“But don’t you want to be a part of that?” Oryon asked.
Keets nodded. “Of course. But right now we’d only endanger you if we stayed. It’s clear that the Empire knew exactly what it was hitting in that attack. We’ve got to lay low to protect what little organization we have.”
“We’re always available to help,” Curran said. “But we’re going to be searching for a new place to live in the sub-levels.”
The others exchanged glances. Ferus knew they were all thinking the same thing. They’d never expected this. Was it the beginning of an end they couldn’t see?
Quietly, Keets and Curran left them.
“Moonstrike can still go on,” Oryon said. “We gained three new members while you were on Alderaan, Ferus. And Flame is starting to line up some corporations. She had a meeting with the scientists from Samaria and Rosha. They’re eager to meet and exchange their technologies to create that super-droid you talked about on Samaria.”
“There’s plenty of good stuff going on,” Trever said. “It’s just hard to feel good when Dex and Keets and Curran aren’t part of it.”
“We still need a place for the meeting,” Oryon went on. “We haven’t been able to agree on where.”
He didn’t say any more than that. But Ferus knew what he wanted.
The success of the first Moonstrike meeting now rested with him. He had a safe place—the secret base on the asteroid. He had almost run through the list of the Force-sensitives. He hadn’t had any success in locating any additional Jedi.
He stood. “All right. Contact the others. Tell them we have a safe place to meet. Offer them Jedi escorts. If we split up the group into three teams, Solace, Ry-Gaul, and I can take them to the asteroid. No one but us will know where they are going. Once we set it all up, we’ll be on comm silence until we get there.”
Oryon nodded. “It’s a good plan. All we need are ships.”
“Flame can help us with that,” Trever said.
“She’s waiting for our signal,” Oryon said. “Let me see if I can get a holo transmission.”
Oryon signaled Flame, and in a few moments she appeared in miniature holo-mode. Ferus quickly told her that he had agreed to let the first Moonstrike meeting take place at his secret base.
“We need ships,” Oryon said. “Fast ones.”
Flame nodded. “I’ll get you ships.”
“It’s not only the ships,” Ferus pointed out. “They’ll have to be registered. We have to go through Imperial checkpoints. With three ships picking up that many beings, the odds of dodging Imperial checks aren’t good.”
Flame thought for a moment. Then she smiled.
“I have an idea,” she said.
Darth Vader left the Imperial hangar and walked the distance to the Republica Towers. He had been gone longer than he’d wanted, and Zan Arbor had ignored his messages. Once he had the memory agent, he’d slap her in an Imperial prison and see how she liked it.
Things on Alderaan hadn’t gone well. The Emperor was displeased with his performance. The Empire had looked foolish when the weapons Vader had planted had disappeared. The Emperor had suggested that after Ferus Olin was through with his mission, he’d be assigned to Vader. Impossible! He wouldn’t stand for it. He’d find a way around it.
He knew that his Master was testing him. If he could get rid of his memories, he would be stronger. If Padmé didn’t still visit him at night in his dreams, he would be able to rest.
He stopped at the lobby. The desk clerk was visibly shaking when he approached.
“May I assist you, Lord Vader?” the clerk asked.
“Is Jenna Zan Arbor in residence?”
“Yes, sir. I mean, Lord. I mean, yes, she hasn’t checked out. She accepts deliveries for food. I’ll contact her and announce you—”
“Don’t. Just unlock security. I am going up.”
He strode into the turbolift. He could hear the rasp of his breathing as the lift rose. Soon he would have peace. Zan Arbor was a vain, infuriating, pompous harridan, but she was also brilliant. She would save him. And then he would throw her in prison.
The turbolift opened, and he walked toward her rooms. The desk clerk had released the lock. Vader pushed open the door.
She sat curled up on the couch, facing the floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside, air traffic flashed in the crowded space lanes of Imperial City. She didn’t turn. The table in front of her held a crowd of teapots and teacups. Tea had spilled and dripped on the floor.
“You have ignored my messages.”
She still didn’t turn. Odd.
He walked closer. He came around so that he could see her face.
Her lips were moving. She didn’t turn to look at him. She was talking to herself.
“The formula for the toxin derived from C-tentium is...is...I knew it once, or I think I did...I was born on Moseum, I remember that...I don’t remember when I came here...I have bank accounts, somewhere...have to remember where, have to...” She thumped her head several times. “The delivery system for toxins into water is...I once had a septsilk gown that everyone admired...”
She shot toward the table and drank from a teacup. “My favorite tea was tarine.” She took another sip. “No, it was hannite. No. Flushberry blossom...”
“What are you doing?” Vader roared.
She looked at him for the first time. “Do I know you? I do, don’t I?” She raised her hands in a childlike way. “I can’t remember things. But if I think very, very hard I might...do you remember my septsilk gown? Can you tell me what color it was?”
Horrified, Vader turned away. He hurried to her bedroom. Her dataport was gone, all her files, her records.
He stood in the middle of the room and felt his fury build.
Olin was behind this.
His last chance for peace was gone.
Padmé would be with him always. The memory of her softness, her smiles, her horror as he held her with his mind, choking the air from her, wanting her limp, wanting to show her, wanting to make her pay for her disloyalty...
