Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(44)

“How’s this going to end, then, Embo?”

From behind the bounty hunter, the faraway cry of another voice she recognizes—the blunt, workman accent of another bounty hunter Sugi worked with once upon a time: Dengar. His presence here is a surprise—Swift is really bringing the history with this crew. Sugi always hated Dengar. Everybody always hated Dengar.

Of course, they hate Swift, too…

“Back to the ship! She came this way!” Dengar says.

She can’t see that old salt. Not yet. But he’ll be here, soon.

C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.

“Embo,” she says, “I know you have debts. You and Sugi—you two helped people. You did the right thing and I know that upset the wrong people. It cost you. I have her debts, too.” She realizes now, the deal for the Kyuzo is probably simple: Embo’s slate will be wiped clean if he brings in Jas. Debt for debt. Credit for credit. She starts to hear Dengar, now. Closing in. “Sugi always did what was right even though she didn’t admit it, and you were loyal to her. I’m trying to do something good here, too. The right thing. Even if it’s not the easy thing. Even if it makes the wrong people mad. Even if it costs me. So, I need you to not bring me in. And…I need that ship.”

Embo seems to consider this.

“I am old,” he says. “And Marrok always liked you.”

He lifts the bowcaster and steps away from the ship.

Her path is clear. She lets out a breath.

“I won’t forget this, Embo.”

“As you say, child.”

She wants to do more. Even just stand here and talk to him—she regrets suddenly having lost touch with him all these years. But there’s no time for that. Already as she runs toward the ramp, she spies that old bastard Dengar trotting up, his long-barreled rifle swung up by his hip.

“Jas! Don’t you dare run!”

His cannon rifle goes off—she winces as a bolt shrieks over her shoulder. Nearly falling, she manages to hurry up the ramp, slamming the button closed behind her—it begins to ascend as she dives into the cockpit, opens the gunnery panel, and sets the shuttle’s nose-cone turret to drop.

As she warms the engines, the turret begins barking fire through the hangar. Dengar dives behind a rock formation just as the turret blasts a small crater where he was standing only moments before.

Time to get out of here. Time to find Norra.





“Bring him out!”

Two Red Key raiders—Yimug the Gran, Gweeska the Rodian—drag the man in all-too-familiar Mandalorian armor out into the center of so-called Freetown. The man staggers forward, his hands behind his back. Yimug throws him to the ground. Gweeska kicks him in the tailbone so that his helmeted head pitches forward into the sand.

Lorgan Movellan steps up. All around, the Red Key raiders applaud and hoot and catcall. They line the walls all around Freetown, raising blasters in the air, some firing them. The people of this town are huddled together down here in the center. Some lie dead, serving as lessons to the others. The rest wait with weapons against their heads to remind them to remain docile, lest they, too, find their brains cooking on the sand.

Movellan looks down his long, crooked nose and scowls at Cobb Vanth. He lifts his lip into a sneer and hawks phlegm into his mouth, then spits. It spatters against the Mandalorian helmet.

“You don’t deserve that armor,” Lorgan says, his voice a hiss like sand against sand. For good measure, he kicks out with a cobble-tread boot, kicking Vanth in the head so hard the so-called mayor of Freetown goes down like a sack of mox-spelt. “Is it even real Mandalorian armor? Looks like something hammered out on a swindler’s forge. Besides…wearing a strong man’s armor doesn’t change how weak you are. Take his helmet off.”

Gweeska and Yimug work in tandem, unscrewing the helmet off Vanth’s head with an unceremonious twist. With that done, Lorgan now can look into the eyes of the man who has been giving him so much trouble.

“You’ve been like a grit of sand in my undercarriage,” Lorgan says, baring his teeth. “Cobb Vanth. Noble lawman. Sheriff and mayor and all-around thorn in my hind end.” He shrugs. “I’m not impressed.”

“Gotta give me some credit,” Vanth says, gravel grinding in his voice. “I was enough of a pain in the ass to bring you out here.”

“Who are you, anyway?”

“Just a man trying to do right.”

“What’s your game? What do you want? Not power? Not money? Surely this little…cult of personality is paying off? Is it women? Maybe the armor has given you delusions of grandeur.”

“I want freedom.”

Oh. So that’s it. He grabs the man’s head, pushing it forward hard enough that Vanth’s teeth clack as his chin slams into his own chest.

There, on the back of Vanth’s neck: a symbol formed out of scar tissue, like a primitive star with a series of dots and hashes. An owner’s mark. “You were a slave.”

“Sure. That’s the story we can tell.”

A playful flash glints in Vanth’s eye, and it only enrages Movellan further. He was nobody, and now he’s very much somebody. A slave turned sheriff. A ghost into a man. With Jabba gone and the Hutts in disarray—and further, with the Empire and its slave tax having disappeared once the second Death Star went kaboom—it makes sense that the slave class here on Tatooine would break apart. Its slaves, once given a measure of freedom, would not go so easily back to the cage. But who owned him? And why risk his neck for the others?