“I know,” Devon said. “I wanted to talk to you about your plans.”
“What plans?”
Devon smiled—just the slightest curve of thin lips. “Exactly. Last you said, you hadn’t picked where to go with all your traveling money. I thought I’d make a recommendation.”
“Yeah?” Rikton smiled in return, but his eyes were cast low, peering at Devon’s throat.
“Heard of a place you could use your skills better. They’re hiring mechanics by the cargo-load out in the junker systems. Not just scrappers, but folk with real expertise. They’re desperate. The pay’s good.”
“Not sure I want to be a mechanic forever,” Rikton said. “No offense.”
“None taken. But you don’t have to do it forever—do it for a month. Word is the guild got their hands on not just one Star Destroyer but two.” He held up a hand to silence the boy. “You know that technology. I’ve seen you, and I haven’t asked why. Truth is, I’m not interested in judging your past, or why your parents disapproved—I just want to help you find a good place. And for a little while, so long as there’s demand, salvaging battleships is as good a place as an Imperial grease-trooper is apt to find.”
The tin cup trembled in Rikton’s hands. He put it down on the catwalk where they sat and looked into the abyss of piping and conduits. “I don’t appreciate you making assumptions—”
“Rikton. You don’t have to be afraid.” His voice was smooth and honed as a knife. “You don’t have to be ashamed. You’re good at what you do.”
Rikton’s eyes flicked upward to meet Devon’s at last. “I am.”
“Good. Should I reach out to the junkers, then? Find you a contact?”
“I don’t—” Rikton started to turn away. Devon placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’ve got plans,” Rikton said. “I’ve got other plans already.”
“You care to tell me?”
Rikton looked to Devon’s hand. Devon drew away and took another stab at his eggs, finishing the last moist morsels as the boy considered his answer.
This was the moment, Devon thought. Rikton would open himself or he wouldn’t, and that would determine his fate.
“I wasn’t a grease-trooper,” Rikton said. “I was navy, not army. Shipboard engineering. Served on a Gozanti cruiser eighteen months. Was studying to become an officer.”
“Not a bad start. Then Endor happened, and, what—half the crew left?”
“Half the crew died. Got caught by the rebels; captain decided to fight. I found an escape pod, ended up alone. Wasn’t a plan or anything, but I didn’t have anyone to report to after. Didn’t have anywhere to go.”
Devon nodded and gestured for Rikton to continue.
The boy shrugged. “Wandered a little, ended up here,” he said. “Never expected it to fall apart so fast, you know?”
“No one did,” Devon agreed. “You try to contact them at all?”
“Tried. Didn’t get much back.”
“But you got something.”
Rikton flinched. Devon saw it and decided to press.
“Is that why you’re building a bomb?” Devon asked.
To his credit, the boy didn’t seem surprised. His shoulders fell. He seemed to shrink inside himself. But he wasn’t surprised. “You noticed the pieces?” Rikton asked.
“Not until the power pack. After that, I caught on. They give you a target?”
“I can’t—” Rikton’s voice was shocked and pleading—appalled that Devon would ask more than afraid of the consequences of answering.
Devon kept his own voice steady, if not soothing. “I have to know, Rikton. If it’s here on the station, it—”
“It’s not.”
“Then where?”
“It’s not!” Rikton repeated.
“Then where?” Devon asked again, and the last of his compassion was gone. There was only the demand now, the confidence and authority.
Rikton trembled, as if the words tore through him. But his voice was soft. “Traitor’s Remorse.”
Traitor’s Remorse.
The last riddle was answered. Devon understood, now—understood exactly what had happened to Rikton the Imperial and driven him to become Rikton the mechanic and soon, once he had paid his transport fees and lied to the New Republic, Rikton the martyr. The boy whose parents had hated the Empire. The boy with nothing, who still wanted to serve. The boy who had somehow found an Imperial loyalist urging the lowest and most vulnerable to throw themselves back into the fires of war.
Devon understood, and he believed that Rikton knew he understood. With both hands he reached out and clasped the boy’s shoulders, pulling him into an embrace.
“We need to talk,” Devon said.
So they did.
* * *
—
They sat on the catwalk for hours, long after Devon had sent a message to the Harch indicating that neither of them would be working that day. They spoke about loyalty and honor and treason; about Traitor’s Remorse and about pride and sacrifice. Rikton confessed his secrets and Devon confessed his—secrets a thousand times more valuable than the boy’s, but all he had to offer in trade. They spoke until the station lights dimmed and the next morning they returned to work and spoke throughout the shift.
“There’s no shame in defection,” Devon told Rikton as they toiled over an airspeeder for an oblivious customer. “No shame in making a new life.”
“I swore an oath to the Empire,” Rikton said.
“The Empire’s gone. Every soldier has to find his own way.”
For days, they talked. Then one morning Rikton failed to arrive at the Harch’s shop. Inside his own locker, Devon found a note attached to a duffel stuffed with mechanical components—including a power pack—he’d never expected to see again.
“Rikton’s gone,” Devon told the Harch after her other employees had left. “Says he’s going to Corulag.”
