Empire's End: Aftermath (Star Wars) Read online

  Everyone nods except Temmin.

  He stands there, shaking. His eyes wet. He wants to scream and yell and flail about. He wants to tell her, My mother is there, and you don’t need any more facts than that. He wants to threaten her with: If you don’t go and save my mom right now, I’ll go out there and tell everyone. I’ll scream it so they can hear me as far as the Outer Rim. But when the chancellor points her gaze at him, it’s like being pinned by a set of crosshairs.

  Reluctantly, he nods.

  Before exiting, Mon Mothma turns heel-to-toe with the precision of an old battle droid (not Bones, who would more likely do a plié and kick the door down). Leia says, “We will get Norra back, Temmin. I promise.”

  And then she’s gone, too.

  Once more, it’s just Sinjir and Temmin.

  “That’s a promise she can’t make,” Temmin says, his voice quiet.

  “True. Though I suspect she means it just the same.”

  “We can’t count on her to get it done.”

  “Never count on a political machine to operate efficiently.”

  “So we do it ourselves?”

  Sinjir claps a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “We do it ourselves. And we call in our chip with Solo, too.”

  “Thanks, Sinjir.”

  “Don’t thank me. I want them back as bad as you do. Now we just have to find a way to make it happen without, well, dying in the process.”

  Night falls on Jakku. With the darkness comes the cold. It leaches the heat out of the air, the sand, the stone.

  In the distance, black shapes rise—shadows deeper than the dark of the sky. Plateaus and buttes like carbon anvils. It was Jas’s idea to head that direction. Not only would that get them out of the hellish heat of day, but she saw a flock of ax-beaked birds flying that way. “They’re headed toward something,” Jas said, then. “Don’t know what. Food, hopefully. A settlement, maybe. Anywhere is better than nowhere.”

  And so, once they pilfered the pod of all its limited goods—medkit, blaster, a handful of rations—they started walking.

  And walking. And walking some more. The sand is slippery beneath their feet. It’s hard to find purchase, which works extra muscle groups—every time the sand shifts or she steps on a stone slippery with scree, Norra’s muscles tighten further, and by now her legs feel as stretched out as the control belt on an old speeder.

  Worse, Norra feels sick. The sun sucked everything out of her, siphoning her lifeforce away drop by bloody drop. Now, with night, the chill has crept under her skin and settled in those empty spaces like an infection.

  But still, they trudge along.

  To where, she doesn’t know.

  To what end, she cannot say.

  This was a mistake.

  Sloane is here. She knows that. She can feel that—not like she has the Force, but like it’s something in the air, in the dust. Maybe she’s just trying to convince herself that this is it, this is where it all ends. But even if Sloane is here, then what? Norra is on a dead-end, bone-dust world. The erstwhile grand admiral could be anywhere, in any direction, and Norra could spend the rest of her days wandering the burning dunes managing to find nothing or no one but her own foolhardy demise.

  Perhaps the one advantage is that this is such a dead place. Someone like Sloane would stand out. Now if only they could find someone to whom that matters—someone with eyes to have seen Sloane in the first place.

  She’s about to say something to Jas—

  But the bounty hunter now faces her with wide eyes. A hard finger mashes against Norra’s lips. The Zabrak warns: “Shh.”

  Norra watches as the shape of Jas—her shadow, her silhouette—gestures toward her ear. A sign to listen, so Norra listens.

  The few sounds of the planet crawl into her ear: the whisper of wind across the dunes, the distant ululation of some animal, the drum-pulsing of her own heartbeat behind it all. But then their ears pick up something else—a faint shudder and hiss. Like the sand moving. It’s off to Norra’s right. And then, again, to her left. The sounds come simultaneously.

  And they’re getting closer.

  The noises stop as fast as they start. Once again Norra and Jas are left with the wind, the faraway beasts, the pounding of blood in their own ears.

  Norra thinks and is about to say: We need to keep moving.

  She doesn’t get that chance.

  It happens quickly—from both sides, the sand erupts around them. The spray stings against Norra’s cheek and she staggers back, her eyes burning. She swipes at her face, blinking back tears, and something crashes into her, roaring. Her shoulders hit the ground half a second before her tailbone. The wind is knocked out of her, leaving Norra gasping. Her attacker is on top of her, and as her vision clears she wishes it hadn’t: The face leering down at her is far from human. Big black eyes, an insectile mandibular mouth, leathery flesh—

  No. Not a face. A helmet. A mask.

