Empire's End: Aftermath (Star Wars) Page 15

  Bones, above all else, cares about fairness. About loyalty.

  About friendship.

  His friend’s face swims into his matrix-mind. Embers of data in the darkness bloom like mechanical synapses, and Bones remembers Temmin—panicked—giving him one last set of commands: Launch and get to Jakku. Find Mom. Protect Mom!

  Mom. Mother. Temmin’s mother.

  NORRA.

  That is her, there in the dark. A newer, fresher image hits the droid’s memory banks like a concussive explosion: the image of blaster bolts clumsily dissecting him. Bones struggles to extend his matrix-mind outward to his limbs, but none of them respond. Diagnostic checks cascade through him and all of them report back:

  DESTRUCTION. All four limbs are detached and unresponsive. The droid’s head, too, is partly detached—its socket lies ruptured, but the metal skull remains connected to the torso by a telescoping cable.

  Woe darkens the matrix-mind. Despair is not merely a human condition; droids know the doom of existence and the end of things. And Bones worries suddenly—a deep, hungry worry like a slick-walled pit one cannot escape from, a pit where even light is swallowed whole. He worries that he is dead. That he will not be able to fulfill his mission. That the life his Maker and Master gave him has been squandered, ended now on the floor of this desert, near to the Maker’s own mother.

  The droid wills this to be untrue. Bones struggles against the fear that all his lives have led to this one worthless moment.

  But! The restraining bolt that the trooper put upon him—his diagnostics return and inform him that though his limbs are gone, so too is the lock. And then, in that revelation, a new memory surfaces. Or, rather, resurfaces. That memory brings with it three letters: ARM.

  Three letters that stand for three words:

  Autonomic.

  Repair.

  Mode.

  YES.

  Bones is often getting into trouble, but the anatomical framework of a battle droid is quite simple. And so begins a self-repair routine: The cable connecting the droid’s head to his torso suddenly retracts—vvvvvvipp—and the socket, though damaged, telescopes open and once more embraces the stem of the B1’s neck. Bones shifts his head down. His serrated beak digs into the dirt and cinches shut, moving him forward.

  He does this again and again. Each time, it moves his frame forward by a few centimeters. It is slow and arduous. But it is progress.

  When he closes in on the nearest arm, he again digs the front end of his raptor-skull robot head into the ground, but instead of moving it up and down he swoops it from side to side. Servos whine and grind. Again, it is enough to move the body to the right—centimeter by centimeter until the torso taps the disconnected arm waiting there. Tink.

  ARM, autonomic repair mode. The socket at the side of the torso thrums as it magnetizes. The arm judders on the ground, twitching as if suddenly and independently alive. It slides swiftly toward the body. Ball joins with socket. Metal claw-clips fix it in place.

  Bones sends a ping down the length of the limb. Fingers move. The arm bends. I HAVE AN ARM AGAIN. That arm is a vital tool that allows the droid to—like a dead thing reanimating to life—lift himself up off the ground, where he sees his other three limbs. Two legs. One arm.

  He begins to reassemble himself.

  Piece by piece. Appendage by appendage. Buzz and click. Durasteel talons pin wires inside joints. The droid readjusts a few bent rib bones. His hand functions as a wrench—enough to tighten his spine, but not enough to fix the bowing, bent posture. The left arm is not fully functional. The right leg isn’t fully functional, either. External repairs will be needed.

  But the droid now stands in the dark by Norra’s cage.

  This is Mister Bones.

  —

  In the blackness of the Jakku night, Norra stirs. Her eyes bolt open. Something’s off. Something’s wrong. No—

  Something has changed.

  She swallows and it’s like choking back broken blast glass. Everything feels dried out, and when she blinks the grit is only ground deeper into her eye. She winces, reaching out, pulling herself to standing.

  The shape of the droid’s parts in disarray is gone. Bones…

  They must’ve come for him and taken him away after she fell unconscious. Once more she feels dreadfully alone.

  Out there in the darkness, someone screams. That scream is cut in half. Moments later something rolls out from behind the kesium rig wells. Something that tumbles up to her cage with a clong.

