She tried not to think of the merchandise aboard the Ghtroc 690. She was glad the Verpine hadn’t started the ship’s engines; she didn’t want to inspire the enemy to barrel on through, desperate not to lose the cargo. Desperate not to lose friends and comrades.
Then a shadow crossed her body and her ragged hair shifted in the breeze. An engine roared louder than blasterfire. Her X-wing had arrived.
Another disconcerting advantage of flying with an astromech droid: Your ship came when you called.
The X-wing lowered itself into the cavern on its repulsors, barely edging around the freighter. Quell waited until it was ten meters away then made her dash. The enemy would pause for an instant to confirm she’d stopped firing, then pursue; if she wasn’t under the canopy by the time the Imperials were in the hangar, she’d make an easy target.
“Now!” she called.
The X-wing hovered in place, canopy open and D6’s dome spinning as the droid scanned its surroundings. Quell leapt and caught a strike foil—already locked into attack mode—as particle bolts lashed past her. She felt the exhaust of the freighter’s thrusters against her cheek as she half swung, half fell into the cockpit seat. The transparent metal canopy was already lowering.
Then she was in position. Her body still felt uncomfortable in the rebel ship, but her feet located pedals and her hands, after a moment searching panels, found the controls she needed. She looked through the haze of crimson bolts and saw a squad of Imperials pouring through the cavern entrance.
The attackers were in civilian attire, yet they moved with the coordination of army veterans. They weren’t the bruised and filthy captives Quell had seen aboard the freighter. Neither were they polished fighters in pressed uniforms and grimly determined faces. They looked desperate. They looked scared. They reminded Quell of the inmates at Traitor’s Remorse.
One carried a portable rocket launcher. As the woman hefted it onto her shoulder, Quell made her decision and squeezed the trigger on her control yoke. The cavern exploded in fire, and she watched the faces of the soldiers as, one by one, they died to the X-wing’s blasts.
She heard no emotion in her voice as she said: “Quell to squadron. We’re lifting off.”
IV
Wyl Lark’s reservations about the mission changed nothing. When the signal came from Chass he opened his throttle, checked his course, and made to intercept Chass and Kairos as they emerged from Abednedo’s atmosphere. He called for Nath to join him—the Y-wing wasn’t built for dogfighting but the assault craft would be vulnerable on its own—and it was Nath who reminded him, “What about not authorized for combat operations?”
“The combat operation came to us,” Wyl said. “If you know how to avoid a fight, now’s the time to say.”
Nath laughed. Wyl saw the Y-wing match his course, and he reduced his acceleration to allow Nath to catch up.
There were three new marks approaching Chass and Kairos. Wyl wasn’t sure where they’d come from, but Chass called out an ID—“Three dupes closing”—and snorted.
“You want to repeat that?” Nath asked. “They’re really sending TIE bombers?”
“Must be all they’ve got left,” Chass said.
Wyl strained forward, staring into the starfield in search of the bombers’ double-sphere chassis (the dupes) and curved wings. He tamped down his confidence. A bomber might lack speed and maneuverability, but its cannons could still tear a fighter apart.
He’d almost lost Chass in the Oridol Cluster. He’d failed there in many ways, but he didn’t intend to lose her now. Nor Kairos.
The dogfight had already begun by the time Wyl spotted the foe. The TIEs swung in to fire a coordinated volley at the U-wing, then retreated before Chass’s B-wing could snare a target. Wyl was preparing to pursue the TIEs on their next pass when another voice came through his comm.
“Tensent. Lark. I’m en route to your last coordinates but not seeing you. What’s going on?”
Quell’s voice. Wyl winced. “Kairos has three marks on her,” he said. “We’re about to intercept—you want us to turn around?”
There was a short pause, then: “Negative. I’m still in atmo. Got an allied light freighter ahead of me but no threats in sight. I’ll get it to hyperspace, then join you.”
“Acknowledged.” Wyl glanced at the scanner and saw the exposed freighter at the edge of his range. He agreed with Quell’s assessment of the threat: The U-wing was in imminent danger. The freighter was not.
He watched emerald fire blaze over the U-wing—even made out the shimmering of the transport’s shields—and angled himself into position to pursue the last bomber as it came out of its dive. The other enemy pilots realized what was happening and tried to decelerate, to fall back and behind Wyl, but they weren’t swift enough to save their comrade. Wyl latched onto his target, squeezed his trigger, and felt the pulse of his cannons ripple through his ship. He was forced to slow as the bomber detonated in a bright, powerful burst ahead of him, giving his pursuers an opportunity to draw closer. He would need the rest of his squadron to save him.
“Give them to me,” Nath said, “if they’re careless enough to follow.”
“Roger that.” Wyl angled the A-wing to bring it around, watching the two marks follow on his scanner. “We’re doing good,” he murmured to his ship.
And they were. For all their early troubles during training, the squadron seemed to be operating effectively. Wyl rolled and jinked, not trying to lose his pursuers but simply preventing them from getting a target lock. He veered into Nath’s cone of fire and saw the closest TIE careen away—damaged or attempting to escape, he wasn’t sure. The second bomber remained in pursuit, and he pulled it into range of Chass; the mark disappeared from his scanner and the Theelin announced, “Scratch one.”
