by Chuck Wendig
I have you.
For now.
“Admiral,” he says, his tone suddenly changing. He even offers a wan smile and bows his head. “I am of course just playing the Imperial advocate. One must attempt to fully dissect the animal to understand it, and so I appreciate you letting me challenge you in this way. Do as you see fit.”
She nods. A temporary victory, she thinks. But Pandion is doing exactly what she wants to do with the fleet above Akiva: He’s retreating temporarily in the hope of fighting again another day. What was it Tashu said? Hide in the shadows and strike when your enemy passes.
—
Seems we do have a problem, after all, Sinjir thinks, ducking blaster fire and leaping up, running across gambling tables. He kicks a set of chits up into the air—the gambler, some degenerate nerf herder with a sweat-slick face, chases after his lost chits and gets blaster fire in the back for his trouble. Sinjir knocks a set of dice off another table, then nearly trips on a gambling wheel before taking a running leap—
He catches the bar top across his middle. The air goes out of his lungs. Blaster fire peppers the wood and sends bottles and glasses spinning to the ground, shattering. Sinjir oofs but still clambers up and over, holding his arms above his head to protect his skull from the falling barware.
Then everything goes quiet.
He thinks: Is it over?
A shadow descends over him.
The bartender looks down. Greasy grin on his face. His chin still green and slimy with leaf-spit.
“You got a problem,” the bartender says.
Then the bartender drops a fist like a falling meteor. It hits Sinjir like a malfunctioning bay-door piston, and his eyes roll back in his head as everything goes slippery and he tumbles toward unconsciousness.
“We have a problem,” the driver says.
Young Pade sees the smoke over the hills long before he sees what’s making it. Though the boy can certainly take a guess.
He looks around at the other recruits—or potential recruits, anyway. They’re all whispering about it now. Murmuring and opening the windows on the transport and looking out.
The hoverbus driver—a bewhiskered, round-muzzled Nimbanel—looks back with eyes that look beady under its huge brow. The Nimbanel says to Pade and the other boys: “You…you tell them. You tell them I don’t work for the Empire. I’m just a driver! You all know that, right?”
“Go on, mister,” Pade says. “Just turn around and get us there.”
The Nimbanel mutters something mean under his breath.
One of the other boys—a pudge-bellied kid with dark, coarse hair and a speckling of moles on his cheeks—turns around and stares over the seat at Pade. “You think we’re done for?”
“I dunno,” Pade says with a shrug. “Wait and see, I figure.”
He puts on a tough face. It’s a lie, though. Because he’s scared, too.
The bus continues on, riding over the broken roads of Uyter. Hills rising up on either side—the grass once green, now bleached pale. And soon, tucked between those hills: the Imperial stormtrooper academy here.
It’s burning. Or, rather, it has burned. Half of it is torn open by the tearing hands of old fire, and now black smoke drifts from inside it.
On the ground, a dozen dead stormtroopers.
Among them: other men and women. Not Imperials. Simple vests and utility belts. They have rifles and blasters. All the boys on the bus lean out and stare. They, like Pade, have never seen weapons up close. Pitchforks and spanners and a few blunt instruments here and there. Mostly, they’re farm boys. Locals from the fringes. Some of them recruited by officers.
Some of them, like Pade, were simply…sent away.
Sent here.
To a place that is no longer a place.
The bus stops as one of the men—one of the rebels, Pade thinks—steps in front of the vehicle. The door opens and the Nimbanel steps out. The boys stay seated, not sure what they should do.
Pade thinks to look tough. He gets off the bus.
The Nimbanel and the rebel, a man with a scruffy beard and a scar running across the side of his neck, are arguing. The Nimbanel is waving his hands saying, “No, no, these kids are not my responsibility. No! I won’t drive them back. I’m not paid for that—”
“Sir,” the rebel says, “as you can see, the Imperial academy is closed. This isn’t a place for kids anymore—”
And then he sees Pade standing there. The man turns away from the driver and looks down.
“Mister,” Pade says.
