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Epub ISBN: 9781473505360

Version 1.0

Published by Century 2017

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Star Wars: Aftermath: Empire’s End is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

Copyright © Chuck Wendig 2017

Copyright © 2016 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™ where indicated.

All rights reserved. Used under authorisation.

Book design by Christopher M. Zucker

Cover art and design: Scott Biel

Chuck Wendig has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Century

Century
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA

www.penguin.co.uk

Century is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

HB 9781780892634
TPB 9781780896878

INTERLUDE

KASHYYYK

Here on the slopes of Mount Arayakyak, the Cultivating Talon, the jungles once served as a rain-forest orchard, providing the Wookiees with an array of fruits, the shi-shok being most prized because its utility was wide—the pulpy fruit was delicious and vital, the hull was hard enough to withstand nearly any impact, and the vines of the tree made for the strongest binding and climbing ropes known.

But the child that lopes through the jungle now does not know these things. He does not know the world’s history, for he barely even knows his own. He does not know that this rain forest was once lush and once gave his people life. All he knows now is that it is a scarred, carved-up place. Many trees are broken and collapsed against one another like campfire kindling. Others are sickened from the roots up—a poisonous black mold has taken them, rotting them, turning their fruits into hard, shriveled pods.

Lumpawaroo knows very few things. He knows his name. He knows that his mother was taken from him. He knows that his father has long been gone. He knows that he has been a slave for the rrraugrah—the hairless Imperial intruders—most of his life. But he also knows that recently, something has changed.

The bad song has ended. Each of the Wookiees had a song in their head, a song of fire and terror, a song like the sound of the thrumming wings from a swarm of drriw-tcha blood-worm flies. The song made them do things. The song screamed louder whenever they defied the milk-skins. At its loudest, the song could kill them—Waroo remembers when one of his slave-mates tried to scale the walls of the daubcrete bunker, and the song in her head caused her such misery that her neck craned back far enough to snap.

But now the song is gone.

The rrraugrah locked them away. They brought out the old chains and collars. They now force the Wookiees to work again with shock-lance and blaster, with screams of rage and baleful threat. Things have gotten worse since the song died. But in that, they have also gotten better.

Many of the intruders at this settlement have fled. Others have doubled down, gone mad, locked themselves away. Sometimes the milk-skins are there behind their doors, yelling, smashing things, weeping. They’ve ceased cleaning themselves. They hide. They even attack one another, at times. All while claiming to wait for something, someone, anyone to come. They think they will be saved. That someone will come to bolster their forces, to bring them new food, to help return the song to the Wookiees’ heads to control them once more.

Waroo feared that might be true, that someone might come, that the song might again be sung. So Waroo watched. And waited.

And soon the opportunity came.

One of the rrraugrah in a filthy gray officer’s uniform began closing the pylon-gate. This was Commandant Dessard, a vicious little man with a greasy peak of dark hair. Waroo waited until Dessard had almost closed the gate …

Then he leapt for the opening. Though Waroo was weak and starving, he summoned everything he could to make it through that gap.

And make it, he did. Once out, he kicked backward with both legs, knocking Dessard through the gap. Waroo shouldered the gate closed, then howled to the other young slaves—for this is a child camp, where the young Wookiees are prized for their small hands and their ability to climb oh so high—that he would come back to free them all.

Then Waroo fled into the jungle, down the slopes of Arayakyak, the Cultivating Talon, through the broken trees, up into their diseased boughs, across old rotten bridges, and through shattered homes hanging from cratered bark. For a time, he was alone. Now, though, that too has changed.

Waroo is being hunted.

The stink of Dessard is carried on the wind: sweat and waste and his own hatred. Waroo knows now why the man comes for him: The loss of one Wookiee is of no consequence except to the man’s own ego. He is angry to have lost one, to have been tricked and injured. That anger is a foul odor all its own, and Waroo can smell it. Worse, Dessard is not alone.

But Waroo is Wookiee. He is smart even though he is weak. He knows they cannot come for him up high, so he finds one of the diseased shi-shok trees, and Waroo ascends. He clambers from branch to branch, up a blackened vine that twists in on itself, through the sickened pleach. But his hand falls on something—a bulging fungal sac, one of the spore-pods that have helped to sicken the rain forest here. It erupts. From it comes a cloud of black spore, and Waroo inadvertently takes a deep sniff of it—

Everything goes white. He coughs, whimpering and bleating. Dizziness assails him; it feels like he’s spinning around and around, and his hands go slack and the world rushes up past him—

Waroo falls. He hits branches. Rot-curled leaves whip past him in a whirlwind. He bounces off a bough, and before he knows it—

Wham. The air escapes his chest in a cannon blast. He curls onto his side and tries to cough more, but Waroo cannot find the breath. He wheezes and whimpers. Just as his breath returns to him, so does the smell.

The stink of Dessard covers him like a tide of mud.

Dessard stands there, leering. His mouth is a vicious sneer. He has a blaster in his hand—a grungy, rust-rimed pistol. “You,” he hisses. “You thought you could get away. No one gets away. No one escapes. Not you. Not my own troops. Any who flee die. And they die very badly.”

Other Imperials encroach, forming a half circle behind the commandant. Waroo tries to get himself upright, but his strength is sapped. The spore, the fall, the fact he’s already starving and weak …

But one thing that remains strong is his senses.

