Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(113)

Most pirates, they take what they take to live and fight another day. They take the spoils to survive or to squirrel away.

But Eleodie wants something bigger. Better. Something forever. The Empire is dead and the New Republic can’t handle its business. That leaves room—air whistling between the bricks where Eleodie can slip in and out like a breath, hiding in the interstitial spaces, growing like an army of ghosts.

Right now, zhe stands at one of the many thousands of viewports here on the Liberty’s Misrule, looking out over zher ragtag nation of ships, a nation without a planet, but one that may never need one. The stars are our nation, zhe thinks. We glitter like a thousand suns, our hearts as black as the void in which we travel. Next to Eleodie stands the girl, Kartessa. The girl’s hair is shorn down to the scalp, her cheeks dirty from working in the engine room (her choice, for she claimed correctly to be good with machines).

Kartessa says, “Fleet is getting bigger.”

“Every day,” Eleodie says with no small pride. The nation fleet is now two dozen ships strong—that’s not figuring in the contingent of old starfighters they’ve brought on board and retrofitted, which are now flying the colors of their new Wild Space nation: red, yellow, and black. The fleet comprises half ships they’ve stolen, half those brought here out of the chaos of a galaxy gone awry. Pirates and refugees who have nowhere to turn, who have seen the protections of the Empire turn to vapor, and who fear the coming of the New Republic and its laws sweeping across the systems.

Eleodie fears that, too. The New Republic is growing. The Empire will soon be gone. Even now, zhe is reliably informed that on a world called Jakku, the Empire is losing its fight—maybe its last fight—against the Republic. What then? What will become of the rest of the galaxy?

Eleodie turns from regarding zher nation outside the Star Destroyer to those within it. Many come seeking asylum but having no ships.

Those who do now serve as crew.

Down below were once a series of connected hangar bays—gray, sterile, with a singular function. That has changed. Now the hangar bays are homes: tents, shipping pods, ramshackle crate-shacks. Thousands dwell here. They live. They operate markets. They cook food using jury-rigged thermal vents carved out of the underfloor ducts. And color is cast far and wide. Motley hues from red tents, spray-tagged containers, the raiment of many cultures and many species and many worlds. Everything is art and chaos and noise. It is just as Eleodie wants it.

“Your mother around somewhere?” Eleodie says to the girl.

“No. I ditched her on the engineering sublevel.” Kartessa pouts. “She won’t leave me alone.”

“She is your mother. It is her job not to leave you alone. You should be nicer to her. Poor fool woman followed you here into this glorious madhouse, this wondrous nation of derangement. Do not shut her out.”

Kartessa sighs. “Fine.”

“Good.”

After a few minutes of scuffing her heels, the girl pipes up: “Can I ask you something?”

“You may.”

“How’s this all going to work?”

“This all what now?”

“This…pirate nation. Pirates don’t make nations.”

“These pirates do. I do.”

“Why? How?”

“Girl, it’s like this: The sea is changing, and the tides are shifting. It’s about to get real nasty for us nasty types. Either we’re gonna be running from the new sheriff in town, or we’re gonna be trying to kill each other in the farthest-flung dung-heap systems, stabbing each other over a few scraps of what was once ours by right. I’m proposing we get together and we stay together. Scoundrels like us, we always worked together—it just wasn’t official. So I’m making it official.”

Frustration darkens Kartessa’s brow. “But that doesn’t answer my question. Pirates are selfish. You’re in it for yourselves.”

“That’s true enough,” zhe answers. “But we can all be in it for our mutual benefit. Some predators are lonely things, big and scary and all by themselves. Others know when they need each other. They know when to form a pack. Used to be I had a pirate crew of a few hundred. Now I got a crew of ten thousand—and that number is going up, up, up. We will ransack, pillage, and steal. We will kill less, because it is the threat of our numbers, not the threat of our weapons, that will precede us. We will share the spoils equally, not so that we may be rich, but so that we may be fed and fat and happy together. Swilling and singing and whatever other salaciousness comes to the fore of our nasty little minds.”

The girl appears to chew on this. Like it’s a piece of gristle she can’t quite get out of her teeth. Seems she’s about to say more, but an interruption from her Omwati first mate, Shi Shu, prevents that.

Shi’s beak clacks together. “We have visitors.”

“Come to revel in my elegance?” Eleodie asks.

The Omwati seems guarded. “We need you on the bridge now.”

Eleodie asks the girl: “Want to come?”

“I do.”

“Then let’s go.”

Together they walk the length of the balcony overlooking the hangar deck (presently named Hangartown, though that is its third name and other names may yet come) before turning in toward the turbolifts. They take the lift up to the bridge, riding in silence, Eleodie with zher chromatophoral cape tucked around zher like a cocoon.