Life Debt

by Chuck Wendig

  It’s all background noise to the bounty hunter.

  The noise in the foreground is the static of her own thoughts, crackling and snapping right at the front of her mind. Her skin tingles with an unusual kind of anxiety, one she’s not used to, one that is born of a division inside her—a fissure she cannot seem to close, an injury that won’t heal. At her core, Jas feels like two different people.

  She has always told herself that everything she does is for her ownself. I am not here to make friends being an oft-repeated phrase—anytime some weapons trader or bartender or client wants to do more than talk about the business at hand, that’s the line she drops in their laps. Not friends. Don’t need them. Sorry, thank you, goodbye.

  And she’s never had much of a cause to carry, either—the only purpose she possesses is to pay her debts. Debts that actually aren’t really her own at all, are they? They’re her aunt’s. Sugi’s.

  Damn you, Sugi.

  Jas loved her aunt. Loved her more than words can say. And all the while she watched the woman fritter away her contracts. She’d bail on jobs if they violated her “honor.” Or she’d do them her own way and burn the client in the process. Or she’d side with her team, or she’d take on rinky-dink low-pay (or no-pay) work to protect some new group of underdogs or slaves or pathetic deviants, or, or, or.

  In the end, it all added up to one thing:

  Sugi owed more than she took in.

  Those debts mounted.

  And now those debts belong to Jas.

  She always told herself: I’ll never be like Aunt Sugi. This job is a merciless one, and it requires rather extreme moral calisthenics. You go where the credits flow. You take the target out however you have to. She doesn’t have to be friendly, but she damn sure has to be fast, and she has to be good. That’s how you earn a name. That’s how you get the next job.

  Even still, she tells herself that she’s here because right now, the New Republic is the winning side. They don’t have the whole galaxy pinned down and buttoned up all nice and neat yet, no, but the stars are drifting in that direction. One by one, systems shake free the yoke of the Empire’s oppression and move to independence—and the chaos of that independence drives them inevitably to the New Republic. A single banner. One government. A new galactic order.

  Whatever.

  And if that breaks apart and falls away, as it could? Then Jas tells herself: I’ll flip. She can swing like a monkey-lizard from a broken branch to a safe one. From the Republic back to the Empire—or to a Separatist system, instead. Could be she’ll tuck herself into the pocket of some credit-flush crime lord (long as it’s not the Hutts, as Sugi never had luck with those treacherous piles of humid guano). Certainly there will be a number of ex-Imperial bankers striking out on their own. They’ll need enforcers. They’ll need someone to go secure their loans—break some legs, twist some tentacles, blacken an eye or another sensory organ.

  She has always told herself: pragmatism above ideals. Self above others. The mind over the heart.

  The job above all else.

  This is that, right?

  And yet…and yet.

  Here she is. With a team, ugh. Sinjir looks over, gives her a wink even as she tries to remind herself You’re not here to make friends. And across the table is Jom, who has this look in his eye, this hungry look like he wants to reach across the table and gobble her right up and may the stars help her she feels a rising heat and by all the gods of the great beyond, what happened to her?

  Is this who she really is? Soft like Sugi? Maybe her aunt hides within her like a ghost, summoned to the flesh when she got soft. Or maybe Sugi knew something special all along. Something Jas is only just learning.

  She doesn’t like it. Burn it out with fire, she thinks.

  Norra stands there—Norra! Whom Jas feels warmly toward, which makes her wonder suddenly if her brain has been taken by some kind of parasite, like that Neimoidian tick larva that makes you crave blood?—and spreads out a special deck of pazaak cards.

  (Jas is thankful for the sudden distraction.)

  These are not your standard cards. These are the New Republic’s MOST WANTED. On each, a face and a name, listing the Imperials the New Republic wants captured. Some of them are big players presently operating within the known Empire. Others have gone AWOL, like Gedde.

  Speaking of Gedde, Norra grabs that card and hands it to her son. “Tem, if you would?”

