The Last Jedi

by Michael Reaves

  “Your last chance, Pavan. Come willingly and live. Resist, and die. It makes no difference to me.”

  That was a lie and Jax knew it. It did make a difference to Darth Vader, because it made a difference to Anakin Skywalker. Jax understood, at last, that if he capitulated, he would vindicate Anakin in his fall to the dark side. If he resisted to the last and died, there could be no vindication. The Jedi Order—the thing that Vader lived to crush—would be gone, true enough. But Jax knew that merely killing it would not be enough for Darth Vader. No, the last Jedi had to do more than just die.

  He had to be broken.

  If not—if he made Vader end him—the Dark Lord’s thirst for vengeance would remain unslaked, and there would be no one left for him to avenge himself upon. Even if there were other Jedi still alive—it was a big galaxy, after all—the man who had been Anakin Skywalker could search for a lifetime—a thousand lifetimes—and never find them.

  He would be without purpose.

  Like you were?

  Something deep within Jax Pavan resonated with that. Didn’t he also seek revenge for Laranth’s death? Yes, of course—he’d come to rescue Yimmon, but hadn’t he ultimately wanted this?

  He met Vader’s opaque gaze, stared into the gleaming black lenses. If he died, would that put an end to Vader’s purpose? If Vader died, would that put an end to Jax’s?

  There was no time to answer the question. The Dark Lord was coming at him with long strides.

  “Choose, Jedi!”

  Jax chose. He flung himself at the Sith, lightsaber cutting the machine-scented air of the docking bay. Vader parried and the blades locked, slid apart, arced, and locked again. The air sizzled with their power.

  Again, again. Thrust, parry, fade. Thrust, parry, fade.

  Jax worked his way slowly, inexorably back toward the Aethersprite’s berth. He was careful not to seem as if he’d given up the fight. If Vader realized he was being lured, there was no telling how he’d react.

  So Jax fought. Quite as if he expected to win.

  He pelted his adversary with small objects—anything that wasn’t bolted down, and a few things that were. Vader parried them with his lightsaber, slicing everything that came at him into shards of slag. He answered by treating Jax to the same rain of metal.

  Crew scrambled to get out of the way; but, prisoners of curiosity, most of them continued to watch from the far sidelines.

  And that gave Vader the advantage he sought.

  With a flick of his free hand, the Dark Lord Force-lifted one of the deckhands off his feet and hurled him at Jax.

  Jax froze for a split second, his weapon raised, then twisted out of the way of the screaming crewman. Anakin knew him too well—knew what he would and would not do.

  Maybe.

  With a supreme effort of will, the Jedi felt the local time currents around him, stirred them to eddies, then dropped and rolled beneath the fuselage of a small shuttle that lay between him and the Aethersprite.

  Vader’s next barrage of ordnance was aimed at where Jax had been, not where he had gone.

  Jax shot to his feet and pelted toward the Jedi starfighter where it lay tucked behind its Imperial look-alike. He was panting with the effort now, drained by the effort it took to harness so much energy.

  The deafening groan of metal from behind him caused Jax to turn. The small vessel he’d just rolled beneath was ripped from her moorings and flung aside as if she were a bit of stray debris. Darth Vader came at him out of her wake, his Sith weapon shedding lurid light.

  “You amaze me, Pavan. The things you have absorbed from that dark well of knowledge, the ease with which you use them. You are truly wasted on the light side. Your continued existence and what you have done to ensure it confirm this.”

  The observation cut deep, but Jax would not let Vader see him bleed. “What I’ve done, I did to free Yimmon. Having done that, I’ve served my purpose.”

  He was close enough to the Delta-7 now that he could feel the energies of the pyronium-fed projection as a humming tremor in the Force around him. He was certain Vader must feel it, too.

  “Served your purpose?” the Sith echoed. He made an elegant gesture with gloved hands, the lightsaber describing a graceful arc in the air. “Then surrender.”

  “I’ll die before I let you have what’s in my head, Anakin.”

  Vader was completely still for a moment, then raised his lightsaber for an attack. “As you wish … Jax.”