“Where’s the last TIE?” Wyl asked.
“Got away,” Nath said. “Heading for the freighter.”
Wyl grimaced and looked in the direction he and Nath had come from, but he saw only the bright curve of Abednedo above him. “Quell? You get that?”
“I got it. One bomber incoming. I can intercept. Lark, see if you can catch it before it arrives.”
He adjusted his course and opened his throttle until he could feel the strain and rattle of the ship in his bones. He watched the scanner and allowed the computer to automatically adjust his vector—at his velocity, a one-degree error would send him kilometers from the TIE.
To his surprise, the bomber was still accelerating. The TIE wouldn’t escape—the A-wing could keep up no matter how much power the enemy pilot diverted to engines—but what was it trying to do? At its current speed, it would only have a fraction of a second to fire on Quell or the freighter before whipping past. After that, it would need minutes to return and make another firing run, if the maneuver didn’t tear the TIE apart.
“Quell?” he asked.
“I see it.”
“What are you—”
“Go radio silent, Lark. I need to focus.”
As his body protested against the g forces, he watched the blips on his scanner. The TIE approached the freighter. The X-wing moved to intercept. Like the TIE, Quell would have only one chance to destroy her target—one volley as the bomber came hurtling past.
Wyl realized what was going to happen. He saw what the TIE was trying to accomplish. But there was nothing to be done. He needed seconds more to enter firing range.
He watched the scanner as his ship roared. He saw the TIE pass Quell’s X-wing close enough for the dots to merge. He saw no explosion, no distant flash of light.
The flash came a moment later. The freighter and the TIE both disappeared from the scanner.
“They’re gone,” Quell said. “They’re gone.”
Wyl heard the despair in Quell’s voice.
“What was on t
hat freighter?” he asked.
V
Caern Adan was waiting in the hangar of the Lodestar when they returned. With him stood a security team primed to take possession of the sole surviving prisoner. But Quell barely noticed either as she climbed out of her X-wing. She was cold—her flight suit was soaked through with sweat—and the afterimage of devastation was burned into her retinas. She still saw the freighter tearing in two as the bomber impacted; the specks of soldiers floating in the void before they were vaporized, their journey of misery and imprisonment ending in inglorious death.
Light-headed, she swept her gaze to the other ships—her squadron (her squadron) and the pilots climbing down onto the hangar deck. She summoned them with a wave of her hand as the security team boarded the U-wing.
Her people knew what had happened. They knew what to expect. Wyl Lark looked somber, head high, ready to take responsibility; Nath Tensent watched the U-wing; Chass na Chadic shifted uncomfortably, boredly; and Kairos was Kairos, motionless and unreadable.
“That was a disaster,” Quell said.
No one replied.
“You—” She jutted a finger at Lark, then moved it to Tensent. “—should never have repositioned without authorization. I don’t care what you did as a rebel, improvisation gets people killed.”
Lark looked surprised. Tensent grunted. Again, no one spoke.
“You—” She turned her gaze on Chadic. “—could have signaled me for instructions. You could have reached me through my comlink if I wasn’t in my fighter. You could have avoided engaging the bombers and just jumped to lightspeed. You could have—”
“I could’ve done a lot of things,” Chadic said. “You’d have blamed me for them, too. You could’ve not split us up, paid more attention to the comms, actually shot the bomber heading directly for you—”
“You’re not in command!” Quell heard her voice rise to a shout and forced herself to control her volume. She noticed Ragnell, the tattooed engineer, pretending not to watch while she unloaded D6 from the X-wing. “This is a debriefing, not a discussion. You want to talk tactics, we can do it later.”
Chadic shook her head in evident disgust, but she held her tongue. It was the most Quell could hope for.
Chadic wasn’t wrong, of course. Quell knew that, but she couldn’t think about it now.
“We screwed up,” Quell said. “People are dead. We’ll have to live with it.”
“We got one,” Tensent said. “We screwed up, but we gained more than we lost.”
“Only if the captive is useful,” a new voice added. Quell turned to watch Adan approach the group. He wasn’t looking at her, instead observing the security team half guiding, half carrying the stormtrooper sergeant from the U-wing. “That man doesn’t strike me as the link to Shadow Wing we were hoping for, but I suppose you can’t tell at a glance.”
A shiver worked its way down Quell’s spine. “No,” she said. “You can’t.”
“And apparently,” Adan continued, “you also can’t tell when a mission will involve combat. At least the ships are all intact.”
“We knew it was a risk,” she said. “There’s always a risk of engagement.”
“Well, we’ll just have to try very hard to get information from our one lowly sergeant—”
“Stop,” Quell said. Her shuddering was constant now. She drew a long, ragged breath, but it wouldn’t end.
Adan looked at her with sudden intensity. Something ignited in his eyes. “Excuse me?”
