The Last Jedi

Thirty-Seven


“You don’t mind using Jax’s quarters?” Den stood uneasily in the hatchway of the Jedi’s cabin, watching Sacha Swiftbird examine it.

“I don’t if he doesn’t. And he’s not here to ask—so, no. I don’t mind.”

She moved to the miisai tree and brushed her fingertips over the delicate branches. “This was his?”

“Yeah. Uh. She gave it to him … Laranth did. He used it—uses it—to meditate.”

“Looks like it’s had a rough time.” She fingered a broken branch, then patted some loose moss into place around the base of the little trunk.

“Yeah, it … met with an accident.”

Den was going to ask if he should take it off her hands when she reached into the front flap of her pack, pulled out a packet of energy nuggets, and proceeded to crumble one into the planter’s feeding receptacle. Okay, so she was the nurturing type.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Den said. “Come up to the bridge when you’re settled in.”

“Sure thing.”

Settling in took Sacha longer than Den expected, and I-Five was inexplicably absent, as well. Sitting alone on the bridge, Den had begun to wonder if he was the only one who felt any sort of time pressure when he heard the landing ramp retract.

Well, finally.

A minute or two later, I-Five slipped onto the bridge in his pit droid persona.

“Where the heck have you been, Ducky?” Den asked. “I thought we were in a hurry.”

“We are, but I had to consult Geri about some … further modifications.”

“Modifications to you, you mean?”

“Yes. Are we ready for liftoff?”

“As soon as our new engineer shows up.”

As if on cue, Sacha appeared in the hatchway. “Sorry,” she murmured. “Just settling in.”

“Ah,” said I-Five. “There you are. Would you like to put the Laranth through her paces?”

“Love to.”

Den vacated the copilot’s station and watched her slide in behind the control panel. She seemed … troubled. Or at least introspective.

“I think the wisest course of action is to put in at Keldabe to pick up some actual cargo and to establish our point of origin as Mandalore,” the droid continued as the Ranger checked over the controls. “That way, if the folks at Kantaros Station check our back trail …”

Sacha was nodding. “… it reinforces our disguise as a Black Sun carrier,” she finished for him. She took the yoke and checked their heading. “We should be at a good jump point one-point-two-five hours out.”

“That’s what I make it, too,” I-Five said.

Den, sitting behind Sacha and to her left, found himself watching her. She seemed edgy … or ill at ease. Her hands were working the steering yoke—fingers flexing, tapping, rubbing. Her jaw seemed tight.

Den had opened his mouth to ask if anything was wrong when she said, “Um. I … ah … I found something kind of … unusual … in Jax’s cabin. Not quite sure what to make of it.”

“Unusual?” I-Five repeated.

“What?” Den asked, his mouth suddenly dry. The last thing he wanted was to have their new colleague tell him something scary about Jax to add to all the other scary things about Jax he’d come to know.

“There’s a hidden drawer in the casing of the planter that little tree is in—which I found while I was making sure the water-to-food ratio was set right,” she added when Five swiveled his head to look at her. “Anyway, there’s a lightsaber in it.” She hesitated. “A Sith lightsaber.”

There was a profound silence while she waited for their reaction. Den broke it by bursting into laughter.

Sacha gave him a strange look. “That’s funny?”

“No. Not funny.” Den swallowed the inappropriate mirth. “Just a relief.”

“A relief that our Jedi friend has a Sith weapon hidden in his quarters.”

“Listen, Sacha, with all that’s been going on with Jax, I was afraid you were going to tell me—I don’t know what—but something I couldn’t cope with.”

Her look became more perplexed. “Hello? Sith? Dark side? Not Our Friends? The Enemy, in fact.”

Five interjected: “Jax received the lightsaber from an anonymous source prior to confronting the assassin Aurra Sing. You may have heard of her.”

Swiftbird nodded. “Piece of radically deadly work. Yeah.”

“Jax theorized that the blade might actually have belonged to Sing. When he faced her, she was carrying a Jedi weapon.”

“You mean they … swapped somehow?”

“Jax’s lightsaber had been destroyed. He used the Sith weapon until he and Laranth were able to build a new one.”

“But he kept the Sith weapon, anyway?” The idea seemed to disturb her.

“The plan,” Den said, “was to locate a new crystal for the hilt and remake the weapon for some future Padawan. It just never happened.”

Sacha Swiftbird nodded slowly, processing the information. “Okay. Thanks for explaining that. I was a little leery of my new quarters.… I’m not likely to find any other surprises in there, am I?”

“Hopefully not,” I-Five said.

“But you never know,” Den murmured.



In some parts of Coruscant, night was brighter than day. With the artfully refracted and reflected sunlight gone, artifice took over completely and turned the streets to gold, to copper, to silver, to rubies and emeralds, to rainbows. False day reigned in all its varied splendor.

But here, in the abandoned recesses of the antique mag-lev system, night was night. Black on black.

