The Last Jedi

by Michael Reaves

  “If?”

  She chuckled. “I’ve got what I need. Come on back before you get swept up in whatever’s going on over there.”

  The droid obeyed immediately, trundling back through the Red Zone’s hallways. He had made the turn at which he’d parted company with the Inquisitor he’d followed when the stormtroopers reappeared, marching in perfect unison toward him.

  In their wake were the Inquisitor, Tesla, and Darth Vader.

  Den got a way-too-close look at a reflection of R2-Five in Vader’s black mask as he passed by and licked suddenly parched lips. “We just ran out of time.”

  Forty-Four

  Tesla had served the Dark Lord long enough to know when the Sith was agitated. He felt his Master’s present agitation as a chaotic, eddying current that seemed to have neither direction nor destination. He did not let on that he felt this, however. Nor did he ask what was disturbing his Lord. To hint that he thought Darth Vader was in any way shorn of his usual cold, imperturbable self-possession could prove disastrous.

  And yet Probus Tesla knew better than most that his Lord was a being—somehow the word man seemed inadequate and inappropriate—of towering passion … but a passion that, like an incipient volcanic eruption, was shielded within the walls of an impenetrable furnace. It was what gave Darth Vader his aura of power, Tesla thought—that sense that there was a deep, hot molten core beneath the icy exterior.

  Now, as they made their way toward Vader’s private quarters, Tesla simply waited for his Lord to make his wishes known—which he did not do until he had dismissed the stormtroopers and given the Imperial officers orders to extend the station sensors farther into the asteroid field.

  “You followed my orders regarding Thi Xon Yimmon?” Vader asked him when they were alone.

  “Yes, Lord. I observed him carefully and closely.” True.

  Tesla expected Vader to ask next what he had observed.

  He didn’t. Instead he asked, “Did you sense any … disturbances in the Force while I was absent?”

  What had he sensed? That he was being observed, probed by rivulets of Force sense? “Not that I couldn’t account for. Why do you ask? Has something happened, Lord Vader?”

  The gleaming, black mask was opaque, but Tesla did not imagine the momentary stillness behind it, as if the Dark Lord were calculating how much to reveal. He felt a tickle of disappointment. Darth Vader didn’t trust him, that was clear. He swallowed the disappointment; he would win that trust.

  “A door opened,” Vader said, “and out of it poured light and darkness … twilight. Like the moment before dawn. It was … unexpected.”

  “I don’t understand,” Tesla said stupidly.

  Vader made an abrupt gesture. “You didn’t feel it, then?”

  “When would—”

  “No matter. If you had felt it, you’d know. You wouldn’t need me to put a time or date on it. You would know.”

  Tesla bit his lip, using the pain to focus his emotions. Once again he had been found wanting, but he would not allow it to affect him. “You asked about Yimmon. If I had observed him.”

  Vader moved restlessly, then turned to face his Inquisitor. “And what did you observe?”

  Tesla had thought much about this—about the peculiar feeling of being watched when he was in contact with Yimmon. But how to explain it to his Lord without revealing the depths of that contact?

  He did not answer the question directly. “The dual cortex possessed by the Cereans is a significant adaptation,” he began. “It allows them, I think, to be … quite above the sort of tactics we have used. I believe that whether he is experiencing pain, sensory deprivation, or anxiety, our ‘guest’ is able to literally detach himself and rise above what he is feeling. It’s as if he is able to allow one part of his brain to feel the emotions connected to his suffering, then buttress it with the strength of the other.”

  Vader’s masked face was turned toward Tesla, but of course he could read nothing in the opaque optical shields. He cleared his throat and forged on.

  “It has been theorized that a Cerean’s lower faculties reside in one cortex and his higher ones in the other.” He had researched that exhaustively and was pleased with his findings.

  Vader stirred, and Tesla had the absurd idea that his mind had been elsewhere.

  “That would be a remarkable adaptation,” Vader said now. “Let the primitive lower brain absorb the physical and psychic shocks, then soothe it with the higher faculties.”

