by Chuck Wendig
But not really gone at all.
The droid lands on the ground with a hard clack and a splash.
It begins.
—
What happens next is like something out of a nightmare, Sinjir thinks. (Though it seems to be a nightmare dreamed up in their favor.) They’re standing there, about to surrender. Then he sees something—movement in the air, something spinning. Then he hears something land.
The Imperials and Surat’s men are slow to respond.
Too slow, as it turns out.
Two strangled cries rise up, swiftly silenced—and two stormtrooper helmets vault up into the air, turning like pinwheels. It occurs to him moments later: Not the helmets. But the heads.
The two other troopers turn—and so does Surat’s collection of thugs. The officer, slow to realize, is knocked to the ground as something moves into the middle of them, wading in like a threshing machine. Some shape, some bony configuration of limbs, begins wheeling about—a vibroblade buzzing through the air. Men scream. They discharge their weapons, but this thing is fast, too fast, improbably fast, and they end up shooting one another as the thing ducks under, its whole body bent and suddenly scuttling like a stirred-up spider. It gets underneath the officer just as he stands up. Then he’s dragged down to the ground once more, thrashing about—bones crack and shatter as the Imperial’s screams are cut short.
Sinjir gapes.
What mad hell is this?
But the boy is at his elbow, urging him on. “We have to go!”
Sinjir nods, gamely. Yes, yes they do.
—
They run. Past the chaos. Past the throng of bodies battling a singularly insane battle droid in the rain—the droid now crowing a discordant song as he spins about, blade out, knocking stormtroopers to the ground and dispatching Surat’s thugs with a mad, dancing whirl.
Temmin charges hard—almost losing his balance from the water rushing around his feet. Doesn’t help that he’s dizzy, hungry, and shot through with so much adrenaline he’s pretty sure he might vibrate into a cloud of disconnected molecules at any given second.
Ahead, a three-eyed Gran steps out. One of Surat’s many enforcers. The alien’s caprine muzzle bleats out in alarm—the Gran raises a netgun, and Temmin winces, waiting for the incoming blast. But there’s a flash in the rain from behind the enforcer, and suddenly the alien’s three eyes roll back in their fleshy stalks before he plunges face-first to the ground.
Mom!
Norra stands there, straddling a bala-bala speeder—a narrow, stumpy vehicle meant to take the tight channels and sharp-angled turns of the streets of Myrra. Everyone uses them to go to work or move crates. On any given morning or evening, the CBD ends up choked with those speeders: every one in a different color, each one modded at least a little bit by its owners. This one is blue, with a braced box-rack in the back, where a chain and ball-hitch are hooked as well.
Temmin instantly recognizes it as belonging to his aunts.
Norra waves them on. “Come on! Come on.”
Temmin hops on the back of his speeder behind his mother. Norra starts to hit the throttle—Temmin yells at her. Tells her to wait for his friends. She turns, emotions warring on her face.
“We have to go,” she pleads.
“They saved me. They’re coming, or I’m not.”
She gives him a nod.
The other man, the tall one who came in with the bounty hunter, runs forward ducking an incoming bolt of fire. He nearly falls over—but catches himself against the side of the speeder. Temmin points him to the box-rack in the back. The tall man makes a disgruntled face, but climbs into it and wads himself up like he’s a too-big animal for a too-small crate.
The man yells: “What about her?”
Jas comes up—she’s got the blaster back in her hand, apparently having scooped it up. She’s laying down covering fire.
The Zabrak bounty hunter turns, sees the stumpy speeder.
They all look to one another in panic.
The doors of the cantina burst open. More thugs and brutes. The Herglic leads the charge. Surat is in the midst, still in his surgical robe—he points and shrieks.
The bounty hunter moves fast.
As she runs, she tucks the blaster in her pants.
She claps her hands, yelling to the man: “Throw me the chain!”
The tall man wings the end of the chain at her—she snatches it out of the air like it’s nothing, then winds it around the dead Gran laying there.
Temmin’s eyes boggle. Is she doing what he thinks she’s doing?
