Empire's End: Aftermath (Star Wars)

by Chuck Wendig

  His voice trembling and his breath weak as they hurry on, Addar says, “I hate those things. Why won’t they leave us alone? We should kill them.”

  Jumon says, “They are creatures of the Force, too.”

  “So?”

  “So, we do not attack.”

  “But we know they’ll attack us.”

  “It is their way.”

  “Maybe their way is the dark side.”

  “Maybe Brin has it right,” Jumon says, “maybe there is no dark side.”

  “It can’t be that simple. I believe in evil. So does Brin. Besides—” Addar lifts his shirt and shows what he brought—a small blaster pistol. “I have this. We can use it.”

  “You shouldn’t have brought that. A lethal weapon? Here? On this sacred place? You know the—”

  Uggorda shushes them both and they continue on.

  On the eighth day, Uggorda is dead. Or so they believe. The Kyaddak come out of nowhere, three of them—their saw-blade limbs cutting her down as the massive bugs pounce upon her, pincers holding her fast. Jumon has his telescoping staff out quick as anything, and he bares his teeth as it spins in his hand like a whirring rotor—he and Mabo leap into the fray. The droid lifts one of the Kyaddak high, flinging it into the trees—branches snap and crystal rains to the ground like a hail of singing, tinkling glass. Jumon’s staff connects with one of the bug’s many-eyed heads, closing it permanently as it erupts in a gush of fluid. The thing shrieks and skitters away. The last one is Addar’s—he rushes up to it, fear governing his limbs. He closes his eyes and draws the blaster pistol, firing it wantonly in the air—not to kill, just to scare it off. He knows that when he opens his eyes, the monster will be upon him, cutting open his middle—

  But he hears its many limbs going tak-tak-tak in the other direction.

  Addar opens his eyes and it’s gone.

  Together they stare at Uggorda’s dead body—until she sits up suddenly, slick with her own blood. Addar wonders if she came back from the dead somehow or if she was just not injured as badly as he thought. Uggorda wheezes, “Let us keep moving. Those three will just be the first. They claim this forest as territory—when we are free of the trees, we are free of the Kyaddak.”

  They do as Uggorda says, helping her along.

  On the ninth day, they are out of the forest. Here the rocky ground gives way to crystal beneath: slippery and smooth, a thousand facets on which to lose one’s footing.

  That night, they sit around the fire again. Mabo tends to Uggorda’s wounds with a surprising tenderness—delicate despite the droid’s massive box-lifting limbs.

  Around the fire, Addar says to Jumon: “I want to ask you something.”

  “Ask,” Jumon purrs.

  “When did you become a believer?”

  Jumon shrugs like it’s no big thing. “I had an experience. A vision called to me three years ago. It showed me a path through a wilderness not far from my home. I followed it and there I found Brin, injured after having fallen into a crevasse. I helped him, and he told me it was destiny that we met. That what guided me was the Force.”

  “You’re lying. The Force is only for the Jedi.”

  “No!” Jumon says, not angry so much as he is incredulous. “They wield it, but the Force is in all living things. It is what gives us our intuition, our drive, it’s what connects us to one another. We are all one with the Force.”

  “The Force, the Force, the Force! Everything the Force.” Addar is frustrated and afraid. He has no faith in this, or in Izisca. Just because his mother helped found the church doesn’t mean he has to be a believer, too. Does it? This is a fool’s mission. A death parade. One of the so-called pilgrims is already dead, another has almost perished. He whispers: “How many more of us have to die to carry this burden? We didn’t steal these things. The Empire did. They should be the ones performing penance.”

  “We all carry the burden. We all pay the penance. Because—”

  “Yes, yes, I know, because we are all children of the Force.”

  “You should watch more of Izisca’s holoform.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  But after the others are asleep, that’s exactly what Addar does. He watches a vid of Brin reading from the Journal of the Whills:

  “The truth in our soul,

  Is that nothing is true.

  The question of life

  Is what then do we do?

  The burden is ours

  To penance, we hew.

  The Force binds us all

  From a certain point of view.”

