Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(112)

A pta fruit spatters uselessly against Wartol’s face. It hits. It drips. It plops back down to the ground. His jaw extends outward and curls into an underbite, and the senator blasts a puff of air upward, unmooring dribbling pta juice from his nose-slits and brow.

“The fruit won’t save you now.”

Sinjir says, “No. But it distracted you, didn’t it?”

Wartol makes a bewildered, animal sound—nngh?—just as a blaster goes off and clips him in the shoulder. He spins like a child’s top and crashes against his own chair. His cup of whatever-it-was splashes down against him and shatters. The snub-barreled blaster drops. Conder steps forward, his own blaster in hand, and steps down on it.

With a quick slide of his foot, he sends the blaster spinning to Sinjir, who snatches it and wearily stands.

“Have I been shot in the head?” he asks Conder.

Conder’s eyes open in shock, and his mouth forms an alarmed O-shape. Well, I suppose that answers that. Sinjir’s hand flies to the side of his head—it comes away wet with his own blood. Some of it has already been cauterized, making it tacky against his fingers. The shot glanced along the side of his head, carving a furrow that starts at his temple.

“Sin, I think you’ll be all right—”

“I’ll be fine. My rather luxurious hair, not so much.” He strides forward and stands atop Wartol. “You. Answer for yourself.”

“Die, Imperial slime.”

Sinjir points the blaster and shoots the man in the knee. He howls.

“Now, I’m of a mind not to actually kill you, because I’m one of the good ones these days and I have appearances to keep up. But I will whittle you down until you’re naught but a talking, jabbering head. Why pull a blaster? What are you hiding?”

“I told you, it’s too late.”

“What is too late?”

“I can’t call him off now.”

Sinjir shoots the other knee. Wartol bellows, sitting suddenly upright like a book slammed shut. He clutches at his knee as purple blood bubbles between his fingers. “Call who off? What are you—”

At first, he thinks it’s thunder, the faraway sound. But thunder is a low rumble, like a sallow belly expressing its hunger. This is duller, deeper, one and done. A hard, shuddering boom. An explosion.

“What did you do, Wartol? What did you do?”

Wartol’s laugh dissolves into a blubbering confession: “Sacrifices are necessary, Imperial. Sometimes a disease is so rampant you must cut off limbs to save the body. Like on Orish. The Empire was a cancer on the galaxy. Just as Mon Mothma was a cancer on the Republic.”

Was a cancer.

Was.

“You didn’t,” Sinjir seethes.

But Wartol simply weeps—not from grief, no, but what Sinjir sees is clearly relief.

Conder steps back and unrolls his sleeve—underneath is nothing so small as a comlink but rather, a whole tech gauntlet. With it, he can slice into doorways or program droids or any number of things, but he can also tap into various feeds: HoloNet, orbit control, NRN news, and of course local security bureau transmissions. He dials into the frequency—

The air fills with static, then resolves into a voice. “—code four-two-four, repeat, code four-two-four, reports of an explosion at the north tower of the Senate Building. Code four-two-four—”

Sinjir thinks, No, no, no, it’s not possible. He marches straight to the door, to the ramp, down to the landing bay. All of the landing bays here are up high, over the coast, and at this vantage point it’s easy to see to the center of Hanna City where the Senate Building sits.

Looming above that building is the tower where Mon Mothma’s office sits. Where Sinjir was only hours before.

A hole has been blown in the side of it. Even from here he can see how ash and debris are vacated out into open air, how the white permacrete side is charred with soot and tongues of flame. Smoke billows out like an escaping fiend.

The chancellor. She was in there—

He left her alone in there…

Sinjir turns, marches back inside. Pistol up. He storms through to the sitting area, past Conder, then drops to Wartol’s chest. He screws the barrel of the Kanji blaster so hard against the man’s forehead it nearly breaks the hard plating that covers the man’s head.

“You killed her.”

“I had it done,” Wartol croaks.

“You will pay for this.”

“Do it. End me. I have no career. But I have sacrificed myself to make a better galaxy. Chancellor Mon Mothma will no longer be able to spread her corrosive stain across the burgeoning New Republic.” Wartol lifts his head into the blaster. “Pull the trigger! Coward!”

Sinjir roars and draws the blaster back. His chest heaves as rage runs so hot inside him, it’s like a star burning itself up. But he resists. “You’ll not die today. You’ll go to trial. You’ll go to prison. You’ll see your name and your people dragged out in front of us all as craven traitors.”

He looks to Conder. The man gives him a small nod. It’s a small concession: a mote of light in a suddenly dark day. But it’s all he has, so he holds on to it as tightly as he can manage.





The dreadnought is no longer the Annihilator. It is no longer called that because that is no longer its function. Now it serves as the capital ship in a new galactic nation forming at the fringes of the galaxy, in Wild Space and beyond. The ship’s new name: Liberty’s Misrule. That name means whatever it means to whoever hears it, but Eleodie Marcavanya—pirate captain of this ship and leader of this new, unnamed nation of deviants and miscreants—chose the name first because, quite frankly, zhe likes the damn sound of it. But also because it means the ship is no longer used to destroy. Now it is used to create: a new government, a new nation, an armada of pirates who take equal spoils in an effort to make something lasting.