Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  “I’m a little busy,” Nath said. His voice was almost inaudible through the static, as if he were whispering. “Any chance you can handle this one?”

  “I’m handling all of them,” Wyl said, doing his best to suppress his irritation. You’ve never flown a Y-wing, he reminded himself. You can’t know what he’s dealing with. But Wyl’s shields had nearly burst and another solid hit would tear his fighter apart. “Please—I need a few seconds to recharge my deflectors and I can’t get it by myself.”

  Nath hesitated before answering, “Do what you have to.”

  Blink remained the closest TIE behind Wyl. There were others ahead and farther back, but they were problems he could deal with fifteen seconds into the future. Blink, however, was loosing shot after shot, close enough to illuminate Wyl’s cockpit with emerald light.

  Wyl was about to let him get closer.

  He kept his thrusters at maximum output—he couldn’t afford to hint at what he was doing—while dipping and soaring to shear off speed and draw Blink in. Wyl cast a glance behind him and saw the dark eye of the TIE cockpit silhouetted against the scarlet mist, then plunged toward the orbital station at a forty-degree angle. His breathing was shallow and his bones felt ready to crack as he leveled out a few dozen meters in front of Nath’s Y-wing.

  Blink followed. They were a perfect line: Wyl, in Blink’s sights. Blink, in Nath’s.

  Come on. Shoot him. Shoot him!

  Wyl saw the ripple of the Y-wing’s cannon blasts outside his cockpit. The shots had gone wide—maddeningly wide, not even close to Blink—and Wyl knew it meant his own death. He didn’t have time to spin away. Didn’t have time to shunt all power to aft deflectors and hope for the best.

  He tried to think of Home and saw Sata Neek instead.

  Yet he didn’t die.

  A rumble like thunder passed through his ship and through his body. His A-wing leapt as if slapped aside by a god’s cosmic hand, off to starboard and away from the orbital station. Emerald flashed where Blink had aimed his weapons, but the green was pale and dim compared with the bright glow in the distance, on the opposite side of the facility.

  When Wyl regained control of his fighter he saw flames racing across metal.

  “Lark to Quell! Lark to Chass!” he called. “What happened?”

  “Blew a gas pod,” Chass answered. “You should try it.”

  Wyl didn’t smile. He glanced at the TIEs on his scanner—scattered by the shock wave but quickly regrouping—and permitted himself another look at the fire. From a distance, he saw no gaping hole, nothing sheared off by the destructive power, but the station was burning.

  Suddenly all his thoughts of Riot Squadron and Shadow Wing and Blink and Char seemed limp and selfish—they weighed on him still, but it was the crushing weight of a corpse.

  Kairos was still on the station, along with her strike team. The station was burning. What were his problems compared with hers?

  Be safe, he thought, and returned to the fight.

  VI

  Orbital One was on fire, but that wasn’t Shakara Nuress’s biggest concern.

  The blown Tibanna gas pod wasn’t a catastrophe. It was a knife in the guts of her production schedule and the resulting damage would be considerable, but she could still recover. The warning indicators shining from every console in the command center were a badge of shame, not defeat—she’d read the specifications of Orbital One and it was built to survive a massive industrial disaster. The fires would spread only until they met the reinforced bulkheads between station sections and then slowly die as they exhausted all oxygen in their compartments. Even if she lacked the staff to see to the fire suppression systems, the safety shutdowns, all the protocols that were meant to be followed, Orbital One would remain intact.

  No, her biggest problem was the same as it had been from the start. Her pilots were still trapped in the hangars. She had no defenses—no path to victory—without them.

  “Rassus!” she cried. Only three other officers remained in the command center—she’d begun short-staffed and sent the others to check on her pilots after internal comms had shorted out—but she had to shout to be heard over the wailing alarms. “How much longer?”

  “Till—?”

  “Until we can release the fighters!”

  She saw the answer in his eyes. Too long. The fires had disrupted repair of the hangar doors.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “Another fifteen minutes.”

  Shakara had the dignity—and the presence of mind—not to swear. The wailing alarms dropped abruptly in volume; for that, at least, she was grateful.

  Her eyes found the black glass stare of the Emperor’s Messenger. The wraith had said nothing since its arrival, and it remained at its post near the doorway. Shakara wanted to approach it, to shake it, to demand answers—not just to her current predicament, but about why it was there at all. What the Emperor intended it to do.

  We wiped out a planet for you, she thought. The least you can do is tell us why.

  Tell us how to survive.

  Tell us how to preserve your Empire.

  She said nothing. She knew she would receive no answer, and the Empire she had fought for—the Empire she knew—had rewarded determination over groveling. She was among the Empire’s best. She had seen the Empire grow and evolve and surpass the legacy of the Old Republic.

  If she couldn’t win today, perhaps Pandem Nai deserved to fall.

  “Blast them open,” she said.

  Rassus didn’t seem to hear. Then he turned abruptly from his console. “What?”

  “The hangar doors,” she answered. “Seal off the sections—as best we can, given the damage—and give the fighters permission to blow a hole through anything in the way. Yes, it won’t be a simple fix. Yes, we’ll do serious harm to subsystems and we’ll need to evacuate additional compartments. But we’ve no other recourse.”