She stared at her superior officer. The man she’d fought to prove her loyalty and ability to over the course of weeks. The man who had given her a second chance after she’d abandoned the Empire. But she couldn’t prevent the words from escaping her lips. “Stop,” she repeated. “We were on this mission because we didn’t have any other leads. Because you, the intelligence officer, didn’t give us anything better to work with—”
“You should watch your tone,” Adan said, and now his voice was loud, too, his eyes wide. Lark was saying something, stepping forward and trying to intervene, but Quell ignored him.
“You threw this group together from scraps,” she said, “like we’re supposed to know how to do this, but we don’t. We don’t have the training, we don’t—”
“None of us had training!” Adan’s voice was a roar. “None of us had the luxury of years in an academy, learning every damn protocol under the suns. We figured it out along the way, and when people got killed we knew it was the price of rebelling against your Empire! Maybe it’s time you—”
The words began to blur together. Chadic was nodding slightly. Quell saw the dead prisoners floating in space. She felt the stiffness in her shoulder as she lunged forward and brought her fist into Adan’s stomach.
He hadn’t been prepared for it. He bent over, and Quell heard indecipherable shouting through the hangar. She didn’t look at the others as she stormed out, making her way through the Lodestar’s cramped hallways until she found a restroom.
There she fell to her knees and vomited.
* * *
—
None of this was why Quell had joined the Rebellion.
She sat on her knees on the cold floor of the restroom, picturing the soldiers who’d died aboard the freighter. Picturing the infantry she’d slaughtered with her X-wing in the cavern. Thinking of the occupied research station she’d fired upon at Harrikos-Fifteen.
She was sick of bloodshed. She felt dirty from toes to hair. She’d joined the Rebellion—the New Republic—to get away from that feeling. To do something worthwhile.
She thought of her mentor, Major Soran Keize, and what he’d told her long before the incident at Mek’tradi—long before she’d confessed her youthful admiration for the Rebel Alliance. It had been after Mennar-Daye, when so many of their enemies had fallen and the bombers had made runs over the cave systems for days. She hadn’t been able to sleep, knowing about those bombers, imagining rebels buried in grit and slowly suffocating. Keize had found her one night studying in the Pursuer’s mess hall, and gradually coaxed out her insecurities.
“War is always monstrous,” he’d told her, “but that doesn’t make us monsters.”
It was the first time she’d heard him say that, but not the last. She’d eventually learned to repeat the words like a mantra, use them to calm herself after operations that seemed destructive beyond reason. She’d believed in the sentiment. It had helped her face herself and her comrades.
But Keize had participated in Operation Cinder, too.
The words weren’t as soothing as they’d used to be.
VI
“She hit me,” Caern said. His stomach was still sore. He could feel the fist impacting flesh, the vertigo as he’d been thrown off balance.
“That is inexcusable,” IT-O said. The droid floated amicably above the cot in the supply closet Caern had requisitioned for his private cabin. “But I must ask: Did you intentionally provoke her?”
“Of course not!” Caern scoffed, stood from his seat atop his cramped workdesk, and sat back down as the blood rushed to his head. He started to go on, then grudgingly replayed the confrontation in his mind. “No. I may have—I was irritable, and that may have affected me, but no. Would it matter if I had?”
“It would in no way justify her actions. It would provide additional insight into your motivations, and hers.”
“This isn’t about my motivations. This is about gross insubordination and—and she’s testing her limits. She disobeyed orders. Now she’s punching people? It’s gone far enough.”
“I agree completely,” the droid said. “I suggest she be removed from duty immediately.”
Caern let out a hoarse laugh. The droid knew what his response would be; did IT-O want to force him to say it? “We’re stuck with her now. Even if I could find a new squ
adron commander—High Command might, might take me seriously enough to transfer someone from elsewhere on the battlefront, though it would be humiliating beyond belief—she’s still the only one with inside experience. She’s the one who’s been training the squadron to work together. We don’t have time to find someone else.”
“Is it possible that the cost of keeping Yrica Quell is greater than the cost of delay? There are other squadrons beyond your working group.”
Caern considered the question. His voice was softer when he said, “No. No, that’s the sort of thinking that got Shadow Wing deprioritized in the first place. If we don’t stop them here, there will be another Nacronis. Or another Blacktar Cyst. Or—something new and awful, the sort of thing only officers like Quell can dream up.
“I’m going to keep digging. Call in every contact I’ve got, in and out of the New Republic, to uncover her story. If we find the truth about Yrica Quell, maybe we can control her.”
“I don’t envy your position,” the droid said.
“No,” Caern said. “I suppose you don’t.”
He sat in silence awhile. The droid usually reduced its hovering altitude, dimmed its lights, and muffled its hum when it recognized that a conversation was over. It didn’t do so now and Caern knew it was giving him space. A moment to reflect before moving on to the next awful dilemma.
The moment didn’t last. “I understand the squadron brought home a captive. A stormtrooper sergeant who participated in Operation Cinder.”
“What about him?” Caern asked.
“Do you intend to interrogate him yourself?”
He let the question linger. He savored the bitterness like a swallow of wine. “Yes.”
“Would you prefer that I did so in your place?”
Caern met the gaze of the droid’s red photoreceptor. “No. I would not.”
The droid had asked that question before—more than once over the years. Caern had never said yes. He feared what would happen if he did.
Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars) Page 24
