“Trial?”
Den stared at the thing. It was pathetic. The head was missing its crown and rear plate, and while the body was intact, it had had only one complete leg and the upper half of one arm. The lower left arm was from the Nemesis assembly. The right one was a crazy quilt of parts from a number of different droids. The left leg was, from the knee down, just a thick durasteel rod with a roller ball set into the bottom of it. If Five was seriously suggesting he take it for a test drive, he wouldn’t be able to walk so much as scooter along.
“You’re joking, right?”
The pit droid oculus swiveled toward him. “Joking. Me.”
“Okay. I take it back. What do we do next?”
“We take me out of here—” I-Five tapped his current braincase. “—and install me in there.”
“Right.” Den slid off his chair at the workbench. I-Five folded up into his compact form and tilted his head forward. “I’m thinking we should install a secondary cortex in each of my chassis that will allow me to transfer myself as needed.”
“Oh, I see. Thereby making me redundant and dispensable.”
“Only you would choose to see it that way. I was thinking of your welfare. I thought it might be best if you didn’t need to play mechanic every time a change was required. There might also be emergency situations in which you might not be available.”
Den took a deep breath. “Emergency situations, yeah. I can see that.”
I-Five tripped the catch on his helm and popped it open, allowing Den access to his cortex.
Den wiped his hands on his pants. “I don’t mind telling you that this makes me very nervous.”
“You’ve done it before.”
“Yeah, but the R2 unit didn’t have a fripping blaster built into its manipulators.”
“I promise I will not shoot you. Please proceed.”
Den carefully lifted I-Five’s brain out of the DUM head casing and installed it in the hybrid droid. Its optics lit up so swiftly he was startled. He jumped, took a step back, and landed on his butt on the deck.
“Ah,” I-Five said from the new unit. “Ah-ah. Calibrating. Hm. Optics are not optimal. We’ll have to make some adjustments—in fact, I’ve been contemplating some upgrades.”
“You sound … more like you,” Den observed.
“My resonating cavity is larger and deeper,” the droid responded. He turned his head. Shifted his shoulders. Flexed his elbows. Den flinched. The cobbled-together droid—Den was still having a hard time thinking of it as I-Five—curled his lethal fingers. Rotated his lone ankle.
Then he stood.
“Move aside and let me see if the legs work.”
Den scrambled to obey, his eyes on the Nemesis blaster arm. “What about the draft?”
“The draft?”
Den pointed to the crown of his own head. “We’re missing a piece of your skull, in case you’d forgotten. I’d hate for you to have an unfortunate accident and undo all of Geri’s careful work. Not to mention losing your mind. Ha.”
I-Five ignored the weak joke. “You can use the magnetic clips to attach the Nemesis carapace.”
Den looked at the insectile shell doubtfully. “Seriously?”
“It may not be the ideal arrangement, but it will do for a test.”
Den lifted the Nemesis helm, activated the magnetic latches, and placed it atop the I-Five head. It looked … ridiculous. It looked like the droid equivalent of a long wig.
Den was unable to stifle the laughter that bubbled up out of his throat. He laughed until his nose started to run and his eyes watered.
“I’m pleased,” I-Five said when Den finally ran out of breath and mirth, “to be the cause of levity. You’ve been positively gloomy lately.”
“Yeah? Can you blame me?”
“All things considered, no.”
I-Five adjusted his carapace and experimented with motion. With one unarticulated leg and a roller, he could only scoot—which was just as funny as Den had imagined.
He felt another fit of laughter coming on, but his gut hurt. He shook his head as he watched I-Five testing his joints—picking things up and putting them down again … except for the ones he dropped. The Nemesis hand had a few bugs, Den noted.
He was suddenly struck by the sheer hopelessness of their situation.
“Why?” he asked.
The droid stopped scootering across the deck and turned. “Why what?”
“Why are you doing this? Why are we doing this?”
“Could you be more specific?”
Den made a frustrated gesture. “Why are we here sitting on Mandalore, turning you into a juggernaut, while Jax is playing games with Black Sun?”
“We may need me to be a juggernaut, and is that really what you think Jax is doing—playing games? I rather think his dealings with Black Sun are deadly serious.”
“Yeah,” said Den laughing nervously. “I guess that’s what I was afraid to say. Why is he doing this? Why is he dealing with them?”
“He said it: He’ll do whatever it takes to find Yimmon. Deal with whomever he has to deal with.”
“And you approve?”
“Do you think I do?”
Den sighed and sat back down at his workbench. “No. But, blast it all, it feels wrong. Why doesn’t it feel wrong to Jax?”
“Jax is a man driven by grief, outrage, and purpose.”
“Jax is a Jedi!” Den objected.
“Yes, but he is still a man.” I-Five glided back to the workbench again. “Here, put me back in my other chassis. We need to work on my optics.”
“Yeah, and find you a real leg, or I’ll have to start calling you I-Gimpy.”
“You’re not funny when you’re depressed—you do realize that.”
“Sit down and shut up.”
For the second day in a row, Jax walked for kilometers around Keldabe, poking his nose into public houses and businesses that catered to spacers, asking questions and soaking up answers and the energies that went with them. He felt no real need of the answers at this point—he was marking time, waiting for Fabris to get back to him about Vader’s possible whereabouts.
He hated it. Told himself he didn’t; that he could be patient, watchful, calm. But inside, he was buzzing. His chest felt as if it harbored an expanding ball of static electricity that would—if left long enough—explode and short-circuit his entire system.
Nonetheless, some of the answers were interesting—stormtroopers had been here, seeking mercenaries with a particular skill set that included an extreme lack of sensitivity to the Force. That made sense; if Vader was planning on subjecting Yimmon to interrogation or guarding by sentients he’d hardly want them to be susceptible to the sort of psychic ricochets that could occur when powerful minds collided.
Yimmon, being a Cerean, was an unknown commodity in some ways. Jax had always suspected that the dual brains the species possessed allowed them to handle even small amounts of Force energy differently and perhaps more effectively than sentients with only one central processor.
Yimmon had been tortured once in his youth. Jax had asked him how he had dealt with it. He said something cryptic: “I hid.”
“I don’t understand,” Jax had admitted.
“I hid,” the Cerean had replied, tapping his skull.
Jax did understand the concept. Jedi were taught to absent the mind when exposed to extreme stimuli. Jax had even been able to practice it … once.
At the end of a long day, he returned to the ship, entering to the murmur of voices drifting up from engineering. He headed in that direction, intending to report what little he’d learned. The sound of Den’s laughter brought him up short. Something had set the Sullustan off. His laughter came in gales.
Jax’s reaction was disturbing even to himself. He felt a flash of deep, painful anger, as if there was something wrong in the laughter—something disrespectful. Beneath that was an equally intense longing—a sort of mindless envy—to experience something that could make
him laugh.
He stopped just beyond engineering hatchway and listened.
“It feels wrong,” Den was saying. “Why doesn’t it feel wrong to Jax?”
Jax didn’t stay to hear the answer. He felt like an interloper, an outsider. Right now, perhaps he was.
He moved swiftly to his cabin, slipped inside, and locked the hatch. A soft, insistent chime started up in one corner of the small chamber. Puzzled, he looked around. The light on the miisai tree’s container was flashing yellow.
He stared at it, stunned to the roots of his soul. How had he forgotten? He hurried to find organics to feed the converter. Here he’d been angry at Den for laughing in the shadow of Laranth’s death, while he’d neglected the one tiny bit of her that he still had.
His hands trembled as he crumbled a protein bar into the container’s food receptacle and closed the door of the converter. The chime went silent; the light returned to a calming shade of green.
Jax took a deep breath, wiped sweating palms on his tunic, and stepped back to the center of the cabin just as the cabin’s comlink pinged.
