by Chuck Wendig
And yet—that was the man’s copilot. His friend. His family.
I have copilots, too. It’s taken Sinjir some time to see that. Certainly he’s come to see these people around him as his friends, as his family.
And yet there’s one more copilot out there.
Conder Kyl.
Damnit, blast, damnit.
I never should’ve left him.
Conder makes Sinjir a better man. Just as Chewie helped to make Solo one, too. We both need our copilots, it seems.
“We need to think,” Sinjir says, “because I need to get Conder back. He’s important to me, Solo. You understand?”
“I hear you loud and clear.”
“Why would they even take him?”
“Bargaining chip, maybe. Or because he’s a slicer and they want him to do something for them.”
“Bargaining chip. Yes. Because even if we intercept the other senators before the vote, they’ll have Conder to play. That’s their plot, isn’t it? We have him, so don’t disrupt the vote or he gets it.”
Solo looks disappointed. “Why didn’t they take me?” He pouts. “They threw me away like I was trash.”
“They didn’t take you because you’re too high-profile. They take the venerable Han Solo and they risk his old friend Luke cutting them all to bits with his fancy laser blade.” Sinjir thinks but does not say: They didn’t take me because I’m ex-Imperial and they couldn’t risk the lack of sympathy. Oh, well, it’s just Sinjir. Nobody will miss him. “If they want to use him as a slicer, they’d need a building near the Senate house with some digital pipe—some cabling. That might stand out here. Nakadia isn’t well connected.”
“Still means doing a ground search,” Han says. “We don’t have the time for those kinds of—”
Their comlinks suddenly crackle to life in unison.
From the static comes Conder’s voice:
Kkksssh. “—ere am I?”
Sinjir’s heart leaps in his chest like a hare over a puddle. He speaks into the comm: “Conder? Where are you? Are you all right?”
But the slicer doesn’t answer. At least, he doesn’t answer Sinjir, but he does keep talking. “When my friends get here, you’ll be sorry.”
“He’s broadcasting,” Solo says. “Somehow.”
C’mon, Conder. Tell us something. Anything.
The slicer continues: “Don’t think I don’t see that Red Key mark on your biceps. I know who owns you. And you there. Black Sun?”
A muffled sound: someone speaking back to Conder. But Sinjir can’t make out the other person’s words. We already know it’s Red Key, Conder. And Black Sun. Keep going. Keep telling us information.
“Looks like a—” A burst of static eats the word, but it resurfaces through the crackle: “—rehouse. Red roof. Two story—”
The other person says something. Sounds like Shut up.
Then: bam. The comlinks blast a dull thud and a loud high-pitched shriek before going dead once more. “Conder? Conder?”
Jom and Temmin poke their heads into the cockpit.
“You hear that?” Jom asks.
“I think he said warehouse,” Temmin says.
Sinjir grips the back of the copilot’s chair so hard he’s afraid he’s about to rip it out of its mooring. “We need to—”
“On it.”
Solo’s already leaning on the thrusters. The Falcon jumps forward—and in moments the ship is shaking as it burns through the atmosphere, the black void of space giving way to the daytime sky of Nakadia.
We’re coming, Conder. We’re coming.
—
The chancellor moves slowly, faking a limp as she steps off the ramp of the Ganoidian cruiser. She waves to those gathered—it seems their time trapped in space caused a bit of a stir, a little drama, and now Nakadians have gathered to watch it end. Cams hover nearby, broadcasting. She spies a familiar face at the margins: Tracene Kane, of HoloNet News.
As she hobbles forward, Wartol steps next to her. He’s smiling, waving at the crowd, but his low-spoken words to her betray any mirth he broadcasts on his face. “Quit. Limping.”
“I seem to have injured my ankle a touch. I’ll get along.”
“Another ploy.”
“Hardly,” she lies. “My good friend Ackbar has had me on a rather strict exercise regimen ever since the attack left me in critical care, and I fear I’ve overexerted myself just a touch. How does the saying go? Slow and steady wins the race?” She emphasizes those last three words: wins the race.
