Empire's End: Aftermath (Star Wars)

by Chuck Wendig

  All of them are good people. Even when they’re doing bad things. But is she that? Perhaps she is their opposite. Or maybe killing Sloane is a bad thing, but it wouldn’t change that she’s a good person.

  She tells the truth when she says, “I don’t know. For now, we…do whatever it takes to capture her.”

  “Fine. How?”

  Norra thinks. A plan—clumsy and terrifying—forms. “We can’t take out those turbolasers.” She remembers rocketing over Myrra on Akiva in a TIE fighter—those ships are insanely maneuverable, and even then it was a struggle not to get fried. “Instead we fly down, but never stop moving for long. Someone drops out, grabs Sloane. We use Bones as backup.” Bones is presently on the shuttle, charging his batteries and doing light diagnostics on himself. “Then whoever’s flying the ship brings it back around just long enough to drop the ramp so we can all get aboard. And while the clearance codes are still good, we get offplanet and back to the Republic with our prisoner in tow.”

  “It’s dangerous.” Jas’s face wrinkles up into a frustrated knot. “We’ll probably die. Then again, we’ve survived this long, and your plan might be the only way. I like it. There’s one other thing, though.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “It’s time to consider the possibility that Rae Sloane is no longer in charge of anything down here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. The grand admiral of the whole Empire is down there in the company of a Hutt gangster. She’s clothed like a common scavenger. Sloane has lost control, Norra. She’s not in charge of a hill of sand, much less the Empire. And whatever’s out there is important enough to be guarded by a bank of high-test turbolasers, but secret enough to have no visible Imperial presence. Something’s going on here. Something big.”

  Norra paces. Jas is right. And yet—what can they do? How can they see the scope of it? Do they even need to?

  They don’t, she decides.

  “The goal is the goal,” Norra says. “Get Sloane. The rest is for someone else to uncover. We do our part, and if we bring back the erstwhile grand admiral, maybe she can do her part and shine a light on these shadows, show us what’s really going on.”

  “Sounds like a deal. Ready to try to not die once again?”

  “It seems to be my calling.”

  —

  Something is up there.

  Sloane is sure of it. She’s been staring up at the distant ridgeline for the last hour, certain that something is hiding there behind the rocks. At first she thought, Maybe it’s just an animal. In her short time here on Jakku she’s already seen creatures she hopes to never see again: devouring worms underneath the sand, birds whose beaks can punch through metal, massive lizards that run across the hot desert as fast as lightning. For a time she thought maybe it was some beast watching, waiting to feast upon them should they dare to sleep. But now she’s not so sure. It’s the way that the shadows move, and the way she sometimes catches the flintiest glint of starlight. It’s someone, not something.

  She tells Brentin as much. He remains crouched behind a bent and crooked stone, and he asks the natural question: “Who?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t have any friends here. But I don’t think it’s the Empire, either, or they would’ve come already.” Or so she thinks. The turbolaser turrets out there—they’re guarding something spectacular. Something that belongs to Gallius Rax.

  But does it belong to the Empire? Or just to Rax?

  “Could be scavengers,” Brentin says.

  “Could be.” Just as an animal might look to devour them, scavengers might hope to do the same—looking to plunder not their meat but the debris field scattered out in front of them in the open valley.

  “Niima still isn’t happy.”

  It’s hard to see the Hutt now, but it’s easy to hear her. The distance that separates the two groups from each other is close enough that the slug’s snorts and hisses and gurgles of rage are clear across the quiet night. There arises a thumping, too—the Hutt’s tail, pounding the desert.

  Sloane is sorely tempted to lure the Hutt out of hiding and hope that one of the turbolasers turns the worm to a red mist and a rain of foul blubber. But it would do Sloane no good, of course, beyond affording her a moment of pleasure—and eradicating one of her enemies.

  “What do you think Rax is hiding beyond the valley?” Brentin asks.

  “I don’t know. The rumors said it was some kind of weapons facility.”

  “Why would he hide that? He seems to be hiding it from his own people.”