  He nods and takes it over to a board hanging from the wall, next to the oxygen recycler. Temmin takes a little blob of tacky goo from a can, dabs it to the back of the card, and sticks it up there alongside nearly a dozen others. Among them: the targets from Akiva (Pandion, Tashu, Shale, Crassus), and those they’ve taken since (Commandant Stradd, Prefect Kosh, Moffs Keong and Nyall, Vice General Adambo, and ex-ISB minister Venn Eowelt).

  Norra says what Jas already knows: “Gedde was poisoned. Likely the poison hidden in his spice.” Jas asks if it was the fungus, and Norra confirms. As if there were any doubt, Jas thinks.

  “I know who did it,” Jas says.

  Eyes turn toward her, expectantly.

  “A bounty hunter, like me. Mercurial Swift. He loves poisons. And that mycotoxin is one of his signature favorites.”

  Jom grunts. Though he saves half a moment to pin his gaze on her. He smiles. She tries not to smile back, and fails. Damnit. “That means, what?” he asks. “The Empire is sending killers after their own?”

  “We don’t know the Empire engineered the killing,” Norra says.

  “But it makes sense, right?” Temmin asks. “I mean, c’mon. Gedde left the Empire and if we picked him up, maybe he’d flip on others.”

  “Good,” Jom says. “That’s easy, then. We suss out which ones are AWOL, and we concentrate on the others instead. Let the Empire eject its own garbage. Saves us the effort.”

  “Robs us of the credits, too,” Jas says, her brow knitted.

  “We’re not doing this for the credits.”

  “You’re not doing this for the credits. Me? It’s the only reason.”

  “You don’t care about the galaxy at all? Don’t care about doing justice for the people and kicking the Empire out the air lock?”

  She shrugs, even though inside that war between her two halves goes from a cold war to a very hot one. “No. I don’t care. I care about the Me who is on this adventure. And besides, if all of you cared so much about the people of the galaxy, why did our last job concentrate on taking out Gedde instead of Canker? Gedde was just sitting there. High on spice, hurting mostly nobody. But Canker runs a slave network. We didn’t take him out. We didn’t free any slaves. What good did we do?”

  “We had orders!” Barell protests.

  “Spoken like a true Imperial,” Jas snaps back. She’s revving his engine, now, she knows that. But past the sharp teeth of her sarcasm lies a real question: What good are they doing?

  The better question being: Why does she care?

  Jom stands, his nostrils flaring. She’s happy to have made him mad. It thrills her, inexplicably. She’s tempted to drag him into the bunkroom for another, ahem, sparring match, but Norra suddenly raises her voice to say:

  “None of this is relevant right now. We can talk about the hows and whys of what we do later. Right now, we’ve been asked—quietly, very quietly—to look into someone who has gone missing.”

  “Who is it?” Jas asks.

  Temmin whistles. “I bet it’s either Skywalker or Solo.”

  That earns him some looks—including a jaw-dropper from Norra—but Jas can buy it. She says, “That tracks. Two heroes of the Battle of Endor, and I haven’t seen Solo around here in months. Skywalker for even longer.”

  The look on Norra’s face tells the tale true—it’s one of those two. She pinches the bridge of her nose and nods. “Yes. Han Solo is missing.”

  “General Solo,” Barell corrects.

  And Norra corrects him in turn. “He resigned his commission.”

  “Then he
’s just a smuggler and not our concern.”

  “I say he’s our concern,” Norra says. “Besides, this comes from on high, from a source very high up in the New Republic—”

  “Leia,” Jas says.

  “That’s Princess Leia to you,” Norra says. “And how did you know that? Did you bug my chambers?”

  “No. I know because I’m a professional. And because scuttlebutt says the two of them have been a thing since Endor or before. Makes sense that he goes missing and she’s the one who wants him found. Understandable she’d come to us. Smart credits say she’s using Wedge as an intermediary.”

  “I heard they got married,” Temmin says.

  “Wedge and Princess Leia?” Jom asks, incredulous.

  “Solo and Princess Leia.”

  “Oh.”

  Sinjir claps his hands. “Bonus trivia: She’s pregnant.”

