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 tiny 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 trie
d 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 reemerges.”
If? No, not if. Jax knew it was really only a matter of when.
Two
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 Je
di 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.
The Last Jedi Page 2