Empire's End: Aftermath (Star Wars)

by Chuck Wendig

  Star Wars: Aftermath: Empire’s End is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  ISBN 9781101966969

  Ebook ISBN 9781101966976

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Christopher M. Zucker, adapted for ebook

  Cover art and design: Scott Biel

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Prelude: The Second Death Star Over Endor

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Interlude: Kashyyyk

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Interlude: Theed, Naboo

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Two

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Interlude: Tatooine

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Interlude: Christophsis

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Interlude: Coruscant

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Part Four

  Interlude: Devaron

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Interlude: Cloud City, Bespin

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Part Five

  Interlude: The Imperialis, Twenty-five Years Ago

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Interlude: Liberty’s Misrule

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Epilogue: The Unknown Regions

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Chuck Wendig

  About the Author

  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….

  For the first time in a generation, democracy has been restored to the galaxy. Although reeling from a crippling Imperial attack, the New Republic has managed to drive the remnants of the Empire into hiding. Still, the threat of continued violence will always remain while the war persists.

  On the remote planet of Jakku, far from Republic eyes, the once-secretive Gallius Rax strives to rebuild the crumbling Empire in his own image. But his plans may soon be challenged by former Grand Admiral Rae Sloane who seeks to destroy Rax and reclaim her Empire from his dark machinations.

  Unaware of Rax’s plot, Norra Wexley and her crew continue to pursue any information that could lead them to the fugitive Sloane. Convinced that Sloane holds the key to the Empire’s defeat, Norra’s search brings her closer and closer to Rax’s hidden army. For on Jakku, the Empire prepares to make its last stand where the fate of the galaxy will be decided.

  The architecture of the Death Star, even in its unfinished reconstruction, brings awe to Admiral Gallius Rax. It is a world unto itself, and as he walks the hallway toward the turbolift, shepherded by a pair of red-helmeted guardsmen, he notices that the battle station hums and thrums all around him—a subtle vibration in which Rax hears a mad song. It is a song of might, of potency, of destruction. An Imperial opera in timbre and tremor.

  He never set foot on the first incarnation of the Death Star. He wasn’t allowed to—it was his role to be kept at the margins, waiting for a destiny he was sure would never come. And yet now, here he is. Invited on board to see. Which suggests to him he is either soon to fulfill that destiny, or even sooner to die as his destiny withers on the vine.

  The guards step forward, summoning a lift lit with red and white light, its black floor so smooth and so dark it’s like a mirror cast in obsidian and stained with moral decay. They usher Rax into it, but do not follow.

  He goes up alone.

  The turbolift opens.

  There waits the Emperor at the far end of the throne room. The old man in his black cloak sits regarding the soft glowing curve of the Endor moon that lies beyond the radial viewport. Slowly, the chair spins.

  Only half the man’s face can be seen. The lines in it have deepened considerably. Flesh sags from the jaw and the jowls, and his mouth is cast in a feral grimace that is somehow also a troubling smile. That face with that mouth is like a rotten piece of bag-cloth with a knife-slash cut in the fabric. The rest of his countenance is hidden in the shadow of the black hood.

  It has been many years since Rax has seen Palpatine up close. The awfulness he once saw cast upon the man’s face has been carved into his skin and made flesh.

  The sight of the Emperor robs him of breath. It steals from him a measure of strength, and his knees nearly give out. Palpatine has the presence of a collapsing star and the consumptive void that results from it. It draws you in. It takes something from you. It is a flensing, frightening force.

  But Rax stands tall, as he once did on Jakku.

  “Come,” Palpatine says, a rigor mortis claw summoning him.

  Rax does as commanded. “My Emperor.” He bows his head.

  “A shuttle has landed on the Sanctuary Moon,” the old man says. Rax doesn’t know how to answer this—the words come almost as an accusation, though not necessarily aimed at him. “Destiny accompanies that ship. There is one on board who challenges the course of fate as I have seen it.”

  “I shall have the shuttle destroyed.”

  “No, my boy. I have greater plans for the one on the shuttle—whether he will be a demonstration of my power or a slave to replace the one who has failed me, I cannot say. That remains unclear. But we are led to a moment in time, a moment of grave uncertainty. All things flow toward this moment.” His voice goes soft and his head eases back into his hood. “I sense…chaos. Weakness. I sense a shatterpoint.”

  Rax thrusts out his chin and puffs up his chest. “Just tell me whatever it is you need, my lord.”

  “I need you to be ready.”

  “I am always ready.”

  “It may soon be time for the Contingency.”

