by Chuck Wendig
“It’s a few days’ walk out into the jungle,” she says, but the way she says it indicates that the Zabrak isn’t buying any of it. “Had to make sure my trek into the city was unseen.”
“Convenient. By way of grave inconvenience.”
She stares holes through him. “What happened that day? On Endor?”
“You know what happened. You were there.”
“To you. What happened to you.”
“I…” Sinjir puts forth a grim smile, trying not to speak aloud the memories that are tearing him apart. “Fine. You really want to know? You won’t stop poking? Let’s have it, then.” He swirls the honeyed liquid around the bell of the bottle. “So, like I said, I was an Imperial loyalty officer on the base of Endor and—oh look it’s Norra!” He nearly drops the bottle when he sees her step into the kitchen.
Her. Norra. Standing right there. Fuming. Chest rising and falling like that of a beast who smells blood on the wind. He should’ve heard her come up. But with the drinking and the talking…
“An Imperial,” she says.
“I’m sure you misheard me,” he says. “I said…mImperial?” He frowns and hmmphs. “That’s not a word, is it.”
“An Imperial,” she says again. Louder this time.
“Norra, listen—”
She charges at him. Tackles him into the counter. Bowls clatter. The saltcellar spins off the edge of the table and shatters. Her hands wrap around his throat and her face hovers over his.
“I should’ve known,” she says. “You didn’t carry yourself like one of us. Too superior, too nose-at-the-sky. That accent, too. Crisp like a bitten cracker. You sonofagundark—”
The click of a blaster.
Jas presses it to the side of Norra’s head.
The bounty hunter speaks in a calm voice. “Norra. You are going to have to make peace with this. If you can’t make peace, everything falls apart. He was an Imperial. And we can use him.”
It’s like watching the mist clear out over lake water. The fight goes out of Norra and she falls into this thousand-meter stare. Sinjir eases out of her slackening grip and rubs his throat.
“We can use him,” Norra says. “You’re right.” Her focus snaps back and it’s as if she’s made a decision. “Something has happened. The timeline has changed. We need to move now.”
From behind them, Temmin says: “Am I interrupting something?”
Nobody says anything.
“What’s going on? Hello? Anybody?”
Norra smiles and says:
“I have a plan.”
Three slaves huddle in the shadows of Imperial turrets, hiding behind a jagged rock as the battle rages: Hatchet, the Weequay, whose craggy face is marked by a central scar running down between his eyes, down the length of his nose, over his lips, and even to his chin; Palabar the Quarren, whose tentacled face is chapped and chafed and peeling (for the air here is so dry and full of particulate it will slowly abrade you sure as water erodes rock); and Greybok, the one-armed Wookiee, a beast who hovers over the both of them and protects them even as an A-wing slams into the red-rock mountainside above, raining debris upon them.
“We must run,” Hatchet hisses. “The Imperials are winning this battle. And when they do, the mines will again be theirs. We will again be theirs!”
The Quarren nods. Palabar has been so traumatized over the years that he goes wherever the wind takes him, cowering and nodding and whimpering in the dark.
But Greybok roars: a guttural growl of dissent. He shakes his one fist in rage, baring his teeth as he ululates.
The Imperial turrets spit fire across the open plain leading up to the mouth of the spice mine. Other slaves huddle about. Some wounded. Others dead. Most just trying to survive however they can.
Greybok growls again, his head lifting, his filthy, matted fur shaking.
Hatchet shakes his head. “You’re mad! We cannot help the rebels win. This is not our war, you walking pelt! Our only hope is not to die.”
But in a rare fit of dissent, Palabar says: “What…what if the Wookiee is right? What if this is our only chance? If we run, they will find us…”
Greybok barks in agreement. He shakes his arm again. The Sevarcos slavemasters took his other one many years ago when he tried to escape. Their masters were not themselves Imperials, but this mine has long been in the grip of the Empire. Officers coming to inspect the proceedings, to take a tithing of credits and spice. The Empire does not frown on slaves, but rather was built on their backs. The credits in the Imperial coffers are earned by those who are kept against their will. Whole species! Greybok knows all of this—he is no common worker, though that is his purpose here, to swing a pneumo-hammer and pulverize rock. Once, he was a tribal diplomat. He knows the rough shape of things. He is no fool.