Pol Haus knew that there were things surviving down here that never saw any sort of daylight—false or otherwise. Things that fled light and sound, scent and vibration … unless they were hungry.

It was just such a place he had chosen to hide the Whiplash train. He had let go all but the first three cars—sacrificing the tail to save the body and mind—and had brought those to the lowest level still accessible from the tube where Sal had originally left them. He chose a length of track that only seemed to be cut off from egress but actually had a well-hidden “back door.” He had also rigged the computer core with a number of destructive software and hardware devices; if discovered, and cut off from that back door, he could irretrievably vaporize every jot and tittle of information in the system.

He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but he had no way of knowing for certain if his Bothan lieutenant had been alone in his activities. Instinct said yes. Droosh’s motivation had, ultimately, been greed. Greedy people tended not to want to share their potential sources of wealth and/or power with others.

But again, one never knew.

So, as he and Sheel Mafeen made their way into the bowels of the old mag-lev system, hundreds of feet below the original tunnels Whiplash had used, he rehearsed in his mind what an escape might look like if they had to flee before they’d extracted all the information from the system.

Haus pulled his two-person speeder into the lee of the rearmost car and got out, blaster in hand.

Sheel slid out behind him. That she was nervous was obvious in the way her voice trembled when she asked if the train seemed as he’d left it.

“Yes. And since I took the precaution of setting up a sensor perimeter, I can guarantee that no one has been here.” He deactivated the sensors as he spoke and approached the hatch that gave onto the rearmost car—the one that held Tuden Sal’s quarters.

They boarded, and he reset the external sensor field, which was implemented by a set of small discs magnetically clamped to the sides of the train cars. Cheap as dirt to acquire, easy to install, and quite effective.

Once inside, they each had a predefined task. Haus went to the main computer console to begin downloading data to several HoloNet nodes at various locations elsewhere in the city. Sheel, meanwhile, tackled the stand-alone unit in Sal’s personal quarters. She had a handheld retrieval device for that; they’d theorized that Sal’s personal data would be only a fraction of what was in the main node.

They’d been at their jobs for perhaps half an hour—Haus was switching to his tertiary backup node—when Sheel uttered a cry of surprise or distress.

Haus was out of the main car and standing at the door to Sal’s quarters before he’d half realized he’d moved. The room still smelled like death, or perhaps that was only his fertile imagination.

“Sheel, what is it?”

She turned to look up at him from Sal’s private console with an expression of such anguish on her face that he felt a primal need to touch her, to reassure her. He reached her side in two strides and laid a hand on her shoulder.

“What’s wrong?”

In answer, she held her retrieval unit out to him, tilting the screen so he could read it.

“I prioritized the download,” she said, “and had it sequester anything that mentioned Jax, Laranth, Darth Vader, or the Emperor. This entry is from Sal’s private correspondence.”

Frowning, Haus took the handheld and peered at it. There was no holographic data—it was text only. The sent message read: Urgent. Att’n Lord Vader. Some reason to suspect movement of Pavan and “persons of interest” through Myto’s Arrow. This was followed by a range of dates that included the time period Jax and his companions had been moving Thi Xon Yimmon …

“Through Myto’s Arrow …” Haus murmured. He shook his head. “I don’t get it. What …”

“He sent this,” Sheel said urgently. Her eyes were sparkling with unshed tears. “Sal sent this. To the Imperial Security Bureau—to Lord Vader. It was encrypted. One of maybe a dozen encrypted messages, and the only one that mentioned both Jax and Vader—which was why I sampled it. Sal sold them out, Pol. He sold us out.”

With a world-shuddering impact, the information hit home. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it was for reward. He did this anonymously—encrypted the message, sent it via shadow link so it went through a host of nodes before getting to the target. It’s text only—clearly he didn’t want to be recognized … and he gives only minimal location and timing data, when he knew exactly what Far Ranger’s itinerary was.”

Haus leaned heavily against the bulkhead and stared at her. “He could have sent the Imperials to Toprawa on the exact day of Yimmon’s arrival there.”

“But he didn’t.”

“Again, why?”

Sheel sat down on the edge of Sal’s bunk, her feet inches from the stain left by the dying Sakiyan’s blood. “Maybe he didn’t intend them to be caught, but only … I don’t know … scared off, perhaps?”

Haus nodded. “His plot against the Emperor. He knew Yimmon and Jax would never have allowed it to go forward. If they were running from Vader—hiding out away from any resistance cells—he could do whatever he wanted and they’d be none the wiser until it was too late.” He tried, unsuccessfully, to loosen his jaw. “He could do exactly what he did do.”

“Except that with Yimmon captured …”

Haus closed his eyes, understanding at last why Sal had been so committed to assassinating Palpatine. “He couldn’t abort his plans, no matter what happened. The only way to keep Yimmon’s capture from shattering the resistance would be to kill Palpatine and destabilize the Empire.”

