Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars) Read online

  “Do they know you’re not really here on the New Republic’s behalf?” Quell asked. She remembered Ginruda’s claims of cooperation with the New Republic government.

  “Doubt they care. Who knows what counts as official New Republic support these days? I’ve got a rank and a starfighter—I give them legitimacy even if I’m not legit.”

  “And that’s enough for you?”

  Tensent grunted, but he didn’t lose his smile. “It’s an arrangement.”

  Quell smothered her disgust and nodded. She tried to see the man as he saw himself—conjure up his mental state from Adan’s files and the shabby apartment. He was a deserter who insisted his choices didn’t matter. What could she do with that?

  She pictured the face of her mentor. Major Soran Keize had possessed a way with pilots—a way of looking across at you, hearing you, and opening his soul to show you that he bore the same scars you did. That he had shared your doubts, failed like you failed, and still become a hero.

  Quell would never be the person Soran Keize was. She hadn’t made the foolish decisions Nath Tensent had. She had to try, nonetheless.

  Earn your way back. Earn your chance.

  “You were with the Rebellion for a long time,” she said.

  “I was.” Tensent smirked like a card player entertained by his opponent’s bluff.

  “Ever stop to wonder whether they’re not doing fine without you?”

  “Can’t say I have. The Emperor’s dead. Worst case, what’s left of his Empire consolidates its power, manages to hold a healthy portion of its old territory and lose all influence outside its own systems.”

  It was the same analysis Quell had heard more than once aboard the Pursuer in the days after Endor. Tensent wasn’t stupid. She shook her head, immediately regretted it as her forehead sang with pain, and tried to get back on track.

  “We’re winning, it’s true.” The we felt wrong—she didn’t deserve to say the word—but she had to play her part for the argument to work. “But look at what’s gone down. Coruscant is still under Imperial lockdown. Operation Cinder cleansed whole worlds.” Cleansed wasn’t what the rebels would call it, but she couldn’t help herself. Her mouth stayed open as she racked her brain for more specifics; her month in Traitor’s Remorse had left her with only a loose conception of the war’s progress, as if it were a target creeping at the edge of her sensors.

  She continued: “You lost your whole squadron. The people who hit you are still active. What they’re doing now—they were involved in Cinder. They’re still out there fighting.”

  Tensent didn’t react. She aimed what she hoped was the killing blow. “How many other squadrons deserve to go down like yours?” she asked.

  His smirk vanished completely. Had she reached him?

  “You want to know about my squadron?” he asked.

  No, she thought. “Yes,” she said.

  Tensent grunted and ran a hand through his thinning hair. When he spoke, his voice dropped an octave and turned as rusty as an abandoned blade.

  This is the story he told.

  * * *

  —

  “My squadron,” he said, “was ambushed during a bombing run over the Trenchenovu shipyards.

  “We’d prepped for that mission for six weeks, training till we could launch a torpedo down an Abyssin’s eye socket. I didn’t much like asking my people to play heroes, but we could handle this one and—” He snorted. “—I needed a favor from General Lexei. We do this job, I pick the next one. That sort of thing.”

  She forced herself not to protest. You don’t fly for favors. Duty isn’t a bargaining chip.

  “What happened?” Quell asked.

  “About six seconds before Piter was supposed to drop the first payload, flight of TIEs swept in from nowhere and cut his fighter in two. First loss we’d taken in eight months, and Piter was a good kid—whined like a baby but fought like hell when he was cornered. He’d been with us since the start.”

  “When you were flying for the Empire.”

  “Like I said, from the start. Can I keep talking?”

  Tensent wasn’t touching his drink anymore. Quell sipped at her flavored water. “Sure.”

  “So Piter’s gone, like that. Reeka—she’s my second—she figures it out same time I do. Sees they’re prepped for us. No way we’re going to pull the mission off. I trust—I trusted that woman more than anyone, so when I say we abort and she says we launch everything, I don’t wait to figure out why.

  “We drop enough ordnance to glass a city. I mean, we do it right then—no targeting, just lighting up anything in sight. TIEs are coming in around us but the whole battlefield’s white with detonations. We pull up, figuring we’ll be scorched but they’ll be blind. We’ll get some distance and jump to lightspeed.”

