Aftermath: Star Wars (32 page)

The very simple plan is this:

They find their way to the entrance into the satrap’s palace. It’s obvious enough: It’s not sealed with some inelegant crumble of rock and stone, but rather with the finest brick. Blood-red bricks embedded with flecks of lucryte—a semiprecious stone that glitters and flashes when light touches it. Upon the brick is a sign in ornate script:
SEALED BY THE AUTHORITY OF THE SATRAPY OF MYRRA, AKIVA.

Then, they move down the hall, just around the bend.

And there they wait.

The officers will come past. Likely with a handful of stormtroopers or palace guards in tow. And once past, they will have a surprise waiting.

Norra’s not sure about this. She hunkers down behind a pile of mossy rubble and leans back toward Jas. “You’re sure this will work?”

“No,” Jas says. “I’m never sure. But this is our best bet.”

“We won’t be able to take them all.”

“Among the four of us, I trust in our abilities. Particularly with my skills and the droid’s programming, we will be just fine.”

To Temmin, Norra says: “Are you okay?”

He nods. But he’s not okay. She can see that. Something is bothering him. He tries wearing a confident, even cocky mask—giving her that wry smile of his. But it’s false. She’s his mother, so she knows. Something is eating at him—chewing him up from the inside out.

He’s afraid, maybe.

But is that all? He’s usually so fearless. This feels like something else.

No time to find out now.

She hears something. To her son and the bounty hunter, she raises a finger to her lips and then mouths the words:
They’re coming.

Moments pass. And as they do, confusion and then horror settle into her, because what she’s hearing
isn’t
from the direction of the sealed portal. It’s from the other direction. It’s coming from
behind
them.

A faint shudder to the ground. Footsteps. Coming closer and closer.

“The Uugteen,” Jas says, and jacks a slug into her rifle.

“No,” Norra says. “I know that sound.” It’s not the mad scramble of those wretched things—the Uugteen swarmed with scrape of metal and machine wails. This is a measured step. The clatter of armor, not of repurposed droid limbs. “Stormtroopers!” Norra says.

And down the long, cragged passage behind them, she sees the first flash of white armor. A red laser bolt punctures the air just above their heads—a spray of stone and debris. Norra fires back, and then suddenly the air is peppered with streaks of light. “Fall back!” Norra says.

They have only one fallback position.

Back toward the sealed gateway into the palace: a dead end.

But what choice do they have? They pull back around the corner, and as they do, she tries to get a quick count of what’s coming—a dozen or more stormtroopers. A tough fight, but maybe doable.
Maybe.

They round the corner—

Just as the gateway detonates. Crimson bricks clatter against the wall as the explosion eradicates the barrier.

Through the dark haze of smoke and dust, more flashes of white.

Stormtroopers pouring in from that end, too. Now they’re trapped on both sides, caught like a rat between two cats—

It hits her, then. A sinking feeling as she realizes:

Sinjir sold them out.

They’re caught at the corner, hunkering down next to one another, she and Temmin firing in one direction, Jas and the droid—Bones with a blaster in his clawlike grip, too—firing in the other.

A voice cuts through the hellstorm—

“Put your weapons down.” A woman’s voice.

The look on Jas’s face is a lightning strike of sheer rage—a mask of fury and murderous determination. “Eat slugs!” she barks, and raises her long-barreled rifle again. But Norra puts a hand on her shoulder. Jas looks—a confusing stare. Pleading in its own way.
Let me kill them,
it says.

But Norra shakes her head and drops her weapon.

“Norra,” Jas says.

“You can’t claim that bounty if you’re dead,” she answers.

“I’m so sorry,” Temmin says.

The woman’s voice calls out again: “Weapons down. Stand up with your hands up. Move slowly.”

Jas curses in a tongue Norra doesn’t know, then lays her rifle down. Temmin’s blaster is already down and he tells Bones to do the same.

They stand, hands up.

Stormtroopers emerge through the haze. A dozen on each side of them. Too many to take, even
with
a skilled bounty hunter and psychopathic battle droid on their side. Norra’s insides twist up.

Through the stormtroopers on the palace side, a woman—the one who commanded them to lay down their weapons, it seems—walks through her soldiers and toward the fore. Her hands are clasped behind her back. The woman has dark eyes and skin, and her face is pursed into a dissecting stare. Her back has an arch to it, and her posture is one of authority and confidence.

