Star Wars: The Last of the Jedi, Volume 4 (6 page)

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.

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 med-center, 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.

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 and 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 martyrs. 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 down 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 bad 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,” Keets 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 Keets, 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.”

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.