by Chuck Wendig
Temmin looks at his shop, says a small and silent good-bye, then shuts it. Ahead, Sinjir snaps on the illumi-droids: little floating lanterns, each with a trio of tentacle arms dangling beneath. Arms that dead-end in pincer grips.
The light from the droids is mottled, greasy. (They’re dirty and dinged up.) But it’s enough.
Norra and Sinjir forge ahead. Temmin starts to follow, but Jas catches his arm first. “This crate,” she says.
“Surat’s weapon,” he says. He tries to say it with some authority, like, Yeah, this is Surat’s, and I stole it. What of it?
“It’s not a weapon.”
“What? Yes it is.”
“Maybe it can be. But it isn’t literally a weapon.”
“I don’t understand, how did you—” He touches one of the carbon locks, and it springs open. His eyes widen. “What? What. I’ve been trying to open these for days. For days!”
“I picked them.”
“You…you just picked them. Do you have magic fingers? Are you some kind of wizard?”
“I have talents. And I used them while I was down here repairing my gun before I helped your mother claim one of those TIE fighters for herself.” She gestures toward it. “Go on. Pop it.”
He does. Like a kid on his naming day, he rips into this present with greedy gusto. Soon as the lid lifts, a blue glow emerges. He has to squint against it, it’s so bright. Then he sees. It’s a box of data cubes.
“Data cubes?” he asks. “That’s it? It’s not a weapon at all!”
“It’s not. It’s something far better: information.”
“Surat was protecting information?”
“I don’t know about what. But if we get through this, I’ll help you figure out what that information is. And then together we can sell it.”
Ah. There it is. There’s her angle. He knew there had to be one. He clucks his tongue. “And I assume you get a cut. For your benevolence and wisdom and your connections to whatever market would buy this—”
“Sixty–forty.”
“Oh, whoa, hey, that’s not fair—”
“I’ll give you the sixty.”
Oh. He hesitates. Ahead, the light recedes as the others walk on, the illumi-droids bobbling after them. His mother calls: “Are you coming?”
“Deal,” he tells Jas, then shakes her hand.
“Deal.”
“We’re coming!” he yells. Under his breath, he adds: “So impatient.”
—
Sinjir is used to tight spaces. The Empire was not known for its roomy architecture. It was fond of austere pragmatism (that term, austere pragmatism, or sometimes pragmatic austerity, found its way atop many Imperial brochures and propaganda tracts), and so kept its hallways low and narrow. Stormtroopers were literally supposed to be within the same range of height and weight in part because of exactly that—he wasn’t joking when he said he was too tall to be a stormtrooper.
The catacombs, as such, do not give him claustrophobia. Not strictly speaking. No, the anxiety in his chest is from something else: the way they wind around. It’s not enough that the maze asks them to go right, left, or straight. Instead some passages go up, others down, and others yet wind around in a spiral. One pathway will be dry as dust, and the smell coming out of it will be of pulverized bone. Another pathway will be wet, heady, almost fungal. They walk through puddles and over crumbling stone and mortar. Sometimes the illumi-droids highlight a wall as they pass, and the wall shows off filthy handprints streaked across the rock, or instead shows something in a language far off from Basic. Some curse, perhaps, some profanity. Or perhaps some threat.
Occasionally, sounds wind their way through the labyrinth, too. Scraping. Scuffing. A hiss. Once: A pair of green eyes sat shining in the darkness like glowing crystals. When their light reached it, Sinjir saw it was just a fengla—a pale, hairless vermin. High haunches and crooked incisors. It spits and hisses before scurrying off, claws clicking.
They walk for a while. Stopping sometimes to check the map. Then they continue on. Walking underneath dripping water—lingering rainwater, Temmin assures them, not, like, the bodily excretions of some Ithorian doing his business up above. They cross a long, narrow bridge—only halfway across it does Sinjir realize that it matches the battle droid, because the thing is mostly bones. Larger bones. Not human. Bound up with rusted wire. It sways over a chasm, and Sinjir remembers the great rift below him as he dangled there in Surat Nuat’s dungeon. A dungeon that must connect up to the city’s underground space.