An admiral, by the bars across her chest.

“I’m Admiral Rae Sloane,” the woman says. “You are under arrest for conspiring against the Galactic Empire, long may it reign.”

Jas curses again in an unknown tongue:
“A-kee a’ tolo, fah-roo kah.”
Then she spits on the ground.

“You’ll never get away with this,” Norra says. “The end of the Empire is here. The comet is coming that will smash the rest of your rule to dust.”

“Yes, well. The comet has not struck us yet, Norra Wexley. Come. For a short—very short—while, you get to be guests of the satrapy of Akiva.”

Jom lies down underneath the console. Wires dangle in his face like the face-tentacles of a Quarren dentist. He ties off one wire, then pairs another two together. It sparks and he curses. He fights desperately to bypass the trigger mechanism—which must be broken—and allow firing control to route right to the console itself. He ignores the pinprick burns on his face and tries a third wire—

Above him, he hears a hum. The console is back on.

That
did it. Yes!

He bites the inside of his cheek to distract from the pain as he hauls himself back to standing, then he again aims the cannons—now the yacht has landed at the palace. Well, no, not exactly—it can’t land, not now. The landing ring is a mess. Even from here he can see that the whole thing leans at a bad angle and looks as fragile as a house of pazaak cards. So the yacht hovers, burning fuel and staying aloft just nearby.

It gives him a clear shot.

He takes it. Jom finds the button to which he rerouted the firing mechanism—a button once used just to turn the lights on and off inside the turret—and smashes it with his thumb.

Nothing happens.

He roars in frustration and presses it again.

The console lights up bright, then too bright, and then sparks crackle out of the sides and seams and then the whole thing goes dark.

Norra is forced to her knees on the palace floor. A beautiful floor: a cerulean blue like she’s never seen before shot through with veins of copper and bronze. It has the look of seawater catching sunlight, and part of her wants to stare down at it forever and ever, pretending that none of this is happening. But it is happening. Sinjir has sold them out. They are captives. Their mission has failed and they will be imprisoned or executed.

Despite her best desires, Norra isn’t the type to turn away from what’s coming, no matter how terrible.

She lifts her chin and meets it, scowling.

Next to her, Temmin and Jas kneel, too. The droid remains standing, warily pivoting his head around, looking at all those who surround them—every time his skull turns on its axis, she hears its little servomotors whine.

She thinks:
The droid is scattered. Upset. Unpredictable.

She whispers to her son: “Control your droid.”

But Temmin just looks ashen. He says nothing.

The admiral paces alongside them. At the top of a set of grand steps stand others of import: Norra sees a tall, fox-faced man in a dark moff’s uniform and a smaller, older woman. That must be the general: Jylia Shale. Behind them, a round-bellied, rubicund man with a wispy beard and another individual in a tall, pompous hat. That one has a strangely beatific smile.

Rae gives a nod to someone.

Through the crowd, they bring Sinjir.

His eye is swollen shut. His nose, plugged with blood, and the bridge of it looks scabbed over, maybe even broken. Sinjir’s hands are bound behind his back. They shove him forward and he lands hard against his shoulder with an
oof.

“Sinjir,” Norra says. “I don’t understand.”

Stormtroopers approach with magnacuffs.

“LET ME FREE, MASTER TEMMIN,” Bones says, his astromech arm starting a slow whir.

Temmin, in a small voice says: “No, Bones. No.”

A trooper grabs roughly for Norra’s arms, yanking them back. The cuffs snap around her wrist. They grab for Jas, too, and she fights a little—yanking her shoulders away and growling like a feral beast—but that small act of defiance isn’t enough. The shackles hum and snap around her wrists.

Temmin, though: He stands up.

“Temmin,” Norra says. “Son, this isn’t the time.”

But he ignores her and steps forward. Stranger still, nobody stops him.

“Let me go,” he says. “Me, my mother, and the droid.”

Jas says, “Oh, no. Temmin, no.”

The sound in her voice: disappointment. Norra doesn’t get it at first, but then Temmin says: “That’s the deal. Honor the deal.”

Rae holds up a small holoscreen. She taps a button and a projection emits. There stands a flickering blue hologram of a Sullustan with one eye. She knows who that is. That is Surat Nuat.

