Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars) Page 4

  The TIEs danced like dead leaves tossed by a breeze, and the volley of particle bolts passed harmlessly through the gaps between enemy ships. The stray energy would dissipate into the dark. The three A-wings increased their thrust and pulled out of the path of the spiral. No one pursued.

  Riot Eight swore. “They saw us coming. They’ve trained at this, and we picked the most obvious way to break them.”

  “The spiral attack pattern is new,” Riot Four said. “Who wants to get creative?”

  “We can take another pass,” Wyl said. “They’re giving us room, we might as well—”

  “No.” Riot Leader again, steady as always. “Hellion’s Dare is about to lose a deflector. Bolster our perimeter around the frigate and prepare to jump to lightspeed. Coordinates incoming on your navicomputers.”

  Riot Eight swore again. Wyl craned his neck and tried to spot the jutting body of the frigate before adjusting course. At his current speed, he’d need to arc wide to return to the Hellion’s Dare—trying to turn any sharper would tear his inertial compensators apart.

  So as he steered through the turn and felt the A-wing rattle, he listened to the comm chatter and watched the battle on his scanner. He heard Sata Neek laugh bleakly as a TIE flew close enough to disrupt his sensors with its ion trails. He watched another TIE shake a concussion missile after a tense fifteen-second chase. He watched the Hellion’s Dare creep out of Jiruus’s orbit, determined to escape the planet’s gravity well.

  His navicomputer signaled the receipt of hyperspace coordinates as the Hellion’s Dare absorbed a barrage powerful enough to send its shields shimmering through the color spectrum. Multiple voices cried out reports as the TIE swarm converged on the frigate and trapped A-wings and B-wings against the capital ship’s hull. Then the final order came:

  “Now! Jump now!”

  Wyl let the computer calculate his trajectory and felt his fighter lurch forward. The stars warped as the laws of conventional physics—of light and velocity and mass—ceased to exist and the ship’s hyperdrive urged the vessel through a gap in reality. The jump felt profound to Wyl, no matter how many times he’d done it; it was a glimpse into something otherworldly. Something transcendent.

  The cerulean storm of hyperspace enfolded the A-wing and he left the battle behind. There was no sound but the hum of the hyperdrive. Even the ship’s rattling ceased. There was only the journey through a universe far from Jiruus and the ruins of the Empire.

  * * *

  —

  When Wyl Lark’s A-wing returned to realspace through a second gap in reality, the pilot’s first act was to lean onto his console and gaze out at the stars. The sky was clear but the constellations were foreign—thousands of unfamiliar stars glimmered against the darkness, joined instants later by new lights that blazed into existence one by one: the distant specks of starfighters. The A-wings of Riot Squadron came first, followed by the B-wings of Hound Squadron. Finally the great mass of the Hellion’s Dare, the Nebulon-B frigate, slid silently into place above Wyl.

  The comm chatter began immediately. Riot Leader standing by. Riot Two standing by. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

  Riot Eight was silent.

  “I don’t think Nasi made it,” Sata Neek said. “I saw a TIE flight move on her position at the end, right before we jumped.”

  No one spoke for a while.

  “She fought bravely,” Rununja finally said. “You all did.” But there was no comfort in the words.

  It wasn’t until later—after the Dare had recalled the starfighters to its hangar and Wyl had stripped off his flight suit; after he had embraced Sonogari, who refused to weep for Nasi and who would mourn her the most—that he realized, with a pang of distress and selfish guilt, the least important consequence of the battle.

  Wyl wasn’t going home yet after all.

  II

  Quell hadn’t known what to expect from Caern Adan’s “New Republic Intelligence working group,” but she’d pictured something involving conference rooms and computer terminals and droids. Something sleek and dull and formidably bureaucratic, like the Empire might have assembled.

