The Last Jedi

by Michael Reaves

  “What is that?” Den asked.

  “Something I picked up in the medbay.”

  “Do you—”

  “Yes, I do know what it is, what it does, and how long it will take them to wake up and be able to move their joints and use their vocal cords.”

  She held up two Imperial comlinks. She opened one and removed its guts, stomping them to shards, then scooted them beneath life pod’s soft-docking skirt. Then she rose and crept to where she could see the full sweep of the concourse.

  She knelt there for a moment or two, watching something going on down the way, then rose and beckoned to Den and I-Five. When they reached her, she drew her weapon, pointed it at Den, and nudged him along the causeway toward the inner portal. I-Five, in his astromech camouflage, scurried along at her side.

  They were in the middle of the Imperial docking bay and had just come in sight of Vader’s shuttle when I-Five spoke softly.

  “He looked at me.”

  “Huh?” Den grunted.

  Sacha said, “What? Who?”

  “In the corridor earlier. When he was coming in from his shuttle. Vader looked at me as he passed by.” He let a beat go by in which time Den’s insides had once more gone squirmy, then added, “No one notices droids.”

  Forty-Six

  Jax was wary of reaching out through the Force so close to Vader and his nest of Inquisitors, but he was hopeful that if he “tunneled,” as Darth Ramage had called it—focused so tightly on a particular energy that he glided past all others—he might go undetected. The chief drawback of the discipline was that it kept the practitioner from being aware of any energies other than the one targeted. In seeking one Force-user, he might miss the presence of another.

  For Jax, that was an acceptable risk. He knew there were Inquisitors on the station—suspected that Vader might even be here—though making absolutely sure would cause him to reveal himself.

  What his tunneling told him as he sat in stillness aboard the starfighter-cum-courier was that Thi Xon Yimmon was no longer surrounded by sensor-confounding equipment. They had moved him. And, Jax realized as he felt the Cerean’s patterns of consciousness alter inexplicably, they had drugged him.

  Pursuant to what?

  It didn’t matter. Jax could wait no longer to move.

  It would take many minutes to work his way to where Yimmon was being held. Ten. Perhaps fifteen. Perhaps longer if he met with unforeseen obstacles. There was no way to be sure when a decoy would be the most needful, so he would have to guess. He would also have to trust the station schematic he’d gotten from Xizor. The thought made him realize how dependent he’d gotten on I-5YQ for some things—I-Five would be able to check the schematic against the reality held in the Imperial AI, for example.

  Jax would be less than honest if he didn’t also acknowledge how much he missed the droid—and Den.

  He stilled himself further, reaching for the knowledge he’d assimilated from the Sith Holocron. It continued to appear in his mind’s eye as a “library” containing a collection of books. Now he opened the Book of Time, plotted an angle of approach—the “southern hemisphere” that could be accessed from the commercial docks made the most sense—and felt of the local time currents.

  Then, with the pyronium nugget suspended before him in a field of Force energy, he considered what a berserker Jedi might do to rescue a friend.

  Tesla calmed himself with a will, imagining a cool stream of water pouring over his head. He was not nervous, merely excited. His Lord had requested that he oversee the prisoner’s preparation for surgery while Vader, himself, conferred with the Emperor.

  Tesla would be here at the Dark Lord’s triumph; they would pry Thi Xon Yimmon’s dual cortex open like a clamshell and extract pearls of information. They would have the resistance in the palm of their hands.

  The Inquisitor checked the brain pattern readouts at the head of the table on which the prisoner lay.

  Fascinating.

  The twinned brains were even reacting to the anesthetic differently. One was in a soporific state; the other seemed much less affected. In fact, as Tesla watched, the more robust brainwave surged. At the same time, he felt a ripple in the Force, like a pebble dropped into a lazy pond.

  Odd.

  Which cortex was reacting, and what was it reacting to? Which brain handled the autonomic responses and which the higher reasoning faculties? He could make an educated guess, but there was no way to be certain.

  Unless …

  Tesla reached out a tentative rivulet of the Force to probe the Cerean’s consciousness.

