The Rise of the Empire

by John Jackson Miller

  “Atrocity.” The hulking figure wrapped in the tarp had finally approached. His voice was deep and resonant. Two meaty, four-fingered hands kept the tarp clasped at his shoulders, while a second pair of hands loosely carried a massive blaster cannon at waist level. “How can anyone born of flesh do this?”

  Charmer bit his lip. Namir shrugged. “Could’ve been combat droids, for all we know.”

  “Unlikely,” the hulking figure said. “But if so, responsibility belongs to the governor.” He knelt beside one of the corpses and reached out to lid its eyes. Each of his hands was as large as the dead man’s head.

  “Come on, Gadren,” Namir said. “Someone will find them.”

  Gadren stayed kneeling. Charmer opened his mouth to speak, then shut it. Namir wondered whether to push the point and, if so, how hard.

  Then the wall next to him exploded, and he stopped worrying about Gadren.

  Fire and metal shards and grease and insulation pelted his spine. He couldn’t hear and couldn’t guess how he ended up in the middle of the road among the bodies, one leg bent beneath him. Something tacky was stuck to his chin and his helmet’s visor was cracked; he had enough presence of mind to feel lucky he hadn’t lost an eye.

  Suddenly he was moving again. He was upright, and hands—Charmer’s hands—were dragging him backward, clasping him below the shoulders. He snarled the native curses of his homeworld as a red storm of particle bolts flashed among the fire and debris. By the time he’d pushed Charmer away and wobbled onto his feet, he’d traced the bolts to their source.

  Four Imperial stormtroopers stood at the mouth of an alley up the street. Their deathly pale armor gleamed in the rain, and the black eyepieces of their helmets gaped like pits. Their weapons shone with oil and machined care, as if the squad had stepped fully formed out of a mold.

  Namir tore his gaze from the enemy long enough to see that his back was to a storefront window filled with video screens. He raised his blaster rifle, fired at the display, then climbed in among the shards. Charmer followed. The storefront wouldn’t give them cover for long—certainly not if the stormtroopers fired another rocket—but it would have to be enough.

  “Check for a way up top,” Namir yelled, and his voice sounded faint and tinny. He couldn’t hear the storm of blaster bolts at all. “We need covering fire!” Not looking to see if Charmer obeyed, he dropped to the floor as the stormtroopers adjusted their aim to the store.

  He couldn’t spot Gadren, either. He ordered the alien into position anyway, hoping he was alive and that the comlinks still worked. He lined his rifle under his chin, fired twice in the direction of the stormtroopers, and was rewarded with a moment of peace.

  “I need you on target, Brand,” he growled into his link. “I need you here now.”

  If anyone answered, he couldn’t hear it.

  Now he glimpsed the stormtrooper carrying the missile launcher. The trooper was still reloading, which meant Namir had half a minute at most before the storefront came tumbling down on top of him. He took a few quick shots and saw one of the other troopers fall, though he doubted he’d hit his target. He guessed Charmer had found a vantage point after all.

  Three stormtroopers remaining. One was moving away from the alley while the other stayed to protect the artillery man. Namir shot wildly at the one moving into the street, watched him skid and fall to a knee, and smiled grimly. There was something satisfying about seeing a trained stormtrooper humiliate himself. Namir’s own side did it often enough.

  Jerky movements drew Namir’s attention back to the artillery man. Behind the stormtrooper stood Gadren, both sets of arms gripping and lifting his foe. Human limbs flailed and the missile launcher fell to the ground. White armor seemed to crumple in the alien’s hands. Gadren’s makeshift hood blew back, exposing his head: a brown, bulbous, wide-mouthed mass topped with a darker crest of bone, like some amphibian’s nightmare idol. The second trooper in the alley turned to face Gadren and was promptly slammed to the ground with his comrade’s body before Gadren crushed them both, howling in rage or grief.

  Namir trusted Gadren as much as he trusted anyone, but there were times when the alien terrified him.

  The last stormtrooper was still down in the street. Namir fired until flames licked a burnt and melted hole in the man’s armor. Namir, Charmer, and Gadren gathered back around the bodies and assessed their own injuries.

  Namir’s hearing was coming back. The damage to his helmet extended far beyond the visor—a crack extended along its length—and he found a shallow cut across his forehead when he tossed the helmet to the street. Charmer was picking shards of shrapnel from his vest but made no complaints. Gadren was shivering in the warm rain.

  “No Brand?” Gadren asked.

  Namir only grunted.

  Charmer laughed his weird, hiccoughing laugh and spoke. He swallowed the words twice, three, four times as he went, half stuttering as he had ever since the fight on Blacktar Cyst. “Keep piling bodies like this,” he said, “we’ll have the best vantage point in the city.”

  He gestured at Namir’s last target, who had fallen directly onto one of the civilian corpses.

  “You’re a sick man, Charmer,” Namir said, and swung an arm roughly around his comrade’s shoulders. “I’ll miss you when they boot you out.”

  Gadren grunted and sniffed behind them. It might have been dismay, but Namir chose to take it as mirth.

  —

  Officially, the city was Haidoral Administrative Center One, but locals called it “Glitter” after the crystalline mountains that limned the horizon. In Namir’s experience, what the Galactic Empire didn’t name to inspire terror—its stormtrooper legions, its Star Destroyer battleships—it tried to render as drab as possible. This didn’t bother Namir, but he wasn’t among the residents of the planets and cities being labeled.

  A half dozen Rebel squads had already arrived at the central plaza when Namir’s team marched in. The rain had condensed into mist, and the plaza’s tents and canopies offered little shelter; nonetheless, men and women in ragged armor squeezed into the driest corners they could find, grumbling to one another or tending to minor wounds and damaged equipment. As victory celebrations went, it was subdued. It had been a long fight for little more than the promise of a few fresh meals.

  “Stop admiring yourselves and do something useful,” Namir barked, barely breaking stride. “Support teams can use a hand if you’re too good to play greeter.”

  He barely noticed the squads stir in response. Instead, his attention shifted to a woman emerging from the shadows of a speeder stand. She was tall and thickly built, dressed in rugged pants and a bulky maroon jacket. A scoped rifle was slung over her shoulder, and the armor mesh of a retracted face mask covered her neck and chin. Her skin was gently creased with age and as dark as a human’s could be, her hair was cropped close to her scalp, and she didn’t so much as glance at Namir as she arrived at his side and matched his pace through the plaza.

  “You want to tell me where you were?” Namir asked.

  “You missed the second fire team. I took care of it,” Brand said.

  Namir kept his voice cool. “Drop me a hint next time?”

  “You didn’t need the distraction.”

  Namir laughed. “Love you, too.”

  Brand cocked her head. If she got the joke—and Namir expected she did—she wasn’t amused. “So what now?” she asked.

  “We’ve got eight hours before we leave the system,” Namir said, and stopped with his back to an overturned kiosk. He leaned against the metal frame and stared into the mist. “Less if Imperial ships come before then, or if the governor’s forces regroup. After that, we’ll divvy up the supplies with the rest of the battle group. Probably keep an escort ship or two for the Thunderstrike before the others split off.”

  “And we abandon this sector to the Empire,” Brand said.

  By this time Charmer had wandered off, and Gadren had joined a circle with Namir and Brand. “We will ret
urn,” he said gravely.

  “Right,” Namir said, smirking. “Something to look forward to.”

  He knew they were the wrong words at the wrong time.

  Eighteen months earlier, the Rebel Alliance’s sixty-first mobile infantry—commonly known as Twilight Company—had joined the push into the galactic Mid Rim. The operation was among the largest the Rebellion had ever fielded against the Empire, involving thousands of starships, hundreds of battle groups, and dozens of worlds. In the wake of the Rebellion’s victory against the Empire’s planet-burning Death Star battle station, High Command had believed the time was right to move from the fringes of Imperial territory toward its population centers.

  Twilight Company had fought in the factory-deserts of Phorsa Gedd and taken the Ducal Palace of Bamayar. It had established beachheads for rebel hover tanks and erected bases from tarps and sheet metal. Namir had seen soldiers lose limbs and go weeks without proper treatment. He’d trained teams to construct makeshift bayonets when blaster power packs ran low. He’d set fire to cities and watched the Empire do the same. He’d left friends behind on broken worlds, knowing he’d never see them again.

  On planet after planet, Twilight had fought. Battles were won and battles were lost, and Namir stopped keeping score. Twilight remained at the Rebellion’s vanguard, forging ahead of the bulk of the armada, until word came down from High Command nine months in: The fleet was overextended. There was to be no further advance—only defense of the newly claimed territories.

