The Rise of the Empire

by John Jackson Miller

  “They say you got into the security zone because you were ferrying miners to work,” the woman said. “If you’re a bus driver, why were you trying to enter the factory?”

  “Heading to pick up my pay.” Hands manacled behind his back, Kanan flashed a smile at her. “If you want, once I get it I can show you the town.”

  Sloane’s brown eyes narrowed. “Wait a second. I know you! You’re that pilot from the explosives hauler. The mouth.”

  “You’ve got a name for me,” Kanan said, grinning. “That’s great. I knew you couldn’t just fly off. You came all the way down here to see me?”

  Sloane stepped forward, reached around to grab his ponytail, and yanked. “Let’s not be giving me jobs to do, pilot,” she said, forcing him to the ground. “This little act of yours might work with some. Me, I might press you into service and set you to maintaining trash compactors. Or shove you into one!”

  “Okay, okay.” Kanan shrugged against the stormtrooper’s hold. “But if you know I’m a pilot, you know I work here.”

  “With no pass for the grounds?”

  “Lal Grallik knows me. Ask her.”

  “Making friends?” Kanan heard a now-familiar voice from behind Sloane. The captain spun without releasing him, wrenching his neck in the process. Hera stepped forward from the factory, dangling his pass in her hands. “You left your ID in the plant, buddy.”

  The Imperials shone their light on Hera. Sloane studied her before looking back to him. Kanan nodded, to the extent he could with the captain holding on to his hair. “Told you.”

  Sloane released Kanan with a shove, knocking him backward and down into the mud. She turned on Hera. “And where’s your badge?”

  Hera grinned. “Well, I’ve got to have it. How could I be in here, otherwise?”

  Sloane looked to the sky and growled with frustration. “I’ve had enough of you people. I think we’ll take you all in for—”

  “Sloane!”

  The captain checked her comlink. “Count Vidian,” she said. “We’re still running down Skelly—and any accomplices.”

  “Forget them,” Vidian replied.

  “My lord?”

  “The inspection. Everything. Forget it all. I’ve seen enough here. I have a new strategy that will serve the Emperor. We need to return to Ultimatum right away. Gather your team and meet me at the shuttle.”

  Sloane acknowledged the order and deactivated her comlink. She gestured to a stormtrooper to remove Kanan’s handcuffs. Another returned his blaster and holster. “Your lucky day,” Sloane said.

  “It sure is,” Kanan said, nodding to Hera. “I’ve got the two of you here.”

  Hera rushed forward and grabbed his arm. “Thank you, Captain. We’ll be going.” She began pushing Kanan toward the open gate, under Sloane’s icy glare. “Sorry to have disturbed you.”

  “Yeah, good luck with your inspection,” Kanan said, before Hera forcibly shoved him out the employee gate.

  Hera hustled Kanan around the corner and back to the hoverbus. She seemed perturbed. “You really don’t know when to quit, do you?”

  Kanan shrugged. “Hey, it worked, didn’t it?” He wiped the mud off his trousers. “Being hostile or closemouthed just sets them off. The way to get rid of Imperials is to be so happy to see them that they’re thrilled when you’re gone. Some Imperials, anyway.”

  Hera put up her hands. “We don’t have time for this. Something horrible happened in there, and—” She paused and looked down, choking up a little. He realized he hadn’t seen her looking anything but fully in control before. Now she looked spent.

  “Hey,” he said, touching her wrist. “You’re not kidding. Something bad?”

  “Vidian killed the administrator.”

  “What, Lal?” Kanan was shocked. “He killed her? Why?”

  “Because he could,” she said, looking up and staring into his eyes. “Her husband saw it and ran off searching for Vidian. And it sounds from that comlink call like Vidian’s up to something else!”

  “Right about over there,” Kanan said, pointing to the Imperial shuttle. Across the muddy boulevard from it, Moonglow’s main gate opened. Vidian appeared there, talking with the vessel’s flight crew. Sloane and her stormtroopers joined him.

  “We’ve got to follow them,” Hera said.

  “I can’t follow a shuttle in a hoverbus!”

