Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(109)

And then, he’s running full-throttle into a trio of desert troopers, their armor scarred, the grooves and joints caked with dust.

They raise their blasters and he skids to a halt, holding his in the air.

The troopers don’t say anything at first. Already that makes his hackles rise—Imperial soldiers are about protocol. They have a pattern. They warn you. Tell you to drop it. Like they’re on a program.

But this time, they follow no protocol. They remain silent.

Behind him, the AT-ST tromps up the dune toward them. Its shadow falls across Temmin, a shadow so damning it’s as if it has its own weight. Temmin swallows hard, feeling sweat run down his jaw, his neck, his collarbone. “I…”

“Shut your mouth,” the middle trooper says. That one’s helmet has a hard dent in the plastoid surface. He’s got a pauldron over the right shoulder, red and dark as a hot coal. He’s the leader. “Rebel scum.”

“Let’s have some fun with this one,” says the trooper on the right—the face of the helmet painted with finger-streaks of gray ash.

The one on the left takes off his helmet. A jowly, scruff-cheeked man’s face is underneath, lit up with rage. He points the blaster. “We shoot bits off him. One by one. Hands. Ears. Each knee. See how long we keep him alive. Then the AT-ST can finish him off. Scatter his atoms.”

The one in the pauldrons says: “We should do it quickly. Get back to the battle.”

“Battle’s over,” Ash-Streak says. “Might as well have fun.”

Nobody’s listening to the leader.

Nobody’s listening to anybody.

I’m going to die.

Scruff-Cheek looks up. “Hey, what the—”

Whong.

Temmin whirls around to see something land, crablike, on top of the AT-ST’s cockpit skull. That something lifts its head, feral and red, showing off a set of hand-cut sawteeth.

Bones!

The troopers open fire, but Bones is fast. Too fast for them. The droid grabs the rail at the edge of the AT-ST, swinging down like a monkey-lizard before flinging himself to the sand, landing in a crouch. Blasterfire riddles the space where he just was as he pivots, pirouettes, and begins handspringing across the sand—plasma cooking the air as he dances around each lance of searing light. Arms snap back. Blades stick out.

Bones goes to work. He gets under the pauldroned leader, sticking a vibroblade up underneath the chin of the helmet with a dull crunch. The man’s body twitches as his blaster drops. The modified B1 droid whirls around the still-standing corpse like it’s a pole, kicking out with one clawed foot and knocking Ash-Streak back. As that trooper falls to the ground, Bones pounces on his chest and—wham, wham, wham—perforates the armor again and again with the blades. The man’s heels kick the ground.

Scruff-Cheek bellows for the AT-ST to fire, and fire it does—loud blasts from its cannons biff through the sand, just missing Bones but knocking the droid back, limbs akimbo. The scruffy trooper raises his own rifle to fire on Bones, and Temmin launches himself at the man. His attack is clumsy and broadcast a kilometer away, but the helmetless stormtrooper isn’t paying attention—Temmin clubs the soldier in the temple with his own blaster and the man topples like a tree. Unnff.

Bones is up again, cartwheeling away from the AT-ST’s cannons—it tracks him, but its head is too slow, and the droid too fast. Temmin’s mechanical bodyguard returns to the place it landed, scurrying up the side of the walker’s leg, metal clicking on metal, until it reaches the top once more.

The droid struggles, his servos grinding and his pneumos whining as he wrenches the top off the AT-ST, flinging the hatch behind him. Feetfirst, Bones silently slips into the cockpit of the chicken walker.

Thus commences a bang and a rattle. The walker rocks back and forth just slightly. It takes ten seconds, no more, before Bones pops back out wearing one of the drivers’ open-face helmets, a pair of black-lens goggles hanging off in front of the B1’s own ocular lenses.

“HELLO, MASTER TEMMIN.”

Temmin falls to his knees, relieved. “Bones. I missed you, buddy.”

“I MISSED YOU. I PERFORMED VIO—”

Suddenly the top of the walker erupts in fire and shrapnel, exploding. Temmin is knocked backward, the breath knocked from his lungs in a thunderclap of air. He waves smoke out of his face and wipes sand from his eyes, and when it clears he sees the walker standing there—

It’s just two legs, now. The cockpit is peeled back like a blooming metal flower, its durasteel petals burned and charred.

Bones is nowhere to be found.

Bones. No, Bones, no…

He cries out, wondering what happened—did it detonate all on its own? Was there something the droid did to cause it to explode?

But then a pair of A-wings appear overhead, roaring past.

It was them. They shot the walker.

And Bones along with it.

Temmin crawls on his hands and knees, looking for parts of his droid—he finds seared, melted limbs. He finds rivets and scrap. But he sees nothing else. No skull. No program motherboard. He draws sand into his hands, but it slips through his fingers with nothing to show for it. Bones saved his life and now is gone. His best friend is slag.

Temmin presses his forehead to the hot sand and weeps.





“You don’t have to do this,” Conder says.