Empire's End: Aftermath (Star Wars) Page 14

  “He passed away some years ago.” Marrok: Embo’s pet anooba. A vicious beast to Embo’s enemies, but to her, the long-muzzled hound was ever the diligent cuddle-bug, never failing to roll over and seize a belly-scratching opportunity as the young girl giggled.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. He was a good hound.”

  “He was.”

  “So you’re, ah, you’re working with a crew again?” Her two hearts hammer inside her chest, beating so fast it’s like cannon fire underneath the mantle of her breastbone. If I move, he’ll end me.

  “I always work with a crew. It is the Kyuzo way to not be alone.”

  “But Swift, huh? I wouldn’t have thought…”

  To that, Embo says nothing. He only shrugs.

  She asks: “You always know you were hunting me?”

  “I did.”

  “How’s this going to end, then, Embo?”

  From behind the bounty hunter, the faraway cry of another voice she recognizes—the blunt, workman accent of another bounty hunter Sugi worked with once upon a time: Dengar. His presence here is a surprise—Swift is really bringing the history with this crew. Sugi always hated Dengar. Everybody always hated Dengar.

  Of course, they hate Swift, too…

  “Back to the ship! She came this way!” Dengar says.

  She can’t see that old salt. Not yet. But he’ll be here, soon.

  C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.

  “Embo,” she says, “I know you have debts. You and Sugi—you two helped people. You did the right thing and I know that upset the wrong people. It cost you. I have her debts, too.” She realizes now, the deal for the Kyuzo is probably simple: Embo’s slate will be wiped clean if he brings in Jas. Debt for debt. Credit for credit. She starts to hear Dengar, now. Closing in. “Sugi always did what was right even though she didn’t admit it, and you were loyal to her. I’m trying to do something good here, too. The right thing. Even if it’s not the easy thing. Even if it makes the wrong people mad. Even if it costs me. So, I need you to not bring me in. And…I need that ship.”

  Embo seems to consider this.

  “I am old,” he says. “And Marrok always liked you.”

  He lifts the bowcaster and steps away from the ship.

  Her path is clear. She lets out a breath.

  “I won’t forget this, Embo.”

  “As you say, child.”

  She wants to do more. Even just stand here and talk to him—she regrets suddenly having lost touch with him all these years. But there’s no time for that. Already as she runs toward the ramp, she spies that old bastard Dengar trotting up, his long-barreled rifle swung up by his hip.

  “Jas! Don’t you dare run!”

  His cannon rifle goes off—she winces as a bolt shrieks over her shoulder. Nearly falling, she manages to hurry up the ramp, slamming the button closed behind her—it begins to ascend as she dives into the cockpit, opens the gunnery panel, and sets the shuttle’s nose-cone turret to drop.

  As she warms the engines, the turret begins barking fire through the hangar. Dengar dives behind a rock formation just as the turret blasts a small crater where he was standing only moments before.

  Time to get out of here. Time to find Norra.

  “Bring him out!”

  Two Red Key raiders—Yimug the Gran, Gweeska the Rodian—drag the man in all-too-familiar Mandalorian armor out into the center of so-called Freetown. The man staggers forward, his hands behind his back. Yimug throws him to the ground. Gweeska kicks him in the tailbone so that his helmeted head pitches forward into the sand.

  Lorgan Movellan steps up. All around, the Red Key raiders applaud and hoot and catcall. They line the walls all around Freetown, raising blasters in the air, some firing them. The people of this town are huddled together down here in the center. Some lie dead, serving as lessons to the others. The rest wait with weapons against their heads to remind them to remain docile, lest they, too, find their brains cooking on the sand.

  Movellan looks down his long, crooked nose and scowls at Cobb Vanth. He lifts his lip into a sneer and hawks phlegm into his mouth, then spits. It spatters against the Mandalorian helmet.

  “You don’t deserve that armor,” Lorgan says, his voice a hiss like sand against sand. For good measure, he kicks out with a cobble-tread boot, kicking Vanth in the head so hard the so-called mayor of Freetown goes down like a sack of mox-spelt. “Is it even real Mandalorian armor? Looks like something hammered out on a swindler’s forge. Besides…wearing a strong man’s armor doesn’t change how weak you are. Take his helmet off.”

