Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(46)

“Funny thing,” Vanth says. “The Tuskens consider this place sacred. And they don’t like slavers any more than we do. We cut them a deal. We give them water, they leave us alone. They like that we have a Hutt, too. Earns us a bit of respect. And my friend here, Malakili, he procured for them something real special: a pearl from a krayt dragon’s belly. That afforded us the last piece of the puzzle: their protection. Though I think they might’ve done it for us anyway—they don’t like you syndicate types out here.”

Lorgan tries to crab-walk backward, but Vanth presses down on his wrist hard enough to hear the bones start to grind. He cries out. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Vanth. You’re an idiot playing a game against gods. You stole that suit thinking you can fill it, you stole a Hutt thinking you can raise it to the dais—you’ll never succeed here. My masters will come. They’ll kill you. They’ll wipe this place off the map.”

Vanth kneels down on his chest. “What you think I stole, I say I earned. You think I’m just some slave, and that’s one part of the story. But you don’t know the rest. What I’ve seen. Who I was before. And I know my time is short. I’ve poked the monster, and now it is awake. I’ll die in service to this town, and maybe this town will die with me, but we won’t be the last, not by a long shot. The next ones who come, they’ll know me, they’ll know my time, they’ll carry the flags of Freetown even if Freetown is gone. And one day, Tatooine is free even if me and my ‘swindler’s forge’ armor and my little town have been claimed once more by the sands. Now hold still. I gotta carve a message into your face before I send you on your way.”

Lorgan cries out as Vanth reaches for him.





The skittermouse does what the skittermouse does: It skitters.

Across the desert, its little paws tickle the deadland as it runs—tiny claws make tiny sounds, ticka ticka ticka ticka.

This skittermouse is like the other skittermice here on Jakku: small enough to never be seen, skinny enough to fit through a bit of pipe or tubing, and curious enough to look for food in the strangest of places.

Currently, though, it is not seeking food.

It wants to build a nest. A burrow. Its last one was taken over by a pole-snake, and the mouse wants no part of that serpent. A skittermouse burrow is a peculiar thing: The critter tends to find a hole in the stone or the sand, and it lines its future home with bits of detritus scavenged from, well, anywhere and everywhere. A dead man in the desert will remain only so long before the skittermice come and take whatever the carrion birds have not: leather from a boot, tufts of hair from the top of the scalp, fingernails. Stories have been told of nomads in the desert seeing a bubbling fountain oasis in the distance only to come upon it and find the fountain is really an undulating pile of skittermice. Scare them and they scatter, revealing a dead man reduced to little more than bone.

Once the mouse has its burrow material, the creature begins to look for a larger object with which to plug its burrow to keep out other animals such as, say, pole-snakes. Presently, this skittermouse has found a bit of wire. Wire is good. Wire can be bent with the mouse’s tiny scissor teeth, and turned into a little place to curl up and sleep—or a place for babies to do the same.

But these wires are stubborn. They just won’t move. Tug, tug, tug.

Nothing.

They’re stuck. Anchored tight to a bulky hunk of metal—at least, a hunk of metal bulky by the skittermouse’s standards.

Ah. But what is this? A black metal thing. Cylindrical and already hanging off the side—it hums and sparks. This would make a most excellent burrow plug, would it not? The mouse gives up on the wires and moves now to this other thing, and the skittermouse squishes itself between the black object and the metal bulk to which it’s attached—the mouse suffers a sharp spark, but for a good burrow plug, it will endure. It must endure.

The mouse squeaks as it noses the black piece free.

The mouse gets behind it and with its delicate front paws begins to roll the cylinder into the dark, hoping very hard that ripper-raptors or vworkka do not spy it doing the industrious work of merely surviving on this heartless, desiccated planet.

For a time, all is still after the mouse leaves.

Then—then—two lights flicker and go bright as moons.

Slowly, surely, something comes back to life.

—

This is Mister Bones.

The B1 battle droid’s memory matrix remembers many things: It remembers darkness.

It remembers marching with its skeletal brethren in perfect lockstep, advancing on a village surrounded by green grasses, innocent people huddling there in the night. Innocent people who would not survive thanks to this battalion of battle droids.

It remembers spears of light, green and blue, cutting through the night and taking those metal men apart, one after the other after the other. Showers of sparks. Searing magma lines of melted metal. It remembers an incongruous memory, too: those beams of light held in its own hands. Not two hands, but four. Spinning about, vwom-vwom-vwom-vwom.

It remembers—no, he remembers dancing the la-ley. Singing for children. A program to amuse them. A program to please.

It remembers triple sixes. A designation, perhaps. Once.

More darkness.

This matrix is not one thing. It knows that. Bones is many minds and many lives. Some known. Others hidden. Protocol programs. Martial arts. Combat strategies. Puppetry. Child-rearing. They are fitted together by an eager if inelegant hand, the hand of a clever boy who needed a friend.