  As Vader swept toward him, Jax reached back and felt of the connection between the pyronium and the ship. A simple command—a simple trigger—was all it would take to end this.

  He was startled by the sudden flash of light that exploded along the hull of the starfighter’s nearest neighbor. It was as if someone had opened a door between the two ships, letting sunlight pour through.

  Vader stopped, his attention half on the newest intrusion. “Is this another of your projections? I won’t be fooled by it …”

  The dark voice trailed off as the Dark Lord must have sensed what Jax did: the new presence had a Force signature of its own—weak, but steady.

  The glow intensified, and Jax could see a figure at its heart. A humanoid figure. Had Sacha—

  “Run!”

  It was a familiar voice, but he hesitated to obey. He knew what he had to do. He had to destroy the starfighter, himself, and Vader with him.

  “Run!”

  A volley of blasterfire streamed out of the radiance between the two ships, targeting Vader. The Dark Lord Force-leapt from the station deck in an arc that took him over Jax’s head. He touched down in a swirl of black robes and rolled beneath the Aethersprite.

  The rapid blasterfire followed him, sweeping the length of the vessel and melting its port landing struts. The Jedi ship sagged toward the deck, then dropped its bow with a metallic groan.

  Jax ran.

  He ran toward the light and found, at its center, not Sacha but a stranger—a man. No, not a man, he realized as his eyes and Force sense took in the details of the face and body.

  It was a droid—a human replicant droid. It could only be I-Five, his android arm encumbered with the Nemesis blaster rifle.

  Jax stopped beside the droid.

  “Keep moving,” I-Five said, his humanoid face showing grim determination. “I am not losing you the way I lost your father.”

  Jax kept moving.

  Behind him, the blasterfire intensified. He heard a roar of Force-backed rage, then felt the air quake as something exploded in his wake. The blast tumbled him off his feet. He pitched up against the landing strut of a small courier vessel.

  Stunned, he tried to peer into the fiery aftermath of the explosion. There was no sign of Vader. And I-Five … he caught the shimmer of silvery metal as the lower half of the droid’s leg—stripped of its synthflesh—toppled into hungry flames.

  No. No, not that. Not Five.

  Jax surged to his feet, started back toward the blast, and kicked something hard that lay on the deck. He looked down. I-Five’s HRD head stared up at him from the decking. One ear had been blown away, but the durasteel skull was intact.

  As Jax reached for the head, its eyes blinked and it gave a very human grimace.

  “This,” said the droid, his voice muffled and small, “is getting old.”

  Jax smothered his quaking elation and gathered the head up.

  He became fully and suddenly aware of the chaos around him. The fire was spreading. Klaxons were going off, lights flashed, and over it all a voice repeated a dire warning: “Evacuate docking bay! Evacuate all personnel and vessels from the docking bay! Explosion imminent! Evacuate docking bay! Evacuate …”

  Jax needed no further encouragement. With I-Five’s head tucked under one arm, he hauled himself up into the courier—a tiny two-seater—and set I-Five’s head on the second seat.

  “The Laranth?” Jax asked, as he fired up the engines.

  “On her way into the asteroid field … if they obeyed my la
st instruction set.”

  “Let’s hope they did.”

  Jax navigated the little ship away from the burning wreckage and maneuvered easily among the shuttles fleeing the burning docking bay. As they zoomed clear of the station, he spared a backward thought to the crippled Jedi starfighter.

  A moment later the docking bay was racked by a second explosion as the Aethersprite sacrificed itself. The ruined ship was shot out into the void of space by the blast, and vanished as if it had been sucked up by a vacuum. In a sense it had—the pyronium had devoured the energy of the blast and now was just one more tiny, glittering bit of flotsam jettisoned from the Imperial shuttle bays. A very powerful bit of flotsam.

  Jax doubted even Darth Vader would be able to track it down … if he thought to look for it. Right now, the Dark Lord would have other things on his mind. And Jax knew without question that that mind had survived—he could feel the waves of cold rage even now.