Sheel got to her feet. “We need to finish this up and get out of here, Pol. We need to go over all of this as carefully as we can. And we need to try to reconnect with our allies. We can’t let this kill the Resistance on Coruscant. Whiplash can’t have died in vain.”

He gazed at her, admiring her courage—her sheer stubbornness. He liked stubbornness.

“Died?” he repeated. “I’m not ready to hold the funeral just yet.”



Probus Tesla had made an impression on his prisoner, that much was clear. The Cerean’s thoughts, while hidden behind his still-impressive calm, were more emotional, more unsettled. Tesla sensed trepidation, sorrow, hope, regret.

Now, what to do about it?

Lord Vader had given explicit instructions to him not to interact too directly with the Whiplash leader, but only to observe. Tesla believed he could truthfully say that he had done just that—though perhaps he had given himself something to observe by making veiled suggestions to the rebel that his colleagues were in distress.

Which was only the truth.

It made sense for him to proceed, next, to offering simple reminders of what had already been lost. With that in mind, literally, Tesla visited the holding cell in which Yimmon was imprisoned, and at an unusual time—while the other man was eating his meager meal. Surprise, Tesla knew, was an effective tool in the interrogation process.

Even as he entered the room, Tesla felt the rewards of his effort. The Cerean was startled, momentarily off center. He had not expected this visit at a time he was usually left alone and so soon on the heels of their last encounter. He hastily raised a mental barrier, but Tesla had felt of his inner turmoil. He was thinking of his possibly dead allies back on Coruscant.

Perfect.

Tesla came and sat cross-legged before his prisoner, facing him.

“You have suffered much loss” was his opening gambit.

Yimmon glanced up at him only momentarily, then returned his attention to his meal. He ate slowly, in tiny, careful bites.

“You realize you will suffer more.”

No response.

“Laranth Tarak, Den Dhur, Jax Pavan—all dead.”

A brief flicker of the Cerean’s eyes and emotions caught the Inquisitor’s attention. Tesla pressed on: “You are utterly alone.”

Thi Xon Yimmon raised his gaze to Tesla’s face, his eyes sharp, clear, disconcerting. “Am I?”

Tesla was puzzled by the tickle of emotion he sensed from the Cerean. It was all wrong. Yes, there was sorrow, but not a bottomless pit of despair. Yimmon had … hope.

Hope of what? Hope from what source? Tesla almost asked the questions aloud.

The Cerean pulled his gaze away, and Tesla knew.

“You believe Jax Pavan is still alive? You think he’s going to rescue you? I tell you, he’s dead.”

Yimmon shrugged. He actually shrugged. As if they were debating a meaningless difference of opinion.

“Why do you persist in this vain hope, Yimmon? You were there. You saw the condition the vessel was in. You saw the explosion when it was finally sucked into the nexus between the two stars. All life aboard that vessel was obliterated. Utterly destroyed.”

Again, the artless shrug. “Believe what you will. I will believe what I will.”

Tesla trickled more of his Force energies into the gaps in Yimmon’s consciousness. He felt something far stronger than mere hope. Certitude. It was absurd. Infuriating. Mad … yet there it was.

Tesla sat back in sudden disappointment. Is that how Yimmon proposed to escape Vader’s efforts—by diving headfirst into insanity?

The Cerean met his eyes again, calm, serene, certain … implacable. His faith in the Jedi and in the Force was complete. Tesla perceived flashes of it from Yimmon’s perspective: how the young Jedi Jax Pavan had outwitted the Inquisitorius and disrupted Darth Vader’s plans repeatedly … how he had snatched Kajin Savaros from under Tesla’s nose … how—at their last encounter—Tesla had been forced to flee.

The Inquisitor did not try to hide his disgust. He stood slowly, until he towered over the seated prisoner. Then he deliberately pulled back his cowl, revealing his expressionless face and shaved head.

Here is the face of your enemy, Cerean.

“How sad,” he said aloud. “Lord Vader will be disappointed that you’ve crumbled so much mentally as to harbor these … vapid fantasies. But I suppose that will make it easier for him to prise the information he needs from your mind.”

He felt Yimmon’s barriers fly back into place, and smiled inwardly. Too late. Tesla not only knew Thi Xon Yimmon’s emotional weakness, he also saw how it could be exploited.

He replaced his cowl and left the chamber, wondering if he should contact Lord Vader and announce his breakthrough. His dilemma was solved when he received a communication from his Master: having dealt the rebels on Imperial Center a mortal wound, the Dark Lord was returning to Kantaros Station.

Tesla decided he would wait to share his insights. For now, he had to calculate how best to use what he had discovered about the prisoner’s mental condition.

Sequestered in his quarters, he sat in meditation on the subject of Jax Pavan. It was more difficult than he’d expected—every time he tried to ruminate on how he could use Yimmon’s mad faith to advantage, he was forced to face his own deep hatred for the Jedi, forced to remember the stinging humiliation of their last encounter.

It was a shame Jax Pavan was already dead, because Tesla would have liked very much to be the one to kill him.