  Up in the northern Imperial docking ring, in the bays reserved for small craft, a courier vessel opened her outer hatch and extended her landing ramp. An officer descended and made his way to the portal that led into the Imperial facility proper. He moved with purposeful stride into the interior, passing other officers, a handful of technicians, a group of stormtroopers. Other than saluting superior officers, he interacted with no one.

  In fact, Jax had no idea what he would do if someone decided to stop him. After setting up his decoy, he had used the pyronium to power the Aethersprite’s disguise. This meant the illusion was, to all intents and purposes, eternal, but it also meant that he didn’t have the pyronium with him to extend his use of the Force. With it, perhaps he would be Darth Vader’s equal; without it, he could only hope that something he had assimilated from the Holocron would give him some small advantage, however fleeting.

  He shook the dire thought away. He’d made the decision that keeping the Delta-7 cloaked was of paramount importance since it removed a potentially disastrous random variable—the sudden discovery of a Jedi vessel in an Imperial facility—and held open his only avenue of escape.

  The projection of himself as an Imperial officer, while effective, was difficult to maintain, given that he also had to tunnel to keep himself focused on Yimmon. He needed a different means of cloaking himself, one that would leave him free to employ the tools Darth Ramage’s Holocron had given him.

  Letting go of Yimmon, he quickly scanned for an empty room, found one, and slipped into it. It was a small commons of some sort. No, rather, a meditation chamber—the lightfoils and other nuances confirmed this was where the Inquisitors practiced their various disciplines. It was empty just now, though Jax could sense the residual energies of its most recent and powerful occupants. Tesla had been here not that long before; the Jedi could feel the prickly texture of the Inquisitor’s agitation.

  He pushed the sensory fabric aside. An Inquisitor would be perfect for Jax’s purposes—or rather, his outer garment would be.

  He scanned again, seeking a Force signature nearby. He found one mere meters away.

  Back out in the corridor, he located the doorway that hid the Inquisitor and signaled for admittance. After a moment of hesitation—during which he sensed an interruption of the other’s meditative state, annoyance at having been interrupted, and hope that it would not be an interruption of long duration—the door slid aside to reveal a tall figure in the robes of an apprentice, still adjusting its cowl.

  Surprise in his tone, the Inquisitor asked, “Yes, Major? What do you want?”

  “A word with you,” Jax said, and stepped through the door and around behind the Inquisitor—an Elomin. He raised a hand as the other man turned, touching his fingers to one bony temple.

  Caught completely unawares by the psychic jolt, the Inquisitor folded up like an emptied sack and dropped to the floor. Jax considered taking the robe he wore, but changed his mind when he saw that others like it hung in a small closet next to the refresher unit. Better yet. That way, the Inquisitor would not be certain, on awakening, what had happened to him or why. If Jax was lucky, he wouldn’t notice that one of his robes was missing.

  He moved the unconscious Inquisitor to his bunk, then donned the borrowed robe swiftly, settling the hood over his head. As tall as he was, it was large on him and puddled a bit about his feet. Jax adjusted the folds of fabric to
minimize that effect, then moved back out into the corridor. It was empty, so he took a moment to check his chrono; his decoy would activate in less than a minute.

  Jax resumed his journey toward Yimmon, focusing completely on the Cerean’s consciousness. What he found there surprised and perplexed him, for it was not Thi Xon Yimmon alone that he touched upon, but another consciousness, as well—subliminal, but clearly that of a Force-user.

  In a chaos tumble of impressions and emotions, Jax understood three significant things: Yimmon was in a medical facility for some reason, he felt himself to be in immediate danger, and he was in mental contact with the Inquisitor Tesla.

  Jax withdrew instantly. His feet continued to move forward, but his mind was roiling. If Tesla was probing Yimmon’s drugged mind in some way, might he have sensed Jax’s undisguised touch?

