Empire's End: Aftermath (Star Wars)

by Chuck Wendig

  “I still think Tolwar is dirty.”

  “I cannot speak to his cleanliness.”

  “No, I mean—I think he’s corrupt.”

  Sinjir shrugs. “Of course he’s corrupt. He’s a politician.”

  “The bug. The one in Leia’s droid? He planted it. I couldn’t manage to track it back to him, but he was the one who gained from the information. It had to be him, Sinjir. I know it.”

  “One suspects that’s true. He was using it to gain a political advantage, not a criminal one. The Orishen are almost overly noble, driven mad by an aggressive sense of honor. Something-something sacrifice, something-something stern father telling his son how hard it is out there.” He sneers. “I do despise how they name themselves, though. Tolwar Wartol. Vendar Darven. TimTam TamTim. You’d think they could be more original.”

  “It’s cultural.”

  “Well, that’s no excuse.”

  “Go,” Conder says. “Deliver your fruit. Be as polite as you can manage. Do not start an intergalactic incident.”

  “Those I leave to Jom.”

  “Have fun at work, honey.”

  “Thank you, doll. And if you call me ‘honey’ again, I’ll rip that beard off your face swatch by swatch with miserable pinching tugs.” He mimes the gesture with his hand, just in case Conder doesn’t get it.

  “You’re such a romantic.”

  “My heart is a dry nest of dead birds.” He stoops down to kiss the man’s scrubby cheek. “Bye, Con.”

  “Bye, Sin.”

  —

  Wartol sits. Still as the steeple of an old temple. In front of him is a cup of something bitter smelling: probably some kind of old root juice the Orishen people consume. Steam rises off it.

  Around, the Ganoidian cruiser is decked out in the Orishen way: severe, spare, blocky, unpleasant. Sinjir likes it. It’s quiet, too. No security to be found. No pilot. No anyone except for the senator himself.

  He sets the basket on the floor. “A gift from the chancellor.”

  “You’re the ex-Imperial.” Wartol’s voice is a deep, thrumming timbre.

  “And you’re the chancellor candidate who has been outplayed at every turn, including by a ginger woman with a single, sour fruit. Oops.”

  The senator’s slitted nostrils pucker with irritation even as his jaw gently eases apart before stitching back together again. “You work for her, now? You’re a symptom. You see that, don’t you? A symptom of a larger, nastier disease.”

  “Do tell.”

  “An Imperial, working for the chancellor? So cozy with her? Oh, my, how cosmopolitan. Your presence has infected the process. Whispering in her ear, surely. Ah, but I give you too much credit. You won’t lead her. She’ll lead you. She’ll lead us all. Mon doesn’t need you to thin her moral code, because it’s already thinner than a slurry made of spit. Mon Mothma is weak. She will destroy this Republic if we let her. People like you at her side will only hasten its demise. We’ll blink and one day, the Republic will have fallen and the Empire will step out of her shadow and gently take its place.”

  Sinjir thinks at first to hold his tongue, but really, what’s the point? The chancellor knew what she was getting when she sent him along. You ask a hound to find a bone, you can expect some holes dug in the yard. And it’s not like the pta fruits are a subtle message, are they? No, she wants him to scrap a little. Sinjir will do it so she doesn’t have to.

  He says, “It’s ironic, you know? You go on about fearing another Empire, and yet you’re the one who reminds me of every Imperial autocrat, every bully-fed officer who thinks that the best way to lead is through acts of severity, through a parade of cruelty just to remind the men Mmm, life is hard and so you must be harder. They go on about sacrifice but never really sacrifice squat themselves, oh no, because they’re the ones above the heavy boot on the back of the neck, not the ones beneath it. You want war. You want defense. You’re a raptor who sees all his people as defenseless little flit-wrens—and you’ll save them, if only they give up the fanciful notion that they can lead themselves, that they can protect themselves.”

  “You understand nothing.”

  “Meanwhile,” Sinjir says, really leaning into it now, “your opponent is a woman who wants to give democracy to the entirety of the galaxy. Freedom for all. Oppression for none.”

  “It’s naïve.”