  Gweeska and Yimug work in tandem, unscrewing the helmet off Vanth’s head with an unceremonious twist. With that done, Lorgan now can look into the eyes of the man who has been giving him so much trouble.

  “You’ve been like a grit of sand in my undercarriage,” Lorgan says, baring his teeth. “Cobb Vanth. Noble lawman. Sheriff and mayor and all-around thorn in my hind end.” He shrugs. “I’m not impressed.”

  “Gotta give me some credit,” Vanth says, gravel grinding in his voice. “I was enough of a pain in the ass to bring you out here.”

  “Who are you, anyway?”

  “Just a man trying to do right.”

  “What’s your game? What do you want? Not power? Not money? Surely this little…cult of personality is paying off? Is it women? Maybe the armor has given you delusions of grandeur.”

  “I want freedom.”

  Oh. So that’s it. He grabs the man’s head, pushing it forward hard enough that Vanth’s teeth clack as his chin slams into his own chest.

  There, on the back of Vanth’s neck: a symbol formed out of scar tissue, like a primitive star with a series of dots and hashes. An owner’s mark. “You were a slave.”

  “Sure. That’s the story we can tell.”

  A playful flash glints in Vanth’s eye, and it only enrages Movellan further. He was nobody, and now he’s very much somebody. A slave turned sheriff. A ghost into a man. With Jabba gone and the Hutts in disarray—and further, with the Empire and its slave tax having disappeared once the second Death Star went kaboom—it makes sense that the slave class here on Tatooine would break apart. Its slaves, once given a measure of freedom, would not go so easily back to the cage. But who owned him? And why risk his neck for the others?

  “Lemme ask you a question,” Cobb says.

  “I’ll allow it. Ask, though no promises you’ll enjoy my answer.”

  “What do you want with this place anyway? Tatooine is a sandbox. Water’s scarce. It’s hot and dry as a dead man’s mouth. Why not leave it alone? Why not leave its people alone?”

  Lorgan takes a long draw of air through his bent nose. The stink of the man—and really, of all these Freetowners—is nearly overpowering. Sweat-slick and oily. “If you must know, the Hutts consider this world vital for reasons I care not at all to comprehend. What I do know is that Tatooine has its resources. Dilarium oil. Silicax oxalate. But its so-called people are the most vital resource of them all. Some of the galaxy’s legacy breeding stock is here, and we wouldn’t want to diminish those slave bloodlines.” He says this last bit as a dig against Vanth. “Your failure here today will see all these people back in chains. You, too. Your time in the wilderness is over.”

  “It’s not my time that’s ending,” Vanth says. “You’ll see.”

  Lorgan considers rebutting the man yet again, but what is the point? It doesn’t matter. He’s taken the town. He’s got the man in the mask. Red Key is ascendant both here and across the galaxy.

  Now only one more thing.

  “I find it strange you thought your ploy could work,” Lorgan says. “I mean, really. Just because you have a Hutt-slug doesn’t mean you can install it on the dais and control Tatooine. That’s what this really is, isn’t it? You don’t want freedom for people. You see this place as a resource just as I do. Just as I see you as a resource. Now I’m going to take that Hutt-slug and I’m going to sell it back to the Hutts. You will be dead by then.”


  He thrusts up a finger, and two more of his raiders come forward—the wattle-necked Ithorian Vommb, and that broad-shouldered brute woman, Trayness. They come dragging a ripped red tarp, a tarp that squirms and squeals as the slug inside it tries to escape. Behind them, on a chain, comes a fat-bellied man in a long leather hood, his shirtless skin grimy with some sort of foul grease. Slug slime, Movellan thinks.

  Another twirl of the finger, and they unroll the tarp. The Hutt spawn slug—young, barely an adolescent—rolls out, small arms flailing, craterous mouth crying in fear and pain. The hooded man hurries to its side, cooing to it, shushing it, stroking its ooze-slick brow.

  “Shh, shhh,” the Beastmaster says. In a singsongy voice he adds: “Everything will be okay. Everything will be fine, baby Borgo…”

  Borgo. They’ve gone and named the thing.

