by Chuck Wendig
“Admiral?” he asks, not understanding her.
She wheels on him, impatient. “I mean, this is just empty guest rooms here, and at the other end, kitchens, sanitation, a game room.” Sloane chews on that. Could he be using the sanitation shoot? The stormtroopers have already checked it out, and didn’t find anything.
“Perhaps he thought to steal a bit of food—”
“No,” she says, suddenly figuring it out. “It’s a ruse. It’s always a ruse with the rebels, isn’t it? Always some trick, some game. He didn’t stop here, he just wants us to think he did so we waste time. That ventilation shaft. Where does it go? Show me the schematic.”
Tothwin fumbles with the holodisk, snaps it on. There, the schematic for the Vigilance. She scrolls through it, moving the image about, highlighting the shaft and following it to its logical conclusion—
Oh, no.
She growls: “I know where he’s going.”
Or where he’s already gone.
Damnit!
—
His leg isn’t broken, he doesn’t think. But it’s jammed up pretty good. Once upon a time, he crashed an A-wing at the lip of a volcano—one of his first runs out as a pilot for the then-burgeoning Rebel Alliance, at the urging of a friend—a rebel agent known only as Fulcrum. That crash left him limping for months, and there? His leg was broken. In three places, no less. Almost cut short any career he hoped to have as a pilot, but he convinced the rebels to let him work a freighter manning the guns and as occasional navigator, so.
Whatever the case, he’s pretty sure the leg isn’t busted.
But it sure hurts from his jump out of the back of that Starhopper—moments before he set the torpedoes to blow.
Clambering through ventilation ducts didn’t help the pain. But getting away from Imperial eyes was key. Since then, he’s been sneaking around, doubling back, covering his tracks—dropping in and out of vents. At first he was guideless, without a plan, but it didn’t take long to realize what he had to do—and better yet, being here on this Star Destroyer offered him something of a real opportunity.
Communications are blocked to all traffic in the space above Akiva and, he’s betting, to all on the ground, too.
But if anybody has the channels still open?
It’s the Empire.
And so now, he stands in the communications room. The bodies of three comm officers lie nearby. One slumped over her station, another two dropped on the floor. Stunned, not dead. Wedge isn’t a killer. He’s a pilot, and taking down other pilots means ending the lives of combatants. Comm officers aren’t soldiers, aren’t pilots. They’re just people. Wedge thinks: That’s a lesson we could stand to learn. Imperials are just like us. Some of them, at least. It’s easy to label those who serve the Galactic Empire as pure evil, all enemy, but truth is, a lot of those who do so were either sold a bill of lies, or forced to by threat of pain or death. Already the New Republic has seen defectors. Men and women who have seen a chance for escape, for a new life…
That means getting the message out. That means running the comms now and bringing in the troops.
Two holoscreens rise up. On the one side he tries to aim a subspace frequency toward New Republic space—but all those frequencies remain blocked. That presents a short-term problem and a long-term one: Right now, it means he can’t send a message to where it needs to go. In the long term, it means the Empire knows their frequencies. Suggesting that somewhere, there’s a mole in the halls of the New Republic—maybe unsurprising, but all the more reason he has to get a message out somehow.
He flips over to local channel traffic.
There, none of the known Republic channels is blocked.
That means he can get a message out to those loyal—but they must be local. What are the chances? That here, at the precipice of colonized space, he’ll find someone listening, someone loyal to the New Republic?
It’s the only shot he has.
He dials it up. Wedge zeros in on the emergency channel, then draws the mike out of the console, the metal cold in his hand. Into it he starts to speak: “This is Captain Wedge Antilles of the New Republic. Repeat: This is Wedge Antilles of the New Republic. I am trapped on the Star Destroyer Vigilance in the space above Akiva, and I am in—”
A bright light. The bark of a blaster.
He cries out in pain as a laser bolt burns a hole through his shoulder. His hand reflexively opens—the microphone clatters away. He paws at his hip for his own blaster, but another shot and the weapon that hung there is quickly spun to slag and knocked off his belt.
