by Chuck Wendig
“You, you monster…”
Cobb shrugs. “Oh, now. I’m no monster. No worse than your boss, that Weequay dung-muncher, Lorgan Movellan. I know his scam. I know all the scams. Afraid the Republic is back and gonna put their boot down on all the lowlifes and scum-lickers, the syndicates are trying to find new ways to appear legit. And with the Hutts fighting one another for control, bunch of these little quote-unquote mining companies are swooping in with brutes like your boss at the helm. A new age of mining barons. Won’t fly. I’m here now. Me and others like me. Bringing the law to this lawless place. And that starts with me shooting you and taking that armor out from under you.”
Adwin whimpers. “Please don’t kill me.”
“Oh, I’m not. I’m leaving you alive so you can go tell your boss that he’d best pack up and hit the hyperspace lanes out of this sector, lest he wants me coming for him in my new—well, new to me—suit of armor.”
“I will,” Adwin says, sinking to the floor. He watches Cobb pick up the box of armor before heading to the door.
On his way out, Cobb says: “Next time you wanna pretend to be a gunfighter, best to shoot first, talk later. Bye now.”
Whap.
The rock crashes hard against the stormtrooper’s helmet. The helmet spins and visibility is lost. Jom Barrel dances around to the front of the armor-clad Imperial and gives a hard kick upward—the toe of his boot catches the stormtrooper’s blaster hand. The hand snaps back. The blaster leaves the grip and spirals forward.
Jom catches it and fires three bolts into the stormtrooper’s chest.
The body drops atop the other three troopers.
Jom’s one broken arm still dangles at his side.
Not bad for a bird with a busted wing, he thinks.
He starts to climb up the ladder that leads up to the turbolaser ground-to-orbit turret, but as it turns out, climbing up the ladder is the hardest part. He has to lean into it. Take it slow. Haul himself up with one good arm, the stormtrooper’s blaster rifle bolted onto his back.
It’s a miserable endeavor.
Lots of grunts and growls.
It takes what seems like a galactic epoch, but somehow he manages to get to the top and pop the hatch. He starts to climb inside—
“Don’t move,” comes a voice.
A young Imperial gunnery officer in his little officer’s hat stands there. A small Imperial blaster pointed. That hand shakes just so.
Jom sighs. He climbs all the way through—“Slowly!” as the Imperial warns him—and lifts his one hand up to placate.
“Both hands,” the officer says. He’s a fresh-faced nobody. Cheeks like marshmallows. Scared eyes like livestock about to meet its maker. The kid stands in front of the gunnery console—through the glass, Jom can see the twin turbolaser barrels aimed heavenward.
“One’s broken,” Jom says.
“I said…both hands.”
Jom growls. Fragging kid. He winces as he lifts his broken arm. White-hot pain arcs across both shoulders. He bares his teeth and stares through watering, wincing eyes. “There.”
“Now…on your knees.”
“You’re young.”
“Wh…what?”
“Young. Like a baby whilk calf—don’t know a whilk? I grew up on a farm. Long-legged critters. Meat tastes stringy, but the milk is good, and their hides make for fine leather. Their babies are clumsy, fumbling things. Knock-kneed and dumb as a box of retainer bolts. You’re just a baby.”
“I am not,” the officer insists, gesturing again with the blaster.
“Uh-huh. Lemme guess how it’s been. Your top officers are mostly gone now. A lot of them went up with the Death Star or the ensuing battles. Some got sold out by governors. So now the officer pool is either guys like you who are really young and untested, or really old and are being brought back in from the pasture because they got nobody else.”
“I am not untested.”
“Not anymore, you’re not. Because I’m testing you. Here’s my test: You can run or you can die. I’d not fault you for running. You wouldn’t be the first Imperial to abandon his post. Some of you are finally figuring out you lost the war and you’re just clinging to debris. It’s okay. You can go, and they won’t ever find you.” Jom steps sideways, circling a bit closer to the officer and the gunnery console behind him. “Go ahead.”
“I…”
“No judgment here, pal.”
