[Last Of The Jedi] - 05(12)

Suddenly a skyhopper zoomed down in front of him. “Air taxi, sir?”

It was Clive. Ferus stepped inside the vehicle. “I’ve got a seeker droid to lose,” he said.

“I’m way ahead of you, mate. You’ve been under droid surveillance since you left that crazy palace. Let’s lose the creep.”

Clive hit the engines hard. Ferns felt his stomach lurch as he moved up into space-lane traffic. “Have to get past these canal bridges, then we can go up,” Clive said, swerving to avoid an airspeeder dodging an air taxi.

The space lane was clogged with traffic. Without signals, it was a free-for-all. Unfortunately, the citizens of Sath didn’t believe in slowing down.

Ferus was plastered against the seat. “This is insane.”

Clive cackled. “Isn’t it great?”

The seeker was keeping up. Clive suddenly swerved to the left, nearly colliding with a large airspeeder. “Oops, I keep forgetting about my lack of starboard visibility.” He tapped on the nav screen. “This keeps blitzing in and out.”

“Great.”

“Keep an eye out on starboard, will you?”

Ferus glanced over his shoulder. “There’s an airbus —”

Clive pushed the skyhopper violently to the right, passing underneath the bus by centimeters. “I saw it!” he said defensively when Ferus gave him an incredulous look.

“Watch out for the —”

“I’ve got it,” Clive said, diving down almost to the surface. “Woo, this is fun!”

“The seeker —”

“Oh, right.” Clive yanked the controls and zoomed down an alley. He looked up. “Got some room overhead —”

“There’s not enough room!” Ferus saw only a tiny bit of sky between a cluster of towers overhead.

Clive hit the engines, and the skyhopper zoomed up several kilometers in an instant. They passed through the space between the buildings, so close that the skyhopper scraped against the building. The vehicle shuddered, but Clive only went faster. They seemed to pop out of the space like a cork. Ferns could swear he saw the paint peeling off the hull of the skyhopper.

Below them, the seeker crashed into the side of one of the towers. It flamed out and dropped.

“Told you there was room!” Clive chortled.

He zoomed even higher, until they were in the upper atmosphere.

“Where to, sir?” he asked.

“The Hundred Seventh district,” Ferus answered. “And step on it.”

“Music to my ears,” Clive said.





CHAPTER SIX


In an office in the Senate complex on Coruscant, a slender man clothed in black hit the control for his datapad. It rose from the center of his polished desk and he tilted the screen at the precise angle for viewing.

Senator Sano Sauro was impatient, but anyone peeking into his office would never know it. He sat composedly at his desk, his hands tightly folded in front of him. He hated to be kept waiting, and Bog Divinian was keeping him waiting. It was tiresome to have such a sloppy partner, but Bog had his uses.

He turned and looked at the artifact that hung suspended in a cube of transparisteel. He allowed himself to feel a surge of satisfaction at the battered object, a broken lightsaber hilt from a fallen Jedi. The Duro who sold it to him told him it had belonged to Mace Windu himself, but Sauro had no way to verify that. It just pleased him to imagine it.

He had hated the Jedi all his life. Their privilege, their arrogance. He’d brought one of them to trial — that odious boy, Obi-Wan Kenobi, who had later become such an important general. He was dead now, too.

And Sauro was alive. Older, but still in excellent shape, thanks to careful attention to his diet and visits to spas every six months. Not for him to accept the decrepitude of old human age.

He was now one of the most powerful Senators in the Emperor’s inner circle, a confidant and an advisor. They had formed their alliance years ago, after his attempted takeover of the Chancellor’s position. Palpatine had called him into his office after the debacle, when so many Senators had been slaughtered. Sauro had planned just how to wiggle out of responsibility. He’d blamed the assassination attempt on Granta Omega, of course, a conspirator who had gone much farther than he claimed to have known. He had expected censure from the Chancellor, perhaps an arrest, though there was no hard evidence. Instead, Sauro had been offered a deputy position. It was clear, Palpatine had said, that Sauro knew the uses of power. He would give him a platform to exercise that gift.

And he had.

Behind the scenes, he had bribed, punished, flattered, and manipulated. Now he was the unseen power behind Palpatine. The Emperor had been hideously scarred after the assassination attempt by the Jedi Mace Windu, but Sauro did not underestimate him. His personal power had not diminished.