Wedge, breathing deep, gritting his teeth against the pain, wheels on his attacker. He expects to meet some stormtrooper, or ironically a comm officer who is just returning from a meal.
But no.
The woman standing there is in a crisp admiral’s uniform. She’s dark-skinned, with cold brown eyes to match. In her hand, a long-barreled pistol—a unique blaster of elegant, mirrored chrome.
“Please,” he says, clutching his shoulder, favoring his leg.
She takes three steps into the room. “I cannot have you complicating what’s about to happen. The future of the Empire—of the whole galaxy—is at stake.” And then, a flash of surprising empathy. “I’m sorry.”
“Wait. Let’s talk this out.” He swallows hard, wincing. “It’s over. You know it’s over. We can negotiate a surrender, a meaningful surrender. Right here, right now, you and I can—”
Behind her, a small squadron of stormtroopers catch up, their armored boots clattering in the hall behind her. They raise their blasters as she lowers hers. “I’m sorry, Captain,” she says. Then, to her backup: “Arrest him. Take him to detention level— No. Wait.” She snaps her fingers. “Have him shackled and taken to my shuttle. Have a medical droid in attendance.” With a stiff smile she says (as if for his approval): “We are not animals.”
For years, Norra did not weep. Could not weep. She joined the Rebel Alliance as a pilot and when the decision was made—a decision made less in her head and more in her gut—she cinched everything up. Put extra steel in her spine. All the fears and worries and emotions became extraneous things: anchors, she thought, mooring her to an old life, to an old way of thinking. If she was going to make it through this, then she had to cut those fetters with a cold, merciless knife. Leave them behind her.
The Alliance deserved that much from her. This fight afforded them no time for weeping. They did not possess the luxury of looking back.
Since she joined the fight, she has had two moments when she wept. The first was only months earlier, after the battle over Endor had concluded; after she and her Y-wing (and her laser-crisped astromech) emerged from the labyrinth of half-constructed passages inside the second Death Star—just escaping in a plume of flame as the whole thing began to implode and then explode behind her, the shock waves causing her little fighter to tumble end-over-end until she almost passed out. That night, she sat alone in a changing room on the star cruiser Home One, and sitting there half in and half out of her jumpsuit, she wept. Like a baby without its mother. Hard, racking sobs hit her like crashing waves until she was curled up on the floor, feeling gutted. A day later, she got her medal. She smiled, turned toward the applause of the crowd. She didn’t show them how stripped-down and scraped-clean she really felt.
The second time is right here, right now. Holding her son and feeling his arms around her in turn. The tears that spill now are not the throttling sobs of that night months ago, but tears of happiness (and though she is hesitant to admit it, even in her own mind, of shame). It feels like a completed circuit: What she lost that night in the battle is returned right here, right now. Then she felt gutted. Now she feels filled up once more.
And then, everything snaps forward. Time unfixes its feet from this slow, perfect moment (she has not seen her son in years, after all), and suddenly Temmin reveals himself less a child and more a man: He’s young, but starting to grow into himself. Lean, ropy, a muss of dark hair spr
outing up off the top of his head. He’s snapping to the strange battle droid on the floor, clapping his hands: “Bones. Pull the speeder around back. We need to load these slime-guzzling Hutt-mothers up and you need to fly them out far as you can along the Trabzon Road, I’m talking all the way to the Kora Biedies—” Here he turns to her and says: “These eddies of water where the river meets the road. Rapids.” Then back to the droid: “You hear me, Bones?”
The B1 battle droid stands up, all the bones dangling from its body rattling as it does. The mechanical man gives an awkward salute and in a garbled, distorted voice says: “ROGER-ROGER. BODIES BEGONE, MASTER.”
Then the robot hums a discordant tune as it begins to drag the thugs out toward a back portal door. Temmin calls after: “Cover them up before you go. Use that blanket!” From outside, the mechanized voice: “ROGER-ROGER, MASTER!”
