The Last Jedi

by Michael Reaves

  The mech-tech nodded. “Enhanced, of course.”

  “Of course. Can you enhance it further to allow for direct interface with a second artificial intelligence?”

  “Meaning you?”

  “Meaning me,” I-Five said. “At least in my present incarnation.”

  “It’s got a mount for an auxiliary R2 unit, but—”

  “That should do nicely, I think.”

  “But you’re not an R2 unit.”

  “Not at the moment, no.” I-Five turned to Geri, gesturing toward the tunnels that led back to the underground facility. “I have an idea. Are you ready for some more science experiments?”

  Geri’s face lit up and his eyes seemed to grow bigger—if that were possible. “Freezin’!” he enthused, and loped off toward his workshop with both droids in tow.

  Jax watched them with an uneasy expression on his face. “Den, would you go make sure they don’t do anything that … can’t be undone?”

  Den nodded, getting it. Things were changing a bit too fast for him, too. He followed his “assistant” and the droids from the cavern.

  “So, what’s this plan of yours?” Den asked I-Five when they’d reconvened in the workshop.

  “It is easier to show you than to tell you,” I-Five said, and reached up to release a catch on the underside of his helm. It flipped up to reveal a steel mounting cage suspended in a well behind the little droid’s optics. “Geri and I were able to place my synaptic grid cortex into this case, which will allow it to be moved more easily from one receptacle to another.”

  Den just blinked at him. “That’s … um. Wow. So when you were talking about the R2 …” He trailed off as Geri steered just such a unit out into the center of the workshop under the bright lights of his operating theater. “You intend to interface directly with the ship through the astromech.”

  “Isn’t that just freezin’?” Geri asked enthusiastically. “Man, I wish I had a droid who could think like this one.”

  Candy’s bleat eloquently conveyed complete outrage.

  “Freezin’,” Den muttered, and dived back into the work. Keeping his hands and mind busy distracted him from the hard reality of what it meant to return to Coruscant under their present circumstances.

  Seven

  Jax was letting nothing distract him from their return to Coruscant. He had wasted a day and a half. It was enough. He had a deadline now—a window of opportunity in which to try to track Vader’s movements since the ambush. The interceptor would be ready for her shakedown in two days’ time. He needed to bring something back to Coruscant with him besides loss and grief. He needed to return with some sort of lead on Thi Xon Yimmon and Darth Vader.

  To that end, he’d broached the subject with Aren Folee as they sat together in the mess hall of the subterranean complex.

  “All I’ve got,” he told her, “is data from the escape pod. If I could get data from any ships or observation posts you have in the sector …”

  “No sooner asked than done,” she said. “We’ve been working on that angle already.”

  “Any conclusions?”

  “About where he went? No. But at first blush it looks as if he used the gravimetric distortions around the Twins to disguise his movements. Clearly, they had to have jumped into the area, then used ion propulsion to position their forces.”

  “Which would have left a trail.”

  “Exactly. So if you want to come to the command center—”

  He really didn’t want to be in the command center. He’d already noted that his presence had attracted much attention—and speculation—about who he was and where he’d come from. “Is there any way I could work on this from some other, more private location?”

  Aren nodded. “Sure. There’s a workstation-slash-conference-room right next to the communications bay. I can have any data you want routed there. Do you want my help in going over it?”

  “No,” he said more sharply than he meant to. “I … might need the tracking data from your ship, though. You might have picked up something …”

  Something I failed to notice, he finished silently.

  She looked as if she were going to reply, but didn’t. She just nodded and went to make arrangements for the data transfer.

  Jax was in the workstation when Den came looking for him about an hour later.

  “They said I’d find you here. What are you doing?”

  Jax looked up from the sim he was constructing from the several data streams he’d sampled from tracking stations and ships that fed the resistance telemetry. The work was slow and piecemeal, even with the help of the station AI.

  “Trying to figure out where Vader came from and where he went.”

  Den’s face brightened. “Looks like I got here just in time, then. I’ve got just the thing to make the work go faster—a hot-rod pit droid with all sorts of bells and whistles. Weaponry, force shields, redundant core mechanisms, and a through-put of a gazillion terraflops per second. The downside is that it comes with I-Five’s acerbic personality. Couldn’t get Geri to program that out of him.”

  Jax took a deep breath and let it out. He wasn’t sure he was ready for levity yet. “Are you sure he’s up to this? Have you run diagnostics on him?”

  “Up to it? Sure we’ve run diagnostics. He’s fine. Well, okay—apart from having been blown to bits. Whatever reinforcements your dad put in Five’s braincase saved his life … or facsimile thereof. He can do this. Better than you can. He doesn’t have to wait for the data to be visible before he decodes and understands what it means.”

  Jax glanced down at the flat-screen display he’d been studying. He wanted the data to be visible—needed it to be visible—with an intensity he didn’t understand. Somewhere in that data was the answer to a question, the question to which Jax Pavan really wanted—needed—an answer.

  Why? Why had Laranth died … and was there a scenario in which she didn’t die?

  “If I-Five parses all of this, I might as well go climb a tree, Den.”

