III
The dying-animal squeal of Chass’s music flooded the comm as Nath Tensent plodded toward the battle. T5 was reconfiguring his thruster output but he doubted the droid would squeeze much more out of the aging Y-wing. “Just keep us steady,” he called, and the ship only seemed to buck harder.
If he was late to the fight, he thought, it would be for the best. After hitting the walker, he was short on ordnance.
Quell called out orders. Nath snapped off a few shots, coming close to actually hitting a TIE before Kairos, of all people, eliminated his target. She wasn’t a showy flier or a tactical mastermind, and Nath had a habit of forgetting she was more than troop support, but she still packed a punch when on the offensive.
Chass, meanwhile, scrapped more TIEs than should’ve been possible by a B-wing. By the time Nath came into optimal firing range, all that was left was salvage and an asteroid that burned like a reactor core mid-meltdown. “You never know what’s flammable around here,” he said. “We all set? We need to hunt for survivors?”
“One crashed into that burning asteroid,” Wyl replied. “I’ll do a flyby, check and see.”
Poor boy, Nath thought, and shook his head with a smile.
“Finish up quick,” Quell said. “Kairos, stay with Lark in case he finds something. Chadic, sweep for reinforcements on my wing. Xion, scan all comm frequencies and make sure that cargo shuttle isn’t sending a distress call.”
Wyl and Chass called acknowledgments. Kairos moved into position. Guess that makes me Xion, Nath mused, but he didn’t comment on Quell’s slip and he let T5 scan as instructed. No one else seemed to have noticed.
“So, you pull off whatever convoluted spy job you and Adan had planned?” he asked.
“I’ll let you know when it’s done,” Quell said.
Soon after they were finished and en route to Troithe, the five vessels moving in formation out of the debris field and their computer-adjusted velocities locking them in relative position as they swept toward the planet. They crossed over the broken landmass and a neighboring sea, then descended toward one of the unshielded sectors of the sprawling city-continent.
The solar projectors had dimmed from pale yellow to a twilight blue, suffusing the blur of decaying skyscrapers and disused industrial parks—a testament to millennia of development and transformation and vibrancy that had peaked long before the rise and fall of the Empire. Centuries earlier, Troithe had rivaled Coruscant as the Republic’s cosmopolitan jewel, its city encompassing half a globe and teeming with billions of residents—more than a few belonging to the Republic’s most respected aristo-mercantile families.
Troithe had been the sort of planet the rust worlds of the Mid Rim pretended to be: a place of invention and manufacturing, where a skilled artisan could develop a cognitive module in the morning, attend a trendy concert midday, and oversee the assembly of an innovator droid army at night. Troithe fell anyway: Coruscant, already the political center of the Republic, had drawn migrants from thousands of Republic member worlds and foreign allies and built sector after sector, level after level of new housing blocks in response. It began to outpace Troithe as an industrial powerhouse by virtue of its greater population, putting hands and minds from countless species to work.
And as Coruscant’s production had waxed, Troithe’s waned due to factors both unavoidable (the exhaustion of precious mineral resources on the broken continent; the Cerberon system’s decreasing accessibility in a Republic expanding into the Colonies and the Inner Rim; the gradual decay of Troithe’s planetary orbit as it spiraled toward the black hole) and tragically preventable (a short-lived civil war between the mixed-species underclass and the majority human population—a conflict manipulated in part by an ambitious aristo-mercantile family seeking to profit). By the Clone Wars, Troithe had settled into slow decline. Every year, its billions-strong populace grew a little smaller. Every year, another factory shut down or another residential district was abandoned.
Many of Troithe’s inhabitants had welcomed Emperor Palpatine’s promises of renewal and restored prominence for their world. Some of those promises had even been kept, and a substantial portion of the population still retained Imperial sympathies. That was one reason why the operation to seize Troithe had been slow going.
The skyscraper hills sloped into a basin filled with low metal platforms and webs of scaffolding, along with tents and prefab shelters packing the roads and runways. Past the refugee enclaves came hangars and tarmacs occupied by dozens of freighters, corvettes, and snubfighters. At the very center was the Lodestar, the aging Acclamator-class battleship that had carried Nath and his colleagues across half the galaxy and back.
“You can smell the carbon scoring from here,” Nath observed. “Old girl hasn’t moved for weeks and she’s still waiting for a good scrubbing.”
“Your kind of woman,” Chass answered with a snort, and laughed to herself at length.
Instead of angling for the battleship, the starfighters curved toward a landing pad half a kilometer out while Kairos split off with her U-wing to join the other transports. Twenty minutes later Nath had lowered his vessel onto the landing pad, briefed his ground crew on his spent weaponry (he didn’t trust them with more than basic maintenance), and extracted T5 for recharging. Finally, he reunited with Wyl under the black sky to begin their trek back to the carrier.
Sweat saturated both men’s flight suits, though the day was cool and mild. Each carried his helmet under his right arm. Aside from uniforms and postures they bore little resemblance to each other: Where Nath was broad and muscular, Wyl was slender; where Nath’s hair was dark, receding, and pulled back, Wyl’s was brown and neat; where Nath’s skin was tinged with brass, Wyl’s was olive-toned. Yet despite nearly two decades separating them, both walked with the swagger of youth.
They spoke to those around them more than to each other—as they strode down tarmacs Wyl waved encouragement at two Hail Squadron pilots tinkering with their ships. Nath yelled good-natured insults and sly innuendos at passing speeder riders and received grins and ripostes in return.
“You see Chass anywhere?” Wyl asked after a while.
“She’s gone wherever she goes after missions. Expect she’ll be back by morning.”
They didn’t see Quell, either—Nath assumed she’d already gone to huddle with Caern Adan at his makeshift intelligence headquarters—but they crossed paths with Kairos as the Lodestar’s hull grew large on the horizon. If the silent woman ever sweated, it didn’t show through the layers of fabric that swaddled her body or the riveted metal mask that concealed her face. She fell into step beside them as they maneuvered through a field of tugs, loadlifters, and equipment crates before marching up the boarding ramp. Inside, the vast hangar mirrored the civilian encampment outside; rows of multicolored tents, the smell of oil sizzling on heater plates, and the noise of a hundred conversations dominated. Soldiers ate and cleaned their rifles and played keep-away with someone’s crumpled jacket.