  “It’s a Mark Six Smoothride,” she said. “It’ll fly!”

  “About a zillion years ago,” Kanan said. He looked back to see Vidian marching purposefully along the planking toward the shuttle. Sloane lingered at the gate with the others, evidently giving orders related to her departure.

  And then, his eye tracing the path back to the Lambda, he saw something wedged beneath the plank nearest the ship. It looked like a small pouch, several meters away from what appeared to a sewer grating.

  An open sewer grating.

  Kanan didn’t need the Force to tell him to grab Hera. “Get down!”

  The night lit up in Shaketown. The Imperial shuttle exploded, sending blazing debris in all directions. In the street, the shock wave caught Vidian, hurling him bodily into the factory’s outer fence even as a fireball blazed overhead.

  Kanan caught only a glimpse of the cyborg’s fate as, Hera’s shoulders in his gloved hands, he dived with her behind the Smoothride. Metallic debris rocketed in all directions, some of it slamming thunderously into the hoverbus. Speeder bikes parked earlier by the reinforcements went spinning wildly; Kanan saw one impale itself in the fencing behind him.

  The din subsided. Once certain Hera was all right, Kanan drew his blaster and looked cautiously around the vehicle. Up the way, Vidian was on his knees but alive, his reinforced frame evidently giving him some protection. But the street before the factory was a blazing crater—and the block of buildings behind it, including poor Drakka’s Diner, was now afire. Kanan’s instinct was to run toward it, to see if the Besalisk cook was all right.

  But something else caught his eye first. A dark figure, scrambling out from the sewer grating he’d seen. The spot was amid the flames but untouched at the moment—and the figure was limping quickly along with a large pack on his back. Skelly!

  Finding a functioning Imperial speeder bike, Skelly took one look back. Then he mounted it and was gone.

  HERA CAUGHT HER breath as she reached the third-story rooftop. The buildings across the boulevard from Moonglow’s headquarters weren’t tall, but they all had ladders or some other kind of fire escapes. Everyone knew to expect groundquakes on Gorse. This was another story.

  From a concealed spot, she looked down into the street with amazement. The Imperial vessel was still burning below, destroyed by someone they’d hurt. It was something Hera had expected to see one day, something she’d always believed was coming. Just not this soon, and not this way. She wasn’t sure what had driven Skelly to do it, but he certainly had been the one responsible, based on what Kanan had seen.

  Hera hadn’t wanted to linger at ground level after the blast. The street looked like a war zone, and the assassination attempt was sure to send the Imperials over the edge. But she’d helped with the search-and-rescue for as long as she dared, and had to scout the best way out of the security-cordoned neighborhood. Only Kanan had any kind of permission to be on the ground anyway, and he’d hung around down there, trying to free people. She thought well of him that he’d do that. It went very much against the freewheeler mold he seemed to want to fit into.

  In truth, she was still reeling from the moment in the factory when Gord Grallik had viewed the recording of Vidian killing his wife. A typical tough security guy, yet he had watched the murder as if his world were crumbling around him. It still wrenched at her heart to remember it.

  But that wasn’t the worst part, she now realized as she looked down at the street. Vidian, singed but apparently intact, was being hustled from the scene by his escort when Gord appeared at the gate. The Besalisk rushed forward amid the flaming embers only to
be stopped by the stormtroopers. She couldn’t hear him from this distance, but he was appealing to them, begging them. To arrest Vidian, she supposed. A Moonglow aide handed Gord a datapad: Hera assumed it was the images from the security cam. The frantic Besalisk showed it to one trooper after another, but they would not let him pass.

  Hera didn’t want to watch—there was nothing at all she could do. Not here, not now. But she made herself. Gord tried to follow Vidian anyway, only to be grabbed by the troopers. It took four of them to restrain the heavy-shouldered security chief: one for each arm.

  Then they beat him. This was justice in the Empire.

  When the stormtroopers parted, Hera saw Gord crawling back toward Moonglow’s gate. She blinked away a tear of anger. Yes, she needed to see these things, to remind her what she was fighting for.

