Shadow Fall (Star Wars)

by Alexander Freed

  Give them time, he told himself, then chastened himself. Time was not on their side.

  “Distress calls going out,” Rassus announced from his station on the bridge, glancing backward at Soran. “Shall we attempt to jam them?”

  “No,” Soran said.

  Rassus opened his mouth to argue, then returned his attention to his console.

  Question me or be silent, Soran wanted to say. Show confidence for the sake of the others.

  Perhaps the others wouldn’t notice.

  The fighters continued their brutal work, Gablerone’s own flight spraying fire onto the roads and bridges. Soran had timed the attack precisely, allowing the colony’s industrial hubs to release their workers from their afternoon shift. Civilian casualties (if one could call colonists supplying the New Republic military civilians) would be higher than if he’d chosen a nighttime strike, but that was incidental to Soran’s goal. Fewer workers at their stations guaranteed greater chaos.

  It was a lesson he’d learned in the aftermath of the Roona attacks, years before. The tactics of the Rebel Alliance had struck him as cruel, then. Perhaps attacking from a position of weakness required cruelty.

  “Patrol craft sighted,” Gablerone announced. “Enemies incoming.”

  “As we discussed,” Soran answered. “Do not engage.”

  He turned his attention to the tactical maps and watched the TIE flights increase speed as they wove through the colony. The local militia was confined to atmospheric vehicles—according to the intelligence Soran had been able to obtain, there were no enemy starfighters in-system—but so close to ground level the TIEs had no natural advantage over armored cloud cars. The TIEs took evasive action through the streets, firing on targets of opportunity while avoiding closing range with the patrols.

  Soran knew his people well enough to understand the restraint they exerted—none of them was comfortable running from a threat. Yet they maneuvered well. Outnumbered and in unfamiliar territory, utilizing tactics they’d lacked even a simulator to practice, they outflew their enemies with ease. An enemy patrol craft disappeared from the tactical map, and Lieutenant Seedia called out the cause: a collision with a garbage silo by an enemy attempting to outflank the TIEs. “Convenient,” she added, “for whatever cleanup crew comes after.” Soran heard pride in her aristocratic enunciation.

  Afraid or not, doubting or not, the men and women who flew over Jarbanov were still pilots of the 204th. They were still Shadow Wing. If their execution was imperfect, it was because they’d flown through the gates of hell and returned to fight a war they hadn’t trained for—not because a backwater colony militia could match them blow for blow.

  “How much more time?” he asked, striding lazily behind Rassus.

  “Three minutes. Maybe four,” the gray-haired major said.

  “Good.” Soran clapped a hand on Rassus’s shoulder and began to pace the bridge, attempting to project confidence.

  He listened to reports of recycling yards burning and junker caravans scattered, updating his profile of Squadron Four and its pilots. Every call and response reminded him of how much the unit had changed—he had found Shadow Wing decimated, reeling from the loss of Colonel Shakara Nuress and with a roster of dead longer than any he’d predicted.

  He’d called Nuress Grandmother. They all had once, in sly admiration of the woman who had made the 204th into one of the Empire’s finest fighter wings. She had been his friend, and in honor of her memory—among other reasons—he had come to take command, to reshape the unit, after once refusing to shed his blood with his pilots in their darkest hour.

  His homecoming had been…difficult. Command was not what he had been given.

  He checked the tactical map again. “Captain Gablerone? May I make a suggestion?”

  Gablerone paused for longer than Soran would have liked. “Go ahead.”

  “You’re outnumbered. Crossfire situations are to your advantage. You may wish to adjust formation accordingly.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind, Major,” Gablerone said.

  Gablerone did not adjust his squadron’s positioning, and Soran didn’t press the matter.

  He had been a different man during his absence from Shadow Wing. He remembered being Devon and mourned the loss.

  Devon had never truly treasured his own existence—his freedom from all responsibility, save for those he chose. He had not appreciated the luxuries of mercy and time.