He found Den at his cabin door. “There’s a woman at the air lock asking for you. A Balosar.”
Tlinetha. “Did she say what she wanted?”
Den’s thick lips twitched. “You.”
“I meant—”
“Yeah. I know what you meant. She won’t say what she wants.”
Jax nodded. “Bring her aboard.”
“You sure?”
“She works for Tyno Fabris.”
The big dark eyes were suddenly wary. “Oh. I see.” Den glanced back down the corridor. “It’s okay, Five. You can let her come aboard.”
She appeared before the Sullustan could quite remove himself from sight. He ducked down the aft passage.
“Who was that?” she asked, nodding toward Den’s shadow as he disappeared into his own quarters.
“Crew. To what do I owe the honor?”
Tlinetha looked past Jax into his quarters. “Tyno sent me.”
“And?”
She met his eyes for a moment. “He wants to see you.”
“He has information for me?”
She chuckled softly and slipped past him into his cabin. “You think he’d tell me? He just said, ‘Bring him.’”
“Then let’s go.”
She looked back over her shoulder at him, smiling. “What’s your hurry?”
Before he could tell her what his hurry was, she had swung back around, taking in the small quarters at a glance. Her gaze fixed on the miisai tree.
“I need that information, Balosar.”
“I think you need to relax.” She moved to the tree and reached out to touch one of the gracefully turned boughs.
Jax had crossed the space between them and grasped her wrist in a punishing grip before her fingertips could brush the silvery green foliage.
She turned on him, her smile deepening. “That’s more like it.”
“It’s fragile,” he said, dropping her wrist. “Don’t touch it.”
“That go for you, too?”
He turned away from her, gesturing at the door. “Tyno’s waiting.”
She hesitated for a moment longer, then shrugged and ducked past him into the corridor.
She took him directly to Tyno Fabris’s office in the cantina, where the Arkanian awaited him, sitting behind his fabulous desk, his feet resting on its polished surface. He looked relaxed, lazy even, but that was a lie. Underneath the relaxed exterior was a strange watchfulness that put Jax immediately on alert.
“You have something for me?”
Fabris nodded. “It wasn’t easy to get, my friend, but let’s see if it’s worth the price. Vader’s forces came through Mandalorian space in three waves. The first, as you know, was close to a month ago. They made landfall on Mandalore and on Concordia. The second wave—three ships, so not much a wave as a ripple—came through roughly two weeks ago. They didn’t stop—just dropped out of hyperspace on the fringes of the system, adjusted course, and took off again. The third wave was composed of only two ships. Also in a hurry. One of these ships sent two coded messages—one to Imperial Center, the other to a destination in Bothan space. I would assume that destination was where the ships were headed.”
“Where?”
Fabris didn’t answer, just continued his narrative. “The messages positively identified the ship of origin as a Lambda-class long-range shuttle—the Questor. I have it on good authority that Darth Vader himself was aboard.”
“Where did he send the second message?”
Fabris sat up straight, feet on the floor, and spread his hands in a gesture of bemusement. “Aren’t you the least bit interested in what the messages said?”
“You were able to intercept and decode them?” Somehow Jax hadn’t thought Fabris’s resources ran to that sort of technology.
“No, but I know someone who did. I figured you might want to meet him. So I invited him to our little meeting.”
A frisson of wariness scurried down Jax’s spine. Who would have the resources to do that without Vader knowing it?
One of the hidden doors slid open and the tapestry covering it was swept aside by the brawny arm of a Mandalorian mercenary in full armor.
Jax took in his escape options in one swift glance—he was midway between the chamber’s exit and a barred window fashioned of artisan glass in a rainbow of colors. Either would serve.
Jax knew whom he would see before Xizor entered the room: the heady wash of pheromones preceded him.
The Falleen was engaged, excited, but not, surprisingly, hostile. He held up both hands in a reassuring gesture. “Please, Jax. I’m here to deal, not fight.”
