Shadow Fall (Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron, #2)

by Alexander Freed

and it turned out being on the winning side of a war meant fighting for stupid things.

In the hands of a skilled pilot, a TIE fighter was a knife—swift and slender and deadly against a lumbering beast like the B-wing. In lesser hands a TIE was a garbage pail strapped with guns. Clumsy and defenseless.

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.

Quell was a liar, a hypocrite, and a war criminal. But on her best days, the woman had style.

“For your species, an individual recollection is not a single clear recording but a reassembly of all relevant data.

This is a really interesting view of the human psyche and how we build memories.

Star Wars Squadrons game

“But Vanguard’s on a mission to try to ameliorate the shortage of starships going around. Special mission, from Syndulla’s special consultant Lindon Javes.”

It appears Moff Pandion has indeed been killed, and that his forces have allied with Admiral Rae Sloane. Sloane’s fleet is clearly growing, and she appears to be operating primarily within the Outer Rim.

A voice, low and wet and guttural, made sounds that Quell took full seconds to register as words: “They fall for us, so we may purge the shadow. The mission must succeed.”

“Caern Adan is a bastard,”

Jyn had fought an impossible war against an overwhelming enemy. Chass was finishing an easy war from a position of strength—even if the New Republic was having a bad day.

And she’d excused the undercurrent of dread, the constant fear of failure (fear of the consequences of failure), as something that was part of all families.

Maya Hallik.

Jyn’s last name while hiding

The tower formed gradually out of the night, taking shape where stars were absent against the sky. From a distance, it might have been a natural obelisk—a gargantuan version of the black stones that erupted during the worst of the quakes. As Quell’s eyes adjusted and she strained to take it in, however, she saw that the top of the tower was ornately forked—two individual spires rising from the central mass, arcing and coming together to frame an opaque lens that dully distorted the stars behind it. There was nothing Quell could see at the base of the tower. There was no path through the sand, or even the corpse of another stormtrooper to indicate the location had significance. She thought of what Adan had said about sites targeted by Operation Cinder. “Do you know what it is?” she asked the interrogation droid.

Closer to the tower, she could see that it had indeed been carved of the quake stone, apparently from a single piece. Its surface was broken by a circuit maze of shallow, nearly imperceptible grooves. Inset in the tower base was a massive rectangular door formed from a metal the same color as the rock, distinguished only by its marginally more reflective luster.

The tower’s antiquity was obvious from the weathering of the stone. What had once, Quell suspected, been perfectly square corners were rounded from centuries—from millennia, perhaps—of wind and sand. Quell felt instinctively certain that the tower was older than anything on Catadra. Her memory drifted to the Jedi temple she’d visited on the Harkrova moon, and that memory led to a vaguely recalled word she’d encountered somewhere among rebel propaganda videos: Sith. She couldn’t recall the word’s meaning, though she tried.

“Imperial soldiers openly disdained nonhumans, and the ruling class did little to intervene. But how often have we heard the New Republic chancellor talk about ending xenophobia while handing out medals to all-human death squads? We’ve met the New Republic’s troops, and it is still humans who outnumber the rest.

“Then again, I hear the New Republic intends to repurpose Hoth as a prison for those who remain loyal to the Empire. Maybe I’ll have my chance someday.”

“In the years since those experiences, most every cell in your body—every atom—has been replaced and renewed. You have rebuilt yourself, both physically and mentally. You do not need to carry the guilt of prior incarnations.”

“You listen to the Force, so you can build a better civilization.”