  Quell didn’t interrupt this time. She played out the battle in her mind, going through the roster of commanders who might have led the TIE squadron. Gablerone would have swept around, used the TIEs’ speed to outflank the rebels. Phesh would have gone silent—let the fires hide the TIEs, then waited for the enemy’s move.

  Major Keize would’ve picked off the enemy blind.

  “The TIEs stay on our tail, but barely. By the time we can see again, we’ve lost Mordeaux and Canthropali. We’re almost clear of the shipyards, though. Then—” He slammed his palm on the tabletop, sending the glasses wobbling. “—they bring in a Destroyer. Jumps out of lightspeed dead ahead, just waiting for the signal. They didn’t only want to protect the docks; they were there to kill us.”

  Quell arched her brow in surprise. If a Star Destroyer had been involved, it should have been the Pursuer—the 204th’s carrier—which meant she would have been aboard at the time.

  Or another Destroyer had arrived by coincidence. Bad luck for Tensent’s squadron, good luck for the Empire.

  Or Tensent was lying.

  He went on. “We’re flying BTL-A4 Y-wings. Better fighters than you’d think, but we weren’t getting around that Impstar intact. Couldn’t go through it, either, since—well.”

  Quell finished the thought. Since you’d just wasted all your heavy ordnance on a cheap stunt, thinking you wouldn’t need it. “So you turned around?” she asked.

  “Right back to the shipyards, taking cover in the superstructure,” Tensent said. “Lousy plan, but what are our options? So yeah, we decide to split up, work our way to the other side of Trenchenovu and break free there.

  “I kept my comm open. I got to listen every time TIE fighters caught up with one of my kids. Braigh, poor idiot, tried to bargain—broadcast on all frequencies, said she’d sell us out along with the whole Rebel Alliance if the Empire would take her in. Of course it got her killed.

  “Pesalt tried to outmaneuver the TIEs; slammed right into a support strut. Rorian limped about halfway before his engines overloaded. Ferris ejected. You can imagine what happened to him. Me and Reeka, we were the only ones who came out the other side. Took three TIEs down in the process—even in a Y-wing, she could hit just about anything.”

  Quell waited for Tensent to continue. He watched her with heavy-lidded eyes, like he was squinting into a sun.

  “Reeka, though? One of the TIEs had shot the head off her little astromech. Y-wing can’t jump to hyperspace without a droid. We had about twenty seconds to decide what to do, but like I said: What were our options?”

  For the first time, Quell experienced a twinge of sympathy for Nath Tensent. She felt cold and dizzy. She brushed away the names that haunted her as Reeka haunted him.

  “You see what happened to her?” Quell asked.

  “Sure,” Tensent said.

  But he didn’t answer her question further.

  “After Trenchenovu,” he said, “I limped to the Hive for repairs. Did some investigating to learn
how it went so wrong. Learned a few weeks later the Imps had cracked our rebel cell’s security codes—they’d been listening in for a month.

  “My best guess? They saw a chance to thwart a rebel attack and even an old score. After all, they knew who me and my people were, and—” His lips twitched. “—the Empire doesn’t take kindly to defectors.”

  She ignored the barb—or the warning, whatever it was. She spoke carefully, voice low and firm. “The TIEs who ambushed you were part of the 204th Imperial Fighter Wing—”

  “Shadow Wing,” Tensent said, with a guttural laugh. “Found out that part, too.”

  Quell kept going. “—and they’re still out there. Still active.” She was repeating herself, but she had to draw the connections for him. “They’re very dangerous, and my superiors are forming a working group to neutralize them. You could stop them.”

  Tensent lifted the glass of spicewine and drained it in a delicate motion. He made a show of savoring the liquid as it passed his lips.

  “That crew,” he said. “My squadron. They were pirates and bastards and cowards, and I’d kept them alive since we were flying for a senile old colonel in the Western Reaches. We defected together. We made a fortune together and lost it. They swore loyalty to me and I gave them everything.

  “Now they’re dead.

