Chass looked between her scanner and the asteroid. A moment later she spotted the glinting vessels erupting like a geyser from a chasm, the spout compact closest to the asteroid before dispersing farther out. She counted at least a dozen ships—all basic TIE/ln fighters, with two broad, flat panels protecting the central cockpit eye.
In the hands of a skilled pilot, a TIE fighter was a knife—swift and slender and deadly against a lumbering beast like the B-wing. In lesser hands a TIE was a garbage pail strapped with guns. Clumsy and defenseless.
Alphabet Squadron had been in Cerberon long enough for Chass to understand what to expect.
“Look at them,” Chass muttered. “They can’t even stay in formation.”
Quell grunted but didn’t disagree. The TIEs broke into separate flights, sweeping away from the chasm as one last ship emerged: a cargo shuttle, boxy and asymmetrical with a four-winged design out of fashion for decades. Chass called out its coordinates and said, “Looks like it’s running—you want to go after it?”
“No.”
“This why we’re out here?”
“Yes,” Quell said. “With the hideout on Troithe gone, we know exactly where it’s going. But we can’t let it look like we’re letting it escape.”
Eight TIEs moved between the New Republic fighters and the shuttle, dividing into pairs and sticking close to the rocks. “Two ways of doing that,” Chass said. “We’re outnumbered, so we could run like idiots—or we could fight as hard as we can while trying not to win. You know my vote.”
Chass expected she knew Quell’s vote, too. But anything sounded better than returning home, lying in her bunk, and waiting for the next mission. The Narvath retro-shudder came to a close and a new song, squealed at high speed in a language she didn’t recognize, began.
“Sixty seconds of fight time,” Quell offered. “If we’re hard-pressed, we blow one of the big rocks for cover and bail in the debris shower.”
Chass laughed, boosted power to her deflectors, and tumbled toward the enemy. Maybe Quell had changed, but she liked her new commander. “Deal. Try to keep them off me, huh?”
The TIEs were using the asteroids for shelter. It wasn’t a bad plan, but the counter was straightforward: Chass squeezed her trigger and filled the sky with particle bolts, raking the asteroids and sending granite shrapnel flying in every possible direction. Her own shields flickered as she was pelted by stone fragments. If she was very lucky, a shard would puncture an unlucky and unshielded TIE’s engine, but all she was really looking to do was make a mess and reduce scanner visibility—and in that, she had succeeded.
She called out her target as Quell swept around, attempting to intercept the first pair of TIEs heading their way. Instinct told Chass what could happen next—told her a dozen ways she could win and fifty more she could die, but she’d learned in the past weeks that death was a broken promise. Verzan, the system’s airless garrison world, had been a fortress that cracked open under the Lodestar’s fire and Alphabet’s proton bombs. Catadra’s temples and palaces had burned as its defenders spat impotent turbolaser volleys. The battle group had seized Troithe’s main spaceport in less than a day of fighting. In Cerberon there was no sense that any lost battle could be the last in the war, as there had been with the Rebellion; there was no failure the New Republic couldn’t recover from against a scattered and diminished Empire.
People died. Infantry died. But TIEs were in short supply and death was for the stupid and careless, not for heroes.
It wasn’t what Chass wanted, but she figured she might as well enjoy it.
She adjusted her aim and fired at the first of the TIEs as Quell’s X-wing tore through the second fighter. She hauled her control yoke to port, barely avoided a volley of particle bolts as her opponent sped past her, and rather than pursue, focused instead on the six fresh enemies closing fast. “Got to hit one of them,” she muttered, and loosed quick pulses at the cluster.
“I’m taking a shot at the cargo shuttle,” Quell said. “Hold on.”
Chass half snarled, half laughed as the X-wing slipped between the asteroids and fired wildly at a target she could no longer see. The seven surviving TIEs changed course to surround her—she shot down one, grazed another, and watched emerald streak past her canopy. One of the nearest asteroids was burning, releasing some combustible gas from a punctured pocket. She put her aft to the flames and wondered how she would survive.
