Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars) Page 14

  “Yes.”

  “Into combat.”

  Quell felt a wave of heat and ire crest and forced it down like bile. “There won’t be any combat if we’re right. The outpost should be undefended. But Tensent and Kairos don’t have the expertise to do the job alone.”

  She said it and almost believed it.

  “Your shoulder is not fully healed. Your skull is not fully healed. Maneuvering at combat speeds will exert pressure that may cause additional fracturing—”

  She edged around the torture droid as she stalked into the corridor. It kept talking. “—causing permanent loss of manual dexterity in one arm. You may suffer subarachnoid hemorrhaging. You may suffer brain injury—”

  She spun around as the droid continued its litany of horrors. “Keep your little fantasies to yourself,” she snapped. “Understood? Are we done?”

  “When did you last sleep?” the droid asked in the same dull, relentless voice.

  She had to think. She’d drowsed in hyperspace during her scouting mission, but it had been days since her last full night’s rest—the night before Operation Cinder had replayed over and over in her ears.

  The realization penetrated her body, weighing her eyes and limbs. “I’m rested enough to fly,” she said.

  “Medically speaking, you are entirely unqualified to fly.”

  Probably true, she thought.

  “There’s no one else,” she said, “and Adan already cleared me. There won’t be any combat if we’re right.”

  “If you’re wrong, are you prepared to fire on Imperial forces?”

  That stopped her altogether.

  She saw what the droid was doing. Torment her with images of suffering. Remind her of her exhaustion. Hit her with an emotional trigger to test her loyalty.

  “Even if I’m wrong, any defenses will be automated. It’s a research outpost.” Her voice was soft, steady, and rational. “Are you going to stop me?”

  “I’ve already passed on my recommendation to Adan,” the droid said. “I’d hoped you would be more reasonable.”

  “You may think you do, but you don’t know me terribly well.” Quell started toward her ship. Her X-wing. Whether she succeeded or failed, she would fly for the New Republic today.

  It might be her only chance.

  * * *

  —

  Harrikos-Fifteen was classified as an Imperial research facility, and that was all the New Republic knew for certain. The rest—that it was studying the Oridol Cluster; that its defenses were minimal; that it held exactly what the New Republic Intelligence working group on the 204th Imperial Fighter Wing needed—was guesswork informed by old rebel reports and anecdotal evidence. There were a hundred ways the mission could go wrong and no time for study.

  So Quell plunged into the azure fires of hyperspace (accompanied by Nath Tensent’s Y-wing bomber and Kairos’s U-wing support vessel) with a plan sketchier than any she’d encountered inside Shadow Wing. If it had come from the mind of Major Keize or Colonel Nuress, she might have taken more comfort in it; instead, the plan was her own.

  The Buried Treasure was not a combat vessel, and its cargo was too valuable to risk. It would only follow the starfighters to Harrikos once the pilots signaled victory. Adan, too, had declined to come, despite Quell’s suggestion that he ride with the U-wing’s passengers. Before they’d parted ways, however, he had granted her provisional command of the mission. “You know their protocols. Kairos and Tensent will follow your lead,” he’d said.

  He’d taken Tensent aside immediately afterward and stared meaningfully at Kairos. Quell hadn’t taken offense. She understood exactly how far her command extended.

  Still, she was flying again.

  She fell asleep to the tuneless whistling of the D6-L astromech and woke shortly before her X-wing erupted out of hyperspace. The stars fell into position and she blinked at the haze smeared across the black void—the scintillating cloud of the Oridol Cluster, its fractal patterns filling the vastness of space. She saw Kairos and Tensent wink into existence on her scanner. There were no other vessels. No communications signals. One assumption proven correct.

  She activated her comm. “All ships report in.”

  “Tensent here.” The voice came through, gruff and dour. “Don’t get us killed.”

  Then a second voice—not Kairos, but one of the Buried Treasure crew members aboard the U-wing. “Corporal Shroi here. We’re standing by.”

  “Stay close, but not too tight,” Quell said. “The last thing we need is to stumble over each other.”