  At that, Rax’s throat tightens. My destiny…

  Palpatine continues: “You will go far away from here. You will take the Ravager and hide in the Vulpinus Nebula until the events of this shatterpoint resolve.”

  “How will I know?”

  “You will know. I will send a sentinel.”

  Rax nods. “Yes, my lord.”

  Palpatine regards him. Rax cannot see the Emperor’s eyes, but he can certainly feel them. Sticking him like pins. Dissecting him to see what he’s made of. “My boy. My precious boy. Are you ready to be the Outcast? Are you prepared to become the Contingency should it come to that? There will be others you mu
st call to your side.”

  “I know. And I am ready.” I am ready to go home. Because that’s what this means, does it not? It means one day soon returning to the sands of Jakku. To the Observatory. To everything he hates, and yet to the place that harbors his destiny—and the destiny of the galaxy as a whole.

  “Then go. Time is precious. A battle will soon be upon us.”

  “You will win it, most assuredly.”

  Another vicious smile. “One way or another, I will.”

  This part of Taris is a wasteland, and Mercurial Swift moves through it like a rat slipping through bolt-holes. The bounty hunter clambers through the wreckage of an old habitation building, its apartments long shattered, the walls torn open to expose the mess of collapsed urban sprawl. Through the broken world, life tries to grow: creeping three-fingered vines and twisting spirals of slime-slick fungus. And though the ruination conceals it, people live here: They dwell, huddled up together in shipping containers and through crumbling hallways, hidden under the fractured streets and atop buildings so weakened they sway like sleepy drunks in even the softest wind.

  His prey is here. Somewhere.

  Vazeen Mordraw, a wilder girl who stole a caseload of ID cards from the Gindar Gang—cards that were themselves stolen from New Republic dignitaries. Cards that would allow anyone easy passage through the known worlds without triggering a closer look. The Gindar want the cards back. And as a special bonus, they want the girl, too.

  Preferably alive. Dead if necessary.

  Mercurial plans on the former. If only because it’ll be a lot easier to extract someone who can move around on her own two feet—carting a corpse over the wreckage of Taris sounds like a damn fine way to snap an ankle. And that would make this job unnecessarily harder.

  There. Up ahead. Some scum-farmer kid stands in the shadow of a shattered wall, scraping sponge-moss off the stone, maybe to feed his family, maybe to sell. The boy—head shaved, dirt on his cheeks, his lower lip split as a scarmark indicating that he is an owned boy—startles and turns to run. But Swift calls after.

  “Hey! Slow down, kid.” He shakes a small satchel at him. Credits tink as they jostle together. “I’m looking for someone.”

  The kid doesn’t say anything, but he stops running, at least. Wary, he arches an eyebrow, and Mercurial takes that as a sign of interest. The bounty hunter taps the gauntlet at his wrist, and a hologram glimmers suddenly in the air above his arm. It’s an image of the girl, Vazeen.

  “Seen her?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t be cagey.” Again he shakes the credit bag. “Yes or no.”

  The boy hesitates. “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Close.”

  Yes. Mercurial knew she had to be here. The old Ithorian at the spaceport crawled out of his spice-sodden haze long enough to confirm that he knew the girl and that she would go to ground near her family. Her uncle lives here in the remains of the old Talinn district. (Swift is suddenly glad she doesn’t have family on the far side of the planet—there the wealthy live in massive towers, hypersecure, guarded by armies of private security.)

  “How close?”

  The boy’s eyes flit left and right. Like he’s not sure how to answer. Which leads Mercurial to suspect that the boy actually knows her. “I…”

  “Kid. I’m going to either give you these credits, or I’m going to throw you out the hole in that wall over there. You can leave here with some extra currency in your pocket, or with two broken legs. Maybe even two broken arms.” Mercurial flashes his teeth in a sharp grin. “It’s a long way down.”

  And still the boy hesitates. He’s chewing over his options. A heady, swamp-stink wind whips and whistles through the shattered hallway.

  “I’m not going to hurt her,” Mercurial assures him. It’s mostly true. In his experience, people want to be selfish, but they need to feel like they’re being selfless while doing it. They want an excuse. He’s happy to help the boy feel good about doing bad if that’s what it takes. “Better I find her than someone else, trust me.”

  There it is. The moment of acquiescence. The boy closes his eyes gently, a decision having been made. Finally he says: “She’s one building over. The old Palmyra foundry. Vazeen has a little…cubbyhole up there. A hiding place.”

  “Congrats,” Mercurial says, flipping the satchel into the kid’s open palm. The boy stares down at it, greedy and eager. Too bad he doesn’t realize that the credits are barely worth their metal. Imperial currency has crashed hard, cratering with meteoric impact. Everyone knows that soon the Empire will be stardust—and then what?