  “One minute!” Rassus called.

  “Withdraw your forces when ready,” Soran said.

  Devon could never have survived in the 204th.

  Soran watched Squadron Four shake its pursuers and skim the surface of the planet Jarbanov before rapidly ascending. Seedia hung at the rear of her flight, straying off course long enough to puncture a row of hazard vaults on the colony outskirts—an act Soran had advised against during planning, out of an abundance of caution. He tried to picture how the young lieutenant had bypassed the defenses and made a note to warn the ground crew.

  “Congratulations, Lieutenant Seedia,” he said. “You may have just rendered the entire Jarbanov colony radioactive.”

  “Do you object, adviser?”

  Adviser. Her voice suggested no hint of disrespect, but even Gablerone had called him by his rank.

  “I don’t,” he said, “but I suggest you remain in your cockpit until all trace radiation has been scrubbed from your ship.”

  “I’m comfortable in my flight suit,” Seedia replied. “Proceeding with the extraction.”

  Someone snickered over the comm channel.

  The single Republic corvette in orbit would attempt to intercept Squadron Four, but the TIEs had speed and planning on their side. They headed directly for the far side of Jarbanov’s moon, where they would soon rendezvous with the cruiser-carrier Allegiance and jump directly to hyperspace. Escape would not be difficult, even if the squadron’s discipline appeared lax.

  Which meant Soran could turn his attention to other matters.

  He looked from the tactical screens to the viewport, studying the massive junk field where the Aerie drifted. With its systems at low power and the colonists otherwise occupied, the vessel had maneuvered deep into the inner system, dangerously close to Jarbanov.

  Jarbanov was on the outskirts of the junker systems—not officially affiliated with the guild, but nonetheless a major processing center for everything from starship wrecks to obsolete planetary mining rigs. It had taken Soran considerable time, effort, and expenditure of personal influence, but he had managed to make contact with a reliable ally inside the Jarbanov Orbital Sorting Association.

  “Do we have a visual?” Soran asked.

  Rassus nodded, flipping a switch on his console. “Activating the tractor beam now,” he said.

  The secondary viewscreen flashed, replacing an image of Jarbanov’s moon with a low-resolution feed from the Aerie’s main hangar. Beyond the magnetic field, outside the ship, local space was cluttered with unidentifiable plastoid lumps and pitted bulkheads. Moving toward the Aerie, caught in the grip of the tractor beam, was a salvage sled: an autonomous vehicle fifty meters long, little more than a spindly platform with magnetic clamps protruding from its body like a centipede’s legs.

  As the tractor beam urged the sled closer, the sled’s cargo came into view: Attached to nine clamps was the wreckage of nine TIE/ln starfighters. One vessel was missing the solar collectors on its port wing, leaving its naked side albino white. Another lacked its cockpit viewport, as if someone had gouged out its eye. A third TIE had had both wings amputated altogether. All were smeared with ash and carbon scoring, and many dangled cables and piping from exposed wounds.

  Soran looked from the viewscreen to his crew. He noted pursed lips; eyes that refused to observe. He voiced the sentiment that he knew was in their
hearts: “We risked our lives for these? We risked our colleagues in Squadron Four and exposed ourselves to attack for—what? Junk?”

  He shook his head briskly, waiting for Rassus and the others to turn his way. When they did, he continued.

  “These are our ships. These are the vessels of the Empire, flown by pilots who gave their lives for their brothers and sisters. They will have the chance to fight again.

  “We will make them fly again.”

  He timed his words carefully. He finished as the tractor beam deactivated and the sled gently tapped the deck of the hangar, then transitioned from speechmaking to command in an eyeblink. “Lock down the hangar and retrace our path through the field. Prepare for lightspeed jump.”

  Thankfully, the crew obeyed. Rassus hadn’t yet questioned him openly. Someone whispered, “Let’s just burn down a planet already,” and Soran felt the Aerie vibrate beneath him as the cruiser-carrier’s thrusters ignited.

