Ever since Emperor Palpatine’s Order 66—which called for the execution of all Jedi—Jax Pavan is the last Knight around to fight the dark side of the Force. Together with his droid I-5, Jax has eluded Vader time and again, all the while wreaking havoc against the Empire through the underground resistance on Coruscant. But now the Rebel’s leader on the city-planet has been captured, and it’s up to the Last Jedi to ride again… possibly for one final adventure.
MICHAEL REAVES is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter and New York Times bestselling co-author of Star Wars: Shadow Games (with Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff); cowriter (with Steve Perry) of the two Star Wars: MedStar novels and Star Wars: Death Star; and the author of the three Star Wars: Coruscant Nights novels. He lives in the Los Angeles area.
MAYA KAATHRYN BOHNHOFF is the New York Times bestselling co-author of Star Wars: Shadow Games (with Michael Reaves). Her other writing includes the novels Magic Time: Angelfire, The Meri, Taminy, The Crystal Rose, and The Spirit Gate, as well as a slew of short speculative fiction in such magazines as Analog, Amazing Stories, Realms of Fantasy, Paradox, and Interzone. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and British Science Fiction awards. She lives in San Jose, California.
Contents
About the Book
About the Authors
Also by Michael Reaves and Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
Title Page
Dedication
The Star Wars Novels Timeline
Dramatis Personae
Epigraph
Part One: Vaster than Empires
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Part Two: Flight and Pursuit
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Part Three: Journey’s End
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Epilogue
Copyright
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (a Coruscant Nights novel)
Star Wars: Shadow Games
Star Wars: Coruscant Nights I: Jedi Twilight
Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows
Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force (with Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff)
Star Wars: Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter
Star Wars: Death Star
Star Wars: Medstar I: Battle Surgeons
Star Wars: Medstar II: Jedi Healer
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Epub ISBN 9781448184231
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Published by Arrow 2013
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Copyright © 2013 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™ where indicated. All rights reserved. Used under authorisation.
Michael Reaves and Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Century
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ISBN 9780099542674
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. . . .
Aren Folee; Antarian Ranger (human female)
Darth Vader; Sith Lord and Emperor Palpatine’s enforcer (human male)
Degan Cor; Toprawan resistance leader (human male)
Den Dhur; former journalist (Sullustan male)
Geri; resistance mech-tech (teenaged Rodian male)
I-Five; sentient protocol droid
Jax Pavan; Jedi Knight (human male)
Laranth Tarak; Gray Paladin (Twi’lek female)
Magash Drashi; Dathomiri Witch of the Singing Mountain Clan (Zabrak-human female)
Pol Haus; sector police prefect (Zabrak male)
Prince Xizor; Black Sun Vigo (Faleen male)
Probus Tesla; Inquisitor (human male)
Sacha Swiftbird; Antarian Ranger (human female)
Sheel Mafeen; poetess (Togruta female)
Thi Xon Yimmon; Whiplash leader (Cerean male)
Tuden Sal; Whiplash operative (Sakiyan male)
Tyno Fabris; Black Sun lieutenant (Arkanian male)
“The Jedi are extinct; their fire has gone out in the universe.”
—GRAND MOFF TARKIN
To my family, for not minding all the times I blathered on about droids, lightsabers, and Force-adepts. And for reminding me that even Jedi have to eat, sleep, and do the laundry.
—MKB
This one is for Grant Fairbanks—JMR
“Sakiyan freighter Far Ranger requesting clearance for departure.”
I-Five’s mimicry of Tuden Sal’s gruff voice was flawless. No one listening—or, more to the point, no vocal analyzer scanning—would know that, in reality, the Sakiyan merchant was sitting in a safe house somewhere in the twilight warren near the Westport, plotting infamy against the Empire. No one, that was, except for the Far Ranger’s crew and her lone passenger.
Jax Pavan, his hands on the Far Ranger’s steering yoke, realized he was holding his breath as he waited for the Westport flight dispatcher to approve their departure plan. He let his tension go with a soft rush of air and ignored the urge to reach out with the Force to give the dispatcher a nudge. It was tempting, but best not to take the chance. Even something as minor as that could alert Darth Vader to their movements . . . if Vader was, against all odds, still alive.
Jax believed that he was. Even though he hadn’t sensed the Dark Lord’s uniquely powerful indentation in the fabric of the Force lately, it was difficult to conceive of such power, such concentrated evil, being gone, being over, being done. And until he gazed upon Vader’s corpse with his own eyes, until he could reach out and touch him with the tendrils that constituted his own connection with the living Force and sense no reciprocation . . .
Well, until that came to pass, Jax knew he couldn’t be too careful.
And speaking of erring on the side of caution . . . was the silence on the comlink just a little too long? Had someone suspicious of the freighter’s relatively new Sakiyan registry connected the ship to Jax Pavan?
Am I overthinking this?
“Far Ranger, your ascent plan is approved. Your departure window is . . .”
There was a pause, and Jax held his breath again. I-Five glanced at him and let two pearls of luminescence migrate, left to right, along the top outside rims of his photoreceptors—the droid’s equivalent of rolling his eyes.
“Ten standard minutes—on my mark.”
“Aye,” said I-Five.
