Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(20)

“Be glad it isn’t, because presently the Senate is too timid to authorize a handkerchief for a noisy sneeze. Kashyyyk, I’ll remind you, was a success, and we did it without your help.”

“Hunting down Grand Admiral Sloane is the purview of the New Republic, not an Alderaanian princess and her friends—” The tension between the two of them is like a tightening cable. But suddenly the chancellor puts some slack in it. She lets out a deep breath when she says: “Leia. I’m sorry. You were right and you’re still right. Freeing the Wookiees was the just thing to do. And if the Empire is really there on this planet…”

“This is what we’ve been waiting for,” Leia asserts. Her tone, too, becomes more conciliatory, as if she’s pleading with the chancellor. “This may be it. The end of the war. I know that you don’t condone military action for the sake of it, but it was military action that destroyed two of their battle stations. It was our military that freed Akiva, and overtook Kuat. We have to take this seriously. If this is true, we have to attack.”

“Wait,” Temmin says. “Attack?” All of him tenses. Images from the space above Jakku flash inside his head once again: TIE fighters swarming everywhere, his innards gone cold, his blood gone hot, his mother rocketing away in an escape pod. If war comes to Jakku, she’ll be even more vulnerable, even more in danger. War: That’s what Sinjir meant—Send all your little ships, all your precious troops. Oh, no.

But no one answers his question. His fear lies unassuaged.

The chancellor nods to Leia. “Yes, but we have to do this right. We don’t even know what this is yet. Why this planet? How much of a fight are we to expect? We want this to be the Empire’s last stand. Not ours.”

“Whatever we need to do, let us know,” Leia says.

Sinjir adds: “Yes. We’re ready.”

The chancellor stiffens. Gone is the slack in her cable. Once more, the cold, undeterred mask settles over her face. “Good. Stay ready. This will need to pass muster with the Senate—I cannot authorize an action so consequential without their approval, but after Liberation Day I suspect they may be eager for a last taste of Imperial blood. Still—I must have data. I cannot take mere suspicions to them or they’ll bury me. That is the primary mission: Get the facts. In the meantime: Tell no one. What we talked about here does not leave this room. Are we clear on that?”

Everyone nods except Temmin.

He stands there, shaking. His eyes wet. He wants to scream and yell and flail about. He wants to tell her, My mother is there, and you don’t need any more facts than that. He wants to threaten her with: If you don’t go and save my mom right now, I’ll go out there and tell everyone. I’ll scream it so they can hear me as far as the Outer Rim. But when the chancellor points her gaze at him, it’s like being pinned by a set of crosshairs.

Reluctantly, he nods.

Before exiting, Mon Mothma turns heel-to-toe with the precision of an old battle droid (not Bones, who would more likely do a plié and kick the door down). Leia says, “We will get Norra back, Temmin. I promise.”

And then she’s gone, too.

Once more, it’s just Sinjir and Temmin.

“That’s a promise she can’t make,” Temmin says, his voice quiet.

“True. Though I suspect she means it just the same.”

“We can’t count on her to get it done.”

“Never count on a political machine to operate efficiently.”

“So we do it ourselves?”

Sinjir claps a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “We do it ourselves. And we call in our chip with Solo, too.”

“Thanks, Sinjir.”

“Don’t thank me. I want them back as bad as you do. Now we just have to find a way to make it happen without, well, dying in the process.”





Night falls on Jakku. With the darkness comes the cold. It leaches the heat out of the air, the sand, the stone.

In the distance, black shapes rise—shadows deeper than the dark of the sky. Plateaus and buttes like carbon anvils. It was Jas’s idea to head that direction. Not only would that get them out of the hellish heat of day, but she saw a flock of ax-beaked birds flying that way. “They’re headed toward something,” Jas said, then. “Don’t know what. Food, hopefully. A settlement, maybe. Anywhere is better than nowhere.”

And so, once they pilfered the pod of all its limited goods—medkit, blaster, a handful of rations—they started walking.

And walking. And walking some more. The sand is slippery beneath their feet. It’s hard to find purchase, which works extra muscle groups—every time the sand shifts or she steps on a stone slippery with scree, Norra’s muscles tighten further, and by now her legs feel as stretched out as the control belt on an old speeder.

Worse, Norra feels sick. The sun sucked everything out of her, siphoning her lifeforce away drop by bloody drop. Now, with night, the chill has crept under her skin and settled in those empty spaces like an infection.

But still, they trudge along.

To where, she doesn’t know.

To what end, she cannot say.

This was a mistake.

Sloane is here. She knows that. She can feel that—not like she has the Force, but like it’s something in the air, in the dust. Maybe she’s just trying to convince herself that this is it, this is where it all ends. But even if Sloane is here, then what? Norra is on a dead-end, bone-dust world. The erstwhile grand admiral could be anywhere, in any direction, and Norra could spend the rest of her days wandering the burning dunes managing to find nothing or no one but her own foolhardy demise.