Soran looked from the viewscreen to his crew. He noted pursed lips; eyes that refused to observe. He voiced the sentiment that he knew was in their hearts: “We risked our lives for these? We risked our colleagues in Squadron Four and exposed ourselves to attack for—what? Junk?”
He shook his head briskly, waiting for Rassus and the others to turn his way. When they did, he continued.
“These are our ships. These are the vessels of the Empire, flown by pilots who gave their lives for their brothers and sisters. They will have the chance to fight again.
“We will make them fly again.”
He timed his words carefully. He finished as the tractor beam deactivated and the sled gently tapped the deck of the hangar, then transitioned from speechmaking to command in an eyeblink. “Lock down the hangar and retrace our path through the field. Prepare for lightspeed jump.”
Thankfully, the crew obeyed. Rassus hadn’t yet questioned him openly. Someone whispered, “Let’s just burn down a planet already,” and Soran felt the Aerie vibrate beneath him as the cruiser-carrier’s thrusters ignited.
Everything he’d said was true. It galled him to stage an operation solely as a diversion—solely so he could claim ships that the Empire would have incinerated rather than repaired. That even the New Republic had deemed unworthy of use. It pained him to put his pilots into action when they were barely a cohesive unit.
But the 204th was fragile. He had counted the TIEs and pilots surviving, and neither was sufficient to the task ahead. He could not lead a wing ready to break after a single blow; he could not save his unit without rebuilding it.
It would take time. But he would restore Shadow Wing to glory.
CHAPTER 3
PAST AND FUTURE GLORIES
I
“I called him Xion. In the middle of an operation, I called Tensent by Xion’s name. I don’t think he noticed.”
“Would it be terrible if he had?” the droid asked. It dilated the red dot of its photoreceptor, in the accusatory way Yrica Quell had grown accustomed to. “Your squadron is aware of your past inside the Empire.”
“Not really,” Quell said.
“No. Not really.”
The IT-O unit’s spherical black chassis floated roughly two meters from Quell, above the emergency driver’s pit of the tram car. Quell sat in the doorway opposite, where a heavy barricade should have sealed off unruly passengers from the cab’s almost entirely automated controls. But the tram car hadn’t run for weeks—not since the New Republic had secured Troithe’s primary spaceport, and likely not during the turmoil preceding—and the reprogrammed interrogation droid had taken the car for its office, correctly presuming no one else would need the vehicle.
“I remember things all the time now,” she said, and it was as difficult a confession as any she’d made.
In the Cerberon debris field Quell’s mind had drifted to another mission—a patrol on the outskirts of Cathar, undertaken shortly after her graduation from the Imperial Academy. Back then she’d discovered during takeoff that her helmet had reeked of creamed longcorn and bile. She’d been new to her squadron and had said nothing about the stench. When she’d returned to the Star Destroyer Pursuer it had been another three shifts before Sergeant Greef found her scrubbing her flight suit; as it turned out, half a dozen officers and crew had known about “the incident” with Xion, who’d grabbed Quell’s helmet at a moment of acute nausea.
Quell wasn’t sure why the mission had dredged up that particular memory, but it had. The memories that came were often of unimportant things—of Shadow Wing pilots who had died a year into her tour of duty, or of the astringent aftertaste of Imperial rations stamped by Aldraig manufactories. Occasionally she remembered more distressing events—maneuvering through the clutterbomb-riddled passages honeycombing Tassahondee Station, or the day she’d nearly collided with an ejected rebel pilot in the vast emptiness of space.
Sometimes she thought about how, months before coming to Troithe, when she’d still belonged to the 204th Imperial Fighter Wing, she had taken part in an unforgivable crime. She had abetted—she had performed—an act of genocide on the planet Nacronis. Given the opportunity, she’d have continued in her role of murderer, of war criminal, of squadron commander. Only her mentor had saved her from that fate.
“Memory is a construct,” the droid said. “For your species, an individual recollection is not a single clear recording but a reassembly of all relevant data. Before Pandem Nai, you suppressed the keystone to all of your memories with the 204th. Now that you have acknowledged your trauma, it is not surprising other memories would surface.”
Major Soran Keize had told her as they’d surveyed the Nacronis wasteland: “If you would do this, then there’s nothing that will drive you out.” He’d spoken of a moral sickness destroying her, and warned that she would stay with the 204th until either the sickness killed her or the rebels did.
Keize had ordered her to leave, and she had. She’d lacked the spine to argue. She’d lied to the New Republic about the circumstances of her defection, lied to her comrades about attempting to thwart the genocide at Nacronis, lied to her new superiors, and lied to herself. She’d found that so long as she clung to the fiction of Yrica Quell, the righteous woman who’d been pushed too far and tried and failed to stop Operation Cinder, she could hunt down her old friends with barely a twinge of remorse.
But now someone knew. The droid knew. She could no longer lie to herself.
So she was beginning to remember.
“You witnessed a terrible act,” the droid went on. “You feel tremendous guilt, and daily you deceive the colleagues with whom you entrust your life. The notion that this should not affect your health is absurd on its surface. The only question is whether you will permit us to heal the injuries you have suffered, rather than simply ameliorate them.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Quell said.
“You are. And I recognize that important step. Nonetheless, I’m not certain I understand what you expect from these sessions. I wonder if you know yourself.”
“I want you to show me how to get my focus back. If you need to medicate me, medicate me.”
The droid’s primary manipulator twitched. The attached syringe was empty. “Medication is in extremely short supply. I will assist you in functioning day-to-day, but the symptoms are not the disease.”
She stretched out one leg that had been folded beneath her and rubbed at the tattoo on her biceps showing the Alphabet crest.