And though he is no warrior, today he has cause to try.
“Don’t go out there,” Hatchet spits. “Don’t be a fool, Wookiee.”
But the Wookiee doesn’t care.
Greybok just wants to be free.
He stands up. Roars the battle cry of his people. Then he runs into battle, ducking laserfire. An Imperial in mechanized battle armor wheels on him, turning a heavy handheld cannon toward him. But Greybok has speed and surprise, and gets under his attacker and flings the heavy trooper into a crevasse.
Greybok never stops moving.
He has a plan.
There, ahead: a corral. High fence with electrified gate. Inside are three more slaves—these easily ten times the size of Greybok. Rancors. Creatures made vicious by the slavers. Forced to march in the outer canyons to keep the slaves from attempting escape—everyone knows that if you did make it to those canyons, the rancors there would hunt you and eat you.
But when the Imperials come, the rancors are drawn back to their high-fence corral and kept—they don’t like anybody. Slave or Imperial. The rancors are trained only to like the slavers who train them.
These rancors are here now. On the side of the Imperials. They gnash their teeth and scream. One of them is smaller than the others: bright yellow eyes and gray-green face. The others are rust red like the mountains in this part of Sevarcos: bigger, too.
Greybok bolts toward the corral, scooping up a heavy rock as he goes. The rancors turn toward him, shrieking. Greybok roars back and begins to bang the rock against the massive lock holding the electrified gate closed.
Wham. Wham. Wham. The rancors stop screaming and watch what he’s doing with intense fascination. Imperials start to yell. Laser bolts pepper the ground near his feet, and sizzle against the fence.
He keeps going. Wham. Wham. Wham. Until—
The lock cracks in half and drops.
The crackling serpents of electricity that once crawled all over the corral fence suddenly flicker and die. The charge is gone.
And the gate starts to swing open.
The smaller rancor roars and bats the gate open with the back of its hand. The gate catches Greybok and flings him to the ground. His head cracks against a rock and everything goes blurry.
Above him, dizzy shapes as the three rancors escape. Screams ensue. Something explodes. Men, yelling in panic. Then, suddenly, someone appears over Greybok—a slaver. A Zygerrian. Mouth twisted up in feral rage. The master seethes: “What have you done, slave?”
Greybok tries to stand, but the Zygerrian points one of their terrible weapons—a blaster called a needler. The slaver spins a dial on the side and pulls the trigger. Ropes of red lightning flicker from the tip of the weapon and surround the one-armed Wookiee.
Everything is light and pain and fire.
He can’t even roar. He can only choke and gurgle.
Blackness bleeds in at the edges. The Zygerrian means to kill him. That is one of the powers of the needler: It can cause a little pain, or a whole lot of it. Enough, over a short period, to seize your heart and kill you.
But then it stops—the fire recedes, the pain fades (though the memory will long remain). The Zygerrian drops.
There stands Hatchet, holding a bludgeoning rock of his own.
Greybok roars a thank-you.
And then darkness takes him. Though only for a moment. Or so he thinks: He opens his eyes and it feels like no time has passed at all.
Except, it has.
Hatchet sits there, picking his teeth with a broken stick. All around is the waste of war: the turrets on fire, rebels rounding up slavers, canisters of spice thrown into a crackling fire. One of the rancors lies dead: one of the big ones. The gray-green one and the other rust-red monster are nowhere to be found and no sounds of them can be heard.
Greybok roars a question.
The Weequay answers: “What happened is, we won. Or the rebels won. Well, somebody won, and it wasn’t the Empire or the slavers.”
Nearby, Palabar holds his knees close with his long arms. His tentacles search the air anxiously. He asks: “What happens now?”
