Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(130)

Sloane likes him. But she worries about him, too.

They could colonize it all.

Their new galaxy will never have known a time without an Empire.

That thrills her.

And, indeed, it worries her, too.

“It’s time to start over,” she says to Hux. “That is our first order. To begin again. And to get it right, this time.”

“Yes, of course, Grand Admiral. Anything you need. Glory be to Grand Admiral Sloane.”

“No,” she says. “Glory goes only to the Empire.”

My Empire, she thinks.




To Luke S.,

wherever you are




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


I think the biggest acknowledgment I need to make is to those architects and dreamers who made this galaxy as real to me as they did to so many others out there over the last (gulp) four decades: George Lucas, Kathleen Kennedy, Leigh Brackett, Irvin Kirshner, Dave Filoni, Timothy Zahn, J. J. Abrams, and soon, Rian Johnson. That’s only a spare, cut-down list of the hundreds, even thousands of people who have shaped this galaxy of stories in some way, big or small, over the years.

Thanks, too, to Grand Admiral Editor Elizabeth Schaefer, Vizier Tom Hoeler (who also has a side job as a Huttese translator and songwriter), and Super Secret First Order Literary Agent Stacia Decker.