  A helmet. White, mostly, though striated with finger marks of Jakku dust. It belongs—or belonged—to a stormtrooper.

  Blood soaks the sand beneath it.

  Out there, another piercing scream. Blasterfire fills the air just after, lighting up the dark. Something moves in the shadows, and Norra presses her face against the cage to see two more stormtroopers running toward the shape—they disappear behind the kesium well, and that’s the last Norra sees of them. But she hears their cries. Their bleats of pain.

  Now, from that direction comes someone else.

  Effney, the officer. He staggers forward, falling to one knee, though momentum bounces him back up to running. He’s shirtless and sweat-slick, a white cloth swaddled around his brow. In his hand hangs a small blaster.

  He fires it behind him as he runs. He screams: “No! Get away! Get away from me, you monster!”

  He is prey. And his predator reveals itself.

  The battle droid moves in herky-jerky fits and starts—Bones is broken, Norra can see that much. His right leg is slow and wobbles at the joint every time it touches down. His left arm—blade extended—convulses even as the other arm remains steady, pointing its weapon.

  Effney’s shots go wide, missing the droid by a considerable margin.

  He’s running toward her cage. He’ll be alongside it—

  She growls, scooping up a handful of sand and dirt in her open palm, and as he comes past, panicked—his mouth wide, his eyes wider—she flings the debris into his face. He cries out, clawing at himself.

  It stops him long enough for Bones to catch up.

  Effney swivels, pointing the blaster. It’s too late. The droid’s blade cuts that arm off, and it thuds against the sand. Then Bones does to him what he did to Bones—one piece after the next, until Effney is just a pile of himself sitting outside her metal cage.

  Bones swipes his vibroblade downward, buzzing through the lock on Norra’s cage. The door swings open.

  “I HAVE PERFORMED VIOLENCE,” Bones says.

  “Yes, you have,” Norra says.

  “FOUND YOU.”

  “You sure did. Thank you.” And thank you, Tem, for building him. Her strange, cackling, dancing, knife-slicing savior. “We have to go, now, Bones. Or we’re both dead.”

  “ROGER-ROGER.”

  The days of Counselor Gallius Rax are busy. Busier than even he anticipated, for the act of running an Empire is a complicated feat, and he can only delegate so much. Some things require his hand. Many things do, in fact, and it is vital that he remain the one in control.

  In the morning, everything is administrative. He sits at a desk under a tent atop the roof of the main building. This vantage point allows him to gaze out over their base here in the shadow of Carbon Ridge on Jakku. From here, he can see the yield of his efforts laid bare. The data on his screen is brought to life as his Empire grows to power: All Terrain Armored Transports march the perimeter, a line of AT-STs wait on the left, ranks of TIE fighters wait on the right. And above, the ghosts of Star Destroyers, ready to drop from the sky and slice the enemy in twain like an executioner’s blade.

  Day by day, the Empire grows. The weakness from within is cut out—like a soft, overripe part of the fruit sliced free and left on the floor—and the strong are summoned. They come here. They come to his testing ground.

  They come to his home.

  He draws a deep, centering breath as he is wont to do. In that breath he smells the scents of the planet o
n which he was raised—the smell of sun-warmed stone, the stink of sand, a heady whiff of something dead. It dries out the inside of his nose. The rest of him is that way, too: the moisture wicked free from his insides. All of the Empire is hardening—a fatty cut of meat cured into a bitter, leathery strip that has no purpose but to sustain.

  Sometimes he stops and looks in a mirror. Even he, who has kept up a rigorous physical regimen since he left this planet, looks tightened, stripped down, worn away. The transformation is a pleasing one. I am metal hammered into a blade. As he does this, he hums to himself: an ancient madrigal called “Treachery and Countenance.” A favorite of Palpatine’s.

  Soon he is done regarding himself and his Empire.

  He goes then and meets with his inner council: the general, Old Man Borrum; the architect of the new stormtrooper program, Brendol Hux; the propagandist Ferric Obdur; and by hologram, Grand Moff Randd.

