Alphabet Squadron - Alexander Freed Read online

  Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9781984821980

  International edition ISBN 9781984819963

  Ebook ISBN 9781984821997

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Elizabeth. A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Cover art: Jeff Langevin

  Cover design: Jeff Langevin and Scott Biel

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Del Rey Star Wars Timeline

  Epigraph

  Part One: Elements of a Killing Machine

  Chapter 1: Situational Awareness

  Chapter 2: Angle of Attack

  Chapter 3: Inertial Velocity

  Chapter 4: Electronic Countermeasures

  Chapter 5: Identification Friend or Foe

  Chapter 6: Payload

  Chapter 7: Guidance System

  Part Two: Maladies of an Endless War

  Chapter 8: Disunity of Purpose

  Chapter 9: Delusions of Grandeur

  Chapter 10: Spontaneous Ethical Reconfiguration

  Chapter 11: Primitive Cultural Regression

  Chapter 12: Spiritual Reawakenings

  Chapter 13: The Determination of Soldiers

  Chapter 14: The Exploitation of Fanatics

  Part Three: Stages of a Rapidly Decaying Plan

  Chapter 15: Preflight Preparations

  Chapter 16: Tactical Engagement

  Chapter 17: Unexpected Complication

  Chapter 18: Catastrophic Failure

  Chapter 19: Emergency Readjustment

  Chapter 20: Redefinition of Victory Conditions

  Chapter 21: After-Action Review

  Chapter 22: Celebration for Heroes

  Chapter 23: Unfinished Business

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Alexander Freed

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Tie Fighter #1

  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….

  CHAPTER 1

  SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

  I

  "I was eighteen kilometers above sea level when they caught me,” she said.

  The droid measured her heart rate from across the room (sixty-two beats per minute, seven above her baseline) and stored her voiceprint for post-session analysis. It performed a cursory optical scan and noted the scrapes on her lips and forehead; the sling supporting her right arm. She had begun to regain muscle mass, though she remained—the droid permitted itself a poetic flourish—frail.

  “You remember the precise altitude?” the droid asked. For this interaction it had chosen a masculine voice, bass and hollow. The sound projected from a speaker on the underside of its spherical black chassis.

  “I have an extremely good memory.”

  The droid oriented the red lens of its photoreceptor as if to stare. “So do I.”

  The woman met its gaze. The droid readjusted the lens.

  This is the story she told.

  * * *

  —

  Eighteen kilometers above the surface of the planet Nacronis, Yrica Quell fled for her life.

  The siltstorm raged outside her starfighter, blue and yellow mud roiling against the faceted viewport. A burst of wind lifted the ship’s port-side wing, nearly sending her into a spin; she adjusted her repulsors with her gloved left hand while the right urged a rattling lever into position. The ship leveled out, and the comforting howl of its twin ion engines rose to a screech as six million stony granules entered the exhaust. Quell winced as she bounced in her harness, listening to her vessel’s agony.

  Emerald light shot past the viewport, incinerating ribbons of airborne mud. She increased her thrust and plunged deeper into the storm, ignoring the engines’ scream.

  Her scanner showed three marks rapidly closing from behind—two fewer than she’d hoped for. She moved a hand to the comm, recalibrated her frequency, and called out two names: “Tonas? Barath?” When no one answered, she recalibrated again and tried, “This is TIE pilot Yrica Quell to Nacronis ground control.” But Tonas and Barath were surely dead, and the locals were jammed, out of range, or ardently inclined to ignore her.

  Another volley of emerald particle bolts sizzled past her ship. Quell maintained her vector. She was a fine defensive pilot, but only the storm could keep her alive now. She had to trust to the wind and the blinding mud to throw off her enemy’s aim.

  Her comm sounded at last. “Lieutenant Quell?”

  She leaned forward, straining at her harness, trying to peer through the storm as her teeth chattered and her hips knocked against her seat. A ribbon of blue silt streaked by and she glimpsed, beyond it, a flash of white light: lightning ahead and twenty degrees to port.

  “Lieutenant Quell? Please acknowledge.”

  She considered her options. She could head toward the lightning—toward the storm’s center, where the winds would be strongest. There she could try to locate an updraft. Reduce her thrust, overcharge her repulsors, and let the draft and the repulsors’ antigravity toss her ship high while her pursuers passed below. If she didn’t black out, if she didn’t become disoriented, she could dip back down and re-engage her enemy from behind, eliminating one, maybe two before they realized where she’d gone.

  “You are hereby ordered to reduce speed, eject, and await pickup, detention, and court-martial.”

  She couldn’t imagine that the man on the other end of the comm would fall for such a maneuver. More likely she’d be shot down while she spun helplessly through the sky.

  Of course, she’d also be shot if she ejected. Major Soran Keize was a good man, an admirable man, but she knew there would be no court-martial.

