Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(48)
Now, from that direction comes someone else.
Effney, the officer. He staggers forward, falling to one knee, though momentum bounces him back up to running. He’s shirtless and sweat-slick, a white cloth swaddled around his brow. In his hand hangs a small blaster.
He fires it behind him as he runs. He screams: “No! Get away! Get away from me, you monster!”
He is prey. And his predator reveals itself.
The battle droid moves in herky-jerky fits and starts—Bones is broken, Norra can see that much. His right leg is slow and wobbles at the joint every time it touches down. His left arm—blade extended—convulses even as the other arm remains steady, pointing its weapon.
Effney’s shots go wide, missing the droid by a considerable margin.
He’s running toward her cage. He’ll be alongside it— She growls, scooping up a handful of sand and dirt in her open palm, and as he comes past, panicked—his mouth wide, his eyes wider—she flings the debris into his face. He cries out, clawing at himself.
It stops him long enough for Bones to catch up.
Effney swivels, pointing the blaster. It’s too late. The droid’s blade cuts that arm off, and it thuds against the sand. Then Bones does to him what he did to Bones—one piece after the next, until Effney is just a pile of himself sitting outside her metal cage.
Bones swipes his vibroblade downward, buzzing through the lock on Norra’s cage. The door swings open.
“I HAVE PERFORMED VIOLENCE,” Bones says.
“Yes, you have,” Norra says.
“FOUND YOU.”
“You sure did. Thank you.” And thank you, Tem, for building him. Her strange, cackling, dancing, knife-slicing savior. “We have to go, now, Bones. Or we’re both dead.”
“ROGER-ROGER.”
The days of Counselor Gallius Rax are busy. Busier than even he anticipated, for the act of running an Empire is a complicated feat, and he can only delegate so much. Some things require his hand. Many things do, in fact, and it is vital that he remain the one in control.
In the morning, everything is administrative. He sits at a desk under a tent atop the roof of the main building. This vantage point allows him to gaze out over their base here in the shadow of Carbon Ridge on Jakku. From here, he can see the yield of his efforts laid bare. The data on his screen is brought to life as his Empire grows to power: All Terrain Armored Transports march the perimeter, a line of AT-STs wait on the left, ranks of TIE fighters wait on the right. And above, the ghosts of Star Destroyers, ready to drop from the sky and slice the enemy in twain like an executioner’s blade.
Day by day, the Empire grows. The weakness from within is cut out—like a soft, overripe part of the fruit sliced free and left on the floor—and the strong are summoned. They come here. They come to his testing ground.
They come to his home.
He draws a deep, centering breath as he is wont to do. In that breath he smells the scents of the planet on which he was raised—the smell of sun-warmed stone, the stink of sand, a heady whiff of something dead. It dries out the inside of his nose. The rest of him is that way, too: the moisture wicked free from his insides. All of the Empire is hardening—a fatty cut of meat cured into a bitter, leathery strip that has no purpose but to sustain.
Sometimes he stops and looks in a mirror. Even he, who has kept up a rigorous physical regimen since he left this planet, looks tightened, stripped down, worn away. The transformation is a pleasing one. I am metal hammered into a blade. As he does this, he hums to himself: an ancient madrigal called “Treachery and Countenance.” A favorite of Palpatine’s.
Soon he is done regarding himself and his Empire.
He goes then and meets with his inner council: the general, Old Man Borrum; the architect of the new stormtrooper program, Brendol Hux; the propagandist Ferric Obdur; and by hologram, Grand Moff Randd.
Rax tells them that war is coming. “It’s inevitable,” he explains almost dismissively. “We’ve seen now one rebel ship enter our space, barely managing to escape. Not long after, we detected a probe droid and a scout ship haunting us from the next sector. We’ve all seen Mothma’s precious little speech. Though I am told she is bound in the torpid politics of the New Republic, I assure you: the battle is coming.”
“Coming slowly,” Borrum says. And he’s right. Rax wonders why that is. He’s been assuring his council that the attack from the New Republic is imminent. And it should have been—but the days pass and no attack has come. At first he worried that the Republic had a different strategy in mind, one he could not foresee—but now he suspects the reality is all the duller: They’ve gone timid. The New Republic is not a military entity. It is one of democracy. And it is painfully na?ve to think that democracy can work on a galactic scale. It is a very bad idea to expect a starship piloted by a thousand monkey-lizards to do anything but drive itself straight into the sun.
Borrum harrumphs and crosses his arms. “I grow impatient. We can stand on alert for only so long. It wearies the men. It tests the soul.”
My soul is indeed tested, Hodnar Borrum.
Randd, ever the taut pragmatist, says: “Let them arrive to the battle as slow as they would like. It gives us more time to bolster our numbers. With each day we see new ships join us. Just today the veterans of Ryloth joined us in the Star Destroyer Diligent.”