  Rassus didn’t question her further. He brought his link to his mouth and started snapping orders.

  Shakara looked again to the Emperor’s Messenger. It didn’t react, of course. Had she been expecting approval? A pat on the cheek from the Emperor’s ghost?

  Rassus nodded to her. Shakara stepped to the railing behind one of the tactical consoles and clasped it with both hands. A moment later a shudder ran through the deck. A new set of warnings lit up. The shudder became a jolt and a low, hollow boom like the beat of a metal drum resounded through the station.

  She imagined the first TIE fighters hovering inside the wreckage of the hangar, directing their fire at rubble and carving through a bulkhead. She imagined a whirlwind sucking air and debris through the newly created gap, and the TIE pilots struggling not to collide in the face of such chaotic force. In a matter of moments, each squadron would creep through the gap and arrive in Pandem Nai’s atmosphere. Above the burning Orbital One, they would swarm the handful of enemy ships and regain control of the battlefield.

  The enemy fleet outside the minefield could press toward the planet if it wanted. Against the full force of the 204th Fighter Wing, Shakara was confident it would lose.

  Victory had a price. But it was coming.

  VII

  The turret was warm beneath Kairos’s gloved hands. Like a living thing, it would grow hot with fury, its heartbeat pulsing, and then creak softly when it was quiescent. Kairos stroked the metal of the barrel, turning it away from the burning corpses of the three stormtroopers who had entered the docking bay.

  She wondered why so few had come. She could only assume that the enemy was not aware of the U-wing’s presence, or of the presence of the strike team. She had noticed the orbital station shudder and been certain that her mission was complete, but the special forces troops had signaled her with a single, oblique transmission confirming that the task was not done.
r />   So she waited. When there was the opportunity to kill—to puncture and incinerate the creatures who crawled through the station in the name of their fallen lord and Emperor—she killed. When she was forced to wait, she waited. She was not patient, but neither was she an animal.

  A deep booming sound, resonant and metallic, shook the station a second time. The U-wing, still aloft on its repulsors, barely shook. Kairos shifted her weight all the same.

  What was happening? She was needed to guard her vessel, yet was she needed elsewhere, too?

  The cockpit comm spoke. “Strike team to Kairos. Detonators in place. Returning to the transport now.”

  She stepped away from the turret and entered the cockpit long enough to trail her fingers across the controls and send a signal of her own.

  She might not know what had transpired. But that was not her purpose.

  The signal was sent. The defector would determine all their fates.

  VIII

  Quell watched jagged metal tear through mist as a section of hull along the station’s side erupted. At first she didn’t understand what had happened—maybe, she thought, the fires from the gas pod’s destruction had detonated some volatile piece of machinery—but then she saw shadows within the cloud of smoke and wreckage.

  A trail of TIE fighters emerged from the station’s wound like insects roused from their nest. First one, then a pair, then a steady stream. Whole squadrons, no longer captive.

  They were blasting their way out of the broken hangars. Shadow Wing was free.

  Quell’s eyes were fixed on the dark trail. She barely had the presence of mind to touch her comm. “Lark! Your side of the station. Are you seeing—”

  “I see it!” he replied. “They’re coming out!”

  Then we’ve lost, she thought. They’d barely been able to survive against two patrols. Against every squadron in the 204th, they were doomed.

  But though her mind was nearly paralyzed, her body was not. The enemy still pursued her, and she pulled up and away from the station, her vision swimming as she looked toward a gas tanker drifting far above. Streaks of emerald flared past her and she twisted to and fro, trying to shake the enemy. Her fingers ached as she clutched her control yoke. She plotted a course in her head that would take her back to Chadic. It wasn’t a plan—she had no plan—but it was the least she could do for her squadron.

  She was diving when a miracle occurred. Her comm chimed. A message from D6-L appeared on her console.

  Kairos’s mission was complete.

  She cried out her response in a voice of clarity and desperation: “Blow the reactor! Do it!”

  She risked another glance toward the station. The great spoked wheel was a monstrous thing, flames licking one side and smaller fires, dimmer and ornamented with electrical arcs, crackling where the two starfighter hangars should have been. The trails of TIEs hadn’t stopped, and the clouds of enemy ships could have been mistaken for ash and dust.

  Quell waited for what she knew would come next.

  IX

  Caern Adan didn’t understand the look of horror on General Syndulla’s face. He had watched the battle progress from the same vantage, seen the same esoteric tactical displays and heard the same shouted reports as her. He had felt his underarms dampen with sweat and his stomach churn and he’d yearned desperately to stride to his quarters and find a bottle of—well, just about anything.

  But even with Shadow Wing released from its prison, they were on the verge of triumph. He saw energy readings spike on the long-range sensors. Someone called, “Visual confirmation! The reactor has been detonated!”

  This wasn’t the plan. The plan had been to disable the 204th’s orbital headquarters with the fighters still inside, crippling Pandem Nai’s defenses so that the fleet could move in. But the attack could still prevail. A Shadow Wing without leadership, without a base of operations and support crews and fuel and equipment, would last days against a siege, not months.

