Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(66)

Rax remains down in the bowels of the Imperial base. The sentinel stands in the corner, projecting images from the center of its hand.

In walks Tashu. And with Tashu comes Brendol Hux.

“I have retrieved him,” Tashu says with a dramatic bow.

“It’s late,” Hux says, his lips smacking drily together. “What is all this? Why am I summoned at this hour?”

It takes a moment for Hux to regard the strange scene: a spare room with dark blastocrete walls, a red-robed sentinel with Palpatine’s face, and images of the Jakku desert projected into the air.

“I need your help,” Rax says to Brendol Hux.

“Wh…what kind of help?”

“I need to know: Are your recruits ready?”

“I need more time…” Hux flinches. “They need more time.”

“They have no more time. Prove your worth to me, Brendol.”

Hux’s eyes search the screens and the sentinel’s flickering face, trying to make some sense of all of this. “I…”

“Prove yourself and I’ll tell you what’s really going on.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Fail me and you will spend the rest of your days wandering this graceless desert.” It is a bold offering. Rax knows full well that Hux could try to leave here and tell the others in the council what’s happening. They could attempt a coup against him, though it would not succeed. Still, Brendol Hux is not a popular man. He isn’t army, he isn’t navy. He’s cold, smug, stubborn. He spends his time alone. Even his own son stays away from him—and that boy has no friends here, either. With the fall of the Empire, Hux and his son have been increasingly alienated.

And this is a way back in. A way out of isolation. A reward, dangling there in front of him.

Will he jump for it? Or will he wilt like a flower in this dead place?

Hux nods, puffing out his chest. “They’ll do what you need. Just tell me what it is and I will have them ready to serve.”

Rax smiles. “Good.”

—

“What happened down there?”

Norra asks because the fuzzy view through the quadnocs—stolen from the Corellian shuttle, now parked behind them—gives no meaningful answer. Jas flew the ship up here to the effective end of Niima’s canyons and caverns, parking it atop a tall, toothy ridge that overlooks a broad valley that opened up in the desert. There the valley extends outward, guarded on both sides by a gauntlet of plateaus and megaliths, striated in the colors of fire and blood. But it’s not the valley that puzzles them.

It’s what’s in it.

Down there, about five klicks out, is a caravan in ruins. Something laid waste to it. A dais sits collapsed, broken in half like a shattered table. All around lie the smoking remains of wheel-bikes and speeders. Pack beasts dot the area, dead. And there are human corpses, too. White as bone. Painted that way, Jas said: Hutt-slaves belonging to the slug boss, Niima.

Niima is there, too. Norra spies the long-tailed slug waiting on this side of one of the plateaus. She’s not alone—some of those white-painted slaves crawl all over her like bugs swarming a fallen log.

Norra leans into the crook of where two jutting stones meet, then turns the ’nocs east— That is where she finds Sloane.

Sloane’s hunkered down there between the wall of an anvil-like plateau and a small pile of ancient broken boulders. The admiral, too, is not alone: Someone is with her. A man, hiding behind a spire-like stone.

“My take,” Jas says, “is that we’re talking turbolasers. Look past the broken caravan. Another couple of klicks.” Norra refocuses the quadnocs for a more distant view—they’re night-vision, but the thermal view still distorts what she sees. Just the same, she sees something out there. Something boxy, moored to the slopes of low mesas. Beyond that, there’s a final plateau that closes the valley: This plateau looks like an outstretched arm with a cupped hand at the end of it, as if looking to catch whatever might fall from the sky.

“I think I see them.”

“They’re usually for ground-to-air—”

“But like Akiva, they’re being used for ground-to-ground, too.”

“Correct. Which means they could tear us in half if we get hit.”

Norra stands and leans against one of the jagged stones. The ’nocs hang by their strap. “What do we do?”

“The more important question is, What’s your plan with Sloane?”

“I don’t follow.”

Jas crosses her arms. “We have two ways to deal with her. One involves capture and extraction. That means taking her back to Chandrila—or Nakadia, or wherever—to face a tribunal.”

“And the other way is to kill her.”

“Correct. Assassination. Here and now. A proper revenge.”

Norra knows what she wants to do. And Jas only makes that choice easier when the bounty hunter explains: “If we want her dead, we head in that direction, our cannons going at full blaze. She gets hit and dies, or she runs out into the open where a turbolaser turns her to dust on the wind.”

“And the other way?”

“That gets trickier. Because it means we need time to get her on the shuttle, and that area she’s hiding in doesn’t afford us much room. Pretty cozy down there, so our tail feathers will be hanging out.”