Death on Naboo Page 4

  Curran nodded. "I was thinking the same thing." "I've still got my contacts in the Senate," Keets said.

  "And there are a few even in the Imperial Army officer corps who don't like where they are," Oryon added. "They might talk."

  "I've got friends I can ask, too," Dex said. "If we do this, we could attract the notice of the Inquisitors. They'll come looking, no doubt about that."

  The others nodded. They would accept that risk.

  "But why?" Trever asked them. "You hardly know Ferus. You just met him a few days ago."

  "Doesn't matter," Dex said. "We're all soldiers in the same fight now. We'll risk what we have to for our own."

  Trever looked at Dex gratefully. He knew Ferus would be touched by their help. He only hoped Ferus would live long enough to see it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  That night, Ferus's cell door slid open and the guards threw a body inside. Ferus sat up, leaning on his elbows. The door slid shut and Clive unfolded himself from his tucked position. He dusted off his dirty prison coveralls.

  "I don't know why they have to do that," he said.

  "How'd you manage it?" Ferus whispered.

  "There's a creepy logic to this regime," Clive answered in a low tone, settling himself next to Ferus. It had been at least two years since Ferus had last seen him. He was thinner, and his thick black hair was cut close to his head. His blue eyes had dark smudges underneath them. Then again, they all looked older.

  "When you rule by fear, everyone is afraid of you," Clive said, lying back and crossing one ankle over his knee. "This can have its advantages.

  Obviously. I mean, they're in control of the galaxy, right? But it can offer windows of opportunity for fellows like me. Hence. There's a chap in the data-works section — not an Imperial guy, just a civilian with a job. He had a slight problem with his pro­gram, and I saw him sweat. If you mess up on the job here, you get a boot in the face and a transfer to someplace worse. Does that concept boggle the mind or what? So I fixed it for him on the sly. He owed me a favor. This is it."

  "So what are you in for?" Ferus asked.

  Clive stretched out his legs. "I was lying low under one of your excellent false identities — thanks for never charging me, by the way — when I saw an opportunity I couldn't pass up."

  "Don't tell me. A little espionage? A tiny theft of an industrial secret?"

  Clive grinned. "Something along those lines. The next thing I knew, I was being arrested. They threw me against a wall and put stun cuffs on me. They traced my ID does and somehow in a burst of their usual efficiency they discovered who I was. That was act three of this space opera, mate. Once they had my real name, they had me. Into the simmer I went. The End."

  But it wasn't the end. Ferus knew enough about Clive to know that. He'd met Flax in the time before the Clone Wars, when he was still operating his busi­ness, Olin/Lands. He and his partner Roan offered their services to whistleblowers, beings who exposed corruption and then found the law did not protect them. Roan and Ferus created new identities for the whistleblowers and their families and also offered protection while they established themselves on new worlds. Clive hadn't needed their protection —he had honed his own style of defense, with amazing skills Ferus had never seen outside of the Temple.

  Using his abilities as a musician, he had often gone unnoticed in bars or parties while he was gath­ering information or stealing it. It was a living, he would say with a shrug. Once the Clone Wars started, he saw his skills as marketable. Ferus had thought of him immediately after he had been put in charge of an operation on the planet of Jabor. He had recruited Clive and sent him undercover to a Separatist base to work as a double agent. As a result, Ferus had been able to bust a Separatist spy ring that had oper­ated throughout the Mid-Rim. It hadn't won the war, but it had saved lives.

  If there was anybody in the galaxy who he'd want to watch his back — with the exception of Roan or Obi-Wan — it was Clive Flax.

  "So what's the plan?" Ferus asked.

  "What plan?"

  "The escape plan. I know you have one."

  "You're right," Clive admitted easily. "I just need an accomplice. The galaxy smiled on me the day I saw your ugly mug in here. That's why I kept you alive."

  "You mean you only saved my life so you could use me?"

  "Of course, mate. You know I only think about my own sweet self." Clive grinned at him.

  "Tell me the plan," Ferus said. "I don't care what it is — I'm in."