The officer lowers the gun, takes one ginger step forward. Like someone easing across the surface of a frozen lake, moving slowly lest the whole thing crack and shatter and dump them into the hoarfrost depths.
Jom thinks: Well, that went better than expected.
But then a look crosses the young officer’s face—another flash of fear, but this time it’s different. A greater fear. A fear of his own people and what they’ll do to him if he runs.
The officer makes a decision in that moment. He raises the blaster anew—but by the time it’s up, Jom is already charging forward like a bull. He slams into the Imperial, lifting both of them off the ground and slamming the young officer back onto the console. The young officer goes still, and rolls off onto the ground. He curls up, moaning.
Jom takes the blaster pistol, picks up the kid, and shoves him in a footlocker trunk toward the back. “Shoulda made a different choice, kid,” Jom says, then slams the trunk down. Inside, the officer yells and weeps.
Jom winces and sits at the console.
He pulls up radar—one ship.
Incoming.
He taps on it, and data cascades across a trio of screens in front of him—it’s a yacht. A Ryuni-Tantine Vita-Liner. Fancy ship, if a little old, for the richest in the galaxy—what Jom and his friends used to call the “upper-atmos,” because on his world, Juntar, the richest of the rich used to live up in the sky in these floating mansions while the rest of the world toiled on the farms and in the dirt-cities below. The yacht is from an older day—Clone Wars era. A day of greater pomp and circumstance.
It’s got a trajectory toward the palace.
He checks its signature, because somehow, it’s made it through the blockade—and sure enough, the code that flashes checks out:
It’s an Imperial code. Which makes that an Imperial ship.
Jom chuckles and spins up the cannons. He pulls out the manual controls and tilts the two barrels of the massive turret toward the yacht—the ship coming in low and slow out of the clouds, its side gleaming in the sun like a sheen of liquid light. Jom grins and winks. “Bye-bye, little ship.”
He pulls the twin triggers.
Nothing happens.
Pull, pull, pull. Click, click, click.
Nothing.
“Fraggit!” he bellows. Slamming the officer into the console must have damaged…something.
He watches the yacht ease toward the palace. Safe as a star-whale in an empty ocean. No, no, no. He has to fix this thing. And he has to fix it now. Because he’s taking out that ship, one way or another.
The very simple plan is this:
They find their way to the entrance into the satrap’s palace. It’s obvious enough: It’s not sealed with some inelegant crumble of rock and stone, but rather with the finest brick. Blood-red bricks embedded with flecks of lucryte—a semiprecious stone that glitters and flashes when light touches it. Upon the brick is a sign in ornate script: SEALED BY THE AUTHORITY OF THE SATRAPY OF MYRRA, AKIVA.
Then, they move down the hall, just around the bend.
And there they wait.
The officers will come past. Likely with a handful of stormtroopers or palace guards in tow. And once past, they will have a surprise waiting.
Norra’s not sure about this. She hunkers down behind a pile of mossy rubble and leans back toward Jas. “You’re sure this will work?”
“No,” Jas says. “I’m never sure. But this is our best bet.”
“We won’t be able to take them all.”
“Among the four of us, I trust in our abilities.
Particularly with my skills and the droid’s programming, we will be just fine.”
To Temmin, Norra says: “Are you okay?”
He nods. But he’s not okay. She can see that. Something is bothering him. He tries wearing a confident, even cocky mask—giving her that wry smile of his. But it’s false. She’s his mother, so she knows. Something is eating at him—chewing him up from the inside out.
He’s afraid, maybe.
But is that all? He’s usually so fearless. This feels like something else.
No time to find out now.
She hears something. To her son and the bounty hunter, she raises a finger to her lips and then mouths the words: They’re coming.
Moments pass. And as they do, confusion and then horror settle into her, because what she’s hearing isn’t from the direction of the sealed portal. It’s from the other direction. It’s coming from behind them.
A faint shudder to the ground. Footsteps. Coming closer and closer.
“The Uugteen,” Jas says, and jacks a slug into her rifle.
