“How are they doing that?” he asked, peering at the frigate. “You’d think they’d be crushed.”
I-Five answered him. “Passive repulsor fields, most likely, or possibly a tractor/pressor web. Either would provide an energy cushion around the vessel that would keep the asteroids from colliding with it and would keep it moving along with them. I’d bet on a web, though. More energy—greater stability.”
Den grimaced. He’d bet on a web, too.
I-Five swiveled his domed turret toward Jax. “The question is, is Vader there? I don’t see his shuttle. Of course, the landing bays could be internal.”
“He’s there. When I … brushed Tesla, he was with Vader.”
Den blinked his huge eyes, startled. “You don’t think Vader … you know … recognized your, um …”
Jax shook his head. “I was camouflaged—in a manner of speaking. Tesla didn’t seem to notice that I’d touched him. He was focused on something else.”
“Why isn’t there more of an Imperial presence?” Den asked. “Where are the perimeter patrols, and the surveillance outposts? Are they hidden in the other asteroids?” He squinted at a large specimen that tumbled past the smaller body they were using for cover.
I-Five uttered a series of rapid clicks as he read data from the sensors. “Not as far as our sensors can determine. Odd. So little protection.”
“Not so odd, considering whose lair this is,” Jax said. “The physical protection is all around us. Without the transponder codes, a non-Force-sensitive wouldn’t be able to find this place except by trial and error.”
That was a chilling thought. “Which sort of makes this place an ideal Jedi trap, don’t you think?” Den asked.
“There are no more Jedi,” Jax murmured.
Den bit back an angry retort, recognizing—in the instant it began to claw its way up from his gut—that it rested on a solid foundation of icy fear. “Then we’d better take good care of the one we’ve got,” he said.
“How do you propose we proceed?” I-Five had swiveled back to the view of the station.
Jax studied the heads-up display. “That asteroid, there—the one closest to the station—would get us within several hundred kilometers of it.”
“And then what?” Den asked. “We jump across like green fleas? It’s not as if you can land on that thing undetected. I mean, if you had a shielded ship and a big distraction, then maybe …”
“We have a shielded ship. If we could slide past the dark side of the asteroid …”
“The frigate is on the dark side of the asteroid,” I-Five noted. “Jax, I don’t think we can do this unaided. I think we should return to Toprawa and enlist the help of the Rangers.”
“There is another possibility,” Jax said thoughtfully. “The station crew is composed of Imperial regulars, mercenaries, and some civilians. According to Xizor’s intel, the civilian crew and the mercenaries get … extra supplies through the black market.”
“You mean through Black Sun,” Den said, not at all liking where this was going.
“Yes, and these black-market runners are allowed access to parts of the station.”
“Not the parts we need,” Den objected.
“Once we’re aboard, I’ll have to work that out. The real trick is getting aboard in the first place. We’re flying a ship with Mandalorian ident codes. We might be able to pass ourselves off as Black Sun.”
“Yes, we might. But we’d need to have a legitimate cargo … or rather an illicit one,” Den observed. “Which we don’t.”
“Not now, but we could pick one up on Concordia.”
I-Five emitted a high trill and rotated his turret back toward the sensor panel.
“What is it?” Jax asked.
“Activity in the Kantaros docking bays.”
Den drew in a sharp breath. “Maybe they’ve spotted us.”
“Unlikely,” said I-Five. “We’re shielded and our comm is silent.”
Jax’s hand hovered over the controls of the tractor beam that tethered the Laranth/Corsair to her hiding place. He watched as a portal opened in the lower hemisphere of Kantaros Station and a number of small, long-range fighters emerged, swarming around the station like gnats. They seemed to be in a holding pattern, awaiting command or perhaps a vessel they were intended to escort.
“Jax …” Den breathed the name out on a rising tide of unease.
