Shadow Fall (Star Wars) Read online

  Star Wars: Shadow Fall is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the CIRCLE colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9781984820044

  International edition ISBN 9780593159873

  Ebook ISBN 9781984820051

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Cover art: Jeff Langevin

  Cover design: Jeff Langevin and Scott Biel

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Del Rey Star Wars Timeline

  Epigraph

  Part One: Under Ravenous Heavens

  Chapter 1: Six Trillion Suns and None

  Chapter 2: An Honest Day’s Work

  Chapter 3: Past and Future Glories

  Chapter 4: Subsurface Rot

  Chapter 5: A Winding Path to Victory

  Chapter 6: A Straight Path to Tragedy

  Chapter 7: Schemes and Dreams

  Chapter 8: The Illuminating Brilliance of Starlight

  Chapter 9: High-Velocity Impacts on a Pitted Surface

  Chapter 10: Starfighters Like Motes of Dust

  Chapter 11: Behemoths Dancing Like Planets

  Chapter 12: Long Shadows of Astronomical Objects

  Part Two: Over the Abyss

  Chapter 13: Shadows at Dusk

  Chapter 14: The Joyous Togetherness of Shared Suffering

  Chapter 15: Fantasies of Grander Days

  Chapter 16: Deep Beyond Day

  Chapter 17: Shattered Worlds and Nightmares

  Chapter 18: That Which You Take with You

  Chapter 19: The End of Community

  Chapter 20: Courage in the Ruins

  Chapter 21: The Chaos of Victory

  Chapter 22: Buoyant Spirits in Something Less Than Celebration

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Alexander Freed

  About the Author

  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….

  CHAPTER 1

  SIX TRILLION SUNS AND NONE

  I

  On Polyneus, where Wyl Lark was born and lifted into adulthood by the Sun-Lamas of the Hik’e-Matriarch, the word city was synonymous with garden. Settlements on Polyneus grew on canyon walls like moss and sprouted from forest floors, cultivated and tended by their residents. In Cliff, where Wyl learned to fly the sur-avkas, the streets flooded and changed with every monsoon, and the residents rearranged their homes to suit what fate and drainage made of the landscape.

  Wyl had traveled to many worlds since leaving Polyneus. On Troithe he realized he had never truly seen a city before.

  The engines of his RZ-1 interceptor thundered as he banked away from a massive façade of midnight metal and gold-plated arches, hurtling between towers and under tram lines. Above the lines of digital billboards solar projectors cast their midday light. Bright against the black sky, they guided Wyl through the urban labyrinth.

  “Tell me you’re not running, brother?” The voice coming through Wyl’s comm was barely audible over the noise of the A-wing. Nath Tensent sounded amused.

  “Not running,” Wyl said. “Circling around.”

  “That’s a big circle. You’re off my sensors.”

  “Maybe because your equipment is older than I am,” Wyl returned, but he forgot to smile and he wasn’t listening to himself. He angled his fighter into a cloud of smoke, specks of ash smearing his canopy as he reduced speed. He wrestled with throttle and repulsor controls, looking only at his scanner—visuals told him nothing—and his stomach lurched as the A-wing dropped a hundred meters and exited the cloud.

  To his right, a multi-level speeder port rose out of view. Sections of three stories spewed jets of flame—the source of the smoke cloud—while crimson particle bolts sprayed another two levels, pockmarking metal and chipping duracrete slabs. Wyl veered away from the flames and into the storm of bolts, watching his shields shimmer as he banked hard and felt his harness bite into his side.

  He glimpsed pavement far below and two groups clashing along the boulevard. The particle bolts battering the speeder port (and—at the moment—Wyl’s deflector screens) were aimed at a UT-60D “U-wing” transport hovering twenty meters above one group of combatants and unleashing its weaponry onto the second. Wyl processed the image in less than a second, steering his ship with his body as his vision glimmered with spots. “Kairos?” he asked. “You need an assist?”

  He avoided colliding with a metal spire—decorative architecture or obsolete technology, he wasn’t sure—as a low tone sounded over the comm.

  That’s a negative, Wyl thought, and flinched at the roar of the U-wing’s laser cannons.

  “What she needs”—Nath’s voice again—“is for us to handle our target. I’m making my attack run in about ten seconds. You want high or low?”

  “High,” Wyl replied, and swung his fighter down an avenue perpendicular to the main boulevard. His eyes sorted through structures filling the horizon—domed opera houses and shopping spirals, stacked spheres of cracked crystal that had once hosted sporting events—and focused on the titanic metal fiend striding toward him on four spindly legs. Its arched back led to an insectoid head bearing twitching gun barrels in place of mandibles, and its plating was scored by blaster impacts and coated in dust and ash. Though it was dwarfed by the surrounding buildings, it moved among them like a predator through grass.