  “Sah-shee tah!” her foe barks at her, words gurgled around a hissing ventilator. A fist slams into her middle. Anger blooms in its wake.

  Her adversary has his legs straddling her hips—but the ground beneath her shifts easily with the sand, and it takes little effort to wriggle free. She kicks out hard, pivoting her lower body as she does, and it gives her the opening she needs, crab-walking backward as her foe paws for something in the sand—a weapon. A blade.

  Square at the top, bent in the middle. Like a machete. The metal is dark, maybe rusted, though it’s hard to tell. He roars again and brings the blade down against her legs—but she scissors them apart, and the blade is buried in the sand with a coughing cuff sound.

  Norra stabs out with her foot.

  Her heel connects with his ventilator, and it starts squealing. Plumes of steam, white as a ghost, come free of his mask as he claws at his face.

  Now, as he dances backward, Norra can see Jas—

  Jas has her own enemy to deal with. The bounty hunter is still standing—and lashing out with a high kick. Her foe is bigger, heavier, with an upper torso like a handful of grain sacks strung together with heavy-gauge chain. She connects with the kick but it doesn’t seem to faze him. The big monster bellows an incomprehensible cry, then catches Jas in a hard swing of his meaty fist. The bounty hunter topples, limp and lifeless.

  No. Norra gets her legs under her and springs forward. She connects with his middle, tackling him, expecting her weight and momentum to knock him off balance. But the thug isn’t going anywhere—he’s like a pylon driven deep into the mantle. He doesn’t budge.

  Worse, he laughs.

  A gross, mechanized chuckle erupts from his own ventilator, and both of his hands marry together into one hellacious mega-fist. He slams his hands down into the center of Norra’s back. She hits ground once more. Air gone. Pain radiating. Blood in her mouth as her jaw snaps shut, teeth around the tip of her tongue. In the dark behind her eyes she sees streaks of white.

  Someone grabs her ankle. Turns her over.

  Her attacker is back. He adjusts something along the side of his head, and the jets of steam suddenly cease.

  The thick sack-chested monster joins the other one. The two of them stand tall over her, talking, pointing.

  “Va-wey ko-yah,” the littler one says.

  “Yash,” the sack-chested monster says, agreeing, chuckling.

  Then the little one shakes and shudders. His chin lifts and his head does this…wobble on his neck. Norra’s face is suddenly wet, as if misted.

  He hits the ground like a felled tree.

  Sack-Chest grunts in confusion. Then his head tilts hard to his shoulder—this time, Norra sees a faint red flash along with it—and the monstrous thug pivots on one heel and lands hard atop the other.

  We’re saved, Norra thinks. Or, rather, Norra hopes.

  She stays still, though, just in case.

  “Jas,” she says in a loud whisper. Nearby, Jas groans.

  Lights fill the air. Bright and bold. Not from one direction, either
, but from three—all on at the same time, and Norra has to cover her eyes lest she go blind from it. Shadows emerge, light framing dark armor.

  The crackle of static as a voice broadcasts:

  “Don’t move.” As the shadows close in, Norra hears the faint jostling of jointed armor and blaster rifles in gloved hands. It’s a familiar sound that means one thing: stormtroopers. The voice is quieter when it says: “We found them. We found the rebels.”

  From nearby, Jas curses under her breath.

  Norra, though, smiles around her bloodied mouth. Because stormtroopers means Empire, and Empire means Sloane.

  Sloane kneels, blind and bound.

  The ratty ribbon across her eyes is filthy and rough; it feels like it’s abrading the skin off her face. This whole planet is like that, though: Everything is coarse-grained sandpaper wearing her down first to muscle, then to bone, then to the marrow beneath, and soon only to whatever passes for a soul or a spirit. A ghost left to wander these dust-choked deadlands.

  Her wrists chafe, too: The rope binding them is raw and fibrous.

  At least they haven’t sealed her mouth or her ears.