“Son,” the man says. “We’ll get you back on the bus and on your way home in two twitches of a nerf tail—”
“I don’t want to go home.”
“Just the same, home isn’t here.”
“Home isn’t anywhere, then. My parents kicked my can down the road and moved on when I wasn’t looking. Went off to be nomads somewhere. It’s the Imperial academy for me, or it’s nowhere.”
The rebel chews on that. He looks off at the hills. Then to the Nimbanel and the bus and back to Pade. “What’ll you do if you can’t go here?”
“I told you, go nowhere.” Pade leans, lowers his voice. “You kill the kids in that academy? Ones who were gonna be baby stormtroopers?”
“What? Stars, no.”
“What’d you do with them?”
“You sure stick your nose in it, don’t you, kid?”
“Maybe that’s why my parents fixed to get rid of me.”
The man sighs. He kneels down. “Some of those kids will go home. Some of them are heading out to the New Academy on Chandrila. If they’re of an age, we’ll take them and teach them how to be soldiers, if they care to join the cause. Otherwise, it’s back to their parents. Or to orphanages.”
Pade thrusts out his chin. “Then that’s where I wanna go, too. The New Academy.”
“Hm.” The man narrows his eyes. “All right. Here.” He dives in his pockets, pulls out a handful of credits, then turns and slaps them into the Nimbanel’s palm. To Pade he says: “Central City’s still in the Empire’s back pocket, so make sure he drives you to Riverbreaker. Shuttle’s leaving there tomorrow morning for Hanna City. Be on it.”
Pade nods. “Thanks, mister.”
“Other boys are welcome to catch that ride, too. You tell them.”
“I will.” Pade turns, then calls over his shoulder. “Thanks. May the Force be with you, mister.”
“You too, kid. You too.”
A strange thing, being a parent. A parent raises a child with the expectation that it’s her job to teach the child how to…well, how to do everything. How to eat, live, breathe, work, play, exist. A mother advises her child on how to deal with bullies at the academy, or what streets are safe and what ones aren’t, or how to drive a bala-bala cart without crashing it into a wall. The parent teaches these things because the child needs to know. Because the child isn’t capable. Not the child’s fault, of course. They’re born a clean slate. It’s the parent’s job to put the first writing on the wall, to make sure that writing serves as an instruction manual. To ensure, well, the kid doesn’t die trying to figure out how to live.
It’s hard to get out of that mode. Hard to see when one’s child has cast off the mantle of ignorance and figured out how to do things.
Or just how to be.
And right now, Norra isn’t seeing it.
Because her son is about to kill them both.
She leaps on the speeder bike and Temmin launches back out of the Moth’s bay doors like a jogan-bat with its wings on fire. She tugs on his arm, points toward the jungle—the rain forest is thick, and it’s easy to get lost out there. These stormtroopers aren’t wilderness-ready. They’re not proper speeder pilots. Out among the trees and vines, Temmin and Norra will be able to disappear. Maybe even down into the canyon.
But Temmin doesn’t listen.
Listening, it seems, is no longer his strong suit. He used to be a good listener. A good kid. Always headstrong, sure, but h
e listened to his mother. Took her advice, did what she told him to do.
That has changed. Plainly. She tells him to go toward the jungle, and he goes the other way. Temmin points the speeder back toward the city.
The streets are too narrow! They can take some of the main thoroughfares, yes—whip the speeder down the CBD or across Main 66—but the former will be choked with people, and the latter choked with vehicles and herd animals. She tries to yell at him again, trying to get him to turn back around and head toward the rain forest, but he brushes her off—
Just as laserfire kicks up mud and stone around them.
A glance over her shoulder reveals: two speeder bikes, coming up fast.
The stormtroopers are hunched forward, throttling the speeders to their maximum. Red blaster fire sears the air from underneath the bladed steering vanes at the fore of each vehicle. She yells in Temmin’s ear: “Incoming!” And he gives her a quick nod and then cuts the speeder sharply to the right. He takes it over a small berm, and then beneath them is the shattered plastocrete that takes them right down a winding alley.