“Your deal was with
him,
” Sloane says, and the Sullustan smiles.

The projection of Surat speaks: “Regrettably, boy, the Empire has negotiated their own deal. And they have changed their terms.”

“No!” Temmin says. “You said we could go free.”

“Temmin,” Norra says, and she hears the terror in her voice.
This can’t be true. He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t…
“Temmin, what is going on?”

He shoots her a look: sad and panicked. “I’m sorry.”

From the floor, Sinjir groans. “He sold us out.”

“I wanted to stay here,” Temmin says. “I didn’t want to leave. This is my home! I had to give Surat something or he’d kill us. Mom, please.” Then to the admiral: “No! This wasn’t what we said. The deal was for me, my mom, my droid—we all get to go.”

“You may go,” Rae says. “The others remain. Unless you’d like to stay behind, as well? I’m flexible on how tight we tie this noose.”

Surat chuckles.

Jas looks at the boy and says, “You’d make a good bounty hunter, kid.”

“He’d make an even better Imperial,” Sinjir says.

Temmin, rattled now beyond measure, wheels on his droid. “Bones! Save us!” And the droid utters a mechanized war whoop and leaps up—

The battle droid never had a chance.

Laserfire cuts the metal man down in midair. The B1 droid screams and lands hard on his ground, so hard he shatters the blue-and-bronze tile. His legs go out from under him and he slams onto his side as Temmin races to him. Stormtroopers shove the boy out of the way and then hold him back. Norra tries to get to her feet but they hold her there.

She watches with inevitability as Sloane steps over to the droid. She draws her blaster and fires round after round into the machine’s head.

After the sixth shot, it pops off and spins away, smoking.

The droid’s limbs go still, clunking to the ground.

Temmin weeps.

“As was our deal, you may go,” Sloane says to the boy. To the stormtroopers holding him, “Escort him out of the palace. By way of the roof, if you please.”

No!

Norra launches herself up and starts to run toward Temmin.

A flash of white behind her as a stormtrooper steps in and clubs her in the back with the butt of his blaster rifle. She goes down amid broken droid parts. Sinjir lies nearby—she cries out as they carry Temmin away, the boy kicking and screaming and calling for his mother.

What have I done?

That thought runs on an endless loop inside Temmin’s head. Guilt cuts through him like the vibroblade at the end of Mister Bones’s arm—the memory of the droid’s destruction joins his guilty thought. That, his mother crying for him, the look on the faces of Jas and Sinjir…

At the time, it seemed like the right move. He knew he never wanted to leave Myrra, but that meant making peace with Surat or finding his own tongue cut out of his head. So he went and made a call to Surat—and the Sullustan gangster took the deal. Temmin excused it that the ex-Imperial and the bounty hunter would do the same. They’d sell his skin soon as someone offered enough credits—he said to himself,
They don’t have any scruples. They don’t have a code.

But it turns out he was the one without scruples.

Temmin is the one without a code.

He hoped against hope that it would all fall apart and he wouldn’t have to go through with it—that it would all work itself out and the snare he’d tied around his own stupid leg would just…
untie
itself, the knots going loose as the whole situation resolved itself without his plan coming to fruition, but now here he is—dragged up steps by a pair of stormtroopers. His heels kicking against the hard stairs, his hand trying to catch ahold of something, anything—a railing, a light fixture, a door handle.

Ahead, another staircase—

Temmin darts his hand out, catches the lip of a small fountain pressed into the wall. He curls his fingers around the stone and pulls himself free. Both stormtroopers cry out in alarm and come after him.

He stabs out a kick, catches one in the chest.

The stormtrooper
oof
s—but captures his foot. Then the Imperial pistons a fist into Temmin’s stomach. The air goes out of him. An ache runs through him—down his legs, up his arms.

Again they pick him up. Carrying him up the second set of steps and through a set of red doors—out onto the roof. Temmin coughs, blinking back tears. He hears it now: the sound of chanting. Yelling. The crowd.

“No, no, please,” he pleads with them as they haul him toward the roof’s edge. The two stormtroopers lift Temmin over their heads. He can see the crowd now. Massive. They’re streaming in from all directions. Signs. Effigies. Rocks, bricks, bottles thrown. Akivans. Protesting the satrapy. Protesting the
Empire.
Temmin missed it. He thought everyone just wanted to keep their heads down. Like him.
I’m on the wrong side of this thing.