  "I've been stealing things for months," Clive said. He reached inside his coveralls and laid out several items on the hard floor.

  Ferus looked at them dubiously.

  A servodriver.

  A spoon.

  A droid's restraining bolt.

  A handful of durasteel bits.

  "This is what you're going to break out of prison with?"

  Clive picked up one of the tiny bits. "You see this? You put a small object in a piece of equipment in the right way, you can disable it. Disable some­thing, you've got a distraction. Sometimes that's all you need." He replaced the scrap of metal with something like fondness. "Besides, I had a plastoid datacard, too, but I had to use it to save your sorry neck. The transport ship comes tomorrow for the new load. Are you in or out?"

  Ferus gave another glance at the motley group of objects. Sure, they didn't look like much. But Clive had just saved his life with a datacard.

  "I'm in," he said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Malorum sat in the cockpit of his private starship on one of the landing platforms of Polis Massa.

  There were too many unrelated facts in his brain. He was used to cataloging facts and swiftly reaching conclusions — that's how smart he was — but now he felt only confusion. He hated confusion.

  Think, he told himself impatiently.

  He suspected that Senator Amidala had been treated here, but he could not locate any evidence of it.

  One of his best agents, Sancor, had been killed here. According to the operational head of the med­center, Maneeli Tuun, Sancor had "accidentally" fallen off an observation platform and landed on some lethally sharp surgical instruments.

  Accident. Did they take him for a fool?

  A source had told him that a Jedi had been the one to take Amidala's body to Naboo. Of course the galaxy believed the Jedi had killed Amidala, but Malorum knew it was a lie fabricated to slur the Jedi. He didn't care about that. He cared only about what really happened, because it was information Darth Vader did not have. And any information Vader didn't have could be used against him.

  The funeral . . .

  Malorum tapped his fingers against the cockpit instrument panel. The funeral had been organized in haste. For such a ceremonial people, it was per­haps too hasty.

  He leaned over to the nav computer. He set a course for Naboo. His work here was finished. He'd found nothing.

  Instinct was telling him that his answers lay there, not with Ferus Olin. He would call in the ex­ecution order. The galaxy would have one less Jedi sympathizer in it.

  That could only be an improvement.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Trever walked down a warehouse aisle, in between blocks of towering garbage. The smell was overpowering. He could see fat white gaberworms as long as his arm slithering through the waste.

  Workers of many species toiled without stop­ping, shoveling the garbage into a machine that cubed arid sanitized it. They wore face masks and gloves, but Trever couldn't imagine that those helped with the smell or the feel of the garbage.

  "Told you you'd regret tagging along," Keets told him.

  "It's not so bad," Trever said. "You should have seen my brother's bedroom."

  The joke slipped out before he could stop it. Keets gave him a quick, sharp look. He hadn't men­tioned his family before. He never mentioned his family. Their lives, their deaths, were his business.

  He hated to think about them. He tried not to. It was tough coming from a family of heroes and mar
­tyrs. His mother, his father, and his brother had all fought the Empire. They had all been killed. He had no intention of ending as they did, if he could help it.

  He sensed the itch in Keets to ask another ques­tion — he was a journalist, after all — but Keets said nothing, just kept leading the way down the aisle of the facility toward the friend he called Davis Joness.

  Keets had filled Trever in on the background as they took an airbus fifty levels clown to the facility. Davis Joness had been an influential and powerful Coruscant administrator. He had remained neutral during the Clone Wars but could not conceal his dis­taste for the Empire's new regulations. One day, he ran afoul of the new Imperial leadership and was instantly reassigned to garbage duty.

  They found him at the end of the line, using a servoshovel to pick up the hunks of garbage that had fallen from the piles. He wore a bright orange bandanna around his head and boots up to his thighs. His eyebrows shot up over his face mask when he caught sight of Keets.

  "Come to give me a hand?" he asked.

  "I think I'll pass."

  "You disappeared."

  "Thought it might be a good idea at the time."

  "Why'd you come back?"

  "Usual story. I missed all this."

  Keets lifted his arms to take in the towers of garbage.

