Vitale raised her wine cup with a grin before spitting on the ground. “If they tried him first, every Imperial who followed would have a defense: I wasn’t as bad as that guy.”
“Executions never brought anyone justice,” someone else said, and Quell stared past Lark’s shoulder into the crowds of refugees milling about in the starlight or heading to their tents. The conversation fractured, one half of the gathering arguing over the ethics of capital punishment while the other half offered ill-informed tactical speculation about the defenses of the Anoat sector and the Iron Blockade there.
“Come on,” Nath Tensent said, and practically lifted Quell from her seat one-handed. “Let the dirt-stompers have the table—we’ve all got enough wine in us to enjoy the night.”
* * *
—
She would’ve had an excuse if she’d been drunk. But only Chadic had imbibed enough wine to be more than loose, and Quell knew she was responsible for her choices as they made their way into the spaceport tram station and boarded one of the maintenance cars. Unlike the rest of the network they were self-powered and fully functional.
“We’ll get shot down, and then what?” Quell asked as Tensent withdrew a code cylinder and activated the autonavigation.
“It goes half a klick outside the port,” Lark said patiently. “If there are enemy troops targeting us this close in—”
“—we’d be doing the general a favor, luring ’em out!” Chadic said much too loudly, laughing as she did. She flung her arms around Quell’s shoulders for balance as the tram car lifted out of its moorings and hummed along an ascending mini line.
The four of them rode together, and Quell tried to put aside questions like Why are we doing this tonight? Why am I here? What if an alert goes out? and focus instead on the view and Chadic’s warm, muscular arms against her.
Lark and Tensent were pointing out something below them. Quell didn’t try to see what. She watched the lights of the camp grow smaller until they reflected the brightness of the starry sky. She watched the titanic cityscape become as unreal as a silhouette in the night, saved from total obliteration by scattered lanterns and distant towers blazing like distant beacons, detached from the dormant power grid. Quell felt what she could not see—the antiquity of the world, the billions of lives lived across hundreds of years, the masses still teeming in the darkness, and the utter weight of a world converted into a labyrinth of civilizations extending through time and space. Parts of her brain sparked like a loose electrical conduit, attempting to calculate the tonnage of Troithe’s structures as a means to understand its scale. She didn’t know how to begin.
She leaned against Chass na Chadic and heard conversation beside her, but she no longer understood the words.
* * *
—
It was a glorious evening.
It wasn’t yet midnight when they parted ways. Lark said he needed to check on his ship before bed. Tensent winked and headed back into the refugee camp. Quell escorted Chadic back to the Lodestar, shivering in the night’s chill. The Theelin woman stumbled all the way through the spaceport and into the battleship’s halls, shrugging off Quell’s offers of help and proceeding into a turbolift with a slurred “I do this every night.”
Quell would have followed up—the notion raised alarms and reminded her of Syndulla’s concerns—if she hadn’t heard the footsteps behind her. She turned. Standing in the dim light of the corridor was Kairos.
Quell stiffened as if she’d been caught. Kairos hadn’t been with them through the evening, hadn’t lowered her guard, and now she watched Quell with her softly glowing visor as if she were ready to rebuke Quell for forgetting herself.
Quell opened her mouth and said nothing. She breathed in the floral scent of the strange woman.
Kairos took three steps until she was half a meter from Quell. Each footfall rang like a gong on the metal deck. Quell noted the tears in the woman’s cloak; the rip in the leather of her left glove, which revealed only more fabric beneath.
The last time she’d been so close to Kairos, the woman had thrown her onto the floor of an airless cargo bay and pulled away Quell’s oxygen mask. Kairos had been steady then, implacable, and Quell still didn’t fully understand why the woman had spared her.
Kairos was not steady now, nor implacable. She was trembling.
A voice, low and wet and guttural, made sounds that Quell took full seconds to register as words: “They fall for us, so we may purge the shadow. The mission must succeed.”
As if released from a spell, Kairos’s shoulders slumped and she spun away, marching back the way she’d come.
* * *
—
Chass na Chadic was snoring in Quell’s bunk when Quell finally made it to her billet, one of the Theelin’s legs dangling off the edge and a blanket pulled halfway over her face. The unreality of Quell’s encounter with Kairos dissipated like a dream. She had to hold back a laugh.
She couldn’t imagine why Chadic was there. Once it might have shaken Quell—back when she’d first met the younger woman, when (she could admit it now) she’d felt a juvenile attraction crawling under her skin. She’d felt jealousy watching Chadic and Lark on the cold moon of Harkrova.
That crush was gone now, the intensity burned away in the aftermath of Pandem Nai.
Quell lowered herself to the floor, tugging over a corner of Chadic’s blanket to use as a pillow. As she drifted into sleep, she thought about what Kairos had said: She thought of the masked woman flying above the Thannerhouse lake, hugging the water as she rescued soldiers in the face of certain death; she thought of Kairos killing with cannons and gloved hands.