  Addar fails to understand what it means, but he admits: He enjoys listening to Brin. He falls asleep wondering who the man really is—no one seems to know much about him. He and many of the patrons and matrons of the Church are mysterious.

  On the tenth day, they walk underneath an outcropping of crystal-encrusted rock, and a jagged stalactite of midnight glass breaks off. It spears Uggorda through the top of her head, and with that she is truly gone.

  Then they are three.

  On the twelfth day, they are hungry. They have food, of course, but all that’s left are protein packets and nutro-pills, and though such grim victuals keep them going, it’s hardly satisfying.

  As night falls on that day, Mabo missteps across weak ground, and the crystalline mantle cracks hard beneath him. There is a moment when everyone realizes what is happening—the droid clings to the shelf, his telescoping eyes glowing white with panic—

  Addar leaps for the crate, and catches the handle.

  Mabo lets go, because surely the droid understands that Addar cannot hold both the machine and the crate. (And also, as Jumon will soon point out: “Mabo had faith. He was a believer, a pilgrim like us. And a friend.” But Addar must ask himself, is he really a pilgrim? Or did the droid have more faith than he?) Addar saves the crate, even as the droid falls through the open gap.

  “Brin would be proud,” Jumon says, grinning a feral, vulpine grin. “You made a leap of faith. And the Force rewarded you. The Force rewarded us all.” He smirks. “I have something to confess.”

  “So confess.”

  “The vision I had. I still believe in it but…” His voice trails off.

  “But what?”

  “I was drunk at the time.”

  “Let’s just get this done,” Addar says, rolling his eyes. “We’re almost there.” He and his friend both carry the crate—it’s heavy, so they share the load.

  And on the thirteenth day, the Kyaddak return. They come fast, limbs clicking and clacking as they swarm from above and from below, pouring out like liquid shadow. They shriek and stab, and Jumon tells Addar to go, go, keep going. Jumon takes out his staff, spins it, and begins whipping it about. It connects with one Kyaddak, then another, and the bug-fiends are flung against the wall, screeching in pain—

  But there are too many. They swarm Jumon.

  Addar hugs the heavy crate to his chest and runs.

  His calves burn. His knees feel like they’re going to pop. Everything hurts but he continues on—

  A locator at his wrist beeps. This is it. This is where the crystals belong. Smooth boreholes litter the walls—here the crystal isn’t faceted but rather sculpted like wind-shaped glass. It’s just like in Brin’s drawings. He rushes forward, nearly tripping on a berm of argonite poking up through the quartzine mantle, but he manages to stay on his feet as he ducks into the darkness of this new passageway. Deeper, deeper he runs. Grunting in pain. Holding back tears. Ducking spears of crystal. Slipping on smooth ground. I’ve lost them. I’ve lost the Kyaddak.

  And I’ve lost Jumon, too.

  Soon the cave begins to glow.

  In the dark crystal walls are other, smaller gems—each glowing bright. Different colors. Like eyes watching. Red, green, blue. A feeling overtakes him. A strange, giddy madness. It rises within him, effervescent like bubbles, and he wonders, Is this what being drunk feels like?

  Then the tak-tak-tak of Kyaddak limbs.
>
  They’re coming.

  Panic rushes through him. He turns and sees that the way he came in is the only way—there are no other points of entry. Out there, the shadows move and shift, sweeping in with alarming swiftness, and he pulls his blaster and grits his teeth and begins firing wildly into the space.

  Plasma bolts cook the darkness. Kyaddak scream.

  And crystals shatter. The walls and ceiling begin to fracture. The air is filled suddenly with the roar of the crumbling roof, and Addar falls, crab-walking backward as the cave passageway is swiftly closed off by a wall of ruined, broken crystal.

  He can barely catch his breath.

  The Kyaddak are gone. The wall is impenetrable. Many of the creatures may be buried beneath it, Addar doesn’t know.

  When he has his bearings, he sees now that there is nowhere deeper to go. This is the end of this cave. He tries fruitlessly to dig himself out, but it is no use. The crystals cut his hands. The wall will not be moved.