Soon, they start to see droid pieces. And blaster scoring on the walls. Sinjir even thinks he sees scarring from lightsaber blades: This was the site of an old battle during the Clone Wars. When the Jedi were populous and not on the edge of extinction.
Temmin says, “We’re coming up on the junk pits.”
The map says as much, Sinjir thinks.
And then he watches Temmin. He hadn’t been, not really. The boy seemed fine, if a bit shook up from all of this. He can pretend he’s hard against it, but between almost getting killed by a Sullustan gangster and losing his mother, it’s to be expected that the boy is off his kilter.
Something else is going on, though.
It’s in the way the boy looks around. And fidgets. He’s nervous. Like he’s hiding something. Temmin has a secret.
Sinjir hangs back, and urges Jas to hang back with him.
“What is it?” she asks in a low voice.
“We need to talk.”
“Mm,” she says, nodding like this was inevitable. “I knew this would come. And yes, I concede.”
“You concede what, exactly?”
“You are satisfying.”
“I…don’t follow. Satisfying? I don’t know what that means. I do know that it sounds awfully…milquetoast. Drinking a cup of protein slurry when you’re truly hungry is satisfying. And yet, disgusting.”
Jas gives him a frustrated look. “I mean that I find you capable. You interest me. And so, yes, when all this is over, we may couple.”
“Couple. Like—” His face goes suspiciously and surprisingly red. “Like you and me? Together?”
“That is indeed what I mean.”
He laughs. “Oh.”
“If you’re going to laugh about it,” she says, suddenly stung. “Then you can take my invitation and stick it in your exhaust port.”
“No, I just mean…I’m not into…this.”
“This?” Her scowl deepens and her teeth bare. “Aliens?”
“Women.”
“Oh. Oh.”
“Yes, oh.”
“Oh.”
Moments pass. The awkwardness between them is a living thing—like a cloud of flies you can’t ignore no matter how hard you try. Eventually she blurts out: “You wanted to speak to me about something else, apparently?”
“Ah. Yes. The boy. Temmin.”
“He’s clearly too young for you.”
“Would you stop? That’s not what I mean. Listen. He’s lying to us.”
“Everybody is lying all the time, Sinjir. I recognize that your former role in the Empire makes you excessively paranoid, but—”
“The map,” he says, finally. “It’s about the map.”
“What about it?”
“Temmin told us the map had changed. That it was wrong.”
He sees the realization hit her. It lands on her the way a fly lands on someone’s nose. “But it hasn’t been wrong,” she says. “It’s been right.”
“Exactly.”
“He’s hiding something.” Her brow darkens. “Something down here he doesn’t want us to see, perhaps.”
“A stash, maybe. A trove.”
“Could be. Keep your eyes peeled.”
“You too.”
—
The junk pits: massive craters dug out of the catacombs. The stone brick gives way to natural rock, opening into chambers wide and deep that house heaps and mounds of old scrap. Droid parts, mostly, and a great deal of it largely unr
ecognizable or unusable. The good stuff likely picked over and pulled out—by my son, Norra thinks.
She stands by it, looking around. She kicks a stone forward. It pings off what looks like a half-melted protocol droid arm. Other parts clang and clatter, sliding down—a momentary avalanche of scrap-scree. All of it echoes. Temmin sidles up next to her. “There goes us being quiet,” he says.
“We’re alone down here.”
“You hope.”
She rolls her eyes. “Where are the other two?” Mister Bones stands about three meters back still cradling the crate of thermal detonators while humming. But the other two aren’t here.
“They’re back a way. Talking. I saw the light from their droid.”
“Hm.” She wrinkles her brow. “Temmin, do you trust Sinjir?”
“I dunno. Why?”
“He’s an Imperial. He hurt people for a living.”
“You trust the bounty hunter but not the Imperial?”
She shrugs. “A bounty hunter lives by a certain code. They want to get paid and this mission gets her paid. I trust her as far as all that.”
“But Sinjir, not so much.”
“I…don’t know. I want to trust him.”
“He got us this far.”
“That’s true.”