  She checked her scanner again and told her droid to make for the Harrikos-Fifteen Research Station—a speck of metal within the system’s vast ring of frozen methane. The light of the burning blue sun glinted off the ice as the X-wing approached, and Quell’s shields flickered as solar radiation beat against the electromagnetic bubble like rain. She kept her thrusters at low power to minimize the g forces; even so, she felt her shoulder throb and her forehead pound.

  D6-L recommended she open the ship’s S-foils and power her weapons. “Not yet,” she said.

  Before she’d stolen her starfighter, she’d barely seen an X-wing with strike foils closed. The ships were the backbone of the rebel starfighter corps, nearly as capable in a dogfight as a TIE though never quite as maneuverable, trading speed for shields and torpedoes and hyperdrives. Trading specialization for versatility. Her experience was as an adversary, not a pilot; if she did have to fight, she would be at a disadvantage.

  She watched her estimated range to the station tick down and opened a new comm channel. The words felt natural as she spoke. “This is Lieutenant Yrica Quell, 204th Imperial Fighter Wing, to Harrikos-Fifteen Research Station. Authorization code—” She rattled off a string of eight numbers that had meant something before the Emperor’s assassination and might be meaningless now. “Requesting emergency landing.”

  She didn’t expect the station crew to believe her. She just needed to sow doubt.

  The response came in the mechanical cadence of a droid. “Unrecognized vessel. You are not authorized to land. Do not approach.”

  She’d been hoping for a human. Now she had to persuade a machine.

  She maintained her course and speed. “Do you know what’s happening out there?” she asked. “The rebels destroyed DS-2. They say the Emperor is dead. My squadron escaped from a prison camp. We stole these ships, we’re almost out of fuel, we need repairs…” She heard desperation in her voice. The role came to her entirely naturally.

  “Do not approach. This is your last warning.”

  She couldn’t see the station as more than a dark dot against the field of ice. But there was nothing on the scanner—no squadron of TIEs coming to greet them.

  Make the call, Yrica. Race for the outpost or circle and keep talking?

  Crimson lightning shot past her canopy, startling her out of her thoughts. The blasts had come from behind. She cursed and craned her neck as Tensent’s voice came through the link. “They’re not biting. Shoot the hostage and prepare for attack run.”

  What?

  An indicator on the comm was flashing—a signal from D6-L. Tensent’s message had been wide-beamed to the U-wing on an insecure channel. He was shouting so anyone could hear. He was improvising.

  Her best reason yet not to like the blasted pirate.

  Tensent fired again, the blasts a hundred meters off her port side. She bit her lip and opened the throttle, felt the acceleration in her body like someone driving nails into her forehead and shoulder. She remembered the words subarachnoid hemorrhaging.

  “Lieutenant Quell, this is Harrikos-Fifteen. Report immediately. What is occurring?”

  She had to answer. Had to say something to keep the ruse going. But she didn’t know how to lie when the lie didn’t fee
l true. “Harrikos-Fifteen, please. I can’t explain now—” She tried to inject panic into her strained breathing. “Just please let me land.”

  “Authorization denied.”

  She was outdistancing Tensent. The X-wing’s thrusters handily outclassed the Y-wing’s. The U-wing could’ve stayed closer, but Kairos had chosen to remain with Tensent instead of pursuing Quell at top speed. It made the ruse less convincing, but it gave Quell one less worry.

  She could finally make out the shape of the outpost: two metallic spires, each wide at the base and tapering toward the tip, connected by a slender docking strip. The design was standard for a deep-space monitoring station housing no more than thirty permanent residents. If Quell was right, it had no fighter complement.

  The outpost swelled in her view as kilometers flashed by. Sunlight reflected off ice blocks larger than cities, forcing her to squint into the glare. She decelerated to avoid racing past her target and felt as nauseated as a first-year cadet.

  Emerald fires burned like halos around the spires’ midsections. But the cannons weren’t aiming for her—they were targeting beyond her, shooting at Tensent and Kairos. The lie had worked.