  “My thought, Lord Vader,” Tesla said, taking a quick step toward the Sith, “was that it is an adaptation that could be used against him.”

  Vader was still watching him. “You found contact with him … disturbing.”

  It wasn’t really a question, and Tesla hesitated, knowing that he had allowed something to seep from beneath the shield he’d erected around his own emotions. “Yes. I did. Until I determined why he made me uncomfortable.”

  Vader’s regard was swift and piercing. “A sensation of being watched.”

  Tesla felt as if every bit of blood had drained out of his head. Could Darth Vader penetrate him that easily? “I … I find that an accurate description.”

  Vader turned away and moved to stare at the viewscreen that showed the prisoner in his expansive cell, sitting, as ever, in meditation. “Could he be the source of …” He didn’t finish the thought.

  “The source of what, my Lord?”

  “Of the strange … twilight effusion I felt in the Force.”

  Tesla shook his head. “I don’t know, Lord.”

  “No. You don’t.” Vader swung about to face him. His gaze, as always, was inscrutable, expressionless—still, Tesla felt sweat break out beneath his heavy robes. “That is, Master, I have no reason to believe him a Force adept as such, though …”

  “Yes?”

  “When I was in the room with him, I did sense something beyond what I expected. I believe that to be the result of a combination of his extreme intelligence and his species’ dual cortex. In fact, the answer to breaking Thi Xon Yimmon—to making him permeable—might lie in surgically disconnecting his cortices so that the one cannot defend or buttress the other.”

  Darth Vader was still for a long moment, so still for so long that Tesla felt a vague annoyance that he should have come to what he felt was a remarkable idea, only to have his Master focus less on what should have been of vital interest—crushing the resistance—and more on some freakish “twilight effusion” of the Force that Tesla had not even felt.

  Vader abruptly turned back to the viewscreen in a swirl of black robes. “Arrange for our ‘guest’ to be taken to the infirmary. I will program the surgical droid myself.”

  Tesla fought to muzzle the burst of accomplishment—of pride. He had done it; he, Probus Tesla, though but an Inquisitor, had solved a conundrum that the Dark Lord himself had been unable to solve. “Yes, Lord Vader. At once.” He turned and strode toward the entrance to his Master’s quarters.

  Vader’s next question was soft, almost purring; yet Tesla felt it as a bucket of ice water poured down his back. “Tell me, Tesla—how did you come to know what you have told me about Yimmon?”

  The words arrested him just shy of the door. “I … I have done a great deal of research—”

  “You sensed this. You felt the dual regard.”

  “I … Yes.”

  “Yet I did not,” Vader said musingly. “Perhaps because I was working to contain him, while you were contained. You walked through the intersection of his dual consciousness.”

  “I—I realize that you told me to observe only, my Lord. Which I did, though I admit I got closer to him than I intended. For that I am truly—”

  Vader seemed not to have heard him. “Interesting. That the experiences of even an inferior Force-user may prove instructive.”

  Inferior? Anger flared in Tesla’s breast, then quickly guttered. Of course he was inferior. For one blinding second he’d forgotten to whom he was speaking. That was
dangerous. Extremely dangerous.

  Vader continued, “You walked through his mind. Did you leave your footprints there?”

  In an obscure corner of Probus Tesla’s consciousness, the part that was not quaking in scalded fury cowered in terror. “My Lord, I …”

  “Tell me.”

  The compulsion was stronger than mere words, leaving Tesla with the impression that Vader held his will in one gloved hand.

  “I—I merely suggested that Whiplash had fallen. That his network of friends and associates on Coruscant was gone. That it was only a matter of time before the entire resistance was as dead as Jax Pavan.”

  The release was sudden and violent. Tesla reeled back against the wall, gasping for breath.

  Vader’s voice was once more unnervingly calm. “Go. Prepare for the surgery.”

  Tesla went, wondering if it had been his disobedience that had caused that flare of rage in his Master … or the mention of a dead Jedi. He had a feeling it had been the latter.