  That is a worry for another time.

  The boy runs off.

  Mercurial hunts.

  —

  Hours later, the bounty hunter lies flat on his belly and brings the quadnocs up—he stares through them, flicking the zoom forward click by click until his view is zeroed in enough to make out just enough detail. The roof of the foundry is flat and, like everything else here, broken. A vent stack tower from the next factory over fell across the foundry, connecting the two ruined buildings—and Mercurial decides that will serve as his extraction point if everything goes sideways. Though he’s hard-pressed to imagine how collecting this simple bounty could go wrong…

  He spies sudden movement on the roof. Swift focuses in on it, and sees a small sheet of tin move aside—and a brush of pink hair catches the fading light of day.

  Target acquired.

  A little part of him is thrilled to find her, but at the same time, his heart sinks. The future plays out in his mind, and at its end waits a worthless payout. He’ll nab her. He’ll take her to the Gindar prigs. They’ll give him a meager stash of chits—not Imperial credits, not anymore, but chits that he can take to certain merchants on certain worlds and cash in for gear or ammo or a meal, but of course they won’t work everywhere, and what one chit is worth now will fluctuate wildly depending on who owns the currency. In this case, the Gindars are owned by the Frillian Confederacy, and the Frillians are owned by Black Sun. And nobody owns Black Sun. Not yet. But that day may be coming—with the Empire waning and the New Republic rising, the syndicates know that opportunity waits for those willing to seize the galaxy during this time of chaos. But who? Who gets to exploit that opportunity first? It’s led to infighting. The syndicates are aiming to one-up each other, trying to establish supremacy. A shadow war is just getting started. They want to own the currency and set the criminal destiny for the entirety of the galaxy. Black Sun. Shadow Syndicate. The Hutts. Red Key. The Crymorah. The Sovereign Latitudes of Maracavanya. What a bloody mess.

  Eventually, Mercurial knows that someone will try to own him, too. But he has no intention of being a kept boy.

  The bounty hunter stands and emerges from the bent, dented hull of an old freighter—one that must’ve crashed on the habitation roof eons ago and is now just a sculpture of rusted beams. Swift pulls his batons and moves fast: He runs and leaps off the lip of the building, giving his jetpack two quick pulses. The crackle of energy fills the air behind him, propelling him forward as the foundry roof comes up fast. Swift tucks and rolls, and when he returns to his feet, he spins his batons and runs straight to the ramshackle lean-to where Vazeen has been hiding.

  She steps out. She sees him. He sees that she sees him, and yet his target stands there, unmoving. At first Swift thinks, The girl knows the game is over, but that doesn’t track. This is a girl on the run. This is her planet. She should spook. She should run. Everyone runs.

  And yet she remains, staring right at him.

  The realization sticks Mercurial like a knife:

  She’s not running. Because she’s bait.

  Damnit!

  He drops down again into a roll just as the stun blast fills the air above his head in a warbling scream. Swift leaps to his feet and expects to see someone he knows coming for him: an old enemy, a betrayed friend, an ex-girlfriend with a broken heart and a blaster rifle. But instead, he sees s
ome other woman coming for him. Older. Silver hair moved by the wind. Whoever she is, she looks familiar to him, but he doesn’t have time to sort through all the faces he’s met, because she’s got a pistol pointed right at him and another stun bolt comes—

  But he’s fast: a coiled spring, suddenly unsprung. He deftly pivots on the ball of his right foot, and as he spins around he has one of his batons up and flung—it leaves his fingers and whistles through open air.

  Clack! His baton clips the front of her blaster. She cries out as the gun tumbles away, clattering onto the rooftop. The woman shakes her hand—the vibration surely stung her mitt, and now she’s trying to soothe it—but still she keeps on coming, her face a grim rictus of determination.

  Good for her. But she’s still not going to get him.

  He flexes his hand, fingers pressing into the button in the center of his palm. The extensor pads at the tips of his fingers suddenly buzz, and his one flung baton jumps up off the ground—

  And surfs the air currents back into his grip.

  The older woman skids to a halt, throwing a punch as she does—it’s a good punch, solid, but the bounty hunter knows it’s coming because her body language telegraphs the attack. Mercurial sidesteps, her fist catching open air, and it gives him an opportunity to jab his baton up under her arm. Electricity courses through her. Her teeth clamp together and her eyes open wide as every centimeter of her seizes up. When she drops, he hears the scuff of a boot behind him, and he thinks: I’m too damn distracted. This job made him too comfortable, too complacent, and now someone’s hammering a fist into his kidneys, dropping him down to one knee.