Empire's End: Aftermath (Star Wars) (Star Wars: The Aftermath Trilogy) by Wendig Chuck

Author:Wendig, Chuck [Wendig, Chuck]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781101966969
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

The Observatory’s defenses made short work of the Hutt’s caravan, but Gallius Rax can see that, regrettably, they failed to finish the job. Now night has fallen and his quarry is positioned defensively behind pillarlike plateaus down in the valley. He flicks from screen to screen, watching. Sloane and someone else—some man he does not know—are behind the eastern pillar. Niima and some of her Hutt-slaves are hidden in the shadow of the western plateau. The good news is that they’re all trapped, pinned there by the turbolasers. They could try to run, but they would end up like the rest of the caravan: smoking wreckage and tangled corpses.

Rax remains down in the bowels of the Imperial base. The sentinel stands in the corner, projecting images from the center of its hand.

In walks Tashu. And with Tashu comes Brendol Hux.

“I have retrieved him,” Tashu says with a dramatic bow.

“It’s late,” Hux says, his lips smacking drily together. “What is all this? Why am I summoned at this hour?”

It takes a moment for Hux to regard the strange scene: a spare room with dark blastocrete walls, a red-robed sentinel with Palpatine’s face, and images of the Jakku desert projected into the air.

“I need your help,” Rax says to Brendol Hux.

“Wh…what kind of help?”

“I need to know: Are your recruits ready?”

“I need more time…” Hux flinches. “They need more time.”

“They have no more time. Prove your worth to me, Brendol.”

Hux’s eyes search the screens and the sentinel’s flickering face, trying to make some sense of all of this. “I…”

“Prove yourself and I’ll tell you what’s really going on.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Fail me and you will spend the rest of your days wandering this graceless desert.” It is a bold offering. Rax knows full well that Hux could try to leave here and tell the others in the council what’s happening. They could attempt a coup against him, though it would not succeed. Still, Brendol Hux is not a popular man. He isn’t army, he isn’t navy. He’s cold, smug, stubborn. He spends his time alone. Even his own son stays away from him—and that boy has no friends here, either. With the fall of the Empire, Hux and his son have been increasingly alienated.

And this is a way back in. A way out of isolation. A reward, dangling there in front of him.

Will he jump for it? Or will he wilt like a flower in this dead place?

Hux nods, puffing out his chest. “They’ll do what you need. Just tell me what it is and I will have them ready to serve.”

Rax smiles. “Good.”

—

“What happened down there?”

Norra asks because the fuzzy view through the quadnocs—stolen from the Corellian shuttle, now parked behind them—gives no meaningful answer. Jas flew the ship up here to the effective end of Niima’s canyons and caverns, parking it atop a tall, toothy ridge that overlooks a broad valley that opened up in the desert. There the valley extends outward, guarded on both sides by a gauntlet of plateaus and megaliths, striated in the colors of fire and blood.

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