The Last Jedi

by Michael Reaves

  Or … was the man responsible standing atop this walkway, looking down at his nemesis?

  The thought struck Jax hard enough to make him take a step backward. Below, on the sun-washed platform, Darth Vader had paused to speak to the officers awaiting him at the bottom of the ramp. The conversation was brief and one-sided. At its conclusion, the Dark Lord took a step onto the landing ramp.

  Then he hesitated, and turned to look up at the man on the walkway.

  One’s face was obscured by a mask, the other’s by the shadows of an Inquisitor’s hood, yet still Jax felt naked before the touch of Vader’s regard.

  Do you know who I am?

  It took the full force of Jax Pavan’s will to bow his hooded head deeply to the Dark Lord, then turn and resume his slow, gliding walk. He entered the Flight Control facility on the opposite side of the walkway. Only once inside did he quicken his pace.

  He passed one or two Inquisitors on his way out of the building. He did not acknowledge them in any way, nor they him. He passed through checkpoint after checkpoint, glad that the Inquisitorius inspired such fear that the guards were reluctant to even look at him.

  When he left the bureau complex and recrossed the broad plaza, the space between his shoulder blades itched. In his mind’s eye he saw that masked face with its obsidian goggles turned up toward him, stripping away layers of skin and bone to ultimately bare his identity.

  Or so it had felt.

  But …

  He didn’t know me, Jax told himself. If he’d known me, he would have challenged me. He would never have let me walk out of there alive. If he’d known me, I would have felt it.

  Still in Inquisitor’s guise, Jax returned to the Westport, hoping that by the time he got there he would have stopped shaking.

  At the point Den realized he was checking the chrono every five minutes, he stopped glancing at it. Jax had been gone for over two hours without a word, and the Sullustan wished desperately—not for the first time in his life—that he wasn’t stone deaf when it came to the Force. At least then, he told himself, he’d know if Jax was all right or if he’d been discovered … or worse.

  “Why didn’t he take us with him, Five?”

  The question had been revolving in his mind since Jax had set off for the Palace District. It was driving him crazy. He turned his gaze from the landing pad to look at the droid, who was tinkering with a new chassis design through his onboard holodisplay.

  “I mean, if Yimmon was there, and Jax had any hope of rescuing him, he’d need backup, right?”

  I-Five swiveled his head so that the oculus was aimed at Den. “Jax may have reasoned that a lone Jedi would have a better chance of rescuing Yimmon than a Jedi encumbered with a couple of miniature sidekicks.”

  “Okay, I can see why he might not take me. I’m frankly not that quick or stealthy or impressive. But you? You’re not a liability by any stretch of the imagination. Especially since we got those laser units installed. You can do just about anything but fly.”

  The droid’s monocular optic spun as if in contemplation. “Antigravity generators come in fairly small packages these days. With perhaps a repulsor unit for swift ascensions—”

  “Stop it!” Den exclaimed. “You’re trying to distract me.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I know you, Tin Man,” Den said, pointing a stubby digit at I-Five’s lens. “You’ve been wondering the same thing, haven’t you? Why would Jax leave you behind?”

  “I can’t say that I have.” Five shut off the holoimage of a souped-up I-5YQ unit. “What I have been doing is sorting through possible reasons why he may have done this. The most obvious one is that he’s afraid of putting us in harm’s way.”

  “That’s not his decision to make, blast it! It’s ours.”

  “It could be reasonably argued that someone had to stay with the ship, keep it liftoff-ready.”

  “Like I said, I could have seen him leaving me here, but not you. He needs you, Five. Probably more now than—” Den broke off when a flicker of movement at the periphery of the landing platform tugged at his eye. “What was that?”

  I-Five turned his gaze to the exterior view. “I saw nothing—which, given my monocular vision, is unsurprising.”

  Den half rose from the copilot’s chair. “It was there. Over there by that fuel port.” He pointed at the bright yellow housing of a robotic unit that dispensed liquid metal fuel.