  Instead he slumps back against the wall and draws the crate toward him. He pops a series of latches; the lid opens. Inside waits a series of crystals like the ones in the walls and ceiling above. Hundreds of them.

  Addar stifles a cry, then withdraws another of the projector disks. He places it in his lap and ignites it—again, the holoform of Brin Izisca appears. The vid of Brin says: “Just as the Jedi are a lens that focuses the Force, so is the kyber crystal a lens that focuses the light inside the Jedi—and the light inside the Jedi’s weapon, the lightsaber. But those crystals can be used for greater, more evil powers—the Sith focus the Force, too, but they use it not for light, but only for destruction. These crystals were taken from Christophsis to power two of the most insidious weapons built, the legacy of Galen Erso, the legacy of Orson Krennic, of Tarkin and the Sith, of Palpatine and Vader. The Death Stars are gone. Light has persevered through the necessity of dark. These crystals must go home. That is your task.”

  With that, Addar begins taking the crystals out one by one, setting them down into the cave from which they had been taken years before. He sets the disk to project the holoform once again. He tries not to think about how this is the place where he is going to die—or, in Brin’s words, where he will join soon with the living Force, all hail the light, the dark, and the gray.

  At the camp, the troopers are dead.

  Effney has been reduced to spare parts.

  Bones frees the prisoners. Gomm gabbles as he’s let loose, scrambling on all fours around the sand. The skull-eyed thing warbles with laughter, kneeling and raising its arms to the sky to take in its freedom. The others filter out to gather around the Imperial water supply and drink till their bellies must hurt.

  Norra tells them they’d do best to hightail it out of there, because the Empire will soon come. And next time they might put them in graves, not cages.

  She finds a speeder bike. She and Bones steal it and go.

  Together they travel for hours. Endless sand streaks past in mounding dunes that grow higher and higher, and soon the bike is cresting each hill and leaving her stomach behind with the drop back down on the far side. Bounce and dip, rise and fall. Worse, she has to close her eyes most of the time—she has no goggles, and the streaming sand burns her eyes. And it’s not like she even knows where she’s going. Right now, the priority is get away in any direction. The direction she picks is the one they chose at the outset: In the distance she sees canyons and plateaus. The same ones, she believes, that they saw when they crash-landed here.

  So that’s where she points the front prongs of the speeder.

  The blue sky begins to dim, bleeding at the horizon line. In the distance she sees a pair of goggle-eyed humanoids half her size digging in the sand. They don’t even look up as the bike zips past.

  She hears something. An engine. A ship. That can’t be good. The Empire controls the airspace here. Ahead, a small shape in the air grows larger and larger until she can see that it’s a shuttle. Imperial, probably.

  Norra turns the speeder next to a heaping dune and lurks in its shadow as the ship passes overhead.

  It’s not Imperial. It’s some other make. Corellian, she thinks.

  It burns sky and keeps going until it’s gone.

  Norra tells Bones to hold on again, then she throttles the speeder. It leaps forward like a haunch-whipped varactyl—and again they’re up and racing across the sands, fat plumes of dust filling the air behind them.

  Soon, though, she hears that ship once more, and she hears it too late to hide. The shuttle blasts past. It’s not the Empire, so they should be safe, right? Except now the vessel is slowing down. It eases to a stop, hovering above the next dune—slowly its blunt front end starts to rotate back toward her direction. Oh, no. Whoever it is, this can’t be good. They have to keep on moving.

  Go around, she thinks. She turns the speeder so it’ll take a far path around the shuttle. Just in case.

  But as she whips past, someone is yelling.

  At her? To her?

  Wait. They’re yelling her name.

  “Norra!”

  She tilts her heels back and pops the brakes. The bike skids to a halt in a spray of sand. She was right—the pilot of that ship is a bounty hunter.

  There, on the far dune next to the shuttle, stands Jas Emari.

  —

  Jas takes the shuttle up toward the red-rock canyons, and there, as night falls, they park the ship in the shadows of a rocky overhang.