Walls whip past on each side. Norra finds her breath trapped in her lungs. Just a few centimeters one way or another, and they’re toast. If she moves even a little bit, the wall will wear down her kneecap or elbow like a macrosander, and that’ll be the end of them. Suddenly the speeder jerks up and over a bundle of wire fencing crossing the alley.
Behind them, both the pursuing speeders manage the same jump. One after the other—now in a line, not next to each other. Which means that only one can fire its cannon. A shrewd move by her son. Maybe.
As long as they don’t die from taking a too-sharp turn.
Temmin does indeed take a sharp turn—around the bend of an octagonal building. An old bank, she thinks, which means they’re headed toward the markets, toward the CBD avenue. There, a wider place to drive, but more dangerous, too. All those people will complicate the equation. Like asteroids floating in wide-open space—and the last thing she wants to see is what happens when they clip some poor ship merchant or quilka-leaf vendor and turn him into a red spray.
Ahead, between a stack of boxes, the way toward the CBD.
Blaster fire pocks the boxes. They jump and judder.
The turn comes—
And Temmin doesn’t take it.
He keeps going straight.
Ahead, a low wall. A dead end. Just a pile of junk: more bundles of wire, more crates, a piece of corrugated aluminum.
She begins yelling Temmin’s name—“Temmin! Temmin!”—but he just gives her a thumbs-up. He yells back:
“Trust me!”
Trust in her son.
Trust him to make the right decisions.
Trust him not to kill him, her, and those two stormtroopers hot on their tail.
The wall approaches fast—boxes, wire, sheet metal.
It’s then she realizes:
He’s not going to go straight forward.
He’s going to take them straight up.
One quick shot from the blaster at the fore of his speeder and the aluminum does a quick hop—it slides a bit to the left, creating a shallow ramp. He turns the speeder just so, and next thing Norra knows, her stomach is left somewhere about three meters behind them, down on the ground.
Norra feels her son tense up. And then turbothrusters push them forward, fast and hard.
The speeder zips up the ramp, over the boxes, and along the top of the short wall. A wall that’s scalloped, the concrete shaped with wavy contours—and the speeder follows them like a boat skipping across rollicking tides. They zip fast with sickening dips and Norra holds on for dear life.
Behind them, one of the stormtroopers tries the same move.
The front foil catches at the lip of the wall, and the back end of the vehicle flips up and over. The stormtrooper shrieks as he pitches forward, the whole speeder crashing down on him. It bursts into a plume of flame.
The other speeder makes the jump. Through the belching fire of the first speeder it roars, cannon on full-auto. Peppering the air around them with screaming laser blasts.
Temmin cuts to the right. He takes the speeder over a plank sitting catty-corner from the short wall to a taller one: a house with a decrepit rooftop garden long gone unused. They whip past a saggy-bellied, shaggy-chinned Lutrillian sitting in a half-collapsed lawn chair, a half-eaten amphibian in his grip. He barely startles as they zoom past.
Temmin, she realizes, isn’t planning on dropping them down to the street level at all. The rooftops—of course. You want to travel Myrra, most people stick to the streets. But Temmin and his friends always used the rooftops. Making jumps from building to building that would cause Norra to snap her ankle like a piece of brittle driftwood. Temmin and the others set up planks and sheets of tin. Ropes and balance poles, too.
He knows the rooftops of this city well.
And it occurs to her: This probably isn’t the first time he’s taken a speeder bike up here, either.
Her son, she realizes, is a damn good pilot.
And a smaller voice chides her: Just as reckless as you, too.
Suddenly—a shower of sparks behind them. Her tailbone vibrates as a blaster hit clips the back end of their own speeder. The vehicle starts to wobble and drift just as they cross over another set of planks to an even higher rooftop. But Temmin manages to keep it steady.
He reaches back, grabs his mother’s hands, and pulls her forward, placing both her hands on the handlebar controls.
“Your turn!” he yells. Then starts to squirm under her arm.
“What?” she yells back, in panic.