There was meaning to be found in those half-cogent images, but by morning Quell had forgotten it all.
CHAPTER 6
A STRAIGHT PATH TO TRAGEDY
I
“Bombers in position?”
“Waiting for the fun to start,” Nath Tensent said into his comm, though it struck him as he said it that this was the least fun he’d had in weeks. He called out his coordinates to the Lodestar, leaning back as the Y-wing rumbled around him. “How about you, Chass?”
“You know I’m in position. You can see me floating to starboard,” she answered. “I’m the speck that doesn’t handle well in wind.”
Nath’s display blinked and he read T5’s commentary. His astromech droid had a foul imagination. He grinned and refrained from sharing the message for the sake of the flight control officer. “Just let us know when you’ve got work for us. We’ll keep our eyes on the shield,” he said, and ceased transmitting to the ground.
By now Wyl and Quell were streaking toward the capital, low enough to slip below the energy shield and make for the generators. Until the shield was down, though, there wasn’t much for Nath or Chass or Hail Squadron to do—their assault craft didn’t have the speed or agility to follow the A-wing and X-wing, and the enemy wasn’t stupid enough to send forces out from cover.
So they waited.
“You picking your songs?” Nath asked.
He heard the petulance in Chass’s voice: “How long do you think it takes me?”
“So you’re not busy, then? I’ve got a pack of cards—”
“Seriously?”
“Sure.”
“You got a week’s pay to bet?”
“Sure,” Nath repeated.
His week’s pay wasn’t the same as Chass’s, but she didn’t need to know that. Caern Adan was still lining Nath’s pockets, as he had been since the founding of the working group.
Originally, Adan had treated Nath as his personal agent, offering regular deposits of credits in return for the occasional side job. Now that Adan had a whole division working for him, both men understood the new deal without speaking openly of it: Adan’s payments were meant to keep Nath silent
as much as keep him on the squadron.
Nath had learned things about Yrica Quell that Adan was choosing to keep quiet. Nath was fine with that. He could use the extra cash.
Nath pulled a deck from under his seat. He and Chass played a slow, awkward hand of full open sabacc, occasionally pausing when someone announced progress on the ground. “What do you say about a side wager?” he asked. “Suppose the governor’s got a surprise waiting for us down there?”
Chass laughed loud enough for the cockpit speaker to crackle. “ ’Course he does. No bet.”
Nath shrugged and scratched beneath his helmet’s chin strap. Chass wasn’t the brightest member of the squadron, but she wasn’t an idiot. “What’s your prediction? For the whole battle?”
“My prediction is that Wyl and Quell fly into a firestorm. They scrape by, take out the shield generators anyway, and by the time we get down there it’s all easy flying. Still a meat grinder for the ground troops, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Nath liked the troops of the Sixty-First, but he’d learned before ever joining the military that infantry didn’t survive long. It was why he’d picked the navy instead of the army. “Guess in a few hours, the planet will be ours. Maybe Quell or Adan will share their plans for us, then.”
He noticed the uncertainty in her silence even before her awkward reply. “Right.”
Now, that’s interesting.
“You figure they’ll keep holding back?” he asked. It wasn’t a question he especially cared about, but it was a probe fired off into the night.
“Probably,” Chass said.
Nath turned the conversation over in his head and grinned. “You don’t want to see Shadow Wing again, do you?”
Chass swore. Nath silenced her transmission and replied to a status update from the ground before he caught the end of her signal: “—you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure I do,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Truth is, I don’t think Wyl much wants to run into them again, either.”
“He tell you that?”
“Wyl’s a good kid. He’ll grow into a half-decent commander if he gets the chance. But he isn’t exactly hard to read.”
That got a snort from Chass, though she didn’t say a word. Nath considered sharing what Wyl had told him but decided to keep the boy’s confidence. They’d spent an evening together dancing around the subject, Wyl expressing his gentle frustration with the Troithe operation until it became obvious he was worried about another disaster like Pandem Nai. Worried about the price of another victory.
But Nath assumed that sheer terror played a role in Wyl’s lack of enthusiasm, too. Wyl wasn’t a coward, but he was only human. If he didn’t want to face Shadow Wing again, of course he’d justify it as worry over the plan.
He wondered if he could get Chass to come clean. She was the last squad member he’d expected to have reservations—even if she’d gotten past her death wish, she sure as sin hadn’t lost her grudge against Shadow Wing.
Before he could say anything, she spoke again. “What about you?”
He considered the question before saying, “I got my revenge, and those bastards nearly killed me twice. I’m not looking forward to it, either.”
He left out the parts she didn’t need to hear: That the fun was getting a pile of credits for very little work as the New Republic claimed its territory; that he was finding a lot of pleasure in playing air support to troops who would shout his name and drink with him and make a fuss when he landed. Taking the capital was a risk. Trapping Shadow Wing was going to be work.
“Well,” Chass said. “Maybe we’ll screw this mission up and we won’t have to worry about it.”