  He looks to Vanth one last time and says, “The Hutt is ours. These people will all be slaves. You picked the wrong hill of sand to die on.”

  “So did you,” Cobb says through bloody teeth.

  Then a moment passes between Cobb and the Beastmaster. Vanth gives a small nod and a wink. The Beastmaster returns the nod and begins stroking under the Hutt’s chin, whispering something—

  Lorgan barks an order to Trayness, and she moves fast, clubbing the Beastmaster in the head with an open fist. The man bleats and falls, clutching his now bleeding head.

  The Hutt spawn lifts its head to the sky. Its slit mouth opens, and its tongue wiggles out, tastes the air. And then it howls. What comes from its whole-bodied throat is a shrieking, ear-bleeding dirge.

  There’s a stir at the margins. Movellan’s own people suddenly turning and pointing beyond the walls of the town—he cannot see what they see, but when they begin firing their blasters, he knows something’s gone wrong.

  Then comes a sound—a terrible howl followed by a mad battle cry. Red Key raiders begin falling from the walls as blasts from outside take them out. Movellan turns, his finger in a wild lasso gesture—to Vommb and the others he says, “Go! Go find out what that is.”

  They hurry off, but he doesn’t have to wait for their answer.

  The front gates of the town bash open—

  A massive bantha, bigger than anything Movellan’s ever seen, crashes through the opening. It has one eye scarred over, and its fur is matted with filth and wound with bones and rusted gears. Atop it is one of the Tuskens, those feral desert raiders who have given Red Key so many problems over the last year. This Tusken is, like the bantha, bigger than all his cohorts—huge, bristling shoulders hold up a head wrapped with ragged fabric and plastered with massive black goggles gleaming in the sun. Red Key raiders attack the bantha, but the Tusken maneuvers atop the beast like a circus performer—swooping down, breaking one Red Key neck with his crude stick weapon, then scrambling underneath the bantha and up on the other before unslinging a cycler rifle and firing a trio of shots, all of which find a home in the heads and chests of Movellan’s men. Then the Tusken is back in the shaggy beast’s saddle once again.

  Other Tusken brutes begin clambering up over the walls, swarming the Red Key. And yet the Freetowners are untouched…

  They knew. This isn’t a random attack.

  Lorgan wheels on Vanth—

  The sheriff is standing there. Behind him, the cuffs lie in the sand. The Beastmaster—looking gleeful, like a pleased baby—stands there with a magna-driver, having clearly helped remove the shackles.

  Lorgan is fast, but not fast enough—even as he brings his blaster up, Vanth backhands him hard. He goes down. A boot finds his wrist, pressing down hard enough that his fingers uncoil from the pistol’s grip. The shadow of the lawman falls onto him, and he stares up at the suns-edged silhouette. All around him, the bark and gargle of Tusken battle cries.

  “Funny thing,” Vanth says. “The Tuskens consider this place sacred. And they don’t like slavers any more than we do. We cut them a deal. We give them water, they leave us alone. They like that we have a Hutt, too. Earns us a bit of respect. And my friend here, Malakili, he procured for them something real special: a pearl from a krayt dragon’s belly. That afforded us the last piece of the puzzle: their protection. Though I think they might’ve done it for us anyway—they don’t like you syndicate types out here.”

  Lorgan tries to crab-walk backward, but Vanth presses down on his wrist hard enough to hear the bones start to grind. He cries out. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Vanth. You’re an idiot playing a game against gods. You stole that suit thinking you can fill it, you stole a Hutt thinking you can raise it to the dais—you’ll never succeed here. My masters will come. They’ll kill you. They’ll wipe this place off the map.”

  Vanth kneels down on his chest. “What you think I stole, I say I earned. You think I’m just some slave, and that’s one part of the story. But you don’t know the rest. What I’ve seen. Who I was before. And I know my time is short. I’ve poked the monster, and now it is awake. I’ll die in service to this town, and maybe this town will die with me, but we won’t be the last, not by a long shot. The next ones who come, they’ll know me, they’ll know my time, they’ll carry the flags of Freetown even if Freetown is gone. And one day, Tatooine is free even if me and my ‘swindler’s forge’ armor and my little town have been claimed once more by the sands. Now hold still. I gotta carve a message into your face before I send you on your way.”