  Rax tells them that war is coming. “It’s inevitable,” he explains almost dismissively. “We’ve seen now one rebel ship enter our space, barely managing to escape. Not long after, we detected a probe droid and a scout ship haunting us from the next sector. We’ve all seen Mothma’s precious little speech. Though I am told she is bound in the torpid politics of the New Republic, I assure you: the battle is coming.”

  “Coming slowly,” Borrum says. And he’s right. Rax wonders why that is. He’s been assuring his council that the attack from the New Republic is imminent. And it should have been—but the days pass and no attack has come. At first he worried that the Republic had a different strategy in mind, one he could not foresee—but now he suspects the reality is all the duller: They’ve gone timid. The New Republic is not a military entity. It is one of democracy. And it is painfully naïve to think that democracy can work on a galactic scale. It is a very bad idea to expect a starship piloted by a thousand monkey-lizards to do anything but drive itself straight into the sun.

  Borrum harrumphs and crosses his arms. “I grow impatient. We can stand on alert for only so long. It wearies the men. It tests the soul.”

  My soul is indeed tested, Hodnar Borrum.

  Randd, ever the taut pragmatist, says: “Let them arrive to the battle as slow as they would like. It gives us more time to bolster our numbers. With each day we see new ships join us. Just today the veterans of Ryloth joined us in the Star Destroyer Diligent.”

  “The messaging of our occupation here—” Obdur starts to say, but Rax cuts him off with a hissing shush. Obdur is an admirable lout, and truly, Rax appreciates the power of propaganda. It is a necessary and theatrical component of what they do, and Rax loves nothing more than he loves theater. But Obdur’s function dwindles. There is no more “message.” The value of propaganda is nearly zero. Unless it could be used to taunt the New Republic into attacking…

  No. That would be too bold on the face of it. A magic trick is best performed when the audience doesn’t know it’s a trick at all.

  It is decided. He will have Obdur killed. It’s no great loss. Obdur was a staunch ally of Sloane, and look how she turned out. (So disappointing.) Ending him must be done quietly, though. Rax will not bloody his own hands, not in this. Perhaps this is a test for Hux’s new recruits…

  Speaking of Hux, the man looks worried. As usual. His broad shoulders curl inward—his posture has been wretched of late. This world is having its effect on him. And admittedly, Rax has been making inordinate demands of the man and his talents. Thing is, Gallius needs Hux. Not just now, but for what comes later. He must be preserved in sanity and in body. It may be time to confide in the man more completely.

  Of course, that went poorly with Sloane.

  A conundrum. One that will have to wait. For now, a different matter calls, one that demands he bloody his hands.

  Rax leaves them before the meeting is over.

  He heads downstairs, past the prefab training facility—where troopers gather and battle, encircled by their mates and cheered on by bloodthirsty officers. Betting is fast and furious. Their training is more brutal now. Survivalist, animalistic—as fits this vicious world. He has no time to watch them maul one another.

  Rax heads deeper still.

  It’s cooler down here in the sublevel. Pipes and conduits line the hallways, circumnavigating the base’s necessary mechanisms. He winds through the hallways and finds the door—the room beyond is mostly just storage of unimportant things: uniforms and manuals, mostly, both elements of a more refined Empire, an Empire that cannot endure.

  In this room, a very old man waits. His hands are bound behind his back; his knees touch the floor. Like he’s praying. How appropriate.

  “Anchorite Kolob,” Rax says.

  The man lifts his head, his eyes narrowing to tired slits as he stares through the half dark of the room. Even from here, Rax can see how old he has become. Everything looks pinched and puckered. Deep lines and liver-dark blotches mark his face, his neck, his hands…

  “Who is that? Who are you?” The voice is trembling and cracked.

  “You don’t remember me,” Rax says.

  “Should I?”

  “Is your mind weakening? Or am I merely that forgettable?”

  The anchorite sighs. “My mind is flint-sharp. It is capable of seeing all the suffering of the waking world, just as it is sure to remember the Eremite’s precepts on torment—”

  “Don’t. I do not require your spiritual lectures. I require only that you see me. Do you know me?”