“Mark.”
“Beginning ascent.” I-Five cut the comlink and turned to Jax. “She’s all yours. And not a single battle cruiser on our tail, that I can see.”
Jax ignored the droid’s sarcasm. His left hand eased forward on the thruster control as his right pulled up and back on the steering yoke. The ship, a modified Corellian Action VI transport, lifted from the spaceport docking bay into the night sky, which, even at this elevation, was a blaze of ambient light. Jax felt the vibration of the ship through the yoke, felt it merge with his desire to be away from Coruscant until it seemed to him that Far Ranger itself yearned above all things to leap into hyperspace before even clearing the atmosphere.
The sky changed. It warmed to twilight, to daybreak, to full day, then cycled back again through dusk and twilight as they soared, finally, into the flat black of space. They saw no stars; the glorious blaze of the city-planet’s night side was enough to drown out even the nearby nebulae of the Core completely.
I-Five sent a last message back to Flight Control in Tuden Sal’s gravelly tones: “Far Ranger away.”
“Aye. Clear skies.”
The droid shut down the comlink and Jax navigated above the orbital plane, adjusted course, and set the autopilot to their first jump coordinates. Then he sat back to clear his head.
He felt a touch—in his mind and on his arm. Laranth. He turned his head to look up at her. She was grinning at him—or at least, she was doing something that was as close to grinning as she was likely to get. One whole corner of her mouth had curled upward by at least a millimeter.
“Nervous, are we?” she asked. “I could feel you angsting all the way up in the weaponry bay.”
“What were you doing up there?”
“Getting the feel of the new triggering mechanism.”
“Nervous, are we?” Jax mimicked, smiling.
“Being proactive.” She gave his arm a squeeze and glanced out the viewport. “I’ll be glad to be out of this gravity well. Too much traffic here by half. Any one of those ships—” She nodded toward their closest companions in flight: a Toydarian grain transport, another Corellian freighter, a private yacht. “—could be targeting us right now.”
“You’re being paranoid,” Jax assured her. “If Vader were watching us, I’d know. We’d know.”
“Vader watching us—now, there’s a cheery thought.” Den Dhur stepped onto the bridge and slid into the jump seat behind Jax. “I’m hoping he’s watching us from beyond the crematorium.”
“Paranoia,” I-Five said. “Another human emotion I just don’t get. The list of things both animate and inanimate in this galaxy that are capable of utterly annihilating you is longer than a superstring . . . yet real danger evidently isn’t enough: you organics aren’t happy without making up a bevy of bogeymen to scare you even more.”
Jax said nothing. In the months since their last confrontation with the Dark Lord—a confrontation in which one of their Whiplash team had betrayed them and another self-immolated trying to assassinate Vader—they had heard not even a whisper about either his whereabouts or his condition. There had been no reports on the HoloNet, no rumors from highly placed officials, no speculation or stories by various life-forms in places like the Blackpit Slums or the Southern Underground. It was as if the very concept of Vader had vanished along with his corporeal form.
And yet Jax still couldn’t believe that his nemesis was dead, as much as he wanted to. The entire scenario had been too perfect. In the thrall of a potent drug that enhanced Force abilities in unpredictable ways, Vader had lashed out wildly, trying to fend off his would-be assassin. The release of energy had been enough to vaporize the unfortunate Haninum Tyk Rhinann, who’d pushed Vader over the edge—in more ways than one. Both of them had fallen a great distance. Rhinann had died.
Vader had vanished.
If Darth Vader had been a normal human being—or even a normal Jedi—Jax could assume he was dead, as well. But he was neither of those things. He was at once less and more than human. At once less and more than a Jedi. He was a powerful merger of the human and the inhuman. He was a Sith . . . who had once called Jax friend. For Jax suspected—no, more than suspected, knew—that Darth Vader had somehow once been Anakin Skywalker. He had sensed it through the Force, and in their last encounter Vader had confirmed it with a slip of the tongue that might well have been intentional.
The man who wouldn’t die.
“You going to share that load with us, Jax?” Den was looking at him with eyes that only seemed lazy. “Have you sensed anything about Vader since . . .” The Sullustan made a boom gesture with both stubby-fingered hands.
Jax shook his head. “Nothing. But Den, if he’d died, I think I’d know that. There would have been a huge shift in the Force if a being of that much focused power was destroyed.”
“I saw the flaming backwash from ground zero,” Den objected. “That wasn’t a shift?”
“No, that was a light show. Mostly flash, with a little substance. It was enough to kill Rhinann. But I don’t think it killed Vader.”
The Sullustan looked to Laranth. “No joy from you, either?”
“Sorry, Den. I’m of the same opinion. He might be severely injured and in a bacta tank somewhere, but he’s not dead. The most we can hope for is that he’ll be out of commission long enough for us to get Yimmon to safety.”
“You just came from Yimmon, didn’t you?” Jax asked Den, and at the Sullustan’s nod, he added, “How does he seem?”
Den shrugged. “About like you’d expect a guy to seem who’s been nearly dead four times in the last three weeks.”
