Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(80)

“A man must keep his secrets.”

“Not me. I have none. I am done with secrets.”

“Somehow, I doubt that, Sin.”

Conder’s gentle eyes twinkle. Sinjir admires the man. His drive. His capability. After rescuing the slicer from the warehouse, they had to move fast—the good news was, as suspected, that the Black Sun and Red Key thugs had hacked a line to the datapads of their five senators. The line was encrypted, though, which is where Conder came in. The slicer did as the name suggested, slicing through algorithms like a man with a blade cutting ribbons. In only a few minutes, Conder—beaten, woozy, caked in his own blood—stole access to the senators’ datapads.

And from there, they delivered the messages.

Sinjir’s initial idea was to threaten them. But Sinjir also knew that threats created fear and fear made people act a certain way. It’s one thing to have someone bound to a chair; there, you control the fear. You wield it like a weapon. But those senators were in the wind. A fight-or-flight response could’ve had them doing any number of unpredictable things—turning themselves in, running for the exits, or even voting as the syndicates demanded they vote in the hope it would save them.

No, instead Sinjir said to make them an offer—an offer braided into the threat. He had Conder send a missive telling them they would be given pardons if they voted with the chancellor. And further, they told Nim Tar that his child was safe and Sorka that her prize jerba was rescued. (That latter bit was a necessary lie. Sorka will soon learn that the syndicates already sold her prize animal on the butchers’ black market.) And with that, they did it.

They solved the plot. They got the votes. The final battle is coming.

Conder says: “You’re worried.”

“Am I that obvious?”

“Usually not. This time, you are.” Conder clasps his hand. “Jas and Norra will be fine.”

“I could go. I should go. Demand to be put in a ship. Like Jom. Like Temmin. I should be there.”

“You’re not a soldier.”

“I trained to be, once,” Sinjir says. “I know how to fight.”

“If you want to go, I’ll go, too. Maybe they can use a slicer.”

Sinjir nods. “I suppose it’s not impossible.” He hates that he wants to be there. He knows himself and he should be balking at this. Loyalty only goes so far, and despite once being the man who tested the loyalty of others, he himself is not particularly fond of the concept. And yet here he is. Wanting to rush into danger again for his friends. He supposes he should stop being surprised. I’ve become a different person than I expected. Or maybe he was a different person all along, led to a myth about himself created by himself. Is that how people are? Do they all have two sides? Who they really are, and who they believe themselves to be?

“Who do we ask?”

“Considering the size of the favor we just performed in service to the chancellor, I think we might ask her.”

Conder draws a deep breath. “Are we going to Jakku? Are we really doing this?”

“We might be, dearest Conder, we might be.”

“I had hoped for a nicer vacation.”

Sinjir hrms. “You and me both.”

—

War is coming.

It’s what Jom Barell is built for. He never really felt like he trained for war but rather that he was just plain made that way. All his life it’s been about the fight. He fought against the Empire on Onderon. He fought against his own bloodline brothers there. He fought as a rebel. He fought as a commando for the New Republic. He fought with Norra and her crew.

And now he wants to fight again.

Sergeant Dellalo Dayson is, with her SpecForce team, loading munitions onto a low-atmo U-Wing. It’s a fat-bellied starfighter used as a troop transport, meant for fast, dangerous insertion into enemy territory. It’s an old class of fighter, but this is an old class of soldier. Jom feels that way, too.

He whistles to Dayson as he skirts past one of the ship’s four engines. “Sergeant,” he calls.

She turns and stares down her long nose at him. “You cleaned up,” she says. And he has. He shaved everything down—though he left the handlebar mustache and the meatchop sideburns. He combed his hair. Best he can do to look like a proper commando again. “Whaddya need, Barell?”

“I need to go with you.”

“No can do. Not my call. You want back in, there’s a whole chain of command you gotta climb.” She sees his face and offers both hands up in a peaceable gesture. “Don’t get mad at me, Jom. You broke ranks and did your own thing. You go and talk to General Tyben, maybe he gives you a stamp and gets you back on your way. But it won’t be with my crew.”

“Damnit, Dayson—”

“Sergeant Dayson, if you’ll recall.”

His nostrils flare. “Sergeant. This fight? It matters. Maybe more than all the others.” She probably thinks he means it because this could be the Empire’s last hurrah. And that’s true. But for Jom, it’s personal. For Jom, it’s about Jas. He drops his bag. He cranes his neck so that the vertebrae pop. “I’ll fight you for it. I’ll fight the whole platoon for it. I take even one of you out, I want to take that commando’s place.”

Dayson laughs. “We’d kill you.”