Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(115)

“How can there be a new Empire?” Brendol blusters. “The one we had is gone. We do not number enough to begin anew—”

“There are others,” Tashu says, singsongy.

“Once we had the calculations, we sent another ship ahead.”

“Calculations. What calculations? What do you—”

“Brendol, please. Time is fleeting fast, too fast. Go to the ship. I will join you there.” And just in case, Rax puts a gently threatening hand on the man’s arm. “Understand that you will help be an architect of the future to come. You are a visionary and that is why you are here, alone. This is not a time to test me. This is a time to trust me. Do you trust me?”

The man, red-cheeked and obviously afraid, nods. “I…do.”

“Good. Now go, go like the skittermouse.” To Tashu he says: “Are you ready to fulfill our destiny, Adviser Tashu?”

Tashu licks his teeth and shudders as if experiencing otherworldly pleasure. “All glory to the Contingency. All glory to Palpatine.”

“Yes,” Rax says, mirroring the same sycophantic smile. “All glory.”

—

It takes both of their handprints to open the door. Tashu on one side, Rax on the other. The scan plates shine around their splayed fingers. Behind the door, a mechanism fires up, groaning and grinding.

The door, gold as the sun, opens slowly, rolling upward.

When they enter, the door closes behind them.

Rax walks ahead of Tashu. He moves forward with a confident stride. The pentagonal hallway descends slowly at a gentle angle. It’s formed of burnished metal and black glass, with lines of red light framing every angle. Every ten steps is a pillar holding up the world, preventing the sands from pressing down and swallowing the Observatory whole.

Everything is clean and untouched by the filth of this world. As an irony, Rax runs his hand along the wall, leaving behind the faintest streak of oil and sweat. There, now the world has left its mark, he thinks.

No. He is not of this world, he tells himself. He has transcended it. Palpatine saw that. Yes, the old man was delusional about the mystical forces that governed the galaxy, giving too much credence to them—he believed that just because he had abilities beyond the ken of mortals, all things cleaved to the same power. Which is madness, really. It is the primitive attitude of a creature learning to make fire for the first time, certain that the fire he made was the only power that governed the galaxy.

And yet Palpatine wasn’t delusional about the state of the galaxy and the role of the Empire. Though he infused it with a great deal of magical foolishness, he was a master tactician, and knew how to play a game so long that the horizon line was actually the starting line.

Palpatine saw something in Rax. A destiny, he called it. Even now, Gallius—Galli, in a way, for he feels oddly young and innocent again, like that Jakku child running across the desert—feels that destiny swelling up inside him. He takes a moment to enjoy it. To feel filled up by it; satiety resonates through him.

But the job is not done. Not yet.

Ahead, the hallway opens up into an eight-sided chamber. In the center of it is a same-shaped bank of computer systems—but not systems like the ones found on a Star Destroyer or even the Death Star. No, these are ancient computational mechanisms from an earlier civilization. From precisely when, Rax cannot say. The Old Republic? The fallen Sith Empire? He knows not and he cares little. Their history is irrelevant.

It is only the present that matters.

Above the computers is the projection of a three-dimensional star chart that matches no known map here in the galaxy. Which makes sense given that it does not chart the known galaxy, does it?

For decades, these computers have been plotting a journey. Outside the known galaxy is an unexplored infinity, Palpatine explained, one closed off by a labyrinth of solar storms, rogue magnetospheres, black holes, gravity wells, and things far stranger. Any who tried to conquer that maze did not survive. The ships were obliterated, or returned to the galaxy devoid of travelers. Communications from those explorers were incomprehensible, either shot through with such static as to make the content useless, or filled with enough inane babble to serve as a perfectly clear sign that the explorer had gone utterly mad out there in isolation. But Palpatine had one in the navy who knew something of the Unknown Regions: Admiral Thrawn, an alien with ice-blue skin who came from beyond the borders of the known galaxy. Palpatine only kept that one around because of what he knew of traversing those deadly interstices. Much of what Thrawn knew went into the computations of this machine.

Palpatine said that this galaxy was to be his, but that it was only one among many. Again that phrase arose: the unexplored infinity. This, he noted, was his demesne. The galaxy was his game board.

If he lost this game, the game board was to be broken in half and discarded. A new demesne must then be found.

The computers here have long been searching for a way through the storms and the black spaces. Slowly, surely, they have been putting together a map: a journey into chaos. The Empire has sent probe droids to test the computations as the computers have made them. Many never returned.

But some kept reporting in, pinging the transponder here. Every droid that made it further contributed to the map. And with distance achieved, the computers, through the scanning droids, continued to chart the course and compute the next branches of navigation.

Before Palpatine’s demise at the hands of the rebels, the computers finished their calculations, finally finding a way through the unknown. The Emperor was convinced that something waited for him out there—some origin of the Force, some dark presence formed of malevolent substance. He said he could feel the waves of it radiating out now that the way was clear. The Emperor called it a signal—conveniently one that only he could hear. Even his greatest enforcer, Vader, seemed oblivious to it, and Vader also claimed mastery over the dark Force, did he not? Rax believed Palpatine had gone mad. What he was “receiving” was nothing more than his own precious wishes broadcast back to himself—an echo of his own devising. He believed that something lay beyond, and so that became a singular obsession. (When you believe in magic, it is easy to see all the universe as evidence of it.)