Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(38)

Once the vote is in, the ships launch.

The ground forces mobilize.

Everything begins.

And hopefully, her tiles fall faster than the Empire’s, and this is truly the end of that oppressive regime’s rivers and roads.

She collapses into her chair.

Auxi sweeps over, a bulbous long-necked bottle of very good brandy held in the same hand with which she precariously grasps two glasses by their rims. “I think this calls for a nip.”

“What’s the old saying? You can never count the stars, for some may already be dark. The vote isn’t in yet, Auxi.”

“But it will be. Momentarily.” She sets the glasses down and begins to pour. Rich amber liquid sloshes around the bell of each. “And we’ll win. But what does it matter? After the day we’ve had, I think we deserve a bit of the good stuff. Oh! And your numbers are already improving nicely. They were up before you even stepped on stage.”

Mon sighs and takes the glass in her good hand. “People do like war.”

“No, shh, stop that. People like to know that they are safe. And in this case, if that safety is earned by grinding the last Imperial stormtrooper into the dirt—then count me among them.”

Their brandy glasses tink as they tap together.

Mon takes a sip. The liquor is warm in her mouth, and as she swallows, it spreads its heat to her throat and her belly. As it goes down, it’s like a zipper opening her up—all this tightly packed material inside her heart suddenly unspooling. She feels like she is almost ready to breathe a sigh of relief and sleep a very long sleep.

Don’t get too comfortable, she cautions herself. You won’t be able to rest long on your laurels. Ackbar will lead this battle, but it is you who oversees the war, Chancellor.

As if on cue, her office door chimes. Ackbar enters.

She is poised to ask him if it is time. Time to launch. Time to complete the dread task they set out to complete many years before with the first stirred embers of the Rebel Alliance. But she sees now the stark look on his face. Mon Cala are hard to read for most humans, but she knows Ackbar well—and she spies the reluctance in his stiff-backed posture, in his curling chin tendrils, in his half-lidded eyes.

“Tell me,” she says.

“The vote did not pass,” he says. “We are grounded, Chancellor. The fleet will not go to Jakku, and there the Empire shall remain.”





Cold, rank water hits Norra in the face. It pours over the top of her head, a sour bile-spit smell filling her nose. She coughs and sputters, standing up inside her cage. Two stormtroopers stand on the grated metal ceiling of the prison in which she sits. Above them, the Imperial fleet hangs, veiled behind bands of gauzy clouds.

One of the troopers holds a bucket. The other has his blaster rifle pointed down. From her vantage point below them, with the sun above, the Imperials look like little more than shadows—scavenger birds ready to pick her bones as soon as her flesh gives up.

“Wake up,” the one with the bucket says. He lets it hang loose, and it knocks against the side of his armor—armor that’s no longer the pristine white of most stormtroopers. This armor has been marked and gouged, painted and carved into. The one with the blaster rifle has blood-red dye spattering the face of his helmet, shaped into the crude icon of a skull—taking what was always metaphorical about the stormtroopers and literalizing it. We are the agents of death, it says. We are killers.

“I could just shoot her,” the rifle-holding trooper says. He gestures down through the bars of the wrought-metal cage, the tip of his rifle poking through. “She’s just another mouth to feed. I could close that mouth. Permanently.”

“Do it,” she whispers.

He does.

No!

The blaster goes off, and everything around her lights up red—

The bolt digs a furrow out of the hard sand-pack beneath her feet. She dances away from it, panic throttling her.

“She’s awake now,” the bucket-holder says.

The two troopers laugh and keep walking, boots clanging.

Norra kneels down and weeps.

—

Hours later, she’s up and working a kesium gas rig—it’s a big cylinder-bore screwed into the sand, and it needs people all around it to turn valves and tug levers to balance the rush of gas coming up from beneath the mantle. Let too much up at one time and the whole thing pops its top, maybe blowing them all to vapor. Let too little up, and the shaft-line seals shut as the sand collapses back into the channel. She’s here, chained along the edge with half a dozen other prisoners, all shackled around the circumference of the well. If any one of them fails, they either get punished or get dead.

Worse, she still smells like bile and spit. That, courtesy of the bucket dumped over her. It wasn’t water. Oh, no. Nobody would waste water on this planet just to wake up a prisoner. It was backwash from a happabore trough: rancid water sloshed in and out of their leathery maws.

Norra, at this moment, has never felt so alone.

When the troopers brought them here, they scanned and ran their faces, said that there was a bounty out for Jas. Before Norra knew what was happening, they were throwing her friend aboard a sand-scoured shuttle—and just like that Jas was gone.

That was a week ago. Or longer. Norra can’t even tell anymore.

After they took Jas, some pock-cheeked officer asked Norra point-blank if she wanted to die, or if she wanted to work. The answer was easy. If Norra gets dead, then that means Sloane escapes. Death was not an option. Not until revenge had its day.