She is. Because as soon as she has the chain around, she flinches away from incoming blaster fire and yells: “Go, go, go!”
Norra hits the throttle. The bala-bala lurches forward like a tauntaun with its tail stepped on—the three-eyed alien’s body goes with it, at first splashing through the street water but then skimming above it.
The bounty hunter rides the body. Like it’s no big thing at all. Just another day in the life of Jas Emari.
In the deep well of Outer Rim space, a Carrack-class light cruiser—the Oculus—sits quiet and still amid a field of debris. The debris: the pulverized leftovers from the comet Kinro, a celestial object once predicted to carve a path clean through the Core Worlds many eons ago, sure to destroy one or several planets and the people on them. The history books suggest that it was the Jedi who banded together, and several gave their lives (some, just their minds) willing the comet to break apart before it ever even punched a hole through the Mid Rim.
Ensign Deltura cares little for that history. Not because it doesn’t interest him—it does. His father was a history buff. Their home had little furniture, but stacks of books and heaps of maps.
Right now, though, the only thing Deltura cares about regarding this comet field is that it provides him and the cruiser perfect cover.
He looks over to the young Togruta woman next to him: Science Officer Niriian. She cocks her head toward him. Niriian is cold, efficient. All business. The woman keeps her head-tails pulled back behind her, bound with a small black cord. She studies him and everyone around her like they’re winged insects pinned to a board. He likes that about her. Deltura suspects its why she’s good at her job. Speaking of that—
He gives her the nod. “Launch the probe droid.”
She returns the nod. “Launching viper probe droid, designation BALK1.” A tap of the button, and—out there, in the void of space, a plume of gas, and the droid launches. It’s an Imperial droid, stolen and subverted for Alliance—he has to correct his thinking, New Republic—purposes.
“We good?” he asks her.
She turns a dial on the console and flips a switch—the screen starts to fill up with data and the speaker plays the strange encrypted droid-song.
“Already reporting in with atmospheric data.”
“Thank you, Officer Niriian.”
He takes her hand and kisses it.
She offers him a small smile. One of his greatest, most cherished things, that smile. The fact that he alone seems able to crack the ice wall façade she’s thrown up gives him faith in himself, herself, them as a pair, the New Republic. Heck, the whole galaxy. Optimism blooms.
He comms in. Ackbar’s face appears on the screen. The admiral looks tired. Unsurprisingly. Holding together the pieces of a broken galaxy is a strain. Deltura can only imagine the toll it has taken on the Mon Calamari.
“Probe launched,” Deltura says.
“Excellent,” Ackbar answers. “See you again in six hours, Ensign.” Six hours: the time it will take for the probe droid to enter the space around Akiva. Though even now he can see the planet: just a small marble floating out there beyond the debris field.
She smiles. “We have time. Dinner, then rest?”
“Dinner, then something else, then rest?”
She chuckles. A musical sound.
—
The argument, raging long into the night. As turbulent as the storm outside the
satrap’s palace. (Though the satrap seems to be the only one utterly disinterested in the storm outside and the storm raging in this very room—he sits in the corner, slumped against the wall, snoring.)
“—we mustn’t forget that we have the credits,” Arsin Crassus says, rapping his knuckles on the table as he speaks. He does this whenever he feels he’s making an important point, and it would seem that he always feels he’s making an important point as he makes this knock-knock-knock gesture with irritating frequency. “The credits to spend how we see fit.”
Jylia Shale sits stone-faced. Barely having moved in the last many hours—as if this isn’t taking the toll on her that it is on the rest of them. Shale says, “Credits will not buy back our galaxy. They will not buy the hearts and minds of the people. And the Imperial coffers are far less formidable than they once were, Arsin.”
“We still have the reserve accounts. The Banking Clan has wealth, tangible wealth we can plunder yet—”
“And plunge the galaxy into a recession?” Shale barks in a huff. “Oh, yes, that will surely win us the confidence of the people.”