  “I don’t know that, either.” Certainly the Empire had its secrets. Layers of them, actually. Even she does not know them all.

  “I heard a rumor once.” Brentin sits up with a groan, his back scraping up the side of the rock. “Working pirate radio for the rebels meant not only getting propaganda out to the galaxy, but also intercepting communications from the Empire. I worked with guys who knew how to slice those frequencies, how to tap into feeds and transmissions—they even figured out how to hack hyperspace drives to snatch those frequencies right out of far space. This one Abednedo I worked with, Awls Ooteek, he said they caught a snippet that came from some far-off system. Adumar, I think. In Wild Space. The transmission said something about a…laboratory, a hidden facility. We sent scouts to look for it but nothing ever came of it, and it’s not like we could devote a lot of attention to that endeavor. The Alliance had to be careful how it allocated its people. But I wonder if something was out there. And I wonder if what’s here is like that.”

  Something the Emperor himself set up? That could be. Sloane’s mind flashes to that image she saw in the Imperial archives: Palpatine, Yularen, Mas Amedda, and the young Gallius Rax. Rax was a hero of the Empire, but his record remains clouded behind layers of classification. How close was he to Palpatine? What was his true role?

  What if what’s out there was like the secret facilities that helped to develop and design the Death Star? Or what if it’s something far stranger?

  Whatever it is, Rax cannot be allowed to control it. He’s not to be trusted.

  In her belly, there’s a twinge as that thought repeats itself: He’s not to be trusted with my Empire. New purpose burns like lava in her marrow. Maybe Brentin Wexley is right. Could be that she requires a purpose beyond merely cutting out Gallius Rax’s heart.

  Maybe she can reclaim the Empire. Maybe she can save it.

  And maybe whatever he’s protecting and hiding will help her to do just that. Which means they have to find a way past those turbolasers and—

  “Look,” Brentin says.

  Sloane is jarred loose from her momentary reverie and follows his pointing finger. There, up on the ridge, she spies movement.

  A ship. A shuttle.

  It lifts up and points toward them.

  Sloane’s mouth spreads into a wicked grin. “Get ready.”

  “For what?”

  “We’re going to take that ship.”

  —

  Jas says that Norra should pilot the shuttle down to the surface, and Jas will be the one to hit the sand and grab Sloane. That fulfills each of their roles. They are each trained accordingly—Norra is a sly pilot, one of the best the Rebellion had. And Jas is a bounty hunter. She knows how to fight. She knows how to subdue.

  But Norra’s not having any of that. Her jaw locks tight. Her eyes are open and intense. When she says through trapped teeth that she wants—no, needs—to be the one to take in Sloane, Jas agrees. The bounty hunter knows this is a fight she can’t win. So she acquiesces.

  They’re in the shuttle now. The ship rises fast off the ridge, and Jas plots the vector—swoop west and come in from an oblique angle. The plateaus will block any meaningful fire from the turbolasers. Norra waits on the ramp with Bones, ready for what’s to come. If she fails to grab Sloane, the droid will be able to do the job, and at the very least he’ll defend Norra from the admiral and whoever she’s with. Jas will do a looping slalo
m through the valley plateaus, then return to pick up Norra and Sloane.

  Easy. Or so Jas hopes.

  But it’s never easy, is it?

  As Jas swings west, she turns the ship toward Sloane’s position.

  And that’s when her screens light up with incoming ships.

  —

  Norra has no intention of “taking in” Sloane. Already her heart is telling her that in the battle between justice and revenge, she knows what has to be done. As they get closer and closer, her urge to see that woman pay for what she’s done grows like an infection. If she has a shot, she’s going to take it. There will be no need to bring her aboard the shuttle. Jakku will take her body after Norra does what must be done.

  The wind whips across Norra as she hangs on to the pneumatic piston that allows the ramp to hang open even as the Corellian shuttle darts and dips back toward the valley. Bones is behind her, hanging from the other piston like it’s a streetlight from which he dances—one arm and one leg out as if he just finished a magic trick, ta-da.