  Jax located the Laranth amid the flotilla of commercial vessels that had evacuated the station in the wake of the “accident” on the Imperial side. He made a soft dock with the little freighter and transferred aboard before setting the courier adrift in the lee of a slowly moving asteroid.

  It felt strange to be back aboard the Laranth. He was caught up in a daft combination of joy and trepidation. After all that had happened—after all he’d done—would the others be welcoming or wary?

  He stepped through the hatch onto the cramped bridge, I-Five’s head still cradled in his arms. Sacha, Den, and Yimmon all turned to look at him for a long, heavily silent moment.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake!” Den said, his gaze lighting on what Jax was carrying. “Are you planning to make a habit of this?”

  The droid snorted through its slightly flattened nose. “I’m pleased to see you, too.”

  “Yeah, right.” Den pulled himself out of the copilot’s seat and came back to the hatch, holding his hands out. “Give him to me. I’ll go put him in one of the, umm … other chassis.”

  Jax handed over the head.

  Den slid past him, grumbling, then paused to look up into his face. “Welcome back, Jax. If you are back.”

  Jax nodded. “Yeah. I’m back. For good, this time.” He turned to Sacha, who was still watching him warily from the helm. “Set a course for Dathomir. I’ve got an appointment to keep.”

  Epilogue

  The stop on Dathomir was relatively brief; just long enough for Augwynne Djo to keep her promise to relieve Jax of Darth Ramage’s dark knowledge. It was risky, trusting a Dathomiri Witch to restore some balance to his mind, but that act of trust was, itself, a step back into the light.

  Now back aboard the Laranth, prepping for liftoff, Jax probed his mind for memories of what he’d done on Kantaros Station. The events were there—clear and crystalline. How he had influenced them was a blank—a fuzzy hollow. He could no longer sense time currents, though the concept of their existence was still in his memory. The rest of Ramage’s ideas were mere vapors—thin to transparency.

  Beside him, in the copilot’s seat, Sacha moved restlessly. “You … you all clear? Your head, I mean. You got all the … dark stuff out of it?”

  “Well, at least the dark stuff Darth Ramage contributed.”

  “Where to now, Jax?” Den asked from the jump seat behind him.

  “We’ll take Yimmon back to Toprawa, get in touch with Pol Haus and Sheel Mafeen on Coruscant, do what needs doing.”

  He turned his gaze to Sacha Swiftbird. “You don’t need me for liftoff, do you?” he asked.

  “Not for liftoff, no.” She shot him a cockeyed smile, the scar across her left eye wrinkling. “You got a hot date?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I haven’t meditated in a long time.”

  She nodded. “The tree’s right where you left it. Five and I have been taking good care of it for you.”

  “Thanks.” He returned her smile.

  “Um,” she said, oddly diffident, “about that red lightsaber …”

  “Why don’t you keep it?”

  Jax climbed out of the pilot’s chair, brushed the top of I-Five’s helm with his fingertips, laid a gentle hand on Den’s shoulder, and went aft. He hadn’t returned to his quarters since coming aboard. He’d let Sacha continue using them, and had bunked with Den and Yimmon.

  The Whiplash leader had also been in need of the Dathomiri Witches’ ministrations, even once clear of the Imperials’ drugs. When Jax asked how he had withstood the Sith interrogations and seemingly lulled Tesla into a false sense of security, he smiled benignly and said, “I had an unfair advantage—two brains instead of one. And he wore his desires—and his fears—too close to the surface. It was easy enough to leave a trail where he would follow. But,” he added, his expression sober, “Tesla had quite correctly suspected that separating my cortices would rob me of that advantage. Had he not invaded my mind one last time …”

  Yimmon’s recovery was aided by many hours spent in a meditative state. Jax, however, hadn’t wanted to meditate until the dark stain of Darth Ramage’s knowledge was sponged from his mind. Now, finally, he was ready.

  The tree was right where he’d left it, but it looked significantly healthier. Sacha’s care was evident in the repaired feeding and watering device. She’d even returned the Sith lightsaber to its compartment.

