Aftermath: Star Wars (30 page)

Dancers. That explains some things, actually. The occasionally graceful way the droid moves, but also: the humming and singing.

“Crafty,” Sinjir says.

“That’s me.”

“What else is down here?”

“I dunno. Your guess is as good as mine.”

That answer: It reads true. Temmin doesn’t appear to be lying, but as Sinjir just noted: The boy
is
crafty. “Is there something down here you don’t want us to see, Temmin?”

“What? Are you accusing me of something?”

“I just want you to know we’re not going to…plunder your wares.”

“I don’t have any wares down here to
plunder.
”

Sinjir sniffs. “I thought perhaps you didn’t want us getting to the droid factory treasure before you did. But that means it’s something else.”

“…
what’s
something else?”

“You’re hiding something, Temmin. I can sense it.”

There! There it is. Temmin’s whole expression shifts just slightly—there’s a flicker on his face like a disruption in a hologram, a sign that Sinjir is right. The boy
is
hiding something. “I…I’m not—”

Ahead, Jas says: “The factory.”

She points to the side.

To Temmin, Sinjir says: “To be continued.” Then they jog to catch up, the little illumi-droid burbling a meter behind.

Here, the passageway opens up. The droid factory entrance is a wide mouth framed by metal arches, two booths, an old corroded sign that says:
SUPPORT THE CONFEDERACY OF INDEPENDENT SYSTEMS!
Another sign says:
BUY A DROID FROM THE SEPARATIST ALLIANCE!
A third hanging from above—at an angle, since one of the bolts has come free—says,
RALLY AGAINST REPUBLIC OPPRESSION.
On that one, some of the letters are so rusted they’ve essentially gone missing.

Norra says: “This, from the days when the Separatists brought the war to the Outer Rim in the later years of the Clone Wars.”

“How’d they get the droids out?” Jas says. “They didn’t march them through these…sewers.”

Temmin shifts his weight nervously. Sinjir watches him. The boy says: “Used to be a telescoping platform. They’d raise the droids up for delivery and ships would pick them up. It’s all destroyed, sealed over. I thought once you could get down here from there, but it’s too wrecked.” He scratches his head. “Can we go? This place gives me the hypers.”

A small technique for
rooting out
truth is to make the subject—Sinjir actually thinks the word
victim
but he tries to shove that kind of thinking back in the dark hole from whence it came—uncomfortable. Put them off balance. Do that, they make mistakes. They say things they don’t mean to say. And so, that is Sinjir’s plan of the moment.

He picks up a hunk of stone. “It’s not haunted,” he says. “Look.”

Sinjir wings the stone toward the gate. It
bongs
off one of the booths. Rust flakes rain and the stone drops.

“Don’t!” Temmin cautions.

“There’s nothing to worry about, the factory isn’t—”

Inside, deep within the bowels of the factory, something howls. A mechanized sound. Not human. Maybe not altogether robotic, either.

“The gates,” Jas says. “This place should be sealed up.”

“But it’s not,” Norra adds. “Everything’s open.”

Another wail. And a third after that. Closer now.

“I HAVE A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS,” Mister Bones says.

“We need to go,” Temmin says.

From inside the old factory, a sudden scramble of sound—metal on metal. Like footsteps. Coming toward them, and closing in fast.

“Run!” Sinjir yells.

His red nostrils flare. Air in and out. Ackbar longs for water. He has a small tank here—a bacta healing tank retrofitted with water possessing the salinity and pH balance of his homeworld, Mon Calamari. Sometimes he goes into it and just…floats. But he has little time for such moments.

Maybe one day. But not today.

The message from Captain Antilles plays again and again in his mind. It came in on an Imperial channel, of all things. Ackbar wasn’t the recipient, but saw it soon after. Wedge looked ragged, injured. His message before he collapsed and the communications ended was brief. Too brief.
High-level Imperial meeting. Blockade on…Akiva. Palace at Myrra. Now is the—

And then it was over.

He tells the others—Agate, Madine, Mon Mothma, Ensign Deltura—that Antilles was right. Ackbar presumes to finish the captain’s statement:

“Now is the time. Prepare a small fleet, but have other ships in reserve, fueled up with full loadouts. Agate, I want you to lead the charge. Be ready for anything. If this is the Empire, you can be sure they will not go easily. And they are overly fond of tricking us into doing what they want.”

It’s like inverting a pyramid and carrying it, point down, on your back. All that weight. The sharp peak between your shoulder blades. Built of bricks of blame. A terrible and uncomfortable burden.

Sloane is feeling it now.

The others are driven now by panic, rage, opportunity. Pandion, trying to winnow her down to particulate matter. Shale, the doomsayer who thinks they must surrender now or die soon. Tashu, interjecting now and again with some parable or pabulum about the wisdom of the dark side and if only they followed its teachings and oh, Palpatine said this, the old Sith writings said that. Crassus wants to buy their way out. He’s waving around his metaphorical creditspurse thinking that the Empire can bribe its way free of New Republic persecution.
Best of luck with that,
Rae thinks.