  Hera squinted to see through the smoky darkness where Vidian had gone. She spotted him and Sloane in intense discussion, heading between a line of flanking stormtroopers on the way toward—

  No, Kanan’s not going to like that.

  —

  “Are you kidding me?” Having finished his search and joined Hera on the roof, Kanan stared down at the empty spot on the street. “I can’t believe this. They stole the hoverbus!”

  “I think they call it commandeering on official business,” Hera said, crouching at the roof edge and pointing east. Kanan saw the outline of the hoverbus bobbing far up the lane. “I’m sure they’re headed to the Imperial spaceport to get another shuttle.”

  Kanan frowned. “Yeah, well, wait until they find the bathroom door’s stuck.” He flicked wet ashes from his tunic. He’d found Drakka pinned behind his freezer unit; it had taken long minutes to extricate him. Then the cook had stormed out, intent on giving the Imperials a piece of his mind about his destroyed business. Kanan could see from his position that the conversation wasn’t going very well, but he had his own problems. “The spaceport’s in Highground. How am I supposed to get over there?” It was ten kilometers away.

  “I’m more interested in getting out of here,” Hera said, rising. “An attempt’s been made on an envoy of the Emperor—everyone’s a suspect. We’ve got to get out of this neighborhood before half the Empire shows up!” She turned away from the street side of the roof. “Maybe back down those alleys to the south?”

  “It’s Okadiah’s bus,” Kanan said. “I can’t just forget about it.” This was the whole problem with making friends, he did not say: They made it impossible to be truly free.

  He looked back across Broken Boulevard—now a more descriptive term than usual—and saw a lumbering gray hovertruck departing Moonglow’s loading dock. “Hey, wait,” he said, grabbing Hera’s wrist before she could leave. “I think we can solve both problems at once.”

  He pointed to the vehicle. “That’s full of refined thorilide.” Even trespass, murder, and sabotage couldn’t stop thorilide production, it seemed: Every six minutes another one of the transports departed the plant. “It’s headed—”

  “—straight to the Imperial spaceport,” Hera said. “I caught that on my reconnoiter yesterday.”

  Their eyes met—and a heartbeat later they were running along the rooftops. Hera was fast as she was lithe, hurdling obstacles and leaping one gap after another. Every so often, she looked back to see if Kanan was keeping up.

  “I’m fine,” he said, keeping a few steps back. “Just trying not to run into you.”

  She smiled and leapt the next opening. He followed suit.

  Reaching the end of the row of flats, they found a door and scrambled down a staircase. Catching their breaths in the doorway, they stopped in time to see the hovertruck move up the street toward them. A stormtrooper waved the vehicle and its golden chauffeur droid past.

  As soon as the stormtrooper turned his head, Kanan and Hera bolted toward the approaching truck. Kanan leapt to the running board of the passenger side.

  “I am sorry,” the droid said. “Riders are not allowed on the—”

  Hera, now hanging outside the other door, flicked a switch on the droid’s neck, shutting him off. Kanan scrambled inside the cab, grabbed for the control yoke, and ducked. The vehicle executed a wide left turn past the last stormtrooper checkpoint; the sentry never saw the woman hanging outside. Adroitly, Hera opened the door and bumped the robot out of the way.

  “I prefer driving,” she said, reaching for the controls. “Nothing against you.”

  Kanan closed the passenger door and stretched his legs. “Sweetheart, you can drive me anywhere.” He glanced back at the mess Shaketown had become. “As long as it’s away from here!”

  —

  Hera had been scarcely more talkative than the deactivated droid, Kanan thought. She’d said nothing about what had gone on in the plant before she’d found Lal.

  He didn’t know Lal’s husband well, other than that he had a short fuse and a big blaster collection. And something else. “That guy lived for Lal,” he said.

  “I could tell. It was rough.”

  Watching her, Kanan thought that must be an understatement. “Well, you found out one thing about Vidian. He’s evil in a can.”

  “Being evil doesn’t stop you with the Empire. It helps.” She sighed. “I didn’t even get near him this time—but I guess I found out what I came to Gorse to learn. The secret to Denetrius Vidian’s efficiency is murder.”

  “And where does that get you?”