Jax took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Those near-hits were why they were removing Thi Xon Yimmon from Coruscant. The leader of the anti-Imperial resistance cell known locally as Whiplash had been targeted a number of times in the past weeks by Imperial forces. In two cases, only the fact that Jax and his team had a friend on the police force—a Zabrak prefect named Pol Haus—had tipped them to the threat in time to avoid it.
In a twisted way, the Imperial attention to Whiplash—and Yimmon in particular—was flattering. It meant they had risen from mere annoyances to serious threats. Perhaps the Empire had even made the connection between the local resistance on Imperial Center and the broader movement that was springing up on a growing number of far-flung worlds. In practical terms, this meant that—over the last several months—the Imperial orders had gone from “shoot ’em if they get in the way” to “ferret them out, track them down, and destroy them.”
The Emperor had also changed tactics. Absent from these recent attempts at annihilation were the Force-sniffing, raptorlike Inquisitors. Now the attacks came from Force-insensitive bounty hunters and battle droids. It was as if, having failed to turn the gifts of the Force against Yimmon and his cohort, the Emperor was simply throwing every mundane weapon in his arsenal at them.
Jax wanted to believe that these were the acts of a desperate tyrant who had just lost his most potent weapon. He wanted to believe it as much as he wanted to believe that Vader was gone. But . . .
The man who wouldn’t die.
He shook himself, realizing he had come to think of Darth Vader as inevitable . . . and immortal.
Whatever hideous truth lay behind that feeling, Jax could not let it distract him from the hard reality that the Empire wanted Whiplash dead and buried. The Empire, being the hierarchical beast that it was, figured this was best done by destroying the brains of the organization. But Yimmon—with his dual cortex and a personal cell of operatives that included a Jedi, a Gray Paladin, and a sentient droid—was a hard man to kill or capture. Still, the last attempt had come close. Too close. Way too close. It had taken out several storefronts and more than a dozen innocent citizens who happened to be too near a tavern that the Whiplash had used to pass messages.
Jax couldn’t shake the memory of the street in the aftermath of that attack. The bodies littering the walkway, the sharp smell of ozone in the heavy air, the photonic imprints of people on the walls of the buildings, reverse shadows caught at the instant of death. The hushed sense that the entire neighborhood was holding its breath, readying a roar of outrage . . . a roar that would fall on deaf ears.
Outrage against the Empire seemed futile; Jax had to believe it was not.
The decision to move the resistance leader from Imperial Center had been almost unanimous. The sole dissenting voice had belonged to Yimmon himself. Only a great deal of convincing had finally gotten him to agree that relocating their base of operations to Dantooine was the wisest move.
And none too soon.
Jax shook off the feeling of dread that threatened to settle over him. For the hundredth time that day, he opened his mouth to tell Laranth about the “summons” he’d gotten three days earlier from a Cephalon Whiplash informant. But caution and Den’s presence kept the words from his tongue.
“I’m going to go back and talk to Yimmon,” he said, rising. “Take the helm?”
Laranth nodded and slid into his seat. Jax turned to I-Five. “Ping me when we’re about to jump to hyperspace, okay?”
“You don’t trust us to enter the corridor correctly?” asked the droid.
Laranth merely looked at Jax through her large, peridot-colored eyes.
“Of course I trust you. I just need a front-row seat for the jump. Yeah, I know it’s not rational,” he added when I-Five made a testy clicking sound. “I just need to see the stars change. That all right with you?”
“As you wish,” droid and Twi’lek said in eerie unison. Jax thought he heard Den Dhur chuckle softly.
He found Thi Xon Yimmon sitting at a duraplast table fashioned to look like wood. It looked like wood for no other reason than that Jax liked wood. On extended missions in space—which seemed to happen increasingly as resistance activity picked up and spread—he wanted to be reminded that somewhere there were worlds with forests alive and growing.
He had a real tree in his quarters—a tiny thing in a ceramic pot. It was a gift from Laranth and was many hundreds of years old, though it remained tiny. I-Five had shown Jax how the masters of an ancient art form called miisai trimmed and guided the branches. Jax had learned to do it using delicate tendrils of the Force. The practice had become a meditation. So, too, had going through the forms of lightsaber combat with his new weapon—a lightsaber he and Laranth had constructed using a crystal that had come to him from an unexpected source. The weapon’s weight was a comforting presence against his hip; no less comforting than being able to stow the Sith blade he’d been using.
He’d had no time to meditate in the last two days. He’d told himself it was because of their aggressive time line for moving Yimmon offworld. He knew better. It was because meditating led to thinking about the message the Cephalon had given him.
Time, for a Cephalon, was a somewhat malleable substance. “Plastic,” a philosopher or physicist might have said. Den called it “squishy.” Whatever modifier seemed most appropriate, it all came down to the same thing: Cephalons “saw” time as other sentients saw spatial relationships. Something might be before you or behind you or beside you, but if you turned your head to look, it was visible. If you walked around an object, you could see different sides of it—gain different perspectives. A crude analogy, but approximate to the way Cephalons saw time. A moment might be before them or behind them or on top of them—future or past or present—yet they could but turn their immensely complex minds and perceive it, move around it, and view it from different points.
This perception might—or might not—have had something to do with the fact that Cephalons had what was known variously as augmented or punctuated intelligence. This meant that they had, in addition to one big brain, several “sub-brains”—ganglionic nodes, really—that took care of more atavistic body functions and left the big brain free to do . . . well, whatever it did.
