BY CHUCK WENDIG 11 страница

They fired on the remaining structures.

They fired on the houses.

Spears of scourging light rent Romwell’s home from the surface. His family was inside when it happened. They are dead now and he is alive because as rebel scum flooded the prison, he fled to the nearest ship and escaped to hyperspace before they could disable the craft.

That was a month ago. He contacted Coruscant—the bureau there was under siege, and he told them he would show up, provide backup. But he didn’t. Instead he just wandered. Floating for a while. Weeping over the pictures of his family. Screaming in rage at those who had done this. Even now, his eyes grow wet at the thought of it. It’s like something wants to crawl up out of him: a screaming monster with breath of fire.

He washed up here two days ago. He wanted information on whoever did this. Who gave the order to wipe out his home? The Republic prides themselves on being noble—their snotty noses thick with the mucus of righteousness. And yet, how do they justify what they did?

Why did they kill his family?

His son, Qarwell, was only five. He liked to draw in moon-dust. He had an MSE mouse droid unit as a pet. The boy was sweet and fun and he had a big vocabulary and an even bigger heart. He would one day have made a most excellent Imperial Security Bureau officer. Better than Romwell. Better even than the boy’s own grandfather.

Now that boy is gone.

And it is the rebels’ fault.

Wonder of wonders, right here, right now, Romwell sees such a rebel.

There, on the far side of the bar, closer to the stage, sits his enemy. The rebel is a lean fellow with a pretty-boy jaw and a swoop of dark hair. On his pilot jacket’s sleeve is the emblem of the so-called New Republic. He’s there with a woman. Their heads nod to the music—some mad-sounding song from Minlan Weil and the Tam-honil Three.

Romwell can read the sign not far away. All are welcome, no fighting, blah blah blah. He knows it. He comprehends it.

But…he’s been drinking.

And that rebel is a pilot. The Hyborean Moon fell to the rebels. Pilots made that happen. Even now he remembers the trio of Y-wings roaring above his head, dropping their payload. He bets this man flies a Y-wing.

Krass decides rather immediately—

That rebel scum was one of them. One of his family’s killers. Anarchist! Murderer! He’s sure of it. He has no reason to be sure of it, but the more he drinks, the deeper his certainty.

There comes a moment when the band stops playing and there’s a pause between sets, and once more the sound of the crowded castle fills his ears, and it’s enough to get him to stand. He pays up, slapping a handful of Imperial credits flat on the bar top. Then Romwell pushes his way past a trio of screeching Chadra-Fan throwing dice in a gambler’s trap. He bumps a table of Bravaisian guilders licking palmfuls of glittering gems—they squawk at him as he passes. Not that he cares. Passing by a sad-faced Skrilling sleeping next to a round jug of bubbling wine—Romwell hooks a finger around the jug handle and lifts it. It’s full. It’s heavy. It’s perfect.

The woman sees him first. Romwell’s still in his officer’s black—he hasn’t changed out of it in a long time. Her eyes go wide and she grabs the pilot’s elbow, and just as the rebel thug turns, Romwell says, his voice oozily slurring from all the drink—

“You killed my family. ”

Then he clocks the rebel across the head.

Or, rather, he tries to. The jug is heavy and the rebel traitor isn’t drunk, so the pilot moves fast enough to take the hit on the shoulder. He still goes down, though, and Romwell barks a muddy laugh.

What surprises him is when the woman stands up and throws a hard straight punch to his chops. His nose pops like an overripe fruit and he cries out, staggering backward. “That’s not how a lady is supposed to act, ” he says, but between the inebriation and the blood running down his face it comes out, Thasshh nah how a dady is thupoothed to ack—

Someone grabs his ankle. The rebel! His enemy pulls hard. The whole world goes tipsy-tumble as he falls, crashing hard against a chair. By now patrons of the castle stand, watching: freaks in masks, disgusting aliens, sneer-lipped mercenaries. Criminals, the lot of them! He’s about to yell at them all to stop their damn staring when the rebel rolls on top of him and starts dropping fists into his gut.

“You blasted Imperial pig! ” the rebel yells, raining punches.