  Without even caring whose ship this is or where Jas got it, Norra greedily feasts on food from a locker. It’s not good food—it’s a survivalist ration of kukula nuts, dried galcot, and kalpa sea-threads. But just the same, it may be the best thing she’s ever eaten. And they have a water recycler, too. That she gulps down. It’s cold and hurts her throat and it’s amazing. Everything is amazing. She wants to sleep. She wants to dance the way Bones is dancing right now. Dance, then sleep. Sleep, then dance.

  I’m alive. I’m with Jas. I’m fed.

  Jas stands in the doorway as Norra fills her cheeks with food. The bounty hunter has her arm against one side of the frame, her hip cocked and pressed against the other. “You look hungry.”

  “They barely fed us.”

  “Me neither. Trust me, I had my gorge-on-everything moment, too. Sorry I didn’t come sooner. I was in a similar predicament.”

  “How? What happened?”

  Jas tells her. About Niima the Hutt, about Mercurial Swift, about stealing this ship. “Your head,” Norra says, suddenly seeing the crust of blood and the missing horns. “You need bacta.”

  “I need nothing. I’ll be fine.” Jas, always stoic. “My horns are broken but they’ll grow back. Over time. Don’t worry about it. What we need to worry about is our next move. We have a ship and I checked the computer—it has Imperial clearance codes. They work for now, though if Swift reports it to the Empire, that may not last forever. But with clearance codes in hand…Norra, we could leave Jakku. Right now.”

  Reflexive fear rises inside Norra’s heart at just the thought of once more flying through the Imperial fleet massing here. Like the Death Star run all over again. But no. This would be safe. They have the proper codes.

  And yet to what end? Their mission is a failure.

  “I…suppose we should do that. Get back to Chandrila. Tell them what we’ve seen here.” She sighs. “Though that means none of this was worth it. We found nothing. Sloane gets away and we’ve made no difference.”

  Jas arches an eyebrow. “Well, there is one thing.”

  “What?”

  “I found Sloane.”

  Those three words. Colder and more refreshing than any water. Norra can barely breathe. “Tell me.”

  “I didn’t see much. It was as they were taking me in. The Hutt was getting ready for some kind of…expedition. The whole place was like a nest of redjackets knocked out of a tree. Sloane was with them.”

  “And do you know where they were going?”

  “I heard a
little. They were going to head past the canyons. There’s some valley beyond it. That’s where they’re headed. Part of some caravan.”

  “And Sloane? What was she doing there?”

  Jas shrugs with her eyes. “No clue. She didn’t look like she wanted to be there, but she wasn’t a prisoner. And…I almost didn’t recognize her.”

  “Why?”

  “She wasn’t in uniform. No Imperial gear or markings or anything. She looked like any other dust-sucker or scavenger. She was talking to someone, a man—another scavenger, I guess. And that’s all I saw. They dragged me back into my cell.”

  Norra finishes chewing one last kukula nut. She stares off at an unfixed point as she speaks. “We could go home. Or we could go after Sloane.”

  “Unless you want to set up shop on Jakku as a couple of sand merchants, yes, I figure those are our choices.”

  “We should go home. That’s the smart thing to do.”

  “It is.”

  “Though we don’t always do the smart thing.”

  “We rarely do, it seems.”

  Norra sighs. “What about you? What do you think?”

  “Norra, I’m a bounty hunter. I’m like an anooba with scent in its nose. I don’t like to stop until the target is clamped tight in my jaws. But I’m not the boss here. You are. You brought us here, so I leave it to you.”

  “I want Sloane.”

  “Then let’s go get Sloane.”

  Norra stands and thrusts out a hand. Jas takes it and shakes it. They embrace. It feels good. Bones is there suddenly, thrusting his jagged-toothed droid skull in between their hug. Slowly, his metal arms enfold them, patting them both awkwardly on the back.

  “HELLO. I AM ENJOYING THIS HUG, TOO. HUG HUG HUG. A HUG IS LIKE VIOLENCE MADE OF LOVE.”

  Jas asks Norra, “And where did you find him, exactly?”

  “I didn’t find him. He found me.”