Through his connection to the Force, Jax had occasionally come close to grasping the reality of this, but even a Jedi couldn’t fathom the precise nature of the Cephalons’ relationship to time. And, alas, what Cephalons could not do terribly well was communicate what they perceived. Tenses were lost on them. What happened the previous day or last century was as “present” as something that would happen the next day or a century in the future. And since they were linked to one another through the Force, a Cephalon might very well be able to “see” something that hadn’t happened or would not happen in its own lifetime.
Which was why receiving a message from a Cephalon Whiplash operative before a major mission was, to Jax Pavan, a severe test of his Jedi patience. He often sent the more dispassionate I-Five to interview Cephalons, but this time that hadn’t been an option. When Jax had received this message, I-Five had been off with Den Dhur and Tuden Sal, securing a series of bogus ship’s ident codes that might be needed for their journey to Dantooine. So he’d gone by himself back into their old neighborhood near Ploughtekal Market to meet with a Cephalon who’d installed itself in a residence that catered to non-oxygen-breathing life-forms. Cephalons preferred methane and liked their atmosphere a little on, as Den put it, the “chewy” side.
Jax had arrived at the Cephalon’s address in heavy disguise. To outsiders he appeared to be an Elomin diplomat—just the sort of visitor a Cephalon might be expected to have. Diplomats and politicians were always looking for an edge when it came to future—or past—events. The Cephalons had no scruples about divulging information. They merely were incapable of communicating it clearly.
Jax found the alien in a loft that was considered grand by Cephalon standards. Within the methane-infused habitat, it kept a variety of kinetic fountains, sculptures, and art wall displays. The Cephalons liked movement. The huge being—whose designation, Aoloiloa, loosely meant “the one before Lo and after Il”—lived behind a huge glass-walled barrier in which it floated in its soup of methane like a gigantic, mottled gray melon. It ate and communicated via a baleen that strained nutrients from the methane soup and vibrated to give form to thoughts that were displayed on a panel in an antechamber outside its inner sanctum. The name, Jax knew, was for the benefit of other sentients the Cephalons interacted with—a means for those temporally challenged souls to distinguish between individuals. Presumably the Cephalons had their own mysterious way of doing that.
Jax had announced himself using the translation device next to the Cephalon’s display panel.
“I, being Jax Pavan, come as bidden.” Now warn me of an Imperial plot.
The Cephalon, of course, did nothing of the kind. Instead, it asked a question: Depart you (have/will)?
Jax blinked. Clearly a question about a future event. “Yes.”
—Crux. The word typed itself onto the display panel.
“Crux?” repeated Jax. “What kind of crux?”
—Nexus, said Aoloiloa. Locus. Dark crosses/has crossed/will cross light.
“Yes, I know what a crux is. What does it mean—in this case?”
—At crux: Choice is/has been/will be loss. Indecision is/has been/will be all loss.
Jax waited, but the Cephalon did not elaborate.
“What does that mean: ‘Choice is loss. Indecision is all loss’?”
—It means what it means. Everything.
Jax kept his thoughts composed with effort. Listen, he told himself. Listen. “Whose choice?” he asked. “Whose indecision? Mine?”
—Choice upon choice. Decision upon decision. Indecision is/was/will be cumulative.
“Indecision over a period of time? Or the cumulative indecision of a number of people?”
The Cephalon bobbed up and down slowly, then turned away from the transparisteel barrier that protected it from the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere of Coruscant.
So, silently, Jax had been dismissed. He’d walked back to the art gallery and event center that served as Whiplash headquarters pondering the Cephalon’s words: Choice is loss; indecision is all loss.
Any way he interpreted that, it did not sound good.
Jax stopped in the hatchway of the Far Ranger’s crew’s commons, studying the Whiplash leader where he sat at the faux-wood table. “You’re still not resigned to this, are you?” he asked finally.
“Would you be, if you were being asked to relocate and leave the heart of your operations? The only reason I agreed to this is that if the Emperor suspects I’ve moved, he may focus his efforts on finding me and give the network on Coruscant some relief.”
“The attack near Sil’s Place was too close, Yimmon. And the loss of innocent life involved . . .”
The Cerean nodded wearily. “Yes. That, too. That bloodbath was . . . unforgivable. That he would send battle droids, have them kill indiscriminately and widely . . .”
“Apparently, they knew we were in the area, but their information wasn’t precise enough to target effectively. Photonic charges gave them a shot at killing some of us without extreme damage to the infrastructure.” Jax couldn’t quite keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
“Maybe. And maybe . . .”
“What?”
The Cerean shook his immense head. “You said it yourself once: It felt as if the Emperor was desperate. If Vader is out of the way for a while and the Inquisitors can’t track us without you sensing them, that makes some sense, but . . .”
Jax felt a niggle of unease but shook it off. He’d understood the Cephalon’s warning, he told himself, and heeded it.
“Are you suggesting the Emperor might not be as desperate as he seems?” Jax asked Yimmon.