Romwell spits his own blood into the rebel’s face, then shoves hard with both hands—the pilot crashes backward into a table. Glasses roll and shatter. And then everyone around starts gasping and moving aside.

It takes Romwell long, too long, to figure out why.

Above him stands a droid. Strangest damn protocol droid he’s ever seen—an exoskeleton like burnished bronzium, and peaky spikes coming off the robot’s legs, arms, and skull.

It chatters at him in some machine language, then repeats in Basic with a mechanized female voice:

“You have violated the Castle’s law. The Castle is all. Castigation is now imminent. ”

“And I’d violate it again, you damn, dirty—”

The droid points her hands at him, the fingers splayed out. The tips of those fingers suddenly fire at him like little rockets, each sticking in the fabric of his shirt—he spies five thin golden filaments now connecting his chest with her hands via those fingertips.

The droid’s hands glow. Electricity courses along the filaments. Everything lights up like a supernova.

And then it goes dark like the deepest night.

Next thing he knows, he’s gasping awake on a filthy cot matted with stinking straw. The chains holding the cot to the brick rattle as he rolls off. His head feels like a kicked pumpkin. He vomits onto his own hands.

The floor is damp and cold. There—a door. Old wood, held fast with hinges of ancient iron. At the top of the door is a small window, and Romwell crawls to the door and pulls himself up to that opening (all the while his brain feels like it’s trying to ram its way out of his forehead). He pushes his face against the smaller bars in the window.

“Help, ” he says. Louder, again: “Help! ”

“We’re done for, ” says the rebel—who stares out a similar window behind a similar door across the hall. Water drips from the vaulted ceiling above. “Face it, pig, we messed up. Now we have to pay for it. ”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, ” Romwell says, then feels his gorge rising anew. He chokes it back and burps into his hand.

“I know there’s one law and we broke it. Why’d you come at me like that? I didn’t kill your family. ”

Romwell thinks: Did I say he did? Maybe he did. “Fine, not you specifically, but your people, they killed my family. My boy. ”

The rebel frowns and looks down at fingers gripping the bars. “If that happened, then I’m sorry it happened. But war isn’t exactly a game of precision, much as we hope it would be. ”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night, scum. ”

“Hey, we didn’t blow up a whole planet. That was you. ”

“I didn’t authorize that! ”

“And I didn’t kill your family. ”

“But your belief in this nonsense ‘Republic’ contributed to—”

From farther down the hall, a sharp voice commands: “Silence! ” It’s a woman’s voice. Sounds old. Footsteps pad on the stone toward them.

The wizened woman, Maz Kanata, reveals herself. She’s withered and shriveled like a fruit left too long on the vine. Her hands are behind her back and she looks to both the rebel and the Imperial with puckered eyes pressed behind round, moon-sized lenses.

“Hm, ” she says.

“Listen, Miss Kanata, ” the pilot says. “Missus Kanata? Whatever, we’re really sorry for what we did—if that brute didn’t think to attack me—”

Romwell interrupts: “Brute? Brute? You and your rebels are the brutes. Indiscriminately bombing—”

Another shush from Maz Kanata.

It echoes like a serpent’s chastisement, and Romwell is surprised at how effective it is at clamping both their mouths shut.

Maz goes over and grabs a two-step stool from against the wall, then drags it to the door in front of Romwell’s cell. She clears her throat as she steps up onto it. With the boost, she can stare in through the portal.

“Let me see you, ” she says, adjusting one of the lenses around her eyes. “Come on, come, come. Closer, now. ”

What is this mad old pirate going on about? He keeps his head back and she clucks her tongue. “You either come closer or I’ll send Emmie down here again to give you a proper shocking. Mm? ”

Grousing, Romwell does as she commands. He leans in.

Her little raisin eyes pinch to slits and she wets her lips with a dark-purple tongue. “I see pain in your eyes. Loss. Regret. You have caused pain, too. You have given loss. ” She puckers her thin lips. “The scales are balanced, it seems. As for your people…”

“What do you mean, the scales? What about my people? ”

“The Empire is dead, ” she declares. “You may think it has life and everyone else may think it is dying but I say that it is dead. But just as a carcass gives way to new life—flies and fungus and whatnot—so, too, will the corpses of the Empire birth new creatures. For now, though, it is dead. ” Her hand rattles the lock by the door and then frees it. She steps off the stool and then lets the door drift open. “You are free to go. Do not come back here. And I advise you not to share your pain with the rest of the galaxy. Find peace for yourself or no good will come to you. ”

Romwell doesn’t know what to say. Should he thank her? Condemn her? Better still to say nothing at all? Instead he flits his eyes toward the rebel. It’s as if she’s reading his mind.

