by Chuck Wendig
It’s inevitable.
Soon it’ll come here, to the base. That’s what Rax wants. Not only does she get to sit here and watch it all collapse, she’ll be underneath it when it does. When the base goes, she’ll go, too. Maybe captured. Probably dead.
And Rax will get away.
But to where? And why? It’s his endgame she can’t figure out. All of this is a show. It’s in service to something. And that place he was protecting out in the valley near the Plaintive Hand—it means something.
Not that it matters. He’s gone. She remains.
Sloane laughs, then weeps, then bows her head like a penitent monk.
“Gah!” Brentin cries out, suddenly. He rolls over, arching his back and baring his teeth to the sky. Pain seems to cross his face. Suddenly a wave of energy pulses the air, causing all the hairs on her arms and neck to stiffen. Brentin stands up, shaking his hands—the two cuffs around his wrists drop away.
She looks at him, astonished.
“You’re free.”
“Uh-huh. And you’re next.” He bends down, scooping something into his open hands, talking as he does. “You ever notice how dirty this planet is? I don’t just mean it like every planet is dirty—I mean, it’s so dry, so desiccated, everything erodes to dust. Dust picked up on the wind and blown everywhere. Like here.”
He shows her his hands, which are now piled with little puffs of brown and rust-colored dust. Then he gets behind her and begins massaging the dust right into the cuffs.
“What are you doing?”
“Rebels like me, we get trained on how to escape all kinds of situations. Magnacuffs are hard to beat, but not impossible, long as you can get something in between the magnetic couplings. In this case—”
Bzzt! Another pulse of energy as the cuffs fall from her wrists.
“The dust of Jakku.”
I’m free, she thinks.
“You’re something, Brentin Wexley.” She knows now that her instincts to preserve his life were right.
“We rebels had to stay ahead of you Imperials somehow.”
“We need to move fast,” she says. “Find a ship. Intercept Rax.”
“You think he’s going back to the valley.”
“It’s our only shot. Something’s going on here. Something big that I don’t understand.” Even if he’s not there, whatever he’s hiding will be the key to understanding it all. “Come on.”
Sloane moves with long strides, ignoring the pain in her side, in her legs, in her throat. She pushes away her dehydration, pretending it just doesn’t exist. As she finds the turbolift down, she already begins to formulate a plan in her head—they’re going to need a ship. Going overland won’t do. Too slow, and the battle raging here will make traversing the surface of Jakku an untenable prospect. That means they need to be airborne in something fast. A TIE could work because it’s fast, nimble, versatile.
Good news is: They’ve got plenty of the Imperial starfighters here—an automatic belt-fed line of them set up for fueling, launch, landing, and refueling. Churn and burn. Fighters. Interceptors. Bombers. Strikers. Move them up and out, get them flying.
The lift hums downward. It dings open. They step out and see a dust-swept hallway—it’s empty. The base is like a tomb. Dirt-caked and filthy, and quiet as the grave, too. Abandoned already? Sloane wonders. Or is it just that the entire breadth and depth of the Imperial forces are already out there, fighting tooth and nail against the New Republic incursion? She suspects the latter. All the pieces have been pushed out onto the game board. None are in reserve. Rax is betting the Empire all or nothing.
A mouse droid wheels past, blurping and squeaking as it rounds the corner. It’s the only sign of life they see.
That is, until they round the same corner.
The mouse droid comes squealing back, zipping through Sloane’s legs—there’s a moment of distraction as she dances out of its way—
And when she turns back around, she’s face-to-face with an Imperial officer. Noncom black. Small hat askew. The bars on the woman’s chest indicate she’s a prison warden, which doesn’t make any sense because—
“Norra,” Brentin says.
“You,” Sloane says to the woman.
A blaster thrusts up into Sloane’s face. “Yes. Me.”
