The Last Jedi

Twenty-Two


He had the dream in hyperspace en route to the Bothan system. It was different from previous dreams in that it did not begin in the chaos of Far Ranger’s ruined corridors. It began at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, in the broad gallery that led to the great library. He was walking toward the huge, heavily carved doors, a wash of sunlight from the skylights laying a glowing, translucent carpet for his feet to tread.

He was aware that someone walked beside him, but when he turned to look, the figure—another senior Jedi Padawan in temple robes—was so bathed in sunlight that he couldn’t make out who it was. He wanted to speak, to prompt the other Jedi to speak so he would recognize him or her, but though he opened his mouth, no sound came out.

He kept walking, the other beside him, stride for stride. When they reached the library, he would be able to see the other’s face.

But they never reached the library. Behind them the broad corridor was shattered by a tremendous blast and filled with smoke and cries of alarm.

Jax was confused. Order 66 had been carried out at night, as had the operation that had resulted in Flame Night. What was this? When was this?

It didn’t matter. time didn’t matter. He had to fight.

He drew his lightsaber and turned toward the chaos, but a strong hand on his arm stopped him. He looked over at the robed figure beside him.

Green eyes met his.

“No,” Laranth said. “We keep going.” She strode toward the library.

Torn, he vacillated. What could be so important in the library that it should keep him from defending the Temple? They knew how this would end. They knew. The younglings and junior Padawans would all be killed. Anakin would murder them with his own hand.

“Jax,” Laranth said, “it isn’t time.”

He felt the heat of flames on his face, watched the corridor melt, heard the screams of the younglings.

“When, then?” he demanded. “When?”

“Time is a spiral,” Laranth said, and layered behind her voice was another voice, saying, Time is/was/will be a spiral.

The lightsaber was heavy and solid in his hand as he glanced, again, down the hall. Flames ran up the walls and dripped from the ceiling. The skylights were dark.

“Choice is loss—” the twinned voices said, and Jax screamed with frustration.

“Yes! Yes! I know! And indecision is all loss. I know that, too!”

“We have to go,” Laranth said.

“Go where? You weren’t there,” he realized. That seemed important suddenly. “You weren’t at the Temple when Order 66 was executed. You weren’t there!”

“You were there. Now I was, too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Time,” she said, and he didn’t know whether she was telling him it was time to go, or that time had something to do with her witnessing the gutting of the Jedi Order. “Time,” she repeated, and turned from him again.

He glanced once more at the deteriorating hallway, then turned to follow Laranth.

She was gone.

Heart hammering, limbs chilled, Jax sprang after her. The grand library doors were falling shut. In a moment it would be too late. He threw himself on the doors, forcing them open again and sliding through.

The library was gone, and Jax stood in the longitudinal corridor of his dying ship. Now the nightmare was familiar. He knew where Laranth was. She was dying in the dorsal weapons battery.

Wake up, he told himself, but he kept walking toward the heart of the ship. A billow of smoke obscured his view.

Again, a hand grasped his arm, halting him.

“I’m not there,” Laranth said, but as before there was another voice only partly hidden behind the Gray Paladin’s. A darker voice.

“I’m not there,” the dark voice said, and now Jax recognized it and knew it came from the chaos of fire and destruction behind him. It was the voice of murder and rage. The voice of death.

The voice of Darth Vader.

He felt the impulse to turn, but that would mean putting Laranth behind him.

Choice.

“I’m not there,” Laranth said emphatically from nowhere.

Jax woke to the realization that they’d dropped out of hyperspace.

“Jax,” Den’s voice said over the ship’s comm, “we’re in Bothan space.”

He opened his eyes to his cabin, and for a moment he was disoriented. Tendrils of Force energy that were not his own enwrapped him. They were translucent yet vividly colored; in the same moment he saw them, they were gone, seeming to withdraw into the miisai tree.

He stared at the tree in confusion for a moment, then responded to Den’s repeated message. “I’m on my way.”

He wasn’t, though. Not right away. He took several moments to connect consciously with the Force, to calm his pounding heart and center his thoughts.

Before he left the cabin, he glanced at the tree again. It did nothing extraordinary, but merely glowed faintly with the energy that only he could see—energy that fed into it continually from the Force.



Somehow Den had expected Kantaros Station to be like other Imperial depots he’d seen: low orbital platforms that floated in the clouds of otherwise inhospitable planets, or dirtside complexes that rambled over the landscape, burrowed under it, or rose out of it. Kantaros was none of those things. It wasn’t tethered to a planet. It wasn’t orbiting a planet. Nor was it floating in free space. According to Prince Xizor’s last bit of intel, it was somewhere in the Fervse’dra asteroid belt that orbited Both where the star’s original third planet had been. Now it formed a formidable barrier between the sere, barren world of Taboth and the population center, Bothawui.

All this meant precisely one thing to Den Dhur—the station was going to be kriffing hard to find, dangerous to approach, and almost impossible to escape from with any speed.