The Cerean sighed, his breath rumbling deep in his broad, muscular chest. “Let us just say that I have never known Emperor Palpatine to be prone to panic. But—as I said—with his champion out of the way . . .”
“Any more intel from our informants?”
“None. No one has seen Vader or heard so much as a rumor about his condition since your last meeting.”
Their last meeting—in which Vader had tried to punish Jax for still being Jedi, in which he had cultivated a traitor within Jax’s team, in which he had tried to make use of a rare biological agent to enhance his own connection to the Force. Jax found it ironic that, in his unenhanced state, Vader might have succeeded in capturing or killing him . . . along with all his companions. But the Dark Lord had overreached and defeated himself. There was a lesson in that about hubris and impatience. Jax wondered if Anakin Skywalker—imprisoned in that towering black survival suit, held together by cybernetic implants—would recognize it.
“Then this is a window of opportunity,” said Jax. “To be timid now . . .”
“Timid?” Yimmon laughed. “Am I not showing timidity by running?”
“No. You’re showing wisdom. Whiplash needs you. The growing resistance needs you. The Emperor’s flailing around almost got you killed.”
Thi Xon Yimmon looked up at Jax with steady eyes the color of old bronze. “What if he is not flailing around, Jax? What if there is a method to these attacks?”
Jax pushed away the cold that tried to invade his core. “Then we’ll remove ourselves from harm’s way. Look, Yimmon, if he’d known Sil’s Place was the pass-through for our operatives, he would have simply taken it off the map. If he’d known where our base of operations was, he would have sent his bounty hunters and his battle droids and his Inquisitors there and killed us in our sleep. What could he possibly have to gain by plunging randomly around like a rancor in bloodlust?”
“Perhaps what he has gained—my leaving Coruscant. My disconnecting myself from the battle long enough to relocate and regroup. Long enough for him to regroup. This may be a window of opportunity for the Emperor, too.”
Jax levered himself away from the hatch frame. “I’ve told you, if you want my team to stay with you on Dantooine—”
The Whiplash leader shook his head wearily. “No. Tuden Sal needs you on Coruscant. He’s unhappy enough that you’re the one serving as my nursemaid on this voyage. He’s right. I’d talk you out of this if I could. I’d like to have our best near Palpatine . . . and Vader, if he re-emerges.”
If? No, not if. Jax knew it was really only a matter of when.
Their route to Dantooine had been decided in a heated consultation during which Laranth and I-Five argued for a direct shot into Wild Space and from there into Myto’s Arrow, while Tuden Sal and Thi Xon Yimmon counseled that they take a more mundane approach along a heavily traveled trade lane.
Myto’s Arrow was a narrow corridor that would take them from the fringes of the galaxy directly to Dantooine through a patch of unstable space stressed by the gravitational tides of a particularly violent binary star system most pilots called simply the Twins. Its saving virtue was that the heavily fluctuating magnetic fields around the binary pair cloaked any attitude changes a ship made as it passed by. Theoretically, a master pilot with an enemy in hot pursuit could flee into the binary’s gravity coil, drop out of hyperspace just long enough to make a radical course change, then leap again in a completely different direction while the pursuer tried to figure out which way he’d gone.
The mere mention of Myto’s Arrow made Tuden Sal’s face pucker. His recommendation that they make port on Bandomeer made Laranth’s eyes roll.
“There’s still a pronounced Imperial presence on Bandomeer, Sal,” she had objected. “After Vader crushed the miners’ revolt last year, the Emperor has kept a watchful eye on things.”
“Which is why no one would expect a ship full of subversives to make port there,” Sal argued. “You would be just one more cargo ship doing its mundane business in an Imperial port.”
Ultimately, Thi Xon Yimmon had made the call. “What’s less remarkable than a freighter stopping at regular ports of call? I think Sal’s right. If anyone does suspect Far Ranger of being anything more than what she seems, they may well have lost interest when all we do is drop into a series of ports to off-load and take on cargo.”
And so they had ended up here, on the well-plied Hydian Way, headed out toward the Corporate Sector . . . except that they had no intention of going that far. They would make port on Bandomeer, communicate briefly with the nascent resistance cell there, then move on, stopping sequentially at Botajef, Celanon, Feriae Junction, and Toprawa, where they would contact the remnant of the Antarian Rangers.
The Rangers—little less reviled by the Emperor than the Jedi—had disappeared from the Empire’s scanners, but they were far from dead. There was, in Jax Pavan’s heart, a deep but fragile hope that perhaps the same was true of the Jedi. That perhaps he was not, as he often suspected, the last one.
At Bandomeer there was, indeed, an Imperial presence. There were also one or two Inquisitors, which meant that Jax and Laranth remained aboard Far Ranger in a state of dormancy. I-Five and Den carried out the playacting necessary to barter for ionite—which also resulted in contact and an exchange of information with members of the Bandomeer version of Whiplash.
Ionite was a substance of extraordinary properties—it canceled out whatever charge it was presented with, be it negative or positive—which made it ideal for defeating such devices as shield generators and communications grids. It had also proved an effective component in weaponry, which made it valuable to the resistance.
Cargo holds full of ore and ingots, Far Ranger lifted again and continued her sojourn, making several ports of call along the Hydian Way and navigating the final leg with an amount of ionite sufficient to the needs of their allies on Toprawa.