—
Norra came out of a docking bay along the side finding a base mostly empty: no troopers, only droids and a few officers pecking about. At the time she thought, This is it, this is the end of the Empire, they just don’t know it yet, and strange as it is, a sense of hopelessness settled over her, and with it, a feeling of lost purpose. The Empire had been her enemy for so long—what happens when it’s gone? It’s like putting out a fire by sucking all the oxygen out of the room. The fire’s gone, but now how do you breathe?
She had to put that aside, though, because as she reminded herself: She still had a purpose. Find her husband. Find Sloane. And one minute she’s wandering the labyrinthine base, stepping past an abandoned, gutted supply room—and the next she’s rounding the corner and meeting her quarry face-to-face.
It takes her a second to recognize Sloane.
It takes her even longer to register her husband saying her name.
Next thing she knows, she’s got her blaster pistol up and pointed right in Sloane’s face. Instantly she wants to pull the trigger and vacate the woman’s brains from her skull—a surge of anger geysers up inside her like a spout of corrosive acid. No justice. Only revenge. But Brentin steadies her hand. “Norra. No.”
“Brentin,” she says, the name spoken not happily, but with trepidation and grief. “Get your hand off me. Why are you here? Why are you with her?” Paranoia unspools inside Norra’s mind. She fears suddenly that he’s still programmed, still enslaved to the chip embedded in his brain stem—
Bones takes the cue and grabs his wrist, twisting it so hard he cries out in pain. The droid smashes her husband against the wall.
“YOU HURT TEMMIN.”
The heavily modified B1 droid begins to bend the arm back farther, farther, farther, until Norra can hear the bones creaking and straining—
“Bones,” she says with a reluctant admonition. “Stop. Just hold him.”
“Norra,” Brentin pleads, “I’m not with the Empire, I didn’t mean to do those things, is our son okay—”
Sloane, with her hands up, says: “He’s right. He was made to do it.”
“Shut your mouth,” Norra hisses at her. “Both of you. Be quiet. We don’t have time for a conversation. What’s going to happen is, we’re going back to my ship. We are getting out of here. And soon as we have a window, I’m taking you both back to Chandrila.”
“It’s not me you want,” Sloane says.
“Norra, she’s right—”
“Quiet, Grand Admiral.”
“Look at me. Do I look like an admiral anymore? I’m sneaking around an Imperial base with a rebel. Norra, don’t be an idiot.” At that word, Bones extends his other arm—the one not poised to break Brentin’s limb—and extends his concealed vibroblade. It thrusts up under Sloane’s chin. It nicks the skin; a bead of blood swells up like a little balloon. “I’m…sorry for calling you an idiot. But there’s more going on here.”
“Norra, please listen to her.”
Sloane continues: “A man named Rax—he’s in charge of the Empire. He’s the one who put a chip in your husband’s head. He’s the one who set up the attack on Liberation Day. I was just a…” Sloane cringes, as if this is hard for her to admit. “I was just a distraction. He’s the puppeteer. There’s something out beyond Niima’s canyons and caverns—a valley. Rax is protecting something there. Take me there. We can finish this.”
Indecision wars inside Norra’s heart.
She wants to shoot Sloane right in the chest. Or club her in the head. Or drag her by the hair back to the shuttle. She wants to kiss her husband. And kill him. And throttle him to ask him why, and apologize for leaving him behind, and pretend like none of th
is ever happened and that she and her son and her man are still back on Akiva, living their best life.
Norra tells herself: Sloane is lying. The woman is a practiced deceiver. And Brentin is on the leash of whatever control chip she hammered into his head. And yet she’s clearly right. Sloane is no grand admiral anymore. She was brought here as a prisoner. The Empire no longer calls Rae Sloane its leader or even its daughter.
What if she’s right?
What if that man, Rax, is the answer to everything?
Norra tells herself, I don’t have to care about that. I can do the job I was brought here to do. Capture Sloane, save her husband, and go home.
But what if that doesn’t fix anything? What if Norra has a chance, one chance, to stop the real monster behind the scenes? What if this Rax is really the puppet master Sloane claims he is? Can Norra just…let him go?
