Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(61)
“Solo’s right. There might be something here.”
“We follow the smoke,” Sinjir says. “We find the fire.”
Only then will they find something to help them get the votes to send the New Republic to Jakku, he explains.
But they’re running out of time.
—
Nakadia.
It’s an agricultural world—broad fields, orchards, pastures. The sky has a violet tinge to it even at the peak of day, and at night the two moons brighten the dark. The air is often warm like bathwater, with just a faint breeze. It’s pastoral. Some would even say backward. The cities are small. The towns are villages. There’s tech, but it all goes to the function of farming—for aerating soil, for injecting micronutrients, for harvesting.
The capital city is Quarrow, and it’s where the Senate will be housed for the next year-cycle, and maybe more if the Senate votes to extend its stay. Quarrow is a city of only a few thousand. No building is taller than three stories. The fibercrete streets are for biologicals only: no speeders, no machines, no droids. (In fact, the planet has something of a bias against droids. It uses them where necessary, but generally it is the Nakadians themselves who work the soil and tend to the crops. Nakadia has a long memory, and it remembers the waves of droids that occupied it during the Clone Wars. It accepts these machines but Nakadians do not treat them as equal, or even as sentient.) Quarrow is a city with little nightlife. Frankly, it is a city with little day life, as well—it has restaurants and taverns, yes. It has one poma-club, where you can go and sit in a deprivation chamber as throbbing pulse-music massages your every molecule—those chambers are filled with bubbling poma, a fluid derived from the seeds of the inedible poma-drupe fruit. It relaxes the muscles. It releases the mind. Some hallucinate a little. The next day they return to the fields—freshly invigorated and freed of what they call psychological baggage.
There’s little crime.
There’s little drama.
There’s little anything, really.
Life on Nakadia is not easy, but it has an easy lean to it.
Simplicity is king.
And so the challenge for the five spies is this: How exactly will they capture any of the five senators in wrongdoing when everything is so simple, so untainted by corruption, so boldly out in the open?
—
Night on Nakadia. Tomorrow morning, the Senate is primed for its first session here on the planet, but right now Quarrow is alive with the kind of life it has not seen…probably ever. It’s not just that there are now 327 senators encroaching on the quiet city, it’s that those senators also come with their own entourages: droids, advisers, attachés, siblings, children, mates, and lovers. Ships clog the docks. Hanna City, on Chandrila, was ready for what was to come. Quarrow on Nakadia is not. It is a logistical logjam. And one by one, senators disgorge from their vessels, tainting this very nice world with the smug and indulgent cloud of politics and government.
That, at least, is how Sinjir feels about all of it.
Presently, he is assigned to watch Ashmin Ek, of Anthan Prime. They wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Jom. Here, the only ones allowed onsite are senators, their staff members, their security, and those who petitioned for the exception list. Those on that list of exceptions might include journos, celebrities, certain business barons who want to press the flesh and try to encourage industry-friendly policies…
Thing is, that list is curated months in advance. The slots are limited and have been full since it opened. Yes, Mon Mothma or Leia probably could’ve pulled the strings to get their names on the list—but doing so would have been an obvious gesture, and one that connects what she’s doing on Wartol’s cruiser to their efforts down here on Nakadia. The chancellor wisely did not want any threads connecting her to them, lest this all blow up in their faces.
That’s where Jom came in.
Jom, now working as security, was willing to, erm, adjust the list—he knocked off a handful of questionable journalists and added their names to it, instead. Solo and Sinjir were easy: Both count roughly as “celebrities” among the most narcissistic of politicians. Solo as a bona fide hero of the Rebellion, and Sinjir as a freakish curiosity (“Oh, look at the funny Imperial. Gasp, did he know Darth Vader?”). Conder has worked for senators before, so he, too, was a value-add for the list. Temmin was tougher to get on, but they used his nickname (“Snap”) and put him down as a “military veteran,” and nobody looked askance.
So now they wait. And they watch.
It is predictably dull work.
Across from the Quarrow Senate house sits a restaurant—Izzik’s. It’s mostly outdoors, and underlit tables populate a trio of staggered, hovering patios. Senators crowd around them, elbow-to-elbow, shoulder-to-shoulder, tentacle-to-eyestalk, gassily congratulating one another on their debatable achievements. Laughing and lightly applauding, and now the tentacled senator from Torphlus is gurgling something that may be a song or may be a cry for help and there’s more laughter and more applause.
Ek, for his part, is a mover and a shaker. Some sit in one place, dropping an anchor at a table and hanging tight in little cliques, but the Anthan Prime senator is a veritable social pollinator, flitting from political flower to political flower and sprinkling a bit of himself on everyone. He’s like a droid on a program: He says the same things, makes the same sounds, offers the same congratulations, bellows the same laughs at the same times.