Free Inferno by Troy Denning Page B

surrender your weapons?”
    “Not really,” Jaina said, resigning herself to working with the sociopath to capture Alema. “And I doubt you’d want us to, if you knew why we’re here.”
    Serpa frowned. “I’ll decide that.”
    “Fine,” Jag said. “Do you know who Alema Rar is?”
    “Of course—a Jedi Knight gone bad.” Serpa smirked again. “Imagine that.”
    “It happens,” Jaina said, fuming. “And she’s here somewhere. We don’t know what she’s up to, but you can bet it’s no good.”
    Serpa scowled in suspicion. “How long?”
    “Probably since last night,” Jag said. “We’re working off a set of vector plots that go all the way back to the Hapes Consortium, so we’re fairly sure—”
    “She came from the Consortium ?” Orame interrupted. “ Where in the Consortium?”
    “On the Terephon side, just outside the Transitory Mists,” Jaina answered. “A place called Roqoo Depot. Why?”
    Orame lowered the corners of her thin-lipped mouth. “I wonder if Roqoo Depot is between here and Kavan?”
    Jaina had a sinking feeling. She didn’t know Hapan astrometry well enough to know the answer, but she had heard that Kavan was where Mara’s body had been found.
    “I’d be very interested in the answer to that question,” Jaina said.
    Before Serpa could object, Orame tapped a string of commands into a control console. The image above the flight control holopad shifted to a map of the Hapan Consortium. Roqoo Depot’s approximate location was noted on the fringes of the map, on the side closest to Ossus. A few dozen light-years away, in the same system as Hapes, the planet Kavan sat at the far end of a hyperdrive route running straight past Roqoo Depot.
    “A straight shot!” Jaina gasped.
    “From what the astrometry files say, yes,” Orame replied. “And if Alema Rar was at Roqoo Depot—”
    “It’s too big a coincidence,” Jaina agreed. “If she didn’t do it, she was involved.”
    “You can’t jump to that conclusion yet,” Jag warned. “Remember, Alema didn’t chop up that freighter crew until after Mara died. Would she really have drawn attention to herself like that so soon after the murder?”
    Jaina gave him a don’t-be-stupid look and said nothing.
    “Okay.” Jag sighed. “We can assume she knows something.”
    “At the least,” Jaina said. Growing more worried about the young ones by the moment, she turned to Serpa. “ Now do you want us to surrender our weapons?”
    “Actually, yes,” Serpa replied. “Your little play was very convincing, but Alema Rar isn’t on Ossus. My team has been in control of the flight room—”
    “Would you have seen her come down in a StealthX?” Jaina asked.
    She didn’t bother explaining that Alema had been flying something else, a vessel they didn’t quite understand but that nevertheless seemed to be as elusive as a StealthX.
    Serpa considered this a moment, then removed a comlink from his sleeve pocket and opened a channel. “Captain Tong, give me a status check on all stations. Note anything out of the ordinary—anything at all.”
    “As you wish, sir,” a clear female voice responded. “I’ll report back in a few moments.”
    Instead of clicking off and waiting for a paging chirp, Serpa held out his arm and stared at the comlink, smiling and nodding to himself each time a station reported everything normal. Jaina saw that she and Jag were going to have to be very careful how they dealt with the major, lest they prompt him to do something rash.
    As Serpa continued to listen to the reports, Jaina lowered her voice to a whisper and asked Orame, “What about the instructors? Why didn’t they try to stop him?”
    Orame shook her head. “The only Jedi here are the Masters Solusar and half a dozen new Jedi Knights stuck on patrol duty,” she said. “Everyone else went to the funeral on Coruscant.”
    “Imagine that,” Serpa said, looking up from his comlink. “Stripping the academy of its Jedi when terrorists