“A good worker, gone.” The Harch folded and unfolded her chelicerae. “Your fault?”
“Not mine,” Devon said. “Blame me for the destination, but not the departure.”
The Harch considered this, then took long, silent strides to her console and began shuffling through datapads with all six arms. “Fine. You will not be docked pay. Not be peeled like fruit to feed the others when our income is reduced.”
Devon smiled his thin-lipped smile. There was no apology in his tone when he said, “I’m leaving, too. Haven’t decided where, but it’s best if I keep some distance from the shop.”
The Harch let out a sound he’d never heard before—a sort of low rumbling. “You disturbed something,” she said. “You summoned a problem?”
“Odds are against it, but it’s possible. Rikton was involved with certain people. He isn’t anymore. If they care enough to blame anyone—and I don’t imagine they will—they’ll blame me.”
“But you leave, despite what you imagine.”
“You’ve been nothing but fair to me,” Devon said. “I don’t want trouble for you or your crew.”
“Nor I for them,” the Harch said.
It was the first time he’d ever heard her say it directly: that she felt a degree of responsibility, if not care, for her workers. He nodded deeply, respectfully, and hoped she understood the gesture.
“You will seek work elsewhere?” she asked.
“I’ve got to eat somehow, and I don’t have your peeling claws.”
The Harch chittered with laughter and tapped at one of the datapads long enough that Devon began to wonder if he’d been dismissed. Then she turned his way and declared, “Vernid. Synonymous with squalor and barbarism. Outer Rim system.”
Devon had never heard of Vernid. But there were a thousand Outer Rim worlds that could be described as squalid and barbaric
. “What about it?”
“I know someone there who would welcome you.”
Six eyes stared at Devon. He stared back before bowing his head once again. “I’ll consider it,” he said.
A short while later, he left the shop of the Harch—and the Whitedrift Exchange—for the last time.
CHAPTER 15
PREFLIGHT PREPARATIONS
I
Nath spent his last hours with his ship and his droid. He wasn’t a sentimental man, or a superstitious one—he didn’t have any preflight rituals or gods to square himself with. But if he was going on a mission that might well result in his death, he wanted to make sure that he’d stacked the odds beforehand.
So he squatted underneath his Y-wing, unbolting panels and bolting them back on. He checked cable connections and power levels in isolated components. He had to resist the urge to disassemble a proton torpedo to confirm its warhead was operational. You’re getting self-destructive in your old age, he thought. T5 rolled back and forth nearby, uncharacteristically silent.
Now and then, one of the engineers would pass by and call to him by name. He’d peek out far enough to wave and grin, ask Mayus about his family or Jems about the centuries-old protocol droid he’d been assembling as a hobby. Only Ragnell, the chief, seemed to notice Nath’s heart wasn’t in it. “Looking a little nervous,” she said, as she eyed him from her seat on a riding sled. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to him. “Big mission up ahead?”
“Don’t pretend you haven’t heard,” Nath answered. “It’s not attractive.”
Ragnell smirked. “If I were worried about that, I’d have lived my life very differently. You’re Nath Tensent, right? The guy who complains whenever we touch his ship?”
“I am.”
“You want my advice?”
“I don’t.”
She gave it anyway. “You want to live through Pandem Nai, let a professional do the final check. You think you know what you’re doing, but my people do this all day, every day. You’re an amateur.”
Nath grunted, though he recognized there was an inkling of truth in it. “Your people know Y-wings. This is my Y-wing,” he said, “and no one knows it like I do.”
“Suit yourself,” Ragnell said, and rode on, leaving Nath behind.
It was his Y-wing. T5 was his astromech droid. Both had been there the last time he’d fought Shadow Wing, when the bastards had executed, one by one, his entire crew. Reeka, Piter, Pesalt, Braigh, Ferris, Canthropali, all of them. But Nath had survived, not because he was a brilliant combat pilot (he could admit that to himself—he wasn’t bad, but he’d flown with better), but because he was lucky and because his ship had taken hits and not burst into shrapnel. That’s what it took to survive, at the crux of it all: not dying.
He held a hydrospanner in one hand. His fingers closed tight around the metal, his knuckles going white. He slammed the tool against the hangar floor and listened to it ring.
The memories came back, dulled by time but still intense. He hadn’t meant to raise them up. Reeka, Piter, Pesalt, Braigh, Ferris, Canthropali. His crew. His responsibility. He hadn’t kept them from dying, and wiping out Shadow Wing wouldn’t do anything to help them.
But it would balance the scales.
And his mother had raised him with a rule that still lived in his heart: When someone attacks your family, you punch back.
He wasn’t in the mood to continue working on his ship. He blamed Ragnell for that, though the thoughts had been brewing beneath the surface before she’d come along.
He double-checked to make sure the panels he’d removed were secured in place, then shuffled out from under the Y-wing and gave T5 a thump on its upper chassis. “Come on, you little trash heap. Let’s you and me—”
The droid let out a series of squeaks and squawks. Nath arched his brow, then laughed in surprise. Should’ve expected that, he thought, though he really hadn’t.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go have a chat with our friend Adan.”