  With her free hand, Norra brings the quadnocs to her eyes once again. She points them toward Sloane’s position. The blurry image grows clearer as they approach—fat pixels resolve into small ones, and she sees Sloane standing up, pointing right at the incoming shuttle. Her heart burns with the need to see this woman defeated.

  Good. Know that I’m coming for you, Rae Sloane.

  Then the man hiding there stands, too.

  The ’nocs focus on him and his face clarifies…

  No. It can’t be.

  It’s like being dropped into the airless nowhere of space. The void consumes her, sucking all the oxygen out of her lungs as she realizes:

  It’s Brentin.

  It’s her husband.

  She almost loses her grip on the piston as her head goes swimmy—the quadnocs do drop from her hand, but Bones is fast and snatches them with a snapping claw before they fall into the void.

  “Brentin,” Norra says, but her voice is swallowed by the roar of the shuttle’s engines and she can only hear the name spoken inside her own head…

  Norra grabs the quadnocs from Bones and looks once more.

  Sloane and Brentin are no longer looking this way.

  They’re still looking up. This time, in another direction.

  That’s when the shuttle suddenly pulls hard to the left—heading back west again away from Sloane, away from her husband. No! That’s not possible! She yells back inside the ship: “What are you doing?” Fury surges inside her like a living thing, and she launches herself back inside the shuttle and makes her way through the main hold and into the cockpit. The ship banks again and she almost loses her footing as she staggers up behind the bounty hunter and reaches for the controls. “We have to go back!”

  Jas yells: “We have incoming Imperial ships!”

  “It doesn’t matter. Brentin is down there! My husband.” She wrestles for the flight stick. Jas grabs Norra by the chin and pulls her close.

  “Listen to me,” she says. Her voice is cold, her eyes are deadly serious. “If we go down there, we’re dead. We’re all dead.”

  “Please,” Norra begs.

  “The Imperials aren’t following us because we have clearance codes. We watch. We wait. We do this right. Okay?”

  “It’s Brentin, Jas, it’s Brentin.” Even Norra hears the madness in her own voice as she pleads.

  “I need you to trust me, Norra. Do you trust me?”

  “I do…”

  “Then buckle up. We need to get out of here. Fast.”

  —

  “We have nowhere to go,” Brentin says. And he’s right. They flee the protection of the plateau, and turbolasers will end them. Stay here, and they’re a target for whoever it is that’s coming for them.

  Sloane doesn’t understand what just happened. The ship that was coming—a Corellian shuttle by the look of it? It turned away at the last second as a trio of Imperial ships came up over the ridge. Those three ships are Lambda-class shuttles and they roar in and swoop low over the desert, dust swirling behind them. The Corellian ship flees. Scavengers, run off by the sight of the Empire? Or saviors? She’ll never know, it seems.

  Sloane looks at the blaster rifle in her hand and tries to imagine what to do with it. Put it under your chin, she thinks.

  But no. She’ll see this through. There is no escape from this situation, but one way or another she will find a way forward. Sloane will end Rax. Sloane will retake the Empire. She’ll do it with her biting teeth and scratching fingernails. She’ll claw her way back to the seat of power. Maybe this is how she gets there. Seize any opportunity, she thinks.

  The shuttles land, far enough apart to block any chance she and Brentin might have of fleeing into the night.

  Ramps descend with off-gassing steam.

  Stormtroopers come off those ramps in no formation—just a sloppy, chaotic disgorgement of soldiers. More like mercenaries at this point.

  Then he comes.

  Gallius Rax.

  He wears the white of a grand admiral, somehow clean despite the filth of this world. A red cape swoops behind him, stirring dust.

  Stormtroopers surround her and Brentin. They bark orders for her to drop her weapon, and she does.

  They part to let Rax through.

  “Sloane,” he says, dipping his chin in a small nod.

  “Counselor.”

  “I thought you had been killed on Chandrila.” The wind whips his cape. “Or taken prisoner.”