  She was close enough to return fire, but she had to time it right. The outpost defenses were still treating her as nonhostile. She adjusted her heading and centered the docking strip in her viewport as if coming in to land. Particle bolts streamed by so quickly the beams became coherent. She saw Tensent and Kairos swerve rapidly on her scanner.

  The docking strip grew larger. She saw guide lights and moorings and air locks. She strained forward in her harness and craned her neck, trying to identify the exact locations of the weapons emplacements.

  Time it right, or they’ll blow you to pieces.

  She counted the seconds. She drew a breath. “Dee-six, lock S-foils in attack position.”

  The X-wing’s strike foils separated and four cannons, capable of greater destruction than any TIE fighter, drew power from the ship’s reactor. The targeting screen unfolded. Quell pulled up as hard as she could and cried out as she nearly collided with the outpost’s hull; she skimmed meters above the plating, whipping past sensors and baffles and antennas. She fired and heard the rippling crack of the cannons, saw the crimson bolts impact gun towers protruding from the station. She flew through a cloud of sparks and twisted metal, blind until she reemerged into the soothing dark.

  “Tensent here,” the comm declared. “You handle the guns. I’ll take the rest.”

  Quell saw the Y-wing closing on her scanner. The assault fighter would barrage the station with ion weapons and proton bombs—bursting enemy shields and shorting out defenses so long as it survived to make its pass. The U-wing, too, was closing in, weaving through cannon fire to approach the docking strip and unleashing swift, wild volleys of particle bolts in return.

  Quell flew on, attuning herself to the X-wing’s responses. The vessel seemed to flinch with every shot. It reacted more slowly than she was used to. But she reduced a second and third cannon to shattered steel and melted plastoid, spiraling her way up the spire of the station. A rotating turbolaser pumped dozens of particle blasts toward her from the spire’s apogee, and she switched her weapons to proton torpedoes.

  She saw, as the X-wing momentarily dipped, a viewport in the hull of the station—a command center, perhaps. She saw silhouettes inside, and faces: uniformed officers hammering at consoles, shouting orders, or staring into the battle.

  Officers fighting for their dead Empire. The station defenses weren’t fully automated after all.

  If you’re wrong, the torture droid had said, are you prepared to fire on Imperial forces?

  She was a pilot for the New Republic. She had no cause for remorse. She let the proton torpedo fly and raced on past the destruction.

  * * *

  —

  Two hours later—after the security team aboard Kairos’s U-wing had taken control of the research outpost and rounded up the few survivors—the first pod streaked like a firework across the sky. It was a bright, burning thing, arcing toward infinity before vanishing into hyperspace. Another flew, then another. Ten, twenty, and more. Quell lost count as she observed from her cockpit.

  Sealed inside each pod was a probe droid programmed to search for the Hellion’s Dare in the labyrinth of the Oridol Cluster. Most of the droids’ journeys would end in sudden and violent obliteration: The ever-changing hyperspace corridors of the cluster would toss the majority into stars or planets or other gravity wells. The few that survived would chart new paths. If one found the Dare, it could guide the New Republic frigate to Harrikos along the trail it had forged.

  Probably.

  Assuming the frigate was still intact. Assuming Quell was right about the Dare being in the Oridol Cluster at all. Assuming so many things.

  You did all you could, Quell told herself. She’d planned. She’d fought. She’d flown. She’d killed.

  The rest was up to the Dare.

  II

  Wyl Lark waited to learn whether he and his companions would live or die.

  The Hellion’s Dare drifted in the fog of the Oridol Cluster, orbited by the dull metal forms of its surviving escort fighters. The fires aboard the frigate had been doused. Electrical arcs no longer ravaged the hull. But the ship’s engines remained offline. Wyl pictured the crew cannibalizing parts from weapons and life-support systems and droids, spraying coolant onto plasma coils and sawing through half-melted conduits with laser torches. While he sat in his harness, floating through the void of space, the Dare’s engineers were fighting against time.