“It shows how pathetic you are that you’re resorting to cheap stunts such as this one. It only delays the inevitable, Chancellor.” He nods at a nearby cam in an avuncular way before returning to hiss in her ear: “You’ll still lose. You’ll lose everything. No ruse of yours will stop that.”
Over their heads roar the engines of a familiar freighter—
The Millennium Falcon.
Hope is a small ember, but with the sight of that, it burns brighter. Mon prays they have found something, anything, to give her an edge.
—
Two streets over from the Senate house sits an agricultural warehouse with a red roof. Behind it are docking platforms meant for harvesters and agri-droids, but one of them is occupied with a different ship: Dor Wieedo’s Tyrusian sky-sloop.
That’s it. Sinjir knows it. He has to hope they’re not too late. They have little time to discuss a plan. What they know is this: Summoning the Senate Guard or the Nakadian peace officers won’t work. The common problem: no time.
They think to intercept the four other bribed and blackmailed senators inside the Senate house, but that, too, is an impossible task—security there will be tight, and trying to bust in with guns blazing will only get them shot.
They could attempt to stop the vote. But the vote needs to happen. If any of this comes to light, the result will almost certainly be a vote delayed by an investigation—which could take weeks to resolve. Weeks when Jas and Norra are left on an Imperial-occupied world.
And those plans also leave Conder on the hook.
That leaves them with one avenue of action and not a lot of time to plan out their assault. Solo finds no safe place to put the Falcon—no nearby docking bay, no hangar, no platform.
He grins, then. That scandalous, boomerang grin.
“I have a plan,” he says.
“Do it,” Sinjir says, without even asking what it is.
—
They pull him out of the Academy. He is hand-selected by a brutal, brick-faced woman named Officer Sid Uddra. Uddra tells Sinjir Rath Velus that he will be no trooper: He is too angry and he is too smart. Both qualities that make for a poor soldier. “They are just fodder anyway,” she says as an aside, dismissing an entire army with a sour sneer.
He ends up in a new training program, this one located in a boxy, duracrete building. This severe structure is the Viper’s Nest and it sits on a peak surrounded by the roiling oceans of Virkoi. It is where the Imperial Security Bureau trains its LOs—the loyalty officers.
Uddra tells him that she comes from the same system as he: Velusia. He is from Sevenmoon, she from Sixmoon.
“You are like me,” she tells him. “You get along with no one. They don’t like you and you don’t like them. It matters little where it started—over time, you’ve learned to protect yourself by preemptively hating everyone else. You distrust and despise even me. Good. That hate will save you. More important, that hate will save the Empire.” And she explains to him what his role will be in the Empire from now on—he will train to become Loyalty Officer Rath Velus. He will hide in plain sight. He will use that hatred of others to see in them their weakness—every weak Imperial is a fontanel where the skin goes thin and the Empire becomes vulnerable.
Then she tells him his training begins now.
She beats him. He is young and foolish and thinks he can fight back against this small, hard stump of a woman. He is wrong. Uddra’s movements are short and precise. He swings. She duc
ks. He leaps. She sidesteps. Every time he misses, she lands a hit. To his ribs. To the side of his neck. To his kidneys. Soon he is left panting and sobbing on the floor, on his hands and knees. Uddra goes to work on him. Whipping him with a wet towel rolled up. Bending his fingers back—not so they break, but so the pain forces him confess everything about himself. Inserting small slivers of metal under his fingernails. The pain is intense. It is clarifying. It rips him open and everything that he is spills out of his blubbering mouth.
This happens again and again. Sinjir trains during the day. He suffers at night. Uddra never shows emotion. She studies him like an eight-legger deciding which part of the fly to eat first. Uddra dissects him.
He is unlike her. He is not cold and calculating. He is angry, vicious, full of rage. Uddra explains: “I will burn that out of you until all that’s left is charred and black. A hot coal gone cold.” Then she breaks his toes.
Then one day, it is his turn. Not to fight her, no. But to turn what he has learned—what has been visited upon him—against another.