Ahead, a metal pole thrust up out of a greenhouse at a forty-five-degree angle. As Temmin snakes his way to the back of the speeder—leaving her in control of it—he yells: “Meet me at Aunt Esmelle’s!”
Temmin, no!
He jumps off the speeder.
She continues to rocket forward—ahead, a cobbled-together crossing of hull metal between one roof and another. Norra thinks to jam on the brakes, but doing that now? She’d lose too much momentum. Probably drop the front end of the speeder over the edge of the wall and go over with it.
And so she does what she can. She accelerates.
Behind her, she sees her son spin around the metal bar like a circus performer—when did he learn to do that? she wonders—and then he swings back down, landing right behind the stormtrooper on the Imperial’s speeder.
Norra takes her own jump, crests another roof, and then: brakes.
The speeder protests the fast deceleration. She cocks the maneuvering controls so that she skids to a halt, parallel to the roof’s edge—
Her heart sinks when she sees:
There, on the roof, a stormtrooper. Supine and still.
And going the other direction:
Temmin’s new ride, disappearing back down the way they came.
Norra grits her teeth, pivots the vehicle back around—but she hasn’t ridden a speeder in years. Everything feels clumsy, and even as she throttles it forward again, the realization hits her like a fist to the chin:
I’ve lost him.
Thunder throttles the skies over Myrra, lightning flicking between bands of dark clouds like a dewback’s tongue. Darkness has settled in, and with it the rains have come. Norra stares out the window. Rain streaks the circular glass. Every boom and flash makes Norra flinch.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” says her sister, Esmelle. Esmelle is older than she is by a good number of years—when Norra was born, Esmelle was already running around the city with a gang of hooligans all her own. She’s lost a lot of that rebellious edge since then—now a woman content to sit in her home on Orchard Hill, as if waiting to die and join the rest of the graves that wait just up the road. Graves underneath fruiting trees. SO THAT WE MAY EAT OF THOSE WE LOST AND REMEMBER THEM, a plaque says on the gate into the orchard. That idea always turned Norra’s stomach.
Norra turns to meet Esmelle. She’s been trying to kee
p the anger inside the bottle, all stoppered up. But she’s nervous, on edge, and she feels the bottle shaking, the glass cracking. “Really? Why would you say that?”
Esmelle, a wispy thing, just smiles. “He’s always been fine.”
“Yes. Fine. Perfectly, utterly fine. Like how he doesn’t live here with you, but how you let him live in our old house. And how you let him turn it into his own personal little black market, where he gets threatened by…by criminals, where he steals and sells the-stars-know-what, where—”
Esmelle, always the smiler, pats Norra on the shoulder. “Norra, honey, you should be proud of him. You raised him to be smart. Independent. You can’t be mad at him for being what you taught him to be.”
Norra laughs—a hollow, bitter sound. “I’m not mad at him, Esme. I’m ticked at you. I left him in your care. You were supposed to be a parent to my son. And now I find you’ve given that up. Did you ever even try?”
“Did I?” The smile falls away from Esmelle’s face like the last leaf on a storm-shook tree. Her eyes narrow. Good, Norra thinks. Let’s do this. Let’s scrap this out. “Might I remind you that you, dear Norra, took off. I thought better than to chase some fool’s crusade halfway across the galaxy like you, choosing to make other people your responsibility and not your own blood-born son. And—” Here Esmelle makes an exasperated sound, pfah! “—and if you wonder why the boy enjoys hanging around criminals, might I remind you that your own husband was—”
Norra raises the back of her hand. “Don’t.”
Esmelle blinks. Swallows. As if she realizes she danced right up to the edge of the cliff and now it’s breaking apart underneath her feet. “I’m simply saying: The boy’s last memory of his father is of them coming and dragging him out into the streets like a common thief-runner.”
“Brentin was a good man. He carried messages for the Rebellion even before there was a Rebellion. And now there’s more than that. There’s a new dawn, a new day, a New Republic. In part because of people like him.”
Esmelle sniffs. “Yes. And I suppose you think you’re just such a hero, as well. You saved the galaxy, but lost your son. Worth it, dear sister?”