Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(52)

That will draw attention. She’ll need to run and gun.

But that’ll time out right—the one on the fat-bellied wheel-bike doing loops will be within range. Take him out. Grab the bike. It’ll be like that time on Yan Korelda when she was just a recruit in the Empire and barely got away from a gang of rebel thugs after refueling her speeder bike. One of their blaster bolts literally cooked a tuft of her hair—she could smell it burning for hours after.

She charges forward. Past the dais. Past a duo of Hutt-slaves who babble at her as she pushes onward. Sloane has no idea where Brentin is—if he’s hot on her heels or burying his head in the sand. She doesn’t care. She can’t care. Her goal is the blaster rifle, then the wheel-bike.

Then Rax.

The Hutt-slave doesn’t even know to suspect her. By the time she’s upon him and he’s turning his head toward her—

Wham. She drives a fist into the back of his skull. His teeth snap together and he doesn’t even make a sound. All he does is pitch forward, face-planting into the sand…and as he does, she catches his blaster and wrenches it out of his grip. Now she has a weapon. Niima didn’t let her or Brentin have blasters—on this journey they’ve been nothing but spectators, buckled into a ride they didn’t ask to take. That changes now.

But the wheel-bike that had been coming her way suddenly kicks up a spray of sand and goes back the other way, its engine growling. No! Get back here, you Hutt-sucking freak. She starts to run, but now cries of alarm rise up around her—Niima’s slaves howling and calling for their mistress. And the Hutt does not disappoint: Sloane hears the mechanical gargle of the slug’s translator box as it transmits her rage to the world:

“STOP HER.”

It all happens so fast.

One slave comes up at her and she cracks the butt end of the blaster rifle into his chin. He swallows teeth and goes down, flailing—and two more come charging up in his place. Sloane raises the rifle, aims.

Two spears of laser light end them as she fires the blaster. Each slave goes down with a smoking hole in the center of his chest.

Something clubs her in the side of the head. Her ears ring as she tumbles to the sand, rolling over and reflexively holding up the blaster across her face just as a slave brings his sharpened machete down—thunk! The blade sticks into the side of the rifle. The slave struggles to extract it.

Someone tackles the slave from behind, knocking him back.

Brentin.

Wexley kicks at the freak with a boot, then grabs the machete with one hand and helps Sloane up with the other.

As he hauls her to standing, Sloane hears a sound: The hissing of sand, the chanting of the slaves, and it’s then she knows that something is coming.

Niima.

If Sloane has maintained one common belief about Hutts, it’s that they are indolent, lethargic creatures. They are called slugs for a reason. But Niima defies this handily. This creature is not some torpid glob. Sloane looks back over Brentin’s shoulder, and fear fills her empty spaces the way fire gobbles air—the Hutt slams down off her dais, hitting the sand with a cough of dust. Niima slithers toward them fast as a viper. Hutt-slaves cling to her like riders, their mouths open, their teeth bared. They have blasters. They start firing.

Sloane grabs Brentin’s arm and they break into a hard run.

Blaster bolts kick up sand around their feet.

Behind them, the hissing sound of Niima’s body sliding across the sand grows louder and closer. She has no idea how near the Hutt is to them—but it’s close enough that Sloane starts to smell the foul stink of the monster. She thinks to turn behind her and fire into the serpent’s face, but the slaves will just swarm her. No. The plan is the plan and she needs to stick with it: Get to the wheel-bikes. She takes aim as she runs, tracking one of the riders with the sights of her rifle…

But something distracts her. In the distance, far away in the valley, she spies a flash of light—something glinting off the high-day sun.

The Hutt roars behind her. A shadow falls upon her as Niima rises up, lifting her whole corpulent body with the sheer strength and will of her tail—

The air fills with white light. A shrieking pillar of green fire fills the space and before Sloane even knows what’s happening, there’s a thunderclap and she’s thrown to the ground. A column of smoke drifts from somewhere, and her eyes follow it to the source—

Niima’s hoverdais is collapsed into the sand, sheared in half.

The Hutt mistress herself is within spitting distance. The slug is dazed, tilting toward her side. Niima shakes her head as her reptilian eyes refocus. Sand streams from her crumpled, rotten skull.

The Hutt bellows something in proto-Huttese, but the translation is lost to another bolt piercing the air, and one of the wheel-cars suddenly flips up, turning once, twice, before slamming back down on top of one of the beasts. The creature screams as its back snaps.

Turbolasers. That’s what’s firing on them. Sloane knows that sound. That beam. She’s never been on the ground when they’ve been firing—and she’s never been the one in their sights—but she knows what they can do, and if they don’t move, they’re all dead.

Change of plans.

The wheel-bike won’t save her. But those plateaus? They might. She reaches down to find her one ally in all this—

Sloane looks over and sees that half of Brentin Wexley is missing.