Empire's End: Aftermath (Star Wars) Page 4

  “Someone has to be a voice of sanity, and I choose me. Norra’s pushing herself hard. Not physically. Emotionally. Her husband is in the wind again, our quarry is a grand admiral she failed to dispatch above Akiva, her son is here and theoretically in danger…guilt and anger are driving her. She thinks this is all her fault.” Jas gnaws at her lower lip, hard enough that Sinjir is surprised she hasn’t drawn blood. “I just worry.”

  He shrugs and sighs. “See, you’re a good person because you worry about others. And I’m a good person because I didn’t actually hurt Geb Teldar. And Norra’s a good mother and Temmin is a good son and Mister Bones is a very good murder-droid, and we’re all good people doing a good thing and let’s just shut up and get it done, hm?”

  “You mean to be sarcastic, but really, that’s damn sensible.” She pats his knee. “You might be right about all that.”

  “Like you, it is rare that I am wrong, Jas Emari.”

  “Let’s hope Jakku has no surprises for us,” she says as she stands.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t count on that. The galaxy seems quite fond of surprising us, I’m afraid.”

  —

  “I can handle myself,” Temmin says to his mother. He waits till she’s done talking to Leia, at least, before he begins his objection. But the moment she ends the call, he springs on her like a jaw trap. “You know I can.”

  Norra, seemingly startled by his presence, looks back. “What?”

  “You know what.” Temmin plunks down in the copilot’s seat and straps in. “Yet again you went planetside without me. Yet again you left me and Bones on the ship. It started on Kashyyyk, and it’s only gotten worse: Ord Mantell, Corellia, Jindau Station—”

  “Tem, we don’t have time for this.” Norra’s fingers move across the controls as she enters coordinates for this planet in the Western Reaches: Jakku. Wherever that is. Some dirtball planet that he won’t get to see because yet again she’ll make him stay in the Moth. Ugh. “Someone needs to stay with the ship and make sure it’s ready to fly.”

  “Bones can do that. Let me come with you. On Jakku.”

  “No.”

  “Mom—”

  “I said no.” She gives him a stern look. “Hyperspace cross-checks?”

  He rolls his eyes and scans the data. “Everything looks good.” He admits to himself that it’s a pretty cursory glance: Navigation is totally boring. Piloting is where the fun is. The MK-4 freighter is leaner than most and has a ton of aftermarket mods that keep it nimble—but it’s still nothing like flying Jas’s gunship, the Halo. Or better yet: an X-wing. He dreams of flying those.

  Norra engages the hyperspace drive. The stars stretch into lines and his stomach tightens as the ship lurches to lightspeed. They sit in silence for a while, watching the starlines pass. Eventually, Temmin looks over to his mother, scowling. “This is what you do, isn’t it? This is just you.”

  “Going to hyperspace? What are you talking about?”

  “You think you have to do it all by yourself. It’s like when you joined the Rebellion. You left me behind to go off on some crusade to find Dad.”

  “We’re not looking for your father.” She speaks those words quietly, so quietly he almost doesn’t hear them over the thrum of the ship. “This is about something else, Tem.”

  “I know, I know. We’re looking for Sloane. But it’s because of Dad, isn’t it? What he did. What she did. And you think she can help you find him. Which is great! It’s smart. But don’t leave me out of it. I want in. I want to be with you on this. I wanna help.”

  “I AM VERY HELPFUL,” Bones chimes in from behind them, whirling past with clanking, dancing feet.

  “See? We can help.”

  He knows this is hard on her. He knows that she wakes up at night, crying out for him or his father—nightmares, he guesses, though she won’t say. Because of that, she sometimes chooses not to sleep. It’s like she’s standing vigil over the console, like at some point Brentin Wexley will just appear over the comms, and tell them he’s sorry, and that everything will be okay. It wasn’t even Dad’s fault. They said he had something in his head—a control bio-chip like the ones in the Wookiees on Kashyyyk, except more advanced. These chips didn’t just prevent behavior: They programmed it.

  They turned captives into killers. Good people, made bad.

  “I was there, too,” he says softly. “I saw what Dad did.” He thinks, but doesn’t say: He tried to kill himself. Only after trying to kill Temmin. In fact, if Temmin hadn’t intervened, his father would’ve ended it right there. Was that part of the programming? Or was that Dad resisting it?