Nath would’ve answered, but another transmission came through first.
People were dying far below. The battle had started.
II
Over two decades earlier, following the ascension of Galactic Emperor Palpatine, Troithe’s capital had been relocated from its thousand-year home in the Gloried Chalice District to the Troithe Planetary Defense Center. Before the Empire, the TPDC’s role had been symbolic—private military companies had battled Separatist incursions during the Clone Wars while the TPDC’s interplanetary missile batteries, stadium-sized ion cannons, and massive infantry barracks had sat abandoned—yet in an effort to restore planetary pride Troithe’s first Imperial governor had razed or converted the obsolete weaponry to build bureaucratic processing centers and state-of-the-art broadcast facilities. Tram lines now ran between missile-silos-turned-luxury-apartment-complexes; modern turbolasers stood surrounded by bronze statues of forgotten Troithe war heroes; and the colossal shield generators that rendered an eighth of a continent invincible rose from army parade grounds between starkly glittering towers.
Even under the dark of the Cerberon skies, Yrica Quell was grateful for the polarized visor of her flight helmet as she navigated the TPDC. Beams of light lanced the air, originating from point-defense mounts and raking the skies in five-second bursts. The beams that failed to find a starfighter—and two had disintegrated Meteor Squadron X-wings already—either ripped through the tallest structures or splashed against the underside of the planetary shields, causing sparks and fire to rain down. TIE strikers (all spherical cockpit pods and bladelike wings, built for atmospheric combat) flew in the beams’ wake, the last of the governor’s air force. Quell swung her X-wing to and fro, fingers stiff around her control yoke and boots alternating pressure on her rudder pedals. She ignored the stream of complaints scrolling down her display from CB-9. The astromech was struggling to keep the ship stable, adjusting thruster output and repulsor power multiple times per second.
Keep it stable or we both die, Quell thought. She felt D6-L’s memory chip on its necklace chain, cold against the sweat on her throat.
“Close strike foils,” she said. Her scanner blazed in warning as a missile (surface-launched or from an enemy fighter, she couldn’t determine) swept toward her. Blood rushed to her head as she rolled the X-wing and skimmed the outer frame of a tower. “See if we can buy more maneuverability.”
The sound of an explosion behind her, powerful enough to rock her ship, reassured her that she’d evaded the missile.
“With S-foils closed you’ve got no weapons,” a voice protested. Quell recognized the speaker as Meteor Leader and resisted snapping back before he continued: “We’ll do our best to cover you.”
“Understood,” Quell said, and tried to find Wyl Lark on her scanner.
Lark was playing scout—his A-wing was faster than anything else in the air. As death pierced the sky from below and fell from above, he’d looped around towers and streaked down streets and tunnels, searching for a path to the shield generator that the X-wings could follow.
Quell found his blip half a kilometer ahead, no more than ten meters aboveground. She felt her ship’s servos whir and the strike foils lock closed as she called, “Where to?”
“They mounted missile platforms on the tram lines,” Lark returned. His voice was strained. “Trace my path exactly.”
CB-9 sent flight paths to her console. She didn’t question them. She dived.
Gleaming metal blurred around her before she leveled out above an electrified transport track built for loads too bulky for trams. Current arced to violently interact with her shields, causing the energy globe to burn so bright she could see nothing beyond her canopy. In that moment—as she wrestled with her controls, using instruments to navigate—she was no longer on Troithe but skimming the surface of Yethra, the horrifying brightness of the sun reflecting off ice sheets and leaving her blind to the world. She wasn’t sure if it was Lark’s voice or Xion’s guiding her, warning her of enemies swooping in pursuit; she watched on her scanner as Major Keize or Meteor Squadron sent the scorched metal chunks of her opponents crashing around her.
It didn’t matter. She knew her mission. She barely knew who she was, but she knew her mission.
“Approaching the generator now,” Lark said.
Reality re-formed around her as she sped down the track.
“Ground forces have engaged the foe,” General Syndulla’s voice announced. “Take those shields down, and take them down fast.”
III
Wyl Lark felt his fighter lurch as he launched every missile he had.
The parade grounds were at street level but they seemed like the depths of a plunging abyss, dwarfed by towers on all sides and awash in gloom. Particle bolts streamed from turret emplacements around the perimeter, charging the darkness with crimson lightning; but the turrets were slow to rotate and their deadly output was simple to elude. The twenty-meter disks of the shield generators were caked in dirt and rust, crude in comparison with the sleek surrounding structures; the vast energy they emitted was invisible to a human eye.
Wyl saw only the first impact: The concussion missile struck between the disks and flashed, but he was already pulling up before the second missile hit home. Far above, he could see the faint, shimmering opacity of the deflector field. His spine dug into his seat. His scanners showed TIEs converging on all sides.
His missiles hadn’t sufficed. If he was going to escape—if he was going to survive—it would be because Quell followed him and finished the job. If he died, he would die dashing his ship and his body against the deflector field they failed to destroy.
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