“He hasn’t fragged us over yet.”
“Language,” she chides.
“Sorry.”
“And you’re right. But we could be walking into a trap.”
Temmin tenses up and looks away. She sees now she’s given him cause to worry. “They aren’t family,” he says. “We’re family.”
“We are. But I’m sure we’ll be fine. It’ll all be okay.”
“Yeah.” He thrusts his tongue in the pocket of his cheek and idly nudges a stone with his shoe. “Mom, I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
He dithers a bit. “For…being a real sleemo to you. It wasn’t right. I just…” His nostrils flare as he draws a deep breath. “I missed you. And I miss Dad. And I was mad that you left and then even madder that maybe you died and I…I don’t have what you have. I don’t have the…courage, I don’t have that fire in my heart for the New Republic like you. I just…”
She puts her arm around him. “It’s okay. You’re a kid, Tem. You got enough to worry about. Don’t worry about this. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
A flutter in her chest. She knows he loves her. But to hear it? It makes all the difference.
From behind them, Jas calls: “Are we stopping?”
Norra answers: “No. Just waiting for the pair of you to catch up.”
They keep on.
—
It’s time, Sinjir thinks, to pry.
They walk past the junk pits, toward the direction of what the map says is the old droid factory. Or its entrance, at least. Temmin says they’ll have to go right past the front of it—though thankfully not inside.
As they pass by a wall of glowing fungus—the stone beneath their feet loose and slippery, slick with spongy moss—Sinjir catches up with Temmin and his B1 battle droid, Bones.
“That droid of yours,” Sinjir says. “He’s something.”
Temmin looks up. A dubious brow raised. “Yeah. I know.”
“You find him down here?”
“Uh-huh. In one of the pits.”
The battle droid saunters alongside. Singing a quiet (well, not that quiet) little song: “DOO DEE DOO DOO BAH BAH BAH DOO DOO.”
“He’s obviously no longer standard-issue,” Sinjir says. “You’ve done some modifications.”
“Thanks, Darth Obvious. Or is it Emperor Palpable? Next you’ll tell me which end of a blaster is the shooty-shooty one, or why I wouldn’t do so hot in a Wookiee arm-wrestling league.”
“You can’t out-snark me, boy, so don’t even try. I’m just saying—how exactly did you program that droid to be so…that.” He gestures to the droid, who stops singing long enough to do a high kick.
Temmin sighs. As if this line of questioning bores him and yet he must persevere. “Bones is primed with a high-octane cocktail of programs. Some heuristic combat droid programs, some martial arts vids, the moves of some Clone Wars cyborg general, and also, the body-mapped maneuvers of a troupe of la-ley dancers from Ryloth.”
Dancers. That explains some things, actually. The occasionally graceful way the droid moves, but also: the humming and singing.
“Crafty,” Sinjir says.
“That’s me.”
“What else is down here?”
“I dunno. Your guess is as good as mine.”
That answer: It reads true. Temmin doesn’t appear to be lying, but as Sinjir just noted: The boy is crafty. “Is there something down here you don’t want us to see, Temmin?”
“What? Are you accusing me of something?”
“I just want you to know we’re not going to…plunder your wares.”
“I don’t have any wares down here to plunder.”
Sinjir sniffs. “I thought perhaps you didn’t want us getting to the droid factory treasure before you did. But that means it’s something else.”
“…what’s something else?”
“You’re hiding something, Temmin. I can sense it.”
There! There it is. Temmin’s whole expression shifts just slightly—there’s a flicker on his face like a disruption in a hologram, a sign that Sinjir is right. The boy is hiding something. “I…I’m not—”
Ahead, Jas says: “The factory.”
She points to the side.
To Temmin, Sinjir says: “To be continued.” Then they jog to catch up, the little illumi-droid burbling a meter behind.
Here, the passageway opens up. The droid factory entrance is a wide mouth framed by metal arches, two booths, an old corroded sign that says: SUPPORT THE CONFEDERACY OF INDEPENDENT SYSTEMS! Another sign says: BUY A DROID FROM THE SEPARATIST ALLIANCE! A third hanging from above—at an angle, since one of the bolts has come free—says, RALLY AGAINST REPUBLIC OPPRESSION. On that one, some of the letters are so rusted they’ve essentially gone missing.