Waroo smells Dessard, yes. He smells the man’s sweat. He smells the Imperial’s willingness—no, his eagerness—to kill.

Then another scent.

A Wookiee scent.

A scent oddly familiar, one that stirs within Waroo a sudden lift of his blood and spirits—

Dessard makes a sound—grrk!—and is yanked backward through the scrub and brush. Branches crackle as he’s whipped away. Then the air goes bright with blasterfire. The other milk-skins are too slow. They’re cut apart. One is knocked back through the air so hard, his feet whip above his head before he’s slammed into the trunk of the shi-shok. Dessard comes back, crawling on hands and knees toward Waroo, his face a simpering mask.

A shadow descends upon him.

And with it, a scent that says, Father.

A tall, shaggy Wookiee with a bandolier steps over the commandant and plants a tree-trunk leg down on Dessard’s back, mashing him against the ground and into the mud. Others emerge from the brush: a gray Wookiee with one arm, another with a visor over one eye, and several milk-skins in raggedy forest-green camo, a firebird sigil on their arms. These others secure Dessard’s arms behind his back, wrenching them into a pair of looped cuffs.

The bandolier Wookiee sees Waroo and cocks his head. He utters a soft purr before the strength seems to go out of his legs. Waroo knows him. This is his father. This is Chewbacca. They crash together, arms around each other, the child’s head buried in the father’s chest.

Chewbacca lifts his head to the sky and ululates a good song, a true song, a song of family, of lost love found once more.

This part of Taris is a wasteland, and Mercurial Swift moves through it like a rat slipping through bolt-holes. The bounty hunter clambers through the wreckage of an old habitation building, its apartments long shattered, the walls torn open to expose the mess of collapsed urban sprawl. Through the broken world, life tries to grow: creeping three-fingered vines and twisting spirals of slime-slick fungus. And though the ruination conceals it, people live here: They dwell, huddled up together in shipping containers and through crumbling hallways, hidden under the fractured streets and atop buildings so weakened they sway like sleepy drunks in even the softest wind.

His prey is here. Somewhere.

Vazeen Mordraw, a wilder girl who stole a caseload of ID cards from the Gindar Gang—cards that were themselves stolen from New Republic dignitaries. Cards that would allow anyone easy passage through the known worlds without triggering a closer look. The Gindar want the cards back. And as a special bonus, they want the girl, too.

Preferably alive. Dead if necessary.

Mercurial plans on the former. If only because it’ll be a lot easier to extract someone who can move around on her own two feet—carting a corpse over the wreckage of Taris sounds like a damn fine way to snap an ankle. And that would make this job unnecessarily harder.

There. Up ahead. Some scum-farmer kid stands in the shadow of a shattered wall, scraping sponge-moss off the stone, maybe to feed his family, maybe to sell. The boy—head shaved, dirt on his cheeks, his lower lip split as a scarmark indicating that he is an owned boy—startles and turns to run. But Swift calls after.

“Hey! Slow down, kid.” He shakes a small satchel at him. Credits tink as they jostle together. “I’m looking for someone.”

The kid doesn’t say anything, but he stops running, at least. Wary, he arches an eyebrow, and Mercurial takes that as a sign of interest. The bounty hunter taps the gauntlet at his wrist, and a hologram glimmers suddenly in the air above his arm. It’s an image of the girl, Vazeen.

“Seen her?”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t be cagey.” Again he shakes the credit bag. “Yes or no.”

The boy hesitates. “Yes.”

“Where?”

“Close.”

Yes. Mercurial knew she had to be here. The old Ithorian at the spaceport crawled out of his spice-sodden haze long enough to confirm that he knew the girl and that she would go to ground near her family. Her uncle lives here in the remains of the old Talinn district. (Swift is suddenly glad she doesn’t have family on the far side of the planet—there the wealthy live in massive towers, hypersecure, guarded by armies of private security.)

“How close?”

The boy’s eyes flit left and right. Like he’s not sure how to answer. Which leads Mercurial to suspect that the boy actually knows her. “I …”

“Kid. I’m going to either give you these credits, or I’m going to throw you out the hole in that wall over there. You can leave here with some extra currency in your pocket, or with two broken legs. Maybe even two broken arms.” Mercurial flashes his teeth in a sharp grin. “It’s a long way down.”

And still the boy hesitates. He’s chewing over his options. A heady, swamp-stink wind whips and whistles through the shattered hallway.

“I’m not going to hurt her,” Mercurial assures him. It’s mostly true. In his experience, people want to be selfish, but they need to feel like they’re being selfless while doing it. They want an excuse. He’s happy to help the boy feel good about doing bad if that’s what it takes. “Better I find her than someone else, trust me.”

There it is. The moment of acquiescence. The boy closes his eyes gently, a decision having been made. Finally he says: “She’s one building over. The old Palmyra foundry. Vazeen has a little … cubbyhole up there. A hiding place.”

“Congrats,” Mercurial says, flipping the satchel into the kid’s open palm. The boy stares down at it, greedy and eager. Too bad he doesn’t realize that the credits are barely worth their metal. Imperial currency has crashed hard, cratering with meteoric impact. Everyone knows that soon the Empire will be stardust—and then what?

