Aftermath: Star Wars (24 page)

A line of sparks, red as a demon’s eyes, runs up along the outside of the door leading into the console room of the comm station. Mister Bones stands in front of it, waiting. Humming a discordant little song—a song some maniac might think is pretty, the kind of song that sounds like wind howling through a cavern might sing. Sinjir waits, too, pistol drawn.

They’ll come for us.

And then he wonders,
What then?

Already he’s alerted the Imperials that he is, indeed, still alive. They won’t realize it, yet. But when all of this shakes out, someone somewhere in
some
office of the Empire will see that Officer Rapace pinged their networks with
his
name and
his
facial scan. What if they capture him?

Oh, irony of ironies—

He will likely be taken before a loyalty officer.

One such as himself.

He almost wants to laugh at that.

The line of sparks, halfway up the door now.

“Wait,” Temmin says. “Wait, wait, wait. Look.”

Sinjir looks. An evaporator unit hangs from the ceiling like a pregnant droid. “So? It’s an evaporator. They don’t use ducts we can fit through—it’s just piping, isn’t it? Unless you have a
molecular miniaturization ray
handy that will magically shrink us down to hamster size, I don’t think—”

“No,
look.
” Temmin points to a pair of hinges. He gets onto his tippy-toes, then raps on the thing with the back of his knuckles.

It results in a hollow
bong, bong, bong.

“It’s not real,” Sinjir realizes out loud.

“Right. It’s a way out. Probably to the roof. They used to do rebel transmissions from this booth. My
dad
might’ve put this here. Or used it.” Temmin jumps up, catches the metal lip of the device—his weight pulls the thing down, and it hangs off its hinges.

The welder line around the door is almost to its end.

“No time like the present,” Sinjir says, and hurries over.

Up there, through the space: a ladder.

The boy was right.

They climb.

Temmin sticks his head up through a hatch. The door swings open and everything is washed out in a wave of searing white: The comm console room was so dark, and out here it’s almost too bright. He pulls himself up, his eyes still adjusting. As he belly-flops onto the roof of the comm station, he can’t help feeling an odd surge of pride. Inside his mind, he repeats what he told Sinjir:
My dad might’ve put this here
.

But then the familiar anger stomps down its foot:

Dad being a rebel is why he got caught.

And why Mom left.

And why everything fell apart.

That good feeling he had is instantly poisoned. Like a beautiful flower sprayed with acid—it withers and rots inside him.

He looks up, then, blinking.

He hears the sound before he sees it.

A TIE fighter. He blinks again, staring up at the sky, toward the sun.

No. Not one TIE fighter.
Two
of them.

He helps haul Sinjir up—“We have to move! Incoming!”

The first TIE bears down on them like a meteor ready to roll right over them. It’s then that he gets it.

Temmin knows what that fighter is here to do.

Bones hops up out of the hole—

Temmin tackles Sinjir and the battle droid. He knocks them both behind a metal fixture meant to look like the exterior mechanism of the (not-actually-working) evaporator system. They all hit the deck.

Just as the TIE fires its front cannons.

The building shakes and from the other corner of the structure there’re streaks of fire and a small blooming cloud of yellow smoke. Temmin peeks his head out and sees the antenna array tilting off the roof and falling away, leaving behind a rain of electrical embers.

They killed the transmission.

He has to hope it stayed out there long enough.

And now, here comes the second TIE fighter. It starts firing at the rooftop, likely intent on bringing the whole building down. It’s not a bomber, so it won’t happen with one run, but those weapons at the front are no small popguns, either. A couple of passes and the top half of the comm station will be turned to flaming chunks of rubble.

He grabs both sides of Bones’s head. “You got this?”

Bones says in that voice that warbles from deep to shrill, a mechanized distortion: “CONSIDER IT DONE, MASTER TEMMIN.”

The TIE cannons begin shattering the other half of the roof. Debris sprays. Fire plumes. The sound of the fighter and its guns and the explosions roars in Temmin’s ears. Not just his ears. He can feel it in the back of his
teeth.
Sinjir winces, clearly feeling it, too, popping up to fire off a few futile shots at the incoming fighter—and then turning to pop shots at the stormtroopers now coming up through the escape shaft.

Bones shrieks: “ROGER-ROGER.” Then the battle droid jumps up in the air, tucking arms and legs together, forming a cannonball—

And crashing through the TIE fighter’s front windshield.

The TIE wibbles and wobbles in the air, careening drunkenly across the Myrran rooftops—it zigzags herkily-jerkily out of sight.

Just as the first TIE, now looping back on its return trip, begins firing its cannons. The blasts pepper the top of the building, crossing the rooftop, and coming right for them. Temmin turns and looks—there’s no time to think, only time to act, but there’s no other roof to which they can jump—

Sinjir points.

A third TIE has joined the fray.

It swoops in, front blasters flashing—lasers unzipping the sky.

Lasers that strike the first TIE in the side. Its hexagonal wing panel breaks off, hitting the side of the comm station. The rest of it spins off to the side, streaking along the building like a meteor—it crashes into the side of an old office building, erupting in a ground-shaking
boom.

The third TIE—their
savior
—shrieks overhead.