  Lorgan cries out as Vanth reaches for him.

  The skittermouse does what the skittermouse does:

  It skitters.

  Across the desert, its little paws tickle the deadland as it runs—tiny claws make tiny sounds, ticka ticka ticka ticka.

  This skittermouse is like the other skittermice here on Jakku: small enough to never be seen, skinny enough to fit through a bit of pipe or tubing, and curious enough to look for food in the strangest of places.

  Currently, though, it is not seeking food.

  It wants to build a nest. A burrow. Its last one was taken over by a pole-snake, and the mouse wants no part of that serpent. A skittermouse burrow is a peculiar thing: The critter tends to find a hole in the stone or the sand, and it lines its future home with bits of detritus scavenged from, well, anywhere and everywhere. A dead man in the desert will remain only so long before the skittermice come and take whatever the carrion birds have not: leather from a boot, tufts of hair from the top of the scalp, fingernails. Stories have been told of nomads in the desert seeing a bubbling fountain oasis in the distance only to come upon it and find the fountain is really an undulating pile of skittermice. Scare them and they scatter, revealing a dead man reduced to little more than bone.

  Once the mouse has its burrow material, the creature begins to look for a larger object with which to plug its burrow to keep out other animals such as, say, pole-snakes. Presently, this skittermouse has found a bit of wire. Wire is good. Wire can be bent with the mouse’s tiny scissor teeth, and turned into a little place to curl up and sleep—or a place for babies to do the same.

  But these wires are stubborn. They just won’t move. Tug, tug, tug.

  Nothing.

  They’re stuck. Anchored tight to a bulky hunk of metal—at least, a hunk of metal bulky by the skittermouse’s standards.

  Ah. But what is this? A black metal thing. Cylindrical and already hanging off the side—it hums and sparks. This would make a most excellent burrow plug, would it not? The mouse gives up on the wires and moves now to this other thing, and the skittermouse squishes itself between the black object and the metal bulk to which it’s attached—the mouse suffers a sharp spark, but for a good burrow plug, it will endure. It must endure.

  The mouse squeaks as it noses the black piece free.

  The mouse gets behind it and with its delicate front paws begins to roll the cylinder into the dark, hoping very hard that ripper-raptors or vworkka do not spy it doing the industrious work of merely surviving on this heartless, desiccated planet.

  For a time, all is still after
the mouse leaves.

  Then—then—two lights flicker and go bright as moons.

  Slowly, surely, something comes back to life.

  —

  This is Mister Bones.

  The B1 battle droid’s memory matrix remembers many things:

  It remembers darkness.

  It remembers marching with its skeletal brethren in perfect lockstep, advancing on a village surrounded by green grasses, innocent people huddling there in the night. Innocent people who would not survive thanks to this battalion of battle droids.

  It remembers spears of light, green and blue, cutting through the night and taking those metal men apart, one after the other after the other. Showers of sparks. Searing magma lines of melted metal. It remembers an incongruous memory, too: those beams of light held in its own hands. Not two hands, but four. Spinning about, vwom-vwom-vwom-vwom.

  It remembers—no, he remembers dancing the la-ley. Singing for children. A program to amuse them. A program to please.

  It remembers triple sixes. A designation, perhaps. Once.

  More darkness.

  This matrix is not one thing. It knows that. Bones is many minds and many lives. Some known. Others hidden. Protocol programs. Martial arts. Combat strategies. Puppetry. Child-rearing. They are fitted together by an eager if inelegant hand, the hand of a clever boy who needed a friend.

  Bones recalls him, too. Friend. Boy. Temmin.

  MASTER.

  Though the boy is not his master because of how he is programmed. Temmin is the droid’s master because Bones knows the value of gratitude. Bones has lived many lives. All of them except this one are now ended. To be given life again—even as a patchwork quilt of identities—is a special thing. Rare and precious, and Bones knows that Temmin is his Maker.

  And so, Temmin is his Master. It is only fair.