Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(67)

“Damnit.”

“The question is, Do you want justice, or do you want revenge?”

“I…”

Images flash. Sloane having Norra’s son thrown off a roof at the satrap’s palace on Akiva. Sloane escaping in a TIE fighter. Their fight on Chandrila—brutal, bitter fisticuffs. I want her dead and gone. I want her to pay. I want my revenge for all that she’s done. But other images cascade: Her son’s face. Leia’s, too. Everyone she knows makes an appearance—Sinjir, Solo, Jom, even Brentin.

All of them are good people. Even when they’re doing bad things. But is she that? Perhaps she is their opposite. Or maybe killing Sloane is a bad thing, but it wouldn’t change that she’s a good person.

She tells the truth when she says, “I don’t know. For now, we…do whatever it takes to capture her.”

“Fine. How?”

Norra thinks. A plan—clumsy and terrifying—forms. “We can’t take out those turbolasers.” She remembers rocketing over Myrra on Akiva in a TIE fighter—those ships are insanely maneuverable, and even then it was a struggle not to get fried. “Instead we fly down, but never stop moving for long. Someone drops out, grabs Sloane. We use Bones as backup.” Bones is presently on the shuttle, charging his batteries and doing light diagnostics on himself. “Then whoever’s flying the ship brings it back around just long enough to drop the ramp so we can all get aboard. And while the clearance codes are still good, we get offplanet and back to the Republic with our prisoner in tow.”

“It’s dangerous.” Jas’s face wrinkles up into a frustrated knot. “We’ll probably die. Then again, we’ve survived this long, and your plan might be the only way. I like it. There’s one other thing, though.”

“Do I want to know?”

“It’s time to consider the possibility that Rae Sloane is no longer in charge of anything down here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it. The grand admiral of the whole Empire is down there in the company of a Hutt gangster. She’s clothed like a common scavenger. Sloane has lost control, Norra. She’s not in charge of a hill of sand, much less the Empire. And whatever’s out there is important enough to be guarded by a bank of high-test turbolasers, but secret enough to have no visible Imperial presence. Something’s going on here. Something big.”

Norra paces. Jas is right. And yet—what can they do? How can they see the scope of it? Do they even need to?

They don’t, she decides.

“The goal is the goal,” Norra says. “Get Sloane. The rest is for someone else to uncover. We do our part, and if we bring back the erstwhile grand admiral, maybe she can do her part and shine a light on these shadows, show us what’s really going on.”

“Sounds like a deal. Ready to try to not die once again?”

“It seems to be my calling.”

—

Something is up there.

Sloane is sure of it. She’s been staring up at the distant ridgeline for the last hour, certain that something is hiding there behind the rocks. At first she thought, Maybe it’s just an animal. In her short time here on Jakku she’s already seen creatures she hopes to never see again: devouring worms underneath the sand, birds whose beaks can punch through metal, massive lizards that run across the hot desert as fast as lightning. For a time she thought maybe it was some beast watching, waiting to feast upon them should they dare to sleep. But now she’s not so sure. It’s the way that the shadows move, and the way she sometimes catches the flintiest glint of starlight. It’s someone, not something.

She tells Brentin as much. He remains crouched behind a bent and crooked stone, and he asks the natural question: “Who?”

“I don’t know. We don’t have any friends here. But I don’t think it’s the Empire, either, or they would’ve come already.” Or so she thinks. The turbolaser turrets out there—they’re guarding something spectacular. Something that belongs to Gallius Rax.

But does it belong to the Empire? Or just to Rax?

“Could be scavengers,” Brentin says.

“Could be.” Just as an animal might look to devour them, scavengers might hope to do the same—looking to plunder not their meat but the debris field scattered out in front of them in the open valley.

“Niima still isn’t happy.”

It’s hard to see the Hutt now, but it’s easy to hear her. The distance that separates the two groups from each other is close enough that the slug’s snorts and hisses and gurgles of rage are clear across the quiet night. There arises a thumping, too—the Hutt’s tail, pounding the desert.

Sloane is sorely tempted to lure the Hutt out of hiding and hope that one of the turbolasers turns the worm to a red mist and a rain of foul blubber. But it would do Sloane no good, of course, beyond affording her a moment of pleasure—and eradicating one of her enemies.

“What do you think Rax is hiding beyond the valley?” Brentin asks.

“I don’t know. The rumors said it was some kind of weapons facility.”

“Why would he hide that? He seems to be hiding it from his own people.”

“I don’t know that, either.” Certainly the Empire had its secrets. Layers of them, actually. Even she does not know them all.