Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(13)

Bright-blue lights perforating the dark. Like the eyes of a terrible, vengeful thing, hungry for death.

Above his head, the light goes yellow.

Then green. Go, Bones, go…

Sinjir fires the Moth’s cannons at the torpedoes—missing with every shot. The ex-Imperial winces and screams in ear-shattering frustration.

The light goes red.

Pod free.

Temmin launches to hyperspace, just as the torpedoes thread the spot where the Moth was half a second before.





A ringing sound in the back of the skull. A faint beep beep beep. Flashes in the black, memories like light pulsing in a dark room: a heel against a button; a shake and a bang as the pod unmoors from its socket in the freighter’s side; a feeling of weightlessness as the whole thing drifts…

Then, light. Atmosphere. Heat. The pod shakes like a toy in the hand of an angry child. Everything feels like it’s coming apart. Darkness goes to blue. Night to day. The weightlessness dissipates, stolen away by the feeling of falling—plummeting down, down, down. Someone screams. An elbow in a throat. A knee in an armpit.

A sudden lift from the repulsor-jets—a hard jarring motion.

The whumpf from a pair of parachutes.

Too late. Too fast.

Wham.

Darkness. Silence. The memory of it all threatens to crush her.

Norra gasps, fumbles for the door latch—she draws the lever down, a hard ratcheting mechanism. The door springs free and lands in sand: thump.

The light reflecting off the surface of Jakku blinds her. Everything is seared away in a burning wave of brightness. Her hands find hard rock and slippery sand. Her guts are suddenly weapons-free and next thing she knows, she’s puking up what little she had to eat today.

Behind her closed eyes, new memories flit past: the tangled pipes inside the resurrected Death Star, the battle above Akiva as she chases Sloane in a stolen TIE fighter, the shock as her husband lifts a blaster in the direction of Chancellor Mon Mothma…

Her eyes open again. Staring into her own ejecta.

This world before her is Akiva’s opposite: dead and dry instead of damp and teeming with life. The only comparison is the heat, but here the heat is like the inside of a clay oven. It’s drying her out. Baking her to a crispy blister. She coughs. She cries out. She thinks: I am alone.

Wait. No.

Not alone.

Jas!

She rolls over onto her bottom and sees the pod sitting askew in the mounding sand. Its door is open and off its fixture, and standing there, braced in the doorway with splayed-out arms and legs, is Jas Emari. A trail of blood snakes its way between her head horns, her lip is split, and her sneering mouth shows teeth wet with smears of red.

Norra starts to say something—some stammered greeting, some breathless entreaty about how she’s glad Jas is okay—but the bounty hunter has only one response, and that’s to pick Norra up out of the sand and slam her hard against the pod. Hard enough that Norra sees stars. Hard enough that the pod rocks on its axis, sending up a cloud of dust and scree.

“Why?” Jas asks. Her voice is raw and rough like it was run over coarse stone.

“We were under attack—the Empire—I had no time.”

“No time,” Jas says, repeating those words. She says them again and again, each time the phrase dissolving further into a mad cackle. “No time. No time! You keep saying those words, Norra Wexley. Like a mimic-bird, No time, no time, raaaaawk, no time. I had no time, either. No time to get my slugthrower. Or quadnocs. Or a damn procarb bar! No time but to fall into an escape pod with you and plunge to a planet—this planet! This dead place about which we know absolutely nothing.” Her fist rears back and she pounds the side of the pod; the metal gongs like a bell. Then she slumps forward, her head pressing against the pod, her chin on Norra’s shoulder.

The fight has left her. Norra pushes her away.

“I’m not sorry,” Norra says.

“Of course you’re not.”

“I’m sorry you got dragged into it.”

Jas sighs. “Save your half-hearted sorry for when I’m dead in the hot sand.”

Norra’s voice breaks as she says: “Liberation Day. My husband. I fought Sloane and…I have to do this.”

“Fine,” Jas says. “So let’s do this. Where do we start?”

“You’re hurt.” She reaches for her friend, and after a gentle touch her fingers come away with blood. “The fall—”

“I’m fine.”

“The pod has a kit. A medkit. I can—”

Jas pulls away. She says more sternly, and in her voice is the admonishment of a child to a parent, the way Temmin would say it: “I’m fine.”

Norra’s mind goes to Temmin. I hope he made it out okay…that thought chased by another: I’ve gone and abandoned him again, haven’t I?

Norra cranes her head back. Up there, in the broad blue, she sees the faint shapes of the Star Destroyers hanging in orbit. Diaphanous, almost as if they’re not really there. Hallucinations. Or a vengeful ghost fleet, come to wreak their revenge.

“Looks like we found the Empire,” Jas says, licking blood from her lip and scowling at the taste.

“But why? Why here?”

“That, I don’t know. Hiding, maybe. We’re pretty far from anything anyone would consider civilization. Far from any trading routes. Far from the known worlds. Close to the edge of the Unknown Regions. Maybe they’re here, licking their wounds, hoping the NR won’t notice.”