  “I…” But Kolob’s eyes widen and focus. His mouth moves to form a smile as the memory forms—and then, appropriately, the smile falls away. “Ah. Yes. The boy who left. The boy at the margins. Galli, is that you?”

  “It is, Kolob.”

  The man’s shoulders sag. “It’s been you all along.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You’ve been the one stealing our children.”

  A small smile grows on Rax’s face. “And why would you say that?”

  “Because you did it then, too. As a boy you wooed the other children away from the orphanage. Brev. Narawal. Kateena. They became wayward as you were wayward. Wild and rebellious.”

  “No, not rebellious. I merely found purpose away from your foolish faith. And the children found that purpose, too.”

  “And what became of them, Galli?”

  I killed them to keep a secret. “They fulfilled their purpose.”

  “And why are you stealing children now? It isn’t your Imperials coming for them. It’s thugs and hunters and scavs coming for them in the night. But it’s your hand I see directing them. Why hide it?”

  Why hide it, indeed? “I am taking the children because they, too, will serve a purpose for me. They will be the first.”

  “The first what?”

  But that, Rax will not answer. Behind him, someone emerges from the shadows of the hallway: a man in a red mask, pointed and demonic, cast out of metal and fixed with hell-black rivets. That man is Yupe Tashu, once adviser to Emperor Palpatine and now an adviser to Counselor Rax.

  Tashu says, “The anchorite’s faith has ties to the Force. To the light side. A thousand years ago, the anchorites of Jakku bound themselves to the Jedi. But now the dark side prevails.”

  Tashu bows his head and hands Rax a long knife with a black blade.

  “Look at you,” Kolob says. “A little savage who learned to sing. Knowing what fork to use makes you no less of a feral child. Here you are, come to show me how much you’ve grown, and yet I see you’ve grown not a whit. You speak of purpose. What is our purpose today, little Galli? Why bring me here? No. You don’t need to answer that. I see the purpose is now in your hand. Though after all this time, why?”

  Rax steps into the room. The knife is light, but feels heavy. Its blade is nocked with teeth.

  Rax closes in on the bound man, speaking as he does. “You told me that children were best when they were seen and not heard. You said that children were meant to be quiet and to serve. To kneel and to suffer and to not as
k for a life of any merit, for service is reward enough.”

  “I did say those things. I believe them.”

  Rax leans in. His voice lowers to a whisper. “You believe lies. It is not our job to suffer. It is not our lot to simply serve. My destiny was greater than that. If I had listened to you, I’d still be here on this rock. Kneeling for you. Praying for you. Listening to your bone-chimes ring. Doing the chores you demanded I do. But I have only one chore here today.”

  He thrusts the blade into the man’s middle. He works it deeper. His hand grows warm and wet.

  “Galli…”

  “Gallius Rax, you mean. No more children will be swept aside by your hand. No more will be made to serve the anchorites.”

  The man smiles, a grim, red smile. “I told you all of life was suffering. And for you, the suffering is just…beginning. You are hunted, Galli. All your plans will…unravel…” He slumps backward, the blade freed with a faint sucking sound as he falls away, dead.

  It is done.

  Rax feels a great weight lifted from him. A hand on his shoulder eases him back. Tashu says quietly in his ear: “A necessary sacrifice. The dark side is stronger. Our mission here is blessed, now.”

  Yes, it is. The true mission, at least. He nods and goes along with what Tashu says—though the man has knowledge greater than most, even still, he is a madman. An ardent believer in the black-edged side of the Force, and Rax cares nothing for such mysticism. But if it appeases Tashu, then the illusion that he, too, is a believer may commence.

  He’ll need Tashu, after all.

  Now Tashu says: “I do not wish to rush the sacrifice. I want to gift you the time to revel, but time is narrow and you have a visitor.”

  “A visitor?”

  “Yes. Come.”

  —

  They go deeper into the underground, around a bundling of power cables, past a coupling of ion panels, into a pitch-black hallway.

  The lights come on. There, at the end, is a figure in a red cloak.

  Rax knows who, or what, it is. He steps forward, suddenly concerned. “What is there to report?” He knows it must be something, and it must be important. A visit from a sentinel like this does not come lightly.