Jax didn’t wait to find out what their agenda was. He deactivated the tractor beam, fired the ion engines, and flipped the little freighter end over end, then fled toward the inner orbit, weaving among the floating obstacles with a speed that pushed Den’s heart even farther into his throat.
As he sat in the cockpit of the Laranth/Corsair, watching the streaks of light beyond the transparisteel cowling, Jax did some hasty calculations. None of them was pleasant. Xizor had known when he’d handed Jax that data wafer and the Mandalorian ident codes that the chances of him being able to infiltrate Kantaros Station without assistance from Black Sun were nil. Coming here had been a waste of time and effort.
And yet, unavoidable. Jax had to own that if Xizor had told him this was what they would find, he’d never have believed him.
There were clearly only two ways to penetrate the station’s defenses: a direct assault with significant firepower; or infiltration, which would require further assistance from Black Sun. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that with Probus Tesla on the station, his chances of blending in without a significant number of others to conceal himself would be suicidal. The Inquisitor knew him too well and had more legitimate reasons to hate him than his dark Master did.
Jax exhaled in frustration. Every answer he needed seemed just out of reach. He was a Jedi, yes, but a Jedi whose education had been cut short by the Empire’s persecution and destruction of his Order. There were things his Master had not lived long enough to teach him, things he’d had to learn imperfectly on his own … many of them from Laranth.
He had discovered on his own the ability to wrap his Force signature in the energies and colors of disguise. Now he wished he understood how to take that principle further. Was it a form of psychometry, perhaps?
When he had touched the Inquisitor, Tesla, he had first imagined himself passing through the miisai tree, wrapping ribbons of its life force around him, clothing himself in them—or perhaps mimicking them. He honestly wasn’t sure which—if either—was the reality. He knew only that he had projected something “other” into the station—something that was not entirely Jax Pavan.
Now he had to wonder: Had his activity been sensed by either Vader or his apprentice? Is that what the sudden activity had been about?
It would be several hours before they’d emerge into normal space near Mandalore, where they were ostensibly going to re-provision and refuel before stopping off on Concordia in search of an illicit cargo.
Den and I-Five wouldn’t know until it was too late to talk him out of it that he had no intention of going to Concordia at all.
Twenty-Five
Tuden Sal sat in a faux-wood chair in one of four themed cafés attached to the Hotel Sunspire. The name was not inaccurate—every suite and condo in the huge, glittering tower had a sunny view of the Western Sea. If you had the credits, you could bide there awhile. If you didn’t, but dressed as if you did, you could pretend.
Sal was doing that now—pretending to be just another wealthy visitor to the seashore, sipping hot caf and reading the latest news from a datapad. What he was doing, in fact, was taking readings of direction and distance between the various points his people had identified as necessary connections in their plan.
And he was awaiting a signal.
Down along the docks of the rich, the famous, and the politically astute, there was constant need for upkeep. Machines scrubbed the docks, the boats, the water, and the shoreline, but someone had to mind those machines. And sometimes, when a machine broke down in the water—as happened now and again—someone, usually of an aquatic spe
cies, had to go repair it.
There was a maintenance crew in the water at the moment, in fact, engaged in the process of repairing a skimmer bot the sole purpose of which was to keep the surface of the water free of unsightly or potentially dangerous debris.
The crew was made up of a Nautolan and a Mon Calamari. The Nautolan was in the water with the broken bot, while the Mon Cal monitored the repair from the docks. As Sal watched, the Nautolan completed his repairs, sent the water skimmer on its way, swam back to shore in a series of effortless strokes, and pulled himself out of the water, the tips of two of his dorsal head tresses lifting to perform a serpentine dance.
Tuden Sal smiled. If all the control overrides and charges were planted that easily, bringing Palpatine’s palatial seaside home down on his head was going to be simpler than he’d thought. When this was over, he decided, the Nautolans who had come up with the idea would deserve a Hutt’s reward—the entire resistance movement would owe them that.
