Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(122)

Gallius Rax—Galli—bugles in pain and falls against the steps. With a groan he pushes himself up on both hands.

She shoots him in the other shoulder. He slumps, sobbing.

Then, as he turns over, his hands up in surrender as he pleads, “Don’t, don’t, don’t, please,” she shoots him in the stomach.

Every shot feels perfect. Every shot feels like revenge. Sloane’s heard stories about revenge, about how it never really finishes everything, about how it never truly completes you, but at this moment, she disbelieves. Because this feels better than anything has ever felt to her.

Rax’s hands move to his midriff, where a spreading red stains his raiment. Soon his naval white matches the red cape spilled beneath him.

Unblinking, he stares at her. Mouth gasping. Something wet slides in the back of his throat like a creeping thing.

“You’re dying,” she tells him. And he is. That much is plain to see. His lips have gone chapped and pale.

“Fellow outcast,” he says.

“Yes.”

“You serve the Contingency, now.”

“I serve no one,” she says.

“Listen. Listen. There’s a ship. Short walk from here.” He wheezes. “Imperialis. Take it. Hux is there. Others. Use the map—in a data spike in the, the computer. Set a course for the unexplored…” He coughs. Flecks of red dot his lips along with bubbles of spit. “Infinity. Already sent a ship ahead. A dreadnought…the Emperor’s…”

It hits her. Of course. Back on Coruscant, looking through the Imperial Archives and taking an accounting of all the ships, one stood out as not being accounted for properly—it was said the New Republic took it down, but no tracking record showed that fate.

“The Eclipse,” she says.

He nods. “Go to it. Leave this place. Find a new demesne. Start the game over.” His teeth clinch together with a vise grip. Through them he keeps talking, babbling now: “Undeserving. I am undeserving. Just a skittermouse, not a vworkka. Outcast, always the outcast. Shah-tezh. Cora Vessora. Undeserved…”

His head thuds against the step. A line of blood oozes from his nose as the last flash of light goes dark behind his eyes.

Sloane stands. From his hand, she takes something else: the pair of game pieces. Imperator and Outcast. Mine, she thinks.

—

The vibration underneath her wakes her. Norra groans, picking herself up. Her husband is beneath her. Eyes shut, as if sleeping. She pretends that’s what it is. He’s just asleep. I’ll wake him later. When it’s time to go. She grabs the wall and pulls herself up.

Moving toward the steps, she sees another body there. It’s him. Gallius Rax. His red cape pools beneath him like spilled viscera. For him she tells a different story: He is not asleep. He is dead. Revenge has won the day. Justice has fled into the shadows.

Nearby, a sound—fingers on keys. The ground suddenly shifts hard and she almost loses her footing. Norra continues up the stairs, one agonizing step at a time. Her gaze follows the sound, the tapping sound, and ahead stands a figure—a bit blurry, but when she blinks the gauzy smear of her vision clarifies. It’s Sloane.

The blaster pistol is on the floor between them.

Norra staggers to it and picks it up.

“Sloane,” she says, pointing the blaster.

The Imperial—or not, who knows where her loyalties lie anymore—turns toward her, hands by her side. Behind her, the computers project an image of a mechanism: locks and chain-drive banding and telescoping doors. Those are the baffles Brentin was trying to close—but he didn’t. He stopped to save her. No, he stopped to die.

“Norra Wexley,” Sloane says. “You and me, once again. At the end of things.”

“Yes.” It’s all she can say. What else is there? Is any of this even real? Is it all a fever dream? Or is she still lying there on the floor with her husband, asleep, dying, or already dead?

“Brentin. Is he?”

“He’s fine,” Norra protests, the words so firm and so fierce they serve as a kind of sharp-tongued protest. But she knows he’s not. Tears streak down her cheeks and she has to lift her chin to try to deny them. “He’s gone,” she says, finally, admitting the truth out loud.

“I’m sorry. He was a better traveling companion than I deserved.”

“Yes. That’s true.” Norra swallows hard.

“What are we going to do here?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“I need to finish what Brentin started and stop this planet from destroying itself. Something has happened in the core. But I can end it. Best I can tell, there are mechanisms that can close the borehole, that can seal off the reaction from heating the mantle and cracking this planet like a geode.”

“Oh.”

“You should let me do that. Just in case, you should go.”

“I don’t know where.”

“Find your son. Go home. Have a life.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Easier for you than it will be for me. I have none of those things. I never had a husband or a wife to die in my hands. I never had a child. I had only the Empire and now…” Norra doesn’t need her to say any more.

“I’m sad for you,” Norra says, and she’s surprised that she means it.