  Not long after that, the retreat began.

  Twilight Company had become the rear guard of a massive withdrawal. It deployed to worlds it had helped capture mere months earlier and evacuated the bases it had built. It extracted the Rebellion’s heroes and generals and pointed the way home. It marched over the graves of its own dead soldiers. Some of the company lost hope. Some became angry.

  No one wanted to go back.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  * * *

  AFTERMATH

  * * *

  by Chuck Wendig

  PUBLISHED BY DEL REY

  * * *

  PRELUDE:

  * * *

  Today is a day of celebration. We have triumphed over villainy and oppression and have given our Alliance—and the galaxy beyond it—a chance to breathe and cheer for the progress in reclaiming our freedom from an Empire that robbed us of it. We have reports from Commander Skywalker that Emperor Palpatine is dead, and his enforcer, Darth Vader, with him.

  But though we may celebrate, we should not consider this our time to rest. We struck a major blow against the Empire, and now will be the time to seize on the opening we have created. The Empire’s weapon may be destroyed, but the Empire itself lives on. Its oppressive hand closes around the throats of good, free-thinking people across the galaxy, from the Coruscant Core to the farthest systems in the Outer Rim. We must remember that our fight continues. Our rebellion is over. But the war…the war is just beginning.

  —ADMIRAL ACKBAR

  * * *

  CORUSCANT

  * * *

  Then:

  Monument Plaza.

  Chains rattle as they lash the neck of Emperor Palpatine. Ropes follow suit—lassos looping around the statue’s middle. The mad cheers of the crowd as they pull, and pull, and pull. Disappointed groans as the stone fixture refuses to budge. But then someone whips the chains around the back ends of a couple of heavy-gauge speeders, and then engines warble and hum to life—the speeders gun it and again the crowd pulls—

  The sound like a giant bone breaking.

  A fracture appears at the base of the statue.

  More cheering. Yelling. And—

  Applause as it comes crashing down.

  The head of the statue snaps off, goes rolling and crashing into a fountain. Dark water splashes. The crowd laughs.

  And then: The whooping of klaxons. Red lights strobe. Three airspeeders swoop down from the traffic lanes above—Imperial police. Red-and-black helmets. The glow of their lights reflected back in their helmets.

  There comes no warning. No demand to stand down.

  The laser cannons at the fore of each airspeeder open fire. Red bolts sear the air. The crowd is cut apart. Bodies dropped and stitched with fire.

  But still, those gathered are not cowed. They are no longer a crowd. Now they are a mob. They start picking up hunks of the Palpatine statue and lobbing them up at the airspeeders. One of the speeders swings to the side to avoid an incoming chunk of stone—and it bumps another speeder, interrupting its fire. Coruscanti citizens climb up the stone spire behind both speeders—a spire on which are written the Imperial values of order, control, and the rule of law—and begin jumping onto the police cruisers. One helmeted cop is flung from his vehicle. The other crawls out onto the hood of his speeder, opening fire with a pair of blasters—just as a hunk of stone cracks him in the helmet, knocking him to the ground.

  The other two airspeeders lift higher and keep firing.

  Screams and fire and smoke.

  Two of those gathered—a father and son, Rorak and Jak—quick-duck behind the collapsed statue. The sounds of the battle unfolding right here in Monument Plaza don’t end. In the distance, the sound of more fighting, a plume of flames, flashes of blaster fire. A billboard high up in the sky among the traffic lanes suddenly goes to static.

  The boy is young, only twelve standard years, not old enough to fight. Not yet. He looks to his father with pleading eyes. Over the din he yells: “But the battle station was destroyed, Dad! The battle is over!” They just watched it only an hour before. The supposed end of the Empire. The start of something better.

  The confusion in the boy’s shining eyes is clear: He doesn’t understand what’s happening.

  But Rorak does. He’s heard tales of the Clone Wars—tales spoken by his own father. He knows how war goes. It’s not many wars, but just one, drawn out again and again, cut up into slices so it seems more manageable.

  For a long time he’s told his son not the truth but the idealized hope: One day the Empire will fall and things will be different for when you have children. And that may still come to pass. But now a stronger, sharper truth is required: “Jak—the battle isn’t over. The battle is just starting.”

  He holds his son close.

  Then he puts a hunk of statue in the boy’s hand.

  And he picks one up himself.

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