“It’s not about winning over all the people,” Crassus says. Knock, knock, knock. “I told you already, the best way forward is to establish a formal splinter Empire. Set up a truce with these New Republic slime-dogs, allow them to go their way, and we go ours. We’re already locked in something of a cold war with those ninnymanderers, so we make it official.”
Shale rolls her eyes. “Yes. Let’s build a wall down the middle of the galaxy. They can have their half and we’ll keep ours. It doesn’t work like that. Let me make this abundantly clear to all who dare listen: We lost this war. We played with a foolish, overconfident, reckless hand, and we paid the price for it. There is no truce to be had. The New Republic will not abide us taking our toys to the Outer Rim. They will hunt us down. They will try us as war criminals. They will jail some of us, and execute others.”
Sloane watches as the archivist struggles to keep up, hurriedly taking notes. He and the satrap are the only others without a formal stake in the meeting allowed in the room. Even Adea must be elsewhere. (Though stormtroopers guard the door, of course.)
Once again, Arsin leans forward and starts to speak, rapping his knuckles on the table to punctuate his words: “Shale, you were a vital strategist for the Empire and yet you lament the Empire’s strategy—”
“Arsin,” Rae blurts out. “If you bang those knuckles on this table one more time, I will break them with a stick.”
“I…that is no way to speak to me,” he blusters.
Pandion smirks. “She’s right, Crassus. It’s deeply irritating. Do it again and I’ll break the other hand to make sure it’s really truly done.”
The banker sits back, arms crossed over his barrel chest. He mopes like a scorned child.
“The strategy of the Galactic Empire,” Shale begins, “was not under my supreme control. I’ll make it clear yet again that I disagreed with both implementations of the Death Star. I opposed its creation from the very beginning—and in fact, that opposition marginalized my input going forward. Except, perhaps, at Hoth. But the Death Star was our undoing. That old phrase, Don’t work your children in the same mine, applies here. Putting so much time, and money, and effort, and people into the ecosystem of that massive battle station was a fool’s crusade. Palpatine was arrogant.”
Tashu, who has been mostly quiet this entire time—frittering with his fingers and the tassels at the ends of his sleeves as if this is all very boring to him, or as if his mind is simply elsewhere—finally speaks up:
“Palpatine’s arrogance is undeniable. Once also cannot deny that without it, the Empire would never have existed in the first place.”
Moff Pandion—Grand Moff Pandion, apparently—stands up, begins to pace a semicircle around his end of the table. “I for once agree with Jylia Shale. Not just that the Death Star was our greatest mistake, but also that no truce will suffice. That will not slake the so-called New Republic’s thirst for our blood. They’ve got it in their heads that we’re monsters. It is decided. But that also means we cannot merely surrender. They’ll want their taste of blood—don’t be surprised if the best of us get dragged out into the streets so we can be shot by some savage with a slugthrower.”
“Yes, Valco,” Shale says. “We know that you want to attack, attack, attack. No matter how much it will cost us to do so.”
He sniffs. “So you’d rather lay down arms and bow your head for the executioner’s ax? You wouldn’t want to go out fighting?”
“This isn’t some kind of inspirational story. Some scrappy, ragtag underdog tale, some pugilistic match where we’re the goodhearted gladiator who brings down the oppressive regime that put him in the arena. They get to have that narrative. We are the ones who enslaved whole worlds full of alien inhabitants. We are the ones who built something called a Death Star under the leadership of a decrepit old goblin who believed in the ‘dark side’ of some ancient, insane religion.”
Yupe Tashu raises a quizzical, academic eye toward her.
Pandion just sneers. “Were this a better day, you’d be executed for treason, General Shale.”
“See?” Shale says. “We are the ones who do the executing, Grand Moff Pandion. If we surrender, the aberrant kindness of the New Republic may translate to us. We may get to keep our heads still.” She huffs. “Besides. We don’t have a meaningful strategy of attack.”
“Of course we do,” Pandion says with a laugh. “Are you mad? The rebels—because that’s what they are, rebels, criminals, deviants—did what they did with almost no war machine in place. Insurgents, all of them. They managed a few lucky shots with their slingshots but we still have the ships, the men, the training.” He points to Arsin. “The money.”