Mom, I’m so sorry.

“Time to join your friends,” one of the stormtroopers says. He doesn’t even know which one. All he knows is he screams as they pitch him over the edge of the roof. Temmin falls.

The yacht floats in the heat haze above the satrap’s palace. Its front end hangs forward like a falcon’s beak dipped in bronze; black windows between bony pipes of red and gold; two wings that angle down and lift upward at the end, appearing like the hands of a plaintive, supplicant monk. The yacht drifts so that it faces its side toward the palace, getting close to the corner of the rooftop as its gangplank extends out horizontally, dropping only at the last minute toward the roof to form a ramp.

From the street, a few rocks fruitlessly pelt the underside of the ship.

Stormtroopers move to the edge and fire their blasters down indiscriminately into the crowd.

Norra thinks:
You only dig the Empire’s grave with actions like that.
Because everyone sees. The Empire is a thug, a bully. It’s no better than Surat Nuat, or Black Sun, or the syndicate of Hutts. The Empire pretends it’s about law and order, but at the end of the day, it’s about dressing up oppression in the costume of justice.

The admiral must understand it, too. She catches up to the stormtroopers and pulls them back, rebuking them loudly.

Ahead of Norra, the other esteemed guests of the Empire—their targets, the ones they hoped and failed to stop—board the ship. The fox-faced man, the one she believes is Moff Pandion, gives them a dismissive look. As if they’re greasy swamp clay stuck to the underside of his boot. A mess that must be scraped off and flung away.

Then he, too, ascends the ramp.

Norra looks to Jas and Sinjir. Both of them standing there, hands bound behind their back. Each hedged in by stormtroopers so that there’s no way to run and nowhere to go if they did.

Then the door opens again, and Norra finally sees:

It’s Captain Antilles. Her heart breaks. His injuries have him in their grip. His hair is spackled to his forehead with sweat. His pallor is the color of fireplace ash. He’s strapped down to a hovering table ushered forward by a pair of stormtroopers and a 2-1B medical droid.

As he passes, his eyes flutter open and he sees her. “Pilot,” he says.

“Captain,” she responds.

He gives her a weak smile as they push him onto the yacht.

Norra looks to Sinjir. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“Well.” The ex-Imperial sighs. “I will probably stand trial. Jas will probably die. You, I cannot say. Prison. Execution. Perhaps you’ll join your rebel friend and be part of a peace settlement.”

“I’m sorry about all of this.”

“Not your fault,” Jas says.

“He was her son,” Sinjir notes, staring at them with his one good eye. The other remains swollen shut. “Her blood in his veins. I can reserve a
little
bit of judgment for her. I think I’ve earned that luxury.”

Jas starts to protest, but Norra interrupts: “He’s right. You can lay the blame at my feet. I just hope, despite it all, my son is okay.”

Sinjir smirks. “Norra, I don’t think any of us is okay.”

“Norra, Temmin is a survivor,” Jas says. “He has what it takes. If anybody will make it out of this alive, it will be him.”

Temmin is dead.

He’s sure of it. He could not have survived. And now, this feeling, this
strange and impossible
feeling—he’s floating. Drifting across what feels like the calm waters of Farsigo Bay in the south. He and his mother and father used to go there sometimes on vacation. There they’d fish or sail spray-boats or try to scare up some of those gleaming korlappii shells—the ones that caught the sun just right and gave off a rainbow of light.

He doesn’t hear the water. Or smell its brine.

And Temmin doesn’t much believe in an afterlife anyway.

The boy opens his eyes.

He
is
floating. Buoyed. Carried on the hands of the crowd.

They caught him.
By all the stars and all the satellites, they caught me.
He laughs: a mad cackle that sounds not unlike that of his crazy droid.

Then he remembers: his mother. And Jas. And Sinjir.

He doesn’t have much time.

He lifts his head and rolls off the carpet of hands that’s been carrying him, and he drops down into the crowd itself. For a moment, he’s lost—it’s hard to get his bearings in this sea of people. The throng overwhelms. But then he spins and sees the massive palace walls rising up.

I have to get back up there.

He starts to push his way through the crowd.