“Let’s go,” she says.
“Norra, wait—”
“You better be right about this Rax,” Norra says. “Because if I find out you’re wrong or that you’re playing me? I’ll have my droid here break every centimeter of every bone in your bodies. Are we clear?”
Sloane grins. “Clear as the blue sky, Norra Wexley.”
It is the first time Galli has been off Jakku in ten years, and only the second time ever—at least, as far as he can remember. He does not know who his parents are or where they came from. Sometimes he imagines that they came from some faraway place, a place of rivers and forests. A place with a sea. Other times, he is angry at them—and he thinks, Who my parents are does not matter. They aren’t my everything. They aren’t my anything. He envisions in these times of anger that they are dirt merchants or sand farmers from Jakku and it will be his great pleasure to transcend them.
(It is far more likely that they are dead.)
Now he sits in a plush room, more opulent than anything he’s ever seen before. This is the same ship as the last time he left Jakku, but this time he is no stowaway. This is not some cargo space in which he hides.
He sits on a chair.
It is the most comfortable chair he has ever sat in.
He wants to live in this chair. He may be fine dying in this chair.
And dying on this chair may in fact be what awaits him. The man to whom this ship belongs, a man named Sheev Palpatine, is a cipher. Galli has only met him once ever, but the man has haunted his dreams since. Those dark robes, that craggy moon face. They are just dreams, surely, and yet—they seem real. As if the man is truly visiting Galli in some way during those meager hours he could carve out for sleep.
He’s met the man’s droids, too—some are cold protocol droids, others assassins, astromechs, and excavators who helped clear the ground at Jakku. And he’s spoken time and again to an adviser: someone named Tashu.
But Galli has only met the man himself once.
And now he is about to have his second meeting.
He fears that death will be the result. He has been used for one purpose, and that purpose is now finished. The Observatory is built. Galli did what he had to do to keep everyone away. None discovered it, and now it is buried beneath the sands near the Plaintive Hand. My usefulness is over, he thinks. The man will kill him. Part of Galli finds strange comfort in that. Another part of him thinks: No, I will kill the man first. Even though the man has magic, real magic and not the parlor tricks of the anchorites. The way he summoned sand to his hand like a flying serpent…
Wait.
He’s here.
Standing in the doorway. Hands clasped underneath the draping sleeves of his night-black robes. Only half of his face can be seen underneath the hood. In that glimpse, the boy can see the awfulness there: as if dark magic has distorted his visage. It is a good reminder that this man has true power unlike anything Galli has ever seen, and with that, the boy quickly stifles any threat in his mind lest the old sorcerer have the ability to pluck stray thoughts from inside his skull.
Palpatine enters the room and with a gentle swipe of his hand, a chair moves toward him—it eases and whirls, settling in front of Galli’s own chair. The man sits, and his hand begins another gesture: The palm rises, as if asking a worshipper to get off his knees. Galli isn’t sure if the gesture is meant for him, but he soon sees it isn’t—just as the chair moved, a table moves, too, rising out of a telescoping portal in the floor. This table is like no table Galli knows: It is circular in shape but with a square board carved into its top. That larger square is hand-etched with a field of smaller black and white squares, and in those squares are circles of opposite color.
As the table rises, so, too, do pieces from within those circles. Each idol is a carving, crudely sculpted. They are symmetrical on each side of the board: Each side gets the same contingent of pieces. He sees pieces that look like beasts, like men with large hats, like warriors, like something that may in fact be a starship. He also sees pieces at the far end of each side that look not unlike Palpatine himself—tall but bent, and similarly robed. The one piece in front of Palpatine is in black robes with a white face. The piece in front of Galli is clad in white, with a dark countenance.
“Hello, Galli,” Palpatine says.
“Hello.”
“It has been some time.”
He swallows a knot. Be strong. You are not some boy. You are almost a man, now. You are vworkka, not mouse. You have killed for him. With that, he lifts his trembling chin to appear fearless and proud. “It has.”