  Wyl had seen its kind in holograms. He’d heard Sata Neek and Sonogari tell stories of Imperial walkers marching in platoons capable of leveling spaceports. This particular monster might have been a cargo-carrying model—one of the ground troops had said as much—but one shot would still suffice to incinerate a dozen of the soldiers below.

  So Wyl went high, streaking toward the walker’s head to seize its attention before bobbing and rolling as energized particles ripped through the air. He went high despite the fact that the walker’s fire would, if it failed to obliterate Wyl, tear into the neighboring structures. It would pierce the domes of opera houses and shatter crystal arenas; it would turn Troithe’s history to dust.

  But it would leave the New Republic infantry intact.

  Wyl cut his throttle, allowing the walker’s targeting sensors to track him. Cannon blasts screamed loud enough to shake his bones and illuminated the world like lightning. He rocked in his seat, flight helmet smashing against the headrest, and tried to stay one step ahead of his foe.

  “You see it?” he whispered, and nearly bit his lip as the A-wing jolted. “Nath’s coming. Just a few seconds.”

  A sensor blip grew brighter. “You talking to your ship again?” Nath asked.

  Wyl laughed, loud and unembarrassed, as he spotted Nath’s Y-wing bomber racing ten meters above street level. Wyl flew on past the walker, out of its targeting zone, and the bomber launched it
s ordnance with the sound of a thunderclap. He looped around, ready to provide covering fire to allow Nath a second firing pass, but crackling arcs of electricity already poured off the now-motionless walker’s hull. “Ion torpedoes, direct hit,” Nath reported. “Think I got it.”

  The walker raised a single leg, its metal struts and pistons trembling arthritically. Its head tilted and the machine’s weight shifted. Gravity did its inexorable work. Wyl watched as—slow as a leaf drifting from an autumn tree, then swift as an avalanche—the walker toppled to one side.

  A round tower walled in broken advertising screens, restaurant balconies, and boutique windows was poised to receive the brunt of the impact. The falling walker’s body connected somewhere around the seventh floor, compacting the building’s frame and tearing through metal support beams. Energy continued to ripple across the armored vehicle, briefly causing exposed power conduits and battery stations in the building’s wall to flare. As the walker’s head struck durasteel, the structure seemed to undulate and Wyl heard a noise like mortars firing as—story by story—the building began to disappear into a mass of rubble and fire.

  A moment later the fallen walker burst as if stuffed full of flames; then it was completely buried. Dust made it impossible to see anything more, though the sounds of collapse and incineration continued.

  Someone was cackling over the comm. “Pretty sure you got it. Appreciate the help, though.” It was a woman’s voice. Not one Wyl recognized.

  Wyl brought his A-wing up and around, out of the dust cloud and back toward the ground troops. He forced himself not to look back. His canopy was plastered in soot.

  “That mean your mission’s done?” Nath asked.

  “Your mission, you mean? We should be getting word from the insertion team soon,” the woman said. “Kind of glad you downed that tower, though—would’ve made a perfect sniper nest.”

  Wyl checked his scanner, saw no one airborne but Nath and Kairos, then shot a glance toward the boulevard and the infantry. The band of soldiers was cautiously retreating from the blossoming dust cloud and passing out of the shadow of the U-wing. “No civilian sightings?” he said. He kept his voice level.

  “Not in the six hours since we entered the district.” The woman’s voice dropped in volume as she shouted orders at her cohorts. Then she resumed: “This all used to be an entertainment center, according to the brief. Big investment when the Empire first came in, pretty well abandoned now.”

  Pretty well abandoned wasn’t a guarantee. “Understood,” Wyl said. “We’ll hold position until you give the word.”

  “Copy that. And tell your U-wing she’s blocking my light.”

  At this, Wyl managed to smile. If only there were light to block, he thought, but instead relayed the message to Kairos, who crept barely ten meters away from the squad. The illumination from the dimming solar projectors seemed no brighter.

  “Feeling a little overprotective?” Nath asked.

  Kairos didn’t answer.

  Wyl caressed his console absently in search of a rattling plate. The dust continued to churn and dissipate. His mind veered between thoughts of the destruction and thoughts of the insertion team descending through the undercity.

  “You know we were careful as we could be,” Nath said. He’d switched to a private channel. “She was a fine-looking building but not worth tearing up over.”

  “I know,” Wyl said. “I’ll be okay—”

  “Target acquired! Three Imp guerrillas bagged, cuffed, and ready for interrogation.” The woman’s voice broke through. “Insertion team’s done the job you flyboys are six tons too heavy for.”

  “Got it.” Wyl focused on the console, adjusting his communications settings and linking to Troithe’s long-range network. “Let’s see if we can get a signal out—we’ve got people waiting.”

  II

  Astrogation charts called Cerberon a system, and it was—but it wasn’t a star system, because there weren’t any stars within half a light-year. Instead, its planets and moons and asteroid fields orbited the Cerberon singularity: a black hole like a burning eye, its ebony pupil surrounded by an iris of fiery debris. In a few thousand years, Troithe, Catadra, Verzan, and the other worlds of Cerberon would be swallowed by the black hole’s gravity—forces more powerful than any Imperial death machine. A few millennia more and the nearest stars would suffer the same fate.