That is a worry for another time.

The boy runs off.

Mercurial hunts.

Hours later, the bounty hunter lies flat on his belly and brings the quadnocs up—he stares through them, flicking the zoom forward click by click until his view is zeroed in enough to make out just enough detail. The roof of the foundry is flat and, like everything else here, broken. A vent stack tower from the next factory over fell across the foundry, connecting the two ruined buildings—and Mercurial decides that will serve as his extraction point if everything goes sideways. Though he’s hard-pressed to imagine how collecting this simple bounty could go wrong …

He spies sudden movement on the roof. Swift focuses in on it, and sees a small sheet of tin move aside—and a brush of pink hair catches the fading light of day.

Target acquired.

A little part of him is thrilled to find her, but at the same time, his heart sinks. The future plays out in his mind, and at its end waits a worthless payout. He’ll nab her. He’ll take her to the Gindar prigs. They’ll give him a meager stash of chits—not Imperial credits, not anymore, but chits that he can take to certain merchants on certain worlds and cash in for gear or ammo or a meal, but of course they won’t work everywhere, and what one chit is worth now will fluctuate wildly depending on who owns the currency. In this case, the Gindars are owned by the Frillian Confederacy, and the Frillians are owned by Black Sun. And nobody owns Black Sun. Not yet. But that day may be coming—with the Empire waning and the New Republic rising, the syndicates know that opportunity waits for those willing to seize the galaxy during this time of chaos. But who? Who gets to exploit that opportunity first? It’s led to infighting. The syndicates are aiming to one-up each other, trying to establish supremacy. A shadow war is just getting started. They want to own the currency and set the criminal destiny for the entirety of the galaxy. Black Sun. Shadow Syndicate. The Hutts. Red Key. The Crymorah. The Sovereign Latitudes of Maracavanya. What a bloody mess.

Eventually, Mercurial knows that someone will try to own him, too. But he has no intention of being a kept boy.

The bounty hunter stands and emerges from the bent, dented hull of an old freighter—one that must’ve crashed on the habitation roof eons ago and is now just a sculpture of rusted beams. Swift pulls his batons and moves fast: He runs and leaps off the lip of the building, giving his jetpack two quick pulses. The crackle of energy fills the air behind him, propelling him forward as the foundry roof comes up fast. Swift tucks and rolls, and when he returns to his feet, he spins his batons and runs straight to the ramshackle lean-to where Vazeen has been hiding.

She steps out. She sees him. He sees that she sees him, and yet his target stands there, unmoving. At first Swift thinks, The girl knows the game is over, but that doesn’t track. This is a girl on the run. This is her planet. She should spook. She should run. Everyone runs.

And yet she remains, staring right at him.

The realization sticks Mercurial like a knife:

She’s not running. Because she’s bait.

Damnit!

He drops down again into a roll just as the stun blast fills the air above his head in a warbling scream. Swift leaps to his feet and expects to see someone he knows coming for him: an old enemy, a betrayed friend, an ex-girlfriend with a broken heart and a blaster rifle. But instead, he sees some other woman coming for him. Older. Silver hair moved by the wind. Whoever she is, she looks familiar to him, but he doesn’t have time to sort through all the faces he’s met, because she’s got a pistol pointed right at him and another stun bolt comes—

But he’s fast: a coiled spring, suddenly unsprung. He deftly pivots on the ball of his right foot, and as he spins around he has one of his batons up and flung—it leaves his fingers and whistles through open air.

Clack! His baton clips the front of her blaster. She cries out as the gun tumbles away, clattering onto the rooftop. The woman shakes her hand—the vibration surely stung her mitt, and now she’s trying to soothe it—but still she keeps on coming, her face a grim rictus of determination.

Good for her. But she’s still not going to get him.

He flexes his hand, fingers pressing into the button in the center of his palm. The extensor pads at the tips of his fingers suddenly buzz, and his one flung baton jumps up off the ground—

And surfs the air currents back into his grip.

The older woman skids to a halt, throwing a punch as she does—it’s a good punch, solid, but the bounty hunter knows it’s coming because her body language telegraphs the attack. Mercurial sidesteps, her fist catching open air, and it gives him an opportunity to jab his baton up under her arm. Electricity courses through her. Her teeth clamp together and her eyes open wide as every centimeter of her seizes up. When she drops, he hears the scuff of a boot behind him, and he thinks: I’m too damn distracted. This job made him too comfortable, too complacent, and now someone’s hammering a fist into his kidneys, dropping him down to one knee.

He cries out and goes low with the next attack—his baton whips around, catching the second attacker behind the knee. His foe, a tall man with a hawk’s-beak nose and dark eyes, curses and drops hard on his tailbone. He recognizes this one, doesn’t he? Imperial. No. Ex-Imperial. Working for the New Republic now—now he wonders, Is this about the Perwin Gedde job? It’s coming back to him now. He stole their target right out from under them. What do they want? Credits? Revenge? Is he on their list?