“No,” Norra says. “I know that sound.” It’s not the mad scramble of those wretched things—the Uugteen swarmed with scrape of metal and machine wails. This is a measured step. The clatter of armor, not of repurposed droid limbs. “Stormtroopers!” Norra says.
And down the long, cragged passage behind them, she sees the first flash of white armor. A red laser bolt punctures the air just above their heads—a spray of stone and debris. Norra fires back, and then suddenly the air is peppered with streaks of light. “Fall back!” Norra says.
They have only one fallback position.
Back toward the sealed gateway into the palace: a dead end.
But what choice do they have? They pull back around the corner, and as they do, she tries to get a quick count of what’s coming—a dozen or more stormtroopers. A tough fight, but maybe doable. Maybe.
They round the corner—
Just as the gateway detonates. Crimson bricks clatter against the wall as the explosion eradicates the barrier.
Through the dark haze of smoke and dust, more flashes of white.
Stormtroopers pouring in from that end, too. Now they’re trapped on both sides, caught like a rat between two cats—
It hits her, then. A sinking feeling as she realizes:
Sinjir sold them out.
They’re caught at the corner, hunkering down next to one another, she and Temmin firing in one direction, Jas and the droid—Bones with a blaster in his clawlike grip, too—firing in the other.
A voice cuts through the hellstorm—
“Put your weapons down.” A woman’s voice.
The look on Jas’s face is a lightning strike of sheer rage—a mask of fury and murderous determination. “Eat slugs!” she barks, and raises her long-barreled rifle again. But Norra puts a hand on her shoulder. Jas looks—a confusing stare. Pleading in its own way. Let me kill them, it says.
But Norra shakes her head and drops her weapon.
“Norra,” Jas says.
“You can’t claim that bounty if you’re dead,” she answers.
“I’m so sorry,” Temmin says.
The woman’s voice calls out again: “Weapons down. Stand up with your hands up. Move slowly.”
Jas curses in a tongue Norra doesn’t know, then lays her rifle down. Temmin’s blaster is already down and he tells Bones to do the same.
They stand, hands up.
Stormtroopers emerge through the haze. A dozen on each side of them. Too many to take, even with a skilled bounty hunter and psychopathic battle droid on their side. Norra’s insides twist up.
Through the stormtroopers on the palace side, a woman—the one who commanded them to lay down their weapons, it seems—walks through her soldiers and toward the fore. Her hands are clasped behind her back. The woman has dark eyes and skin, and her face is pursed into a dissecting stare. Her back has an arch to it, and her posture is one of authority and confidence.
An admiral, by the bars across her chest.
“I’m Admiral Rae Sloane,” the woman says. “You are under arrest for conspiring against the Galactic Empire, long may it reign.”
Jas curses again in an unknown tongue: “A-kee a’ tolo, fah-roo kah.” Then she spits on the ground.
“You’ll never get away with this,” Norra says. “The end of the Empire is here. The comet is coming that will smash the rest of your rule to dust.”
“Yes, well. The comet has not struck us yet, Norra Wexley. Come. For a short—very short—while, you get to be guests of the satrapy of Akiva.”
—
Jom lies down underneath the console. Wires dangle in his face like the face-tentacles of a Quarren dentist. He ties off one wire, then pairs another two together. It sparks and he curses. He fights desperately to bypass the trigger mechanism—which must be broken—and allow firing control to route right to the console itself. He ignores the pinprick burns on his face and tries a third wire—
Above him, he hears a hum. The console is back on.
That did it. Yes!
He bites the inside of his cheek to distract from the pain as he hauls himself back to standing, then he again aims the cannons—now the yacht has landed at the palace. Well, no, not exactly—it can’t land, not now. The landing ring is a mess. Even from here he can see that the whole thing leans at a bad angle and looks as fragile as a house of pazaak cards. So the yacht hovers, burning fuel and staying aloft just nearby.
It gives him a clear shot.
He takes it. Jom finds the button to which he rerouted the firing mechanism—a button once used just to turn the lights on and off inside the turret—and smashes it with his thumb.
Nothing happens.
He roars in frustration and presses it again.
The console lights up bright, then too bright, and then sparks crackle out of the sides and seams and then the whole thing goes dark.
