Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(11)

“I AM VERY HELPFUL,” Bones chimes in from behind them, whirling past with clanking, dancing feet.

“See? We can help.”

He knows this is hard on her. He knows that she wakes up at night, crying out for him or his father—nightmares, he guesses, though she won’t say. Because of that, she sometimes chooses not to sleep. It’s like she’s standing vigil over the console, like at some point Brentin Wexley will just appear over the comms, and tell them he’s sorry, and that everything will be okay. It wasn’t even Dad’s fault. They said he had something in his head—a control bio-chip like the ones in the Wookiees on Kashyyyk, except more advanced. These chips didn’t just prevent behavior: They programmed it.

They turned captives into killers. Good people, made bad.

“I was there, too,” he says softly. “I saw what Dad did.” He thinks, but doesn’t say: He tried to kill himself. Only after trying to kill Temmin. In fact, if Temmin hadn’t intervened, his father would’ve ended it right there. Was that part of the programming? Or was that Dad resisting it?

“I can’t lose you, too,” Norra says.

“You won’t lose me. Okay? Let me be a part of this.”

“I…” But her words die on her lips. Instead she straightens up and gives a small shake to her head. “This is it. Jakku. Coming up out of hyperspace. Ready?”

“Mom—”

“Not now, Tem. Later. Are we good?”

“Fine. Yes. Whatever. Out of hyperspace in mark—three.”

“Two,” she says.

“One.”

They drop out of hyperspace.

And that’s when everything goes wrong.





As soon as the Moth drops out of lightspeed, system alarms start going off—the cockpit fills with pulsing red light, and as the klaxons shriek, the screens start lighting up. But Norra doesn’t need the screens to see what’s out there. No way to miss what they just fell into.

After Chandrila, the Empire fell off the map. It was like one day they existed, and the next they were gone.

But the Empire isn’t gone at all.

The Empire came here.

No. What is this? It can’t be…

Her gaze casts across the span of space above the rawbones planet of Jakku. Hanging there are a dozen star Destroyers, maybe more. And farther out, the massive spear-tip shape of an Executor-class dreadnought. New alarms warn that Imperial weapons systems are spinning up and targeting them. Worse, new ships ping the Moth’s sensors: TIE fighters. There’s a swarm of them, coming in fast.

Even as Temmin is yelling at her, even as she hears Sinjir calling forward to find out what’s going on, Norra does not hesitate. She’s dancing on a tripwire, and no part of her can trigger the trap of indecision.

No time for questions. No time for uncertainty.

Instantly she focuses on the cockpit console, locking in the coordinates that will take the Moth and its crew to Chandrila. As her fingers work as fast as they’re able, she barks an order to her son: “Keep us afloat, point the ship clear. Hyperspace in two minutes.”

Then she unstraps and gets out of her chair.

He calls after her: “Where are you going?”

But she has no time to explain.

And he wouldn’t like the answer anyway.

—

The TIEs are fast. They rush forward in a nest formation, then break apart around the Moth—the freighter rocks with laser blasts peppering the front shields, and Temmin cries out and jams the flight stick down as far as it’ll go. The ship plunges toward the planet as one word whirls through his head on a repeating loop: Evade, evade, evade.

Flashes of laser light punctuate the dark around the MK-4; the craft shakes like a kicked can as Temmin puts a corkscrew spin on it, pulling back out of the dive, pointing both away from the planet and away from the fleet.

The Imperial fleet is here.

The. Whole. Damn. Fleet.

He’s not ready for this. Suddenly his desire to be in the middle of the action seems like a child’s plea—begging to be in on the adventure and then discovering it’s far scarier than he ever imagined. Temmin doesn’t want to be an adult, he doesn’t want to grow up, he damn sure doesn’t want to be a single ship caught in the middle of the entirety of the Imperial remnant.

Someone slams into the back of his chair. Sinjir’s cry of alarm reaches his ears: “What the bloody hell is this? Where are we? Where is Norra?”

“I don’t know!” Temmin bites the inside of his cheek as he desperately tries to point the ship at open space—but Imperial ships are everywhere. So many ships. TIE fighters fill the void. Star Destroyers line the sky like the jagged fangs of a monster’s closing maw. The sensors start blinking faster, and on the screen he sees worse news: The SSD out there just launched a trio of torpedoes. I can’t outfly torpedoes. I’m not that good. I’m not ready. To Sinjir he screams: “I need a gunner! Sit down and start shooting!”

Sinjir drops into the pilot’s seat like a clumsy pile of broken sticks. He stares at the controls as if he’s looking at an instruction manual written in Wookiee claw marks. “I don’t know how to do this!”

“Join the club!” Temmin screams for his mother: “Mom? Mom!” Where did she go? What is happening?