  Jax moved to the tree, put his face to its soft, silver-green foliage, and inhaled deeply of the piney scent. He took the tree, pot and all, out of the feeder and sat with it on the floor of the cabin, falling back into the arms of the Force.

  It flowed like sap through this tree, he realized, roots to needle tips and out into the atmosphere; it permeated the planet beneath their landing struts, the space they would soon leap into … and him. It was the endless, changeless connective tissue of the universe, and it had connected him, and always would, to the Jedi who had gone before him … and the Jedi who would come after him.

  It had connected him, and always would connect him, to Laranth.

  He had not wanted to let go of her. Now he knew, with the strength of epiphany, that he had no need to hold on to what would always be there.

  There is no death; there is the Force.

  How often had he thought or spoken those words? Only now did he truly understand what they meant. They meant that there was no cause for grief, no need for revenge.

  In his mind’s eye, the tree’s aura pulsed and he felt an infusion of warmth. For the first time in what seemed an eternity, he felt fully connected to the Force—rooted in it, just as Laranth’s tree was. He’d cut himself off, he realized—uprooted his own “tree.” He’d been exhausted after the battle with Darth Vader, but the Force was inexhaustible. He had forgotten that; had forgotten himself.

  In the midst of his meditations, he sensed another presence in the room. He opened his eyes and saw a man, handsome if somewhat stern of countenance, dressed in a simple tunic and leggings. After a moment, Jax recognized him; not by his appearance, but by the unmistakable aura of the Force that he exuded. Jax stared at him, this droid who was his closest friend, who had kept the faith that he would return when nearly all others had given up.

  “I’m sorry,” Jax told him. “I know I … went off into the woods for a while. Like father, like son, I guess.”

  “No, fortunately. You had tools your father didn’t.”

  “I had you.”

  The droid was silent for a moment, then said, “You had the Force. And the contents of that Sith Holocron. And the ability to use them for good. That projection you used to distract Vader right at the end was very effective.”

  Jax stared at the droid. “What do you mean? What projection? The Aethersprite?”

  “No. I meant the spectral image you used to cover my approach. That burst of light. Vader didn’t see me until it was too late.”

  “I … I didn’t do that,” Jax said. “At least, not consciously. I thought that was you. I felt a Force signature behind it. So did Vader.”

  T
he droid shook his head. “It wasn’t me.”

  “Then what—” Jax stopped, gazing down at the tree sitting before him on the deck. “There is no death; there is the Force,” he murmured.

  I-Five cocked his head; a quizzical gesture that was simultaneously eerily familiar and completely new. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, I guess, that we go on. In whatever form—” He paused to look at the humanoid droid. “—in whatever capacity. We work in whatever way we can. We never concede to evil. And we never surrender to the darkness.”

  As he said it, Jax could feel the truth of his statement. It was true that the old order of Jedi had been swept away, but that didn’t mean it was gone forever. It just meant that a new Jedi Order would arise, sooner or later, from the ashes. Whether he would be around to help usher it in or not, only the Force knew.

  He looked down at the miisai tree, then back at I-Five.

  “What?” the droid asked.

  “I remember,” Jax said, “when I first sensed the Force from you. It was back in our old digs on Coruscant, when Tuden Sal had talked you into trying to assassinate Palpatine.”

  “Yes. Just before Vader blew me to smithereens for the first time.”

  “It’s accepted dogma by everyone who knows about the Force,” Jax said quietly, almost as if speaking to himself, “that the Force is manifested through living things by midi-chlorians. The higher the cell count of midi-chlorians, the stronger the connection to the Force.”

  “And yet …,” I-Five said.

  “Right. Your neuroprocessor has no organic components—or at least it shouldn’t have them. Neither did your original I-5YQ chassis or those interim bodies you used. This HRD body comes the closest, but it’s still just synthflesh and nanomolecular electronics. You have no midi-chlorians, I-Five.”

  “This is true.”

  “But the Force lives within you. How do you account for this?”

  “It would appear,” said I-Five, “that the Force works in mysterious ways. Or at least that my neuroprocessor does.”