Empire's End: Aftermath (Star Wars)

by Chuck Wendig

  Good. Go. Get safe.

  She takes a moment to look around her. She’s alone. Like a little island in the center of a calm, quiet lake.

  Her screens light up. As expected, the dreadnought is unleashing hell—right as debris from the two eradicated ships begins slamming into the Concord. Lights go dark, then bright, then dark again. The ship shakes and bangs as if it’s a toy held in the hand of a careless child.

  From Agate’s bridge console, she flicks over to the weapons consoles. She prepares everything they have, every bit of ordnance this ship has to bear.

  Bring hell to my door, I’ll bring it to yours.

  She fires everything. Banks of turbolasers. Ion torpedoes. Concussion missiles. Bright lines of death streaking through the black. Lines of the same—fire, castigation, heat—launching from the Ravager toward her. Like threads of light seeking each other. But they will pass each other, instead, each heading onward to an act of destruction, not creation.

  The Concord roars toward it, even as its deflector shields begin to fail on the side. The ship tilts starboard. Debris punches through the hull. The engines gutter. She wills the ship to keep going.

  Hope is a fire fast extinguished inside her. She sees the fury unleashed from the dreadnought—predictive analysis shows the Concord losing this fight. Her volley cannot match that from the Ravager. The Ravager is a beast and will not be sated. She will damage it. To what extent she cannot say, but if she opens it up to attack—even still, her mind attempts the calculations. If she opens up a hole in the side of that thing, it’s something, but it’s still not enough. And if the other Star Destroyers close the gap and protect the injury made against the Ravager, then what?

  Out there, through the cathedral-like arches of glass, she sees the weapons streaming toward her.

  This is it.

  But then: Agate has a new idea.

  —

  War brings with it moments of inevitability. A sinking ship. An onrushing horde. A mortal wound. The worst kind, Ackbar thinks, are the moments when you watch friends die. Especially those times when it happens slowly, too slowly, as if all the moments leading up to it are drawn out and given time like images flash-pulsed into your mind’s eye.

  This is one of those times. Agate cuts communication with him, and he sees the Concord burn hard and move toward the dreadnought as both it and the monstrous Ravager launch everything at each other.

  The problem is, the Ravager’s weapons are far greater than those of a single Starhawk. The Starhawk’s weapons are prodigious and better than even he has on the Home One. It is the uttermost of their tech: bleeding-edge armament. But by itself it can only hope to wound the dreadnought.

  And it will die in service of that act.

  Agate is still on board. He knows this. She is going down with her ship—a dramatic gesture that he hopes has purpose behind it. He suspects she feels that she must command every moment between now and her end, that it should be her hand directing the ship and its fusillade of fire.

  But the Starhawk makes an unexpected turn.

  The Concord banks sharply to the starboard, maneuvering quickly to turn that side of itself toward the incoming attack. The port is already damaged by the debris field. The starboard side taking the hit—with the shields already gone, Ackbar sees—may not destroy the Starhawk outright, but it’ll sink it. Already its engines are damaged on the far side. Atmosphere will grab that vessel like mud sucking on a soldier’s boot.

  A hologram flashes over his console.

  It’s Agate.

  “Agate! Get off that ship—”

  “Admiral, listen. Get everyone you can to hit that dreadnought from aft. Take out its engines. Send every starfighter, every CR90, anyone—”

  “Commodore, I command you to abandon that vessel.”

  “Admiral, it literally pains me to deny your order. But please, trust me. Listen to me. The engines!”

  Out the viewport and on his screen, he watches the fusillade from the Ravager close in on the Concord.

  “What are you doing? Hitting those engines—the Ravager is not moving. The engines aren’t where we need to be concentrating our fire—”

  “Just trust me.”

  “Commodore—”

  “Thank you, Admiral. It has been the highest honor.”

  “Kyrsta!”

  And then she’s gone again.

  Just trust me.

