[Last Of The Jedi] - 04(2)

“And you saw this with your own eyes?”

“I received a report from the commander.” Did the Emperor really expect him to travel all the way down to the Core, to the ancient ocean caverns?

“A Jedi is not dead until you see the body. Inform me when this is so.”

He had been dismissed. Malorum made an instant decision to withhold the information that he had Ferus Olin in custody. He might need that at a future date. And he had plans for the former Jedi apprentice, plans that he was just beginning to form. Ferus was the only being he could find who could connect him to the old Darth Vader.

Malorum bowed and walked out, ignoring Sly Moore and proceeding directly to the express turbo-lift. As he descended into the Senate office building, he thought about what he knew … and what he still had to discover.

His most important piece of information was this: He knew that Darth Vader was Anakin Skywalker.

The Emperor didn’t know that Malorum knew this. Before the tapes of the Temple attack had been erased, he had seen them. He hadn’t been an Inquisitor then, just one of the trusted Imperial intelligence officers sent to the Temple after Order 66. He had seen what Anakin Skywalker had done. And he had seen the Jedi knight kneel down before the Emperor, who had called him “Darth Vader.”

Since then he’d made it his business to discover everything he could about Skywalker. Bribes and surveillance and digging back into what had happened months before.

He knew that Anakin Skywalker had been a Jedi apprentice at the same time as Ferus Olin. He knew that Skywalker was the father of Senator Amidala’s child, the child that had never been born. He suspected that the Senator had been treated on Polis Massa, but so far the disappearance of records had stopped the trail cold.

Secrets contained surprises. Once you knew a person’s secrets, you had the key to destroying him.

Ferus Olin would be the key.





CHAPTER TWO


It wasn’t so bad, for a prison. Ferus had seen worse.

He stirred on the hard duracrete where he slept … and found himself face-to-face with the biggest meer rat he’d ever seen, chewing on one of his boots.

Well. Maybe riot.

He tossed his other boot at the rodent and it scurried away. He figured he might as well look the facts in the face. He’d landed in the worst prison in the galaxy, and unless someone near and dear to him - or even someone who didn’t like him particularly much, like Jedi Master Solace - rescued him, he was stuck here, worked to death until he was executed.

It was the usual cunning plan of the Empire. Condemn the beings who displease you - don’t bother with a trial, because your suspicions are enough - then stick them all in a stinking hole on a planet where nobody goes, force them to labor, don’t even let them speak to one another, and then, when they’re too weak to do you a bit of good, execute them. What a swell system to be stuck in. Trust him to find it.

So maybe breaking into the Temple wasn’t the best idea he ever had. And then he had to go and do it twice. No wonder Malorum had been testy.

He had been looking for Jedi. Rumors had swirled that they were kept in a prison there. But the rumors were designed as a trick to lure any Jedi into a rescue attempt. Ferus had fallen right into the trap.

The need to find every last Jedi was leading him to places he’d never expected to go. Obi-Wan Kenobi, now in exile on Tatooine, had refused to become part of his plans for a secret base. Ferus didn’t let that stop him. He knew there must be Jedi out there who had survived the purge. They needed a sanctuary. He had stumbled on a remote asteroid that constantly traveled the galaxy within a moving atmospheric storm. He had two trusted aides setting up a camp there, Raina and Toma, as well as the recovering Jedi Knight Garen Muln.

When he’d found Jedi Master Solace, he’d discovered that she’d set up a community next to the forgotten underground oceans of Coruscant. The raggedy society had built its homes on a series of catwalks over the sea in a vast cavern. When he’d told Solace what he’d seen in the Temple - a room full of lightsabers captured from murdered Jedi -she had been stricken by sadness and anger. Then he’d told her that he’d overheard that there was a spy in her camp, and she’d become enraged.

She’d talked him into breaking in again. He would need lightsabers, she argued, for the Jedi he was sure were out there. And she needed to discover the identity of her spy.

So they’d broken into the base of the Temple, thanks to Solace’s odd ship with a mole miner aboard. But they’d run into too many stormtroopers and more trouble than they could handle. Now here he was, in prison, with an execution order just waiting to be carried out.