  A chorus of retorts and refutations rise in response. But Sinjir crosses his arms and jeers at them. “What? Don’t look at me like I’m some malfunctioning protocol droid spitting babble. Whatever your jobs are, mine is to read people like they’re a menu at the local automat. The way she dresses? The way she carries herself? The rosy flush to her cheeks? Her hands drifting unconsciously to her stomach? Preg-nant.” That last word he says in a sing-songy way.

  “PREEEEG-NAAAANT,” Mister Bones echoes, also singing—except his song is a disharmonic glitch ballad. Everyone winces.

  “Stop,” Sinjir tells the droid.

  “ROGER-ROGER.”

  All of this is melodramatic and insignificant, Jas thinks. “Do we have anything on Solo? Any leads at all?”

  “We have one,” Norra answers. “Leia sent over the Falcon’s movements. Solo was trying to single-handedly liberate Kashyyyk, but something went wrong and his copilot, Chewbacca the Wookiee, went missing. We have a pattern representing his search.” Norra pulls up a holomap. It fills the air around them with orbs representing glittering systems, each linked by a shining, shimmering hyperspace route. Norra focuses in on a region near Wild Space. “He could be in one of a dozen systems.”

  “It’s a start,” Jom says.

  Sinjir thrusts a long, pointy finger down on the table. He hops it from card to card. “Maybe some of our erstwhile Imperial guests have some information. I’ll canvass our captives.”

  “I can check with some of my contacts in the underworld,” Jas says. “If Solo’s truly desperate, he may have been clumsy enough to have drawn attention to himself.”

  “Good,” Norra says. “I’ll dust off the Moth and fly it out to where Chewbacca was taken by the Empire. Maybe if we can find a clue there as to where Solo’s copilot ended up, it’ll help us narrow down our options.”

  Jom nods. “Let’s get to work, then.”

  —

  They each know their job. Jas heads out—willfully getting ahead of Jom to make sure that he and the rest of the crew know she’s no heart-swollen star-calf, no moon-eyed waif, no lust-struck fool. But again, that war of thoughts within her: Why do you care what they think? Aren’t you protesting overmuch? Admit it, right now you’d climb him like a ladder.

  It makes her grouchy.

  Outside, Sinjir awaits to make her even grouchier.

  He’s grinning big and broad with the puckishness of a boy who hid his mother’s creditspurse.

  “What?” she asks, defensive.

  “You,” he says.

  “Me what?”

  “You never once asked.”

  “Never once asked what? Speak plainly, Sin, or I’ll boot you off this platform. I’m in no mood for your brand of devilry.”

  “What it paid.”

  “I said, speak plainly—”

  He rolls his eyes, obviously impatient with her lack of getting-it. “You never asked what it would pay to go find the missing Solo, Jas. You didn’t ask about a bounty. Or a reward. Not any of it.”

  “I…” Her breath catches in her chest. A very real and very cold panic rises inside her like a cyclone of sleet. He’s right. She didn’t. Worse, she didn’t even give a thought to it. “I knew there’d be a reward,” she lies to him (and really, to herself, as well). “Leia’s accounts run deep. Of course rescuing Solo would be a particularly big payout. And! And even if not, having an Alderaanian princess owe you a favor is not insignificant.” She tells herself that all these things are so true that she must’ve just taken them on as assumed—of course it would be worth her while.

  “Look at you. Such precious backpedaling.”

  “Eat sleem, Rath Velus.”

  He chortles and winks. She stomps off.

  I’m not here to make friends. She repeats this in her head again and again, over and over, until it’s all just gabbling noise.

  Mas Amedda is troubled. He has not slept in days. He has hardly eaten. He is a creature who is trapped by the architecture of a government he helped create, a government that no longer wants him or needs him. For a time, Amedda hoped he had it figured out—he would give himself up. He would hand himself over to the New Republic and they could do with him as they chose. It was, he believed, a foolproof plan. And it was a plan that left him eerily comforted—at least it felt like he had agency. At least it felt like the choice to give up was his. Because everything else is out of his hands. Everything but minor administrative details.