“Deal? I seem to recall that the last time we met you tried very hard to kill me … with my own lightsaber.”
“That was then. This is now. And even then, I didn’t start out to kill you. You were worth far more to me alive, but you were unwilling to be captured and …” He shrugged eloquently. “Well, my life was in jeopardy. It was me or you. Nothing personal, believe me. It was just business. Then as now.”
“And the deal?”
Again the shrug. “You want to know where Vader has gone to ground. I want …” Xizor advanced farther into the room, coming around to lean on the corner of Fabris’s desk, making the smaller man have to peer past him to see Jax. “Well, I’m not sure what I want yet.”
“I offered Fabris, here, a pyronium gem in exchange for information.”
Xizor glanced over his shoulder at the Arkanian. “Tyno has a puny imagination. He believes in things. I believe in people. You, for instance.”
“Me.”
“You’re a Jedi. Possibly the last of a dead breed. Rare. Unusual. Powerful. I like rare, unusual, powerful things.”
Jax’s jaw tightened painfully. Where was this going? “What do you want?”
“I want to be able to name my price later. I want a … voucher. A promissory note.”
“In other words, you want to own me.”
Xizor laughed, but his flesh flushed an exultant violet. “Nothing so melodramatic as that. I just want to be able to call on you at some point to give me something or some service that I will—at that point in time—need more than I need a chunk of strange, glowing metal … or even a strange, glowing data device. Yes, Tyno told me about the Holocron. And I suppose I could have you open it up for me—as I have every faith you can—and give me all that knowledge. Who knows—that might actually be what I ultimately want. But not today, I think. Today, I want to have a Jedi Knight indebted to me.”
Everything in Jax rejected the idea—rejected it to the center of his soul.
“No,” he said, turned, and walked out of the room.
He had no clear thoughts until he had regained the relative safety of his ship. Then, as the hatch slid shut behind him, his mind exploded with questions:
Was Xizor his only resource? Certainly he’d get no more out of Fabris without the Falleen Vigo�
��s approval.
Was that avenue cut off?
Was there enough information in what the Arkanian had already told him to go on?
No, not nearly. Bothan space spanned more territory than he could possibly cover, even given a Jedi’s trained Force sense. Might he learn more on Concordia? The first wave of Imperial forces had gone there for their needs—someone might have figured out where they were headed.
Not likely. Stormtroopers wouldn’t give up that sort of intel.
What did that leave him? Not much.
He turned on his heel, punching the hatch open again.
“Jax?” Den stood just outside of the engineering bay, a frown furrowing his broad brow. “What’s up?”
“I have to go out again. Keep the ship ready to lift, okay?”
Den took a step toward him. “What? Where are you going? Not back to that Black Sun lowlife.”
“No. He’s no longer of any importance.”
Den let out a gust of breath. “Well, that’s a relief. Who, then?”
Jax smiled—an expression that made the Sullustan’s eyes grow rounder. “Don’t worry about it. Like the man said: it’s just business.”
Den watched Jax stride out down the landing ramp, looking every inch the Corellian pirate he was supposed to be.
Scary.
He heard a telltale rattle behind him and turned to find I-Five—in his new half-finished chassis—standing in the access to their makeshift workshop.
Also scary. The Nemesis helm and forearm looked strikingly out of place with the protocol droid’s dull silver torso. Den noticed absently that I-Five had replaced one of the standard optics with one of the odd optical units they’d purchased in Keldabe. The reflector was a bit larger, and the charged unit glowed a fiery amber.
Den had started to think of the new persona as I-Nemesis, but he’d yet to mention that to his mechanical friend. He’d almost begun to wish they’d opted for that LeisureMech Bobbie-Bot that Five had been so interested in.
“If I read the expression on your face correctly—and I do—you’re worried,” the droid observed.
“Aren’t you? He says Tyno Fabris is out of the picture, but he’s still got something going with Black Sun—I can feel it.”
The Last Jedi Page 18