II
Chass deliberated over her choices with the sober dignity of a woman going to an execution. She sorted through the little plastic box full of datachips, taking out one chip at a time as she sat on her bunk and considered the implications.
Herglic rage-metal? Too heavy, and it hurt her ears. She put the chip in her left hand.
Warbat trance? She considered the flight plan, smiled tightly, and put the chip in her right hand.
Glimmik? Too saccharine, she decided, and tossed the chip back in the box.
She’d forgotten she even had the glimmik files. If she remembered right, that chip had been a trade from a girl who collected lost art: music and imagery from people murdered by the Empire, whose identities were forgotten and whose work would disappear if not preserved. Chass had gone looking for a Theelin singer and received the glimmik instead.
In a moment of inexplicable panic, she wondered who would get the box full of music if she didn’t make it back from Pandem Nai. Would it be tossed in the garbage compactor? Left for the crew of the Lodestar to pick through, divvying up their favorites and destroying the rest?
She’d found a pen and was halfway through scrawling GENERAL SYNDULLA on the box when she felt—filling the void of her panic as it began to recede—a deep and pervasive shame. Was this what Jyn Erso had done before Scarif? In her last hours at the Rebellion’s Base One, had Jyn picked out strangers to donate her belongings to?
She tossed the box back on her bed, scooped up her two handfuls of datachips, and marched out of her berthing compartment toward the hangar. Instinctively, she took the route that led to a ladder, and swore as she realized she would have to climb with her fists full.
“You all right?” a voice asked.
She flinched and whirled to find Wyl walking up behind her.
“Fine,” she said. “Yeah, I’m fine.” She held up both hands, indicating the source of her frustration.
Wyl smiled sympathetically, but there was less warmth to it than she would have expected. She thought of Wyl as endlessly, irritatingly compassionate, yet there was something suppressed in his demeanor. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“I am,” Wyl said. “Just—taking stock of it all. I came from the aft observation area. Watching the blue.”
“Hyperspace still look like hyperspace?”
“It does. No matter where you are in the universe, it always looks the same.” He wrinkled his nose. “Maybe that should be comforting, but it isn’t, really.”
“Brings up memories.”
“Yeah.”
She recalled the hyperspace journeys through the Oridol Cluster aboard the Hellion’s Dare. The tension. The worry that the Empire would follow the moment they entered realspace.
“You sure you’re ready?” she asked.
Wyl held out cupped hands. She poured some of the datachips in and flexed her fingers as he leaned back gingerly against the corridor’s piping and conduits. “I am,” he repeated. “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be doing this at all, but—we’re the only ones left.”
Chass nodded. Wyl wasn’t finished, though the words came out slowly. “Riot Squadron had a mission. Hound Squadron had a mission. Someone has to finish it, and I think—we have a certain responsibility. Being part of a squadron means working together. Watching out for one another, and picking up the burden when someone else falls.”
“You could go home,” Chass said. “If you wanted. No one would stop you.”
“I would stop me,” Wyl said. “I stopped me once before, on Jiruus. And in Oridol maybe I failed the test, maybe I was a coward like you said—”
I never said that, Chass thought, but she let him finish.
“—but maybe the test isn’t finished. Maybe I only fail if I run now.” He sounded
sad and quiet, but he smiled anyway and pushed himself off the wall. “I’m ready for this.”
“Me, too,” Chass said.
They climbed down the ladder to the hangar. They strolled to Chass’s B-wing and Wyl returned the datachips to her as she climbed into the cockpit. As Wyl turned away, she called him back and said, “Remember: We watch out for one another, right? We don’t make each other’s decisions.” Your words, not mine, she thought. Which means you can’t argue.
Wyl nodded cautiously. “No,” he agreed, “we can’t.”
He still didn’t understand, of course, any more than he had on the moon.
But Chass was confident he didn’t need to.
III
The Lodestar erupted out of hyperspace on schedule, arriving in an empty star system off one end of the Skangravi-Mestun Regional Hyperlane. Wyl was already in his flight suit by then, and the announcement of “Alphabet Squadron to Ready Room One” seemed redundant. They all knew what was expected of them. Even the briefing felt perfunctory—Quell stood alone at the front of the chamber, reiterating points they’d all been thinking about for two days.
Then it was time to go.
Wyl climbed into his A-wing and stroked the console, whispered gently to his vessel as the reactor powered up and his comrades swept out of the hangar one by one—great roars and wind filling the space as Quell, then Chass, then Nath launched from the battleship. Kairos would follow Wyl.
He tried to think of the sur-avkas of his homeworld. He tried to remember the warmth of the beasts’ flesh, the unpleasant odor of their hide, the sensation of mighty muscles moving beneath him. But the memories were gray and dull and distant, and he found himself thinking instead of that last day in the Oridol Cluster: of floating in space, of telling stories with Riot Squadron one last time, and of reaching out to the pilots of Shadow Wing. He thought of Blink and Char, and of Chass and Sata Neek.
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