Doesn’t matter. I have no time for whatever this is. The girl isn’t worth it. The payout is garbage. It’s time to go. The fallen vent stack tower is his escape route, so he leaps to his feet and bolts fast across the rooftop. Another stun blast warps the air around him (the older woman reclaimed her weapon), but he leaps and slides onto the crumpled tower now serving as a bridge. He rights himself and runs, feet banging on the metal. The vented durasteel provides texture that helps him keep his footing, and he charges down the bridge and toward a break in the factory wall next door. Nobody follows. His assailants are slow, too slow. Because, he reminds himself, nobody is as fast as me. Mercurial Swift, triumphant again.

He leaps across the gap—

And an arm extends across the open space and slams hard across his trachea. His heels skid out and Mercurial drops onto his back, the air blasting out of his chest as his lungs collapse like clapped hands.

“Hi,” says a voice. Another woman. This voice, he knows.

A fellow hunter, a bounty killer and skip-tracer like him: the Zabrak, Jas Emari. She steps over him, and as his eyes adjust he sees her juggling a toothpick on her tongue and between her teeth. She cocks her head, a flip of hair going from one side of her spike-laden scalp to the other.

“Emari,” he wheezes, air finally returning to his reinflating lungs.

He wastes no time. He brings one of his batons up fast—

But she is faster. A small blaster in her hand screams.

And all goes dark.

It has taken them months to capture Swift.

Months to set up a false sting—months to steal ID cards from the Gindar Gang, to pin it on a young woman (who blessedly was happy to do her part in seeing the Empire take its licks), to falsify a bounty on behalf of the Gindars (one they had no choice but to pretend they initiated when hunters came knocking at their door to accept the bounty). They had to make it look good, make it look tantalizing to a bounty hunter like Swift—but not too tantalizing, because Jas assured them that when a job looked too good, too easy, it set one’s teeth on edge. Nobody wanted to spook him, so it had to be done gently, slowly, with great caution and care. And all the while, Norra’s guts twisted in her belly like a breeding knot of Akivan vipers, the nasty thought haunting her head again and again: While we waste time, Rae Sloane drifts farther and farther away. And so did their chance at justice.

It feels good to have caught Mercurial Swift in their little trap—he’s the one bounty hunter known to interface exclusively with Sloane. But it’s bitter candy, because they have bigger prey. He’s just one rung in the ladder.

Please, Norra thinks. Let it be the final rung.

She’s tired, and she’s coasting on the fumes of anger. It’s burning her out, stripping her down, leaving her feeling raw inside her heart.

But at least they have him.

Mercurial Swift hangs from a bent pipe here in the old munitions factory, his arms extended above him, his wrists cuffed. Night has fallen on Taris. Outside, vapor lightning colors the dark clouds ocher, while down below snorting scutjumpers click and scurry amid the wreckage of this world, hunting for bugs to eat.

“I hate him,” Sinjir Rath Velus says, leaning in and staring at their prey. His nose wrinkles as if he’s smelling something foul. “Even unconscious the man looks so bloody smug. And trust me: I know smugness well.”

Jas twirls one of Swift’s batons in her hand. She jabs it in the air. “He’s smug but crafty. These batons are practically art. One end is concussive. The other end, electric. Kill or stun. And the second baton can be modified with a hypoinjector for poison.”

“Let’s wake him up,” Norra says, suddenly impatient. “I want answers and I’m tired of waiting.”

“We’ve waited this long,” Jas says. “We can wait a little longer.”

“I want Sloane. I want justice.”

“You want revenge,” Jas says. It’s a conversation they’ve had before. Many times, as a matter of fact. Round and round they go. Sinjir just sighs and shakes his head as Norra responds:

“Revenge and justice are two sides of the same coin.”

“I don’t know if you would’ve said that before Chandrila.”

“It’s a little galling that you’re the one judging me,” Norra snaps.

Jas holds up surrendering hands. “No judgment. I far prefer revenge as a motive. Justice is a jumping bull’s-eye. Revenge sits still right here.” She taps the center of her chest. “I admire revenge. It’s pure. It also happens to be the thing that pays me most of the time. I just think it’s valuable to know which one is which, and why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

She’s wrong, Norra thinks. That day on Chandrila was a nightmare: her own husband joining the rest of the mind-controlled captives from Kashyyyk to sweep across the stage and plaza in a wave of assassinations. The funerals went on for days. The mourning still continues, months later. This is one of those times when the needs of justice and the urge for vengeance line up neatly, like the metal sights at the end of a scatterblaster. And isn’t justice really just a name for institutional revenge? Commit a crime, pay for the crime. Castigation arrives regardless of whether it’s at the hand of a governmental body or a lone soldier.

At least, that’s what Norra tells herself. And she’s about to tell them all the same thing when Sinjir moans and interjects: “Both of you, please stop droning on about this. It’s giving me a brain-ache. Let us wake up our new friend, if only so I can stop listening to you and start listening to him.”

With that, Sinjir reaches up and plunges the tips of two fingers into the unconscious bounty hunter’s nostrils. He tugs upward, hard. Mercurial’s eyes jolt open and he sucks in a hissing breath.

“Wakey-wakey,” Sinjir says all too cheerfully. “Time to move and time to shake-y.” As an aside, he says: “My mother used to say that. Sweet woman. If I didn’t get out of bed fast enough, her sweetness turned rather sour, though, and she would whip me with a broom.” Now, back to Mercurial: “I don’t need to hit you with a broom, do I? Are we awake?”