  Everything he’d said was true. It galled him to stage an operation solely as a diversion—solely so he could claim ships that the Empire would have incinerated rather than repaired. That even the New Republic had deemed unworthy of use. It pained him to put his pilots into action when they were barely a cohesive unit.

  But the 204th was fragile. He had counted the TIEs and pilots surviving, and neither was sufficient to the task ahead. He could not lead a wing ready to break after a single blow; he could not save his unit without rebuilding it.

  It would take time. But he would restore Shadow Wing to glory.

  CHAPTER 3

  PAST AND FUTURE GLORIES

  I

  “I called him Xion. In the middle of an operation, I called Tensent by Xion’s name. I don’t think he noticed.”

  “Would it be terrible if he had?” the droid asked. It dilated the red dot of its photoreceptor, in the accusatory way Yrica Quell had grown accustomed to. “Your squadron is aware of your past inside the Empire.”

  “Not really,” Quell said.

  “No. Not really.”

  The IT-O unit’s spherical black chassis floated roughly two meters from Quell, above the emergency driver’s pit of the tram car. Quell sat in the doorway opposite, where a heavy barricade should have sealed off unruly passengers from the cab’s almost entirely automated controls. But the tram car hadn’t run for weeks—not since the New Republic had secured Troithe’s primary spaceport, and likely not during the turmoil preceding—and the reprogrammed interrogation droid had taken the car for its office, correctly presuming no one else would need the vehicle.

  “I remember things all the time now,” she said, and it was as difficult a confession as any she’d made.

  In the Cerberon debris field Quell’s mind had drifted to another mission—a patrol on the outskirts of Cathar, undertaken shortly after her graduation from the Imperial Academy. Back then she’d discovered during takeoff that her helmet had reeked of creamed longcorn and bile. She’d been new to her squadron and had said nothing about the stench. When she’d returned to the Star Destroyer Pursuer it had been another three shifts before Sergeant Greef found her scrubbing her flight suit; as it turned out, half a dozen officers and crew had known about “the incident” with Xion, who’d grabbed Quell’s helmet at a moment of acute nausea.

  Quell wasn’t sure why the mission had dredged up that particular memory, but it had. The memories that came were often of unimportant things—of Shadow Wing pilots who had died a year into her tour of duty, or of the astringent aftertaste of Imperial rations stamped by Aldraig manufactories. Occasionally she remembered more distressing events—maneuvering through the clutterbomb-riddled passages honeycombing Tassahondee Station, or the day she’d nearly collided with an ejected rebel pilot in the vast emptiness of space.

  Sometimes she thought about how, months before coming to Troithe, when she’d still belonged to the 204th Imperial Fighter Wing, she had taken part in an unforgivable crime. She had abetted—she had performed—an act of genocide on the planet Nacronis. Given the opportunity, she’d have continued in her role of murderer, of war criminal, of squadron commander. Only her mentor had saved her from that fate.

  “Memory is a construct,” the droid said. “For your species, an individual recollection is not a single clear recording but a reassembly of all relevant data. Before Pandem Nai, you suppressed the keystone to all of your memories with the 204th. Now that you have acknowledged your trauma, it is not surprising other memories would surface.”

  Major Soran Keize had told her as they’d surveyed the Nacronis wasteland: “If you would do this, then there’s nothing that will drive you out.” He’d spoken of a moral sickness destroying her, and warned that she would stay with the 204th until either the sickness killed her or the rebels did.

  Keize had ordered her to leave, and she had. She’d lacked the spine to argue. She’d lied to the New Republic about the circumstances of her defection, lied to her comrades about attempting to thwart the genocide at Nacronis, lied to her new superiors, and lied to herself. She’d found that so long as she clung to the fiction of Yrica Quell, the righteous woman who’d been pushed too far and tried and failed to stop Operation Cinder, she could hunt down her old friends with barely a twinge of remorse.

  But now someone knew. The droid knew. She could no longer lie to herself.

