The Last Jedi

PART THREE

Journey’s End





Twenty-Nine


The timetable was set. Sheel Mafeen had recited it to Haus just as Tuden Sal had revealed it to the Whiplash Council. She’d backed it up with a set of plans sliced neatly from the holo-terminal in the council chamber aboard the Whiplash Express.

Haus was in the process of setting up his own plans for derailing the plot when he got an unsettling piece of intel from a contact inside the ISB: Darth Vader had returned to Imperial Center without warning or fanfare.

In response, Prefect Haus pushed his own timetable up by two days. He assembled a special ops force of crack combat-trained officers and informed them that a dangerous cadre of criminals had set up operations along an abandoned mag-lev route. In the late afternoon—1500 on the chrono—they would follow an informant to a prearranged meeting place, intercept the criminals, and arrest them.

Simple.

Except that when said informant—Sheel Mafeen—entered the abandoned tube station at which the train was supposed to stop at 1515, it wasn’t there. She waited; Haus and his men waited within sight of her. She tried to contact Sal; she got no answer.

She contacted Haus surreptitiously, fear clogging her voice. “This is all wrong, Pol. This is where the train was supposed to be at this time today. We were supposed to go over the plan one more time.”

Haus blew out a long gust of air and squinted at the abandoned freight terminal where the meet-up was to have taken place. A suspicion was slowly dawning that Tuden Sal’s paranoia had caused him to plant decoy plans in the event that his intent was discovered.

Comlink open, Haus said, “All right. All right. I’m gonna call it.”

The words prompted a cloaked Sheel Mafeen to leave the terminal; it prompted Haus’s people to prick up their ears.

“Sir?” asked his Bothan lieutenant, Kalibar Droosh.

“Send the crew in. Look for any signs of recent visits.”

They found more than that. After taking a group of officers down the right-hand tunnel, Lieutenant Droosh appeared mere moments later, alone. Standing in the mouth of the tunnel, he waved to Haus.

“Sir? We’ve found something! There’s an abandoned train car just out of sight in the tube here.”

An abandoned … The hair rose up on the back of the prefect’s neck, making him rub at it. “Just one?”

“Yes, sir. Just the one. Should I have the men board, sir?”

“No! Don’t let them go near it! Get them out of there, Lieutenant! Get them out now!”

The lieutenant’s long nose scrunched into an exclamation point of Bothan puzzlement. He shrugged, turned and shouted, “Sergeant Amry! Come on back! Prefect wants you guys out of there.”

A second later, the lieutenant was blown off his feet by a blast from inside the tunnel—a blast violent enough to bowl over Haus and several other officers engaged in searching the terminal area. In the chaos that followed, Haus picked himself up, already shouting orders to his uninjured men.

What had started out as a sting ended up as a rescue mission.



As soon as the emergency crews arrived and the situation was under control, Pol Haus put a slightly-the-worse-for-wear Lieutenant Droosh in charge, got into his aircar, and called Sheel Mafeen. He explained what had happened in clipped syllables, then expressed his worst fears.

“Sal set that ambush for me, Sheel, because he expected me or someone else to betray him. The fact that you weren’t in on his plan makes it pretty clear he didn’t feel he could trust you completely.”

“He never … I mean, of all of us, he seemed the least trusting of Fars. Fars didn’t want to do this. I wonder if Dyat and Acer knew—”

“It doesn’t matter, Sheel. He’s burned his bridges. Abandoned the mag-lev line. To me that suggests that he’s set things in motion already.”

Sheel gasped. “Oh, spirits of fire and air! What do we do?”

“You go home and wait for me to contact you. I’m going try to salvage this—if I can.”

He took to the upper levels of traffic then, running with his avoidance system and chase lights on and making for the Western Sea. In the gray of twilight, he emerged from between the two last sky-scraping resiblocks and saw the shoreline neighborhoods laid out before him. Here, only the most elite of the elite owned businesses or homes, and the buildings were strictly limited in height. So he knew even as he left the shadow of the towering resiblocks that something dire was unfolding along the shore in the Golden Crescent.

Fire reflected in the waters of the sea, scattering rubies and topazes across its choppy surface. Smoke billowed above the jetty of the Emperor’s villa, but the villa itself seemed intact. There were ground troops in black uniforms and white-sheathed stormtroopers everywhere. The air was alive with military craft, while out on the water, Imperial launches and patrol vessels formed a barrier against the escape of a group of struggling figures they had trapped against the burning jetty.

He drew closer, falling in with a line of other constabulary vehicles that seemed, like his, to be arriving late to the party. One after another, they were stopped by ISB aircars and turned away. When it was his turn to be checked, he showed his ident to the security officer.

“Prefect Haus? You’re from a neighboring prefecture, aren’t you?”

Haus nodded. “I was pursuing a lead on a smuggling ring that caters to the rich and famous. Looks like you’ve got your hands full here. More than smuggling by the look of it.”

“Rebels, sir. A plot against the Emperor, himself, I’ve heard. Not that I hear much. I’m just directing traffic.” The young officer looked apologetic. “I’ll have to ask you to move along now, Prefect.”

“Sure … sure.” Haus gave the security officer an amicable nod and took his aircar up and about, circling just low enough to be able to see the plaza in front of the Emperor’s villa. Stormtroopers patrolled there, standing guard over a group of bodies laid out on the stones before an elaborate fountain. The vidcam could capture what the naked eye could not; Haus made a slow turn, his vidcam trained first on the bodies, then on the jetty.

He knew, even as he flew away, that one of the bodies in the courtyard was a Sakiyan. And he had recognized several others who’d thrown their lives into Tuden Sal’s plan. In his blind quest for revenge, Sal had wiped out the remainder of Whiplash’s guiding council and a number of its technically adept operatives. The fortunes of the resistance on Coruscant were fading with the smoke from the Emperor’s jetty.

There was a sudden flurry of activity in the courtyard that Haus was now watching through his rear vidcam. A figure had stepped out into the walled enclosure to which every other person alive paid instant obeisance.

Darth Vader—as ever, at the center of it all.