  "Come on — we can't talk here, there are spies everywhere." Davis stripped off his gloves and tossed them onto a pile of reeking garbage.

  They followed him through a green door to an outside courtyard. Trever took a deep breath of fresher air, trying not to be obvious about it. Unfortunately, Davis smelled almost as had as the garbage he handled. There was no fresh air to be had in his vicinity.

  Davis noticed when Trever moved away slightly. "Occupational hazard," he said. With a sigh, he sat down on an upended cone of permacrete that served as a stool. "Glad to see a face from the old days, any­way," he said.

  "You gave me some great tips in the past," Meets said. "Are you still hooked in?"

  "Sure, I still keep my fingers on the pulse of Senatorial high jinks," Davis said with a half-smile. "I just can't help myself. It's a blast watching the Senators debate about how many meters wide the Coruscant flag should be while the Emperor plans more death and destruction."

  "So tell me: Where do they send the political prisoners? The worst of the worst?"

  "Don't you mean the best of the best?"

  Keets inclined his head, conceding the point.

  "I've heard about a new prison world. Dontamo. A work prison. The most elite prisoners are sent there. If you know someone who ends up within its walls, forget them. Everybody works and every­body dies."

  Trever clasped his hands behind his back and squeezed, trying to distract himself from believing it.

  "It's not safe here," Davis told Meets, suddenly looking around. "You'd better go. There are at least three workers here who pass along information. Those are the ones I know about. Your image was taken as you entered; they'll put it through security if one of the workers tips them off, which they will."

  "I'm already on Malorum's bad side," Keets said. "I doubt it can get worse."

  "Well, you're in luck. He's on Naboo for the moment, or so I hear. But you'd better get lost anyway."

  Keets turned to go. Then he turned back again. "Why do you stay?"

  "I've been barred from every profession except this one. I've got kids." He balled his fingers into fists and stared at them, his eyes bloodshot, his face mot­tled red from exposure to garbage toxins. "What else can I do?"

  When Trever and Keets returned, Oryon and Curran were talking to Dex. Solace was studying a holographic star chart.

  "We worked a contact in the air control," Oryon said. "A starship left the landing platform of a Coruscant high-security prison yesterday. It was headed for the Radiant One system."

  "We've been reading the star charts," Dex said. "We can narrow it down to about fifteen prisons. Radiant One is a big system, well beyond the Core."

  "We're trying out probability theories, trying to rank them in importance so we know where to start," Curran added.

  Trever looked at Keets. They'd already looked up Dontamo on the star charts. It was in Radiant One. This was the confirmation they needed.

  "You don't need to look any longer," Keets told the others. "We know where he is." He strode over to the star chart and pointed his finger. "Here."

  "There's something else you should know," Dex said reluctantly. "An execution order has gone through for Ferus."

  Silence suddenly filled the room. Trever closed his eyes as he felt them burn. Not again. Not again. Not again.

  Not someone he cared about dying at the hands of the Empire.

  "No," he said fiercely, surprised he'd spoken aloud. "We'll get there in time."

  "I can make it in half a day," Solace said.

  "We're coming with you," Oryon and Curran said at the same time.

  Solace looked at them, surprised.

  "We're seeing this through," Keets said.

  "It's like Dex told us," Oryon said. "It's time to join the fight."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The plan was simple. The hard part was doing it.

  Ferus lay awake in the darkness, reviewing what Clive had outlined while Clive himself slept in a cor­ner snoring loudly.

  Once they were at the factory, Clive would dis­able a loading machine that transported the huge durasteel cartons onto the transport ship. He simply planned to disable the counting system. The fact that he swore he would be able to do this with a spoon was enough to give Ferus nightmares, so he chose not to dwell on that.

  "Inventory," Clive had said, explaining his plan. "If you mess up their inventory procedures, they go crazy. They know they're accountable to some Grand Moffing Toffhead down the line, so it has to be spot-on. So the crates are being loaded, but they're not being counted. That means they're going to have to do a manual count. Which means they'll flip open the bay doors on the transport. And that will give us our chance. After you take care of the main guard and grab his weapon —"

  "How am I going to do that?"

