The Last Jedi

Thirty-Two


The Delta-7 Aethersprite dropped out of hyperspace just within the orbit of the Fervse’dra asteroid field and moved into synchronous flow with the nearest body. Jax had considered his approach to Kantaros Station all during the four-day journey to the Both system. With Darth Vader on Coruscant, he had a window of opportunity, but possibly only a very narrow window.

The first order of business was to find the station. He had returned to where the station had been; it was not there now. He input the telemetry of the station’s last position, which he’d gotten from the Laranth’s navicomp, into the starfighter’s system and had it extrapolate its current location.

He found it more or less where the navicomp said it would be, and parked his ship on a slowly tumbling asteroid roughly one hundred klicks behind it in the flow of stone. He wedged the Aethersprite in between two projections of icy rock. That should be enough to preserve him from accidental detection, but if there were patrols that came this far out, or an approaching vessel overflew his position, his energy shielding would be useless. He set the ship’s sensors to their widest possible spectrum and brought their perimeters in to the point that gave him just enough time to scurry out of sight if anyone entered the area. This gave him decreased range, but increased sensitivity. A lone speeder, life pod, or drone would vibrate his sensor web.

Then, hands on the controls of the ship—ready to lift off at a moment’s notice—he settled into a meditative state, preparing to reach for Thi Xon Yimmon’s consciousness.

For a fraction of a second, his mind swerved to the idea Xizor had raised—that it would be easier to destroy Yimmon than to save him. Everything in Jax rebelled against the thought. Rebelled so emphatically that, for a moment, he was physically ill. He righted himself with a will, closed his eyes, and sank, once more, into meditation. He missed the miisai tree and found himself calling its shape to his mind’s eye.

Jax couldn’t afford detection, so he reached out delicately, carefully. He missed the tree at this point, too, because he had used it before to cloak his own Force signature. All he had now was the memory of the miisai, his native talents, and the skills he’d developed in training them.

And he had the Sith Holocron.

In the stillness that came with the thought, Jax fetched the thing out of the inner pocket of his surcoat. As if his regard had touched off a response in the artifact, it warmed in his hand. When he closed his eyes, he could still see it as a locus of diffuse light and heat … a Force signature.

Balancing the Holocron on his palm, he stretched out his energies with more confidence—long, trailing ribbons of the Force wove through the ambience generated by Ramage’s device and sought their goal.

He found Yimmon, at length, ironically, by using Vader’s seemingly random array of deflection fields to triangulate. He found it interesting that Vader didn’t realize that randomness was a chimera. Patterns were so woven into the fabric of the universe that they emerged despite the most rigorous attempts to avoid them.

Jax was amazed at the Cerean’s mental state. He was calm. Almost too calm, considering the circumstances. Had they drugged him?

No … there was no sense of confusion or sluggishness, just serenity. And watchfulness. He frowned, trying to shake the feeling that he was being observed in some way. It was not unnerving, merely unexpected. As if …

With a suddenness that stole his breath, Jax sensed another presence—no, more than one: a strong Force signature, unrecognizable, pushed aside the recognizable consciousness of the Whiplash leader. Then, before he could half grasp that—

—Listen. Indecision is all loss. Yimmon’s separation destroys us all.

The voice that was not a voice was clear, strong, and insistent. And undeniably alien. Cephalon, in fact.

Aoloiloa? How could that be? How could a Cephalon stationed on Coruscant reach out to him here in this Mid Rim asteroid field?

He felt of the Cephalon’s communication. It was equal parts familiar and unfamiliar. Aoloiloa, but not Aoloiloa. It was, Jax realized, with a jolt of adrenaline, not just one Cephalon, but a living network of them, linked together to send him this message.

But you’ve already told me this, he thought. What more can I do with it? Why do you keep repeating it?

—Separation destroys us all.

Separation destroys … what did that mean?

“I have to get him back,” Jax murmured aloud. Which meant he had no more time to delay. He must move now.

—Separation destroys us.

But wait. The message had changed subtly with every repetition. Jax swallowed a groan of pure frustration. Why, in the name of the Force, could the Cephalons not just say things clearly?