  “It may be. But at this point, I’m going to side with her precious naïveté over your authoritarian bluster. Enjoy your fruit, Senator. We’ll send you a lifetime supply as a consolation when you lose the election.”

  Sinjir sets the basket down on the table.

  And when he does, he notices three things.

  First, Wartol never stood up. That’s odd. It’s standard to get up and greet guests no matter how much you despise them, especially among the Orishen, who have a rather firm grip on protocol.

  Second, Wartol’s left hand holds the cup of steaming dark juice—but his right hand has never gone above the table. It rests beneath it.

  Third, on the surface of the table, across from where the Orishen sits, waits a faint ring of moisture. As if from a cup resting there, a cup sweating its condensation or steam onto the tabletop.

  Sinjir’s gaze turns to it, then to Wartol. The senator is watching him. Wartol saw him look. It is necessary, perhaps, to acknowledge it.

  “Had a guest, did we?” Sinjir says.

  “Not your business, Imperial.”

  “No. It’s not. You’re right.” He’s acting cagey, the senator. Sinjir knows body language, and a lot of that transcends species, sex, age. It’s not just that Wartol is hiding something, it’s that what he’s hiding is up under his skin plates—it’s nesting there like worm hatchlings. He’s bothered by it. He doesn’t want it discovered. So Sinjir decides he’s going to pick this scab, see what bleeds. “Still, though. Why don’t you tell me anyway? We’re friends, aren’t we? I won’t tell anyone.”

  Wartol says nothing. He barely even twitches. Sinjir remains where he is, half leaning over the basket of fruit. The silence is a wall between them.

  Then the wall shatters. Wartol kicks back, his hand up and out—a blaster is in his clawlike fingers. Sinjir stares down the mouth of that pistol, a fat-barreled snub-chambered Kanji-made blaster—

  Like the kind criminals use.

  —and the weapon goes off, but Sinjir turns to the side, flattening his profile as the blast pocks the far wall of the cruiser’s sitting room. He has no blaster of his own in kind (Curse you, Sinjir; you should always bring a weapon when tangling with a politician), so he grabs what’s close at hand.

  The basket.

  He gets his long fingers under the basket’s seat and flips it hard toward the Orishen. Wartol bats it away. Fruit goes everywhere. Through a spray of pta juice, Sinjir rushes the man—the air lights up again and something catches Sinjir hard, and his head snaps back and he smells singed blood and burning hair. Everything goes sideways as the world wheels out from under him. His eyes cross. I’ve been shot. An absurd thought, because he’s fairly certain he has been shot in the head, which is not a good way to live and is in fact a very good way to die.

  Wartol lurches over him, a blurry shape as Sinjir’s vision struggles to find clarity. The blaster is up again—

  Sinjir’s spidery fingers scrabble over the ground, finding something there, something wet, slimy, seedy—

  “It’s too late,” Wartol says. Cryptic. What’s too late?

  The blaster goes off. Sinjir rolls aside as a flash of hot energy digs a furrow into the floor right by his head. His ear goes shrill as it rings, and the side of his cheek feels hot, and the other side of his head feels slick—

  He whips his hand up, flinging whatever was in it.

  A pta fruit spatters uselessly against Wartol’s face. It hits. It drips. It plops back down to the ground. His jaw extends outward and curls into an underbite, and the senator blasts a puff of air upward, unmooring dribbling pta juice from his nose-slits and
brow.

  “The fruit won’t save you now.”

  Sinjir says, “No. But it distracted you, didn’t it?”

  Wartol makes a bewildered, animal sound—nngh?—just as a blaster goes off and clips him in the shoulder. He spins like a child’s top and crashes against his own chair. His cup of whatever-it-was splashes down against him and shatters. The snub-barreled blaster drops. Conder steps forward, his own blaster in hand, and steps down on it.

  With a quick slide of his foot, he sends the blaster spinning to Sinjir, who snatches it and wearily stands.

  “Have I been shot in the head?” he asks Conder.

  Conder’s eyes open in shock, and his mouth forms an alarmed O-shape. Well, I suppose that answers that. Sinjir’s hand flies to the side of his head—it comes away wet with his own blood. Some of it has already been cauterized, making it tacky against his fingers. The shot glanced along the side of his head, carving a furrow that starts at his temple.

