Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(117)
A few beats of quiet and stillness. One. Two. Three…
The world shudders. A fierce growl grumbles up through the bore, and the orange light glows suddenly red—the blue threads of mist turn black. Palpatine was right. The artifacts contain a great deal of energy.
And now they have dropped into the core of this world. With the well open, that energy will vent. So begins the chain reaction that will destroy everything. The planet will soon begin to crack. It shall break apart. It’ll swallow the Empire and the New Republic fleets and soldiers whole. When it does, it will leave this galaxy to the scavengers and the scum, rotting like a fruit lying forgotten in the dirt. Though an idle thought troubles him: All fruit, no matter how rotten, can leave behind seeds…
It’s time to leave. The Imperialis awaits. His destiny calls like a seductive whisper. But then he realizes, he’s hearing voices. Real voices. He is not alone in here, not anymore. And one of those voices, he recognizes.
Hello, Sloane, he thinks.
—
The ground shudders suddenly beneath them, moving hard to the right—Norra nearly loses her footing. Brentin helps to steady her, and she pulls out of his grip, casting him a suspicious look.
“You don’t trust me,” he says.
“I don’t,” she says under her breath. I don’t know what’s in your head. I don’t know if the chip is still controlling you. I don’t know why you were with her of all people. He’s about to say more, but Sloane interrupts—
“Look,” Sloane says, pointing to a bank of octagonal computers. Above them, holoscreens flash red. A diagram shows what looks like a mining bore down through layers of mantle and schist. It’s pulsing white. A number sits above it—a percentage, slowly dwindling.
“What am I seeing?” Norra asks.
“I don’t know,” Sloane answers.
Brentin hurries over to the machine, looking down at a keyboard with a quizzical glance—the keys are triangular, most gold, some silver. He ignores those and instead moves his hand to the holoscreen itself, and when his fingers touch it, it swipes away and fills with scrolling data. “I…oh, no.”
“What is it?” Norra and Sloane say in unison before giving each other a dirty, dubious look.
“The integrity of the planet has been compromised. Something…something is affecting the mantle. A system of tremors causing a cascading failure from the core up. This shaft, this…borehole, it’s the key to it, a channel focusing the seismic wave. There are baffles here—telescoping vents to close the shaft, but they’re on lockdown.”
“What does that all mean?” Sloane asks.
“It means this world doesn’t have long.”
Norra’s knees nearly buckle. Temmin…he’s here. Jas, too. Wedge. The whole damn Republic fleet. If Jakku goes, they all go.
“Can you close it?” Norra asks.
“I can try.”
“Do that,” Sloane barks. “I’m finding Rax. He has to be here somewhere.” Her voice sounds threadbare and desperate.
Norra points her blaster at the other woman. “No.”
Sloane stares down the barrel of the pistol. “I’m not the enemy here.”
“You’re my enemy. You corrupted my husband. You’ve brought him on this lunatic’s journey. You—”
“What I am is running out of time. Rax is the one behind all of this. Put that pistol down, Norra Wexley. Let me do what I need to do.”
Brentin now comes up behind Norra, and she flinches, fearing he’s there to attack her—but all he does is say, “Please, Norra.”
Her hand shakes so hard she’s afraid it might fall off.
Norra lowers the pistol. “Go.”
“You could give me the pistol.”
“Only way I give you this pistol is by pulling the trigger first.”
“Fair enough. I don’t need a blaster anyway—I am weapon enough.” Sloane nods, as if summoning enough courage to make her last statement true. Then she turns on her heel and walks away, heading down an adjacent hallway. Not once does she look back over her shoulder.
Norra wheels on her husband and hisses at him: “You need to fix this. Brentin, listen very closely. Temmin is here, on Jakku. Your son. If you love him, and you love me, and you care at all about the New Republic that you once fought to build, fix this.”
Fear and uncertainly flash like lightning in Brentin’s eyes, but he nods and in a quiet, firm voice he says: “I will.”
—
She finds him waiting for her. Down a set of steps, past a wall lined with what look to be powered-down droids, Rax waits. An infernal glow rises behind him, with blue embers whirling in the air above.
“Hello, Rax,” Sloane says.
It’s just her in here with him. She has nothing. No weapon. That damnable Norra Wexley wouldn’t lend her a blaster. That awful woman was stubborn as the roots of an old tree. Smart move, admittedly. Sloane thought to simply take it from the woman, but in no world does she believe Brentin Wexley would allow that. And so she tells herself what she told them:
I am weapon enough.
At the very least, she knows they won’t be leaving her behind. The shuttle gave up the ghost moments before landing: It was already shot to hell when they took it from the Imperial base, and as the ship settled toward the ground, coming in to land through the blowing sand and whipping dust, the engines gave out, the repulsors failed, and the whole ship thudded dully as it dropped. The panel went dark. The ship died. There goes our ride, she thought. Good news was, they didn’t have to use the shuttle to blast the doors open. The door wasn’t locked. She stepped to it and it opened.