability.

  Then Kairos was at her side and they were running, dragging the sergeant between them. Chass felt herself putting as much distance between herself and the strange woman as possible. She caught glimpses of dark stains on Kairos’s battered cl
oak.

  The U-wing was in sight atop its landing butte when Chass thought to holster her weapon and signal Quell. “We were followed,” she panted, feeling the strain on her throat. “Kairos and I have the trooper, but if they found us—”

  “Someone was watching our source,” Quell replied. She sounded like her thoughts were elsewhere. Chass tried not to resent her for it and failed. “Get to your ship. Get the U-wing and the passenger safely into orbit.”

  “What are you doing?” Chass asked.

  “There’s more. The Verpine has a whole freighter full. He’s agreed to fly his ship back to the Lodestar, but if there’s trouble he’ll need an escort and—”

  “You want us to wait?”

  “No,” Quell said. She paused awhile. “Objective is unchanged. Get out of here with a win. Get the passenger into orbit, rendezvous with Lark and Tensent. I’ll make sure the Verpine gets away safely.”

  It was a bad plan. It was obviously a bad plan, Chass thought, so much so that Quell had to see it. They’d been separated and now they needed to reunite.

  But it was Quell’s plan. Maybe she saw something Chass didn’t.

  “Good luck,” Chass said. “And move quick. The guys chasing us play dirty.” And apparently so does Kairos, she thought, but at least Kairos was on her side.

  III

  It wasn’t more than a minute after Chass na Chadic signaled Quell that the cavern came under fire. The entrance was defensible—a tight enough bottleneck that even Quell, with only her rusty blaster skills and a light pistol, could keep the enemy at bay. But it was obvious the foe wasn’t fully committed, either. The Imperials were waiting for reinforcements, which meant Quell and the Verpine had to leave.

  “Now?” The question came through the comlink. The Verpine was already in the cockpit, anxious to launch.

  “No,” Quell said. “You’ll know when.”