  Forty-Five

  The mechanical part of the plan was the hardest in some ways. Having ascertained that an Imperial corvette was entering the Bothan system and making for Kantaros Station, Jax traced its path and placed his Force-cloaked vessel directly in it. It was possible that even this minimal use of the Force—the equivalent of waving a closed fist at someone behind their back—might alert Vader if he were near, but Jax couldn’t let himself worry about the extent of the Dark Lord’s abilities at this juncture.

  When the ship overflew his position, Jax tried his hand at Force projection: a swiftly spinning chunk of ice and rock the size of a long-range shuttle seemed to ricochet out of the orbit of the larger asteroid field and tumble into the corvette’s path, causing its helmsman to brake tens of kilometers early.

  Pacing the corvette, Jax brought the Aethersprite into contact with the keel of the Imperial ship so gently that he doubted the contact had even registered on the ship’s systems. A moment later the larger vessel raised its shields, enfolding Jax within them as it dived into the asteroid field.

  Perfect. Now even the most sophisticated sensors would read the energy profile of his ship as part of the output of the corvette. The trick now was getting onto the station.

  The corvette wouldn’t enter the space docks—it was too large. It would use a refueling rig flown from the station to replenish its fuel. Any personnel and cargo that needed to be off-loaded would make use of shuttles to enter the docking bays.

  That was where things got tricky. Entering one of the station’s docking areas Force-cloaked was out of the question. Shuttles docked close enough to one another that one of them would be almost certain to collide with him if he seemed to be an empty space. The only possibility was another application of Force projection. A more prodigious one this time: the Delta-7 had to pretend to be a docking shuttle or courier vessel.

  And so it did. When the Imperial corvette’s shuttles left for the station, there was an additional courier in their number that was directed to a diplomatic bay in the northeastern hemisphere of the station’s Imperial sector. It landed stem to stern with another courier, docking in the other vessel’s shadow, just within the docking bay’s perimeter force shield.

  It was, as far as the Imperial operatives in the area were concerned, unremarkable in every way.

  “Sacha, he’s not coming back out.” Den stood in the hatch of the ship’s engineering bay, his stomach feeling as if he’d swallowed a nest of jellyworms.

  She looked up from whatever she was working on and let out an expletive that made the Sullustan’s dewlaps quiver and his ears flush. “Where the hell did Jax get that fragging crisper in the first place? He sure doesn’t act like any droid I’ve ever known.”

  “Jax inherited I-Five from his father. Can you come talk to him? He seems to feel now that he’s downloaded his data he should continue surveillance.”

  “Maybe he’s right.”

  “Maybe he’s right?” Den echoed in disbelief. “How’re we supposed to get into the facility if he’s not with us? Someone’s got to take out the stormtroopers while he messes with the cams at the checkpoint, right?”

  She grinned at him. “Actually, I’m gonna mess with the cams.” She snapped a cover onto the item she’d been working on and held it up for him to see. “My patented sensor recursor.”

  The “patented” recursor was a thin rectangular object about the length of Sacha’s index finger. It had a touch pad on it and a tiny vid display.

  “Your what?”

  “Recursor. It’ll basically cause whatever cam or sensor it’s aimed at to loop until it’s told to stop. One of the clever things you can do with ionite.”

  “So you’re saying we don’t need Five to come back.”

  She shook her head, pocketing the recursor and striding to the communications console. “Didn’t say that. We absolutely need him to come back. But additional surveillance would be good, too.”

  Den grimaced. “Meaning we need two of him.”

  “At least.” She opened a connection to I-Five. “Hey, Tinnie. Your sidekick here tells me—”

  “They’re moving Yimmon,” I-Five announced.

  Den imagined he could hear tension in the mechanically generated voice. Impossible, of course. But he could see by the sudden stiffening of Sacha’s body that she’d had the same reaction.

  Both of them glanced up at the viewscreen above the engineering console. The view I-Five had online showed a group of six stormtroopers and an Inquisitor leading a shambling Thi Xon Yimmon down a short corridor through a set of sliding doors that closed with a snap behind them.