She transferred power to her forward deflectors. She wasn’t surprised when the TIE closest to her exploded instead of shooting. The dagger of an A-wing interceptor cut through the blooming flames and then spun about, eliminating another opponent in a single maneuver.
“You knew they were on their way?” Chass asked, less irritated than she sounded.
“I knew,” Quell said. “You got your sixty seconds.”
Chass looked to her console. With the debris still cluttering the scanner readings, she couldn’t make out the U-wing or Y-wing, but she was confident they were there, too.
“Good to see you, too,” Nath’s voice snapped through the comm. “Play us some music and let’s save your butt.”
III
The dying-animal squeal of Chass’s music flooded the comm as Nath Tensent plodded toward the battle. T5 was reconfiguring his thruster output but he doubted the droid would squeeze much more out of the aging Y-wing. “Just keep us steady,” he called, and the ship only seemed to buck harder.
If he was late to the fight, he thought, it would be for the best. After hitting the walker, he was short on ordnance.
Quell called out orders. Nath snapped off a few shots, coming close to actually hitting a TIE before Kairos, of all people, eliminated his target. She wasn’t a showy flier or a tactical mastermind, and Nath had a habit of forgetting she was more than troop support, but she still packed a punch when on the offensive.
Chass, meanwhile, scrapped more TIEs than should’ve been possible by a B-wing. By the time Nath came into optimal firing range, all that was left was salvage and an asteroid that burned like a reactor core mid-meltdown. “You never know what’s flammable around here,” he said. “We all set? We need to hunt for survivors?”
“One crashed into that burning asteroid,” Wyl replied. “I’ll do a flyby, check and see.”
Poor boy, Nath thought, and shook his head with a smile.
“Finish up quick,” Quell said. “Kairos, stay with Lark in case he finds something. Chadic, sweep for reinforcements on my wing. Xion, scan all comm frequencies and make sure that cargo shuttle isn’t sending a distress call.”
Wyl and Chass called acknowledgments. Kairos moved into position. Guess that makes me Xion, Nath mused, but he didn’t comment on Quell’s slip and he let T5 scan as instructed. No one else seemed to have noticed.
“So, you pull off whatever convoluted spy job you and Adan had planned?” he asked.
“I’ll let you know when it’s done,” Quell said.
Soon after they were finished and en route to Troithe, the five vessels moving in formation out of the debris field and their computer-adjusted velocities locking them in relative position as they swept toward the planet. They crossed over the broken landmass and a neighboring sea, then descended toward one of the unshielded sectors of the sprawling city-continent.
The solar projectors had dimmed from pale yellow to a twilight blue, suffusing the blur of decaying skyscrapers and disused industrial parks—a testament to millennia of development and transformation and vibrancy that had peaked long before the rise and fall of the Empire. Centuries earlier, Troithe had rivaled Coruscant as the Republic’s cosmopolitan jewel, its city encompassing half a globe and teeming with billions of residents—more than a few belonging to the Republic’s most respected aristo-mercantile families.
Troithe had been the sort of planet the rust worlds of the Mid Rim
pretended to be: a place of invention and manufacturing, where a skilled artisan could develop a cognitive module in the morning, attend a trendy concert midday, and oversee the assembly of an innovator droid army at night. Troithe fell anyway: Coruscant, already the political center of the Republic, had drawn migrants from thousands of Republic member worlds and foreign allies and built sector after sector, level after level of new housing blocks in response. It began to outpace Troithe as an industrial powerhouse by virtue of its greater population, putting hands and minds from countless species to work.
And as Coruscant’s production had waxed, Troithe’s waned due to factors both unavoidable (the exhaustion of precious mineral resources on the broken continent; the Cerberon system’s decreasing accessibility in a Republic expanding into the Colonies and the Inner Rim; the gradual decay of Troithe’s planetary orbit as it spiraled toward the black hole) and tragically preventable (a short-lived civil war between the mixed-species underclass and the majority human population—a conflict manipulated in part by an ambitious aristo-mercantile family seeking to profit). By the Clone Wars, Troithe had settled into slow decline. Every year, its billions-strong populace grew a little smaller. Every year, another factory shut down or another residential district was abandoned.
