Nath Tensent flies the Y-wing in Alphabet Squadron, the mismatched unit assembled by New Republic general Hera Syndulla in Alexander Freed’s Alphabet Squadron (Del Rey, 2019). The publisher’s description is characteristically compact: a roguish pilot who also outlasted his squadron.
Freed’s interest is in what that does to a person over time. Tensent is the squadron’s operator — the one with contacts, angles and a working understanding of what things cost — and the trilogy is careful not to let the charm read as harmless. Everybody in Alphabet Squadron is a survivor of something, and his particular adaptation is transactional.
The Y-wing is the right ship for him: obsolete, slow, hard to kill, and still in service twenty years after it should have been retired. Freed matches craft to pilot throughout the trilogy, and it is one of the reasons the books read as military fiction rather than as a Star Wars story with fighters in it.
He is current canon and, alongside Quell, Wyl Lark, Chass na Chadic and Kairos, part of the clearest modern descendant of the Bantam X-Wing novels.