  “I don’t care about the New Republic and there’s no profit in revenge. Right now, I’m here to make a living.”

  Quell stared at the man. Her sympathy faded. Her loathing returned.

  Nath Tensent was the embodiment of everything that had been wrong with the Empire—the corruption hidden beneath a sheen of order and accountability; the willingness to turn a blind eye to brutality so long as the job was done—and a betrayal of the promised ideals of the Rebellion. She didn’t want him to be part of Caern Adan’s working group. She didn’t want him in the galaxy at all.

  She wanted to accept his refusal and walk away.

  But she wasn’t failing her first mission. Her only mission.

  She tensed and seized the only chance she saw. She’d recognized something in Tensent. A note of fury he’d tried to conceal.

  “I was with the 204th,” she said. “Not with the pilots who killed your people, but it was my unit.”

  He moved fast—faster than she’d expected, but not so fast she wasn’t prepared. As Tensent went for the blaster holstered at his side, Quell gripped the table with her left hand, leaned back into her chair, and kicked with all the strength she could muster. Her boots hit Tensent’s seat just as his blaster came out, and he toppled backward onto the floor.

  She scrambled to her feet as he started to rise; fought dizziness and nausea as she moved around the table to bring her heel down on his blaster and kick it across the room. It spun and skittered away. Half a dozen disinterested customers looked toward them, then returned to their drinks.

  Tensent lay on his back, chair to one side, looking up at her. As Quell tried to catch her breath—as she leaned against the table for support—he slowly stood back up.

  “You want to tell me again how you don’t want revenge?” Quell asked.

  “However much I want it,” Tensent said, “it’s not enough. I’m not going back.”

  They watched each other a long while.

  Quell had nothing else to say.

  * * *

  —

  The droid insisted on examining Quell when she returned to the U-wing. As she lay on the collapsible crew seats, the IT-O unit drifted back and forth above her and emitted a hypnotic throbbing noise. Quell slipped briefly into sleep and dreamed of scalpels cutting her skin. When she woke, she was sweating and the torture droid was several meters distant.

  She had indeed fractured her skull, the droid told her, though it would heal cleanly in time. Another broken bone didn’t seem like anything close to her biggest problem. She summarized her exchange with Tensent as she sipped from a pouch of nutrient fluids—not an improvement from the watered-down brandy.

  “How do you intend to proceed?” the droid asked.

  “We’ll signal Adan. I messed up,” Quell said. The confession made her chest ache, but she was officer enough to take responsibility, whatever the consequences. “Probably should signal Kairos, too, if we plan to leave.”

  Quell hadn’t seen the U-wing’s pilot since she’d set foot in the Hive. The droid hadn’t seemed alarmed by Kairos’s absence, so Quell hadn’t inquired further.

  “Adan may not be pleased,” the droid said. “No one can doubt your efforts, however. May I ask—”

  It paused long enough that Quell wondered if the droid had glitched. A flash of her dream came back to her, and she imagined manipulators spindling her flesh. Then the IT-O unit finished, “—why do you think Nath Tensent refused to join us? Was he honest about his reasons? Is he aware of his own motivations?”

  Quell brushed her fingers across her forehead, feeling the tender break point and the sharp pain beneath. “I think,” she said, “that some people—they won’t act, no matter how much they want to, unless some outside force insists. Unless someone or something makes it untenable to keep going the way things are.”

  The droid didn’t acknowledge her reply. Quell had the unpleasant sense of having walked into a trap.

  The low buzzing of the ship’s comm served to mercy-kill the conversation. Quell stumbled into the cockpit and half gently, half greedily touched the pilot’s console. Text scrolled down a display screen, and the sensors winked.

  “Convoy request,” she said. “Someone’s sharing their departure clearance, wants to follow us out.” Not uncommon in high-traffic, low security areas—freighters and shuttles often shadowed more heavily armed vessels in the hopes of avoiding pirate trouble. She hadn’t received a convoy request since her youth; people didn’t often look to TIE fighters for favors. But the U-wing was a gunship designed to deliver troops, capable of holding its own against a light cruiser and compact and maneuverable enough to survive a dogfight. She could imagine it looked like an appealing ally.