“Then why do governors turn away from us every day? Why do we lose more ships every week? Why do we see holovids of freed worlds throwing parades and tearing down statues? They did so much with so little, Pandion. You misunderstand our place in history.”
“Then we do much with little. Besides—” He waves his hand dismissively. “Those holovids are propaganda, and you damn well know it. The reality is, the Rebel Alliance doesn’t have the resources to keep control of this galaxy. But we still do. And—” Here he turns toward Rae Sloane. “Let’s not forget we still possess a Super Star Destroyer. Isn’t that right, Admiral Sloane? Or—do we possess it? Perhaps only you possess it. Perhaps you’re being a greedy little child who doesn’t want to share your fleet with the rest of the academy.”
An expected commentary. One he’s been making again and again since they began this thing. Rae says the same thing she says every time he brings it up: “The Ravager and its fleet are at the disposal of the Galactic Empire, Valco. The question remains—”
He echoes her response even as she speaks it (though with a considerably more mocking tone): “—the question remains, what even is the Empire at this juncture and who controls it? Yes, I’m aware of your stance. I just want the room to be aware that you’re the one with your finger curled around the trigger of our greatest weapon, and yet you keep it hidden…well, we don’t even know where, do we?”
“Your spies haven’t served you that slice of pie, yet, hmm?” she says, putting a small curl at the corners of her lips. Pandion starts to protest, but she wants to control this meeting, so control it, she does: “This meeting is to decide the fate of the Empire with the input of several advisers, not just one. If I wanted to take the Ravager and seize control, I could make that attempt and I might even manage it. But I’d rather not make the same mistakes as in the past. Now, Grand Moff, we have heard from you. We know your position.” Again and again. “One person we have not heard from is you, Adviser Tashu. Would you enlighten us?”
Tashu looks up once more as if all this is a distraction. “Hm? Oh. Yes, yes. Of course.” Tashu was a close adviser—and a friend, as much as one could be, apparently—to the former Emperor Palpatine. The man who was once senator, a
nd then chancellor. And the man whom rumors said was also a dark Sith Lord. Amid the Empire, the presence of the Sith was less a fact and more a myth: A few spoke of it as being possible, but most believed it to be concoction. Palpatine would not be the first ruler to invent stories of himself as if he were of cosmic import: The history ’crons say that a regent of the Old Republic, Hylemane Lightbringer, claimed he was “born in the dust of the Typhonic Nebula” and “could not be killed by mortal weapons.” (A fact proven untrue when he was indeed killed by a mortal weapon—bludgeoned by a chair, apparently.) Palpatine’s legend extended, too, to his enforcer, the brutish Darth Vader. Sloane believes their powers to be real, though perhaps not as omnipotent as Palpatine would have preferred everyone believe.
It is then no surprise that Tashu cleaves to those ways when he speaks.
He says, “You chastise the dark side as if it is an evil path, laughable for its malevolence. But do not confuse it with evil. And do not confuse the light as being the product of benevolence. The Jedi of old were cheats and liars. Power-hungry maniacs operating under the guise of a holy monastic order. Moral crusaders whose diplomacy was that of the lightsaber. The dark side is honest. The dark side is direct. It is the knife in the front rather than one stuck in your back. The dark side is self-interested, yes, but it is about extending that interest outward. To yourself, but then beyond yourself. Palpatine cared about the galaxy. He did not wrest control simply to have power for himself—he already had power, as chancellor. He wanted to take power from those who abused it. He wanted to extend control and safety to the people of all worlds. That came with costs. He knew them and lamented them. But paid them just the same because the dark side understands that everything has a cost, and the cost must always be paid.”
A moment of silence.
Then Pandion snort-laughs. Rae thinks, If the Emperor were still around, that single utterance would earn Pandion the loss of his head. That’s the cost that would be paid for such treasonous disdain.
The moff holds up a hand and operates it like a babbling puppet. “You say all these words, Adviser Tashu, and yet, none of them sound like they have any bearing on…” Another snort-laugh. “Anything at all.”