“I’m awake, I’m awake,” the bounty hunter says, wrenching his head away from Sinjir’s nose-probing fingers. His eyes focus on Jas. “You.”

“Hello, Mercurial.”

He laughs, a small, sad sound.

“What’s funny?” Jas asks.

“Something someone said to me once. Dengar, actually.” He flashes a smile. “He said the day would come. ‘Bounties on the bounty hunters.’ Seems today is that day, hm?”

“Dengar,” she says, the words sounding to Norra like they’re spoken around a mouthful of something spoiled, something foul. “I hate to admit it, but that slovenly lump of congealed sweat could be right: I have a bounty on me, after all.”

“That’s right. I remember Rynscar saying Boss Gyuti had put a number on your head. That number doubled, recently, didn’t it?”

“Tripled,” Jas says. Like she’s proud. Maybe she is. “It’s a big bounty. You, however, are surprisingly without one.”

His eyebrow arches sharply. “Then why am I here?”

“Because we have questions,” Norra says.

“Is this about that mess on Vorlag? I thought I recognized you up on the foundry roof. Gedde was all too easy, you know.”

Jas says, “I knew that had to be your handiwork. The mycotoxin gave you away.”

“I wasn’t trying to hide it.”

“We don’t care about Vorlag,” Norra says. Extracting Gedde—only to have him die in their care thanks to a slow-acting poison hidden in his spice—feels like a lifetime ago. So much has changed since then. “We care about the one who paid you to take him out. We care about Sloane. Grand admiral of the Galactic Empire, and now—out there somewhere. In the wind. In the stars.”

“Don’t know a ‘Sloane,’” he says, but the way the corner of his mouth tugs upward, as if on an angler’s hook, is telling. “Sorry.”

Sinjir gives Norra a look.

Norra gives Sinjir a nod.

With that, Jas eases aside, and Sinjir formally takes up her position in front of the dangling Mercurial Swift. The ex-Imperial clucks his tongue as he starts in on Swift. “If I asked you the question, What is the most important part of your body, you would—as the ego-fed narcissist that you are—say …”

“My mind,” Swift answers.

“Your mind,” Sinjir says, simultaneous with Swift. “Yes. And then I’d roll my eyes like I am now—here, look, I’m rolling them.” He does indeed roll them. “I’d say, No, no, silly, I need your mind keen and sharp, fully aware of what is about to be done and what is happening as it happens. I’d note that what’s precious to you is your hands. Your fast hands, spinning those nifty little batons around like a man from the Nal Hutta circus, and I would note that the hand has so many tiny bones, none so strong as your batons, and it would be dreadfully easy to break each of them, one after the other, as if I were playing the keys of a melodium. And you’d bluster—”

“Break my hands,” Swift hisses. “Do it. Cut them off for all I care. I can afford their replacements. Metal machine hands would—”

“Help you do your job better, yes. I know. And how right you are. The bones in your hand are such small thinking. All of your body is! It’s amateur hour interrogation, really. Ah. Time then to go deeper. More aspirational. Forget flesh and bones and blood. Well. Hold on now. Blood. That’s interesting.” He leans in, practically nose-to-nose with the bounty hunter. Swift struggles. Norra wants to warn Sinjir to be cautious, but he’s like a hypnotizing serpent—Mercurial won’t do anything. Not yet. Not now. He’s rapt. The mystery of the threat to be revealed has been fitted around his neck like leash-and-collar, tugging him forward. “Your name, your true name, is not Mercurial Swift. Is it, Geb? Geb Teldar. Right?”

A flinch as Mercurial retreats from that name like a buzzing fly. “I don’t know that name,” he says. But he does. Even Norra can see that.

“It’s not really as snazzy as ‘Mercurial Swift,’” Sinjir says, making a pouty face. “I mean, is it? Geb Teldar.” When he says those words, he deepens his voice, flattens his lips, makes his accent sound common and muddy. “Oy, my name’s Geb Teldar. I’m a pipe fitter from Avast. I’m Geb Teldar, faithier stall-mucker. I’m Geb Teldar, droid-scrubber extraordinaire. It’s really very … bleh, isn’t it?”

“Go to hell.”

“Thing is, Geb? Once we knew your real name, it was easy to find out other things, as well. You’re from Corellia, aren’t you?”

Swift—or, rather, Teldar—says nothing. His eyes shine with what Norra believes may very well be fear.

In the palm of Sinjir’s hand is a flat disk—a holoprojector. He taps the side, and a single image shines in the space above it: a nice house in the Vrenian style, square and boxy but with climbing flowers up its corners and a lace-metal trachyte fence surrounding it. The door is tall and narrow—and by the door stands a droid familiar to most of them standing there.

Mercurial’s cheek twitches. “Is that—”

“A B1 battle droid,” Sinjir answers, “it is, indeed. I’m sure he had a proper designation at some point, but we call him Mister Bones, in part because he’s very good at pulling the bones out of people’s bodies. Oh. Perhaps you were instead asking a different question, and to that the answer is: Yes, Geb Teldar, that is the house of Tabba Teldar, and if I read the intel correctly, she is … your mother?”

The captive bounty hunter’s face twists up like a juiced fruit. He bares his teeth in a feral display as he seethes: “How did you find her?”