Norra says: “Temmin, I don’t know what’s happening—”
“Mom, not now,” he snaps. “Here, come on.” He hurries across the room, hopping over a pile of spilled junk. He reaches up for the dented skull of an old translator droid and with his fingers forked, presses in on the eyes.
They depress with loud clicks.
And a few meters away, a shelf slides away, and after it, a section of wall. Revealed behind the opening is a set of steps. Temmin waves her on. “Come on, come on.” Then he ducks down the passage.
This is all a bit dizzying, but what choice does she have? Norra skirts the edge of the junk shop and follows her son down the staircase. Her boots clank on the metal steps—it gets darker and darker until she can’t see anything. And then—
Click. Lights. Garish, bright, coming on one bulb at a time.
A room like the one upstairs—except the shelves are clean, shining, and home not to junk, not to trash, but to bona fide treasures. Treasures ranging from top-shelf technology to strange artifacts.
“Welcome to the real Temmin’s mercantile,” he says.
She sees parts for droids that haven’t existed since she was a little girl. A rack of high-end blaster rifles. A crate of thermal detonators. A shelf of old books and mysterious patina-darkened vases depicting images of men in dark robes with red faces. “I don’t understand,” she says.
“Upstairs, I sell junk. Down here? Different story.”
“No,” she says. “I mean, we used to live here. This…this was our home. What happened?”
He stops and stares at her. Regarding her almost like she’s a stranger. “What happened is…you left.” The sudden silence between them rises like an invisible wall. And then, as soon as it arrives, it breaks again, and Temmin is once more wheeling around the room, chattering as he does: “So. Surat knows all of this is down here. That’s not good. And he knows I stole this, too—” Here Temmin points to a matte-black crate bound up with carbon-banded locks. “I stole it from Surat. Some kind of…weapon, I guess. No idea what it does. He knows it’s down here, but what he doesn’t know, what he can’t know, is—”
Her son hurries over to the opposite corner and whips a blue tarp off something: an old valachord.
Their old valachord. The instrument wasn’t an artifact from ancient history but rather, from Temmin’s own. (And here the memory hits her like a gale-force wind: Temmin and his father, Brentin, sitting at that very valachord, playing one of the old jaunty miner songs together and laughing.)
Temmin says, “Watch. Or rather, listen.”
He taps out five notes on the keys—
The first five notes of one of those old miner songs: “The Shanty of Cart and Cobble.” And with that, another door opens up—this one with a pop and a hiss. Even as it opens, a faint breeze keens through the old stone walls beyond. She smells mold, decay, something metallic.
“No way Surat knows about this,” he says. It hits her then—the glint in his eyes, the smirk on his face. At first she thought he reminded her of his father. But maybe, just maybe, he reminds her of her.
“Temmin—”
“So, if we go into the old passages underneath the city and—”
“Temmin.” She uses her motherly voice. The one she uses to get people’s attention. Norra softens it: “Son. Can we…take a moment?”
“Time matters. Those thugs who were here? Eventually they’re going to wake up and crawl back to their boss on the other side of town. Surat won’t let that stand, what I did. He’ll send someone bigger, meaner, or most likely? He’ll just come here himself.”
She walks closer to him. “Temmin, I don’t know what’s going on here. All of this is…alien to me…”
“Because you’ve been gone. For three years.”
“I know—”
“Three years you haven’t been back here.”
“The Rebellion needed people—”
The volume of his voice ticks upward as he grows more agitated, more angry. “No, I needed my father back and you thought joining the Rebellion might help find him. But did it?” He peers around her side, as if she’s hiding something behind her back. “I don’t see him anywhere. Is Dad here? Are you hiding him? Is he a surprise? A birthday gift to make up for the three you missed? No? I didn’t think so.”
“There was a larger fight taking place. It wasn’t just about your father, it was about…all the fathers, all the sons and mothers and families lost to or trapped by the Empire. We fought. I was at the Battle of Endor—”
“Who cares? Spare me the heroics. I don’t need a hero.”
“You will respect your mother,” she barks at him.