Rocks pelt the walls and rebound. He sees people trying to climb up—a Rodian scales the wall and dangles from a balcony. A pair of humans try to help each other up. And Temmin thinks:
That’s my way.

He hasn’t played with his friends in a while. Hasn’t been the street rat urchin for a few years now. But he still knows how to shimmy up a drainpipe, or clamber up a wire-mesh grate, or find handholds where none seem to exist. He doesn’t have time to figure out the best way up.

Instead, all he can do is climb with the others.

As they load the final passengers—the prisoners taken from the catacombs beneath the palace—the satrap catches up and drops to his knees. “Please, please, please. You must take me with you. I am besieged! They are climbing the walls like monkey-lizards.
They will tear me asunder.
”

Sloane puts her hand on his shoulder. “You’ve done the Empire a great service, Satrap Isstra.”

The smile on his face spreads like butter. He believes he is being saved. His chest rises and sinks with relief. “Thank you. Thank you, Admiral. You are too kind.”

“But we no longer require your aid.”

“Wh…what?” Bewilderment crosses his face. He doesn’t know if he’s being punished, rewarded, put out to pasture, or what. “I don’t—”

She gives a nod. Two stormtroopers grab Isstra and drag him back toward the doorway. He kicks and yells like a petulant child.

“You cannot do this!” he cries, froth forming at the corners of his mouth like so much flotsam. “I have been good to you! Guards!
Guards!
”

Two of his palace guardsmen come rushing through the door.

They are cut down by the stormtroopers’ blaster rifles. Dead before they even had the chance to protect their erstwhile leader.

The satrap bleats like a throat-cut stock animal. The troopers toss him to the ground and he crawls between the corpses of his guards, weeping.

Sloane steps aboard the yacht.

The crowd roars. Temmin’s fingers barely hold on, crammed into a tight crack running up the palace wall. His muscles ache. He hasn’t done this for a while. He lifts himself up—

Just as the crowd surges. They pull back from the walls. Someone lobs something against the palace doors.

What was that—

The building rocks. A thermal detonator blast buckles the doors. The fingers on Temmin’s left hand slip out of their mooring—

He dangles, one arm straining, his feet scrambling to find any kind of ledge to bolster himself.

The crowd surges again. They swarm against the injured door. Pushing in. Some four-armed Besalisk comes bounding through the mob with a massive forge hammer, and charges the door.

No time to worry about that.

Temmin screams through clamped teeth as he reaches up and regains his handhold. The boy continues his ascent.

Morna sits in the captain’s chair of the yacht. Rae enters, sits next to her. “Cushy,” she tells the pilot.

Morna nods. “No kidding, Admiral. Everything gleams. And these chairs…I feel like I’m still sinking into them.”

“Don’t get used to them. Comfort is not an Imperial priority.” At that, Rae offers a faint smile. “Any problems with Crassus’s pilot?”

“He fought me, but I made him recognize the Empire’s authority and I assured him he would still be paid for his time.”

“He’s locked up, isn’t he?”

“In one of the bedrooms, yes.”

Adea, too, is in one of the bedrooms. Rae exhorted her assistant to go lie down, for stars’ sake: The woman has been impeccable in her aid, and brave in her defense of the Empire. Rae told her to rest up. She put her in one of the cabins next to Captain Antilles and his guard.

“Excellent. Are we ready to depart this execrable planet?”

“We are, Admiral. And I just got the report that the Star Destroyers have returned to orbit from hyperspace. We have coverage from the
Vigilance,
the
Vanquish,
and the
Ascent
.”

“Then let’s bid farewell to this sweat-slick steam bath.”

Morna nods. She powers the engines up.

The yacht begins to move.

The yacht begins to move.

Temmin scrambles over the edge of the palace roof and sees the gangplank pulling back and the yacht easing away from the edge.

I’m too late.

He looks around, eyes darting quickly.

There.

The satrap. Blubbering between the bodies of two of his own guard retinue. Their vibro-pikes lie off to the side.

This is stupid,
Temmin thinks, hurrying over and kicking one of the pikes up into his hands.
This is the worst idea,
he thinks as he turns and runs full-tilt toward the edge of the roof.
I am a laser-brained moon-calf who is going to die,
he decides as he plants the tip of the pike down hard and uses it to launch himself off the palace roof.

I’m dead.

I can’t make this.