“Do not worry about him. I’ll let him go, too, but only after I see your ship in the sky above my castle. ”

Romwell nods. And Romwell leaves.

Later, when he’s gone and when the rebel pilot has gone, too, she stands alone on one of her parapets overlooking the waters of Nymeve Lake. She feels pushed and pulled from all sides, and so she goes with it, letting her body sway. ME-8D9 comes up alongside.

She asks the old droid—a droid who has been at this castle longer than Maz herself has been, a droid who has seen so much of this galaxy that to plumb the depths of her databank would be an effort of futility and madness—if Minlan Weil and his band have their beds for the night, and the droid replies that they do.

“Peace has returned to the Castle, ” 8D9 says.

“Good, good, good. Still. Peace has not returned to my heart. Something is off balance. Some stirring in the Force has made the water turbid. Hard to see. But I think it best we be prepared. ”

“Please define the next course of action. ”

“Get the Stranger’s Fortune ready for flight. I want to have a look around the galaxy. See just what I can see. ”

“Acceptable. ”

The droid does not belong to her. ME-8D9 does not belong to anybody—the droid is her own master. As it should be. Maz listens to her go, then closes her eyes and tries to feel the tremors in the galaxy—the weave and weft of a changing Force.

One by one the team members arrive in the Skygarden above the Polis District of Hanna City—it’s where the citizens often gather to openly debate politics, which is apparently a favored activity here on Chandrila. To Norra’s mind, it just sounds wearisome. She’d far prefer going home and fixing a meal, or being out doing something. Anything other than discussing politics. Yes, she recognizes that such a discussion has value, participating in democracy and all that. Just the same, she’d rather be a hundred parsecs from it.

Thankfully, today, no such debate is present. The Skygarden has been sealed and they are, for the moment, alone with one another.

“Something’s going on, ” Jas says, leaning up against a planter. Her arms are crossed and she’s chewing a pizo stick—a dried, cured branch from the slickbark tree. Chandrilans chew it and suck the juices to stay awake. Pilots in particular love them when they can get them. “It’s a little too strange that all this stuff is happening. Two heroes of the Rebellion go missing. Then the probe droid signaling a Star Destroyer? And with Tashu somehow wound up in all this? I don’t trust any of it. ”

Sinjir drapes himself backward across a bench. He spins the cap off a tarnished mercurium flask and nips at it, smacking his lips. “Tashu’s a bird trapped in a turbolift. Barking, flogging mad, that one. Still. He gave up the answer to my question without a second’s thought. He wanted me to know. Which makes me think Not-Actually-A-General Solo is in a deep dive. ”

Norra nods. “Either he’s in trouble, or we are. ”

She expects her son to come back with some whipcrack sentiment—he’s good at those when all the chits are on the table. But instead he sits off to the side, staring at nothing. Distracted. Sullen. Norra thinks: I’d better get ahead of that when we’re done here. And then she wonders: Should I tell him about Wedge? What will he think?

Panic assails her.

Meanwhile, Jom paces, craning his head and stretching. “Those bounty hunters did a right nasty number on me. ” His joints pop and crackle as he moves them about. He grunts and shrugs. “Maybe it’s high time we realize that Solo is not our mission. We’ve got real targets to look after. Need I remind the lot of you that we had Admiral Rae Sloane in our sights back on Akiva—and as it turns out, she’s basically the military head of the Empire these days. Let Solo be Solo. I want another shot at Sloane. ”

Behind them all, Mister Bones chases after a butterfly. He catches it gingerly in the cup of his clawed hands. Then he tears its wings off.

Norra refocuses and jumps in, saying: “I’ll remind you that if it weren’t for Leia and Solo, that shield generator would’ve stayed up and the Death Star would remain. ” Her insides twist at the thought of how that would’ve played out. They were already outnumbered and outgunned before the beam from the battle station lit up the black and destroyed both the Liberty and the Mon Calamari cruiser Nautilian. It takes everything she has to hold it together, and she can’t stop injecting a little venom into her voice when she says: “We wouldn’t be standing here if it weren’t for him, so a little loyalty wouldn’t go amiss, Barell—”

Nearby, there’s a soft chime as the turbolift platform at the center of the park begins to rise, bringing with it a small group.

Ackbar leads, striding in his way—his head pointed forward as if drawn forth by the gravity of sheer purpose. Leia walks with him, speaking animatedly, worriedly. Wedge trails alongside Commodore Agate.

Wedge. He lifts his gaze and meets Norra’s. And for just a moment, all her anxieties and all her worries fall away like a heavy rucksack allowed to slip from her weary shoulder.

That ends with the brusque sound of Ackbar clearing his throat. His lips press together and he seems poised to speak.

Sinjir whistles low and slow. Norra leans forward and kicks his shin. The ex-Imperial grouses and sits up, wiping a line of liquor from his lip. Deep in his cups, he noisily whispers to the others: “We are about to be reprimanded by the academy commandant, children. Shhhh. ”

“This is not a reprimand, ” Ackbar says gruffly.

“You were operating under my request, ” Leia says. And then adds with a crisp shot of bitterness: “I’m the one who received the reprimand. ”

“Sir, ” Norra says, “with all due respect—”

But the Mon Calamari does that thing he does where he shuts you up with a look. His bold, golden eyes fix on her. “Han Solo, as I understand it, has resigned his military commission. And even if he had not, we cannot pivot the entire New Republic to search for one man willfully gone off the reservation. We are already overextended. Our reclamation of systems is slow, our grip tenuous. Your team, Lieutenant Wexley, is designed to serve a single purpose, and finding a smuggler—however goodhearted and helpful he is—is not that purpose. Your search for Solo ends now. You will return to pursuing Imperial war criminals posthaste. ”

“No. ”

That single word comes out of nowhere. Norra wonders who even spoke it aloud, until she realizes…

It was her own voice.

Ackbar seems taken aback. His nostrils flare as he scowls.

She says it again, wishing desperately she could catch the words before they leave her mouth and shove them back down into her throat, but the effort is futile. “No. We won’t. The New Republic owes Leia and Solo a great debt. He’s missing and I think he’s in danger. The Empire doesn’t want us to find him, and that’s all the more reason we should be looking. So, with all due respect, we will continue our search for Solo. ”

Oh, no. What am I doing? Shut up, Norra. Shut! Up!

Her fears are reflected back in Wedge’s eyes, now as big as moons. He shakes his head at her, trying to tell her to stop.

“Are you disobeying an order? ” Ackbar asks.

No, she thinks. I would never. I’m a pilot. I’m a soldier. I—

I’m a rebel.

Oh.

“Yes, ” she says, the word erupting out of her. “I am disobeying your order. I resign my military commission. This is the right thing to do and I aim to do it, no matter who stands in my way. I’ll find Solo myself. ”

Sinjir sits forward, grinning like a maniac. “Well, this just stopped being tedious. ” Jas, too, looks on with a smirk twisting the ends of her mouth (though Norra doesn’t know if that smirk signifies approval or amusement or something else entirely).

Jom on the other hand looks like he just ate a piece of rotten meat.

And Temmin? He’s already at her side. “I’m in, too, Mom. ”

Leia steps forward. She clasps Norra’s hands in her own. “Lieutenant Wexley—”

“Norra. ”

“Norra, please, reconsider. Don’t do this to yourself. Not for me. ”

“Why not? You’d do it for me. For all of us. That person, the princess and general in all the holovids? That’s not some creation. It’s not propaganda. It’s you. You gave up so much for us. You lost your world. At least let me get your husband back. ” Norra leans forward and in a much lower voice says: “And a child needs its parents. I know that now. ”

Leia appears speechless. All she can do is acquiesce with a small nod.