  I-Five tapped the control panel and brought up the displays showing views starboard, port, and aft. Den flicked his gaze from one screen to the next.

  “Are you sure—” I-Five began.

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’m—there! Right there!”

  A cloaked figure flitted from shadow to shadow, passing from the fuel port to a stairwell on the port side of the landing pad.

  Den felt as if every drop of blood in his body had congealed.

  “An Inquisitor,” I-Five said with irritating calm. “Perhaps we should let him know he’s been seen.”

  Den shook his head. “No. Let’s just … keep an eye on him … or three. Let’s not tempt fate, okay?”

  “What if Jax returns while he’s out there?”

  Mother of Sullust, he has to ask?

  Den licked his lips. “We should ping Jax.”

  “And if he’s doing something stealthy at the moment we ping him? We were instructed to keep radio silence.”

  “I hate this,” Den said. “A lot.”

  They watched for several minutes as the Inquisitor made a circuit of the ship—once, then twice.

  “I don’t get it,” said Den. “What’s he doing?”

  “Sniffing, perhaps? Trying to see if he can ‘smell’ a Jedi.”

  That made sense. And it meant that if Jax returned while Vader’s little Force hound was out there …

  Den got up and slipped into the short corridor that connected the tiny bridge to the body of the ship. He popped open the weapons locker and took a blaster from the rack.

  “What are you doing?” I-Five was standing in the hatchway.

  “I’m gonna go chase him away.”

  “No, you’re not. I am.”

  The droid scuttled past Den and made for the air lock. He had let down the loading ramp before Den could get to him. With Den standing in the hatch, his heart beating hard enough to sway him back and forth, I-Five stalked down to the bottom of the ramp and looked around.

  “Thieves!” he squeaked in a high, tinny voice. “I saw thieves, Captain Vigil!”

  His head performed almost a 360-degree swivel before swinging back in the opposite direction. When his oculus was pointed away from the Inquisitor’s last known position, he raised a slender arm, pointed a finger 180 degrees away from where he was looking, and fired a bolt of blue energy from his fingertip. It struck the housing of the umbilical cabling—now retracted—that had powered the ship’s systems while she was docked.

  There was a sudden flurry of sound and movement and then … nothing. Or at least as much nothing as there could be on a landing stage at a busy spaceport. Den held his breath, blaster in hand, and tried to listen—to sense—the shadowy presence of the Inquisitor. It was a vain attempt. When it came to the Force, Den Dhur was an inert lump of protoplasm.

  I-Five moved into the shadow of the ship’s keel. “Perhaps, Captain,” the droid said, “you should go monitor the pad from the bridge. I’ll stay down here. Just in case.”

  “Uh, copy that.” Den swallowed, then hastened back to his seat in the cockpit. He turned his eyes to one display after another: bow, port, starboard, aft. The shadows of the dockside equipment seemed almost solid in the glare of Coruscant’s sun. He scanned every one of them, repeating the process—once, twice, three times—before his heart rate began to assume a more normal rhythm.

  At the end of his third cycle, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, wishing Jax would return. Praying to the Great Mother that he would return with Yimmon and this nightmare would simply be over.
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  “I’m coming back aboard, Captain.”

  I-Five’s voice came to him through the droid’s comlink. Den took a breath of relief.

  “Okay. Okay. Great.”

  He opened his eyes to watch the little droid climb back up the landing ramp and saw the Inquisitor step out of the shadows of the spaceport directly behind him.

  “Five! Your back!” Den yelled, but I-Five couldn’t hear him—in his panic, Den hadn’t activated the comm.

  Still, the droid turned to face the Sith operative. Den saw the light on the laser port built into his oculus flash red as it charged up.

  The Inquisitor stopped, raised his hands as if to forestall attack, then put back his hood.

  Den all but melted into a puddle on the deck of the bridge. He was still lounging limply in his seat when I-Five and Jax entered. Jax had removed the Inquisitor’s cloak and looked more or less as he had when he’d left earlier.