  “I can’t lose you, too,” Norra says.

  “You won’t lose me. Okay? Let me be a part of this.”

  “I…” But her words die on her lips. Instead she straightens up and gives a small shake to her head. “This is it. Jakku. Coming up out of hyperspace. Ready?”

  “Mom—”

  “Not now, Tem. Later. Are we good?”

  “Fine. Yes. Whatever. Out of hyperspace in mark—three.”

  “Two,” she says.

  “One.”

  They drop out of hyperspace.

  And that’s when everything goes wrong.

  As soon as the Moth drops out of lightspeed, system alarms start going off—the cockpit fills with pulsing red light, and as the klaxons shriek, the screens start lighting up. But Norra doesn’t need the screens to see what’s out there. No way to miss what they just fell into.

  After Chandrila, the Empire fell off the map. It was like one day they existed, and the next they were gone.

  But the Empire isn’t gone at all.

  The Empire came here.

  No. What is this? It can’t be…

  Her gaze casts across the span of space above the rawbones planet of Jakku. Hanging there are a dozen star Destroyers, maybe more. And farther out, the massive spear-tip shape of an Executor-class dreadnought. New alarms warn that Imperial weapons systems are spinning up and targeting them. Worse, new ships ping the Moth’s sensors:

  TIE fighters. There’s a swarm of them, coming in fast.

  Even as Temmin is yelling at her, even as she hears Sinjir calling forward to find out what’s going on, Norra does not hesitate. She’s dancing on a tripwire, and no part of her can trigger the trap of indecision.

  No time for questions. No time for uncertainty.

  Instantly she focuses on the cockpit console, locking in the coordinates that will take the Moth and its crew to Chandrila. As her fingers work as fast as they’re able, she barks an order to her son: “Keep us afloat, point the ship clear. Hyperspace in two minutes.”

  Then she unstraps and gets out of her chair.

  He calls after her: “Where are you going?”

  But she has no time to explain.

  And he wouldn’t like the answer anyway.

  —

  The TIEs are fast. They rush forward in a nest formation, then break apart around the Moth—the freighter rocks with laser blasts peppering the front shields, and Temmin cries out and jams the flight stick down as far as it’ll go. The ship plunges toward the planet as one word whirls through his head on a repeating loop: Evade, evade, evade.

  Flashes of laser light punctuate the dark around the MK-4; the craft shakes like a kicked can as Temmin puts a corkscrew spin on it, pulling back out of the dive, pointing both away from the planet and away from the fleet.

  The Imperial fleet is here.

  The. Whole. Damn. Fleet.

  He’s not ready for this. Suddenly his desire to be in the middle of the action seems like a child’s plea—begging to be in on the adventure and then discovering it’s far scarier than he ever imagined. Temmin doesn’t want to be an adult, he doesn’t want to grow up, he damn sure doesn’t want to be a single ship caught in the middle of the entirety of the Imperial remnant.

  Someone slams into the back of his chair. Sinjir’s cry of alarm reaches his ears: “What the bloody hell is this? Where are we? Where is Norra?
”

  “I don’t know!” Temmin bites the inside of his cheek as he desperately tries to point the ship at open space—but Imperial ships are everywhere. So many ships. TIE fighters fill the void. Star Destroyers line the sky like the jagged fangs of a monster’s closing maw. The sensors start blinking faster, and on the screen he sees worse news: The SSD out there just launched a trio of torpedoes. I can’t outfly torpedoes. I’m not that good. I’m not ready. To Sinjir he screams: “I need a gunner! Sit down and start shooting!”

  Sinjir drops into the pilot’s seat like a clumsy pile of broken sticks. He stares at the controls as if he’s looking at an instruction manual written in Wookiee claw marks. “I don’t know how to do this!”

  “Join the club!” Temmin screams for his mother: “Mom? Mom!” Where did she go? What is happening?

  Above his head, a light blinks on. Yellow, then green.

  It’s a signal.

  One of the escape pods just went active.

  Oh, no.

  She’s doing it again.