She shows him a door. In this door is a window, and through that window he sees a man in a black officer’s uniform—bars on the fellow’s chest indicate that this man with pinched eyes and a pug’s nose is a lieutenant serving the Imperial Navy.
Uddra tells Sinjir: “He will be your first.” She explains why the man is here: “We believe he is part of a cabal of conspirators who seek to unseat Palpatine from the throne by committing to an assassination plot against the Emperor’s enforcer, Darth Vader. You will root out the names of the other conspirators. Before you do, however, there is one last lesson.”
She takes him outside, where a storm rages. On Virkoi, a storm always rages. Uddra takes a blaster rifle from a rack against the wall of the Viper’s Nest and she points it off at the black, storm-crushed horizon.
Uddra fires.
The bolt cuts through the rain and the winds. It moves fast—a bright flash lancing the dark until it’s a pinprick, then gone.
“You must be like that,” she hisses in his ear. “You are that bolt of searing plasma. You will always be unswerving. No matter the rain or the wind. No matter how hot or how cold. Through the air. Through the void. You must be the brightest beam of light. Only then will the truth be out.”
Sinjir understands. He pushes his anger away. He tortures Lieutenant Alster Grove for two nights straight until the man yields the names of his fellow conspirators. Uddra dumps Grove screaming into the churning sea. The other conspirators are hunted down by Vader and beheaded.
—
I am the brightest beam of light.
All else is chaos. It is like the wind-whipped sea of Virkoi. He will not be fazed by it. He must not be fazed by it.
Solo uses the Falcon’s belly turret to blow a hole in the top of the warehouse roof. Then he sets the Falcon right down upon it. Whump. Temmin stays behind to watch Rethalow. The rest of them are off.
Sinjir is first through the breach.
The warehouse is dim. The noise has already drawn foes. They come up on him in what seems like slow motion.
I am the brightest beam of light.
A thick-skulled Nikto swings a saw-toothed ax at his head. He deftly dips away from the blade, then twists the thug’s arm back, back, back—until there’s the dull vegetal crunch of tendons ripping. Sinjir pitches the Nikto behind him just as a plasma bolt snaps through the air, taking the thug out. That, from Jom, coming up behind—he’s yelling something to Sinjir, something about keep going, keep moving, I’ll cover you, but the ex-Imperial barely registers it at all.
I am the brightest beam of light.
Two more Nikto thugs come up between shelf-stacks of motor-vator parts—two more bolts of light through dark space. One from Han, the other from Jom. Both foes find their heels skidding out from under them as they are taken down, one after the other.
Sinjir stalks the half dark. He draws his own blaster. Some bent-necked Ithorian comes charging up—but Sinjir’s arm is already up, his finger is already tightening. The Ithorian goes from two eyes to three as a searing hole opens in the center of his head.
I am the brightest beam of light.
The storm of violence roils. A shelf crashes down against another. Jom is on the floor, tackled by a smash-faced Iotran—the two wrestle against his rifle, thrashing about. Ahead, Solo runs and guns, ducking and darting, his blaster spitting plasma.
Bright spears of red crisscross in front of Sinjir, carving scorching lines in his vision. Motion comes from his right—Sinjir does not even pause to regard it. His movement is automatic, driving the butt end of his rifle hard to that side—it crashes into the throat of some one-eyed pirate with a little head and a big gut. The man yowls and gargles past his own crushed trachea. Sinjir shoots him in the chest, then kicks him away before continuing through the warehouse space.
I am the brightest beam of light.
And that light now shines on Conder Kyl. Everything focuses on that point: Conder at the far end of the warehouse, kneeling on the floor, his head down, hands bound behind him. Beyond him, another figure: a child in a metal cage, a child with a bobbling wobbling head atop a white stalk neck. Nim Tar’s child, abducted and kept close. No sign of the jerba, but Sinjir can’t give one hot damn about that. Truth be told, he cares nothing for the child, either. The only one he cares about is Conder.
A massive Herglic stands by the slicer, rubbery mitt grabbing the back of Conder’s head—the monster wrenches his head backward, and now Sinjir can see Conder’s bruised, nose-broken face. The Herglic’s massive maw opens and roars a threat—Come closer and I’ll break his neck—and Sinjir knows the beast can do it. Will do it. But only if Sinjir is slow.