  War brings with it moments of inevitability, yes. But it also carries with it the opposite: moments of grave uncertainty bridged only by acts of blind faith. When they say to one another, May the Force be with you, it is precisely this that they mean: It is a wish that when the time comes to leap into the void and to make a decision based on instinct and trust, you are rewarded for that act and not punished. The hope is that if you meet the galaxy halfway, it meets you in the middle and carries you the rest of the distance. Ackbar decides to trust and to leap…

  And to pray that the Force is with them all.

  —

  The exchange of destruction is a mighty one. The Concord’s barrage slams into the Ravager, ripping a hole in the side of the gargantuan ship with the ferocity of a biting, rending rancor. The injury is black and deep, but not fatal. And the dreadnought’s own weapons strike the Concord, slipping past what little is left of the deflector shields and punching clean through it. Oxygen whistles out into the void. Fire plumes as chemicals off-gas into space. The ship groans. Somewhere in the belly of the ship, explosions start going off—fuel cells and magna-batteries chain-reacting, boom, boom, boom. It won’t detonate the whole ship. But it has gutted it.

  The ship is dead in the water.

  And without the repulsors from underneath keeping it aloft, the atmosphere of Jakku is like a reaching, claiming hand. She feels the ship drift downward, drifting as it goes.

  But the Starhawks were designed with one thing in mind: upgrade. So long did the rebels endure an aging, piecemeal fleet that when the time came to finally design something new to serve the nascent Republic, they went all-in. Every internal system, every external design feature, every weapon—all of it was upgraded beyond the watermark set by the Mon Cala ships prior and beyond the known capabilities of the Empire’s extant ships.

  One of the features that saw the largest boost in ability?

  The tractor beam.

  The role of the tractor beam is simple: to grab an object in space, usually a spacecraft, in order to usher it safely into a docking bay or to seize the vessel and pull it closer. The tractor beams on a Star Destroyer were notoriously vicious, with the strength to draw a Corellian corvette into its bay—or to stop a Nebulon frigate from making the escape to lightspeed.

  The tractor beam on the Starhawk is ten times that. Magnite crystals amplify both the range and the strength of the beam. A Starhawk could capture and move a ship many times its own size.

  Agate dials up the tractor beam, points it at the Ravager—

  She fires.

  If I’m going down to the ground, she thinks, you’re coming with me.

  —

  Grand Moff Randd sits in a chair on the bridge of the Ravager. Up until now, he has felt supremely in control of this battle. The Ravager is a vessel whose might is presently unparalleled in the Imperial fleet, and to have been given command of it by Rax himself is an honor he will not squander. His forces have stopped the rebel-born False Republic fleet at every turn—though he is no true tactician, he has many great minds working for him, and their plan of forming a perimeter of vessels around the dreadnought was a sound one.

  Until now.

  The three ships pressing at the barrier—Starhawks, he believes they are called, manufactured for the False Republic—were held fast at the margins, even though the Star Destroyers were taking heavy fire as a result. And then something happened with the Punishment. The officer in charge of that ship, Captain Groff, appeared in a panic: He said that the Destroyer was suffering a coolant leak from the shield generators that was cascadi
ng through the upper levels. Some areas were experiencing fires. He seemed positively deranged—that was a factor Randd had long been worried about. Coming to this desolate world, this far-flung system, brought with it the chance to wear on a man’s soul. It could erode a weaker mind. When he explained that fear to Counselor Rax, the man said, Do not worry about that. The Imperials that have come to Jakku are the greatest of our kind. We will not break. The unkindness of this world will only bolster us. We will harden like calluses, Randd.

  And that was the end of that.

  In Rax, they trusted.

  Randd still trusts him. They have survived this long. And there’s no doubt that Rax is admirable, capable, a true hero of the Empire. Randd is a fan of belt-tightening, and using Jakku to harden their hearts against the fight to come was, to his mind, genius.

  But now…what he feared most has come true.

  Groff lost it. He said that he would not abandon his ship. The New Republic would torture him and execute him. His own people would turn on him. He was frothing with distemper, screaming suddenly about how the New Republic were traitors and they all deserved death like dogs and how they must give no quarter, no quarter at all. The last thing he said was, “I must be a stronger blade! A…a blade with which to slit the throats of the traitors that crawl on their bellies toward our door!”