  “Where is that?” Den asked.

  “Medbay. Two levels up from the high-security area and almost as well protected.”

  Even as he answered, I-Five rolled up to an AI port and inserted his data wand. He withdrew it mere moments later and began to move away down the hall.

  “They’ve got an OR set up in there. All I could get out of the medbay AI is that they’re planning on performing neurosurgery on him. The AI knows nothing about the nature of the procedure—access to that information was sealed by Darth Vader himself.”

  Den felt as if the worms in his stomach had turned to ice. He and Sacha exchanged glances.

  “I’m returning to the outer docking portal,” I-Five said, not waiting for them to respond. “There are two stormtroopers there and security apparatus. I need you to come in at the exact moment I’m going out.”

  “Yeah, yeah, so the portal will be open. I get it,” said Sacha. “Then what?”

  “There is a small life pod under repair just to your left as you enter the portal.”

  “Yeah. Saw it when you went in.”

  “We should be able to use it to cover our activities. If we can take out the troopers swiftly and quietly, we should be able to make use of one of the uniforms and gear to get you inside. Sacha, you spoke of creating a device that would confound the cams—”

  “Done. If we time it right, the surveillance system will never know we’re there.” She quickly explained how the recursor worked, for which I-Five applauded her with a single word of praise.

  “Elegant.”

  “Not really. But it was all I could do on such short notice.”

  Den’s gaze was on the display above the console. It presently showed a set of turbolift doors that hissed open as he watched. The R2 was out like a shot, nearly colliding with a pair of technicians. He rounded them, and continued darting through the mazelike corridors at high speed.

  “You might want to slow down a bit, Five,” Den advised. “You don’t want to draw too much attention to yourself.”

  “I’m behaving like all the other R2 units I’ve seen here. Bustling little tin cans. No one even notices them—” His voice simply stopped, though the scenery continued to fly by. After a pause, he said, “I’m approaching the inner docking bay doors. Time to scramble.”

  Sacha closed the connection to the console, picked up a comlink fro
m the collection above it, and keyed it to I-Five’s frequency. Den did the same. Then they headed for the portal that gave onto the Imperial docking bays.

  They wandered up to the checkpoint, stopping just short of the area the cams covered. The stormtroopers turned their heads in unison to track Sacha, proving that there were actual men inside the white shells.

  Sacha smiled. Waved. “Hi, boys. Tell me, do you ever get bored standing there like that?”

  They ignored her.

  Den’s comlink pinged. “Now,” he said.

  Sacha targeted one surveillance cam, then the other, starting them on an endless loop that showed two bored guards standing there in their little plastic outfits.

  “Hey!” said one of the guards. “What’s that in your hand?” He raised his weapon.

  The portal slid open and an R2 unit appeared. It stopped in the exact center of the doorway, effectively holding the doors open. It was enough to distract the guards: Den stunned the one to his right; Sacha took out the one to his left.

  Checking to make sure the concourse behind I-Five was empty, Den and Sacha dragged the two unconscious stormtroopers back into the Imperial docking bay and into the lee of the life pod I-Five had identified as the best hiding place.

  “I hope that worked,” Den muttered, watching Sacha peel one of the stormtrooper’s gear off.

  “It worked,” I-Five said, “because neither of these guards had a chance to call in an alarm. And even if someone should actually be monitoring the surveillance equipment at the various checkpoints, it would be unlikely they’d watch one post long enough to notice the repetitive nature of the guards’ movements.”

  He swiveled his turret toward Sacha, who was mostly encased in the lightweight, sturdy plastoid of the stormtrooper’s uniform. “Den is your prisoner,” he told her. “I am your escort.”

  She nodded, put on the helmet, strapped on the Imperial weapon, and bundled the guard—clad only in his all-covering body glove—into the life pod with his partner. She gave each an infuser full of something she’d produced from a pocket in her own formfitting coverall.