In the next several days, fifty of the little cleaning bots would come up for routine maintenance. Their team of Whiplash associates—all carefully inserted into the maintenance crew in ways both mundane and ingenious—could service roughly two-thirds of them. Others would seemingly “forget” their programming and run amok, necessitating emergency measures to set them right again.
In the end, Whiplash would have roughly seventy obedient, highly charged assassins on its hands. They would assuredly bring down a large portion of the Emperor’s seaside palace and his landing pad. In the event that this failed to kill him, there was a contingency plan: If the Emperor attempted to flee by water, he would be the victim of a second wave of killer maintenance bots and Nautolan assassins. And if he tried to leave by surface streets, other Whiplash operatives in the area would surely be able to penetrate his weakened defensive forces and destroy him.
Emperor Palpatine’s senses were clouded by arrogance. He thought far too highly of his own powers and those of his lieutenant, Darth Vader. He was about to find out how limited they were against a sly and unpredictable enemy.
Sal finished off his caf and pushed his datapad into his pocket. He felt good about his plan, despite what naysayers like Jax Pavan and traitors like Pol Haus might think. This was the right course of action. The only course of action that made any sense.
Yimmon and his executive council had been too timid—his being abducted while fleeing Coruscant was proof of that … and also, perhaps, a fitting reward for such timidity. It fell to stronger leadership to see what had to be done and simply do it.
Probus Tesla did not wait long to “attend” Thi Xon Yimmon in his cell at the core of Kantaros Station. He had been curious about the accommodations the Whiplash leader had been accorded, had imagined all manner of ways in which Darth Vader might seek to undermine the Cerean’s rocklike calm once he’d emerged from his self-induced catatonia. This Yimmon had done, but apparently what Lord Vader had encountered in the other man’s mind was not at all what he had expected.
Tesla knew nothing of either his Master’s expectations or his findings. What he did know was that Vader had acquired a large blast cage intended to defeat electronic surveillance, kinetic energy, and psychic signals. He was surprised to find that the Whiplash leader was being held, not in that shielded environment, but in a cavernous room whose upper dimensions were cloaked so completely in shadow that, from Yimmon’s perspective, the place must seem as endless and dark as space itself. But though the outer regions of the place were in utter blackness, the spot where Yimmon sat cross-legged on the floor—he had been given no furniture of any kind—was lit harshly from a single overhead source that beat down like a merciless sun.
This was puzzling. Tesla knew that sleep deprivation was a cardinal factor in a successful interrogation, but all Yimmon needed to do to find blessed darkness was walk away from the light. That may have had symbolic or spiritual significance to a religious zealot like Yimmon, but that certainly wouldn’t have kept him from sleeping away his days and hours here.
Only when he had watched the prisoner for several minutes from his hidden gallery high along one wall did Tesla realize the ingenuity of his Master’s devices: when Thi Xon Yimmon moved, the light moved with him, bathing him continually in harsh, white brilliance while leaving all beyond the cloak of radiance in utter darkness. In addition, he discovered that the blast cage had been incorporated into the watcher’s gallery, thus minimizing the likelihood that the psychically sensitive individual in the room below would know he was being observed.
In the dim confines of Tesla’s aerie, a soft tone sounded and a computer voice said, “Subject’s heart rate has reached resting levels.”
The room beyond was suddenly barraged with a chaos dance of light, movement, and sound. Tiny glittering lights spun and wove through the darkness, and a cacophonous blend of arrhythmic and atonal sounds swirled around the Cerean prisoner.
Yimmon rose from the floor and moved slowly to the outer perimeter of the room, finding the wall beneath Tesla’s observation chamber and moving along it, trailing his fingertips over the surface. He never once opened his eyes.
Tesla was astounded. A frisson of some unnamable emotion scurried between his shoulder blades. Surely it was only coincidence that the spot Yimmon had navigated to lay directly below where his watcher was concealed.