  So she was beginning to remember.

  “You witnessed a terrible act,” the droid went on. “You feel tremendous guilt, and daily you deceive the colleagues with whom you entrust your life. The notion that this should not affect your health is absurd on its surface. The only question is whether you will permit us to heal the injuries you have suffered, rather than simply ameliorate them.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” Quell said.

  “You are. And I recognize that important step. Nonetheless, I’m not certain I understand what you expect from these sessions. I wonder if you know yourself.”

  “I want you to show me how to get my focus back. If you need to medicate me, medicate me.”

  The droid’s primary manipulator twitched. The attached syringe was empty. “Medication is in extremely short supply. I will assist you in functioning day-to-day, but the symptoms are not the disease.”

  She stretched out one leg that had been folded beneath her and rubbed at the tattoo on her biceps showing the Alphabet crest.

  She knew better than to argue with the droid. It meant well, but healing was a luxury. The only permanent solution was to finish her mission and get as far away from Alphabet Squadron and New Republic Intelligence and Caern Adan as possible. Escape the people who knew the truth, and the people who would judge her if they knew.

  “What do you want to talk about?” she asked.

  “I’d like to return to the topic of Nacronis,” the droid replied. “Specifically, I’d like to talk about the story you concocted, and some of the details you decided upon. I don’t know if you’re aware, but you—”

  The sound of a fist rapping on metal interrupted the conversation. Quell jerked up, ready to spring to a stand. The droid descended toward the control pit, depressing a toggle and activating the tram’s intercom system. A woman’s voice came through, low and lightly accented: “Gravas here. I’m looking for Yrica Quell.”

  “We’re in the middle of a session,” the droid said. “Can we alert you when we’re done?”

  “Mister Adan’s very busy,” the intercom replied. “So’s the general. They’re ready for her now.” The language was civil, if not entirely courteous. The tone left no room for interpretation.

  The droid acquiesced without further argument. “Car doors unlocked.” Quell rose, swaying on the balls of her feet, and turned away from the cab. The synthesized, masculine voice of the droid called out to her, “You will return tomorrow?”

  “If I can,” she said. Which was true, and vagu
e enough to bind her to nothing.

  * * *

  —

  “We can seize the capital,” General Syndulla said. The green-skinned woman raised her chin, her head-tails bouncing as her eyes swept the room. “The only questions are: How long will it take? and How much will it cost?”

  They’d requisitioned the Lodestar’s tactical center for the briefing. It was less formal than the ready rooms, and with the battleship parked planetside there were no crew members making use of the transparent screens protruding like crystalline stalagmites from every surface. Instead, Quell, Caern Adan, and Syndulla stood at one end of a holographic display table, surrounded by flat images of urban topography and Imperial bunkers and planetary shield maps. Wyl Lark, Chass na Chadic, and Nath Tensent sat at the table’s other end, eyes on the general or roaming the room. Kairos paced, moving from one screen to the next, studying the data.

  Quell could’ve scolded her, but she’d accepted months earlier that Kairos was a woman of unusual habits. Besides, she was still shaking off the session with her therapist.

  “Alphabet Squadron,” Syndulla continued, “has been instrumental in the progress we’ve made in Cerberon so far. With Vanguard Squadron on special assignment in the Bormea sector, Alphabet, Meteor, and Hail are all we’ve got for the remainder of the campaign. However—” She looked among the pilots, even locking her eyes with Kairos’s visor. “—I haven’t forgotten Shadow Wing. I know you haven’t, either. Officer Adan has shared the suspected sightings list with me, and I agree there is a danger.”

  Quell caught Adan’s glance in her direction. He stood to one side holding a datapad, his antenna-stalks nestled in his coiled black hair, and looked simultaneously bemused and smug.

  “Do we know what they’re doing?” Tensent asked. He started to raise his boots to the tabletop, then appeared to think better of it. “Grandmother’s dead. Did they find an Imp battle group still active?”