“Oh?” He laughs: a mirthless sound. “Will I? Here’s the holonews, lady: I don’t need to respect you. I’m not a little kid anymore. I’m grown.”
“You’re still a boy. Fourteen—”
“Fifteen.”
She winces.
He continues: “I’m my own man. Other kids had parents, but I didn’t. I had a mom who flew the coop. Months without hearing from you each time. I had to make do, so I did. Now? I’m a businessman, and I need to keep my business safe. You made your choice. Between me and the galaxy, you chose the galaxy, so don’t pretend like I matter now.”
“You matter. Temmin, by all the stars, you matter to me. I’m here to take you with me. I have a smuggler ready to take us offworld and—”
At her belt, the comm relay crackles to life, vibrating as it does.
Which means: an emergency call. A New Republic signal.
A voice all too familiar to her fills the air:
“This is Captain Wedge Antilles of the New Republic. Repeat: This is Wedge Antilles of the New Republic. I am trapped on the Star Destroyer Vigilance in the space above Akiva, and I am in—”
Then the sound of a blaster. Wedge cries out in pain and—
The call ends.
Her blood goes cold.
Her mind wanders—Norra tries to figure out what that even means. Captain Antilles is here? On one of those Imperial Destroyers? Something really is going on. And suddenly she’s at the heart of it. Again.
“There’s that look,” Temmin says.
“What?” she asks, suddenly distracted.
“It’s the face you make when you’re about to disappoint me again.”
“Temmin. Please. This is important.”
“Oh, trust me, I know. I can always tell when something is important because you go chasing after it, leaving us unimportant losers behind.”
And with that, he ducks down the side passage. She hurries after him, but he pulls a lever on the other side—
The door slams shut between them.
Family dinner at the Taffral house: The patriarch of the family, Glen, sits at the head of the table. To his left sits Webb, the older of the two brothers. To his right: Dav, the younger. Webb is broad-shouldered, full-chested, a rounder belly. His hair sits trimmed close to the scalp, like his father’s. Dav is leaner, smaller, a little scruffier, too.
None of them speaks. But it’s far from quiet. The loud scrape of knives on plates. The rattle of a serving s
poon against a wooden bowl. The groaning judder of chair legs on the wooden floor of the old farmhouse. Outside, wind whistles through the popper-stalks and it carries the chatter-sounds of the starklebird flocks migrating east.
Dav speaks. “Pass the beans.” Webb gives him a look. “Please.”
Webb grabs the dish, starts to pass it over, then pauses, the dish held fast in his hand. He sets it back down. His jaw is set and his teeth work on pulverizing some seed in the back of his mouth.
“I can’t believe you came back here,” Webb says. The way he says it is like he doesn’t want to say it, like he’s trying to bite back the words. But they come out anyway. “You gualama-loving, tail-kissing scum-shepherd.”
Dav sniffs. “Zowie, Webb, why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”
Glen just stares out over the table, silent as a judge.
“Oh, I’ll tell you. I’ll let you have it. You betrayed this family the moment you went out there and you became a rebel-lover. Joining the star-damned terrorists like they’re some sort of freedom fighters instead of…instead of the criminals that they are!”
Dav lets his fork and knife clatter against the plate and table. “They’re not terrorists. They started out as an alliance of resistance, but now they’re a legitimate government, Webb. They’re the real deal.” He dabs at his mouth with a napkin. “The Empire’s days are done.”
Suddenly Webb stands up. His chair is knocked backward. “You watch your mouth. That’s treachery, what you just said.”
“The word is treason,” Dav says, staying in his seat. “And why’s your nose so far up the Empire’s can, anyway? You failed out of the Academy. They beat your hide senseless day in and day out.”
Webb puffs out his chest. “Made me a better man.”
“Made you a belligerent jerk.”
“Why, you slime-slick no-good-brother—” And with that, Webb launches himself across the table. But he’s half drunk on koja-rum and Dav is sober as the noontime sky and so he steps handily out of the way as Webb crashes into the empty chair and smashes against the wall.