It had been only a few days since Trever had first been here with Ferus, searching for Dexter Jettster and hoping he could give them information on a missing Jedi. It seemed like a lifetime ago now.

Oryon led them down a narrow alleyway under the eerie orange light. The buildings here were smoothly rounded at the corners and no higher than ten or twelve stories, unusual on Coruscant. They gave the impression of gentle hills if you squinted hard, but if you really looked you realized that the lack of windows made them creepy. Trever could see the slits in the walls that served as lookouts. He felt the strong sensation of being watched.

Every time he thought they had come to the end of the alley, it turned another way or doubled back on itself. The buildings seemed to hang over them closer and closer as they walked.

On Coruscant you grew used to the constant noise, the hum of speeders and conversations and the whirr of airbuses. The quiet here was unnerving. They could hear their footsteps and their breathing. Oryon stopped in front of a dwelling identical to all the others they had pa.s.sed. He hesitated outside the door. Trever was about to ask why when he realized that Oryon was allowing whoever was inside to see him clearly, as well as his companions. Then he walked forward and punched in a code at the door. It slid open almost immediately.

They entered a hallway lit dimly by powered-down glowlights. A ramp led to an upper level; Oryon climbed it, motioning them to follow. He walked down another hallway, this one wider, but with an odd combination of clinical and military objects. A durasteel cart rested against one wall and a pile of weapons was neatly arranged in a rack. A shelf of medicines rested on a tray. Trever didn't know if he was in a hospital or a barracks.

Oryon accessed a door midway down the hall. Dexter Jettster sat on a chair that was reinforced to accommodate his bulk. Against one wall was a sole bare table. The far, opposite wall was entirely filled up with security screens. In a glance Trever could see that they effectively covered the entire alleyway, the roof, the houses next door, the sky above, and the entrance to the alley, at least two kilometers away.

Dexter raised himself from the chair and lowered his head, tilting it toward them in a way that Trever remembered from his last meeting. It signaled Dex's surrender to deep emotion.

"Glad to see you." He nodded at Solace. "Happy to see you survived." He scanned them. "But not all of you made it back."

Oryon spoke first. "We know Rhya and Hume are dead. Gully and Spence - we believe so. And Curran as well."

Dex shook his head. "No, no, not the wily Curran. He's not dead."

"I'm sorry," Oryon said. "It's impossible that he could have survived -"

"Impossible? No. Improbable, yes. He's here - a little the worse for wear, mind you. He stole an Imperial speeder and met a wall with some force, but he'll do just fine. Looked a bit like Keets there when he arrived. Come on then. I have a med center, if you can call it that. A med droid to take care Keets, and food for everyone."

Dex led them to a blank wall and waved his hand over a portion of it. The wall slid back.

Curran sat up in a med pod while a droid checked his vitals. His furred face lit up when he saw them. "Keets! I saw you hit."

"They can hit me, but they can't kill me," Keets replied.

The med droid rolled closer, its sensors blinking. "Weak vitals. Sit on pod."

Keets moved to a pod next to Curran and sat. "Gladly."

"We'll leave you to it," Dex said. "If you're cleared to join us, we'll be in the galley."

"I'll be cleared," Keets promised.

"Negative, vitals too weak," the droid said.

"I'll be cleared, you clanking heartless hunk of sensors," Keets said. "Now fix me up, quick." He lay back and closed his eyes, finally giving in to the exhaustion and the pain.

After they got to the hallway, Dex chuckled. "He looks half-dead, that Keets, but I wager he'll be up and about in no time. Now come this way. I've been cooking up my special relish, and I can still dish up some sliders."

Trever pushed away his third helping. Dex had insisted that they not discuss what was happening while they ate, and although it had been hard for all of them, they'd managed to eat something without their stomachs churning. Trever was still worried about Ferus, furious and scared, but at least he'd managed to eat. Dex had regaled them with stories during their meal, stories about the street they were living on. It was called Thugger's Alley, using sublevel Coruscant slang for lowlifes and thieves. n.o.body on the outside was quite sure who lived there; mostly they kept their distance.

Dex, however, knew who lived here. Some lowlifes, surely, he said with a chuckle, but more of those like the Erased, those who despised what the Emperor represented and declined to live under his rules. So they set up elaborate security and so far the Empire had left them alone.

"Of course we can't fight them," Dex said. "But we'll see them corning."

"I wish I could say the same," Solace said.

"Now, enough of that," Dex said kindly. "No looking back, isn't that the Jedi way?"

"Something like that," she replied. Her gaze was remote.

"Hrrun . what's next to do, then? You don't know where they took Ferus?"

"Just that he was arrested." Trever felt his stomach lurch. He shouldn't have eaten all those sliders after all. They felt sour in his stomach now.

One of Dex's four hands came down on his shoulder with surprising gentleness. "There isn't a place in the galaxy we can't find him, so don't you worry."

"That's right," Solace said. "We'll start with likely prisons and move out from there. We'll need transports; I don't have a hyperdrive on my ship."

"Transports we can get for you," Dex said.

"That's a random plan," Trever pointed out. "By the time you find him, he could be executed a dozen times. What we need is information."

Solace looked at him, startled. She wasn't used to being questioned, he guessed. But if a plan was stupid, somebody had to say so, in his opinion.

"Do you have a better idea?" she asked, looking down her nose at him.

Trever felt his irritation flare. "Just give me a minute - it won't be hard."

"Now hold on here," Dex said. "Solace, with due respect, Trever is right. If you go from prison to prison, it could take years. The Empire has more prisons than banthas have ticks. What we need is infiltration."

Trever noticed that Curran and Keets had quietly entered the room. Curran looked stronger, his glossy hair now smoothed and pulled back into the thick metal ring. His small, furred face was alert. Keets had a bacta bandage on his side and winced as he sat down in a chair.

"It's time for exposure," Dex said.

He looked at Oryon, Keets, and Curran. "We've lost good friends on this day," he continued. "The other Erased have gone underground again. I have a sweet spot here, and you're welcome to share it. It'd be safe, I guarantee that, at least until the Empire feels like looking for us. Then we'll find another. But . . ." Dex paused. "It's time to join the fight, my friends. To fight means you have to risk exposure. We need to resurface."

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 ident.i.ties - thanks for never charging me, by the way - when I saw an opportunity I couldn't pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ident.i.ties 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 sc.r.a.p 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 c.o.c.kpit of his private starship on one of the landing platforms of Polis Ma.s.sa.

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 c.o.c.kpit 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.