—
Norra is forced to her knees on the palace floor. A beautiful floor: a cerulean blue like she’s never seen before shot through with veins of copper and bronze. It has the look of seawater catching sunlight, and part of her wants to stare down at it forever and ever, pretending that none of this is happening. But it is happening. Sinjir has sold them out. They are captives. Their mission has failed and they will be imprisoned or executed.
Despite her best desires, Norra isn’t the type to turn away from what’s coming, no matter how terrible.
She lifts her chin and meets it, scowling.
Next to her, Temmin and Jas kneel, too. The droid remains standing, warily pivoting his head around, looking at all those who surround them—every time his skull turns on its axis, she hears its little servomotors whine.
She thinks: The droid is scattered. Upset. Unpredictable.
She whispers to her son: “Control your droid.”
But Temmin just looks ashen. He says nothing.
The admiral paces alongside them. At the top of a set of grand steps stand others of import: Norra sees a tall, fox-faced man in a dark moff’s uniform and a smaller, older woman. That must be the general: Jylia Shale. Behind them, a round-bellied, rubicund man with a wispy beard and another individual in a tall, pompous hat. That one has a strangely beatific smile.
Rae gives a nod to someone.
Through the crowd, they bring Sinjir.
His eye is swollen shut. His nose, plugged with blood, and the bridge of it looks scabbed over, maybe even broken. Sinjir’s hands are bound behind his back. They shove him forward and he lands hard against his shoulder with an oof.
“Sinjir,” Norra says. “I don’t understand.”
Stormtroopers approach with magnacuffs.
“LET ME FREE, MASTER TEMMIN,” Bones says, his astromech arm starting a slow whir.
Temmin, in a small voice says: “No, Bones. No.”
A trooper grabs roughly for Norra’s arms, yanking them back. The cuffs snap around her wrist. They grab for Jas, too, and she fights a little
—yanking her shoulders away and growling like a feral beast—but that small act of defiance isn’t enough. The shackles hum and snap around her wrists.
Temmin, though: He stands up.
“Temmin,” Norra says. “Son, this isn’t the time.”
But he ignores her and steps forward. Stranger still, nobody stops him.
“Let me go,” he says. “Me, my mother, and the droid.”
Jas says, “Oh, no. Temmin, no.”
The sound in her voice: disappointment. Norra doesn’t get it at first, but then Temmin says: “That’s the deal. Honor the deal.”
Rae holds up a small holoscreen. She taps a button and a projection emits. There stands a flickering blue hologram of a Sullustan with one eye. She knows who that is. That is Surat Nuat.
“Your deal was with him,” Sloane says, and the Sullustan smiles.
The projection of Surat speaks: “Regrettably, boy, the Empire has negotiated their own deal. And they have changed their terms.”
“No!” Temmin says. “You said we could go free.”
“Temmin,” Norra says, and she hears the terror in her voice. This can’t be true. He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t…“Temmin, what is going on?”
He shoots her a look: sad and panicked. “I’m sorry.”
From the floor, Sinjir groans. “He sold us out.”
“I wanted to stay here,” Temmin says. “I didn’t want to leave. This is my home! I had to give Surat something or he’d kill us. Mom, please.” Then to the admiral: “No! This wasn’t what we said. The deal was for me, my mom, my droid—we all get to go.”
“You may go,” Rae says. “The others remain. Unless you’d like to stay behind, as well? I’m flexible on how tight we tie this noose.”
Surat chuckles.
Jas looks at the boy and says, “You’d make a good bounty hunter, kid.”
“He’d make an even better Imperial,” Sinjir says.
Temmin, rattled now beyond measure, wheels on his droid. “Bones! Save us!” And the droid utters a mechanized war whoop and leaps up—
The battle droid never had a chance.
Laserfire cuts the metal man down in midair. The B1 droid screams and lands hard on his ground, so hard he shatters the blue-and-bronze tile. His legs go out from under him and he slams onto his side as Temmin races to him. Stormtroopers shove the boy out of the way and then hold him back. Norra tries to get to her feet but they hold her there.