  She changed course toward the lightning and pitched her ship incrementally downward. Toward the ground, she reminded herself—ground, like atmosphere and gravity, was a challenge she normally flew without. Another flash of emerald suggested her foes were getting closer, likely attempting to catch her in their crossfire.

  She let the wind guide her. She couldn’t outfly Major Keize, but she was at least as good as his squadron mates. She’d flown with Shana, seen Tong’s flight stats, and Quell deserved her fate if she couldn’t match them both. She dived through a ribbon of yellow silt that left her momentarily blind, then reduced her repulsor output until the TIE fighter’s aerodynamics took over and sent it veering at a sharp angle. Quell might find atmospheric flight challenging, but her opponents would find an enemy jerked about by gravity positively confounding. The next volley of particle blasts was just a glimmer in her peripheral vision.

  They would be back on her soon. A thunderclap loud enough to resonate in her bones reassured her she was near the storm’s center. S he wondered, startled by the thought, if she should say something to the major before the end—make some last plea or acknowledgment of their years together—then blotted the idea from her mind. She’d made her decision.

  She looked through her streaked cockpit at the swirling vortex of colors. She accelerated as hard as the TIE would allow, checked her instruments through the pain in her skull and the glimmering spots in front of her eyes, counted to five, then tilted her fighter an additional fifty degrees toward the ground.

  After that, two events occurred nearly simultaneously. Somehow she was aware of them both.

  As Quell’s fighter rushed toward the surface of Nacronis, her three pursuers—already accelerating to match Quell’s speed—flew directly toward the storm center. Two of the enemy TIEs, according to her scanner, attempted to break away. They were caught by the gale and, as they decelerated, swept into each other. Both were immediately destroyed in the collision.

  The third pilot attempted to navigate the gauntlet of lightning and silt. He fared better, but his starfighter wasn’t equal to his skill. Something went wrong—Quell guessed that silt particles had crept into seams in the TIE’s armor, or that a lightning strike had shorted the fighter’s systems—and Major Soran Keize, too, disappeared from her scanner. The ace of the 204th Imperial Fighter Wing was dead.

  At the same time her pursuers met their end, Quell attempted to break out of her dive. She saw nothing of the world outside her cockpit, nothing beyond her instruments, and her body felt leaden as she operated the TIE’s controls. She’d managed to level out the ship when she heard a deafening crash and felt her seat heave beneath her. She realized half a second later that the bottom of her starboard wing had struck the mire of Nacronis’s surface and was dragging through the silt. Half a second after that, she lost total control of her vessel and made the mistake of reaching for the ejector switch with her right hand.

  The TIE fighter halted abruptly and she was thrown at the now-cracked viewport. The safety harness caught her extended right arm and snapped her brittle bones as the straps cut into her body. Her face smashed against the inside of her flight helmet. Agony and nausea followed. She heard nothing but an unidentifiable dull roar. She blacked out and woke almost immediately—swiftly enough to savor the still-fresh pain.

  Quell had an extremely good memory, but she didn’t remember cutting herself free of the safety harness or clambering out of the cockpit hatch. She didn’t remember whether she’d vomited when she’d removed her helmet. She remembered, vaguely, the smell of burning circuits and her own sweat—but that was all, until she sat on top of her broken craft amid a multicolored marsh and looked up at the sky.

  She couldn’t tell if it was night or day. The swirling, iridescent storm looked like an oily whirlpool, blotting out sun or stars or both. It churned and grew, visibly expanding moment by moment. Glimmering above the white lightning, faint and high, were the orange lights of atmospheric explosions: the payloads of other TIE fighters.

  The explosions would stoke the storm, Quell knew—stoke and feed it, and others like it, until storms tore through every city on Nacronis. The silt would flay towers and citadels to their steel bones. Children would choke on mud flooding the streets. All because an order had been given, and only Quell and Tonas and Barath had bothered to defy it.

  This was what her Empire had become in the days after Endor. She saw it now, but she was too late to save Nacronis.

  * * *

  —

  “You were fortunate to survive,” the droid said when Yrica Quell finished her story.

  “The TIE gave me somewhere to shelter. The open marshland wasn’t hit as hard as the main settlements.”

  “I don’t doubt it. My observation stands. Do you feel fortunate, Lieutenant Quell?”

  She wrinkled her nose. Her eyes flickered from the spherical droid to the corrugated metal walls of the repurposed shipping container where they met.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” she asked. “I’m alive. And I’ve been assigned a charming therapist.”

  The droid hesitated, ran the statement through multiple analysis programs, and was pleasantly surprised to conclude that its patient’s hostility was omnidirectional, counterproductive, and obnoxious, but in no way aimed at the droid. Creating a rapport remained possible. It was, in fact, a priority—albeit not the droid’s only priority.