  Jax reached out tentatively again, this time drawing on the residual personal energy of the robe’s owner to muddle his own Force signature. No, Tesla’s Force sense seemed focused elsewhere. Still, Jax felt a buzz of annoyance beneath the spiky texture of his curiosity about the nature of Yimmon’s consciousness.

  Duality. He was focused on its duality. On separating—

  The intent of the Inquisitor’s interest hit Jax like a bolt from a disruptor as he discovered yet another meaning of the Cephalon’s riddle.

  Yimmon’s separation destroys us all.

  He knew it as surely as if Tesla had spoken the words aloud into his ear. Darth Vader was going to surgically separate the two halves of Thi Xon Yimmon’s brain.

  Tesla kept his mind on the Cerean, his annoyance checked only by his sense of purpose. Trust Renefra Ren to try to snoop into Tesla’s domain. He had felt the questing touch of the odious apprentice and had ignored it.

  Vader would be here in mere minutes to oversee the clipping of Yimmon’s neural pathways. If the operation was a success—if it yielded the information the Dark Lord needed and wanted to take down the resistance—Tesla could not help but be elevated in his Master’s eyes. And when, at last, the Emperor died and Darth Vader moved to choose an apprentice—or if Vader were destroyed and the Emperor had to choose a new champion …

  Tesla did not explore either avenue of thought. It was heady, and he was wary of falling into hubris. He was too smart—too cautious—to do that.

  Some external stimulus vied for his attention. A noise he thought he recognized. It called him sharply, but he steeled himself against it. It was only Ren, most likely, trying to distract him from his responsibility to Lord Vader.

  He would not let himself be distracted.

  Sacha was sweating inside the stormtrooper’s disguise. She was a tall woman, so it fit her reasonably well, but she felt restricted by it. She didn’t know how to make use of the aural and visual enhancements built into the system, so the headgear only made navigation trickier.

  “How far?” she asked I-Five.

  “Four-hundred-eighty-two-point-oh-three meters,” the droid responded.

  “You can approximate.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Quicker.”

  The R2 unit turned left. Two men in blue coveralls passed by, peering curiously at the Sullustan prisoner and his two guards. Neither spoke, though one did cast a glance at them over his shoulder.

  Several meters along the new corridor, an Imperial officer—a commander, judging by his pips—passed by, then stopped.

  “Who’s this?” he asked Sacha, gesturing at Den.

  She shot to attention, her mind fixing on one very important fact—she was female. Stormtroopers were all male. Her natural voice was a dusky contralto, but no matter how low she pitched it, it was still a woman’s voice.

  And yet she heard herself say in a clear baritone—without even moving her lips: “Sullustan spy. Tried to slip in through the portal in the commercial dock down on Level One. He was carrying an unknown device.” Sacha had the presence of mind to raise the hand holding the recursor. “We suspect he may be a resistance operative.”

  The officer glanced at Den. “You aren’t taking him to Lord Vader, are you?”

  The last time Sacha had seen a look that cold, her Podracer had blown up within the next five minutes.

  Again, the male voice issued—seemingly—from her lips. “No. I was told to take him to an Inquisitor named Tesla for questioning.”

  “Questioning. Strip-mining would be a more accurate term. And better than he deserves. Vermin. Carry on, then.” He gestured down the corridor, turned on his heel, and paced away from them.

  “Five?” Den asked softly as they resumed their walk. “Was that you?”

  The droid responded in a series of beeps and whistles.

  “Thanks,” murmured Sacha. “I hadn’t counted on being stopped—”

  She drew up suddenly, hesitating. She couldn’t have said why she was hesitating except that something had … shifted in the atmosphere of the station. It was like a sudden itch somewhere that she couldn’t scratch. She shook herself mentally, squared her shoulders, and started to say something about being suggestible, but I-Five had stopped, too, and seemed to be staring at her.

  “Oh, don’t tell me you felt that, too,” she murmured. “You couldn’t have.”

  “Felt what?” Den asked, looking back and forth between the two of them.

  I-Five set himself in motion again. Sacha followed suit, giving the Sullustan a gentle nudge toward their destination.

