Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(69)

Norra grabs the quadnocs from Bones and looks once more.

Sloane and Brentin are no longer looking this way.

They’re still looking up. This time, in another direction.

That’s when the shuttle suddenly pulls hard to the left—heading back west again away from Sloane, away from her husband. No! That’s not possible! She yells back inside the ship: “What are you doing?” Fury surges inside her like a living thing, and she launches herself back inside the shuttle and makes her way through the main hold and into the cockpit. The ship banks again and she almost loses her footing as she staggers up behind the bounty hunter and reaches for the controls. “We have to go back!”

Jas yells: “We have incoming Imperial ships!”

“It doesn’t matter. Brentin is down there! My husband.” She wrestles for the flight stick. Jas grabs Norra by the chin and pulls her close.

“Listen to me,” she says. Her voice is cold, her eyes are deadly serious. “If we go down there, we’re dead. We’re all dead.”

“Please,” Norra begs.

“The Imperials aren’t following us because we have clearance codes. We watch. We wait. We do this right. Okay?”

“It’s Brentin, Jas, it’s Brentin.” Even Norra hears the madness in her own voice as she pleads.

“I need you to trust me, Norra. Do you trust me?”

“I do…”

“Then buckle up. We need to get out of here. Fast.”

—

“We have nowhere to go,” Brentin says. And he’s right. They flee the protection of the plateau, and turbolasers will end them. Stay here, and they’re a target for whoever it is that’s coming for them.

Sloane doesn’t understand what just happened. The ship that was coming—a Corellian shuttle by the look of it? It turned away at the last second as a trio of Imperial ships came up over the ridge. Those three ships are Lambda-class shuttles and they roar in and swoop low over the desert, dust swirling behind them. The Corellian ship flees. Scavengers, run off by the sight of the Empire? Or saviors? She’ll never know, it seems.

Sloane looks at the blaster rifle in her hand and tries to imagine what to do with it. Put it under your chin, she thinks.

But no. She’ll see this through. There is no escape from this situation, but one way or another she will find a way forward. Sloane will end Rax. Sloane will retake the Empire. She’ll do it with her biting teeth and scratching fingernails. She’ll claw her way back to the seat of power. Maybe this is how she gets there. Seize any opportunity, she thinks.

The shuttles land, far enough apart to block any chance she and Brentin might have of fleeing into the night.

Ramps descend with off-gassing steam.

Stormtroopers come off those ramps in no formation—just a sloppy, chaotic disgorgement of soldiers. More like mercenaries at this point.

Then he comes.

Gallius Rax.

He wears the white of a grand admiral, somehow clean despite the filth of this world. A red cape swoops behind him, stirring dust.

Stormtroopers surround her and Brentin. They bark orders for her to drop her weapon, and she does.

They part to let Rax through.

“Sloane,” he says, dipping his chin in a small nod.

“Counselor.”

“I thought you had been killed on Chandrila.” The wind whips his cape. “Or taken prisoner.”

Her pulse throbs in her temples. Her fingers tighten reflexively into fists. Sloane’s greatest desire is to leap forward right now and drive one punch into his face—a single hit that pistons his nose into his brain. But she’d be cut down by blasterfire before she even got close.

“I am alive. I will retake the Empire, now. Thank you for safeguarding it, but your time is done.” She says that with bluff and bluster, knowing full well he won’t simply accede.

“Your Empire has moved on without you,” he says, his hand going to the air with a frittering gesture. “You understand. After a period of mourning, what else could we do?”

“So you brought it here. To this dead place.”

“We have a destiny here. We all do.”

My destiny is to see you die, she thinks.

And then, from the other plateau, a roar of fury. Out there, Niima the Hutt bellows and slithers swiftly across the desert floor toward them. The turbolasers don’t fire as she crosses the expanse. (That confirms Rax controls them—the turrets didn’t autotarget him or his shuttles.) Niima shrieks in proto-Huttese, the translation box offering its interpretation in loud mechanized monotone: “COUNSELOR. WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN HIDING OUT HERE IN THE—”

But Rax simply holds up his finger and loops it in an almost lazy, dismissive gesture. The troopers turn toward the Hutt, rifles up, and begin firing. Red lasers spear the night, sizzling and pocking as they pelt the Hutt and the slaves who ride her. The slug roars. Slaves fall.

But she doesn’t stop.

Niima suddenly changes course, heads toward one of the shuttles. Wailing in pain and rage, the Hutt moves with terrifying speed toward the closest shuttle, and she hits it like a charging beast. Her head gets under the ship and lifts—Sloane audibly gasps as the shuttle flips onto its side, the wing snapping as the troopers continue firing upon her.

Now the Hutt is coming this way. And Sloane thinks, This is it, this is my way out. She begins to eye the troopers, assessing which she should take— Niima slumps, sliding forward. Her last Hutt-slave, the one who originally draped the speaker around the worm’s neck (or, rather, lack of neck), hits the sand running, ululating— One shot between his eyes drops him.