  —

  There. The clack-and-clatter of someone grabbing a gun off one of the rack mounts along the hallway reaches Jas’s ears—she turns toward the sound, sees Norra moving past. Blaster rifle in hand. Leather go-bag over her shoulder.

  “What is going on?” Jas asks—just as the ship takes a hit and she staggers hard into the wall. Pain blooms in her shoulder, but she shakes it off and hurries after Norra.

  “The Empire. They’re here.”

  “Who? Sloane?”

  “All of them.”

  Norra jabs her heel into a metal button—a door slides open with a plume of steam. It’s one of the escape pods.

  “What are you doing? We’re not abandoning ship. Are we abandoning ship? Norra, hold on—”

  Norra starts buckling herself into the escape pod. “Keep them safe. Temmin especially. That’s on you.”

  Norra’s leaving. Doesn’t take a scientist to figure that out. The burden of it all has pressed Norra down so far it’s broken her. Now she thinks to go at this all by herself: a rogue element. Like you, Jas.

  Jas can handle that life. But the same life will get Norra killed.

  As soon as the pod door starts to close, Jas jabs her hand against the button and it reopens. The ship takes another hard hit from laserfire, causing Jas to tumble into the pod itself, crashing bodily into Norra. A tangle of limbs. Scrabbling, struggling. Norra elbows her in the side. “Get out!” she seethes in Jas’s ear. “Get back to the ship. That’s an order.”

  “You’re not my mother.”

  “I’m your commander! Or whatever!”

  Jas’s fingers fumble for Norra’s straps and she furiously starts to undo them. The plan is to haul Norra out by whatever part the bounty hunter can grab: neck, ears, ankle, doesn’t matter.

  Problem, though: Norra’s stronger than Jas realizes. She’s lean and she’s tough and she’s not just some soft-around-the-middle pilot content to stay buckled into a flight chair. Norra’s hard like a stone, and she roots herself to the pod, kneeing the other woman in the stomach.

  Norra grits her teeth, and Jas sees a grim determination take hold in the woman’s eyes. “I’m going down there. I’m going for Sloane. You can either get out of this pod or you can stay in and take the ride.”

  For Jas, the choice is no choice at all. No hesitation marks the moment. She reaches back and slaps the red button to the right of the door.

  “I’m with you, Norra.”

  The lights dim. The door starts to close. The escape pod rocks free of the Moth, jettisoning itself into space, carrying the two of them through chaos toward the planet’s surface.

  —

  She’s leaving me behind again, she’s going off by herself and this time she’s going to get herself killed. Temmin frantically works to get himself up out of the chair—even as he sees the hyperspace computer furiously conjuring a navigational path one digit at a time, even as a trio of torpedoes zero in on their position.

  The light above his head goes red.

  The pod is gone.

  It shows on his scopes—a faint blurry line. Just a blip in a screen full of red. He cries out, a wordless sound.

  Sinjir growls at him: “Sit down! We’re about to leap.”

  Furiously, Temmin reaches to the hyperspace navigation system, tries to turn it off—but it’s locked. Damnit, Mom. She did that on purpose, and he doesn’t know the passcode to get it to stop. Wait. A new idea hits him. There’s a second pod. If he could make it fast enough, if he could run through the ship and launch…

  But Sinjir can’t fly this ship. Bones can’t, either.

  Every cell inside his body wants to abandon this ship and go after his mother. But his mind is clear and he knows the score: Someone has to get back to Chandrila. Someone has to tell Leia: The Empire is here.

  Temmin punches the back of the seat and slides back into it. He grabs the flight stick with one hand and brings his other to his mouth, yelling into his comlink: “Bones! Can you get to the second pod?”

  The droid’s distorted voice crackles over the link.

  “ROGER-ROGER, MASTER TEMMIN.”

  “Go. Now. I’ll buy us a minute,” Temmin says. Sinjir gives him a look, but Temmin keeps talking to his droid over his wrist comm: “Launch and get to Jakku. Find Mom. Protect Mom. At any cost!”

  “ROGER-ROGER. NONE SHALL HARM HER OR THEY WILL BE CONVERTED TO A PLEASING BLOOD MIST.”

  “Go!”