  Instead—following a brusque discussion with Adan regarding the terms of her “parole” and the distant possibility of a Senate pardon (contingent on Adan’s recommendation and the elimination of the Shadow Wing threat)—she’d been instructed to board a UT-60D transport that afternoon for a “recruiting mission.” It wasn’t until after the U-wing left atmosphere that she realized she’d never see Traitor’s Remorse again.

  She could accept that. There was no one at the outpost she wanted to say goodbye to. She’d left nothing behind but a duffel full of donated clothes. Now she owned only what she carried, and she found that thought freeing—at least until she remembered the locker of mementos and honors and personal effects stowed in the bowels of the Star Destroyer Pursuer. Her old life existed, whether or not it was in sight. Whether she had any idea where it lurked in the vastness of space, waiting to collide with her in the dark.

  For now, she chose not to think about it.

  She sat in the cabin of the vessel, the glow of hyperspace illuminating the cockpit doorway while the rhythmic pulse of the drive system counted down. She distracted herself by perusing the datapad containing the particulars of her “recruiting mission.” She found nothing comforting in the files.

  “You have questions,” said the voice of the torture droid. The black sphere floated in a corner of the cabin, photoreceptor oriented toward Quell as if the machine was planning her dissection.

  “It’s straightforward,” Quell said, and gestured at the datapad. “You think this man will be useful. I’ll get him for you.”

  The man was a roach, but Quell was too sensible to say so. She was an agent of the New Republic now, and she’d been military long enough not to share unsolicited opinions.

  “Not about the man,” the droid said. “About the circumstances. You must have wondered why I’m here?”

  She had briefly wondered why her therapist was accompanying her. Then she’d figured it out. “You’re monitoring me for Adan and New Republic Intelligence. To see if I’m fit for duty. To see if I’m loyal. As I said, straightforward. I was never just your patient, and I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “As a medical unit, I confess my loyalties are divided between the patients I treat and the masters I—”

  A surge of fury rose in Quell and she nearly threw the datapad at the droid. Then she extinguished her ire as if snuffing a match between callused fingers. “I don’t really care about the psychiatric ethics of droids, and I don’t think anyone would mistake you for a medical unit.”

  The droid rotated one of its manipulators—a gesture of apology or perhaps discomfort; Quell wasn’t sure. She searched her memories of their past sessions, trying to determine whether she’d said anything regrettable. But she’d been careful. She’d said nothing that would incriminate or embarrass her. And if Caern Adan went looking through recordings looking for leverage against her, he would search in vain.

  Not that it made a difference.

  “I hope that this will not impede future sessions,” the droid said. “I would very much like to assist your rehabilitation.”

  “I’d like that, too,” Quell lied, and resumed studying the datapad.

  Caern Adan would search the droid’s recordings in vain, and she would still commit to the mission. She would still follow orders. Because she hadn’t yet earned the New Republic’s trust, and she knew what it meant to prove herself.

  She doubted the man she’d been sent to recruit knew anything of the sort. According to his file, Nath Tensent had defected from the Empire—along with his entire TIE squadron—more than four years ago, shortly before the DS-1 battle station had destroyed Alderaan and spurred discontent throughout the galaxy. Unlike most rebels from that e
ra, his motives had been less than idealistic: He and his squadron had been under investigation for gross corruption, and he’d needed safe harbor. Tensent and his people had been running a criminal enterprise across eight systems in the Outer Rim—giving pirates and smugglers a pass in return for a percentage of their take, while simultaneously demanding payment from merchant vessels and transports in return for protection from those same pirates.

  Corruption was common enough in the distant reaches of the Empire, where communications were patchy and loyalty officers were scarce. But Tensent had eventually been discovered, and he’d decided to switch sides rather than face punishment. After that, his career with the Rebel Alliance had been curiously unremarkable—he’d flown with his same crew on over fifty missions with no reprimands and no decorations.

  Or at least that’s what Quell’s file indicated. On further consideration, she realized she had no reason to assume the record was complete. She was seeing what she was permitted to see; as with everything else, she’d earned nothing more.