The Inquisitor watched through the filtered and enhanced transparisteel of the observation chamber’s wall as the prisoner made his way steadily, even briskly, around the outer perimeter of his huge prison cell. He turned at the last corner and made his way up the wall toward where he had begun, seemingly oblivious of the spinning lights and the blare of sound.
Yimmon stopped walking in exactly the place he had begun his sojourn. He stretched, rolled his large head on his shoulders, then made a second circuit of the room, again stopping in the exact spot he had previously.
Well, of course, he was simply counting footsteps. He must have made that same circuit repeatedly in the time he’d been there. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about that, though the eerie serenity of the man was disconcerting. Tesla wondered if the Dark Lord found it so.
The Watcher turned from his window. Now was as good a time as any to begin “attending” the prisoner.
Twenty-Six
“You gonna come with us to the little mercenary’s store?” Den asked Jax as the Jedi put final touches on what Den thought of as his “pirate costume.”
Jax inserted his faux-cyber lens and turned to look at him. “I’ve got another errand I need to take care of at the tapcaf.”
Den shivered at the strangeness of the seemingly mechanical eye. “Yeah? And what might that be?”
“I need to talk to Tyno Fabris about something.”
“Tyno Fabris?” I-Five asked as he entered the tiny crew’s commons, wearing his pit droid persona. “Or Prince Xizor?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not really. Black Sun is Black Sun. One member is just as slimy and dangerous as the next.”
Jax tied the closes of his jacket with extraordinary care. “Five …”
“What can you possibly have to say to him? You refused his additional help the last time you met, if you’ll recall,” the droid said. “I thought it was one of the smartest decisions you’ve made of late.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I think it would be a bad idea to go back and deal with Xizor further. He can’t be trusted.”
“Except not to be trustworthy,” Den muttered.
“Who said I trusted him? I don’t. But I do need his resources. He can get us onto Kantaros Station with some of his smugglers. And he may be able to provide cover or camouflage for us if we should happen to need it.”
“For which he will demand what, Jax?” I-Five asked. “Something you can’t afford to give?”
“We’ve had this discussion before—”
“We apparently need to have it again.”
Den looked back and forth between t
he Jedi and the droid. Under other circumstances he would have found the picture hilarious—a piratical human facing off against a meter-tall pit droid. Ludicrous. He could feel the tension between the two crawling on his skin; Jax was the definition of grim, and I-5YQ bristled with righteous indignation. It was almost like a standoff between a father and son.
Den swallowed an inappropriate chuckle when Jax observed, “This must be what it’s like to have a father.”
“Sometimes you seem to need one,” the droid responded.
“What I need,” Jax ground out, “is a Jedi Master, but I don’t have that. What I need is Laranth, but I don’t have her, either. What I need is not to have put Yimmon in harm’s way, but I did. What I need is the training and the experience to go head-to-head with Vader—but I lack that, as well. The last time I faced him I had help—a lot of it. And even with all that help, it took Vader overreaching and Rhinann throwing his life away to even get us out of there alive. Right now, I’ve got Xizor and his resources and I’m willing to use them.”
“This is a mistake, Jax,” I-Five told him. “For a Jedi Knight to be in the service of a Black Sun Vigo …”
“I don’t like it, either. But it’s what we’ve got.”
Den realized he’d been shaking his head for the last minute or so. “Jax, Jax, we can’t.”
Jax fixed him with a cold gaze. “Maybe you can’t, but I have to. If you don’t want to be part of this, then don’t be. I’m sure I can catch a ride on one of Xizor’s ships.”
“Then perhaps you should,” said I-Five.
Jax slipped his lightsaber under the folds of his jacket and left the ship, leaving Den to stare after him.
“Come on, Den,” I-Five said. “We, too, have errands to take care of. I think it behooves us to get my retrofit completed as soon as possible.”
“Do you really mean to bail on Jax? Can’t we …”
The Last Jedi Page 22