  Temmin grits his teeth so hard he’s pretty sure they start to crack. He whips the freighter back and forth even as his bewildered ex-Imperial gunner fires fruitlessly at the swooping TIEs. New alarms start kicking off, the sounds coming faster and faster, indicating that the torpedoes are closing in—sizzling blue arrows of vicious energy aiming to blow the Moth clean in half. And they might if I can’t manage some fancy flying.

  He looks at the light above his head.

  Still dark. Still dark…

  One of the torpedoes is on them, roaring up from behind. Temmin yells, “Hold on!” and does a hard inverted roll, bringing the ship up and back in a gut-churning loop. The torpedo passes by, and scanners show it and one of the TIEs going dark. One torpedo down, but two more are coming in heavy, and he sees them screwing through space right toward the Moth.

  Bright-blue lights perforating the dark. Like the eyes of a terrible, vengeful thing, hungry for death.

  Above his head, the light goes yellow.

  Then green. Go, Bones, go…

  Sinjir fires the Moth’s cannons at the torpedoes—missing with every shot. The ex-Imperial winces and screams in ear-shattering frustration.

  The light goes red.

  Pod free.

  Temmin launches to hyperspace, just as the torpedoes thread the spot where the Moth was half a second before.

  A ringing sound in the back of the skull. A faint beep beep beep. Flashes in the black, memories like light pulsing in a dark room: a heel against a button; a shake and a bang as the pod unmoors from its socket in the freighter’s side; a feeling of weightlessness as the whole thing drifts…

  Then, light. Atmosphere. Heat. The pod shakes like a toy in the hand of an angry child. Everything feels like it’s coming apart. Darkness goes to blue. Night to day. The weightlessness dissipates, stolen away by the feeling of falling—plummeting down, down, down. Someone screams. An elbow in a throat. A knee in an armpit.

  A sudden lift from the repulsor-jets—a hard jarring motion.

  The whumpf from a pair of parachutes.

  Too late. Too fast.

  Wham.

  Darkness. Silence. The memory of it all threatens to crush her.

  Norra gasps, fumbles for the door latch—she draws the lever down, a hard ratcheting mechanism. The door springs free and lands in sand: thump.

  The light reflecting off the surface of Jakku blinds her. Everything is seared away in a burning wave of brightness. Her hands find hard rock and slippery sand. Her guts are s
uddenly weapons-free and next thing she knows, she’s puking up what little she had to eat today.

  Behind her closed eyes, new memories flit past: the tangled pipes inside the resurrected Death Star, the battle above Akiva as she chases Sloane in a stolen TIE fighter, the shock as her husband lifts a blaster in the direction of Chancellor Mon Mothma…

  Her eyes open again. Staring into her own ejecta.

  This world before her is Akiva’s opposite: dead and dry instead of damp and teeming with life. The only comparison is the heat, but here the heat is like the inside of a clay oven. It’s drying her out. Baking her to a crispy blister. She coughs. She cries out. She thinks: I am alone.

  Wait. No.

  Not alone.

  Jas!

  She rolls over onto her bottom and sees the pod sitting askew in the mounding sand. Its door is open and off its fixture, and standing there, braced in the doorway with splayed-out arms and legs, is Jas Emari. A trail of blood snakes its way between her head horns, her lip is split, and her sneering mouth shows teeth wet with smears of red.

  Norra starts to say something—some stammered greeting, some breathless entreaty about how she’s glad Jas is okay—but the bounty hunter has only one response, and that’s to pick Norra up out of the sand and slam her hard against the pod. Hard enough that Norra sees stars. Hard enough that the pod rocks on its axis, sending up a cloud of dust and scree.

  “Why?” Jas asks. Her voice is raw and rough like it was run over coarse stone.

  “We were under attack—the Empire—I had no time.”

  “No time,” Jas says, repeating those words. She says them again and again, each time the phrase dissolving further into a mad cackle. “No time. No time! You keep saying those words, Norra Wexley. Like a mimic-bird, No time, no time, raaaaawk, no time. I had no time, either. No time to get my slugthrower. Or quadnocs. Or a damn procarb bar! No time but to fall into an escape pod with you and plunge to a planet—this planet! This dead place about which we know absolutely nothing.” Her fist rears back and she pounds the side of the pod; the metal gongs like a bell. Then she slumps forward, her head pressing against the pod, her chin on Norra’s shoulder.