Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars) (Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron) by Alexander Freed

Author:Alexander Freed [Freed, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Published: 2019-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

SPONTANEOUS ETHICAL RECONFIGURATION

I

From a distance of four hundred thousand kilometers, Abednedo resembled nothing so much as a clod of dirt wrapped in desultory clouds. It possessed no majesty; inspired no awe. For Quell, it was nonetheless her best hope for salvation.

She had been the one to dig up the obscure transmission from the New Republic Intelligence data banks. She had concocted the strangled reasoning connecting theoretical Abednedo holdouts to Shadow Wing. She’d done so knowing that her squadron was falling apart and required something more than simulations to stay together. She’d done so for her own sake, in response to the longing she’d felt when she’d seen Chadic return from her specforce sojourn.

It wasn’t likely to work. She was ashamed at how quickly the others had figured it out.

“Chadic, Kairos, with me,” she said as D6-L adjusted her X-wing’s course toward the southern hemisphere. “Lark and Tensent, establish geostationary orbit above Neshorino and await further instructions.”

“Shout if you need us,” Tensent replied.

Quell watched two blips on her scanner peel away, while Chadic’s assault ship and Kairos’s transport followed Quell at a respectful distance. If all went well, Lark and Tensent would never need to make planetfall; the A-wing would make its scouting pass from orbit, if the opportunity arose. The Y-wing was there if everything went terribly wrong.

The X-wing trembled as the vessel penetrated the outermost layer of Abednedo’s atmosphere. “We’re in the soup,” Quell announced as she thumbed through messages from the astromech—signals to and from computerized flight controllers in the city of Neshorino, transmitted far faster than she could read.

The droid’s actions disconcerted her. A TIE pilot had no astromech unit to rely on—she was dependent on her carrier ship and flight controllers to plot her course and choose her dock. A TIE pilot needed to trust her team. Now Quell flew a ship that didn’t even need her to function.

She thought about Tensent’s ancient T5 droid, and how Tensent treated it like a member of the squadron—argued with it in the hangar, wandered with it through the corridors of the Lodestar. She’d barely crossed paths with her astromech off-duty. It hadn’t seemed to mind.

She approved D6-L’s proposed trajectory and let the droid take her down. The silence of space—broken only by the noise and rattle of the ship—gave way to the roar of wind as the X-wing cut through gray cloud cover. Temperature controls activated automatically, chilling Quell as the ship’s exterior baked in the heat of reentry. She heard her repulsors thrum to life a moment later, adjusting for the planet’s gravity.

Neshorino rose out of a mountain range of endless rust-brown rock. Jagged natural spires stood tipped by ornamental towers, and great cliff faces were carved with painted statuary. A thousand narrow streets and stairwells blurred beneath Quell as she made for one of a series of protruding buttes. There was a beauty to the city, but it was a foreign beauty—Neshorino had been built by a species native to caverns and stone, and no human could ever find comfort there.

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