Star Wars: The Last of the Jedi, Volume 5 (5 page)

“Three hundred and twenty-seven,” he said, without looking up.

“How many filed for a refund on the departure tax? Have you tabulated?”

“Almost all.”

“May I see?”

The official hunted through the papers and handed a sheaf to Ferus. He quickly flipped through them. He immediately discovered the names of those who didn’t file for a refund of the hefty
departure tax.

The refund was a considerable amount of credits. Not many would turn down the chance to receive it.

He memorized the five names. One more stop and he’d be sure.

Thanking the official, he hurried back onto the turbolift. He took it down to the main level. There he hopped aboard a moving ramp that shot him forward. He could feel the presence of the seeker
droid behind him.

Ferus took the ramp to the very center of the city. He exited and turned to the right, where a gleaming white structure loomed, long and low. This was the place where the Sathans mourned their
dead. He walked inside.

The glowlamps were red and softly powered down, the air scented with herbs. The mausoleum wasn’t staffed, but relied on huge datascreens for those who entered to find the name of their
loved ones on the intricately carved, curving walls. By pressing the name, information about the loved one would appear and messages could be left.

The datascreens weren’t working. But the names were arranged alphabetically, so Ferus was able to run down the curving walls, looking for a match to any of the five names he’d
memorized. He found it in the Fs. There it was, Quintus Farel, just as he’d thought.

Quintus Farel had turned up in two places—on the list of those who had applied for a Vehicle Purchase Registration Request and on a list of those who never applied for a refund on the
departure tax. If Quintus had bought a star cruiser and planned to leave, his plans had been foiled. But he hadn’t bothered to get a refund.

All of this wasn’t very interesting, except that Quintus Farel was dead.

He’d died twenty-five years ago at age two. A terrible speeder accident. His parents had died, too. Their names were beside him, here in the mausoleum.

Someone had stolen his name and ID information.

It was a common way to get an alias. Find a name that had already been recorded and it was easier to forge ID docs. A security number would have already been issued.

The saboteur had hit the personal records first—the birth and death records. They’d thought their tracks would be covered by the chaos that ensued. But by cross-referencing the
landing platform records—which an overly zealous bureaucrat had painstakingly kept on durasheets, unbeknownst to the saboteur—with the mausoleum records that were kept engraved on
synthstone, Ferus had found his first clue.

“Gotcha,” he murmured.

Before he left, he paused. The longer he let the seeker droid track him, the more information he’d be giving to Bog and the Empire. He wanted to find the saboteur himself, then decide what
to do. He needed to make sure that he wasn’t handing over the planet to Imperial control. He had to hope that Solace and Oryon would be able to find Roan and Dona and free them before he had
to make a choice.

He stepped out into the street again. He felt the seeker lurking underneath the curved roof of the building.

Suddenly a skyhopper zoomed down in front of him. “Air taxi, sir?”

It was Clive. Ferus stepped inside the vehicle. “I’ve got a seeker droid to lose,” he said.

“I’m way ahead of you, mate. You’ve been under droid surveillance since you left that crazy palace. Let’s lose the creep.”

Clive hit the engines hard. Ferus felt his stomach lurch as he moved up into space-lane traffic.

“Have to get past these canal bridges, then we can go up,” Clive said, swerving to avoid an airspeeder dodging an air taxi.

The space lane was clogged with traffic. Without signals, it was a free-for-all. Unfortunately, the citizens of Sath didn’t believe in slowing down.

Ferus was plastered against the seat. “This is insane.”

Clive cackled. “Isn’t it great?”

The seeker was keeping up. Clive suddenly swerved to the left, nearly colliding with a large airspeeder. “Oops, I keep forgetting about my lack of starboard visibility.” He tapped on
the nav screen. “This keeps blitzing in and out.”

“Great.”

“Keep an eye out on starboard, will you?”

Ferus glanced over his shoulder. “There’s an airbus—”

Clive pushed the skyhopper violently to the right, passing underneath the bus by centimeters. “I saw it!” he said defensively when Ferus gave him an incredulous look.

“Watch out for the—”

“I’ve got it,” Clive said, diving down almost to the surface. “Woo, this is fun!”

“The seeker—”

“Oh, right.” Clive yanked the controls and zoomed down an alley. He looked up. “Got some room overhead—”

“There’s not enough room!” Ferus saw only a tiny bit of sky between a cluster of towers overhead.

Clive hit the engines, and the skyhopper zoomed up several kilometers in an instant. They passed through the space between the buildings, so close that the skyhopper scraped against the
building. The vehicle shuddered, but Clive only went faster. They seemed to pop out of the space like a cork. Ferus could swear he saw the paint peeling off the hull of the skyhopper.

Below them, the seeker crashed into the side of one of the towers. It flamed out and dropped.

“Told you there was room!” Clive chortled.

He zoomed even higher, until they were in the upper atmosphere.

“Where to, sir?” he asked.

“The Hundred Seventh district,” Ferus answered. “And step on it.”

“Music to my ears,” Clive said.

In an office in the Senate complex on Coruscant, a slender man clothed in black hit the control for his datapad. It rose from the center of his polished desk and he tilted the
screen at the precise angle for viewing.

Senator Sano Sauro was impatient, but anyone peeking into his office would never know it. He sat composedly at his desk, his hands tightly folded in front of him. He hated to be kept waiting,
and Bog Divinian was keeping him waiting. It was tiresome to have such a sloppy partner, but Bog had his uses.