  So why did General Syndulla stare at the strategy grid and the scanner readings like she was watching the end of the New Republic?

  “Critical temperature,” she called across the room to a tactical droid. “What’s the critical temperature?”

  The droid began rattling off numbers. Caern didn’t understand. By the looks of it, neither did the general. “Just tell me this,” she said. “What happens if they don’t get those fires under control?”

  Then Caern understood.

  He sat back in his chair and tried to determine whether he’d won or lost.

  CHAPTER 18

  CATASTROPHIC FAILURE

  I

  Quell watched the orbital station lurch, its burning port side listing downward. The center of the spoked wheel flashed and glimmered with fire and electricity and radiation bursts triggered by the detonation of the main reactor. Yet even inside her X-wing’s airtight cockpit, she heard the blasts more than she saw them; from above the station, she lacked a direct view of the reactor casing.

  The detonation wouldn’t destroy the station. A dozen secondary reactors would power the repulsors and keep it aloft, with minimal power throughout. But it would no longer be a threat. As the last of the TIE fighters trailed out of the broken hangars, Quell hoped that the loss of their headquarters would force the pilots to pull back to the planet surface. They might yet cede the upper atmosphere to Syndulla’s fleet.

  Her pursuers fell off her trail—confused or responding to new orders—and Quell dived toward Chadic’s last position. She was glancing at her scanner when she heard another peal of thunder and felt another shock wave below her fighter. The jolt passed, but she was searching for the source when a third shock wave hit her and slammed her helmet against the back of her seat.

  Light burned beneath the orbital station as if it sat on a field of fire. The flames along the port side now enveloped half the structure. When the next roll of thunder came, Quell realized what was happening.

  The fire spawned by the gas pod was growing in intensity. Whether due to the initial attack, the hangar explosions, or the detonation of the reactor, it was now strong enough to heat the other Tibanna containment pods to bursting. One by one, the pods were igniting, and with each pod ravaged the fire grew brighter and more terrible. The atmosphere began to churn, as if the orbital station had become the center of a storm.

  Another pod ignited, then another. Tendrils of scarlet mist lit up and wove away from the station, like burning serpents or arteries pumping blood.

  The sky of Pandem Nai caught alight.

  All Quell could think of was Operation Cinder. The storm that the Empire had stoked to destroy Nacronis.

  It’s happening again, she thought. It’s happening again.

  II

  There was nothing but fire—fire and the dark specks of TIE fighters against the light, riding thunder and destruction. Chass rode the waves as well, but no matter how unsuited for atmospheric flight the TIEs were, the B-wing was worse. Only the gyrostabilizers in the cockpit prevented her from being dashed against the canopy a dozen times over as the firestorm threw her higher. The slow, rhythmic beat of cymbals and soft words from the comm was nearly lost in the howl of the wind.

  She didn’t know what was happening. Something had ignited the gas clouds of Pandem Nai, clearly. But how? She supposed it didn’t matter.

  Was this a success? A failure? She wasn’t sure.

  The TIEs were still firing. She opened her throttle, trying to escape the storm as her enemies—shooting wildly in her direction—did the same. She grinned and rolled her ship and prepared to counterattack. Success or failure, nothing really changed.

  She would fight until the end.

  She adjusted the comm system until the music became deafening, overpowering the rush of flames and the sizzle of particle bolts. She thought briefly of Jyn
Erso on Scarif, standing defiant before the battle station that would destroy a planet to stop her, before even that thought faded away, replaced by the beat of a furious song.

  III

  Wyl Lark felt the heat through his canopy and through the metal shell of his fighter. His shields flickered in and out of visibility. He rode the shock waves of the detonations, but the A-wing, for all its speed, was a fragile vessel. It wouldn’t last long in a firestorm.

  Had Quell planned this? Was this all the result of destroying the reactor?

  The TIE fighters wouldn’t last, either. Like him, they sped away from the detonations—yet still they pursued him. Char and Blink looped and wove together, coordinating their shots and forcing Wyl to choose between particle bolts and burning clouds. The orbital station fell away beneath him as he tried desperately to elude his enemies without incinerating his craft.

  Did they recognize him, as he recognized them? Did Char and Blink long to kill the last survivor of Riot Squadron, completing the mission they’d left unfinished?

  Why else would they still be following him, even amid catastrophe?

  Other thoughts nagged at him, and he prized aside layers of fear to reach them. Kairos was still inside the orbital station. He couldn’t help her. Nath had been flying close to the initial blasts when Wyl had been tossed away. Even now, he was failing to protect his partner.

  He activated his comm, adjusting frequency to try to breach the firestorm’s interference. “Nath! I lost track of you—can you get clear of the blasts?”

  Only static came in return.

  “Nath!”

  With a fraction of a second to spare, he dived out of the path of a particle bolt volley.

  He tried to make out the orbital station through a wall of flames. This couldn’t have been some secret plan, he decided. The fire was spreading too far, too quickly, and he couldn’t imagine what could occur if it—