Aftermath: Star Wars (34 page)

And like that, the pale blue skies of atmosphere give way to the gradient darkness of space—and that gradient fades, too, becoming not part shadow, but all dark. The comforting void. Because that’s what it is, to Rae: a comforting emptiness. It gives her pause. The vastness. The endlessness of it all. To feel small in it, but also powerful enough to matter in its midst.

At present, though, she can find no comfort.

Because, ahead of them: War rages in the black.

A brute-force battle. No elegance, no aplomb. On one side, a trio of Star Destroyers firing salvo after salvo of blasts. Those attacks met by the incoming rebel fleet: five ships, each smaller than the Destroyers, but no less potent. And between the two of them, a swarm of ships like flocks of night birds. Trading fire. Some of them burning bright as they spiral like the crackling, wheeling fireworks set off by laughing children.

She chews her lip.

“How are we doing?” she asks Morna.

The pilot answers: “Limping along.”

“Sprinting or limping, just get us home.”

Commander Agate is shaking.

It’s normal. At least for her. The battle here has begun, and in the beginning of any battle, she shakes. It’s a combination of jangled war nerves and the rush of adrenaline hitting her like lightning overloading a ship’s systems. For years, she tried to hide it. She took meds to still her hands. Tried to remain hidden and alone during the first moments of a battle. Because she couldn’t have those with her see. The shaking was a sign of weakness. But eventually she came to realize:

Showing it off—and not caring who cared—was a sign of strength.

So now she trembles. And she lets it happen. It’s a natural part of who she is as a warrior and a leader of soldiers.

She calms herself by staring out at the black and then back again at the battle map holographically projected above the table. All the pieces moving along as they must. A chaotic dance, but one given over to a kind of precious, special order.

Now, though: a new blip.

She taps the air, zooms in on this uninvited guest.

A yacht? Uninvited
and
unexpected.

Imperial? Or some unlucky Akivan land baron who thought to make a hasty escape during…an unfolding space battle? That’s either an idiot or a genius piloting that thing. Agate asks Ensign Targada—a gruff Klatooinian with a high brow and a frowning mouth, an ex-slave who is loudly loyal to the New Republic—to track that ship’s course.

“It’s headed for that Star Destroyer,” he says.

An Imperial, then.

Shoot it down?

She hesitates. Things move more slowly than one would think—big capital ships firing fusillade after fusillade at one another while the fighters swoop and spin among the stars—and careful thinking can be a strength of its own. But hesitation can fast become a liability.

Targada echoes her question: “Concentrate fire on the yacht?”

“No,” she says sharply. “It’s damaged. It may play host to a target of high-value intelligence. Destroying it means destroying information we may need.” She curses under her breath. In an ideal world, they’d swoop in and capture. But the battle won’t allow for such a precision maneuver. “Let’s remove their options for landing. Concentrate fire on that Star Destroyer. If they don’t have a place to land, they become quicker pickings.”

The strange man throttles Temmin. He’s ruddy-cheeked, with a warty nose and pock-cratered cheeks. The man wears a pilot’s leathers.

“What’s happening?” he asks. The lights flick on and off. “What’s happened to my ship, you little urchin?”

Temmin shoves him back. “Get! Off!”

The man snarls. “You’d better tell me what happened. Did you do something? Are you an insurgent? A rebel terrorist? Scum. Scum!”

Then he rushes Temmin.

Temmin cries out and throws a punch. The man’s nose pops like a blister and he goes down, whimpering. “My ship. My ship!”

The boy has no time for this.

He looks around, his eyes having a hard time adjusting when the lights keep strobing like that. The pilot starts crawling for the door, and Temmin moves and kneels down in front of him. “Out that cabin door, it’s death. You hear me? Death.”

“You don’t know that. I need to get to the cockpit! I can fly this ship. Me. Only me! I’m a good pilot. Or…was. Once.”

“Then we need to get to the cabin. The pressure doors are sealed, you nerf-wit. You know this ship? Tell me how to get…somewhere,
anywhere.
”

The man groans as he stands. His joints and bones creak and pop. “Move the…move that bed back. There should be a maintenance hatch under there. But I don’t have a tool to open it.”

Is nobody ever prepared? Temmin rolls his eyes and pops the multitool off his belt. He starts to move the bed. Sure enough: a flat hatch sealed with flanser-bolts. They’ll take time. He gets to work.

Pandion stands. Norra watches him take slow steps toward Sinjir, on whom he seems singularly focused. “You were an Imperial, once,” Pandion says. “A loyalty officer. Is that right?”

“That is accurate,” Sinjir says.

“Ironic, then. That your own loyalty was in question.”

“Not really. I was taught early on in my training to see the weakness in others. It was only a matter of time before I saw the weakness in the whole of the Empire.” Sinjir grins past bloody teeth. “Look closely and you see the whole thing is shot through with cracks and fractures.”

Pandion walks closer. A slow, measured step. A cruelty flashing in his eyes, pulsing and flaring like the lights overhead. “The only weakness in the Empire is men like you. Men who are not committed enough. Men who betray the cause because of a failing inside them. Bruised hearts and diminished minds. The Empire is made stronger when fools like you fall.”

Even with his hands behind his back, Sinjir manages a shrug.

“Seems to me,” he says, “that the weakness in the Empire is in men like you, Moff Pandion. Paltry, ineffectual idiots. Men who want to be leaders more than they want to actually
lead.
And besides, what is a
moff,
anyway? A meager sector head. Even the name sounds weak.
Moff. Moff.
It’s the sound a dog makes as it regurgitates its dinner—”

Whap.
Pandion backhands Sinjir.