  “Sin, I think you’ll be all right—”

  “I’ll be fine. My rather luxurious hair, not so much.” He strides forward and stands atop Wartol. “You. Answer for yourself.”

  “Die, Imperial slime.”

  Sinjir points the blaster and shoots the man in the knee. He howls.

  “Now, I’m of a mind not to actually kill you, because I’m one of the good ones these days and I have appearances to keep up. But I will whittle you down until you’re naught but a talking, jabbering head. Why pull a blaster? What are you hiding?”

  “I told you, it’s too late.”

  “What is too late?”

  “I can’t call him off now.”

  Sinjir shoots the other knee. Wartol bellows, sitting suddenly upright like a book slammed shut. He clutches at his knee as purple blood bubbles between his fingers. “Call who off? What are you—”

  At first, he thinks it’s thunder, the faraway sound. But thunder is a low rumble, like a sallow belly expressing its hunger. This is duller, deeper, one and done. A hard, shuddering boom. An explosion.

  “What did you do, Wartol? What did you do?”

  Wartol’s laugh dissolves into a blubbering confession: “Sacrifices are necessary, Imperial. Sometimes a disease is so rampant you must cut off limbs to save the body. Like on Orish. The Empire was a cancer on the galaxy. Just as Mon Mothma was a cancer on the Republic.”

  Was a cancer.

  Was.

  “You didn’t,” Sinjir seethes.

  But Wartol simply weeps—not from grief, no, but what Sinjir sees is clearly relief.

  Conder steps back and unrolls his sleeve—underneath is nothing so small as a comlink but rather, a whole tech gauntlet. With it, he can slice into doorways or program droids or any number of things, but he can also tap into various feeds: HoloNet, orbit control, NRN news, and of course local security bureau transmissions. He dials into the frequency—

  The air fills with static, then resolves into a voice. “—code four-two-four, repeat, code four-two-four, reports of an explosion at the north tower of the Senate Building. Code four-two-four—”

  Sinjir thinks, No, no, no, it’s not possible. He marches straight to the door, to the ramp, down to the landing bay. All of the landing bays here are up high, over the coast, and at this vantage point it’s easy to see to the center of Hanna City where the Senate Building sits.

  Looming above that building is the tower where Mon Mothma’s office sits. Where Sinjir was only hours before.

  A hole has been blown in the side of it. Even from here he can see how ash and debris are vacated out into open air, how the white permacrete side is charred with soot and tongues of flame. Smoke billows out like an escaping fiend.

  The chancellor. She was in there—

  He left her alone in there…

  Sinjir turns, marches back inside. Pistol up. He storms through to the sitting area, past Conder, then drops to Wartol’s chest. He screws the barrel of the Kanji blaster so hard against the man’s forehead it nearly breaks the hard plating that covers the man’s head.

  “You killed her.”

  “I had it done,” Wartol croaks.

  “You will pay for this.”

  “Do it. End me. I have no career. But I have sacrificed myself to make a better galaxy. Chancellor Mon Mothma will no longer be able to spread her corrosive stain across the burgeoning New Republic.” Wartol lifts his head into the blaster. “Pull the trigger! Coward!”

  Sinjir roars and draws the blaster back. His chest heaves as rage runs so hot inside him, it’s like a star burning itself up. But he resists. “You’ll not die today. You’ll go to trial. You’ll go to prison. You’ll see your name and your people dragged out in front of us all as craven traitors.”

  He looks to Conder. The man gives him a small nod. It’s a small concession: a mote of light in a suddenly dark day. But it’s all he has, so he holds on to it as tightly as he can manage.

  The dreadnought is no longer the Annihilator. It is no longer called that because that is no longer its function. Now it serves as the capital ship in a new galactic nation forming at the fringes of the galaxy, in Wild Space and beyond. The ship’s new name: Liberty’s Misrule. That name means whatever it means to whoever hears it, but Eleodie Marcavanya—pirate captain of this ship and leader of this new, unnamed nation of deviants and miscreants—chose the name first because, quite frankly, zhe likes the damn sound of it. But also because it means the ship is no longer used to destroy. Now it is used to create: a new government, a new nation, an armada of pirates who take equal spoils in an effort to make something lasting.

