Aftermath: Star Wars (25 page)

But then another warring thought intrudes like a rude visitor:
But I haven’t accomplished so much. I have failed my son. And I failed my husband. Brentin, Temmin, I love you.

She aims the spinning TIE right at the palace. Dead ahead is the landing ring. The shuttles. A yacht. They’re lined up
just right.

Maybe, maybe I can take them out with me…

A stray, idle thought as the palace rushes forward to greet her.

I sure wish these things had an ejector seat.

The palace shakes with the impact. The lights flicker. Dust streams down from the ceilings, where cracks appear in the smooth stone. Rae moves fast through the building. Running now, not walking. Someone calls after her. Adea. But then another voice: Pandion, too. Ahead: the staircase and doorway to the landing ring. A staircase in lapis blue and copper, ancient and elegant, beautiful in its construction—but Rae is blind to all of that.

All she sees is her pilot, Morna Kee, staggering down the steps. A line across her brow blackened with soot and dribbling blood. Rae catches her as she comes down. “Are you—?”

“I’m fine,” Morna says. “Don’t go up there.”

“I need to assess,” Sloane hisses, then hurries past her.

Again, Pandion’s voice behind her.
Stay back, you prig,
she thinks.

She throws open the door. Sunlight. Bleaching everything out. The smoke catches in her nose and clings there like an infection. A merciful wind rises then, pushing some of the billowing black away, and she sees the damage done:

Three shuttles, in various states of destruction. Crassus’s yacht is not here—it took off again and went to orbit, an act for which she is suddenly thankful—but at the end of the row sits a charred lump of slag:

A TIE fighter. One of their own. A suicide attack.

Easy enough to see its path through the wreckage. It cut a diagonal line across the three Imperial shuttles: smashing the back end of the first, the middle of the second, the nose and cockpit of the third. Effectively destroying each, rendering them useless.

A sound reaches her ears:

A dull roar.

She thinks:
What could that be?

Rae steps through the smoke, past the wreckage. The landing ring shifts beneath her feet and the metal of one of the shuttles groans and bangs, but then everything is still once more. She shouldn’t go farther, and yet she does—her feet urging her forward without her explicit consent.

At the edge, an old copper railing dusted with emerald patina.

She presses up against it.

The roar is the crowd below. A thin, wan crowd—

But one that is strengthening even as she looks down.

From other streets, Akivans move toward the palace. And that other sound she heard? Rocks. They’re throwing rocks against the palace. None of them can hit her here—she’s a hundred meters above them. They look small to her as a crowd, but as a mass: They’re growing. Like a spreading cancer.

She turns around to behold the wreckage once more and she realizes:

That did it.

The fires of their shuttles burning lit the fuse.

Now the bomb is counting down—the bomb of riot, rebellion, insurgency. It is at their doorsteps. Soon it’ll be climbing up the walls. It hits her all at once:
This was engineered. This was orchestrated by someone, maybe one of our own. Maybe someone inside the satrapy. Someone has kicked over the pile of dirt to watch all the little ants spill out.

And then, another thought:

We are trapped here now.

The ring shifts again. She jukes forward, catches herself on the railing. Hands catch her elbow, pull her back. Morna. “Admiral. Please. Back inside. Look.” Her pilot points. Across the way, on the rooftop of the old capitol building—the one with the rusted tower they took out with the shuttle’s cannons upon arriving here—she sees a few people climbing up there. Citizens, probably. Trying to get a look.
Or a shot.

“Yes,” Rae says. “You’re right. Back inside.”

Outside the cantina doors and windows, a small crowd surges, moving down the street and toward the palace. Sinjir catches a flash of white armor—the crowd carries a struggling stormtrooper past.

It worked, didn’t it?

It worked better than we even imagined.
The TIE fighters destroyed the antenna at the comm station, and he feared that the message hadn’t gone out long enough. But then—explosions at the palace. Norra must’ve succeeded. That and the doctored propaganda they sent out. It worked. The city is responding.
Reacting.
All that pent-up rage? The cork has popped. Everything’s foaming over now. It’s not just from this one moment. Not just from the occupation. The Imperials have long toyed with planets like this one. Though never formally occupying them, they imposed tariffs and taxes on law-abiding establishments while letting the black markets and criminal syndicates go about their business as long as they tithed back to the Empire. That was one of the striking things about seeing the Imperials fighting alongside Surat Nuat’s thugs: It exposed that alliance bold-facedly, revealing what everyone always suspected but few ever really knew.

Across the oka-wood bar, the Mon Cal with the droid arm slides across a bottle of something that glows green like industrial slimewaste. Sinjir gives him an arched eyebrow and Pok just shoves it forward another few centimeters as if to say,
Don’t ask, just drink
.

Well, that squid-faced fellow hasn’t been wrong yet.

Sinjir takes the bottle and heads to the table, where Temmin sits next to his droid. Mister Bones was here when they arrived—Pok’s Place being the go-to meeting spot for the lot of them after the operation’s conclusion—and the droid looked even rougher. Scuffed up. His metal scored in places. Several of his little osseous accoutrements have gone (which also means his bony jangle is no longer present). Otherwise the droid looks pretty good for having cannonballed through the front windshield of a roaring TIE fighter.

Still, Temmin sits, chin on his folded arms, stewing. Eyes narrowed. The tip of one thumb sits thrust in the kid’s mouth as he chews the nail.

Sinjir plunks down the bottle. Takes a sip, and immediately makes a face. A taste fills his mouth that is somehow both bitter and sweet.
Too
bitter and
too
sweet. And the liquid is thick. Almost gummy.