  “Nowhere I wasn’t before.” She shook her head. “And all I was able to find about Tharsa was that he’d visited there a few times a long time ago. I couldn’t find out anything else. First, Gord showed up, then they all started running around looking for Skelly.” Guiding the hovertruck around a corner, she sighed. “I don’t know what Skelly thinks he can accomplish this way. This loose-cannon stuff—it doesn’t get you anywhere.”

  “And where are you trying to get?” He looked at her keenly. “I thought you were going to ditch me after you did your little break-in. And you just said your big mission is done. But here you are.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m helping you get your hoverbus back.”

  “Uh-huh.” Kanan chuckled.

  “No, no, it’s the least I can do,” Hera said. “You were willing to come back inside, looking for me. Unnecessary—and nearly trouble for you. But appreciated.”

  “Well, you’re the only person on this planet I’d take that chance for.” That should tell her something, he thought.

  “I’m not sure I believe that. You went back to help that Besalisk cook—and Okadiah told me back in the bus about you saving him from Vidian.” She smiled. “You even saved Skelly at the cantina.”

  He put up his hands. “Hey, everyone makes mistakes!”

  “Well, we’ll see,” she said, and left it at that. Kanan liked the look he saw from her. It said she’d come to think he was worth keeping an eye on.

  Looking out at the buildings whizzing by, Kanan laughed. “Everything that goes into thorilide—all the security—and here we’ve just driven off with a truckload.”

  “We’re taking it right where it’s supposed to go,” she said. “And it’s not like we’d find anyone to sell it to.”

  Kanan shook his head. “You know, I don’t even know what the junk is used for.”

  “Thorilide?” Hera asked. “It’s used in granular solid-state shock absorption. They use it on Star Destroyers to keep turbolaser turrets in place after firing.”

  “Loose cannons again!” Kanan chortled. “They’re going to this much trouble for it?”

  “They’ve got a lot of cannons!” Hera’s eyes widened as she considered it. “A Star Destroyer requires the use of sixteen million individual components, twenty-seven thousand of which are only produced in a single system, like Gorse.” She looked at him, her face animated with passion. “That’s why the Emperor needs an Empire, Kanan. It’s like a space slug, whose only function is to stay alive. It’s got to consume, and consume, and consume.”

  “You’re starting
to sound like Skelly.”

  “He’s not all wrong,” she said, guiding the hovertruck into Highground. “But he’s definitely not all right.”

  —

  Skelly had taken the speeder bike over rooftops to reach Highground, flying low over their surfaces to avoid any tracking of air traffic. With most of the Imperial attention on getting police vehicles to Shaketown, Skelly had guessed that relatively little attention was being paid to the landing fields. Even so, he knew he couldn’t simply fly the bike over the retaining wall. And he was reluctant to dismount, because every step he took off the bike caused him pain.

  But now, in the dark at the far eastern end of the compound, his war experience subverting barricades served him again. He’d seen during flights to Cynda that the terrain at Highground had deep drainage ditches leading off to the low side of the compound. It was there, outside the wall in the darkness, that he found a culvert large enough to accommodate both him and the speeder bike. The bars guarding the pipe were no match for the variety of explosives he carried in his pack. It amused him that the same techniques he’d used to mine Cynda for the Empire were now getting him onto its base.

  A few muffled blasts later, he was hunched painfully low against the spine of the speeder bike, letting it carry him and his bag of revenge through the tunnel. Inside the compound, he continued to fly the vehicle low through the drainage canals separating the landing areas. The lights here all pointed upward; if anyone had bothered to look down, the sight of his head poking out of the ground and gently sailing along might have given someone pause.

  But no one saw. Now, in the shadow of the spaceport’s control tower, he waited, padding at his swollen face with swabs from the medpac. He watched the ground transport arrival area, where every few minutes another droid-driven hovercraft appeared bearing thorilide for the waiting Imperial freighters.

  This spaceport was it, he thought. The last step before the beauty of Cynda, crushed down and refined, left for Calcoraan Depot and distribution to all the Empire’s insane shipbuilding projects. It made Skelly sick to see it.