Aftermath: Star Wars (23 page)

“Please,” he pleads. “
Please.
I didn’t do anything.”

The Imperial officer chuckles and then says: “I know.”

Temmin springs to his feet, feigns trying to run the other way—

The blaster goes off. The bolt hits him in the back.

He drops. The air gone from his lungs. He wants to cry out, gasp, roll around, try to suck in a fresh breath. But he has to hold it. This has to look convincing.
Stay still. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe.

Play dead.

Moments pass. Temmin feels like he’s going blue in the face.

Then, finally—

“Did we get it?” the Imperial officer—Sinjir, actually—says.

Mister Bones stands there, still as a coatrack. “WHAT.”

Temmin lets out a breath as he stands up and pulls the comm-relay panel out from under his shirt. A deep dent sits in the middle of the steel grid. These plates line the outside of the receiver tower on the roof, and are meant to survive the mausin-storms, so they’re pretty damn indestructible. “This dent looks awful close to being a hole,” he says, chiding Sinjir.

“Well,
sorry,
” Sinjir snips. “It was your idea to use the relay panel. Besides, this was all necessary for the ruse. Now will you
please
ask your psychotic automaton if he captured the footage?”

“Bones, did you get that footage?”

“ROGER-ROGER, MASTER TEMMIN.”

Then the droid starts humming to himself. Shuffling from foot to foot almost as if trying not to dance, but dancing anyway.

Sinjir asks the droid: “And you have Norra’s recording?”

“ROGER-ROGER.”

He turns to Temmin: “And you have the—”

“Yeah, yeah, I have the holodisk. This thing has gone everywhere. Everybody seems to have it. Or seen it.” He reluctantly admits:
Mom had a pretty good plan.
This part, at least. The rest? He’s not so sure. He definitely doesn’t want to leave this planet. This is his home. This is where he has his business. His
life.
And she just wants to rip him away? Take him offworld to—where? Chandrila? Naboo? Gross. He tries to shake off the feeling. “You know, this place. It used to transmit the news. My mom and dad used to listen to it. But the satrapy shut it down on Imperial orders.” He thinks but does not say:
And then it turns out my dad was using this very console to transmit rebel propaganda all across Akiva.

The irony is not lost on him.

Sinjir pulls a chair away from the console and pushes it toward him. “And you really think you can hack the signal?”

“I built him, didn’t I?” Temmin thumbs in the direction of the droid. He sits in the chair, blows dust off the console.

Mister Bones is slicing his vibroblade through the air, trying to attack a moth. Finally, he succeeds—then comes a tiny little
bzzt
as the moth is sliced in twain, two little white wings fluttering to the ground, smoldering.

“Yes,” Sinjir says, voice as dry as an old biscuit. “
That
is what I’m worried about.”

Norra’s lungs and shoulders burn as she clings to the plantation rooftop, her hands scrabbling on the wet ledge. Her boot toes scrape futilely against the wall as she tries to pull herself up.

A shadow looms over her.

The TIE pilot. Standing there, pistol pointed.

“You killed NK-409. He was a friend. You rebel sssssss—”

He staggers back. His finger reaching to probe the hole in the dead center of his black chest plate.

“Scum,” he finishes.

Then pitches forward—right toward her. Norra cries out and hugs the wall as close as she can. She can feel the air disturbed behind her as the pilot plunges through and plummets to the street below.

Her fingers start to slip. She thinks of the dead man below.

I’m about to join him.

Get it together, Norra.

Everything relies on this.

Make Temmin proud.

The tip of one boot anchors her against the wall. She presses up with her leg—the calf and thigh straining, burning. Then, groaning, she hauls herself up and over the ledge and onto the plantation roof.

Norra lies there for a moment. The massive black bat-wing of the TIE fighter—an
evil-eye
as she and some other rebels have called them, because that’s damn sure what they look like screaming at you through the endless void of space—and thinks:
I’m about to fly one of those things.

One last exhalation. Whew.
Better get to it, then.

“We’re in,” Temmin says.

Just then: banging at the door here at the comm transmission booth. From the other side: “Open up!”

Sinjir takes the blaster and fires a shot into the door mechanism. A flash of flame and a rain of sparks. The door judders, then locks.

“Do it,” Sinjir says.

Temmin hits the button.

The transmission begins.

