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 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 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 rea.s.signed 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 pa.s.s."

"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 pa.s.s 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 c.o.c.kpit, 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 pa.s.sed 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 Bella.s.sa. 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 pa.s.sed. 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 b.u.t.t 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, s.n.a.t.c.hing 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.

The officer faced him, his blaster held steady.

Ferus held his blasters. Neither of them moved.

The officer fired. Ferus had already taken advantage of the instant before the blast and leaped. He fired above at the ceiling. The bolts holding the restraints in place fell. The restraining cables dropped to the floor. He wrapped the officer in them and fled.