Aftermath: Star Wars by Chuck Wendig Read Free Book Online Page A

it’s jammed up pretty good. Once upon a time, he crashed an A-wing at the lip of a volcano—one of his first runs out as a pilot for the then-burgeoning Rebel Alliance, at the urging of a friend—a rebel agent known only as Fulcrum. That crash left him limping for months, and there? His leg was broken. In three places, no less. Almost cut short any career he hoped to have as a pilot, but he convinced the rebels to let him work a freighter manning the guns and as occasional navigator, so.
    Whatever the case, he’s pretty sure the leg isn’t busted.
    But it sure hurts from his jump out of the back of that Starhopper—moments before he set the torpedoes to blow.
    Clambering through ventilation ducts didn’t help the pain. But getting away from Imperial eyes was key. Since then, he’s been sneaking around, doubling back, covering his tracks—dropping in and out of vents. At first he was guideless, without a plan, but it didn’t take long to realize what he had to do—and better yet, being here on this Star Destroyer offered him something of a real opportunity.
    Communications are blocked to all traffic in the space above Akiva and, he’s betting, to all on the ground, too.
    But if anybody has the channels still open?
    It’s the Empire.
    And so now, he stands in the communications room. The bodies of three comm officers lie nearby. One slumped over her station, another two dropped on the floor. Stunned, not dead. Wedge isn’t a killer. He’s a pilot, and taking down other pilots means ending the lives of combatants. Comm officers aren’t soldiers, aren’t pilots. They’re just people. Wedge thinks:
That’s a lesson we could stand to learn. Imperials are just like us.
Some of them, at least. It’s easy to label those who serve the Galactic Empire as pure evil, all enemy, but truth is, a lot of those who do so were either sold a bill of lies, or forced to by threat of pain or death. Already the New Republic has seen defectors. Men and women who have seen a chance for escape, for a new life…
    That means getting the message out. That means running the comms now and bringing in the troops.
    Two holoscreens rise up. On the one side he tries to aim a subspace frequency toward New Republic space—but all those frequencies remain blocked. That presents a short-term problem and a long-term one: Right now, it means he can’t send a message to where it needs to go. In the long term, it means the Empire knows their frequencies. Suggesting that somewhere, there’s a mole in the halls of the New Republic—maybe unsurprising, but all the more reason he has to get a message out somehow.
    He flips over to local channel traffic.
    There, none of the known Republic channels is blocked.
    That means he can get a message out to those loyal—but they
must
be local. What are the chances? That here, at the precipice of colonized space, he’ll find someone listening, someone loyal to the New Republic?
    It’s the only shot he has.
    He dials it up. Wedge zeros in on the emergency channel, then draws the mike out of the console, the metal cold in his hand. Into it he starts to speak: “This is Captain Wedge Antilles of the New Republic. Repeat: This is Wedge Antilles of the New Republic. I am trapped on the Star Destroyer
Vigilance
in the space above Akiva, and I am in—”
    A bright light. The bark of a blaster.
    He cries out in pain as a laser bolt burns a hole through his shoulder. His hand reflexively opens—the microphone clatters away. He paws at his hip for his own blaster, but another shot and the weapon that hung there is quickly spun to slag and knocked off his belt.
    Wedge, breathing deep, gritting his teeth against the pain, wheels on his attacker. He expects to meet some stormtrooper, or ironically a comm officer who is just returning from a meal.
    But no.
    The woman standing there is in a crisp admiral’s uniform. She’s dark-skinned, with cold brown eyes to match. In her hand, a long-barreled pistol—a unique