  Her pulse throbs in her temples. Her fingers tighten reflexively into fists. Sloane’s greatest desire is to leap forward right now and drive one punch into his face—a single hit that pistons his nose into his brain. But she’d be cut down by blasterfire before she even got close.

  “I am alive. I will retake the Empire, now. Thank you for safeguarding it, but your time is done.” She says that with bluff and bluster, knowing full well he won’t simply accede.

  “Your Empire has moved on without you,” he says, his hand going to the air with a frittering gesture. “You understand. After a period of mourning, what else could we do?”

  “So you brought it here. To this dead place.”

  “We have a destiny here. We all do.”

  My destiny is to see you die, she thinks.

  And then, from the other plateau, a roar of fury. Out there, Niima the Hutt bellows and slithers swiftly across the desert floor toward them. The turbolasers don’t fire as she crosses the expanse. (That confirms Rax controls them—the turrets didn’t autotarget him or his shuttles.)

  Niima shrieks in proto-Huttese, the translation box offering its interpretation in loud mechanized monotone: “COUNSELOR. WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN HIDING OUT HERE IN THE—”

  But Rax simply holds up his finger and loops it in an almost lazy, dismissive gesture. The troopers turn toward the Hutt, rifles up, and begin firing. Red lasers spear the night, sizzling and pocking as they pelt the Hutt and the slaves who ride her. The slug roars. Slaves fall.

  But she doesn’t stop.

  Niima suddenly changes course, heads toward one of the shuttles. Wailing in pain and rage, the Hutt moves with terrifying speed toward the closest shuttle, and she hits it like a charging beast. Her head gets under the ship and lifts—Sloane audibly gasps as the shuttle flips onto its side, the wing snapping as the troopers continue firing upon her.

  Now the Hutt is coming this way. And Sloane thinks, This is it, this is my way out. She begins to eye the troopers, assessing which she should take—

  Niima slumps, sliding forward. Her last Hutt-slave, the one who originally draped the speaker around the worm’s neck (or, rather, lack of neck), hits the sand running, ululating—

  One shot between his eyes drops him.

  And again all is still.

  “Nasty business, dealing with traitors,” Rax says.

  “It is,” Sloane says. “As you’ll see.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “It is.” She feels her
body moving in time with her heartbeat—rocking side-to-side, bobbing up and down in case she has to run, attack, punch, kick, anything. She flits her gaze to Brentin. In it she attempts to convey a clear message: Be ready for anything. She looks to the stormtroopers again—no, not to all of them. Just to one. The one closest. That trooper stands there, his helmet crisscrossed with angry carved hashes filled with the accumulated rust-red dirt of Jakku. To this trooper she says: “I am Grand Admiral Rae Sloane. I command you to capture Counselor Gallius Rax on the charge of treason against the throne.”

  That trooper flinches—but doesn’t budge.

  “They aren’t yours to command,” Rax says plainly. “A noble effort. And I’m sad you think that what I’ve done is treason. Don’t you see, Sloane? I’ve given the Empire a place again. A purpose.”

  “It’s come to this, then? Death on a dead world. You’ve driven us all to the edge of the galaxy. To the edge of everything.”

  “As I say: There is a purpose.”

  She sneers. “But let me guess? I’ll never see it.”

  “To the contrary. I’m taking you back. Alive.”

  “Why?”

  A slow, self-satisfied smile spreads across his face. “A show must have its audience, dear Sloane.” He turns to Brentin. “But whoever he is, he can go.”

  The troopers raise their rifles—

  Brentin cries out as fingers curl around triggers—

  Sloane steps in front of him. “No. No. He comes with me.”

  Rax laughs. “But why?”

  Because if anybody can help me, it’s him. He saved her once. He’s helped her countless times already. If they kill him now, any utility he may yet possess will be gone.

  Not that she can say that to Rax.

  “He’s a rebel, if you’ll believe that. He had a chip in his head, a chip you helped put there. Don’t you want him to see what your seeds have grown? You want an audience? A witness? Then let him see what you’ve wrought.”