The Last Jedi

Twenty-Five


Tuden Sal sat in a faux-wood chair in one of four themed cafés attached to the Hotel Sunspire. The name was not inaccurate—every suite and condo in the huge, glittering tower had a sunny view of the Western Sea. If you had the credits, you could bide there awhile. If you didn’t, but dressed as if you did, you could pretend.

Sal was doing that now—pretending to be just another wealthy visitor to the seashore, sipping hot caf and reading the latest news from a datapad. What he was doing, in fact, was taking readings of direction and distance between the various points his people had identified as necessary connections in their plan.

And he was awaiting a signal.

Down along the docks of the rich, the famous, and the politically astute, there was constant need for upkeep. Machines scrubbed the docks, the boats, the water, and the shoreline, but someone had to mind those machines. And sometimes, when a machine broke down in the water—as happened now and again—someone, usually of an aquatic species, had to go repair it.

There was a maintenance crew in the water at the moment, in fact, engaged in the process of repairing a skimmer bot the sole purpose of which was to keep the surface of the water free of unsightly or potentially dangerous debris.

The crew was made up of a Nautolan and a Mon Calamari. The Nautolan was in the water with the broken bot, while the Mon Cal monitored the repair from the docks. As Sal watched, the Nautolan completed his repairs, sent the water skimmer on its way, swam back to shore in a series of effortless strokes, and pulled himself out of the water, the tips of two of his dorsal head tresses lifting to perform a serpentine dance.

Tuden Sal smiled. If all the control overrides and charges were planted that easily, bringing Palpatine’s palatial seaside home down on his head was going to be simpler than he’d thought. When this was over, he decided, the Nautolans who had come up with the idea would deserve a Hutt’s reward—the entire resistance movement would owe them that.

In the next several days, fifty of the little cleaning bots would come up for routine maintenance. Their team of Whiplash associates—all carefully inserted into the maintenance crew in ways both mundane and ingenious—could service roughly two-thirds of them. Others would seemingly “forget” their programming and run amok, necessitating emergency measures to set them right again.

In the end, Whiplash would have roughly seventy obedient, highly charged assassins on its hands. They would assuredly bring down a large portion of the Emperor’s seaside palace and his landing pad. In the event that this failed to kill him, there was a contingency plan: If the Emperor attempted to flee by water, he would be the victim of a second wave of killer maintenance bots and Nautolan assassins. And if he tried to leave by surface streets, other Whiplash operatives in the area would surely be able to penetrate his weakened defensive forces and destroy him.

Emperor Palpatine’s senses were clouded by arrogance. He thought far too highly of his own powers and those of his lieutenant, Darth Vader. He was about to find out how limited they were against a sly and unpredictable enemy.

Sal finished off his caf and pushed his datapad into his pocket. He felt good about his plan, despite what naysayers like Jax Pavan and traitors like Pol Haus might think. This was the right course of action. The only course of action that made any sense.

Yimmon and his executive council had been too timid—his being abducted while fleeing Coruscant was proof of that … and also, perhaps, a fitting reward for such timidity. It fell to stronger leadership to see what had to be done and simply do it.



Probus Tesla did not wait long to “attend” Thi Xon Yimmon in his cell at the core of Kantaros Station. He had been curious about the accommodations the Whiplash leader had been accorded, had imagined all manner of ways in which Darth Vader might seek to undermine the Cerean’s rocklike calm once he’d emerged from his self-induced catatonia. This Yimmon had done, but apparently what Lord Vader had encountered in the other man’s mind was not at all what he had expected.

Tesla knew nothing of either his Master’s expectations or his findings. What he did know was that Vader had acquired a large blast cage intended to defeat electronic surveillance, kinetic energy, and psychic signals. He was surprised to find that the Whiplash leader was being held, not in that shielded environment, but in a cavernous room whose upper dimensions were cloaked so completely in shadow that, from Yimmon’s perspective, the place must seem as endless and dark as space itself. But though the outer regions of the place were in utter blackness, the spot where Yimmon sat cross-legged on the floor—he had been given no furniture of any kind—was lit harshly from a single overhead source that beat down like a merciless sun.

This was puzzling. Tesla knew that sleep deprivation was a cardinal factor in a successful interrogation, but all Yimmon needed to do to find blessed darkness was walk away from the light. That may have had symbolic or spiritual significance to a religious zealot like Yimmon, but that certainly wouldn’t have kept him from sleeping away his days and hours here.

Only when he had watched the prisoner for several minutes from his hidden gallery high along one wall did Tesla realize the ingenuity of his Master’s devices: when Thi Xon Yimmon moved, the light moved with him, bathing him continually in harsh, white brilliance while leaving all beyond the cloak of radiance in utter darkness. In addition, he discovered that the blast cage had been incorporated into the watcher’s gallery, thus minimizing the likelihood that the psychically sensitive individual in the room below would know he was being observed.

In the dim confines of Tesla’s aerie, a soft tone sounded and a computer voice said, “Subject’s heart rate has reached resting levels.”

The room beyond was suddenly barraged with a chaos dance of light, movement, and sound. Tiny glittering lights spun and wove through the darkness, and a cacophonous blend of arrhythmic and atonal sounds swirled around the Cerean prisoner.

Yimmon rose from the floor and moved slowly to the outer perimeter of the room, finding the wall beneath Tesla’s observation chamber and moving along it, trailing his fingertips over the surface. He never once opened his eyes.

Tesla was astounded. A frisson of some unnamable emotion scurried between his shoulder blades. Surely it was only coincidence that the spot Yimmon had navigated to lay directly below where his watcher was concealed.

The Inquisitor watched through the filtered and enhanced transparisteel of the observation chamber’s wall as the prisoner made his way steadily, even briskly, around the outer perimeter of his huge prison cell. He turned at the last corner and made his way up the wall toward where he had begun, seemingly oblivious of the spinning lights and the blare of sound.

Yimmon stopped walking in exactly the place he had begun his sojourn. He stretched, rolled his large head on his shoulders, then made a second circuit of the room, again stopping in the exact spot he had previously.

Well, of course, he was simply counting footsteps. He must have made that same circuit repeatedly in the time he’d been there. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about that, though the eerie serenity of the man was disconcerting. Tesla wondered if the Dark Lord found it so.

The Watcher turned from his window. Now was as good a time as any to begin “attending” the prisoner.