They made Toprawa ten days after leaving Coruscant—their plan: to pause there before backtracking slightly to pick up the Thesme Trace toward Dantooine. Toprawa was a world whose temperate zones were covered with lush forests that encroached on every port and outpost. The small spaceport they called at was on the outskirts of Big Woolly township in the cool northern reaches of a major landmass. “Big Woolly,” Jax had learned, was a reference to the appearance of the nearby mountain range, with its fleece of native conifers. They elected to berth away from the main docking complex on an open landing pad, intending to call as little attention to themselves as possible.
It was near sunset when Jax debarked from Far Ranger to find himself surrounded by massive conifers whose sweet, tangy perfume overwhelmed the mechanical scents of the spaceport. He was overwhelmed, as well, by the sheer vividness and vitality of the forest. It was neither as lofty as the growth on the Wookiee homeworld, Kashyyyk, nor as lush as the rain forests of Rodia, but it wrapped the constructed artifacts of the spaceport with teeming life. It was exhilarating and soothing at once, and Jax wished, for a moment, that they could simply stay here—all of them—and make Toprawa their new headquarters.
“Majestic, aren’t they?” Yimmon was at his elbow, gazing across the durasteel landing pad at the sentinel spikes of ruddy bark and blue-green foliage, now tinged with gold from the planet’s lowering sun. “And amazing how something as massive and enduring as those trees should also be flexible enough to bend to the wind.”
Jax took in that feature of the surrounding giants. Deeply rooted, ancient, strong, and connected to the larger force of nature, yet they bowed and shifted at the invisible promptings of wind and weather. He supposed there was a lesson of some sort there.
“I envy the Rangers their capital.” Yimmon sighed. “Though Dantooine is not unpleasant.”
Jax smiled. “Does this remind you of home?”
The Cerean nodded. “Still, I’ve rarely seen trees this tall on my homeworld. There is a vibrancy here that is . . . intoxicating.”
Jax had to agree. The cool, moist air was heady. He breathed deeply of it. It reminded him of the scent given off by his tiny miisai tree when he caressed its branches with his fingers . . . or with the Force.
“They say,” Yimmon said, “that the Force flows in the sap of forests like these.”
“Who says?” Laranth came out onto the landing ramp to survey the Toprawan landscape.
“Ki-Adi-Mundi, for one,” said Yimmon. A member of the Jedi High Council, Ki-Adi—a Cerean—had led the Grand Army of the Republic through several key battles, only to die in the violence and treachery of Order 66. He was a particular hero of Thi Xon Yimmon.
Laranth smiled. Jax knew what she was thinking—how bemusing that a man of Yimmon’s heroic stature should have heroes of his own.
“Well, then,” she said, “if General Ki-Adi said it, it must be so.” She stretched out a hand toward the trees and closed her eyes as if testing the truth of her own hero’s words.
Curious, Jax reached out as well with tendrils of the Force, probing the fringes of the forest, caressing the branches and boughs, feeling the texture of bark and needle, tasting the life force of the sap.
Yes. It was there—a silken fabric of Force energy. Like a murmur of sound, an undercurrent of vibration, an ambient throb of light. It was lovely. Cool and deep as the shadows . . .
Shadows.
His thoughts eddied. Had there been a flicker—the merest shiver—of something not of the forest?
Jax blinked and glanced about the landing pad. Another vessel—meters away—had just drawn in its landing ramp and was revving up its engines. Perhaps the ripple in the energy of Toprawa’s verdure had come from there.
“Are we going to stand here all night admiring the scenery?” I-Five exited the ship with a whisper of servos. “I had thought we were supposed to make contact with an important customer?”
“Yeah, the sun’s going down,” said Den. “Aren’t we supposed to see a lady about some ore?”
Jax nodded. He thought about the fleeting extrasensory impression that he’d just encountered, and decided it must have been some eddy or backwash. “Right. Laranth and I will make contact. I-Five, if you could get the cargo ready to off-load . . .”
“Consider it done.”
Disguised, Jax and Laranth made their way to Big Woolly. The small city had grown up around the spaceport—a crescent of tightly clustered businesses and homes that fanned out from the port facility, roughly five kilometers across at its widest point. The inn at which they were to meet their contact was at the northern tip of the crescent along a curving avenue whose businesses catered largely to merchants. It was a respectable meeting place for successful shipowners and merchants. Hence, the disguises that Jax and Laranth had adopted allowed them to fit into the clientele.
Jax, in a tailored synthsilk suit and gleaming black boots, looked the part of a successful freighter captain. Laranth, ostensibly his business partner, wore the flowing, diaphanous robes that declared her a member of a merchant clan. She’d also affected a pair of vivid orange, silky, bell-trimmed mantles over her lekku, thus effectively concealing both her truncated left lekku and her emotions. The damaged lekku was an old injury Laranth had received in a firefight; it was also an identifying feature that she usually declined to mask. Now, though, it was critical to conceal both identity and telltale changes in hue. Her blasters were concealed; Jax had left his lightsaber with I-Five. This was not the sort of place one advertised the bearing of arms, and he wanted no one to suspect that he was a Jedi.