  What she hears: the pad-pad-pad of feet on stone. Not hers, but those who pull the cart in which she waits, drawing it deeper and deeper through the winding red cavern. The cart itself is old—stone-fiber boards lashed together with braids of tendon and not buoyed by hoverplanks or grav-plates but rather kept rolling by a pair of proper wheels. Wheels that clank and rattle as the cart is drawn over the hard rust-stone.

  What she says: “We’re almost there. The air is colder down here.”

  What he says: “I hope so. Everything of mine is…cramping up.”

  Those are the words of her traveling companion—a man named Brentin Wexley. She found him stowing away in her ship when she barely managed to escape Chandrila. Sloane was injured and drifting toward death, but he saved her life. Sometimes she’s surprised he’s still with her. But his purpose is her purpose, too: find Gallius Rax and end him.

  Rax, who stole her Empire from her. Rax, who stuck a chip in this man’s head and turned him into a killer. Vengeance drives the pair of them. It marries them, too, in a way. The oddest of couples, aren’t they? She, the onetime grand admiral of the Empire (a title she cannot imagine matters anymore), and he, a former rebel spy turned programmed Imperial assassin. Neither of them wants to be here. But this is where they are.

  And they’ve been here for months. Jakku is a decrepit wasteland, bleached to death by an unforgiving sun. And now, mysteriously, it hosts the largest remnant of the Empire—her remnant, as a matter of fact, a military faction she thought she controlled. But her control was an illusion. She was just another puppet dancing on the strings of Gallius Rax, a supposed war hero who came to serve the Empire at the urging of Palpatine himself.

  None of it makes sense. Questions layer atop questions, and no answers are forthcoming. Why here? Why this place? It seems that Rax himself comes from this world, but why return? Jakku is no prize. It has few exports of note; kesium and bezorite have some value to the Empire, but only barely. Better resources exist, and they exist on worlds far livelier than this one. Why make an attack on Chandrila only to abandon the galaxy and come here? Why leave Sloane dangling on the hook? Why do any of it?

  What is Rax’s game? He has one—that much is clear.

  He will tell her. One day soon, she will make him tell her. At the end of a blaster, a blade, or her own choking hands.

  But first, they must get to him.

  Which is why they’re here, right now, on this rolling cart. A cart pulled by men unclothed except for the skirts of threaded leather hanging from their waists—their chests, backs, arms, and shorn scalps are naked, painted with streaks of greasy red dust. Their mouths are closed with metal hooks—a hook in the top lip, a hook in the bottom, the two tugged together with a cinching knot. They can only murmur and mumble. They are servants and slaves—ardent operators and faithful lunatics giving their lives over to their mad desert mistress.

  Next to her, Brentin grunts and growls as he shifts.

  “I told you,” she says to him. “Practice your breathing. Relax your limbs, a deep breath in, a deep breath out. Oxygenate your blood.” Since leaving Ganthel, Sloane has lived her life on starships. In her earliest days, she flew patrols in TIE fighters and shuttles, and her very first job was as a signal hawk on an asteroid monitoring station in the Anoat sector. Those roles did not allow her the luxury of getting up and moving around easily, and so she learned ways to remain comfortable even in contortion.

  “That only helps so much,” he snaps, and she detects a surge of anger. He hates her, she believes, though he won’t say as much. It stands to reason: His own wife, a rebel pilot, is the one who gave her the grievous wound he helped her to heal in the first place. She represents something he despises: the autocratic rule of a mad galaxy. He prefers that madness—the madness of rebellion. So be it. This alliance is built on anger and hatred, and that hatred is the glue that fixes Brentin to Sloane.

  The cart stops short. Hard enough that she almost loses her balance, which would mean pitching forward and smashing her face on the stone-fiber boards. Next to her, she hears Brentin do exactly that: He oofs as his head thuds against the floor of the cart.

  Footsteps all around them. Hands grab at her face, tugging the blindfold off—hers is stubborn and fails to easily fall away, and she feels the cold metal of a crooked blade against her temple. Thankfully, the blade faces away, and with a quick pull the cloth is cut and falls.

  It takes her vision a moment to adjust.

  A massive impasse awaits: The cavern ends in a gargantuan, bulb-shaped chamber, its walls shot through with other smooth-walled tunnels—tunnels that are too high up for this cart to easily reach.

  Next to her, she spies Brentin—his face and neck scrubby with beard, his forehead smudged with filth. He gasps as the slaves lift him up, rocking him back on his knees. They cut his blindfold free, too.

  Red-streaked, dust-caked faces regard them with wide eyes. Hook-bound mouths murmur and hum. The servants perform one more action—cutting through the ropes that bind their wrists—before scampering off like animals. They clamber up the rocks, long fingernails mooring in the cracks. They pull themselves into the tunnels and scurry away.

  Sloane and Brentin are alone.

  He gives her a puzzled look. “Now what?”

  Those two words echo, echo, echo in the bell-shaped cavern.

  “I suppose we wait,” she says.

  “They don’t want us to follow, do they?”

  “I’m strong, but not strong enough to climb up into those tunnels.” Still, maybe that’s what these deviants expect. They seem hardly human. Sanity does not shine in their eyes—no, what lingers there in their stares is a special kind of derangement. The zeal of service, of having given your body and your mind over to someone else.

  Sloane does not add that climbing into those tunnels would be difficult. Her side hurts today, a dread, deep ache from her injury—an injury that never really healed properly. Sometimes she lifts her shirt just to look at it—the skin there is puckered like the sealed, dry lips of a dead man. Were she still in civilization, it would have healed over well with bacta and mend-gel treatments. But Jakku is not civilization, and so her wound healed poorly. Every day it hurts, the pain lurking far deeper than the skin.

  Brentin stands and stretches. He gingerly steps down off the cart, almost losing his footing. Sometimes Sloane looks at him and sees how much he’s been stripped down. Again, the planet as an abrasive: He’s gone from being a gangly, unruly branch to something leaner. A spear. A splinter.

  Though she hasn’t seen a mirror in months, Sloane assumes it’s happened to her, too. Times like this she realizes nothing will ever be the same. She’ll never have her Empire back. She’ll never have her own starship. I’m going to die on this planet. That truth has settled into the well of her gut. That truth is a part of her now.
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br />   “I don’t think—” Brentin starts to say.

  But the sound of something coming through those tunnels cuts him off. It’s a rasping sound. Something sliding along sandswept stone.

  It’s her. Their mistress.

  The Hutt’s face appears at the topmost chamber. Bruise-dark with red striations, the slug’s face is not fat and thick as those of many Hutts, but narrower, like a slimy arrowhead. The mouth is wide, practically bisecting its whole head—the maw opens and a long, lashlike tongue licks the air, tasting it. The Hutt hisses. She blinks her one eye—the other is rheumy, the skin around it pocked and pitted with flecks of embedded metal, like a moon with glittering debris caught in its orbit.

  The slug begins to slither. Up out of the chamber she comes, long arms pulling herself down from tunnel to tunnel. Sloane has met other Hutts: Jabba, for instance, was a fat, blubbery stump whose short tail was the most dexterous part of his corpulent body. A worm, a slug, a grub. This Hutt is longer, leaner, not like a slug at all, but like a serpent.

  The Hutt slithers and wriggles down toward the ground, Sloane sees that behind the thing’s head are a series of bulbous nodules and tumorlike protuberances. They hang bound together with filthy red ribbon—a strange accessory serving as an emblem of the creature’s curious vanity.

  As the Hutt nears the bottom of the hollow cavity, once more her servants emerge from the various tunnels and chambers—they meet the beast at the bottom, thrusting the palms of their hands upward, catching her as she eases forward. Their hands form her stage. Their feet, her vehicle.

  Dozens of her slaves now make up a roving dais.

  They hum and sing gibberish as they draw her forward.

  Their gibberish dissolves into a single word:

  “Niima. Niiiiiiimaaaaa.”

  They haul her forward, this long-tailed worm. It is Niima who will help them. It is Niima who will open the way to find Rax.

  —

  On this world, Rax is a ghost.

  Nobody knows him. Nobody’s heard of him. Sloane and Brentin went to every ramshackle shantytown they could find, from Cratertown to Blowback to hovels in the desert. They visited with Teedos hiding in their trapdoor tunnel systems. They asked questions of Blarina traders, of kesium gas-miners, of black-market merchants. Rax was a non-entity.