Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(75)

“I have a plan,” he says.

“Do it,” Sinjir says, without even asking what it is.

—

They pull him out of the Academy. He is hand-selected by a brutal, brick-faced woman named Officer Sid Uddra. Uddra tells Sinjir Rath Velus that he will be no trooper: He is too angry and he is too smart. Both qualities that make for a poor soldier. “They are just fodder anyway,” she says as an aside, dismissing an entire army with a sour sneer.

He ends up in a new training program, this one located in a boxy, duracrete building. This severe structure is the Viper’s Nest and it sits on a peak surrounded by the roiling oceans of Virkoi. It is where the Imperial Security Bureau trains its LOs—the loyalty officers.

Uddra tells him that she comes from the same system as he: Velusia. He is from Sevenmoon, she from Sixmoon.

“You are like me,” she tells him. “You get along with no one. They don’t like you and you don’t like them. It matters little where it started—over time, you’ve learned to protect yourself by preemptively hating everyone else. You distrust and despise even me. Good. That hate will save you. More important, that hate will save the Empire.” And she explains to him what his role will be in the Empire from now on—he will train to become Loyalty Officer Rath Velus. He will hide in plain sight. He will use that hatred of others to see in them their weakness—every weak Imperial is a fontanel where the skin goes thin and the Empire becomes vulnerable.

Then she tells him his training begins now.

She beats him. He is young and foolish and thinks he can fight back against this small, hard stump of a woman. He is wrong. Uddra’s movements are short and precise. He swings. She ducks. He leaps. She sidesteps. Every time he misses, she lands a hit. To his ribs. To the side of his neck. To his kidneys. Soon he is left panting and sobbing on the floor, on his hands and knees. Uddra goes to work on him. Whipping him with a wet towel rolled up. Bending his fingers back—not so they break, but so the pain forces him confess everything about himself. Inserting small slivers of metal under his fingernails. The pain is intense. It is clarifying. It rips him open and everything that he is spills out of his blubbering mouth.

This happens again and again. Sinjir trains during the day. He suffers at night. Uddra never shows emotion. She studies him like an eight-legger deciding which part of the fly to eat first. Uddra dissects him.

He is unlike her. He is not cold and calculating. He is angry, vicious, full of rage. Uddra explains: “I will burn that out of you until all that’s left is charred and black. A hot coal gone cold.” Then she breaks his toes.

Then one day, it is his turn. Not to fight her, no. But to turn what he has learned—what has been visited upon him—against another.

She shows him a door. In this door is a window, and through that window he sees a man in a black officer’s uniform—bars on the fellow’s chest indicate that this man with pinched eyes and a pug’s nose is a lieutenant serving the Imperial Navy.

Uddra tells Sinjir: “He will be your first.” She explains why the man is here: “We believe he is part of a cabal of conspirators who seek to unseat Palpatine from the throne by committing to an assassination plot against the Emperor’s enforcer, Darth Vader. You will root out the names of the other conspirators. Before you do, however, there is one last lesson.”

She takes him outside, where a storm rages. On Virkoi, a storm always rages. Uddra takes a blaster rifle from a rack against the wall of the Viper’s Nest and she points it off at the black, storm-crushed horizon.

Uddra fires.

The bolt cuts through the rain and the winds. It moves fast—a bright flash lancing the dark until it’s a pinprick, then gone.

“You must be like that,” she hisses in his ear. “You are that bolt of searing plasma. You will always be unswerving. No matter the rain or the wind. No matter how hot or how cold. Through the air. Through the void. You must be the brightest beam of light. Only then will the truth be out.”

Sinjir understands. He pushes his anger away. He tortures Lieutenant Alster Grove for two nights straight until the man yields the names of his fellow conspirators. Uddra dumps Grove screaming into the churning sea. The other conspirators are hunted down by Vader and beheaded.

—

I am the brightest beam of light.

All else is chaos. It is like the wind-whipped sea of Virkoi. He will not be fazed by it. He must not be fazed by it.

Solo uses the Falcon’s belly turret to blow a hole in the top of the warehouse roof. Then he sets the Falcon right down upon it. Whump. Temmin stays behind to watch Rethalow. The rest of them are off.

Sinjir is first through the breach.

The warehouse is dim. The noise has already drawn foes. They come up on him in what seems like slow motion.

I am the brightest beam of light.

A thick-skulled Nikto swings a saw-toothed ax at his head. He deftly dips away from the blade, then twists the thug’s arm back, back, back—until there’s the dull vegetal crunch of tendons ripping. Sinjir pitches the Nikto behind him just as a plasma bolt snaps through the air, taking the thug out. That, from Jom, coming up behind—he’s yelling something to Sinjir, something about keep going, keep moving, I’ll cover you, but the ex-Imperial barely registers it at all.

I am the brightest beam of light.

Two more Nikto thugs come up between shelf-stacks of motor-vator parts—two more bolts of light through dark space. One from Han, the other from Jom. Both foes find their heels skidding out from under them as they are taken down, one after the other.