  Most pirates, they take what they take to live and fight another day. They take the spoils to survive or to squirrel away.

  But Eleodie wants something bigger. Better. Something forever. The Empire is dead and the New Republic can’t handle its business. That leaves room—air whistling between the bricks where Eleodie can slip in and out like a breath, hiding in the interstitial spaces, growing like an army of ghosts.

  Right now, zhe stands at one of the many thousands of viewports here on the Liberty’s Misrule, looking out over zher ragtag nation of ships, a nation without a planet, but one that may never need one. The stars are our nation, zhe thinks. We glitter like a thousand suns, our hearts as black as the void in which we travel. Next to Eleodie stands the girl, Kartessa. The girl’s hair is shorn down to the scalp, her cheeks dirty from working in the engine room (her choice, for she claimed correctly to be good with machines).

  Kartessa says, “Fleet is getting bigger.”

  “Every day,” Eleodie says with no small pride. The nation fleet is now two dozen ships strong—that’s not figuring in the contingent of old starfighters they’ve brought on board and retrofitted, which are now flying the colors of their new Wild Space nation: red, yellow, and black. The fleet comprises half ships they’ve stolen, half those brought here out of the chaos of a galaxy gone awry. Pirates and refugees who have nowhere to turn, who have seen the protections of the Empire turn to vapor, and who fear the coming of the New Republic and its laws sweeping across the systems.

  Eleodie fears that, too. The New Republic is growing. The Empire will soon be gone. Even now, zhe is reliably informed that on a world called Jakku, the Empire is losing its fight—maybe its last fight—against the Republic. What then? What will become of the rest of the galaxy?

  Eleodie turns from regarding zher nation outside the Star Destroyer to those within it. Many come seeking asylum but having no ships.

  Those who do now serve as crew.

  Down below were once a series of connected hangar bays—gray, sterile, with a singular function. That has changed. Now the hangar bays are homes: tents, shipping pods, ramshackle crate-shacks. Thousands dwell here. They live. They operate markets. They cook food using jury-rigged thermal vents carved out of the underfloor ducts. And color is cast far and wide. Motley hues from red tents, spray-tagged containers, the raiment of many cultures and many species and many worlds. Everything is art
and chaos and noise. It is just as Eleodie wants it.

  “Your mother around somewhere?” Eleodie says to the girl.

  “No. I ditched her on the engineering sublevel.” Kartessa pouts. “She won’t leave me alone.”

  “She is your mother. It is her job not to leave you alone. You should be nicer to her. Poor fool woman followed you here into this glorious madhouse, this wondrous nation of derangement. Do not shut her out.”

  Kartessa sighs. “Fine.”

  “Good.”

  After a few minutes of scuffing her heels, the girl pipes up: “Can I ask you something?”

  “You may.”

  “How’s this all going to work?”

  “This all what now?”

  “This…pirate nation. Pirates don’t make nations.”

  “These pirates do. I do.”

  “Why? How?”

  “Girl, it’s like this: The sea is changing, and the tides are shifting. It’s about to get real nasty for us nasty types. Either we’re gonna be running from the new sheriff in town, or we’re gonna be trying to kill each other in the farthest-flung dung-heap systems, stabbing each other over a few scraps of what was once ours by right. I’m proposing we get together and we stay together. Scoundrels like us, we always worked together—it just wasn’t official. So I’m making it official.”

  Frustration darkens Kartessa’s brow. “But that doesn’t answer my question. Pirates are selfish. You’re in it for yourselves.”

  “That’s true enough,” zhe answers. “But we can all be in it for our mutual benefit. Some predators are lonely things, big and scary and all by themselves. Others know when they need each other. They know when to form a pack. Used to be I had a pirate crew of a few hundred. Now I got a crew of ten thousand—and that number is going up, up, up. We will ransack, pillage, and steal. We will kill less, because it is the threat of our numbers, not the threat of our weapons, that will precede us. We will share the spoils equally, not so that we may be rich, but so that we may be fed and fat and happy together. Swilling and singing and whatever other salaciousness comes to the fore of our nasty little minds.”