  Tensent’s career in the Alliance had come to a halt six months before Endor, when his squadron had been obliterated by the 204th Imperial Fighter Wing. That encounter wasn’t detailed in the file—the attached report only named a star system and listed the casualties—and it wasn’t a skirmish Quell had any memory of. Tensent’s people had all died, and Tensent himself had dropped out of communication while recuperating.

  It was, as Quell had said, straightforward. She wasn’t sure what role Adan wanted Tensent to fill, but the man certainly had motivation to see Shadow Wing neutralized. Maybe that was all Adan required for his working group.

  She did have one question, however.

  “Why am I doing this?”

  The droid hadn’t moved from where it hovered near the bulkhead. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m a pilot. Adan’s a spy. One of us is more qualified than the other for this sort of mission.”

  The droid didn’t answer for a long while. Quell counted the heartbeats of the hyperdrive before the artificial voice replied: “Caern Adan is not fond of fieldwork. You have all the necessary tools to succeed; therefore he deemed this the optimal use of available resources.”

  Quell took in the words. She wasn’t sure what they meant.

  As with so many things, she decided it made no difference.

  * * *

  —

  Quell spent the remainder of the voyage in the cockpit, sitting beside a humanoid figure wrapped in strips of graying fabric like bandages beneath a coarse cloak. Heavy leather straps and other swaths of cloth—perhaps once colorful and patterned but now murky—completed the patchwork ensemble, obscuring the tall figure’s musculature. If it hadn’t been for the helmet—a thing of riveted metal and clamps, lit by the flickering glow of its visor—the entity would have resembled the contents of an ancient sarcophagus more than an animate being. The IT-O droid had called the being Kairos, and Quell couldn’t begin to guess her species—the droid had only said “she is our pilot,” and Quell had let the subject drop.

  In her way, however, the stranger was better company than the droid. Kairos said nothing. Her garment smelled inoffensively of iron and spices and something floral. If she’d allowed Quell to touch the U-wing’s controls, Quell would have gladly kissed Kairos’s horror of a mask; yet when Quell had asked to fly, Kairos had dispassionately disabled the copilot’s station.

  The U-wing lurched into realspace within visual range of the Entropian Hive: an asteroid studded with silver spacedocks and swaddled in great organic meshes like webbing. Lights like sparks or dust motes drifted around the asteroid—maintenance droids, perhaps, or shuttles transporting passengers between sealed sections. Quell didn’t know. It felt familiar nonetheless.

  She’d seen dozens of black-market trading posts and refueling stations over her career. Her fingers flexed on an imaginary control yoke as she recalled other outposts, other missions—the rush of escorting bombers past jury-rigged turbolasers; armed enemy freighters closing in; her TIE jumping as a shock wave assured her that the payload had been delivered and a pirate den had been eliminated. She recalled those battles without regret, and wondered if that would ever change.

  Not every action the Empire had taken was corrupt. On balance, she might have killed more slavers than rebels.

  Maybe.

  Today, however, she was a passenger, and Kairos deployed no weapons. The strange being tapped gloved fingers against the ship’s comm controls and transmitted an automated docking request. A reply came swiftly in a trilling, accented voice: “Honored visitors. On behalf of the trading council, I welcome you to the Entropian Hive.”

  “Should I answer?” Quell asked Kairos.

  Kairos said nothing. That’s a no, Quell decided.

  The U-wing lumbered toward the Hive, decelerating as it entered a hangar built into the asteroid. The vessel touched ground, and its vibrations stopped as the engines powered down. Quell exited the cockpit and looked to see if Kairos would follow. The woman did not.

  The IT-O droid floated in the same corner as always.

  “Are you coming with me?” Quell asked.

  “Please keep me apprised of major developments,” the droid answered. “But I would not be especially welcome.”

  There was a convincing imitation of suppressed pain in the droid’s voice. She imagined there weren’t many places a torture droid would be welcome, yet she couldn’t muster sympathy.

