Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(8)
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.”