Greybok echoes the question in a low, thrumming grumble. As a rebel soldier passes by, Hatchet calls out to her: “Hey. Honey. What happens now? For us, I mean. The slaves.”
She smiles a little. But Greybok sees that she looks lost, too. All she can do is shrug. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. You’re free, though.”
The woman keeps on moving. She kicks a stormtrooper helmet out of the way and then she’s gone. In the distance, the sound of another battle. Greybok wonders if all of Sevarcos will fall. Or if it will be reclaimed by the Empire. The future is suddenly unpinned—evolving, spinning, leaping about like a panicked tree-loormor.
Hatchet laughs: a mirthless sound. “Nobody knows. You hear that, fellas? Nobody knows what happens next.” He sniffs and stands up. “Whatever it is, I guess we’re the ones who gotta do it. Let’s walk. We’re free now. Might as well act like it, see what the galaxy has to offer a trio of no-good, no-class ex-slaves, yeah?”
Bleary-eyed, Admiral Ackbar stands, studying the data. It’s a short packet of information, shown in a three-dimensional display—before him, the surface of the planet Akiva grows bigger, blowing up like a balloon until it seems like he could reach out and move the whorls of clouds with the flat of his hand. Like a god. But it’s just a projection. A hologram. Data pulled from the probe droid still there in space. He sees what the droid saw: the small dot (illuminated by a red circle) representing the transport flying in, the SpecForce soldiers exiting the ship one by one (each a yellow circle). Then the flash of cannon fire. A turbolaser from the planet’s surface. That, from somewhere down below the clouds.
The red circle flickers and goes dark, exploding in midair before it ever reaches the ground.
One by one, the yellow circles flicker and go dark, too.
Except for one.
They lose his signal when he reaches the planet, but it would appear as if Sergeant Jom Barell of the SpecForces survived the attack. To what end, Ackbar does not know. Information at this point is and will be sketchy. The communications blackout is doing them no favors—the probe droid only has the information it has because of a visual survey. And they only have the droid’s information because it daisy-chained the communiqué back to the Oculus, which is far enough out of range that it can send it back to Ackbar here on the Home One. Short-range communication made long.
“And we think Barell survived,” Ackbar says.
The hologram of Deltura’s face nods. “We do.”
He moves aside, and the science officer’s face appears. Officer Niriian says: “Though his survival is not guaranteed. You’ll note the erratic pattern he suddenly follows—a pattern that continues to the ground.” She replays that last bit, where Barell’s glowing circle suddenly darts right, then left, then zigzags down. “It suggests he deployed the para-wing too early. The wind at that level is intense. We cannot be certain that the man who landed on the surface is a man who is alive and well.”
Ackbar nods. “Thank you, Officer Niriian. Commendable work, as always.” He cranes his neck and massages it.
Deltura returns. “Sir? Our orders, Admiral?”
“Remain in place until further order. But remain wary. Something is going on there. It seems we will have to reveal the face of this thing with a far more active hand than initially anticipated.”
If this is the Empire, as their shadowy informant suggests, then the war for the galaxy has preemptively come to this sector of the Outer Rim.
—
They already know by the time she gets to the room. The volume level of those present is already a clamorous din, and when Rae enters through the door, that vexed and fretful outcry turns toward her like a laser. The satrap, acting like a servant, hurries toward her and he’s saying—not to her but to those gathered—“I told you, it’s safe, it’s safe, the walls here are stone as thick as you are tall.” He gets to Rae and offers her a tray full of fragrant pastries: delicate little pinwheels with sweet, floral fruit pressed into the centers. She hand-waves them away, despite the hungry protestations of her stomach—she cannot seem like an effective leader if she has a funny little confection in her hand and crumbs at the corners of her lips.
No. Better yet—how best to downplay the severity?
She catches the satrap by the arm and plucks a pastry from the tray and begins to eat it.
Let them see she doesn’t take this threat seriously.
A lie. It’s serious. Or will be dire enough, soon enough.
The fact they already know something’s going on is again a credit to Pandion. He has someone on the inside of her team. Tothwin? Could be. The prat. Adea or Morna? That, a more troubling concern.