  She tucked a comlink in her pocket and activated the starboard loading door. She’d found no weapons aboard the U-wing and was keenly aware of her vulnerability—the pirates and slavers and smugglers of the Entropian Hive would see an unarmed woman, one arm tucked into a sling, and not be entirely wrong to deem her easy prey. Once, her status with the Empire might have afforded her some protection. She had no shield now.

  She stepped outside the vessel and into the cavernous hangar. Freighters and shuttles rested atop rocky plinths connected by metal catwalks, and a distant tunnel appeared to lead to the rest of the asteroid. There was an acridity to the air that made her nostrils burn, and she wondered whether the atmosphere was entirely human-breathable.

  “May we assist you with your luggage?” a voice asked.

  The speaker was a snouted humanoid with a body like a reed and skin the color of regurgitated bread. Beside it stood a protocol droid, arm stiffly extended.

  “No luggage,” Quell said. She frowned at the speaker. It wasn’t the greeting she’d been expecting.

  “Can we provide you with accommodations? A personal assistant, tailored to your species and physiological preferences? Or perhaps—” The snout bobbed and suction-tipped fingers wriggled in what, Quell surmised, was an indicator of thought. “Our medical facilities are state-of-the-art. I would need approval from the Entropian Hive Trading Council, but we could replace your failing limb. If not for free, perhaps at a steep discount—”

  Quell resisted the impulse to hug her arm closer to her chest. “Not necessary,” she said. “Not desired.”

  The humanoid waved off the protocol droid. The snout bobbed again. “Of course. Then please follow me for a brief tour of our facilities. The trading council is committed to making the Entropian Hive a safe, luxurious port of call for all visitors…but especially for our heroic saviors in the New Republic.”

  In an instant it made sense. Someone had identified the U-wing as a Rebel Alliance vessel, and the trading council—presumably whatever criminal cartel ran the Hive, dealing spice and cutting deals and breaking limbs—wanted to make its pitch for legitimacy.

  Quell felt a chill creep up her spine and down her shoulders. It wasn’t the Empire whose reputation offered protection anymore.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s do the tour.”

  The trading council’s emissary introduced them
selves as Ginruda and kept up a steady stream of compliments (some uncomfortably personal) and offers of food and beverage as they roamed the tunnels of the Hive. The asteroid was sectioned into a variety of “inhabitation clusters” designed to appeal to different species. The humanoid cluster was a crowded warren of bazaars and cantinas and auction houses hosting four-limbed, two-eyed creatures from a hundred worlds. The diversity of life-forms felt foreign to Quell, though it shouldn’t have—she’d been raised on an orbital station, lived among Twi’leks and Kel Dors and Devaronians and even less humanoid species as a child. Yet she’d rarely returned home after joining the 204th, and the Empire was selective in its recruitment. She’d grown accustomed to human primacy.

  Maybe, she thought, that explained her instinctive discomfort with Kairos’s appearance. Or maybe not.

  Ginruda emphasized the trading council’s interest in dispensing with the Hive’s less savory elements. “Without access to Imperial law enforcement data banks, we were of course unable to vet visitors to our satisfaction. We became nonconsenting hosts of the most malevolent outlaws—not the freedom-fighting arms dealers who assisted the Rebel Alliance, but vile elements who have no place in any civilized society.

  “Therefore, not being able to prevent spice dealing and bounty hunting from occurring in the Entropian Hive, we did our best to regulate these activities. It’s our expertise in such matters that we believe will make the Hive invaluable in the stabilization of this sector. We are already one of the first outposts to deal exclusively in New Republic credits…”

  You’re wasting your time, Quell thought. She had no authority, no political capital, and she doubted Adan was interested in a report vouching for the trading council. They walked past heavy fencing built into the rock—cages for livestock or slaves—and she tried to imagine who would want to assist the monsters who’d built such a place.