And Sinjir is very fast.
I am the brightest beam of light.
Even as the brute finishes his threat, Sinjir is already firing his blaster.
The blaster was never his specialty. Uddra told him, You are the weapon; no blaster will ever do the damage you can do when you’re up close. But he isn’t close, not now, and this is the only tool he has. He has to shoot true. He has to come correct.
The plasma bolt spears the air.
The Herglic tightens his grip—
Don’t you hurt him, don’t you dare hurt him—
Conder cries out, his eyes going wide—
No, no, no—
The plasma bolt punches through the Herglic’s roaring mouth and out the back of his head. The Herglic moans, the bleating cry of a dying aiwha, and drops backward like a stack of crates.
Conder topples over to the side. Unmoving.
I am the brightest beam of light.
Brightest, yes. But was he the fastest?
The blaster rifle clatters—
Sinjir’s footsteps echo in time with his own pounding heart. He drops to his knees, sliding forward to scoop Conder up, cradling him. The slicer’s head flops lifelessly to the side and Sinjir feels his eyes burning hot tears—
I wasn’t the fastest. I was too slow.
Then Conder’s one eye wrenches open. He gasps. Sinjir gasps with him. “Conder. You’re okay? Tell me you’re okay. Tell me you’re okay.” He’s used to pulling information out of people one fingernail at a time; now he just wants the most basic data: Are you okay, Conder, are you okay?
“Took you long enough,” Conder says, woozily smiling.
Sinjir stoops and kisses him. His long-fingered hands pull the other man’s scruffy face into his own. The moment lasts forever.
And it still doesn’t last long enough. Because now here’s Han, and he’s got a hand on Sinjir’s shoulder—
“We’re not done yet, remember.”
Sinjir remembers. He stares deep into Conder’s eyes. “I’m going to get you free. I know you’re hurt. But we need your help. Can you slice?”
“With you by my side, I can do anything.”
The Nakadian chamber house isn’t like the one on Chandrila—the Chandrilan chamber had an epic sweep to it,
with endless scalloped balconies atop endless balconies, as far as the eyes could see. The one here on Nakadia is smaller, more humble. It’s wood, not stone. Simple chairs in wooden boxes. Nothing is sculpted, nothing ornate. The seats are not merely before her, but all around her in what feels like a whirling cyclone of faces looking down upon her. Judging her, she suspects.
The speech Mon Mothma gives ahead of the vote is essentially the same as she gave back on Chandrila a week before, but it is shorter, and it is angrier. The anger is real because she fears that no matter what she says, it won’t matter. She fears she is screaming into a void.
We have to vote yes.
We have to end the Empire.
We mustn’t be hesitant. Not now. Not so close to its conclusion.
And she adds in one last barb, a line she knows she will one day regret because it does not sound like her—the threat, the bluster, the venom—but she says it anyway: “Those who vote no: Recognize that you are marked. You will be marked as cowards at best and traitors at worst.”
She does not like the way she sounds, even though she knows the words are sincere. I sound like a dictator. She sounds like Palpatine.
The chancellor leaves the circular stage by going down a set of spiraling steps. At the bottom, she nearly collapses against the railing, she’s so tired, so bone-weary. After righting herself, she ends up in the small office afforded to her, an office underground whose window is literally pressed up against the soil: In the rich tilth she sees the lightning shape of forked roots and the turning tunnels of crawling worms.
Auxi enters after. “That was a great speech,” she says.
“I pushed too hard at the end. I went too far.”
“Maybe they’ll respect someone who goes that far.”
She tells Auxi that she needs to be alone for a while.
After Auxi leaves, Mon spends time trying to flex the hand at the end of her injured arm. The fingers have the strength of moth wings. She spies a stain at the end of her sleeve: a bit of pta juice, from the fruit. Mon sits like that for a while. Staring down. Flexing her weak fingers. Hunching over farther and farther until she feels like a monk so reverent and so worshipful that she’ll fold in on herself and become one with the living Force.