  It is lonely being the head of a dying Empire.

  He is a figurehead. Or worse than one. They don’t even trot him out for appearances. His office and his chambers make up his prison. It’s here he mostly stays. Taking in his meals. Watching the HoloNet. Thinking about his future, or rather, the lack of his future.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  Palpatine was supposed to remain. The Emperor was as certain a fixture in the galaxy as the Core itself. As fundamental as the Imperial Palace. Timeless and immortal.

  But he wasn’t.

  He is dead. And Mas Amedda is alive.

  Mas wishes he was dead, too.

  And that is his plan when he returns to his office in the tallest spire of the palace. The office has a balcony over which one can regard the width and breadth of the Empire’s throne room. It has a deflector shield, of course; the whole palace does. But that shield only stops energy blasts—it won’t stop a physical being such as himself from passing through it.

  He will go to his office. He will step out onto the balcony.

  And he will jump.

  None will care. Why would they? The illusion of a united, cohesive Galactic Empire won’t last much longer. Already the schisms have begun. It’s breaking apart like a delicate pastry in his fingers.

  You’re an administrator, Mon Mothma said. So administrate.

  The only thing he intends to administer tonight is his own demise.

  He steps into his office, distracted. It takes him a moment to notice the blue glow coming from the far side of the room, flickering before the massive bulging window that overlooks the Federal District like a great eye. It’s a holographic image. An unmoving one: a static image captured. Amedda approaches the desk cautiously.

  There, in its center, an image reader. On it, a crystal.

  Amedda stares at himself. Because there he is, in that image. Like a ghost of himself standing there, with Palpatine and four others. Screed and Rancit, he recognizes, and Yularen, too.

  The final, though—just a boy. It takes him a moment to recognize…

  “Do you remember it?” comes a voice from the far corner of the room. He startles, though he tries not to show it. Amedda turns, attempting to demonstrate his implacable demeanor. As his eyes adjust, he sees someone sitting there in the far lounger, leaning forward. Hands clasped over his—

  No, her knees.

  “Grand Admiral Sloane,” he says.

  She stands up.

  Here, before him, is the leader of one of those Imperial fragments—a rather considerable one. Perhaps the fragment of note. She controls what remains of the Imperial Navy, and their navy is dominant,
so it is clear that whoever controls the navy controls the Empire. More or less. Still, it leaves her without the bulk of the ground forces, but rumor already has it that she’s begun to bridge that gap and complete the deficit in her military presence.

  Another rumor is that she has been cleaning house. Those who are not faithful to the navy find themselves at the wrong end of a blaster.

  That’s what this is, he realizes.

  She’s come to kill him.

  And here, an ironic twist, because now Amedda is thinking: I could kill her first. He has a blaster holstered under the desk. If he could just skirt around, he could get it. He could defeat her before she defeats him. What a coup that would be—rather than the coup she intends it to be.

  He begins to back toward his desk even as she advances.

  “That image,” she says. “That is you in it.”

  “Obviously.” He’s at the edge of his desk, now. His nails tick and tack against its hard metal surface even as he slides around the edge. Now the holographic image separates him from her—her image is warped by the hologram. Stretched and mutilated, at least until he eases around to his chair and begins to sit. “Let me take a seat and we can talk.”

  “Yes. Let’s talk.”

  His hand eases to his knee, then in toward the blaster—

  “Why do you bring me this image?” he asks.

  “I want to know about it.”

  “I can’t imagine why it interests you. It’s archival. Meaningless.”

  His finger teases along the edge of the holster and he realizes—he’s leaning into it too far. His movement is surely telegraphed. She’s no fool. She’ll see what he’s doing. You have to move fast. And he does.

  He reaches in—

  And finds no blaster.

  “I have your weapon,” she says. She pulls it from behind her, letting it dangle like a tantalizing piece of fruit hanging from a branch too high to reach. “I’m not here to have a conversation with blasters. I’m here to have a conversation between two equals.”

  That last bit she says like she doesn’t believe it, though Amedda supposes he appreciates the thought just the same.