  Against the glowing heavens of the dense galactic Deep Core, the black hole had the distinction of being both the brightest and the darkest object in the sky. Chass na Chadic wondered how anyone could live in the system and not go mad. It hardly seemed like a place worth fighting for—but the New Republic higher-ups were terrified Cerberon could be used as a shortcut between Core Worlds, and it turned out being on the winning side of a war meant fighting for stupid things.

  She tore her gaze from the eye and looked back to the asteroid field surrounding her, carefully rotating the primary airfoil of her B-wing assault fighter from above her cockpit to below. A slab of rock drifted lazily overhead; she’d been flying in atmosphere so often she half expected to feel the ship tremble in reply. She gave a burst of power to her thrusters, wriggled in her harness, and asked, “So what was I saying? Before the rocks?”

  Through her comm, a woman’s voice—rough as a charred bone out of a cook fire—replied, “The Slipglass Conglomerate.”

  “Right,” Chass said. “So the Empire gives the ’Glom total control of transport on Eufornis Minor. Can’t get on a tram without chaincodes, let alone a shuttle, and I’m stuck way out in the middle of muck-all. What do you think I do?”

  “You need a vehicle of your own,” the voice replied.

  Chass laughed. “I do, don’t I? So I’ve never flown one before but my host has this old Voltec skyhopper. Barely works. One night he starts asking about my species again and I decide I’m done, so I climb aboard and start examining the controls, one button at a time…”

  The story was a lie—not every word but enough to qualify—and she stumbled through it joyfully, concocting increasingly absurd incidents while her ship drifted among the asteroids. She told of an arm-length parasite she found in the Voltec’s engine compartment that speared itself on her horn-stubs; about maneuvering through a storm while on the run from planetary security; about firing on ’Glom droids as she landed on the outskirts of a spaceport. She was pretty sure the last part would draw questions—so far as she knew, Voltec had never made a skyhopper with weapons—but no objection came.

  She squeezed her control yoke as an unexpected flash of crimson flared off her starboard side. She saw fragments of rock tumbling her way and heard the voice say, “Asteroid might have been trouble for you. Keep going.”

  Chass shrugged and did as requested. She took the story as far as it could go, ending with: “—finally made it offworld and managed to signal Hound Squadron. Felt good to be back, by the end.”

  You know that’s a lie, she thought. You have to know by now…Hound Squadron wasn’t until way later.

  What will you let me get away with?

  “I can only imagine,” Yrica Quell replied.

  Chass cackled, threw back her head, and nearly winged another asteroid.

  “Something funny?” Quell asked without a trace of irony.

  Maybe Quell was mocking her, Chass thought. Or maybe she was, for some reason, trying to make friends. Either way it was entertaining, but not what Chass expected from a woman as fond of chaos as a badly timed belch. She imagined Quell’s face—blond locks tucked into her helmet, jutting nose and tawny skin, eyes straining humorlessly at the darkness.

  “Nothing at all,” Chass said. “Target’s coming into range. We good to go?”

  “Ground team gave the signal. Guerrillas captured, didn’t get off an alert. Now—” She cut herself off. Chass heard a digitized beeping and an ir
ritated curse.

  “Still not getting on with the new droid?” Chass asked.

  “It’s fine,” Quell said. “CB-9 just wanted to offer input, but as I was saying: Now we go after their supplier.”

  Chass adjusted course and yanked a control lever. Servos issued a grinding noise as her strike foils extended and reshaped the line of the vessel into a cross. She scanned status displays as the computer automatically redistributed power and heat. Ion cannons came online. The primary torpedo launcher registered fully functional; the secondary registered dead as it had since Pandem Nai, but Chass knew better. If she needed the secondary launcher, it would work.

  Finally, she adjusted her comm system. A low drumbeat and swift, Huttese-accented lyrics splashed against static and filled the cockpit: Narvath retro-shudder, from a music chip she’d stolen off a drunk fool in the Western Reaches. Satisfied, she leaned into her seat and let her first torpedo fly.

  The target was an asteroid the size of an orbital battle station. The torpedo, with a flare bright enough to blind anyone within a kilometer, shattered a small mountain’s worth of stone and left the rest of the rock uncracked. Chass loosed a second torpedo before adjusting her systems and spraying particle bolts. She sang as she fired, let the music dictate the rhythm of the violence, and adjusted her vector so that she could batter the asteroid as she passed. Her scanner indicated Quell’s X-wing maintaining its distance on her wing, ready to move in but not engaging.

  She watched the torpedo novas, moved to the beat of the music, and periodically checked her depleting munitions supply. She barely noticed her scanner flash until Quell’s voice broke through the music. “Fighters on the move. Break away from the rock and check your deflectors.”