  “Have you ever been tested for Force sensitivity?” the droid asked subliminally; she heard his voice over the stormtrooper uniform’s audio receiver.

  “When I joined the Rangers. It’s … well, I’m no Jedi. But I get—you know—feelings. What about you?”

  “Droids don’t have the Force.”

  “Yeah? What do you have?”

  “You know,” Den said in a quietly aggrieved voice, “this is like listening to one half of a comlink conversation. What are you two talking about?”

  Sacha turned the corner into a cross-corridor and halted yet again. What stopped her this time was a swiftly moving figure that shot into an intersection some ten meters distant, hesitated, then glanced in their direction.

  Den let out a yelp of surprise. “Jax!”

  If the Jedi saw them, he gave no sign of it. His gaze swept the corridor in which they stood, then he bolted out of sight.

  “That was Jax!” Den cried. “Blast it, that was Jax!”

  “Yeah, but where’s he going?” murmured Sacha.

  A handful of seconds later, alarms began to sound, and security lights raced along the floor and ceiling. I-Five took off toward the intersection with surprising speed. Sacha shouldered her blaster rifle and followed the droid, leaving Den to keep up as best he could.

  “If that’s Jax,” the Sullustan said from behind her, “what the hell is he doing?”

  She didn’t answer, but broke into a run, arriving at the intersection at the same time I-Five did. She turned and looked down the corridor. Jax was nowhere in sight. The only turn he could have taken that would have “disappeared” him that swiftly would have been into one of two turbolifts between here and the next intersection—the wrong direction if he intended to get to Yimmon. Yimmon was on this level.

  Was it possible he didn’t know about the move? That seemed unlikely.

  Was he running interference for them so they could get to Yimmon? That, too, seemed unlikely.

  The thunder of boots against metal hauled Sacha’s attention back to the present. She turned and dragged Den in front of her, clamping an ungentle hand on his shoulder and jamming the muzzle of the blaster into his back.

  A moment later half a dozen stormtroopers raced by, ignoring them completely. The Imperials hesitated at the lift to eye the control panel, then dashed into the one across from it.

  Sacha breathed out a long sigh of relief, then hurried her own team down the corridor toward the next junction, feeling that nasty itch between her shoulder blades again. She paused to give the lift panel a
glance. It had, indeed, stopped two levels up.

  What would happen, she wondered, if Jax realized his mistake, reversed course, and led the stormtroopers—and their boss—back this way?

  “We’re going to take the lift,” she told Den.

  “But we’re already on—”

  “I know, but if Jax realizes he’s off course and heads back this way, we’ll be overrun. We’ll go down, get to a closer lift hub, and then go back up.”

  She activated the left-hand lift, then herded everyone into it, praying—perversely—that Jax didn’t come back this way.

  Forty-Seven

  Jax stopped at the sound of the klaxon’s wail. He wondered if there were some protocol that Inquisitors were supposed to follow under such circumstances—battle stations to go to, that sort of thing. It hardly mattered. He knew where he was going.

  He was peripherally aware of the response to his decoy, felt the shift of attention to the part of the station where he had set his illusory doppelgänger to show itself—fleetingly—to surveillance equipment, before fading to nothing. While his “ghost” would seem to be coming up from the freight bays adjacent to the commercial sector toward the detention area, meanwhile the real Jax would arrive from the small-craft bays higher up on the northern hemisphere—almost the opposite direction. And he was targeting the medbay two levels below the lockup.

  Now that he knew where he was headed, he took a moment to make a general sweep of the area for Force-users. He could do so nervelessly; it would be perfectly reasonable for an Inquisitor to check for the location of his compatriots in such a circumstance.

  He opened himself to receiving the energies and was almost knocked from his feet by their violence. It was like being flayed by icy, malevolent whips of pure darkness. The regard of the Dark Lord was like a thick, viscous cable of frigid malice directed toward the Force projection. Around it, in spiraling tendrils of hostility, the energies of the Inquisitors whipped in the same direction. The attention of the stormtroopers and Imperial officers came in unfocused bursts like brittle slugfire.