  “Why did you do that?” asked Den.

  Jax frowned. “Do what?”

  “The …” Words failing him, Den briefly pantomimed a hunched-over sinister form, large eyes narrowed to slits, finger crooked, clawlike.

  “Oh. A precaution. Vader and his lackeys expect Force signatures from Inquisitors, not members of the local constabulary.”

  “Okay. I get that, but why all the skulking around the ship? You afraid we might have picked up a bug or a bomb or something? I mean, you scared the mopak out of us. Or, well, out of me, anyway.”

  Jax’s frown deepened. “What skulking?”

  I-Five made a soft bleep. “We’ve been monitoring an Inquisitor for the last fifteen minutes or so making a circuit of the ship. I thought I’d just driven him off. We assumed …”

  Jax’s face had paled above his uniform. “That wasn’t me. I just got here.”

  PART TWO

  Flight and Pursuit

  Thirteen

  Jax’s hands flew over the Laranth’s controls, seeming to go in two directions at once. Den felt as if his mind echoed the movements. The difference being that Jax’s hands were sure, methodical, swift; Den’s thoughts were frantic, chaotic, and just plain scared.

  Did the Inquisitor’s presence mean that Darth Vader knew Jax Pavan was alive and on Coruscant? Knew what ship he flew? Knew, even, that he had paid a visit to the Security Bureau? Or was the Inquisitor merely on patrol, groping after Force adepts as Inquisitors always did, and had been drawn to Westport by Jax’s residual signature?

  If Vader had known Jax was alive on Coruscant, Den told himself for the twentieth time, he would have done something. Maybe he still didn’t know … yet. But what would he make of his Inquisitor’s report that he had been fired at on Landing Stage 184Z at Westport? I-Five’s bit of playacting notwithstanding, anyone who fired at an Inquisitor was going to draw swift attention from the Imperials.

  And so they fled … in a legal, orderly fashion so as not to draw further attention. Any thought of waiting out Vader’s departure was forgotten.

  Den could see the agony of that decision on Jax’s tense face as they lifted off and executed a series of course adjustments that put them on a heading for the Hydian Way with an alleged cargo of machine parts. Moments ticked by as they sped out of the Coruscant system, their sensors sweeping surrounding space for pursuers, or an ambush, or anything out of the norm.

  We’re just a tiny little freighter from Toprawa, Den thought, as if his brooding could have any possible effect on reality in their pocket of the galaxy. We’re not worth investigating. He kept repeating that in his mind like a sort of mantra, seeking to squeeze whatever comfort he could from the words.

  Which wasn’t much …

  They reached the threshold of the system’s gravity well without mishap, which—as much of a relief as it was to still be alive—left Den feeling limp with exhaustion. He looked at the star charts on the navicomp display, swallowed hard, and asked, “Where to, Jax?”

  When the Jedi didn’t answer, I-Five prodded him. “Toprawa?”

  “That’s my vote,” Den said. “We’ve got allies there, after all. A place to park and regroup, anyway.”

  “That makes sense,” Jax agreed. “Except that it might make sense to Vader, too.”

  “Really?” I-Five split his concentration between copiloting the ship and determining its course. “Do you think he has any idea that we’re still around? I rather imagine that his overweening self-assurance predisposes him toward believing we’re all dead. So much so, in fact, that I doubt he’d recognize evidence to the contrary.”

  Jax turned and stared at the droid for a moment, as if examining the concept in his head.

  “Y’know,” Den piped up, “I’ll bet Five’s right. Otherwise, he’d’ve been all over us. In fact, if he’d sent that Inquisitor after us, we wouldn’t be in space right now.”

  “We need a course before we enter hyperspace, Jax,” I-Five pressed. “Is it Toprawa?”

  “Have you forgotten that we might have a betrayer there?”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I-Five said after a moment. “In point of fact, I never forget anything. And I suspect Den hasn’t forgotten, either, in this particular case, though his hippocampus is somewhat inferior to my memory chip.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Den.