A line of blood snakes down the ex-Imperial’s chin from his lip.

Sinjir licks it away.

“Moff, moff, moff,”
he says again, mocking.

Norra warns him: “Sinjir, don’t—”

But it’s too late. Pandion is on him again, this time hauling Sinjir up by the collar of his stolen officer’s uniform. He hits him once, twice, a third time and Sinjir’s head rocks back on his shoulders.

“Stop!” Norra cries. “Stop.”

Pandion hisses at her. “Shut up, scum.”

Sinjir seizes the opportunity. He spits a tooth—one of his own—at Moff Pandion’s face. It bounds off the space between the Imperial’s eyes, and as he blinks in surprise, Sinjir head-butts him.

Crack.

Pandion staggers back. Twin streams of blood trickle down his nose. His face twists up like a terrible knot. “You. Traitor.” He wipes blood from his nose, then draws his blaster. “You won’t make it to trial.”

Jas speaks up: “Let me do it.”

Pandion squints. “What?”

“I’ll do it. For the right price.”

“Price? After you’ve thrown in with
this
lot?”

“The bounty on your head was too good, Pandion. But I’m sure there’s more than enough credits to compensate me. Looking at this yacht alone, I can see we’re on a banking ship. Surely you’re willing to pay me more than the New Republic was to capture you.”

“Capture me?”

“It was all about you. You have a very high bounty.”

He sneer-smirks. “Yes. I should have expected that. How high was the bounty?”

“Ten thousand credits.”

“Should’ve been higher,” he snits. “Still. I’ll give you twenty thousand from Arsin Crassus’s coin purse to execute this traitor. Right here, right now. What say you?”

Crassus stands, blustery and blithering: “What? You can’t. I didn’t make that offer!”

“And yet I take it on good faith you wouldn’t want to deny the Empire,” Moff Pandion says. He turns the blaster toward Crassus. “Right?”

“Ah…absolutely. What’s mine is yours.”

Pandion chuckles. “Good.” He spins the blaster around and approaches Jas Emari, extending the weapon out. “Here you go, Zabrak. Take it. It’s yours. Oh. What’s that? Your hands are bound?” He clucks his tongue. “What a shame. Guess we don’t have a deal. Because the Empire doesn’t
do
deals with bounty hunters anymore.”

He wheels back with the blaster and moves to strike her.

Norra cries out.

But Jas is fast. Her hands—they’re free. Somehow. She catches his hand and twists his wrist. Pandion cries out and she snatches the blaster from him and wheels him around, pointing the gun to his head.

“Nobody shoot, or I take off the top of his head with his own blaster,” Jas warns. Jylia maintains her seat, and Crassus keeps standing. Stormtroopers and Imperial Guards point weapons, but Pandion waves them off, saying:

“No. No. Wait. Put them down. Let her speak.”

Norra thinks:
How did she get free?

But then Sinjir steps up. The shackles fall off his wrists, too.

Suddenly a voice calls from beneath her. She turns and looks, sees a pair of eyes looking up through the room-length vent that runs along the seam between the wall and the floor. A little multitool reaches out through the vent. She hears a voice:

“Mom, move your wrists closer. I can pick the lock.”

Out the front of the yacht, a TIE fighter spirals toward them, fire jetting from its one side into the unforgiving maw of space. Morna yanks back on the flight stick, moves the flying brick out of the way just in time. Their own ship shudders as the TIE explodes somewhere out of sight.

Ahead, a pair of TIEs chase a rebel X-wing. They swoop and dip. Beyond them: the Star Destroyer
Vigilance. Not far now,
Rae thinks.

She brings up Tothwin on the comm.

His nervous face appears on screen.

“We’re coming in,” Rae says. “Bay G2D1.”

“Of course, Admiral. We’re taking a lot of damage and the shields—”

Morna leans over. “We’re coming in hot. I can’t slow this thing down. Something is fritzed.”

Rae adds: “Have extinguisher droids on hand, we’re coming in—”

From one of the rebel frigates, a massive blast arcs through space, striking the
Vigilance.
A burst of fire and debris from the bridge. Tothwin’s image dissolves and the link is gone.

“Admiral?” Morna asks. “We can’t land there. The
Vigilance
—”

“Remains for the moment. The plan is the same.”

“Admiral, I strongly advise—”

“I have a plan. Take us in.

“Same bay. The
Vigilance
remains, and I have a plan.”

Tension in the room runs so high that, should a pin drop, everyone might start firing their blasters. Jas stands with Pandion’s blaster held to his temple, her other hand clamped around his neck. Norra is up now, shaking off her shackles. Sinjir is helping Temmin crawl up through a maintenance hatch in the middle of the floor. Norra rushes over and picks him up and gives him a long, crushing hug.

Pandion jeers: “How touching. But what now, bounty hunter? You’ve got one weapon among you, and a dozen pointed in your direction.”

“That one weapon is pointed at your head,” she says.

“Ah, yes. But
then what,
exactly? We land and…you continue this threat? Eventually you’ll meet someone who doesn’t care if I live or die.”

“I’d say we’ve already met several.”

He scoffs. “This charade is temporary. What is your plan?”

She wears a feral grin and licks her lips. “I have no plan. What I do have is
your
blaster and
my
friends and luck on our side. Plus: We’re very good at improvising, as you can well see.”

“You’ll pay for this.”

“No,” she says. “We’ll
get
paid for this.”