As part of her headgear, Laranth also wore a medallion that, like the lekku mantles it adorned, was more than just stage dressing. It was a sigil that was meaningful only to its intended target—an Antarian Ranger.
They entered the large main room of the Mossy Glen Inn and looked around. Jax smiled. How different this was from entering Sil’s Place, where everyone contrived to look at you without seeming to look at you—or the Twilight Taverna off Ploughtekal Market, where everyone in the room turned to assess each newcomer’s potential to be exploited in some fashion. Here, they drew only the most casual of glances. Jax sensed momentary admiration of their physical appearance, but no clandestine regard.
The variety of sentients was not remarkable in any way—there were life-forms from a dozen worlds, though human colonists seemed the best-represented group. All were well dressed and well curried—to their species’ standards—and all seemed to be enjoying a good meal, a good drink, a good laugh, or a good haggle.
Laranth looked around the room with a brisk, businesslike gaze, then led the way to a staircase that rose upward into the softly lit reaches of a second floor. It was quieter up here, and duskier. Little lamps flickered on the tables, and a huge fireplace at the far end of the room sent light and shadow dancing over every surface. The shadows would not stand still and be recognized as one thing or another.
Ambiguity. Jax found it suddenly discomfiting, for reasons he had no time to contemplate. He felt a subtle shift in Laranth’s energies—a sharpening of her regard. She strode down the length of the room to a semicircular booth at the right flank of the great hearth. Jax followed.
A woman sat at the booth. She was dressed in a sleek cutaway coat with synthfur collar and cuffs. Her hair was drawn back in a tight coil at the nape of her neck, and her gray eyes were bright and assessing. Jax suspected that the skirt of her coat concealed a number of weapons.
Laranth inclined her head. “Greetings. Do I have the pleasure of addressing Aren Folee?”
“You do,” replied the other woman, dipping her own head minutely. “And you are . . .”
“Pala D’ukal,” said Laranth. “This is my partner, Corran Vigil.”
Folee nodded in greeting. Her expression was one of polite interest, no more.
“We bring a message from a common friend. A Cerean gentleman of your acquaintance, recently from Imperial Center.”
Folee’s eyes lit. “How is he?”
“He is well. He speaks highly of you and recommends that we do business.”
Folee indicated the seats opposite her. “Please.”
They slid into the booth.
“How confidential are our dealings?” Jax asked, glancing around the subtly lit room.
Folee didn’t answer right away. Instead, she reached up and palmed a medallion she wore around her neck on a thick metal torque. “Very confidential now,” she said. “If anyone’s snooping, they’re getting only the most deadly boring of trade talks fabricated from our actual conversation. So we ought to discuss a bit of trade to give the dialogue generator some fuel.”
Jax was intrigued. He’d heard rumors about the sort of antisurveillance device they were apparently now being screened by. Its ionite circuitry didn’t so much jam snoop signals as feed them cobbled-together dialogues that made use of the raw material of actual conversation. It required only that the speakers clutter their verbal trail with just enough innocuous debris to fool potential eavesdroppers. The device screened out programmed “hot” words and phrases but, as far as any surveillance systems were concerned, no jamming was taking place.
“Nothing could be easier,” said Laranth. “As it happens, we’ve got a cargo hold that contains enough ionite to gum up a whole shipload of surveillance snoops.”
“And in return?”
“One of those lovely medallions you’re wearing, for one thing,” said Laranth. “We could really use that tech at home.”
“And information,” Jax said, “about the Imperial presence in the sector.”
Folee grimaced. “Well, there is a presence, or at least the dregs of one. Messed up my last big mission really good. Killed a lot of resources—both material and personal.”
“Understood,” Jax said. “We’ve sustained our own losses . . . which is, frankly, the reason our mutual friend is moving his base of operations.”
“To?”
“As any pilot would say: to the point.” Jax drew on the tabletop with one fingertip. A long diagonal line. He dotted the end of it with a sharp tap.
Folee frowned, then nodded in comprehension. “Any pilot” would know that the planet at the “point” of Myto’s Arrow was Dantooine. She glanced up, caught the attention of a serving droid, and ordered drinks and a plate of finger food—necessary items for serious and amicable negotiations.
When the droid had trundled off with their order, the Ranger leaned toward Jax and Laranth, looking from one face to the other. “Does this move mean that we are close to incorporating our efforts and moving against our competitors together?”
The question was earnest and had behind it the weight of deep and visceral disappointment and loss. Aren Folee may have spoken casually of the killing of resources, but her feelings about it were far from casual.
Jax exchanged a glance with Laranth. “Closer, perhaps. Very close to orchestrating those efforts more effectively, at least. That was one of the incentives our friend had in relocating. Where he was based . . .”
“Was increasingly bad for his health,” Laranth finished. “Communication with satellite organizations was difficult at times. Though there is something to be said for hiding in plain sight—”
“Or getting lost in a crowd,” added Jax. “Unfortunately, our . . . competitors are making it hard to stay lost.”
Folee nodded thoughtfully. “Communication is not an issue here. We have a most effective network that gets to the point quite efficiently. But about the, um, competition in the area—it is, at times, most fierce. Recently, for example, the trade route between here and the Telos system was overrun with our competitor’s ships. They’re big boys, too. Far outweigh anything we lowly little Rangers can put in the space lanes. So, if your cargo holds are modest . . .”