Nothing to be done now. No time for a rat hunt.
She waves her hand, catching a few falling crumbs in the palm of her hand. “As you know,” she starts to say, then has to say it louder again to quiet those gathered. “As you know, there has been an incursion into Akivan space. We discovered a rebel transport in the atmosphere above Myrra. We eradicated that transport with one of the suborbital ground-to-orbit cannons. That is the end of our present concerns.”
“The end?” Crassus barks. “That feels hardly accurate. How dismissive! This is a threat, Admiral Sloane, the Rebel Alliance—”
Pandion interrupts: “The rebels will send a fleet. Not immediately, but soon. And when they do, we should meet them here. They are blind to the situation. Yet we see with clear eyes. That gives us a powerful advantage. They send a fleet and we have our own—led by the Super Star Destroyer Ravager, of course—waiting. A victory for the Empire. One that will serve as a tolling bell ringing throughout the galaxy, heralding the return of order.”
Tashu and Crassus nod. Shale says, elbowing past the obsequious satrap and his tray of pastries: “They still have the military advantage. Particularly if they send in a large fleet as a response. How likely that is, I cannot say, but just the same, putting any of our command ships into play right now is foolhardy. This battle has no stakes except that of our survival. That is a battle you only fight if you must. If we lose this, then we lose our command ships, and likely our lives or our freedoms. That will be a tolling bell, Moff Pandion. Do you want to lose here as you did on Malastare? The loss of that communications station lost us our meager hold on that world.”
She, too, heard of his loss there—only he escaped. Fleeing in an escape shuttle as the rebels took the base behind him. In the navy, the admiral goes down with the ship. Moffs do not hold such a code, it seems.
Bringing it up has stung Pandion. His anger at that comment hangs on his face like an ugly mask. “You coward.”
Shale shrugs. “Not so much of a coward that I fled as my men fell to capture or death.”
It’s time to step in before these two kill each other. (Though that, she thinks, might solve a problem, wouldn’t it? If only she were so ruthless.)
“The plan as I see it,” she again says quite loudly, “is that we continue breakfast and continue discussing our greater purpose—the future of the Galactic Empire and the galaxy it ostensibly controls. In the meantime, o
ur people will prepare our shuttles, pack our things, and my assistant Adea will plot for us a revised location for this meeting. By lunchtime, we will adjourn to that secondary location and continue this there.”
That statement is her trying to put her boot down on the neck of a wriggling serpent to pin it to the ground before it bites her. This whole thing threatens to be a rope sliding all the way through her grip. Right now her declarative statement seems to give them pause, but she knows at any moment someone like Pandion will step forward, call a vote. That, a precedent from the night before—and a mistake she made letting them all have a voice. (And here she wonders at the larger mistake: Is this meeting a foolhardy endeavor? Perhaps Pandion has a point. The Empire needs an emperor. Not some squabbling council. Councils are how you slow the wheels of progress to an imperceptible crawl. The Galactic Senate was known for its inability to accomplish anything.)
It is what it is.
“Let our meeting commence,” she says.
—
Jom Barrel coughs. His eyes refocus. Where is he? What happened?
It doesn’t take long for it to come careening back—fast as the ground lunging up to meet him. The memory of falling. The transport in flames. His team erased from the sky, one by one, as if by the flicking finger of a callow and callous god. And him: his wings out. The wind taking him. Durs below him. Polnichk above him. A laser erasing Durs. The wind breaking Polnichk before the cannon claims him, too.
Jom fell into it, then—a jet stream of air pushing hard, a cold wind that swept him aside like a brutish hand. He dropped about thirty meters in a few seconds, then tumbled forward, the air gone from under his wings. He blacked out only to awaken again closer to the ground now—the city visible beneath him. He extended his arms once more, felt the air seize him—
His descent was ill controlled. He crashed into the side of a small wagon. And then crawled underneath a small wooden overhang strewn with hay and fruit rinds—the leavings of some domesticated animal—before passing out into what he feared might be death.