  Randd recognized it as a line from Counselor Rax’s speech.

  Groff’s comms went dark after that.

  And then he crashed the Punishment into the nearest Starhawk.

  That led to a chain of events even now Randd does not completely understand—debris from the two ships hit a second Starhawk, and that one he felt sure would be out of the picture. But no. That ship accelerated in the gap right toward the Ravager. Firing all its weapons, and so Randd demanded they return fire, all the way—reserving every weapons system they had launching ordnance in the direction of the onrushing Starhawk, a ship that now identifies itself as the Concord.

  The Concord turned broadside and took the hits just as the Ravager took its own. That ship was scuttled. He did not need his systems to confirm it. His eyes told him all he needed to know. Meanwhile, the Ravager was fine—damaged, yes, and now more vulnerable, but he rerouted power to the deflectors to magnify protection over that chasm and—

  Then the strangest thing.

  The Concord snared the dreadnought with a tractor beam.

  Randd is not a man given to humor—his wife, Danassic, says that she believes he laughs once, perhaps twice a year. But here he almost laughed. Why in all of space and time would the captain of that Starhawk see fit to lash him with a paltry tractor beam? Perhaps to save herself the fall into atmosphere? The Ravager serving as an anchor? He hates to tell her, but gravity is a cruel mistress. It takes what it wants and will not be denied.

  The Ravager moves, suddenly.

  It moves, but he does not command it to move.

  “Status report,” he barks, his calm voice suffering a sudden break to it, like that of a boy just getting hair on his chest. “Status report!”

  Nearby, Vice Admiral Pierson appears, sweat beading on his brow. “The Starhawk has affixed us with its tractor beam—”

  “Yes. I know that. How are we—” The ship drifts again. “How is it moving us?”

  “I—I have no idea, it must be powerful—”

  “Strengthen our engines. Reverse course! Fire repulsors—”

  Alarms go off. The ship shakes again—this time, the sensation is different. Like something is hitting it.

  Pierson’s eyes go wide. “They’re concentrating fire on our aft.”

  The screens show a sudden flurry of starfighters—every variety brought to bear against their engines. If they lose those…

  “Engine five just went dark!” an ensign yells.

  “Now sub-engines three through six!” an engineering officer cries.

  The Concord is trying to drag us down to Jakku. The nerve. “Fire all weapons at that Starhawk—”

  “Sir,” Pierson responds, “the weapon systems will cycle in two minutes. We already hit them with everything we had on your orders.”

  “Then send TIEs after it!”

  “But they’re protecting our flank. The engines!”

  Again the ship shakes. Worse this time. And when it does, it’s like trying to move something heavy and failing until it suddenly gives way—the Ravager slides and dips downward so hard, Randd’s jaw snaps tight, teeth closing hard on his tongue. He tastes blood and curses.

  “The atmosphere,” Pierson says. “We’re entering atmo, sir.”

  “Bolster the engines! Bolster the repulsors! Bolster everything!”

  But in his head, Randd knows the score: It is too late. The Ravager is done for. He has squandered his chance and now, hope is lost. The greatest weapon in the Empire’s arsenal is lost because of him. A flagging fear nags him: It should be Rae Sloane in this chair, not me.

  The one thing about Randd is that he is not a sycophant. He is no zealot. He admires Rax. He trusted him. But he will not be crucified for this.

  In the chaos of the moment—the flickering lights, the shaking ship, the flurry of movement going on across the bridge—Randd sneaks quietly away, boards an escape pod, and jettisons himself into space.

  —

  The Concord has leashed the larger ship with its powerful tractor beam and draws it down toward atmosphere. New Republic starfighters hit the engines of the Ravager, one after the other, again and again, a returning loop of fire while a pair of CR90s keep the TIEs off their backs. The Unity, the last remaining Starhawk, has pulled back to a safe distance and is using its considerable weapons load to provide the Concord with cover, peppering the nearby Star Destroyers with as much fire as it can muster.