All across the city of Myrra, HoloNet receivers flick on. Above cantina bar tops, in little galley kitchens, appearing above the wristwatch projectors sported by those stuck in a long bala-bala commute down the Main 66 highway. It appears on the big, cracked screen hanging just outside the Hydorrabad Arena in the middle octagon of the CBD.

On all the projections appears the face of Norra Wexley.

A pleading face.

The projected Norra says:

Akivans, your planet has been occupied. Myrra is now under the control of the Galactic Empire. Long have we resisted total occupation, but now the war is at our door. And with war comes crimes such as this:

A scene plays out. A boy holding up his hands. An Imperial officer with a pistol.
Please. Please! I didn’t do anything.
And the officer laughs and says,
I know.
Then the Imperial shoots the boy in the back as he tries to escape. The boy falls to the ground, dead.

The Imperial is not really an Imperial, and the dead boy is not really a dead boy. But few would even get the chance to recognize the artifice.

When they see it, all across Myrra the Akivans gasp. They shake their heads. They cluck their tongues. And all that soon turns to quaking in rage.

Norra appears again, her voice booming out:

Right now, at this very moment, a meeting takes place inside the walls of the satrap’s palace. Already a hotbed of corruption, this Imperial meeting means to negotiate the total occupation of your city and your planet. Will you stand for this? Or will you fight?

I say: fight.

And know that the New Republic stands with you.

Then Norra disappears.

A new projection plays, this one on a loop. Princess Leia appears and speaks in the same video many of the Myrrans have already seen, a holovid going around and around. It begins:

The New Republic wants you. The grip of the Galactic Empire on our galaxy and its citizens is relinquished. The Death Star outside the forest moon of Endor is gone, and with it the Imperial leadership…

Rae quakes.

Adea shows her the holovid outside the dining area—the others are still in there, once more arguing their respective positions. Now they’ve moved on to
who
exactly should become emperor in the wake of Palpatine’s death. When Adea pulled her out of the room, Adviser Tashu was floating an idea where they used a proxy to show that the Emperor was “still alive”—after all, he had many body doubles. Easy enough to use one. To her surprise, they all seemed to
like
that idea. And that’s when Adea got her.

And showed her the vid.

…at this very moment, a meeting takes place inside the walls of the satrap’s palace…

“Someone has sabotaged us,” Rae hisses. She sets her jaw and growls: “This is not known information.”

“I know.”

“Was it you?”

Fear travels across Adea’s face like a crack in a wall. “No,” she stammers. “I…Admiral, please, I would never—”

She thinks to press it. Reach out. Take the girl’s throat. Make her confess through a collapsed windpipe. But such cruelty is beyond her right now. Adea didn’t do this. No motive lines up. It makes little sense.

Who, then? Pandion? The satrap?

Someone else, someone unseen?

“Get me Isstra,” Rae says. Adea nods, and ducks back in through the large red double doors leading into the dining room. Doors opulent with scrollwork and carvings of some satrap fighting off strange creatures—a nexu in one carving, a pack of feral humanoids in another. Rae stares at it and suddenly sympathizes:
I, too, am besieged.

The doors open as she watches them. The satrap emerges, all sycophantic smiles and deferential bowing and scraping. “Yes, Admiral Sloane, please, please tell me what I can do—”

She shows him the holovid.

His eyes go wide, wide, wider as he watches it. “Oh, my.”

“Show me a window that faces the front. Toward the Avenue of the Satrapy.
Now.
”

He nods, claps his hands, and with a lasso-whirl of a finger two of his attendants—young women garbed in soft, diaphanous golden scarves—follow after, feeding him small dried fruits as he walks worriedly and hurriedly forward. They go up a set of blue-tile steps, past a wall that is itself a burbling fountain, up another set of steps—these curving, and so tight that two cannot walk up them side by side. They reach a longer hallway, one lined with narrow, arrow-slit windows. “Here,” he says, chewing on one of the small dark fruits nervously.

Rae walks over to one of the slit windows.

Even now, she can see Akivans gathering out front. Not a mob. Not yet. But they regard the palace as an unpleasant curiosity. Like they’re trying to decide what they’re seeing. Or what to do. Or maybe they’re looking for a sign of what’s really going on in here—already they’ve surely seen the Imperial ships parked along the landing ring that forms the top of the palace. And they’ve seen the increased stormtrooper presence, the TIE fighters swooping, the occupation of several key locations across Myrra.

The situation is a canister of fuel, stuffed with a rag, the rag lit on fire.

The rag will burn. It will burn faster than anybody likes or expects.

And when it does:
boom.