“They are,” Laranth and Jax said in unison.
Folee smiled. “Then I’d advise against even bothering going any farther up the Hydian Way. This is as good a place as any to replot your course.”
Their food and drink arrived and they made a show of imbibing before they settled into conversation once more, setting up an arrangement for the off-loading of as much of the ionite as their allies on Toprawa could make use of.
“Coming back this way?” Ranger Folee asked as they concluded their arrangements.
Jax looked up and met Laranth’s eyes briefly before saying, “We hadn’t planned on it. We figured to take a more direct route back to Imperial Center.”
Folee’s gray eyes widened. “You’re going back to Imperial Center? Why?”
“We have . . . interests there, as you might expect,” Jax explained. “Business to see to—”
“And people counting on us,” added Laranth.
“You could have that here, too, you know,” Folee said. “I could really use a couple of associates with your . . . talents.”
She had Jax’s attention. “Our talents?”
“Clearly you both have a connection to the Force. I’d heard that our friend was working with a couple of especially talented individuals. Individuals whom the Emperor found of particular interest. I suspect he meant you two.”
Jax looked at Laranth. Was Aren Folee a Force-sensitive? He considered briefly trying to probe her mind, decided against it; if she were sharp enough in the ways of the Force to be either a benison or a menace, she’d notice his efforts. If she wasn’t, there was no point to it anyway. “What makes you say that?” he asked.
“I’d heard one of these special operatives was a Twi’lek, for one thing.”
“And the other?”
Folee laughed. “Subtext. Half of what you say to each other is unspoken, and you complete each other’s sentences.” She sobered quickly and leaned toward them again. “I’m serious. We could really use you here. This is the best of all worlds—literally. We’re on a main trade route, so there’s a lot of covering traffic for our ships and special cargo, but we’re far enough from the center of the galaxy that the Empire doesn’t normally pay us much attention. We’re just an outlying trade center. But I can safely say there’s a lot more going on here than meets the Imperial eye. We have an extensive underground—and I do mean underground—network.” She glanced down toward the floorboards, then back up. “Sound appealing?”
Laranth sat back in her seat. “Of course it does. But . . .”
“But,” concluded Jax, “with our friend offworld, someone needs to run the business on Imperial Center.”
“Does it have to be you?”
Did it? Jax had to admit he’d asked himself that question a number of times in recent weeks. He also had to admit that Toprawa had strong appeal. He shot a glance sideways at Laranth. She was sitting stiffly erect behind a wall of reserve. He couldn’t, for once, tell what she was thinking, but he suspected she was a bit outraged by the thought that she and Jax might abandon their operations on Coruscant.
He looked back at Folee, smiled regretfully. “I’m afraid it does,” he said.
“So . . . we finish each other’s sentences.” Laranth strolled beside Jax as they made their leisurely way back to the ship.
He smiled. “Apparently.”
“Next we’ll be eating off each other’s plates.”
They walked on in silence until they came within sight of the spaceport. Then Laranth said, “What do you think about what Folee proposed?”
“About basing ourselves here?” He shrugged. “I don’t see how we can. Whiplash needs us on Coruscant.”
“Does it?” She swung around to face him. “Might we not serve the cause better out here, where our forces are building? It seems to me that this is where the front is. This is where the resistance will become a real force in the galaxy.”
Jax was stunned. This wasn’t the Laranth Tarak he knew. Laranth, the fiercely loyal, the champion of honor and duty. He laughed uncertainly. “Who are you and what did you do with Laranth?”
She made an impatient gesture. “Not joking, Jax. On Coruscant, it feels like the walls are closing in. They’re learning to read us. Learning to know what sort of situations we involve ourselves in. What sort of people we’ll risk our lives to help. On Coruscant, they’re learning how to bait us—how to get to us . . .”
Jax raised his eyes to the dark wall of trees that embraced the spaceport. Uncomplicated. Natural. Real ground beneath his feet, the scent of grass and tree needles, the simple susurration of wind. Coruscant, with its barrage of sounds and energies—its clutter of angles and jagged, chaotic patterns of light and shadow—seemed suddenly suffocating. It was like living in a hive. There was no distance between you and the next person . . . and the next person could be an Imperial operative with instructions to capture or kill you. If you didn’t have your Force sense tuned to danger level every minute of every day, you could be caught off guard.
Come back to Toprawa and work with the Antarian Rangers? Maybe use it as a base to find other Jedi—if there were any other Jedi—and build a new Order? Come back to Toprawa . . . with Laranth?
He brought his eyes back to her face. In the moment their gazes locked, to do that—to return here with her and blend into the underground network—was something he wanted beyond reason. The desire rose up in him and almost swamped him.
Almost.
He took a deep breath, and let the desire out.
“We can’t just leave Coruscant, Laranth.”
“Tuden Sal has turned out to be a real asset,” she argued. “He’s smart, politically savvy, driven . . .”
“And still thinks it would be a good idea to assassinate Palpatine.”
That stopped her. “Yes. True. All right. But Pol Haus can balance that out, don’t you think?”