  “With all due respect, if we don’t let him parse it, we might miss something.”

  “You mean I might miss something.”

  Den opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again and said, “Yeah. That is what I mean.”

  He was right. Jax knew he was right. The Jedi fought with himself over it momentarily, recognized both the futility and stupidity of the fight, and nodded. “Right. You’re right. I’m not thinking clearly. Let’s bring I-Five in.”

  It was the right decision. As wrong as it felt.

  Within five minutes of putting I-Five in charge of the data streams Jax realized another reason he’d been avoiding this collaboration. It reminded him forcibly that Laranth was gone. As long as he existed on his own, her specter agreed to stay at bay. When Den and I-Five weren’t there, working as a team to remind him of her absence, he could pretend it was temporary. With the familiar voices in his ears, he knew it was not.

  He shook himself. He had to get used to this. There was no other option.

  I-Five’s new chassis lent the proceedings an air of considerable surrealism. The pint-sized droid eschewed a chair and seated himself on the workstation desktop, from which he manipulated the data by plugging a much-enhanced digit directly into a port.

  Jax shared what he’d been thinking about the ion trail and the need the 501st had to maneuver into the vicinity of the Twins at subluminal speeds. I-Five confirmed the appropriateness of the approach immediately and within minutes had constructed a sim of the ambush from the cobbled-together output of a host of sources—including his own data from the Far Ranger. He displayed his sim via a holographic projection pod that Geri had installed behind his optics.

  It showed the moment of their emergence from the Twins’ fractious gravitational fields into the “free” space beyond, and the speedy approach of their reception committee. The Far Ranger was a bright point of blue light; the Imperial ships were red. Other traffic in the area was rendered in a muted green.<
br />
  Jax felt as if had a lead weight in his chest—heavy and poisonous. The Moment, frozen in time …

  “There,” said Den. “Ion trails.”

  There were indeed ion trails. They ran like fine filaments of crimson thread away from the Twins toward the Galactic Core; they ended at the point the ships entered local space just outside the Twins’ gravity well.

  “That’s where they came from,” said I-Five. “Let’s see if that’s also where they went.”

  He ran the sim forward in time, past the moment in which Jax had hesitated between ensuring Laranth’s safety and Yimmon’s, past the moment in which Laranth drew her last breath and said her last whispered words, past the moment when I-Five was blown apart, past the moment in which Thi Xon Yimmon was lost to the Dark Lord, past the moment in which the Far Ranger was shredded by the forces of the twin suns … and finally, past the moment when the blood-bright shards streaked away and disappeared into hyperspace.

  Den let out a low chuffing sound that—for a Sullustan—functioned like a whistle. “They’re not all headed back to the Core. Some of them are outward-bound.”

  But Jax had noticed something else in the sim—several separate patterns of green signatures that had also left threads exiting local space within the same short time period. Some were oriented in the same direction as the red signatures, while others seemed to have been heading for the Core Worlds when they jumped.

  “What are these?” He indicated each of four separate patterns.

  I-Five shifted the display to show the new pattern of points and trails in yellow. “I would say those were formations of vessels in the vicinity of the Twins that headed out at approximately the same time Vader’s squadron did.”

  “When did they enter?”

  I-Five ran the sim backward again to the point at which Vader’s Fist appeared from hyperspace. The pattern of crimson dots that represented Vader’s 501st was augmented by a sun-bright scattering of yellow ones.

  “They all came here together, apparently,” said I-Five. “And look at this …” He ran the sim forward in time again. One of the red points of light seemed to be headed off in company with a set of the yellow ones.

  Jax watched as the ships separated into five groupings and moved toward the Twins. Then the lone red light changed course, rejoining its fellows and moving toward the Moment.

  “Obviously,” said Den quietly, “those were all Imperial squadrons. I’m honored to have required so much firepower.”

  Jax rocked back in his seat. Vader. Vader had been in that lone ship—the one that had altered course. He had brought that many ships and assigned them different positions because he’d had only a general idea about where the Far Ranger might be. Something had changed his mind about that. Maybe he’d just picked up their signature or maybe they’d done something to betray themselves. Jax supposed he might never know. But he did know the general direction Vader and his forces had taken entering and leaving the area. Some of the ships had returned to the Core, apparently, while others had gone elsewhere.

  That was all the tactical display revealed—two groups of ships that jumped to hyperspace with different orientations. The question was: which group was Vader’s command ship with—and was Yimmon aboard?

  Den had tried a number of times to draw Jax into the modifications that he, Geri, and I-Five were making to the droid. Modifications that, under any other circumstances, Jax would have taken a keen interest and even had a hand in. But Den found the Jedi was focused with laser sharpness on one thing and one thing only—tracking Vader’s ship. He had searched myriad hypercomm messages looking for mention of a fleet of Imperial vessels or, barring that, a group of starfighters with an Imperial cruiser acting as a mother ship.

  There was one vague report of an unexpected and brief Imperial presence on Mandalore, several others—less vague—of a large contingent of Imperial fighters moving through the Galactic Core. A decision had to be made, then, about which route they would try to trace, and there was no exact information on which to base that decision. Which meant that Jax Pavan must feel as impotent as Den Dhur did. Of course, Jax had the Force to fall back on, so Den asked what he’d gleaned from that resource.