To Adea, Rae says: “Begin to prepare the ships.”

“It will take some time to calculate hyperspace jumps—”

“We can do that after we exit the atmosphere. Time is of the essence.”

This meeting is over.

Time to tell the others.

In the darkness, a red lightsaber rises from its hilt.

The blade gently sways—
vwomm, vwomm.
Leaving streaks of red in the black. Nearby, a fat assassin-spider dangles, its thorax glowing with a phosphorescent skull pattern. The arachnid spits venom at the red blade as the red glow moves closer. Then: The sword moves quickly.

The spider is bisected in twain with a little shriek and hiss.

Both halves plop to the floor.

The light returns to the room as a young rat-faced girl pulls back a black curtain over the window.

The wielder of the lightsaber: a long-snouted Kubaz, his eyes concealed behind gold-lensed goggles, the rest of his head swaddled in red leather scarves. He retracts the crimson blade into its hilt.

Three individuals stand before him. Two in black robes, their faces concealed. The third stands at the fore of them: a young woman. Pale. Hunched over, as if her spine refuses to keep her straight. Her hands play at the air—fingers like the legs of that spider, plucking invisible threads that perhaps only she can see.

They stand in a tenement on Taris—now, with the black sheet back from the window, this room is revealed as nothing short of a wreck. A tick-infested pile of pillows on the floor. Walls tagged with graffiti (one such piece of tagging: a stencil of a familiar Sith Lord’s helmet with the phrase beneath it reading
VADER LIVES
). Rubble and ruin everywhere. Not much different outside: tenements stacked atop one another. Some are just shipping containers. Others are hulls from ruined spacecraft teetering precariously on top of or against each other. Rank pollution floats about: yellow like the scum on dirty water.

The Kubaz squeaks in his native tongue: “You have the credits?” The rat-faced girl translates for him, repeating his words in Basic.

“Is it really his lightsaber?” the young woman asks. Her voice is a raspy whisper, as if something is wrong in the well of her throat.

“It’s the Sith Lord’s laser sword, sure enough.”

“May I?” she asks.

The Kubaz shakes his snout and says: “No. Not until I see the money. Money talks or Ooblamon walks.”

Ooblamon’s little friend, the rat-faced girl, giggles when she translates.

The pale woman looks to the other two in their dark robes. They whisper to each other. Almost as if arguing.

She turns back. “How do we know it is Vader’s blade?”

“You don’t. But it’s a lightsaber, isn’t it? And it’s red. Isn’t that the color you seek?”

More whispering, more arguing. A mad susurrus.

Finally, some sort of concession. The robed figures each give her a small box marked with strange sigils. She shakes them: Ooblamon the Kubaz knows the sound of credits rattling. It warms his unkind heart.

They hand over the boxes. He refuses to take them, and instead the rat-girl scurries over. “This is my cohort and apprentice, Vermia.” She takes one box in a clicking claw, and then the other. She hurries back to the corner to begin her count. Credit chattering against credit as she makes her tally.

The young woman offers her pale hand. “The…lightsaber, please.”

“When the count is complete,” Ooblamon says. He cocks his head and stares at them through his goggles. “What are you? You’re no Jedi.”

“We are adherents,” she hisses. “Acolytes of the Beyond.”

“Fanatics of the dark side?” he asks. “Or just children who want to play with toys?”

“Judge us not, thief.”

The Kubaz sniffs with his snout, a dismissive gesture. Vermia hurries back over and says with a chuckle: “The credits are all there.”

Ooblamon goes to hand over the weapon, but as the young woman reaches for it, he yanks it back. Then he pulls back a bit of his own brown, grungy robe and shows the blaster hanging there. “You get squirrelly and think to use that laser sword on me or my cohort, this will not end well.”

“We are not violent. Not yet.”

The Kubaz grunts, then hands over the lightsaber.

The three strangers suddenly turn to face one another, holding the lightsaber among them. Whispering to one another. Or to it.

The woman mutters a half-heard expression of gratitude, then they start to hurry out the door. As they go, Ooblamon calls after:

“What do you plan on doing with that thing?”

The woman says, simply: “We will destroy it.”

He laughs. “Why would you do that?”

“So that it can be returned to its master in death.”

They scurry away. Outside, the sounds of Taris: a bleating horn, someone yelling, a speeder bike backfiring, distant blaster fire.

Vermia says: “Was that really Vader’s weapon?”

The Kubaz shrugs.

“Who knows. And really, who cares?”