The Last Jedi

Thirty-Nine


The Laranth/Corsair had been at Keldabe for less than a day, but in that time they had refueled, arranged for the delivery of cargo, and picked up some small arms. Sacha Swiftbird looked with favor on the DH-17 blaster she’d purchased, but found, when she was in Jax’s quarters, that her gaze went again and again to the weapon he’d left behind.

At first, she had returned the Sith lightsaber to its hiding place. That had lasted only hours, though, and she’d brought it out again, fascinated by it. She’d propped it up beside the miisai tree in the wall niche, where it would be invisible to anyone standing in the doorway. She picked it up at intervals, turning it in her hand. The hilt seemed to fit her hand well, which made her wonder if it might have been a woman’s weapon.

In a rare moment in which she’d been alone on the vessel while Den and I-Five oversaw the loading of cargo, she’d timidly activated it … and turned it off seconds later. The power that flowed from the thing—that seemed to connect her hand, her arm, her entire body to it—had been overwhelming.

And unsettling.

And exhilarating.

The truly odd thing, in her mind, was that she’d felt no evil from it. Power, yes, but no evil. No darkness. Puzzling, that. She wondered if there was some deficit in her own mishmash of virtues that made her incapable of sensing evil.

No. She’d been in proximity to Inquisitors. She knew evil when she felt it.

Maybe, as Jax Pavan’s ownership of the weapon indicated, the Force was agnostic about such things. The difference was in the person who wielded the weapon. She had heard Force-users argue endlessly on the subject: Was there indeed a dichotomy of intention? Or was the Force merely raw power, the distillation of the cosmic Will, and as such above sentient concepts of right and wrong? Or was it beneficent, requiring the venal desires of sentients to use it to dark purpose?

The next time Sacha activated the lightsaber, she held her ground, though her hands trembled and her bones vibrated and her brain itched. She held it, moved with it—albeit gingerly—and finally ventured out into the larger engineering bay to pretend at fighting with it. She loved the way it balanced in her hand. It felt more natural there than any blaster she’d ever owned.

So caught up was she in her dance that she barely registered the sound of the cargo ramp clamping shut. Only when she heard voices in the passageway beyond engineering did she hastily deactivate the lightsaber.

She tucked it into the front of her jacket just in time to hear I-Five say, “Peculiar.”

Two seconds later he and Den appeared in the engineering hatchway.

“What’s peculiar?” Den was asking.

“Yeah,” Sacha echoed, leaning nonchalantly against a circuit panel. “What’s peculiar?”

I-Five fixed her with his pit droid oculus. “I heard something from within this chamber just before we arrived. It sounded like a lightsaber.”

Sacha laughed, knowing her face was flushed.

“What’s so funny?” Den asked, blinking at her.

Sacha recovered her balance, gesturing at I-Five. “Him, talking to me. I can’t get used to the idea of Ducky with a genius-class brain.”

“Ducky doesn’t have a genius-class brain,” I-Five said. “The genius-class brain has Ducky.”

“Yeah. Right.” Sacha cleared her throat. “We ready to fly?”

“Ready as we’ll ever be,” Den said. He wiped his hands on his coverall. “Which is to say, not.”

Sacha patted the Sullustan on the shoulder as she swung out of engineering to head for her cabin. “Ah, we’ll be fine. When we step off this ship at Kantaros Station we’ll look like we were born and raised in Black Sun. I’m gonna go make sure my cabin’s buttoned down, then I’ll join you on the bridge.”

She went aft, whistling, feeling the pit droid’s monocular gaze burning into her back until the turn in the corridor. Inside Jax’s cabin, she quickly returned the lightsaber to its hiding place and stroked the miisai’s boughs, cursing her carelessness.

“Swiftbird, don’t do stupid stuff like that as a matter of habit. Deal?”

She sketched a salute at her reflection in the miisai’s container, then hastened to the bridge.

She’d no more than dropped into the copilot’s seat when the communications array pinged. “Incoming,” she said, peering at the display. Then she gave Den a startled glance. “From Coruscant.”

I-Five activated the unit. He was careful, Sacha noted, to establish one-way visual communication—they would see their “caller” if an image was sent, but would not be seen.

The holographic display showed a Zabrak man and a Togruta woman. Sacha recognized them, but their setting was obscured—probably with purpose, in case someone else was sampling the message. Not likely, but it could happen.

“Jax,” the man said, “Jax, it’s Pol Haus and Sheel Mafeen.”

I-Five activated the visuals from their end, then nodded at Den, who swallowed and said, “Hi, Pol. Uh, Jax isn’t with us at the moment. We … uh, how bad are things there? Is it … is it as bad as you thought?”

“Yes and no,” the Zabrak said with a glance at his companion. “The Whiplash leadership is gone, except for us. Tuden Sal … died rather heroically, as it happens. But not, as I first supposed, during the assassination attempt on Palpatine. There are still lower-level operatives around, though. People who have supported the effort for years but who, thankfully, weren’t inside Sal’s plot. That’s the good news—there’s some remnant left of Whiplash, after all. Though not much. And we were able to retrieve all of the data from HQ and destroy the physical evidence.”

“I take it that means there’s more bad news—apart from Sal and the others being dead.”

Haus nodded and Sheel Mafeen said, “Sal was the one who tipped Vader off that Yimmon was leaving Coruscant.”

Sacha felt as if all the blood had drained out of her face. “I don’t understand. He put Whiplash, the resistance, and the Ranger operation on Toprawa in danger … for what?”

“Revenge,” the Togruta said, her voice unsteady. “He wanted the Emperor dead that badly.”

Haus added: “To be fair to Sal, we don’t think he meant for Yimmon to be captured or for anyone to be killed. We think he meant only to force Yimmon and Jax into deep hiding so they couldn’t interfere with his assassination plot. So I tried to interfere with it. What I didn’t realize was that when Yimmon was captured, Sal had no way out. He had to go through with it.”

“That,” said I-Five, “explains a lot.”

Sacha found herself nodding. “Like why Vader’s knowledge of Far Ranger’s route was only approximate.”

“Exactly,” the droid said. “If it had been a Toprawan operative, he would have known exactly where to intercept us, which he didn’t—apparently until he sensed Jax and Laranth through the Force.”

“We thought you should know,” said Haus. “Tell Jax he can trust his allies on Toprawa.”

“If we ever see him again,” Den murmured.