The satrap, at least, remains quiet. He sits in the corner, staring down at his hands. The writing is on the wall for that one. He knows the Empire will abandon him. He will be left with a city that seeks his head on a pitchfork so they can wave it around for all to see.

In the other corner of the dining room—as they have never yet made it to the meeting room near their quarters on this troubled and turbulent day—stands Adea, her leg already bound up in a foam-layer cast printed by the medical droid. The assistant hobbles over and Rae thinks:
I must keep her close. She has shown more steel than most of these so-called Imperials.

“The yacht?” Rae asks her, ignoring the shouts of vitriol from the rest of the room.

“Had to stop for fuel one system over. But in hyperspace now. Will land soon after. Expected within the hour.”

Rae tenses up. “That’s longer than expected. I don’t know if I can keep these animals at bay until then.”
They might tear my head off, too.
“Any chance Crassus is delaying it behind our backs?”

“Possible, but can’t see why. He’s eager to leave. Truth is, those big ugly barges are—” Here Adea winces in a bit of pain and shifts her weight. “They guzzle fuel like it’s free drinks at the Death Star Commissary.” Sloane spent plenty of nights drinking at the commissary with her comrades. A pang of nostalgia plucks her strings.

Rae turns to the room. She makes her voice louder than everyone else’s. “Shale. How long before we can expect a rebel fleet?”

The woman scrunches up her face and frowns. “Hard to say, Admiral. They’ll send something, probably soon. One suspects it’ll be a reasonably sized fleet. Expect them within the hour if they’re feeling aggressive. Three if cautious.”

That’s cutting it awfully close.
“Our own Star Destroyers. It’s time to call them back. Our ruse is over.”

Shale objects: “Admiral, if we bring them back, we have no guarantee that those three Destroyers will survive the ensuing battle—”

“Caution I admire. Cowardice I do not. Though our TIE regiment is reduced somewhat, our Destroyers are more than capable of cutting down a rebel fleet. Especially if we are ready for the fight. I don’t want to make our escape into space just as the rebel scum come dropping out of hyperspace.” To Adea, she says: “Call them back. Now.”

“Yes, Admiral.” Adea leans in. “Also, you have a call.”

Sloane mouths the question:
Who?

She tilts her screen toward the admiral so that the rest of the room won’t be able to see it.

Rae sees a face she recognizes, though it belongs to someone to whom she has never been introduced.

The Sullustan gangster, Surat Nuat.

But why?

Time, broken out into the moments between trigger pulls. Jas drops to her knee and faces the coming horde as the others flee. The long rifle in her hand. Eye against its scope. Down there, toward the entrance, they pour out.

A flash of corroded metal. Piston legs. Dented chest plates. Long, gangly, many-jointed limbs.
Droids,
she thinks. Mad, lunatic droids. Each different from the last. Glowing eyes. Mechanized wails.

They rush down the passageway. Some thirty meters off. Surging forward like feral things, like the bristle-backed boarwolves of Endor. Running on all fours. Up the walls. Skittering along the crumbling ceiling like spiders.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

The slugthrower launches round after round.

They drop, one by one. She takes the legs out from the first—it crashes down, neck breaking as it hits. A spark as a shot punches through the metal skull of one, and it tumbles into another of its swarm. They shriek and screech. She fires again, and one of their skulls pops off, clanging against the wall with a loud echo—

That’s when she sees.

They’re not droids. They’re something
else.
Creatures. Black-eyed things, noseless. Mouths open, showcasing a pincushion of wild needle-teeth. The thing that loses its skull plate dashes to the side, grabs it, and reaffixes it before joining the rushing throng anew.

Twenty-five meters.

Boom.

Twenty. Eighteen.

Closer, closer.

There’s too many,
she thinks. A dozen here, and more pouring out of the factory. A whole tribe of these things.
A hive.
But she has the slugs. She can do this. But there, Aunt Sugi’s voice whispering inside her ear:

You have to know when to run, girl.

That, a message to Jas only weeks before Jas took her advice. Maybe how Sugi meant it, maybe not. But she ran away from her home planet. A terrible place. A
strange
place, Iridonia. Brutal and unforgiving.

Fifteen meters.

Both her hearts beat fast in tandem, outracing the speed with which she can pull the trigger.

Twelve meters.

Boom.

They shriek and click and swarm.

A hand at her shoulder—a voice, numb and almost lost underneath the ringing of her ears. It’s the boy.

“We have to go,”
he’s saying.
“There’s too many.”

“I can do this!” she roars.

But she can’t. She knows she can’t.

You have to know when to run, girl.

Now is the time to run.

The stories were true, Temmin realizes—from a certain point of view. What came spilling out of that old droid factory weren’t ghosts. The place wasn’t haunted by specters or Force wraiths.

And it isn’t haunted by old, malfunctioning droids, either.

It’s the Uugteen.

When he goes back to get Jas, he sees one—what they thought were droids were just the Uugteen wearing droid parts like armor. The pale, feral things—near-humans, but far enough to still be monsters—usually keep to the jungles and canyons. Sometimes, though, they find caves to live in. The catacombs beneath Myrra aren’t just caves, he realizes.

