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:
“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.