Around him, the walls began to crack.
They had been trapped for two days now, and the morning of the third day they knew they had to get out or they would die.
Clive and Astri had rationed their food and water but they hadn’t had much to start with. They had tried everything they knew to escape the small hidden room in the grand estate on Revery, but they were still trapped. Clive had finally met a lock he could not spring.
He could see that Astri was growing weak. He had tried to give her some of his protein pellets and water, but she’d only become furious at him. She sat, her head against the wall. They were trying to conserve energy now.
“What really bugs me is that we still don’t know,” she said. Her voice crackled with dryness. “If I’m going to die in a small white cube, I’d really like to know why.”
“You’re not going to die.”
She turned her face to him. “You’re not afraid.”
“Not yet. I’m just mad. At whoever designed this contraption. Why would they want intruders to starve to death?”
Astri shrugged. “We’re in a remote area. If you put in alarms, security would take too long to get here. If this is Eve Yarrow’s place, she doesn’t want anybody to know it’s her place, so she doesn’t trust anyone.”
“Wait a second,” Clive said. “We’re assuming that this is a trap. What if it’s not?”
“So what is it then?” Astri asked.
“A place for Eve herself to hide,” Clive suggested.
“Hide from who?”
“Anyone. If I’m right about her, she’s playing a dangerous game. If someone comes looking for her, she ducks in here, waits it out.”
“Okay,” Astri said. “But how does that help us? We’re still trapped.”
“It means there’s a way to get out.”
“We’ve gone over every inch of this place. The walls are solid. The ceiling is stone...” Astri’s voice trailed of
f. Suddenly she slapped her hand on the ground.
“Exactly,” Clive said softly. “For some stupid reason, we didn’t check the floor.”
They both got on their hands and knees and moved over the floor, stone by stone, knocking each one, testing it, rocking it. Nothing seemed amiss.
Astri sat in the middle of the floor, her head in her hands. “If it were me, I’d want a hint,” she said. “There’s a lot of stones in this floor...wait a second. Remember how we got in here in the first place?”
“You saw that painting and tilted it, and the hologram sent a beam of light to the lock. Presto, we were in jail.”
Astri closed her eyes, trying to remember the process. She replayed the scene in her mind. She had tilted the painting, the door had swung open, she’d walked forward....
The beam had entered the small room as she’d walked in. It had been angled down toward the floor....
Astri moved forward. She placed her hand on a rock, smooth and gray like all the others. “This one.” It would be easy to do, she thought. There would a release somewhere....
She moved her fingers around the rock, along the mortar that held it in place. There was a jagged edge on one side that fit neatly against the mortar. She pressed against the edge. Nothing. She hooked her fingers underneath and found something. A miniature sensor, gray like the rock and embedded in it. She pressed it.
The rock slid upward. It hung in the air, held up by an invisible jet of air.
“Stars and planets, you did it,” Clive said.
Astri reached her hand down into the hole the uplifted rock had created. She picked up a small controller that fit in her palm. She held it up to Clive. “This is her way out.”
“Be careful—it probably has some kind of a booby trap,” Clive said. “If someone else uses it, it could fuse the lock.”
She handed it to him. “That’s your department.”
Clive reached into his utility belt. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he took out a small tool and beamed it at the controller. “She probably has a special code...which I’m going to have to circumvent,” he said, working carefully. Astri could see only the top of his dark head.
“Bypass the initial system,” he muttered. “Reinstall my own code directly...okay, let’s try this.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
Clive shrugged. “We’re still stuck. Or...”
“Or?”
“Don’t know. Poison gas gets released?”
“You had to mention that?”
Grinning, his face filmed with sweat, Clive turned back and cued in the numbers. They heard a click, and the door swung open.
“You’re a genius,” Astri said, throwing her arms around him.
“About time you recognized it,” he said into her curls.
She drew back, embarrassed. They walked out together after Clive had replaced the sensor suite and stone. They still didn’t want to leave any evidence of their presence.
“Well, the next step is obvious,” Clive said. “Refrigerator raid.”
“Yes, we need food and water,” Astri said. “But after, I—”
She stopped abruptly. They both had heard it. Someone was coming in the back door.
Clive grabbed her arm and pulled her down the hall just as the door was opening. They were racing for the stairs when they heard a voice behind them.
“There’s a blaster aimed at you. Stop.”
“Seems like a good idea to stop,” Clive said to Astri.
“Turn around.”
They met the eyes of a curious creature—small, fine-boned, with pale green skin and tentacles wrapped around her head like a turban. In the instant it took to size her up, Clive decided it would be a bad idea to try to disarm her.
“Care to tell me what you’re doing here?” she asked.
“We’re friends of the owner,” Clive said. “Eve asked us here. Didn’t she tell you?”
“Do I look like I was brought up in Gullible Land?”
Clive shook his head slowly. “Definitely not. I’d peg you for Smart Land, any day of the week.”
She waved the blaster impatiently. “What are you after?”
Astri decided that they might as well tell a partial truth. She could see by the servant’s simple, extensively mended garb and her ancient boots that she must not be paid very well to be a caretaker.
“We think Eve Yarrow might be trying to hurt our friends,” Astri said. “So we broke in, looking for information.”
“If you let us go, we’ll make it worth your while,” Clive added. The caretaker hadn’t tried to defend Eve Yarrow. That told him everything he needed to know.
The caretaker lowered her blaster. “Well, why didn’t you say so? I’m no friend of the Empire.”
Relief coursed through Clive. It wasn’t often he caught a break like this one.
“I’m just an employee,” she said. “As long as you don’t track mud on the floor, I don’t care. I just came to prepare the house for a visit.”
“Is she coming?”
“So she says. And she’ll have a visitor.” The caretaker looked off to the security monitor. “Looks like he’s arrived.”
“Do you know who it is?” Astri asked.
“See for yourself.” The caretaker waved at the monitor. The cockpit canopy was open and a tall figure in black was striding away from a sleek cruiser.
Darth Vader.
“I think it’s safe to say,” Clive said, swallowing, “that Eve Yarrow is working with the Empire.”
“There’s a door off the kitchen that leads to a service alley,” the caretaker said. “If you leave now, you can take a back path up the cliff. You can’t see it from the house.”
Clive and Astri exchanged glances. This was their chance to finally find out what they were looking for.
“We’re staying,” Astri said.
The laserlights flashed through the gloom of a rainy afternoon: GALACTIC LUXURY STARSHIP MANUFACTURERS’ CONVENTION.
The convention was renowned among the elite of the galaxy, an annual trade show that gave previews of prototypes and new models of personal crafts. Luxury models could be ordered before they hit showroom floors, and the wealthiest competed to see who could get the fantastically expensive ships first.
Flame met Solace, Trever, and Ry-Gaul by the VIP entrance. Ferus was joining them at the hangar. Now that he was a double agent, it was better for him to keep a low profile. Flame handed out identity tags. “This will get you into all restricted areas,” she told them. “We can take off from the hangar here. The salesmen are authorized to push through temporary ship registries on the spot.”
“But we’ll still need background checks, won’t we?” Trever asked.
“They’ll forgo the background checks with the right incentives,” Flame replied. “The galaxy hasn’t changed that much...yet. The rich get what they want. Just follow my lead. I’ve already checked out the displays, and I’ve picked out our new transports.”
They affixed their identity tags to their tunics and walked inside the vast space. Trever swallowed. He didn’t know where to start. Every luxury brand was here, and his eyes were dazzled by chromium hulls and rainbow-hued viewports and laser-baked paintwork. Cockpit hulls and bay doors were open wide and invited glimpses of plush upholstery in sumptuous lounges and cockpits with top-of-the-line steering and propulsion controls. Then there were the observation levels with multilevel seating and the next generation of service droids and servant droids and protocol droids. He turned in a circle, overwhelmed.
“Focus, kiddo,” Flame said to him with a grin. “We’ve got a job to do.”
Flame led them through the convention. Most of the attendees were dressed in the opulent capes and towering headdresses that were quickly becoming the mark of high style for the wealthy in the galaxy. They threaded their way past the crowds lined up to climb aboard the newest models, to a corner where a smaller distributor had set up. SLEEKER SYSTEMS: THE HIGHEST RANKING, THE MOST P
ERSONAL SERVICE, the distributor’s banner read.
Flame drew their group closer. “I researched this company. They’re new and aren’t big, but they have prime technology, and they’re trying to crack the market cornered by the big guys. They’ll be more willing to make a deal. I’ve already set up the appointment. I said we were a small company with offices on different planets in the Core. We need some fast luxury ships.”
They approached the salesman, a short, impeccably dressed young man in a well-cut dark tunic. His hair was carefully styled in points around his head. Trever saw the eagerness in his eyes as they approached. He was clearly hoping for a big sale.
Flame briefly explained who they were and what they needed. The salesman swept his arm to indicate the prototypes behind him. “You’re welcome to climb aboard and take a look. Sit in the pilot seat of these babies. I guarantee I’m going to have to pry you out of there with a servodriver. We’ve got the highest system specs in the business. Hyperdrives on all models, twin ion engines. But do we scrimp on luxury? No sir. Corellian leather and conform seating, the deepest plush levels in the industry.”
Trever didn’t need urging. He strode up the ramp and slid into the pilot seat. He checked out the console. Sweet. Major power, full-screen nav devices, and great visibility.
Ry-Gaul climbed down into the engine well. Solace crouched to examine the under-console. “I could install some laser cannons without too much trouble,” she muttered. “But it would take too long. The best we can do is rely on what they’ve got and just fly fast.”
Trever looked out the viewport. Flame was talking to the salesman. He was shaking his head. It didn’t look good.
“Looks like she could use some help,” he said to Solace.
Solace and Ry-Gaul headed down the ramp. Trever trailed after them.
As they came up, the salesman was shaking his head through a wide smile. “Love to help you. Love to accommodate you. I can’t. I need the prototypes here to sell. You can see that, right? Can’t sell the ships if the public can’t see them, am I right? I can get you ships in two weeks. A month, tops.”