“It was an ordeal,” Norra interjects. “But less than you’d think. You’re arrogant and people don’t like you. All it took was one bouncer in one seedy club to tell us that he heard sometimes you send an infusion of credits to someone living in Coronet City. Cross-referenced with the ever-growing New Republic database, which ties in now with CCPS records. And so it revealed Tabba Teldar to us. Which was enough.”

“You’re New Republic,” Swift says, suddenly smug. He winces as his arms strain above his head. “You wouldn’t do anything to her. You’ve got a code. You have to follow the law.”

Sinjir looks to Jas, then the two of them erupt into laughter. Norra doesn’t, because she’s not in the mood, not even for the pretense of this faux-amusement acted out. But they sell it, and Sinjir—when he’s done laughing and wiping tears of hilarity from his eyes—says with sudden, dire seriousness: “This is all very off-the-books, Gebbo, my friend. The NR doesn’t even know we’re out here. We’re like a proton torpedo without guidance—just launching through space, rogue as anything. Jas, as you know, is a bounty hunter. As for me—oh, my name is Sinjir, by the way, Sinjir Rath Velus—I was once an Imperial loyalty officer, which meant I secured and tested the loyalty of my fellow grayshirts in whatever way was most motivating for them and me.”

“We follow no law but our own,” Jas says.

Mercurial visibly swallows. “Don’t hurt her.”

“We won’t,” Norra interjects, “as long as you tell us what we need.”

The dam of his resolve cracks, shudders, then breaks, and the words come gushing out of him fast and desperate—gone is the pretense of ego and arrogance, gone is his preening self-confidence. “I haven’t spoken to Sloane in months. Last time was just a transmission. She was looking for a ship on Quantxi. The Imperialis. Coordinates on that ship were tied to a, uh, an Imperial officer, a high-ranking admiral named Rax. Gallius Rax. She wanted to know the coordinates—where he was from, what system, what world.”

Sinjir grabs his jaw and squeezes. “Tell us, what world?”

“Jakku.”

The three of them all share looks. In their eyes: confusion. Norra’s never heard of it. Not that she’s some kind of galactic cartographer—out there in the black are thousands of systems and millions of worlds. Swift fills in more information: “It’s in the Western Reaches. I don’t know any more than that because I never had reason to care.”

“Did she go there?” Norra asks.

“I … I think so. I don’t know.”

“There’s more,” Sinjir hisses. “I can see it on your face. Something else you’re not telling us, Gebby. Don’t make me call our droid.”

“Sloane wasn’t alone,” Swift says.

“Do tell.”

“She was … injured, and in a ship, I think some kind of stolen Chandrilan cargo cruiser. There was a man with her. I didn’t get his name. I could barely see him.”

“Imperial?” Sinjir asks.

“I swear, I don’t know.”

Norra to Sinjir: “Do you believe him?”

“I do.”

“Then we’re done here. I’ll call in Temmin.” The younger Wexley, her son, is in orbit above Taris, piloting the Moth with his battle droid B1 bodyguard, Bones.

“We could haul Swift back to Chandrila,” Jas offers. “He’s worked for the Empire. Maybe he knows more than we know to ask.”

“No. No time for that,” Norra says.

“No time? We’ll be headed that way anyway—”

“We will not. We’re headed to Jakku straightaway.”

Jas scowls. “We’re not ready for whatever’s there. We don’t even know where it is. Norra, we need to take the time, plan this out—”

“No!” she barks. “No more planning. No more time. We’ve wasted enough already on this one—” She jabs a thumb against Swift’s breastbone for emphasis. “And I will waste no more. We don’t even know that Sloane is still on Jakku—so we need to pick up whatever trail is there before it goes so cold we can’t find it.”

“Fine,” Jas says, her voice stiff. A voice inside Norra’s head presents a warning: Ease off, Norra. Jas might be right, and even if she’s not, you don’t need to bark orders at her. This isn’t who you are. But every part of her feels like a sparking wire. Like she can’t control it or contain it. Jas asks: “What do we do about Swift, then? I could … dispatch him.”

“Emari,” Swift pleads, “there’s no bounty, there’s no value in killing me, it’s just not worth it—”

Norra sees her opportunity. She yanks one of Swift’s batons from Jas’s grip and spins it around. With a quick slide of her thumb she brings the electro-stun end to life: The tip of it crackles like static, and a blue elemental spark dances between two prongs.

She sticks it in Swift’s side.

He makes a stuttering sound as the electricity ravages him. Then his head falls, chin dipping to his chest. A low, sleepy moan gurgles from the back of his throat. “There,” Norra says. “Let’s go.”

Morning comes to Taris, and with it, Mercurial comes to life just as much of the planet—its scavengers and scutjumpers and its clouds of sedge-flies—goes back to hiding from the encroaching light of day.

The bounty hunter takes some time, then eventually flips his body up so that his legs wrap around the pipe married to his cuffed hands. He hangs there, then jostles his body, slamming it down again and again until the plastocrete at the far end cracks and breaks free, the pipe crashing down—and him crashing down with it.

His muscles aching, Mercurial scoots free of the pipe. He calls upon his body’s memory of a different life as a young dancer in a Corellian troupe and leaps backward over the loop of his cuffed wrists.