Norra says: “This, from the days when the Separatists brought the war to the Outer Rim in the later years of the Clone Wars.”
“How’d they get the droids out?” Jas says. “They didn’t march them through these…sewers.”
Temmin shifts his weight nervously. Sinjir watches him. The boy says: “Used to be a telescoping platform. They’d raise the droids up for delivery and ships would pick them up. It’s all destroyed, sealed over. I thought once you could get down here from there, but it’s too wrecked.” He scratches his head. “Can we go? This place gives me the hypers.”
A small technique for rooting out truth is to make the subject—Sinjir actually thinks the word victim but he tries to shove that kind of thinking back in the dark hole from whence it came—uncomfortable. Put them off balance. Do that, they make mistakes. They say things they don’t mean to say. And so, that is Sinjir’s plan of the moment.
He picks up a hunk of stone. “It’s not haunted,” he says. “Look.”
Sinjir wings the stone toward the gate. It bongs off one of the booths. Rust flakes rain and the stone drops.
“Don’t!” Temmin cautions.
“There’s nothing to worry about, the factory isn’t—”
Inside, deep within the bowels of the factory, something howls. A mechanized sound. Not human. Maybe not altogether robotic, either.
“The gates,” Jas says. “This place should be sealed up.”
“But it’s not,” Norra adds. “Everything’s open.”
Another wail. And a third after that. Closer now.
“I HAVE A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS,” Mister Bones says.
“We need to go,” Temmin says.
From inside the old factory, a sudden scramble of sound—metal on metal. Like footsteps. Coming toward them, and closing in fast.
“Run!” Sinjir yells.
His red nostrils flare. Air in and out. Ac
kbar longs for water. He has a small tank here—a bacta healing tank retrofitted with water possessing the salinity and pH balance of his homeworld, Mon Calamari. Sometimes he goes into it and just…floats. But he has little time for such moments.
Maybe one day. But not today.
The message from Captain Antilles plays again and again in his mind. It came in on an Imperial channel, of all things. Ackbar wasn’t the recipient, but saw it soon after. Wedge looked ragged, injured. His message before he collapsed and the communications ended was brief. Too brief. High-level Imperial meeting. Blockade on…Akiva. Palace at Myrra. Now is the—
And then it was over.
He tells the others—Agate, Madine, Mon Mothma, Ensign Deltura—that Antilles was right. Ackbar presumes to finish the captain’s statement:
“Now is the time. Prepare a small fleet, but have other ships in reserve, fueled up with full loadouts. Agate, I want you to lead the charge. Be ready for anything. If this is the Empire, you can be sure they will not go easily. And they are overly fond of tricking us into doing what they want.”
—
It’s like inverting a pyramid and carrying it, point down, on your back. All that weight. The sharp peak between your shoulder blades. Built of bricks of blame. A terrible and uncomfortable burden.
Sloane is feeling it now.
The others are driven now by panic, rage, opportunity. Pandion, trying to winnow her down to particulate matter. Shale, the doomsayer who thinks they must surrender now or die soon. Tashu, interjecting now and again with some parable or pabulum about the wisdom of the dark side and if only they followed its teachings and oh, Palpatine said this, the old Sith writings said that. Crassus wants to buy their way out. He’s waving around his metaphorical creditspurse thinking that the Empire can bribe its way free of New Republic persecution. Best of luck with that, Rae thinks.
The satrap, at least, remains quiet. He sits in the corner, staring down at his hands. The writing is on the wall for that one. He knows the Empire will abandon him. He will be left with a city that seeks his head on a pitchfork so they can wave it around for all to see.
In the other corner of the dining room—as they have never yet made it to the meeting room near their quarters on this troubled and turbulent day—stands Adea, her leg already bound up in a foam-layer cast printed by the medical droid. The assistant hobbles over and Rae thinks: I must keep her close. She has shown more steel than most of these so-called Imperials.