“That’s done, then, ” Norra says as her heart churns excited—and panicked—blood through her veins. She feels woozy, like she’s on the edge of something. But it feels good. It feels right. “Private citizen Norra Wexley. I suspect this meeting no longer involves me. If you’ll excuse me, Admiral, I have matters I must attend to. ”

—

The matters Norra must attend to include, in order:

a) Trying very hard not to vomit.

b) Trying doubly hard not to pass out.

c) Feeling both lost and free at the same time, which is probably why she feels like vomiting and passing out.

She stands at the far side of the Skygarden, away from the others, just out of sight. She can’t go, not yet. Her legs are too wobbly. And she’s not really even sure where she’s going.

That’s the thing. For so many years now, she’s been on rails. Fixed to a track not of her own making. She almost jumped that track on Akiva, but it wasn’t long before duty called and once again she was swept up in someone else’s cause. Admittedly, it felt comfortable. It felt easy.

Following orders is simple.

But the galaxy isn’t simple, is it? The Empire is about following orders, but the Rebel Alliance was about changing all that—tossing it on its head and flipping up an obscene gesture before walking out of the room. The Empire didn’t care about individuals. It cared only about itself. Still does. But Norra wants to care about people again. Not orders. Not governments. She adds a new “matter she must attend to” when she tries not to cry.

She fails. Norra sobs. Her shoulders hitch and what comes out of her is a desperate, animal sound. Brentin. Her husband. Temmin’s father. Brentin is lost precisely because she got swept up in someone else’s cause. And now her chances of getting him back are gone. Because she chose a path bigger and greater, even if it wasn’t her own.

It was his. It was Brentin’s cause. He was the rebel. She just wanted to be a mother to her son. The galaxy, she hoped then, would sort itself out.

She leans forward, wiping up tears with a drag of her forearm.

A hand falls upon her shoulder.

It’s her son. She sweeps him up into a hug. He oofs a little and then goes with it, hugging her back. Approaching under a copse of flyleaf trees are both Sinjir and Jas, with Bones toodling behind.

Norra says to them: “Sorry to do that back there, I know I’m abandoning you and the team—”

“Shut up, ” Jas says, rolling her eyes. “We’re in. ”

“What? ”

“We’re going to help you find Solo. ”

Sinjir snorts. “Little Miss Bounty Hunter here even negotiated a truly impressive fee for the job. ”

“Shut it, Rath Velus. ”

“Ten credits. Ten. We’re all getting paid enough that we can probably split a steaming kofta-bun or all buy four bottles of jogan juice. Small bottles. We’ll be richer than in our wildest dreams. Provided that our wildest dreams have us living in total destitution. You’ve gone soft, Emari. ”

“Like the lady said, we have debts. I pay mine. ”

“And Jom? ” Norra asks.

Jas scowls. “No. The coward is sticking with them. Antilles, too. ”

“That’s fine. They have to follow their path. We have ours. So let’s get to work. ” She draws a deep breath and wonders exactly what they’re getting themselves into. “Han Solo is apparently not going to find himself. ”

The veldt stretches out before them.

The ki-a-ki bushes tremble in the warm wind, dark thorny scrubs whose gentle tremors call to mind an animal trying very hard not to be seen. The thirstgrass conspires with the breeze: whispers and shushes and hissed hushes. Red, feathery clouds streak across the open sky, a sky the color of blush and bloom. A lone ship crosses it—some cargo ship, probably, one of the few travelers to this distant world of Irudiru.

Down there, among the grass and the scrub, sits a compound.

The compound has seven buildings. Each sits squat and rectangular, each made of blond brick and blood-red mortar, each with rail-top roofs and round porthole windows and water catchment tanks. One of the buildings is different, though: a manse larger and more ostentatious than the other, more austere buildings. The house is surrounded by a screened-in-porch, a xeriscape garden, and a series of shimmering and shifting holostatues. A droid with many extensor limbs flits about, tending to the garden and tuning up the statues.

Otherwise, the compound is silent and still.

And it has been for the better part of the last day.

This is the compound of Golas Aram.