  Nothing, he’d said. But there was something about the way he’d said it that left Den with a cold, clammy sensation in the pit of his stomach. Did you even check? he wanted to ask, but didn’t. Instead he merely asked, “Where are we going, then?”

  “Coruscant. It makes the most sense that Vader’s gone there, where the Emperor can oversee the interrogation and where he’s got the best security apparatus in place.”

  Where the Emperor can oversee the interrogation. Now, there was a phrase that sent a vacuum-level chill through the bone.

  Eight

  The night before the Laranth’s shakedown, Jax couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t meditate. Could barely think straight at times, though he knew that for the sake of his companions and the resistance he had to pretend that he could. So in the middle of the night, he decided he might as well move his few belongings onto the ship and get used to her “feel.”

  The interceptor was much smaller than the Far Ranger, and Jax found that though the captain’s quarters reflected the size differential, they were comfortable enough. He located a place for the miisai tree on a tray that pulled out from the wall next to the bunk. The little “smart pot” the miisai now nestled in was equipped with a set of contacts on the base that allowed it to sync with the ship’s power grid. It used a delicate sensor array to monitor the plant’s nutrient supply and liquid and kept it watered by pulling the needed moisture from the air. A soft yellow light glowed on the front of the shallow pot when the nutrient reservoir became depleted, and a proximity alarm sounded a gentle tone if it sensed movement in the vicinity of the hungry tree—a mechanical means for the miisai to ask for food. Jax swore he would never have occasion to see the light or hear the tone.

  Now he filled the reservoir with some crumbled bits of a protein bar that the smart pot would break down into its component parts. Then he sat cross-legged on the floor of the cabin and tried to clear his mind. He focused on his breathing—on visualizing the Force as ribbons of healing energy that wrapped themselves around him.

  As before, when he opened his eyes, he saw the energy pulsing and flowing up through the little tree—root to trunk to delicate branch. It danced among the needles and sent filaments out toward him to entwine with the Force ribbons he was generating.

  This was a new experience. He was surprised at the sense of warmth and serenity he felt watching the energy strands from the miisai mingle with his own. His meditative state deepened and, at last, he was able to invoke the Jedi mantra.

  There is no emotion; there is peace.

  There is no ignorance; there is knowledge.

  There is no passion; there is serenity.

  There is no chaos; there is harmony.

  There is no death; there is the Force.

  He turned the words in his mind without delving too deeply into their meaning. The rhythm of them was what he craved.

  Yes, craved. That was the word. He’d spent days in turmoil; this softly eddying tranquility was balm.

  He savored it momentarily, then turned his thoughts to Thi Xon Yimmon … and to Darth Vader. There was a trembling in his concentration when he did that, but he held his thoughts steady. If he was to use the Force to help him find the Whiplash leader, he must be steady. He pictured I-Five’s holographic tracers of the Imperial ships as if they floated in the warp and woof of the Force energies around him. He reached into and through the image, groping for the darkness that would be in Vader’s wake.

  In a split second he was back in the dim smoky corridor on the Far Ranger, face-to-face-mask with the Dark Lord.

  “I have one more thing to take from you,” Vader had said.

  Jax cringed away from the reality.

  Anakin Skywalker had said that.

  Anakin had taken Laranth from him—Yimmon, too. And
more. How much more, Jax was only just beginning to realize.

  Why? Why was the Dark Lord toying with him as a predator toys with its prey? What possible benefit did the Empire derive from that?

  The answer came in an epiphany. This wasn’t about the Empire or the Emperor. Vader had said it himself: he obeyed the Emperor in his own way. This was about Vader’s choices, not Palpatine’s.

  What was it the Cephalon had said? Choice is loss; indecision is all loss.

  Had that been as true for Anakin Skywalker as it was for Jax Pavan? Had there been a moment in which the Dark Lord might have engaged him in battle—perhaps killed or captured him—and had the man behind the mask missed that opportunity in his own moment of indecision?

  “Why do you hate me?” Jax murmured. “What have I done?”

  The answer came to him as strongly as if it had been spoken aloud: He had survived. He had survived Order 66 and he existed to this day as a reminder of … what—of failure? Was Jax merely the one who got away—or was there more to it than that?

  When he looks at me … does he see what he might have been?

  Jax’s memory provided him with a startlingly vivid image of sparring with Anakin at a time when he had assumed he and his friend might both someday achieve the station of Jedi Master. That had been his aim, anyway, though he had often been struck with the uneasy sense that Anakin was not content with that.

  He reached into the small pocket in the sash of his tunic that housed the pyronium Anakin had given into his care. It gleamed on his palm—a gem the size of a small egg, iridescent and otherworldly. It was an unknown quantity, alleged to be a source of unimaginable power. A power that was—also allegedly—to be called forth if one only knew the secret. And that, Jax had been led to believe, was revealed on the Sith Holocron he had received from Haninum Tyk Rhinann. The Holocron that his father, Lorn Pavan, had once tried to acquire.