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.
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 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 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 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?”