  "You'll think of something. The other guards will be checking out the machine and watching the pris­oners, because when something goes wrong, they're afraid everyone will riot."

  "So I take out the guard . . ."

  "By that time I'll be in position to stop the loader completely. Then you and I get on board using the bay doors, get to the cockpit, throw out the pilots, and take off."

  "There seem to be a number of holes in this plan." "Well, nothing's perfect."

  Ferus thought back on the conversation now as he lay on his back. He trusted Clive, he trusted his instincts — and he also trusted that if he didn't take this opportunity, he'd be dead.

  He closed his eyes but didn't sleep. It was before dawn when he heard the boots outside. Too early to roust the prisoners for the day.

  He could see the gleam in Clive's eyes. He was wide-awake, listening. "This can't be good," Clive whispered.

  The boots stopped outside the door. Clive moved fast. He threw himself across the cell and punched Ferus just as the door flew open and the lights were powered up suddenly in an attempt to blind them.

  "He stole my boots!" Clive shouted wildly.

  "Doesn't matter now," the guard smirked.

  Ferus was picked up and thrown into a transport cart, a small, locking box they used to move prison­ers in and out . . . to the execution bloc.

  It was his time.

  The cover closed and locked. Within seconds, they were wheeling Ferus out.

  He clutched a restraining bolt in his fingers — the bolt that Clive had passed him when he'd pretended to attack him. He had no idea what to do with it. It was hardly a weapon. But it was something.

  Ferus was thrown into a cell. His execution order was read out loud to him. "By the order of . . ." "Crimes against the Imperial regime . . ." It didn't matter.

  The door locked behind the guards. It
was a tiny cell with thick durasteel walls. There was no room to lie down and barely room to sit. There was no window, no chair. Nothing here but time, and very little of that.

  He grasped the bolt in his fist. He couldn't break out of here with a bolt. Clive knew that. But when they came for him, when they took him to the exe­cution room, then maybe he could use it.

  You put a small object in a piece of equip­ment in the right way, you can disable it. Disable something, you've got a distraction. Sometimes that's all you need.

  All in all, he'd rather have a lightsaber.

  Already he heard them coming. They didn't let you sit for long.

  He still had the Force. It was here, even on this stinking, dismal planet, even in this dark cage of a room. It was inside him and around him and he could access it whenever he chose.

  He stood.

  Today he would either die or escape.

  It would be his choice. Not theirs.

  The door slid open. There were six stormtroop­ers. One was an officer, consulting a datapad attached to his wrist.

  "Ferus Olin, criminal from the planet Bellassa. Retinal scan." He held up a scanner to Ferus's eye. "Identification confirmed."

  They pushed him into another room, a larger one, with several chairs with restraints that were bolted to the ceiling and trailed down like lethal vines. There was a med droid in the corner. So it would be lethal injection.

  They pushed him past the droid. He palmed the restraining bolt as he passed. He hoped the guards would keep shoving him, and they did, poking him with their blaster rifles. He pretended to stumble and reached out with an arm to steady himself. He grabbed on to the med droid.

  "Off!" The stormtrooper slammed the butt of the rifle into his shoulder.

  The pain radiated down Ferus's arm. It didn't matter. He'd been able to slip the bolt into the droid's socket.

  They brought him toward the chair, then slammed him down into it.

  "Prepare injection," the officer said.

  The droid didn't move.

  "Prepare injection!" the officer snapped.

  "Restrained," the droid answered succinctly.

  "What?"

  The officer turned. It was the moment Ferus had been waiting for. With one kick he sent one storm-trooper into another; an elbow sent a third spinning. The Force hummed around him as he leaped over the pile, snatching up two blasters on the way. He twisted in midair, held himself motionless for one instant to blast the droid to smithereens, then landed. He dived away from blaster fire and used the momentum to roll himself like a ball, taking down the rest of the stormtroopers. On his way up he grabbed a security card out of a stormtrooper's utility belt.