  “Let’s resume tomorrow,” the droid said, “and talk more about what happened between your crash and your discovery by the emergency crew.”

  Quell grunted and rose, raising the hood of her poncho before taking the single step needed to reach the shipping container’s door. She paused there and looked from the droid’s photoreceptor to the injector syringe attached to its manipulator.

  “Do people try to hurt you,” she asked, “when they see an Imperial torture droid waiting to treat them?”

  This time, her voice suggested an admixture of hostility and curiosity.

  “I see very few patients,” the droid answered. That fact was dangerously close to qualifying as classified intelligence, but the droid deemed the risk of breach acceptably low next to the benefits of earning Quell’s trust.

  Quell only grunted again and departed.

  The droid reviewed the recorded conversation seventeen times. It focused on the woman’s biofeedback throughout, but it didn’t neglect more conventional verbal analysis. Quell’s story, it decided, was largely consistent with the testimony of a traumatized Imperial defector.

  Nonetheless, the droid was certain she was lying.

  II

  Traitor’s Remorse was a frost-bitten shantytown of an outpost. Once a nameless rebel base built to harbor a handful of desperate insurgents, it had evolved into a sprawling maze of improvised shelters, security fencing, and duracrete bunkers housing twelve thousand would-be defectors from the crumbling Galactic Empire. Under an ashen sky, former Imperial military personnel suffered debriefings and scrutiny and medical examinations as they waited for the nascent rebel government—the so-called New Republic—to determine their fate.

  Most of the defectors occupied the outpost only in passing. They were infantry and engineers, com-scan officers and admirals’ aides. Designated low risk and high value, they received an offer of leniency and redeployment within a week, then shipped out to crew captured Star Destroyers or to join orbital minesweeper teams. Meanwhile, those less fortunate—the defectors designated high risk and low value by whatever New Republic interviewer they’d annoyed—were stuck trying to prove themselves reliable, loyal, and of sound moral character without going mad from tedium.

  Yrica Quell occupied the latter category. She didn’t think the name Traitor’s Remorse was funny, but after a month she couldn’t think of one better.

  On a foggy afternoon, Quell jogged down the gravel path running from her housing unit to the landing pads. She kept her pace slow to reduce the throbbing in her shoulder and minimize the bounce of her sling, rapidly transitioning from chilled to overheated to clammy with cold sweat. She shouldn’t have been running at all in her condition. (She hadn’t needed to heal naturally from a broken bone since she’d been twelve years old, but medical bacta was in short supply for ex-Imperials.) She ran anyway. Her routine was the only thing keeping her sane.

  Once, she would have cleared her mind by flying. That wasn’t an option now.

  Certainly her therapist wasn’t doing much good. The reprogrammed IT-O torture droid seemed more interested in examining and reexamining her last flight than in helping her adapt to her circumstances. There was nothing useful about the images of Nacronis the droid had dredged up in her mind—siltstorms tearing through settlements, explosions in the sky. Nothing that would serve her or the New Republic. Yet until the droid was satisfied, it seemed she wouldn’t be allowed to move on.

  She approached a checkpoint and turned off the gr avel path ten meters before the entrance to the landing zone, running alongside the fence surrounding the tarmac. Brittle cyan grass crunched satisfyingly under her boots. One of the sentries threw her a wave, and she returned a curt nod. This, too, was part of her routine.

  She kept running, past the informal junk swap and the communications tower. Two hundred meters down the tarmac fence she drew to a stop, adjusted her sling, smoothed back her sweat-slicked hair—the blond locks longer and sloppier than she was used to, irritating her nape—and listened to a howl mixed with a high-pitched whine far above. She craned her neck, squinting into the gray light, and looked to the blotch in the sky.

  Right on time. In all the chaos of a civil war, in one obscure corner of the galaxy, the rebels somehow kept their daily transport on schedule. Maybe the New Republic had a chance after all.

  The GR-75 was an aging beast of a starship, slow to maneuver and bulky even for its class, but Quell felt a pang as the tapered vessel descended, washing her with exhaust and radiant heat. Somewhere aboard a pilot calculated landing vectors and calibrated instruments for atmospheric pressure. A pilot who—if only when flying without passengers or cargo—surely accelerated past her ship’s recommended limits and tested herself against the resulting g forces. Quell’s fingers played along an invisible set of controls. Then she clenched her fists shut.

  Give me a shuttle, she thought. An airspeeder. Even a flight simulator.

  The GR-75 tapped the tarmac hard enough to jolt the ground. Quell watched through the fence as one of the outpost sentries performed a cursory inspection of the ship’s hull before signaling for the boarding ramp to lower. A tentacled New Republic officer was the first passenger to disembark. The officer passed a datapad to the sentry, and the march of new arrivals began.