Many of Troithe’s inhabitants had welcomed Emperor Palpatine’s promises of renewal and restored prominence for their world. Some of those promises had even been kept, and a substantial portion of the population still retained Imperial sympathies. That was one reason why the operation to seize Troithe had been slow going.
The skyscraper hills sloped into a basin filled with low metal platforms and webs of scaffolding, along with tents and prefab shelters packing the roads and runways. Past the refugee enclaves came hangars and tarmacs occupied by dozens of freighters, corvettes, and snubfighters. At the very center was the Lodestar, the aging Acclamator-class battleship that had carried Nath and his colleagues across half the galaxy and back.
“You can smell the carbon scoring from here,” Nath observed. “Old girl hasn’t moved for weeks and she’s still waiting for a good scrubbing.”
“Your kind of woman,” Chass answered with a snort, and laughed to herself at length.
Instead of angling for the battleship, the starfighters curved toward a landing pad half a kilometer out while Kairos split off with her U-wing to join the other transports. Twenty minutes later Nath had lowered his vessel onto the landing pad, briefed his ground crew on his spent weaponry (he didn’t trust them with more than basic maintenance), and extracted T5 for recharging. Finally, he reunited with Wyl under the black sky to begin their trek back to the carrier.
Sweat saturated both men’s flight suits, though the day was cool and mild. Each carried his helmet under his right arm. Aside from uniforms and postures they bore little resemblance to each other: Where Nath was broad and muscular, Wyl was slender; where Nath’s hair was dark, receding, and pulled back, Wyl’s was brown and neat; where Nath’s skin was tinged with brass, Wyl’s was olive-toned. Yet despite nearly two decades separating them, both walked with the swagger of youth.
They spoke to those around them more than to each other—as they strode down tarmacs Wyl waved encouragement at two Hail Squadron pilots tinkering with their ships. Nath yelled good-natured insults and sly innuendos at passing speeder riders and received grins and ripostes in return.
“You see Chass anywhere?” Wyl asked after a while.
“She’s gone wherever she goes after missions. Expect she’ll be back by morning.”
They didn’t see Quell, either—Nath assumed she’d already gone to huddle with Caern Adan at his makeshift intelligence headquarters—but they crossed paths with Kairos as the Lodestar’s hull grew large on the horizon. If the silent woman ever sweated, it didn’t show through the layers of fabric that swaddled her body or the riveted metal mask that concealed her face. She fell into step beside them as they maneuvered through a field of tugs, loadlifters, and equipment crates before marching up the boarding ramp. Inside, the vast hangar mirrored the civilian encampment outside; rows of multicolored tents, the smell of oil sizzling on heater plates, and the noise of a hundred conversations dominated. Soldiers ate and cleaned their rifles and played keep-away with someone’s crumpled jacket.
“The heroes of Alphabet Squadron!” a burly sergeant with a stormtrooper’s haircut cried. “You drag yourselves back here looking for applause?”
“We’ll take it if you’re offering,” Nath said.
The sergeant—Nath vaguely recalled the other troops calling him Carver—scoffed loudly, swept his gaze past Wyl, and then gave a fierce nod to Kairos. “Only one who deserves it won’t be the one to ask. Strike team sends its regards—good shooting out there.”
Kairos didn’t seem to hear, and strode toward one of the corridors leading off the hangar. For a woman who risked herself for the infantry as often as she did, she never seemed much interested in face-to-face encounters.
Wyl tried to excuse himself next, but Nath gripped him by the arm and pulled him into conversation with Carver and a dozen other ground troops. While Alphabet had been running jobs for New Republic Intelligence, the Sixty-First Mobile Infantry had continued its slow march through the districts of Troithe. The ground war was a war of attrition and the outcome seemed inevitable—same as throughout the galaxy, really, where there hadn’t been a decisive triumph since Pandem Nai—but the stories were decent enough and it was best not to get on the infantry’s bad side.