  Then she noticed the sender’s authentication codes. She focused her attention on the screen and swore softly. “It’s from an astromech aboard a Y-wing,” she said. “Owner is Nath Tensent.”

  Behind her, she heard the rattle and hum of the U-wing’s loading door.

  “You must have been more convincing than you thought,” the droid said.

  “Maybe.”

  But if that were true, shouldn’t she have felt a stronger sense of relief? Not just caution and doubt?

  She heard footsteps on the deck. She climbed back through the cockpit door and found herself staring into Kairos’s visor.

  Quell stepped aside. Kairos entered the cockpit and sat at the controls. The ship shivered as the main reactor came online.

  “You want to tell me anything?” Quell called into the cockpit, but Kairos didn’t respond. Quell wasn’t particularly surprised.

  She heard Tensent’s voice through the comm now, calling out departure vectors and clearance codes. She looked from Kairos to the torture droid and thought of the droid’s confidence, its reassurance that she had all the necessary tools to succeed at her mission. She didn’t know where Kairos had disappeared to or whether Kairos’s activities were connected to Tensent’s change of heart; but in her mind, the two mysteries congealed into one.

  She had worried Adan was playing her for a fool. She no longer thought he’d meant for her to fail, but she didn’t like what she suspected now at all.

  II

  The second battle had played out much like the first. The Hellion’s Dare, under surprise assault by an Imperial cruiser-carrier and multiple TIE squadrons, had scrambled its escorts while preparing to jump to lightspeed. The A-wings of Riot Squadron had rushed to intercept the attackers, forcing flights of Imperial starfighters t
o break off as they approached the Dare. The B-wings of Hound Squadron had stayed behind to guard the frigate, filling the sky with crimson fire whenever a TIE drew near.

  And just as in the first battle, at the moment it seemed like the Dare and its fighters would escape without casualties, the enemy had chosen an A-wing to harry and surround. The Dare had sent jump coordinates; the order to retreat had gone out; and Sonogari, Riot Seven, had been left behind.

  Wyl wept in his fighter afterward, surrounded by the rippling blue of hyperspace. Sonogari had been a friend, a gentle soul, and Wyl’s informal flight instructor. Sonogari had spent hours with Wyl when the latter had first joined the squadron, perching above Wyl’s cockpit as Wyl had tried to familiarize himself with an A-wing’s controls. Those interactions had turned into discussions about family—Sonogari’s estrangement from his mother, Wyl’s concerns for his aunt and uncle—and about art and religion and the bizarre worlds they’d seen and hoped to return to. They’d kissed once, when they’d been grounded together during a fleet battle at Sarapin, and they’d laughed about it later and decided they were ill matched. Wyl had never before been rejected with so much grace and heart.

  Pilots died in war. Wyl knew this. But he would miss his friend.

  The starfighters and the Hellion’s Dare emerged into realspace within a glittering fog—a crystalline, scintillating field of dust, like a blizzard frozen in time and space. Immediately a dozen voices broke in over the comm. Some asked about Sonogari. Others focused on practical questions: How had the Empire followed the Hellion’s Dare through hyperspace? (Was it a homing beacon? A mole aboard the ship? There were a hundred possibilities, all of which would need to be checked.)

  Wyl stared into the stardust and ached for Home.

  * * *

  —

  Captain Kreskian, the energetic Chadra-Fan commander of the Dare, explained that the frigate had flown into the outer reaches of the Oridol Cluster—a region of densely packed stars and slow-churning cosmic storms that made hyperspace navigation “like sailing a windless sea under cloudy skies.” Though Wyl had never sailed a ship nor seen a sea from ground level, he understood the gist: In the Oridol Cluster, the captain hoped to shake loose their pursuers. Each hyperspace jump would require hours to calculate and convey them only a short distance; a frustration, to be sure, but the enemy would be as stymied and confused as the Dare. Rebels had eluded pursuers in the cluster before, Kreskian said, and the New Republic wasn’t so “high-and-mighty” that it couldn’t fall back on “old stratagems. Reliable stratagems!”