He tries to find his batons—one of the concussive ends will make short work of these magnacuffs—but Emari must’ve taken them.

Fine. He’ll head back to his ship and use the cutters there. But before that happens—he extends his thumb, opening up a comm channel to make a call to Underboss Rynscar of the Black Sun. The face that appears is her true face, the one Rynscar keeps behind that rusted demon’s mask. Her true face is pale, with dark eyes. Her lips are painted the color of dirty emeralds.

She sneers. “What is it, Swift?”

“Jas Emari.”

“You say that name like it is a key unlocking a door. What of her?”

“Is it true? There’s a bounty on her head?”

Rynscar lifts her brow. “It is true.”

“What’d she do?”

“She did nothing. Which is quite the problem. She has debts. More now than when she started, given Nar Shaddaa.”

“Gyuti wants her head?” Mercurial asks.

“He does.”

“And he’ll pay handsomely for it?”

“He will. Fifty thousand credits.”

“I don’t want credits.”

She hesitates. “Are you saying you have Emari?”

Not yet. “I will.”

“Let’s say you do. What do you want in return?”

He grins. A cocky, lopsided smirk. “A case of nova crystals.”

“A dozen,” she counters.

“Twice that.” When she doesn’t answer, he says: “I know Gyuti, and I know for him this is personal. It burns him that she keeps slipping the leash. Makes him look bad in front of the Hutts and everyone. I know where she’s going, so I’ll get her, but I need real currency.”

“Why that much?”

Again Dengar’s words echo: We gotta band together. Form a proper union. “I need a crew to get this done.”

Finally she says: “Then get it done.”

“I’ll get my crystals?”

“You’ll get your crystals.”

Mercurial ends the call and cackles. Time to get paid, because he knows where Jas Emari is going:

The nowhere sandswept deadlands of Jakku.

Leia startles at the sound of a furious pounding on the door, her knee banging into the table above which a glittering star map is projected. The map flickers, and when the voice comes through the door—“Leia! Leia!”—she struggles to stand swiftly, almost forgetting the tremendous living weight around her midsection. The child inside her kicks and tumbles as she endeavors to get upright. Calm down, little angel. You’ll be free soon enough.

“Mum,” says her protocol droid, T-2LC. “It appears as if someone is at the door.”

“Yes, I hear that, Elsie.” She winces as she moves out from around the couch. That couch was supposed to be comfortable—but all it does is swallow her up like a devouring sarlacc. “It’s just Han.”

“Is he in danger, mum? He sounds like he’s in danger. Should I open the door? I don’t want to let the danger in, but—”

“Leia, damnit, the door,” Han says from the other side. His voice is followed swiftly by more thumps and thuds. He’s kicking the door, she realizes.

“I’m coming!” she yells back. To the droid she says: “I’ll get it.”

“But your condition, mum—”

“I’m not dying, I’m pregnant,” she snaps back, then opens the door. Han wastes no time in almost falling through it, his arm cradling a lumpy, uneven bag of something.

“Took you long enough,” he says, smirking as he juggles his footing and skirts past her, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek as he does.

“Don’t you know,” she says, shooting T-2LC a dubious look, “I have a condition.”

“Elsie, I told you, Leia doesn’t have a damn condition.” But then, more seriously and in a lower register, he says to her: “You do need to slow it down a little bit.” He gestures toward the star map. “For instance.”

“I am in command of my own body, thank you very much.”

“Tell that to the little bandit,” he says, dropping the sack of whatever down on the counter in the kitchen. The little bandit is what he’s taken to calling the child currently wrestling inside her belly.

“You mean the little angel.” She follows him into the kitchen, and T-2LC’s whining servomotors behind her indicate he’s following closely behind because someone (Han) told the droid to keep close to her in case she falls. Never mind the fact the droid stays so close to her, she’s nearly tripped on his metal feet half a dozen times already. “What did you bring?”

Han winks, thrusts his hand down into the bag, and pulls it out gripping a jogan fruit. “Look.” He gives it a lascivious squeeze.

She sighs, crestfallen. “Is that … whole bag full of jogan fruit?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I cannot possibly eat that much jogan fruit.”

“Sure you can.”

“Let me rephrase: I don’t want to eat that much jogan fruit.”

“It’s good for you.”

“Not that good.”

“The doctors—”

“Dr. Kalonia said to incorporate jogan into my diet, not to replace everything with jogan fruit.”

He sweeps up on her, cradling her face with his rough hand. He strokes her cheek gently. “All right, all right. I’m just trying to do right by you two.”

“I know, Han.”

“If I think I can help, I’ll always help. With whatever you or our son needs. You know that, right?”

She laughs. “I know.”

It’s been hard for Han. He won’t say it out loud, but she can see it on his face. Her husband needs something to do. He’s bored. Chewbacca’s back home, looking for his family. Luke’s searching the galaxy for old Jedi teachings. Han Solo’s got nothing to smuggle, nowhere to gamble, no foolish Rebellion to fight for.

He’s like the Falcon: retired to a hangar somewhere, waiting for something, anything, to happen.

So he buys fruit.

Lots and lots of fruit.

And, of course, he worries about her. He turns her toward the table and the star map. “You’re not still on this, are you?”

“What?”