“Be charming,” Nath muttered to Wyl as a jittery woman named Twitch described knifing Imperial guerrillas in an alleyway. “You get shot down, you’re going to need these people.”
“Troithe needs these people,” Wyl returned. “General Syndulla needs these people. I need a shower before we’re called out again.”
“Suit yourself.” Nath shrugged. “I can celebrate for the full squadron.”
He could, too. He started to, making an effort to learn the names of Zab and Vitale and Junior, watching for exhaustion and boredom and fervor in the eyes of the grunts as he wove lies about how Alphabet had come together, why General Hera Syndulla had brought them to Cerberon aboard the Lodestar and joined the ground war. He could’ve gone on for hours, but eventually his comm buzzed and he was surprised to hear Quell’s voice crackle through.
“Couldn’t get through to the others,” she said. “Pass the word—briefing tomorrow with the general.”
“Good news or bad?” Nath asked.
“Adan and I have a plan,” Quell said. “The convoluted spy job worked, and we got the intelligence we were looking for off the captured cargo shuttle.”
“Sighting?”
She would know what he meant.
There’d been no confirmed sightings of the Empire’s Shadow Wing since Pandem Nai. They didn’t talk about the enemy they’d been assigned to neutralize anymore—had avoided the topic insistently since reaching Cerberon, with their efforts to assist the assault broken up only by the occasional inexplicable intelligence op.
“Not exactly.”
“What, then?”
She didn’t speak for long enough that Nath wondered if he’d lost the signal.
“We’ve been looking at the layout of the Cerberon system. We have the makings of a trap,” she said.
Nath grinned.
Quell was a liar, a hypocrite, and a war criminal. But on her best days, the woman had style.
CHAPTER 2
AN HONEST DAY’S WORK
I
Soran Keize stood aboard the bridge of the Aerie, surrounded by tactical displays and viewscreens aglow with charts and status readings. He saw none of them consciously—he allowed his hindbrain to absorb the data and translate it into something visceral, staring instead through the viewport of a TIE in his mind’s eye, listening to the imagined scream of the vessel�
�s twin engines.
He saw junk rings glimmering in the sky above Jarbanov’s barren soil, and the domes of a colony rising on the horizon like triple suns. From one of the rings, a glittering stream trickled into the atmosphere like a distant waterfall. Leather-winged birds prowled the air, dipping close enough to study the TIE before veering off in search of easier prey.
“Squadron Four is in position now, Major.” The voice came from the comm. “What do you suppose we should do next?”
Soran let his eyelids flicker and banished the fantasy. When he returned to himself he spoke softly and deliberately, observing the reactions of his bridge officers to Captain Gablerone’s evident sarcasm.
“Proceed as planned,” Soran said. “We have you on monitors and will provide assistance if required.”
“Acknowledged, Aerie,” Gablerone replied, before issuing commands to his squadron—calling approach vectors and assigning targets, ordering final systems checks before the violence began.
The Aerie’s bridge crew, meanwhile, concentrated on their consoles and headsets, never glancing toward Soran. He’d met most of them only recently, but he recognized a stiffness to their professionalism. Officers comfortable with their duties showed it in their posture and the ease of their words. Chatter meant communication and cooperation. Quiet soldiers, conversely, were soldiers with unspoken fears.
He would return to that later. For the moment, his bridge crew was out of danger. It was his pilots who required attention.
Squadron Four struck its first two targets almost simultaneously. Lieutenant Seedia—the squadron’s newest member, transferred and promoted after the death of Draige at Pandem Nai—and her wing strafed the colony’s primary disassembly plant. Soran had suggested filling Draige’s role with Arron, but Arron had died on a mission to someplace called the Oridol Cluster; a loss Soran blamed on his own recent absence. Lieutenant Kandende’s flight, meanwhile, fired on the battery recycling facility nearly too late to inflict significant damage. Soran would have to interrogate that error during debriefing.
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