  I-Five ignored him. “Neither of us is denying the possibility that someone in Aren Folee’s organization might have leaked our course to Vader. But what else might we do? We’ve lost any chance of monitoring Vader’s shuttle as it leaves the system.”

  Jax took his hands from the controls. “Because of me,” he murmured.

  “Pardon?” The low, curving helm tilted askance and the oculus cycled as if to focus more tightly on the Jedi’s face.

  “We’re unable to monitor Vader’s movements because of me,” Jax repeated. “Because I acted precipitously …”

  “What else could you have done? It made sense that Vader would bring Yimmon back to Coruscant.”

  Jax shook his head. “I don’t sense he was ever here. I think he was sent wherever that other contingent of ships was sent. Though I wonder why Vader came back here without him. Not that I’m complaining—it bought us more time.”

  “Maybe,” Den said reluctantly, “he came back here because he’s already gotten the information he needed to bring down Whiplash.”

  “No. He would oversee that himself. We’d be seeing an explosion of activity around his headquarters. But it’s quiet as can be, and he’s leaving again.”

  “Then perhaps our logical next move,” the droid suggested, “would be to head for Mandalore.”

  “Mandalore,” Den repeated, his eyes widening. “You don’t think they’ll still be there?”

  “No,” Jax said thoughtfully, “but I’m hopeful we might find out where they were going.”

  “How? Are we just going to hang out in taverns and ask everyone we meet if they happened to know where the Imperials went? Rumor is rampant that Mandalore is a divided society these days. If that’s the case, whom do we go to for intel?”

  “Whoever seems in the best position to have it.”

  “On what excuse? We start asking questions all over the place, and any hope of keeping a low profile—”

  “I seem to recall,” said I-Five, “that you used to be a journalist. One of the perks of having a memory chip,” he added drily. “Perhaps that would provide a suitable cover and a reason for asking questions all over the place.”

  Den felt as if he’d just awakened from a deep sleep. A spark of something like hope—or at least not like panic—curled around his heart. “I … well, yeah. I guess that could be a good cover.”

  “Indeed,” I-Five agreed. “And though it galls me to contemplate it, I can be your indispensable metal sidekick. Jax, meanwhile, can employ subtler methods of fact finding.”

  “Or,” Jax said, “we could just be pirates.”

  Den grinned. He liked the idea of being a pirate. Pirates ostensibly did much business on and around Mandalore’s il
l-named moon, Concordia. And pirates would have every reason to be interested in the movement of Imperial ships and troops.

  “All right. I like this plan. We can hit arms dealers, public houses and cantinas, ship repair yards—people in those places always have their eyes open for Imperial activity. What do you think, Jax?”

  But Jax had risen and was on his way aft.

  “Jax?”

  “Sounds good, Den.” He turned. “I-Five, since you’ve already filed a flight plan for the Hydian Way, why don’t we make a quick jump in that direction, then adjust course? I’m going to change out of these clothes.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “Don’t you want to be up here to see the stars blur?” Den asked.

  “No.” Jax disappeared into the fore-and-aft corridor.

  Den stared after him for a moment. “I’m a little worried about him.”

  “Only a little?”

  He looked at I-Five. “He’s blaming himself for everything that’s happened—you realize that, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know that’s not justified, but …”

  “But?”

  “It struck me just now … what if that whole thing with Vader’s shuttle was a trap? A ploy to get Jax to reveal himself?”

  “If it were, do you honestly think he’d have gotten out of the ISB unscathed? Or that this ship would still be in one piece?”

  “Well, no. Unless Vader has some ulterior motive.”

  “Vader has faced off against Jax often enough, with results disastrous enough, that I expect he would want to make certain of Jax’s destruction if he even half suspected he was still alive. He would hardly let him slip through his fingers again. Jax could easily just sail off into Wild Space or the Unknown Regions and never come back.”