They’re a whole cave
system.
Maybe they connect out elsewhere—to the Canyon of Akar, or even all the way to the coastline far south. This pack has been living down here for a long time, hasn’t it? It doesn’t even matter now. Because he and his friends are besieged. Chased. And the monsters are gaining ground fast.

Jas turns suddenly—she fires a shot at a half-collapsed stone beam hanging above the passageway. One shot, it cracks. Starts to splinter. Two shots, those cracks spread. But the pack is almost upon them. Gibbering and screaming like men on fire. Again Temmin tries to pull her along—

But she takes one last shot. The beam crashes down. Water streams along with it. It crushes the front line of the monsters.

It slows them down.

For a moment.

They run once more, rounding a corner. Here it goes up—and he knows that they’re nearing the ground underneath the Royal District. Another half-hour walk and they’ll be at—or beneath—the satrap’s palace.

Mister Bones skids to a halt. He sets down the box of detonators. His astromech arm spins up, blurring the air. His other arm snaps back, revealing the vibroblade. Bones makes sounds like the Uugteen—threatening howls, barks, gargled blasts of mechanical distortion.

Temmin yells at him, tells the droid now isn’t the time.

But Bones is programmed to protect Temmin. That is the programming that overrides all else. Fierce, loyal, psychotic.

The Uugteen swarm up over the broken beam.

Temmin hears his mother calling for him. He tries to tell Bones to move—even pulling on the battle droid’s arm. But he doesn’t budge.

Then he looks down. Near the droid’s feet. The box of detonators.

The box of detonators.

“I’ve got a plan!” he yells at Bones. “Come on, come on!”

He grabs one of the detonators out of the box. Just one. Then he pops it open, spins the top to its shortest fuse, and flings it back into the box from whence it came. Then he yells: “Run! Everybody run!”

Temmin bolts forward, his legs straining—all parts of him tensing up as he waves everyone away. Bones sprints alongside of him, the droid’s feet smashing hard into the brick. The battle droid yells:

“ALL WILL GO BOOM.”

Six seconds. The Uugteen swarm.

Five seconds. Norra waves her son and the others on.

Four seconds. The droid-clad monsters rush up to the box.

Three seconds. Jas pivots, fires her rifle over Temmin’s shoulder.

Two seconds. Bones cackles.

One second. Temmin winces and dives to the ground as—

He lifts his face from the ground. His head pulses like the engine of an idling speeder bike. Temmin pushes himself up on his hands, dust and rocky bits raining down from his hair. He flinches just in time to see Jas leap forward and jam the butt of her gun into the faceplate of one of the Uugteen—a protocol droid face painted in what looks like blood, the mask rent in half with a jagged rip so it looks to be some nightmarish mouth—and the thing pinwheels and goes down. Bones stomps on it again and again.

Temmin thinks
, It didn’t work. The plan didn’t work,

But then he braces himself against the wall and pulls himself up. Jas offers him a hand and he takes it. Two of the Uugteen lie on the broken floor—here the floor is crooked, sporadic tile. All of it shattered.

The tunnel is sealed.

“Stragglers,” Jas says, gesturing toward the two monsters. Up close, he can see their pale flesh underneath the armor—revealed between the joints, like the flesh of a krillcrab when you turn it over to get at its meat. “You okay?”

He nods, numbly.

“That was a good idea,” Jas says, and then she quick-steps out of the way as Norra launches herself at Temmin, wrapping her arms around him.

“It was a good idea,” Norra says. She kisses his brow. Idly he thinks,
Even though I’m dirty.
That’s what a mother does.

“Thanks,” he says, that high-pitched tone still moving from ear to ear, his head still pounding like heavy rain on an old fuel drum.

Sinjir steps up, dusting off his officer’s uniform. “Let’s not all crack open a case of fizzy drinks
just yet.
I’ll casually remind you all that the boy just detonated our key into the satrap’s palace.”

Yes,
Temmin thinks.
Now we’ll have to turn back around. And everything will be fine again.

“We can’t go back,” Jas says.

“Guess it’s over,” Temmin says with a shrug. He tries not to play it too eagerly. “This’ll all…it’ll all shake out. We’ll find a way back up to the surface, and—”

Sinjir lifts his head. “Way up to the surface? Can you find us a way out nearby?”

“Absofragginglutely,” Temmin says.

“Language,” his mother says.

“Sorry. But yeah, um, hold on…” He unrolls the map, his heart beating a kilometer a minute in his chest.
We’re in the clear.
His second thoughts about everything no longer matter. “Here. Close by. Five minutes and we’re there—should take us up right into the old Banking Clan building.”

“Not
us,
” Sinjir says. “Me.”

That earns him some quizzical looks.

“I’m dressed for the occasion of duplicity,” he says, demonstrating his officer’s uniform with an open-handed gesture. “I’ll find a way up and out. I’ll contact the Imperials at the palace—I should be able to find the frequency, because, oh, that’s right, I was an Imperial with high-level clearance. And then I’ll get
them
to open the door for us.”

Jas frowns. “And how do you plan to do that?”

“That is the brilliant part. I’ll tell them the tunnels are their one safe way out of the palace.”