What the crew knows about Aram is little, but perhaps enough: The big-headed Siniteen was once employed by the Galactic Empire as an architect. A prison architect, in fact. Aram designed some of the Empire’s most notable prisons, including the Lemniscate beneath Coruscant, the floating asteroid prison of Orko 9, and the Goa Penal Colony. Aram’s reported specialty was making prisons that were self-sustaining and inescapable. He considered it his “art. ”

Thing is, he didn’t work only for the Empire. He operated freelance, too—helping design and build prisons for the Kanjiklub, for the Junihar Cartel, even for Splugorra the Hutt.

Aram is retired, supposedly.

Just the same, Aram is the only Imperial connection out here on Irudiru. He’s the one good lead they have. But what happens when they go pulling on that thread? Will they find Han Solo? Or will the whole thing fall apart? Could they be putting Solo in danger?

The narrative they can put together for Solo is shaky, at best. The Millennium Falcon got into a scrap not far from Warrin Station. Han had transmitted after that—but whatever he was investigating sure stirred up trouble. Given the presence of that Prowler droid, plus the information from Black Sun and the sheer manic glee of Tashu regarding Irudiru, there’s cause to worry. So if Han was here investigating Aram, then what? After that, the narrative frays. Why look into Aram at all? Did Aram catch Solo sniffing around? Is Solo in prison—or is he looking for someone in prison?

Either way, it’s what they have, so here they are.

From their hiding spot atop a gentle hilltop plateau, Norra leans forward, parting the sharp-bladed thirstgrass like a curtain and peering out through a pair of macrobinoculars. Using the dial on the side, she scans through the heat signatures then clicks over to electric and electronic indicators. The binocs highlight a series of danger spots all around the compound; they glow red in the viewscreen. “I see them, ” she tells Jas—Jas, who lies unseen in the tall grass even though she’s only a few meters away.

The binocs highlight that the compound is ringed by an invisible perimeter fence: a barrier of ghosted lasers, impossible to see but sure to cut you apart if you marched through them. The ground leading up to the compound, both in and out of the fence, is littered with land mines. Then, located throughout the compound are turret-droids. Each hides in plain sight near vaporators, looking like part of the mechanism. Stealthy buggers, those.

Through the grass, Jas says, “The place is loaded for war. Aram’s protecting himself. I get that he's paranoid, given the changes cascading through the galaxy, but this is a whole other level. He’s afraid. And he hasn’t come out in days. ” From behind them, Norra hears Temmin working on something—a tink tink tink followed by a buzzing twist from a microspanner. What is he doing back there? Norra’s about to ask, when—

The grass swishes and shakes as Sinjir crawls up on his belly. “Ow! ” he says, flexing his hand and popping the knuckle of his thumb in his mouth. “This grass is slicing me to bits. ”

“It drinks your blood, ” Jas says, easing closer. “Thirstgrass sustains itself on the creatures who walk through it. Little sips from little cuts. ”

He frowns. “Lovely. I’m here for my hourly update. And my hourly update is: I am bored. Bored out of my skull. ”

“That’s always your hourly update, ” Norra says.

“Because it’s true every hour. ”

“It’s my update, too, ” Temmin says, crawling up next to them. “Seriously, this is awful. I want to burn all this grass. And the thorny bushes. And the flies. ” As if to demonstrate, he swats at the back of his hand. “See? Ugh. I should’ve stayed on Chandrila. ”

“Can’t we just go back to Kai Pompos? ” Sinjir asks. “We’d make it by nightfall. There’s a little drinkery around the back of the town. They have a still where they ferment this root, this korva root. So we go back, we tip back a few under the Irudiru moons, we reformulate our strategy—”

“This is a fact-finding mission, ” Norra says, feeling like a mom commanding a child to stay put. “We stay here until all the facts are found. ”

“Facts are, ” Temmin says, “the guy isn’t coming out. He’s dug in like a blood-bug. ” They’d heard rumors that Aram was a big-game hunter, and thought maybe that would afford them an opportunity to get close to him. But so far, no go. Nor has he gone out for supplies. Or even a breath of fresh air. They’ve seen neither hide nor hair of the man. Just droids. “Here’s what we do. We take Mister Bones—” Bones sits crumpled up behind them, his skeletal body folded tightly with his head bowed and his arms enclosing his knees. “And we let Bones march down there, find the guy, drag him up here onto the plateau, and we question him. Simple. ”