Sinjir, panting, says: “I think your mother found her ride.”

Temmin nods, checking himself over to make sure he’s all there.
Mom really is one starcracker pilot.
No time to think about that—or her—right now. Instead he says: “We better go. They’re gonna swarm us in no time.”

Norra finds herself thinking about wasps.

Here, in Akiva, there exists a wasp: the redjacket. The length and width of the tip of one’s thumb, the redjacket wasp is a scourge. They are mean, vicious creatures. They sting. Their stingers suck up blood. They take the blood to feed their young and use it to build their signature rust-red nests. Mostly, you find them out in the jungles, though once in a while they stray from their comfort and you find a nest under an overhang or a rooftop (at which point the common solution is just to burn the whole thing with a can of engine solvent and a flick-tip lighter, making a homemade flamethrower).

Thing is, those wasps fly a certain way. Individually, they’re hard as anything to catch or kill, because they fly up, down, left, right. They can zip forward, then stop in midair and hover before zipping back the other way. (And usually that’s when they go in for the sting—and one stick from a redjacket’s stinger can leave your whole arm numb for an hour.)

Flying a TIE fighter reminds Norra of those wasps.

It’s incredible. Such maneuverability. She can do just as the wasps do: thrust forward, then retroboost to a stop, then streak to the left or the right. On a lark she gives the whole thing a spin—literally corkscrewing the ship as she flies it over the city that was once her home.

Of course, the trade-off is this: The TIE is a suicide ship, isn’t it? To get the speed and maneuverability, the Empire sacrificed safety and sanity in the rest of the design. The whole thing is brittle like a bird skeleton. Doesn’t even have an ejector seat. It’s not just a fighter.

In dire situations, it doubles as the pilot’s grave.

Still, Norra isn’t thinking about that when she takes out the other TIE fighter menacing the rooftop of the comm station. Her twin laser cannons tear the wing panel off and as it crashes, disintegrating, she thinks:

That’s what you get for messing with my boy.

Norra whoops, exhilarated.

Now for the task at hand.

Ahead, through the sun-glitter haze hanging over the city, she spies the massive citadel that is the satrap’s palace. Gaudy and opulent. All its towers and parapets splayed out in the asymmetry of an insane being. (Every satrap builds something else onto the palace, it seems—regardless of how well it matches the design of the rest. The result is something altogether more chaotic than intended. Beautiful, too, in its strange, slapdash way.)

Around the center dome and tower sits a ring, and around that ring are parked the familiar fins of Imperial shuttles.

Those are her targets.

Below her, her screen blinks, then flashes green.

Two bogeys on her tail. Another pair of TIE fighters, joining the fray. She thinks:
It’s flashing green because it doesn’t know they’re enemies, does it? It reads their signature as friendly.

She hopes they read
her
as friendly, too.

But she learns quickly the reality of that situation as both of the evil-eyes behind her open fire—muscle memory precedes proper thought (for her hands are fast even when her brain is slow) and she again spins the fighter through the air, spiraling it forward and then up as laser bolts pepper the air around her. G-forces put pressure on her temples like a crushing vise and it feels like her legs and guts are somewhere still down about a thousand meters below, and everything feels like it’s going to be torn apart—

The blood rushes back into her head (or is it out of it? she can’t really tell) and when she again rights the TIE, her two pursuers are now the pursued—the pair flying dead ahead of her.

She feels a surge of excitement. Her panic is buried beneath it.

Then Norra pulls the triggers on her twin flight sticks.

Green lasers cut through open air and rend the first TIE into shrapnel. The bulk of the destroyed fighter lists into the other. A flash. A great shuddering concussion of air and fire as her enemies spiral downward and disappear into the city in one final detonation.

She flies through the fading fire.

And again sets her sights on the palace ahead.

There, on the screen held vertical in Adea’s hand. An incoming TIE. An enemy combatant flying it. Heading right toward the palace. Rae understands its purpose. It can’t do anything to the palace. The walls are too thick. But one part is exposed:

Their ships.

Those shuttles are their lifeline.

It’s too late to get their own ships back in the air. And they have no defenses, no cannons, no—

Wait.

She snatches the holoscreen out of Adea’s hand and punches up the controls for one of the three ground-to-orbit turbolaser cannons they set up across Akiva’s capital city. Her assistant’s eyes go wide.

“Admiral, the turbolaser isn’t meant for this—”

“It’s our only chance.”

“It’s pointed right at the palace.”

Rae looks at the calculated trajectory.

It’s not ideal.

But it’ll have to do.

She fires.

One minute Norra is flying along, her path safe, secure, assured. And then the air lights up with blinding light and something shears the right wing panel off her own TIE, and suddenly—she’s lost all control.

No, not all of it.

She’s spinning, once more winding through the air, this time in an uncontrolled spiral, but she
does
have some control.

Just a little. Just enough.

She holds the flight sticks firm, locking one against the other, fighting against the spin. Her head is dizzy. Everything’s gone loopy. Her guts churn and she wants to puke.
Steady. Steady.

The distant thought reaches her:

I’m going to die.

This is it. The culmination of all she’s done and all she is.

Part of her feels proud.
I’ve accomplished so much,
she thinks.