It’s awful stuff.

His mouth goes a little numb.

Huh. He takes another sip anyway. Looks around idly: The cantina is mostly empty. Just a few old salts in the back, drinking their drinks. Together but alone at the same time, somehow. Most of the crowd is outside.

“You
drink
that stuff?” Temmin says, not lifting his chin.

“I suppose I do. Not that I know what ‘this stuff’ is.”

“Plooey-sap. Comes from one of the trees in the jungle.”

Sinjir scrunches up his nose. “Well, it tastes like I’m licking the underside of a leaky droid, but I seem compelled to keep drinking it.”

“More power to you.”

“You’re worried.”

“Worried? About what?”

Duh.
“Your mother.”

“Whatever, Mom’s fine. And if she’s not, y’know. Whatever.”

“Yes, you said that already. ‘Whatever.’ ”

Now Temmin lifts his chin. His lips lift in a sneer. “What? You don’t believe me?”

“I believe every boy worries about his mother just as every mother worries about her boy. My mother used to whip my back with switches she pulled from the tree in our front yard. I hated her. But I loved her and worried after her just the same because that’s how sons and mothers happen to be. It is just one of the many truths of the universe.”

“Well,” Temmin sniffs, “
my
mother abandoned me to go fight in some dumb war. So, trust me: I don’t care.
I don’t care.
”

Mister Bones echoes: “HE DOES NOT CARE.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. I. Do. Not. Care—” Temmin’s eyes flit to the door.

Sinjir cranes his neck and sees Jas walk in. Her gaze finds them and she comes over. But there’s something in her approach. The slightest hesitation. Her body language screams:
I have bad news and I do not want to deliver it.
Then the way she looks at Temmin as she steps up…

Oh. Oh, my. Sinjir realizes what it is even before she says it.

“Temmin,” she says. “Your mother succeeded in her mission. But she didn’t make it. Norra is gone.”

Panic at the summit. A cacophony of competing voices like a roost full of ill-kept birds. They all stand around the grand dining table, yelling at one another about what to do next. Holoscreens are cast about the table, projecting data at various stations. Data showing surging crowds. Revealing their own casualties. Offering predictions of what comes next.

“How many TIEs do we have left?” Pandion barks. “Answer me, Admiral. How many are left on Akiva?”

Adea eases the base of one of the holoprojector disks toward Rae, and on it, a casualty report. Sloane turns it toward Valco.

“We lost five in that attack. Two at the roof of the comm station that served as the origin point for the rebel propaganda, and two from whoever was in that stolen TIE. That last fighter is the fifth. We lost half.”

“Half,” Pandion says with a huff. “We only have
five
short-range fighters stationed across the city?”

“Correct.”

“And how many troops?”

“A single company, besides what’s here in the palace.”

“A hundred, hundred fifty stormtroopers? That’s it?”

“And their attendant officers. Another twenty or so.”

“So, one hundred and twenty Imperials for a city of—how many?”

Here, Shale speaks: “About a million.”

Pandion asks the inevitable question: “Why don’t we have more, Admiral? Why are we not better protected?”

Truth is, he already knows the answer to this question. They all do. Negotiating this summit into existence was quick, but took a hero’s effort—sleepless nights, countless communiqués, ceaseless bickering. They exacted out each little detail, down to the food they would be served and the types of fabrics they desired in their bedsheets. They
know
why the city isn’t locked down with whole battalions of stormtroopers, and yet, Pandion asks the question because he wants to whittle her authority down to splinters—she the stick, he the knife. So, she answers him:

“We couldn’t have this look like a total occupation. The risk was low—”

“The risk is now considerably higher, wouldn’t you say? We need more ships. We need to bring the Star Destroyers back. Recall them from the neighboring system, Admiral. Return them to orbit. We will return to our ships and make our escape.”

Shale stands and throws her hands in the air—an unusual gesture for her, this physical act of exasperation. “How do you intend to make that escape? We have no ships of our own here. We are boxed into this palace by a population that has been long abused by the satrapy—”

Now it’s Satrap Isstra’s turn to speak up. Gone is his strident, fawning obedience. Present now: a taste of venom on his tongue. His handsome, smiling face twists into a mask of desperation. “No!” he says. “You cannot mound this weight upon my back. I am not your pack beast here to carry your sins. I imposed the taxes the Empire demanded. I have been a loyal ally, implementing any program you wanted, and what do I get for it?” His voice goes suddenly high-pitched. A plaintive whine. “You shot a hole in the side of my palace! That turret took off the easternmost tower—a tower that has stood tall over this palace for two thousand years.”

A lie. Sloane knows that the tower the turbolaser destroyed was relatively new—built by one of the Withrafisps in the last two centuries. The design of that tower—the speckling of red brick spiraling up the side, the onion-shaped dome—matches the architecture of
that
period. Not millennia before. Sloane pounds the table with her fist. The satrap’s jaw shuts.

“I will not order the Star Destroyers to return.”

Mouths gape. Crassus says: “We get to vote.”

“As has been noted,” Rae says, “decisions like these are best left to a singular authority, not a voting body. I am the acting fleet admiral and I decide what to do with those ships.”

Pandion counters: “You
will
bring them in. You must. From there we can bring in a shuttle, and the TIE fighters will give us enough cover. We must show strength. We will not merely
sneak out
and
flee
like scared ryukyu hares—we do not run from the fire. We must face it. Then, we use the Star Destroyers to dispatch bombers and we teach this city what it means to rise up against the Galactic Empire.”