  Thousands of kilometers and minutes away, the Imperial cruiser-carrier was fighting the same battle. Chass na Chadic had led the B-wing pilots in their struggle to incapacitate the enemy vessel. The B-wings—despite the loss of Glothe—had succeeded, and now the carrier’s complement of TIE fighters enclosed it in a protective blockade. The Imperial crew was doubtless racing to repair the ship before the Dare could depart.

  Wyl had wondered at first why the TIEs hadn’t pressed the attack. He’d asked over the comm, and Rununja had explained, “If the TIEs abandon the carrier to attack our frigate, we’ll send our ships to destroy the carrier. There’s no hyperdrive on a TIE fighter. We’d be dead, but without their ship they’d be stranded.”

  That made sense to Wyl. He told himself that (unlike certain members of Riot Squadron) he didn’t mind waiting. He just needed to understand the reason.

  Yet for the first half hour, he stared at his scanner and sweated into his flight suit. At any moment, the enemy might attack. At any moment, the Dare might signal its readiness to jump to lightspeed. To maintain focus, to maintain alertness, was agonizing. If he quieted his mind, the lights of his instruments became hypnotic; if he let the roiling in his brain rise, the situation became unbearable.

  The other surviving pilots—Rununja, Sata Neek, and Skitcher in their A-wings, Merish and Chass in their B-wings—checked in every five minutes. There was no news. No enemy sightings. Merish reported a power fluctuation in one of his cannons; then, five minutes later, reported he’d fixed it.

  Thirty minutes and six report cycles in, the squadron’s agitation was obvious. Skitcher flew in wider loops around the Dare until Rununja warned him not to waste fuel. Merish repeatedly asked Rununja to relay updates from the frigate, only to grow frustrated when no updates came. Wyl nervously checked his oxygen reserves. It was foolish, he knew; he had enough air for days. But each time his eyes drifted from the gauge, they snapped back. He thought of the patched crack in his canopy—still faintly visible—and the journey through hyperspace he’d taken while his oxygen had hissed away and his head had begun to pound.

  You could have gone Home, he told himself. He laid his head on his console and whispered to his ship, “There comes an end to every war. Someday, we’ll both be finished. You and
me.”

  He inhaled the scents of metal and sweat and the floral perfume worn by one of the engineers. It wasn’t the musk of the sur-avkas he’d grown up flying, but it was familiar, and it comforted.

  Sata Neek’s voice broke over the comm and said, “Riot Five to Riot Ten! Chass na Chadic!”

  Wyl jerked upright and looked to the scanner. There was no change in the enemy position.

  Chass didn’t answer.

  “Chass na Chadic!” Sata Neek cried again.

  “Riot Ten?” Rununja’s voice came through now, low and somber.

  Wyl’s breath came faster. Chass had saved him from suffocation. He didn’t believe in life debts, but he believed in gratitude. If she’d been ambushed…

  “What?” the lime-haired Theelin finally answered, abrupt and irritable. “What happened?”

  Sata Neek clacked his beak—a sound nearly indistinguishable from static. “It was as I told you. The darkest secret of Riot Squadron revealed: Wyl Lark speaks to his ship!”

  The others guffawed. Wyl fell back in his harness and looked at his comm—still open and broadcasting—with dismay.

  “She betrayed you, Wyl! Your ship told us everything!” Skitcher cried, and absurd though it was, Wyl couldn’t honestly say he didn’t feel a twinge of betrayal. Sata Neek cackled the loudest. Chass protested, saying she’d missed it, asking what exactly Wyl had said and how embarrassing it was.

  “Why didn’t you answer before, Riot Ten?” This was Rununja again, and everyone fell silent.

  “I don’t think you want to know,” Chass said. It sounded like a challenge. She’d never much liked Rununja.

  “I might surprise you,” Rununja said. “Or you might surprise me.”

  They waited. Then the answer came, soft at first, like metal vibrating so fast it hummed. The bass vye and the synthtone came through, and then the words, accompanied by Chass’s husky, unselfconscious wails: Red lights, dead state, we’re gonna win too late…The music was simplistic and overwrought and intimate all at once, and Wyl laughed. In that one instant, he loved Chass na Chadic more than anyone in the galaxy.