  And then the Starhawk dips considerably as the atmosphere kisses it, the underside of the ship glowing with the sudden heat of reentry.

  Blade Squadron reports that the last of the Ravager’s main engines are out. Only the sub-engines remain, and they won’t save it.

  The dreadnought’s front end is the first to follow the Starhawk, carving a line across the top of the sky where the black goes to blue like a fading bruise—an aura of fire begins to glow around the Ravager’s fore.

  Ackbar watches the two titans fall.

  The Concord goes first. Agate likely remains on board. She won’t answer his comms, but a scan of the Starhawk shows that not a single pod remains undamaged, and the fighter bays are empty or destroyed. She has no way off that ship, and it is too late and too risky for a rescue.

  As the Starhawk drops, it drags the Ravager with it. Like a rider pulling its beast mount toward the edge of a waterfall, closer, closer—

  Until both plunge through space and into sky. Until the gravity throttles each and draws them ineluctably downward.

  Ackbar grabs the comm and warns those below: “Soldiers and pilots of the New Republic! The dreadnought Ravager is down—it falls to Jakku! Beware debris and take cover!”

  All around him are the cheers of those on the bridge of the Home One as they watch the titanic vessel go faster and faster toward Jakku. But Ackbar does not cheer. He nods quietly and mutters a small entreaty to the Force, asking it to protect those down below, underneath these falling giants, and further, to accept Kyrsta Agate as one of its own.

  —

  I’m really getting the hang of this.

  On Akiva, they have these bugs that fly over still water—polywings, they’re called—and they flit over the surface, changing course like the snap of one’s fingers. They move this way and that, snagging smaller flies out of the air and eating them on the go, chomp.

  Temmin wants to be like those polywings. That’s how he sees his X-wing. He pivots the starfighter fast as lightning, moving erratically so that the TIEs don’t see him coming. His heart is going so fast in his chest he fears it’s going to punch its way out. His blood roars like a river in his ears. An effervescent thrill elevates him to almost giddy heights. He�
�s buoyed, too, by knowing that his mother is still alive. And that Bones is protecting her.

  This is a good day, he thinks. The New Republic is going to win this war. My mother is alive. My best friend is here. And I’m in an X-wing! And I’m not dead! He cackles like Koko with his radio mike on. Koko cackles right back as the two of them cross in front of the other, slaloming around each other, spitting lasers at escaping TIEs.

  One forms up on Wedge’s tail, and Temmin bites his lip to repress the grin that threatens to split his whole face. “Phantom Leader, you’ve got a bug on your back. Lemme swat him for you.” Wedge brings the X-wing low over a dry red ravine, past a squadron of New Republic soldiers taking cover there in the shadows afforded by the gulley. The TIE whips through the space behind Phantom Leader’s X-wing, and Temmin thinks to come in at an odd angle—otherwise, he risks accidentally hitting Wedge with laserfire. He swoops left then turns the nose of his ship right again—

  The TIE lines up in his sights. But Temmin doesn’t need screens. He fires, and the four cannons on his open-foil wings throw spears of plasma—

  But they never find their target.

  Temmin cries out as a piece of black metal crashes down right in front of him, separating him from his oblique pursuit of the TIE. It crashes into the ground, sending up a cloud of red dust. Temmin peels the ship away from its destined course, turning the X-wing sharply to avoid other debris.

  Blast it, that looked like a piece from a starship. A turbine, by the look of it. His comms growl with Admiral Ackbar’s voice:

  “Soldiers and pilots of the New Republic! The dreadnought Ravager is down—it falls to Jakku! Beware debris and take cover!”

  The Ravager? It’s down?

  He whoops as his giddy feeling surges higher. With the Ravager gone, that’ll open up a huge hole in the Imperial fleet. That big monster was everything the Empire had. If it’s gone…

  That means the New Republic just won this battle.

  And maybe, the whole war.