Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(60)

“You did do it. You sabotaged the vote.”

Wartol does not sit back down so much as he falls backward against the chair. He looks away from her as he says, almost dismissively: “I admit to nothing. I will not give life to your conspiratorial fancies.”

“Then let me try a new conspiracy.” She opens her hand and lets a small device clatter across it. The device has a pinhole mike at its top, and from its bottom, a squid-tangle of severed wires.

He barely glances at it. “What is that?”

“You know what it is. It is a listening device. A bug.”

“So you say.”

“You planted it.”

“That is a heady accusation. I assume it comes with proof?” He waves her off, his hand then closing into a fist. “Oh, no, it doesn’t. Just another baseless allegation from the besieged Mon Mothma.”

“You knew. You knew that the Empire was at Jakku. You knew that two of our own were going to take the Millennium Falcon to that world, and you stopped them. Oh, the guards wouldn’t admit it was you, and they tried to claim it was me who stopped the Falcon. But they listen to you. You have authority. You have your little feelers everywhere, don’t you?”

“You can prove none of that.”

“That is correct. I cannot. So I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way: by beating you to a bloody pulp.” Her eyes flash with mischief. “In the election, I mean.”

“Ho, ho, good luck with that, Chancellor. Your precious re-vote is in the morning. Less than twelve hours away. We land soon—I hope you scramble the votes you need. But time is ever-dwindling.”

She smiles. “If only there were some way to delay the vote.”

“Hnh. You should be so lucky.”

The ship jolts as it comes out of hyperspace. Outside the viewport, the blue lines shorten to pinpricks and once more they’re in the deep well of space—but from here she can see the crescent edge of the world upon which the new Senate is housed: Nakadia.

“Beautiful world, Nakadia,” she says.

Tolwar Wartol grunts in reply.

“Interesting fact about Nakadia,” she continues. “We liberated them from the Empire and now they provide a great deal of the food for our troops. Something about the soil composition—it’s just right to grow a variety of vital crops. It’s a pristine environment with a huge food yield for us. The vote to make it a Class A protected planet—well, that was an easy vote. You voted yes. We all did. We came together on that one.”

“History lessons are most effective when they are interesting,” he says. “And this does not pass that test, Chancellor.”

“I’m sorry to bore you. I thought it interesting.”

The door to the sitting room opens. A narrow-shouldered Orishen stands there—not a guard, but a pilot in gold and red with his helmet on, his visor up. “Senator, we have a problem.”

Wartol looks to the pilot, then to the chancellor, then back to the pilot. He is suspicious now. Good. He should be. “What is it?”

“Nakadia isn’t allowing us to land, Senator.”

“And why would that be?”

“They’re saying that preliminary scans indicate we are host to a restricted agricultural product. Potentially invasive.”

Wartol turns to her. He already suspects that she did something. And of course, he’s right. “Chancellor. What did you do.”

A statement, not a question.

She fakes embarrassment as she pulls out a small, palm-sized fruit from within her robes. “Oh, my, my, my. Look at that. A little pta fruit. Already half squished.” She pulls her thumb away from the inside of her index finger—the sap leaking from the punctured skin of the dark orange fruit is brown and sticky and nearly glues her thumb to her finger. Seeds glom onto the glop. What’s important, however, is not the seeds or the glop, but rather, the off-gassing fragrance: one that the ship’s own environmental sensors would have picked up. And Nakadian off-world scanners do a passive reading of every ship’s own sensors as they pass through. Which means those sensors would have picked up…”

“The pta is restricted on Nakadia, isn’t it? They’ll have to do a full sweep of the ship and scan for other contaminants. Oh, my. I fear this will cause us quite a delay. Don’t you, Senator?”





The magic number is five.

Five spies for five senators.

The secret hope is this: The five senators voting against intercession against the Empire are corrupt. There exists a tiny glimmer of evidence toward that end: Conder sliced—not quite legally—into the electronic ledgers of those senators’ accounts, and in two of them he found unusual credit deposits of unidentifiable origin. (Those two senators: Ashmin Ek of Anthan Prime, and Dor Wieedo of Rodia.) That in and of itself is not much—in this time of a waning Empire and a rising New Republic, certain investments are paying off well. The markets are volatile as old industries collapse and new corporations come online, and where there is volatility there are people getting surprisingly and suddenly rich.

That, though, coupled with the fact of a listening device found inside Leia’s protocol droid…

They discuss it onboard the Falcon, in orbit above Nakadia. “Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire,” Solo says before adding quietly, “Usually an electrical fire near the hyperspace drive, which Chewie always warns me about…” He stops talking, looking lost in his own head. Conder jumps in and says: