Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(15)
Everything goes white. He coughs, whimpering and bleating. Dizziness assails him; it feels like he’s spinning around and around, and his hands go slack and the world rushes up past him—
Waroo falls. He hits branches. Rot-curled leaves whip past him in a whirlwind. He bounces off a bough, and before he knows it—
Wham. The air escapes his chest in a cannon blast. He curls onto his side and tries to cough more, but Waroo cannot find the breath. He wheezes and whimpers. Just as his breath returns to him, so does the smell.
The stink of Dessard covers him like a tide of mud.
Dessard stands there, leering. His mouth is a vicious sneer. He has a blaster in his hand—a grungy, rust-rimed pistol. “You,” he hisses. “You thought you could get away. No one gets away. No one escapes. Not you. Not my own troops. Any who flee die. And they die very badly.”
Other Imperials encroach, forming a half circle behind the commandant. Waroo tries to get himself upright, but his strength is sapped. The spore, the fall, the fact he’s already starving and weak…
But one thing that remains strong is his senses.
Waroo smells Dessard, yes. He smells the man’s sweat. He smells the Imperial’s willingness—no, his eagerness—to kill.
Then another scent.
A Wookiee scent.
A scent oddly familiar, one that stirs within Waroo a sudden lift of his blood and spirits—
Dessard makes a sound—grrk!—and is yanked backward through the scrub and brush. Branches crackle as he’s whipped away. Then the air goes bright with blasterfire. The other milk-skins are too slow. They’re cut apart. One is knocked back through the air so hard, his feet whip above his head before he’s slammed into the trunk of the shi-shok. Dessard comes back, crawling on hands and knees toward Waroo, his face a simpering mask.
A shadow descends upon him.
And with it, a scent that says, Father.
A tall, shaggy Wookiee with a bandolier steps over the commandant and plants a tree-trunk leg down on Dessard’s back, mashing him against the ground and into the mud. Others emerge from the brush: a gray Wookiee with one arm, another with a visor over one eye, and several milk-skins in raggedy forest-green camo, a firebird sigil on their arms. These others secure Dessard’s arms behind his back, wrenching them into a pair of looped cuffs.
The bandolier Wookiee sees Waroo and cocks his head. He utters a soft purr before the strength seems to go out of his legs. Waroo knows him. This is his father. This is Chewbacca. They crash together, arms around each other, the child’s head buried in the father’s chest.
Chewbacca lifts his head to the sky and ululates a good song, a true song, a song of family, of lost love found once more.
While senators argue in her office, Chancellor Mon Mothma tries very hard to make a fist with her left hand. The hand rests on her knee under her desk, and she focuses on the act of pulling her fingers into the center of her palm. She can’t do it, not yet, not quite. The fist she makes is less a fist and more a soft claw. Simply closing that hand feels like she’s trying to move mountains, requiring an epic effort that she dearly hopes is not being shown on her face.
“Are you listening?”
She doesn’t even know who asked the question. Oops, she thinks.
Looking up, she sees it’s Senator Ashmin Ek from the Anthan Spire. His lips are twisted up in a sour knot. His silver hair is in a sharp, ostentatious peak above his head. Ek does not like being ignored. He says as much: “Chancellor, I get the feeling you’re not entirely with us here today. You may see yourself as special, but I have taken precious time out of my schedule and put many meetings on hold for this committee…”
Some of the other senators gathered nod along with him: Bushar, Lorrin, and Rethalow. Next to them stands Jebel of Uyter—Minister of Finance for the New Republic. He does not nod, but he strokes his beard and hmms and ahhs, continuing to serve as the pinnacle of ineffective neutrality. (Nower Jebel is always at his most comfortable when he is firmly in the middle—never extending himself, not even by a toe or a finger, toward one side or the other.) Others look embarrassed by Ek’s outburst: Senator Oko-Po and Councilor Sondiv Sella in particular look on with disbelief.
“I apologize,” Mon says, humbly. “I am feeling a little distracted today.” And why ever would that be? she asks herself. Could it be because this is the last week that the Senate will meet on Chandrila? Perhaps because of the rise of the New Separatist Union, or the Confederacy of Corporate Systems, or the pirates and their so-called Sovereign Latitudes? Maybe that horrid Senator Wartol has gotten under my skin. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because my left arm and the hand at the end of it barely operate as they should, thanks to the Empire’s attack on Liberation Day. “I fear it is best to end this meeting early and push it on to next month, once the Senate and my office have been moved to Nakadia. Will that do?”
“It will not,” Ek seethes. “The Committee for Imperial Reallocation is vital for distributing the resources of the fallen Empire—”
“It hasn’t fallen yet,” objects the broad-shouldered Sondiv Sella. He puffs out his chest as he talks—indicating that he’s harboring some anger. “We have to be careful not to think we’ve seen the last of the Galactic Empire. It has a long and deep shadow.”
“They have been beaten.” Ek sniffs haughtily as he says it.