—Separation destroys, insisted Aoloiloa and his networked kin.

I shouldn’t do this alone? Is that what you mean? Is it my separation that destroys?

Jax put the question to the Force, to the living universe. The answer came in the form of a sense—so strong he almost cried aloud—that he was not alone in the confines of the Aethersprite’s cockpit.

—Seek, said the Cephalons, communion. Seek sisters.

Communion? Sisters?

For one dreadful moment Jax was certain he was losing his mind. In one sense Laranth was a sister—a fellow Force-user. But Laranth was dead, returning to him only in dreams and memories. Still, he was frozen in his seat, afraid that if he opened his eyes, Laranth would be sitting beside him in the jump seat.

And equally afraid that she wouldn’t be.

He unfroze when the ship’s perimeter alarms went off. There was a small vessel entering the system. Only a slow-moving freighter, but it had an escort of Imperial TIE fighters and it would soon overfly his position.

Without pausing to think, Jax released the soft docking clamps and gave the ship just enough of a push from its ion drives to turn it away from the oncoming convoy. Then he dived in the opposite direction, out of the plane of the ecliptic, and wove his way through the asteroids. He engaged his hyperdrive once free of the field, only half noting what course he’d set.

He’d used the Force to make that last course setting and hoped he was right and that, on some level, he’d understood what the Cephalons had been trying to say.

What did that mean: Seek sisters?

Whose sisters? The Cephalons’? The only known species that could be considered “sisters” of the Cephalons were the Celegians. They were a rather isolated species and there were few among them who had engaged in training their Force abilities, notwithstanding their natural use of telepathy and telekinesis. They seemed, though not genetically related, at least endophenotypically connected.

Sisters in the resistance? Aren Folee or Sacha Swiftbird fit the bill, as did Sheel Mafeen. That made logical sense. It made so much sense, he leaned forward to check the coordinates he’d set, expecting the navigational array would tell him he’d be on a heading back to Toprawa.

His hand was hovering over the nav panel when a third possibility occurred to him: that by “sisters” was meant other Force-users. He could think of only one such group that could be considered “sisters” of the Jedi and the Gray Paladins: the Witches of Dathomir.

He shook himself. That was a ridiculous thought. Dathomir was not a safe place for Jedi. Especially male Jedi. Though there were exceptions, most of the Dathomiri clans were extremely matrilineal and matriarchal. In many, if not most, men had been reduced to virtual slavery. And though the Witches were strong in the Force, they were understandably hostile to outsiders.

Still, they were allied with the light side of the Force, and their mantra—handed down from their alleged ancestress, the banished Jedi Knight Allya—was “Never concede to evil.”

Jax’s sense of irony was still operant enough to permit a wry shake of his head at a species that didn’t include the concept of slavery in its definition of evil.

There had been two unabashedly evil orders among them, though. These were the Nightsisters and Nightbrothers—many of them human–Zabrak hybrids, and all outcasts from existing tribes. In the years leading up to the Clone Wars, they had allied themselves with the Sith, but not before they had used the serendipitous discovery of the interstellar portal called the Infinity Gate in an effort to destroy Coruscant, which was then the seat of the Republic.

The Jedi had brought them down and destroyed the Star Temple that contained the Gate on Dathomir. Since that time—thirteen years earlier—Dathomir had been all but quarantined. Not fair to the majority of clans, but they were hardly friendly to begin with, and they had neither strategic position nor natural resources that the Empire might envy, nor technology that it might fear.

Jax closed his fingers. The Witches were strong in the Force; that they chanted spells to employ it hardly mattered. They were Force-users—but Force-users who lived and worked beyond the more regimented existence of the Jedi Order, even as Laranth and the Gray Paladins had.

Sisters, indeed. What knowledge might they possess that another fringe dweller might find of use?

Jax made the decision emotionally before his reason capitulated. He dropped out of hyperspace at the edge of Bothan space and put his hands to the navigational controls again, this time to set a course for Dathomir. He was both exhilarated and chilled when he realized that was the course he had already laid in.