He turned and looked at the artifact that hung suspended in a cube of transparisteel. He allowed himself to feel a surge of satisfaction at the battered object, a broken lightsaber hilt from a
fallen Jedi. The Duro who sold it to him told him it had belonged to Mace Windu himself, but Sauro had no way to verify that. It just pleased him to imagine it.

He had hated the Jedi all his life. Their privilege, their arrogance. He’d brought one of them to trial—that odious boy, Obi-Wan Kenobi, who had later become such an important
general. He was dead now, too.

And Sauro was alive. Older, but still in excellent shape, thanks to careful attention to his diet and visits to spas every six months. Not for him to accept the decrepitude of old human age.

He was now one of the most powerful Senators in the Emperor’s inner circle, a confidant and an advisor. They had formed their alliance years ago, after his attempted takeover of the
Chancellor’s position. Palpatine had called him into his office after the debacle, when so many Senators had been slaughtered. Sauro had planned just how to wiggle out of responsibility.
He’d blamed the assassination attempt on Granta Omega, of course, a conspirator who had gone much farther than he claimed to have known. He had expected censure from the Chancellor, perhaps
an arrest, though there was no hard evidence. Instead, Sauro had been offered a deputy position. It was clear, Palpatine had said, that Sauro knew the uses of power. He would give him a platform to
exercise that gift.

And he had.

Behind the scenes, he had bribed, punished, flattered, and manipulated. Now he was the unseen power behind Palpatine. The Emperor had been hideously scarred after the assassination attempt by
the Jedi Mace Windu, but Sauro did not underestimate him. His personal power had not diminished.

The problem was his new enforcer. Darth Vader had appeared out of nowhere. Sauro felt him like an electrojabber in his side. Vader was standing between him and the Emperor, and he couldn’t
have that.

Vader was consolidating his power, planet by planet, system by system. He was bringing governments in line. Already his name was spoken with fear.

Sauro didn’t know where Vader had come from, but he knew he wasn’t a politician. He didn’t know how to maneuver his way through powerful blocs and strategic alliances. In the
end, that would bring him down. He was just a thug.

Palpatine needed someone with elegance and subtlety. Someone like him.

Sauro believed in careful plotting. He didn’t act in haste. He needed to outmaneuver Vader, but it would take time. It might take years. He would wait. If Vader was proving to be the
Emperor’s enforcer, Sauro would be the Emperor’s strategist. Eventually he would demonstrate to Palpatine that he should be his second in command, not Vader.

The trick was to find out what he needed to do to impress Palpatine. He had to go above and beyond what he’d done in the past. He had to anticipate. Not answer the needs of yesterday, but
the needs of tomorrow.

He was good at that.

His comlink signaled at last. The miniaturized hologram of Bog beamed onto his desk.

Bog bowed. “Everything is going according to plan, good friend.”

“And what does that mean?” Sauro asked. Bog was always vague. He seemed to think that if he wasn’t pinned down, he could be seen as marvelously efficient.

“The Jedi is under surveillance. The sensor tag adhered to his boot as he stepped forward to greet me, just as I’d planned. Unfortunately a seeker droid tracking him—because I
believe in backup—met an unfortunate accident. Smashed into a building. The traffic in the space lanes is unruly because of this situation—”

“You idiot, it smashed into a building because the Jedi wanted it to,” Sauro said. “It wasn’t an accident. If you’ve got a sensor in his boot, what do you need a
seeker for? He’ll spot it no matter what it does. Just track him with the sensor. Where is he?”

“In the Hundred Seventh District. It’s in the northwest area of the city—”

“I don’t care where it is—I want to know if he’s found anything!”

“Hard to know,” Bog said.

“It’s your job to know,” Sauro said irritably. “Find out.”

He cut the communication abruptly. He’d have to monitor Bog more closely. Sauro himself didn’t get where he was today by underestimating a Jedi, even a failed Jedi like Ferus
Olin.

He swung his datapad closer. He tapped on the keys. He was taking no chances. He doubted that Ferus Olin was following the Emperor’s orders without his own plan.

Sauro placed a secret code in his files. A neat booby trap. If someone tried unauthorized access, he’d know it immediately.

No one must be allowed to interfere with his plans.

Wil and Amie dropped Solace, Trever, and Oryon off on a bluff overlooking the Imperial hangar and adjacent landing platform. Due to the large number of vehicles and troops
needed for the garrison, it had been built on the outskirts of Ussa, on an empty plain that stretched toward the foothills. Solace, Oryon, and Trever lay flat, watching the traffic below.

“If we can get to the holding pen for the airspeeder transports, we can go in that hangar door,” Solace said. “It’s not being used that much.”

To Trever, it looked as though it was being used every few minutes. Leave it to a Jedi to say something was easy when it was so clearly impossible.

Solace gave him one of her rare smiles. “I can see you doubt me.”

“I never argue with you or Ferus,” Trever said. “What’s the point?”

“Good philosophy.” Solace slipped her liquid cable out of her utility belt. “Ready?”

Oryon nodded. “I’ll take Trever.”

Great. The next thing Trever knew, he was hanging on to the strong broad back of Oryon and falling through thin air, the wind whistling past his ears. They landed on the ground with a bump. They
were concealed here by boulders, and they quickly snaked through them until they were close to the hangar door.

Two stormtroopers were conferring near the entry. After a moment, they both turned to walk inside.