“Leia, Kashyyyk was a fluke. We got lucky.”

“I’m always lucky with you by my side, scoundrel.”

He shakes his head. “You joke, but this is nuts.”

“It’s not nuts,” she says, suddenly irritated. “What we did on Kashyyyk was the right thing to do, and you know it. If we could formalize that process, if we could target other worlds that the Senate is too cowardly to liberate, then maybe we could—with the unofficial sanction of our friendly chancellor—find a way to do right by those worlds. Which means not only do we save whole systems, but those systems might swing our way and join the chorus of voices here in the New Republic.”

He sighs. “I dunno. Can’t somebody else handle this? Just for now …”

“Look,” she says, heading over to the star map. “Tatooine. Kerev Doi. Demesel. Horuz. All worlds still in thrall either to some Imperial remnant or to criminal syndicates or gangs. Rebellions work. We’ve seen it. We’ve helped make it happen.”

“You know Mon’s not going to go for that.”

“She already has. In a way.”

In the aftermath of the attack on Chandrila, the New Republic was left reeling. Already the whispers arose: The New Republic cannot protect itself, how can it protect us? Already the accusations have been aimed at Mon Mothma’s head like turning rifles: She is weak on military presence and now she’s injured, how can she truly lead us? Leia and Han came back bringing a much-needed—if illegal and unexpected—victory for the New Republic at a time when it badly needed it. Yes, Chandrila was attacked. But they saved Kashyyyk. They ran off the Empire and liberated the Wookiees. It was a win. And it stopped the Senate from hemorrhaging loyal senators.

She starts to say, “If we could aid rebels on each of these worlds—”

“Mum,” T-2LC chimes in, literally thrusting his copper-shine protocol droid head in front of her. “You have a call.”

“I’ll take it here.” She settles back down into the couch, then swipes the star map off the projector. A new image replaces it: the face of Norra Wexley. Once a pilot for the Rebellion, and recently the leader of a team of “Imperial hunters,” tracking down the Empire’s many war criminals when they fled to various corners of the galaxy to hide. She had helped Leia in a different capacity, finding her missing husband and helping Han free Chewbacca and his planet from the Empire. Now, though? Norra is out there looking for prey most elusive: Grand Admiral Rae Sloane.

Sloane is a mystery—like a seed between the teeth that Leia cannot work free. First, the self-proclaimed grand admiral went and admitted that she was in fact “the Operator,” a high-level, confidential informant who had helped the New Republic win vital battles against the crumbling Empire. Then Sloane offered to talk peace, and so she asked to come to Chandrila for that very purpose. And while she was present, those captives freed from the prison ship that had held Chewbacca turned on the New Republic, assassinating various high-level figures and injuring many others. The tally of the dead is too long. Senators, diplomats, advisers, generals, admirals.

Was I on the list of targets? Leia wonders that even still. If a twist in fate—Han going off half-cocked to save a whole planet all by his lonesome—hadn’t set her on the path she took, would she have been standing there on the stage that Liberation Day?

No way to know. The list of targets remained embedded in minuscule control chips planted at the brain stem of each returning captive. Too easy to miss on a general scan, and too sinister to even consider real until it was far too late. By the time they discovered the chips—weeks after Liberation Day was already over and the blood had been scrubbed from the plaza stone—they had fritzed out, malfunctioned in some kind of planned degradation. Leia’s own payroll slicer, Conder Kyl, wasn’t able to find anything, either. If Conder can’t find it, then there’s nothing to find.

Point is, Sloane fled Chandrila. An act that coincided with the Empire going dark. Outside a few splinter remnants, the enemy has gone silent.

Which disturbs Leia considerably.

“Norra,” Leia says. She owes this woman a debt. Norra’s own husband was one of the assassins, and Leia tries to imagine what that must do to a person’s own heart and mind. Even more, what that must do to a wife and mother’s heart and mind. (Motherhood has been on Leia’s mind a lot recently, unsurprisingly. What Norra has gone through for the Rebellion and for her family is both admirable and harrowing. Could Leia do the same? Could she walk that line? And then a troubling question she’s almost afraid to answer: Where do her true allegiances lie? She has a family to raise, but a galaxy to help lead …) “Tell me some good news, please.”

“We found Swift.”

“The bounty hunter. Good. Did he give you anything?”

“He did. He said Sloane went to a planet in the Western Reaches called Jakku. Know anything about it?”

Leia does not. She gives a look to Han, who clears his throat and waves to the hologram. “Hey, Norra. Jakku, huh? I know it. Been there once, years ago. You know, the usual: bringing bad things to bad people. There’s nothing there. Miners, scavengers, dirt merchants. They got some kinda hokey religion there in the south, and there’s the Wheel Races in the north. Otherwise—c’mon, it’s a wasteland. Makes Tatooine look lively.”

“Why would Sloane go there?” Leia asks.

“Beats me,” Han says. “Maybe she’s looking to get away. Run and hide. Nobody would look for her on Jakku.”

Norra says, “Swift thought it had something to do with another Imperial. Someone named Gallius Rax.”

That name isn’t familiar to Leia, and she says as much. Something about all this feels wrong. A feeling of worry has burrowed under her skin. “Norra, come home. Perhaps it’s time we present this to the chancellor—”