They came at the asteroid field from the outskirts of the system, hiding in the gravity shadows of the outer worlds, then falling in among the commercial traffic as they came out from behind the purple gas giant, Golm.

What the Vigo had been unable to give them was the station’s transponder frequency. He hadn’t had it—something Den was sure wrinkled his universe. Black Sun runners supplied the station with some hard-to-get items, but they were guided to it on an as-needed basis, entering the system with their own signal beacons pinging and waiting for Kantaros to contact them and pull them in on autopilot. The Black Sun vessel Corsair was on her own.

To approach the field from either above or below the solar plane was just as suspicious. One of the ways smugglers implicitly signaled their “honorable” intentions was to relinquish control of their ships to the station. Every eye on Kantaros would have been upon them from the moment they transmitted their call sign.

They made planetfall on Bothawui, took on fuel, and turned I-Five loose in the Bothan Space Authority’s data banks. He could find no transponder code for Kantaros Station; nor could he find any indication of where it might be in the Fervse’dra field.

“Clever of Vader,” Den said as they moved away from Bothawui toward the ring of asteroids, “hiding his depot in a bunch of tumbling rocks. How are we going to find it?”

“It will still have an energy signature,” I-Five said. “We’ll be able to pick that up on ship’s sensors.”

“Oh, sure,” said Den. “Once we’re close enough to register the energy output. Do you have any idea how big this asteroid belt is?”

I-Five’s R2 turret swiveled toward him. “It is three-hundred-point-oh-six-million kilometers across at its widest point and has a diameter of—”

“It was a rhetorical question.”

Jax, seated at the helm, let out an audible breath. “Den’s right, though. It would take forever to scan this whole structure, even if we took the inside orbit.”

“It will take approximately five days, twenty-seven hours, and—”

“That was also rhetorical. Add to that the fact that if we don’t give them remote pilot control, we might as well come in with blasters blazing.” Then Jax added, “That wasn’t rhetorical.”

“I wasn’t keeping score,” the R2 unit replied.

Den smiled, enjoying the fact that Jax had said something humorous. “So what do we do, then?” he asked. “Is there any way to extend our scanner’s range?”

“This vessel already has one of the most advanced scanning systems I’ve encountered,” I-Five said. “But even with that, we stand only a fifty–fifty chance of locating the station because of the width and depth of the asteroid belt. Which is,” he added, “something of a misnomer—its range is almost sufficient to qualify it as a sphere, rather than a—”

Den was shaking his head. “I never should have installed that vocalizer.”

Jax closed his eyes, looking suddenly exhausted. “So, up to four days if we scan from the interior of the field, and if we don’t manage to locate the station …”

“Then we’ll have to repeat the process on the outer perimeter, which will take roughly twice as long.”

“Time,” Jax murmured. “It’s always a matter of time. Time we don’t have.” He opened his eyes and, after a moment’s hesitation, switched to autopilot. “Den, you have the helm. I-Five, if you think it will do any good, you can target the asteroid field with the scanners and see if we get lucky.”

“And what are you going to do?” I-Five asked as Jax slid out of the pilot’s seat.

“I’m going to find the station … one way or another.”

Den felt as if someone had poured an icy beverage over his head. “You mean you’re going shopping for Force signatures. You’re going to poke around for Vader. Do I need to remind you how dangerous that is?”

“Apparently,” the droid muttered.

“You do not. But I may not have to poke around for Vader. If the intel is correct, he’s loaded up his little dungeon with Inquisitors. That’s a lot of Force energy in one place. And one of those Inquisitors is Probus Tesla. Trust me—I will never forget that signature.”

“There is every possibility,” I-Five said, “that Tesla remembers your signature as vividly as you remember his. If he knows you’re still alive, then Vader will also know it.”

Jax paused by the cockpit hatch, his gaze on the transparisteel viewport over the control console. Den held his breath, hoping the Jedi would change his mind. But he didn’t. He shook his head, his mouth a tight, grim line.

“That’s a chance I’ll have to take,” he said, and disappeared.



Once in his cabin, Jax sat cross-legged on his meditation mat and contemplated the situation. What I-Five had suggested was a distinct possibility. Through a series of confrontations, Jax had become only too familiar with Probus Tesla’s Force signature. It was an alien thing to him. He experienced the Force as threads, ribbons, tendrils of energy that twisted and wove themselves into a fabric of power and meaning. Tesla’s energy did not weave; it boiled, surged, undulated. It had made him wonder if the other adept’s experience of it was, as Kajin Savaros’s had been, liquid in nature.

He had once heard it said that to understand another’s sense of the Force was to understand how he or she could be defeated. He didn’t need to defeat Tesla, only to pass by him unnoticed … or perhaps disguised.

He had closed his eyes and now opened them to gaze at Laranth’s tree. The tree had its own Force signature—a singularly strong signature for a plant. Could he possibly use that to cover or obscure his own telltale energy the way the Inquisitors used the scales of the taozin to muddy theirs?

There was only one way to find out.

He rose and lifted the tree’s pot out of the feeding container.