“The artifacts are in place. The core has been drilled. The sentinels and my adviser, Tashu, report you have been very loyal to us indeed.” He draws a deep breath and shows his yellow teeth in a smile. “The Observatory is done and so is your time on that wretched planet.”
“Yes.” Here it is, he thinks. His death awaits. The ten years since he’s seen this man were just a delay of the inevitable. “I don’t want to die.” He says it not to plead, but just to say it. The man must know.
“Of course you don’t. You have a destiny. Those with destinies are bound to fight for life because life and destiny are irrevocably intertwined.”
“And those without destinies?”
The man waves his bone-white hand dismissively. “They do not know that they crave death, but they do.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“It is not my intention.”
“Then why am I here?”
“As I say, your time on Jakku is over. You are done. You did as I asked and so I am rewarding you with a new life away from that place.”
His heart leaps. Away from Jakku…
“Am I to go back there?”
“Not today. Perhaps one day.”
“I don’t ever want to go back.”
A slow smile spreads. The man’s lips are empurpled. Like a bruise sliced in half so that a tongue and teeth may emerge through the slit. “And yet it may be your destiny. That part is unclear.” Palpatine leans forward, his pointed finger drawing invisible lines over the strange game board there. “Do you know this game, Galli?”
“I don’t.”
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. It’s a very old game. Shah-tezh, in this iteration, though over the eons I have seen it spawn many variants. Dejarik. Moebius. Chess. In most of the iterations the core mechanism remains.”
“Are we going to play?”
“We will. But first I need you to understand not just how the pieces move, but why they move. Not just how to play, but why we play.” Palpatine smiles. “Listen closely.”
And then Palpatine explains the game.
“In the game of Shah-tezh,” Palpatine tells the young man, Galli, “the board is called the demesne, and each piece upon the demesne has its own special role and its own special maneuvers. Each player is afforded one of each kind.” With an arthritic claw, the Emperor twists a piece that looks like a too-thin man in a strange, pillarlike hat. “The Vizier can only move along the diagonal, but has no limit to how far he may travel.” With the side of a yellowed nail he taps another piece: a
hulking, hooded figure with something that might be a long rifle or a long blade—the abstraction of the carving makes it hard to tell. As the nail goes click click click against it, Palpatine says: “This is the Knight. He is versatile and can move two steps in any direction at all. Limited distance, but freedom of movement.”
He goes on like that for a while, describing piece after piece: the Outcast, the Dowager, the Disciple, the Counselor, the Beast, the Craft. He describes how they move, what role they serve, even a little bit of the history (later iterations of the game, he said, removed the Outcast, for the Outcast was “too anarchic a piece” and the players sought a “more stable game”).
Galli follows along, unsure of what he’s supposed to be learning. But he pays great attention, never blinking, never turning his gaze away lest it all disappear the moment he does.
“Each piece exists in service to one other piece—” And here the teacher grabs the final figure off the board, the robed piece that looks not unlike Palpatine himself. “The Imperator. All the pieces of the demesne are here to protect the Imperator. If the Imperator falls, the game is over. That is true no matter how many pieces remain on the board. Do you see?”
“I see.”
“Tell me then what that means.”
Galli swallows. He concentrates very hard to suss out the message—the lesson that the Emperor is trying to teach him. He clears his throat and says, “It means that without the Imperator, the demesne cannot survive.”
A smile creeps across the Emperor’s face like a centipede crawling on a cracked wall. “Good. Good. That is true. That is insightful.” The smile suddenly falls away. The man’s face twists up in a scowl of disappointment. With venom, the old man asserts: “But it is not quite right. It is not merely that the demesne cannot survive. It is that those remaining behind do not deserve to survive.” His voice is laced with anger, the volume rising and the words coming faster as he continues: “They have one role. That role is to protect the Imperator. If an Empire cannot protect its Emperor then that Empire must be deemed a failure. It collapses not only because its central figure is gone, but because it must not be allowed to remain!”