Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(65)

The boy seems taken aback by this. He shares looks with the other five children. A girl with dark braids forming a crown on her head makes a sour face. “You want to die?” she asks. “Iggs, you hear this bugger?”

The sneering boy—Iggs, apparently—lifts the blaster. “Well, Nanz, I suppose we oblige this leech and send him on to the next life.”

He lifts the blaster, and it’s then that Mas Amedda begins to cry. The tears are not tears of fear or hate or rage. They are the blubbering, plaintive cries of a man set on the edge but never allowed to come away from it—nor allowed to leap over its precipice. Here, finally, a release awaits. Even if this release is the dream of a sleeping mind or the vision from a broken one.

The blaster barrel, like a black eye, stares at him.

One of the other children—a bug-eyed Ongree boy—twists the mouth that sits in the center of his bulbous forehead and says to Iggs: “I don’t think this is gonna work, Iggsy.”

“Bah, kriff it, I think you’re right, Urk,” the towhead says. He lowers the blaster. Amedda shakes his head.

“No! It’ll work. Just do it. Please.” He paws at the weapon, but the boy pulls it away in a taunting gesture.

“What am I missing?” Nanz asks. “Let’s ax the monster before anybody hears us! We have to get back out, you know.”

“Look at him,” Iggs says. “He’s not who we thought. This blue bucket of flab couldn’t lead a fly to a stack of dung much less the whole of the Empire. We pop him, we probably do him and the rest of the bucketheads a favor.” The children all look to one another and seem to come to the same conclusion with a series of half shrugs and nods.

Amedda presses himself further into the comfort of the chaise. “What will you do, then?”

Nanz says: “I guess we haven’t figured that out, yet.”

“Who…who are the lot of you?”

Iggs lifts his chin with pride. “Anklebiter Brigade. Or part of it.”

One by one, they identify themselves.

“I’m Iggs,” the redheaded boy says.

The girl with the braids: “Nanz.”

Bug-eyed Ongree: “Urk G’lar.”

A pair of Bith who may be twins or who might just be Bith who look like each other (Mas Amedda has a difficulty differentiating them) name the other: “He’s Hoolie.” “She’s Jutchins.”

“Wenchins,” says the last, another human boy.

“How’d you get in here?” Amedda asks them.

The Ongree, Urk, says: “Laundry tube. We broke it. Climbed up. Big enough for a kid to get through.”

How foolishly simple, Amedda thinks. And then comes the mad irony that Imperial engineers and architects were very good at creating very narrow—and very vulnerable—spaces in their designs. He begins to wonder if they had rebel collaborators building in such weaknesses…

“Help me escape,” Amedda says.

“You must be a real dum-dum,” Wenchins says.

Iggs waves it off. “Can’t fit you down the vacu-tube.”

“I can get us executive access to the turbolift. We just have to clear the hallway. We get to the lift, I can get us out of here. The hallway has three guards. I cannot overpower them, as I have no weapons. But you…you have blasters. Help me escape and I’ll help you.”

Again the children confer silently. Raised eyebrows all around.

Urk leans in, staring with those big yellow eyes. “What’s in it for us?”

“You’re rebels?”

“Of a sort. We rebel,” Iggs says.

“Get me clear, I can turn myself in. I’ll give the Republic the codes to open the doors to the Imperial Palace. I’ll tell them everything. I’ll surrender the whole Empire.” Of course, Mon Mothma did not accept his surrender last time, but these children do not know that. Further, maybe he can offer more this time. Maybe he can do it right. “Please.”

It’s Iggs that finally nods and says, “Deal.”

“He could betray us,” Urk says.

“Enh. He’s done for. I figure he tries that they’ll just lock him back in here. Look around—this lump is just a prisoner in his own chambers.”

“But we could die,” Nanz hisses in his ear.

“That was always on the table,” the boy says—a surprisingly stoic thing to say given his age. But Amedda fears this child has seen more than most Imperial bureaucrats ever have. “We die, we die. Least we die with our hands free and not tied behind us. Let’s get it done.” To Amedda, Iggs says in a low voice: “We’re going to get you out of here. But if you try to twist your way out and mess with us, I’ll shove you so far down that laundry chute you’ll wish you were back here sleeping in your own filth again.”

“Deal,” Amedda says.

“Deal. Now let’s get you to the Republic.”





The Observatory’s defenses made short work of the Hutt’s caravan, but Gallius Rax can see that, regrettably, they failed to finish the job. Now night has fallen and his quarry is positioned defensively behind pillarlike plateaus down in the valley. He flicks from screen to screen, watching. Sloane and someone else—some man he does not know—are behind the eastern pillar. Niima and some of her Hutt-slaves are hidden in the shadow of the western plateau. The good news is that they’re all trapped, pinned there by the turbolasers. They could try to run, but they would end up like the rest of the caravan: smoking wreckage and tangled corpses.