“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 irritated 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.”