He drew in a deep breath, his mind hovering on the verge of epiphany. He felt an echo from that moment of ineffable peace when, months earlier, he had for a brief flash touched the hem of the Cosmic Force. He felt the stirring in his veins and arteries and, wanting it desperately, reached for the realization that was just beyond his grasp …
And touched the black heart of vacuum.
Vader!
Jax recoiled, literally thrusting himself backward and inward, away from that chill connection. He wanted to believe it had been merely a manifestation of his own apprehension, but he knew it was not. He had felt Darth Vader’s touch as surely as he felt the deck of the Far Ranger beneath him.
He flung himself up from the meditation mat and out into the passageway. No more than a couple of steps down the curved corridor, he came face-to-face with Laranth. Her eyes were storm-dark, her expression grim. He needed no verbal confirmation from her; neither did she need it from him. They had both sensed it.
They turned as one and ran for the bridge.
Three
Den Dhur stared out through the viewport and considered whether the relief from boredom offered by challenging Thi Xon Yimmon to a game of dejarik was worth the extreme humiliation that would inevitably follow. So far he had been unable to last more than ten minutes against the Cerean. Yimmon had an unfair advantage, of course, given his dual cortices. Den had considered asking if he could possibly turn one of them off, or distract it with the calculation of pi to several thousand places, or some other engrossing pursuit, but that would be whining. He hated whining. Especially if it issued from his own lips.
He stretched, yawned, and glanced over at I-Five, who was piloting. “Are we there yet?” he mumbled.
The droid turned his head, fixing his companion with both optics. “Obviously, we are not there yet, or we would … be there. We are scheduled to drop out of hyperspace in exactly twenty minutes, thirty-three seconds.”
“Just making conversation.”
“Why? Oh, wait—let me guess—you’re bored.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t get bored. It is one of the advantages of having a machine intelligence as opposed to an organic one. You biologicals are plagued by the sense of time passing. I have no such issues.”
Den sat up straight in his seat, staring curiously at the droid. “How do you experience the passage of time?”
Five turned his optics back to the viewport. “Which kind? Universal time, as in Tiran’s theory? Or hypertime?”
“Uhh …” Den had only vaguely heard of the great Drall physicist Tiran’s unification of sublight time and space, and he’d never heard of hypertime. Blasted if he’d let I-Five know that, however. “Not like the Cephalons, right? You don’t experience time that way. I mean, the way you described it to me once—like objects in space.”
“Ah, yes. I do recall that conversation. I suggested there was a trash bin in your future. You assured me of your ultimate optimism.”
“Yeah. But do you—experience time like the Cephalons do?”
“I rather think no one experiences it quite like that. The difference between the way you and I experience time is a function of the way our memories work. Your memory is volatile. Mine …”
Den gave the droid a sharp glance. Why the hesitation?
“Mine is not,” the droid finished blandly. “Unless someone wipes my memory core—”
“Which has happened.”
“Which has happened,” agreed I-Five. “But if no one meddles with it, it remains intact.”
Mercilessly intact, Den knew. Though they had been wiped some twenty years ago, I-Five’s memories of the death of his human friend Lorn Pavan—Jax’s father—had been restored in vivid and complete detail. As had the droid’s betrayal at the hands of Tuden Sal. Den often wondered how Five could bring himself to work with the Sakiyan in Whiplash. He doubted he could be so sanguine about it—despite the fact that Tuden Sal had lost all of his business holdings, had been blacklisted by the Empire, and had had to relocate his family to a frontier planet where their lives went on without him.
“The memory of an organic life-form,” I-Five said, “is manipulated by the emotional current that goes along with the events in memory. They change, expand, contract, assume epic proportions, or become submerged in those currents. It is at once a great strength and a great weakness.”
Den had opened his mouth to reply when Jax and Laranth exploded onto the bridge.
“Drop out of hyperspace and ping the escort,” Jax said tersely. “Vader’s after us.”
The words were no more than out of his mouth when the Far Ranger seemed to hesitate like a dancer pausing in mid-step, then dropped back into normal space, her automatic systems taking over to make certain she didn’t collide with anything solid or get dragged into a gravity well.
Den scrambled out of the copilot’s seat, allowing Jax to slide into place at the console and activate the heads-up display.
I-Five swiveled his head to look at the Jedi. “I didn’t do that, Jax. I hadn’t time. We were just pulled back into normal space.”
“Where?” asked Laranth.
“Apparently, right where someone wants us,” said I-Five.
Den saw what he meant. Other ships were popping into normal space all around them. While millions of kilometers distant, the Twins still set the void ablaze with their deadly display. His throat clamped shut and his extremities felt as if his temperature had dropped by twenty degrees. There were so many of them! They formed a rough half sphere around Far Ranger and were moving toward them, seeking to cut off retreat.
“Jax …” Den forced the name between his arid lips. “Jax, tell me you have a plan.”
“Are they Imperial?” asked Laranth, though she surely knew the answer.
Jax didn’t answer either question. “I make twenty of them.”
Twenty! Twenty Imperial ships for them? For one tiny rogue freighter?
“He knows we’re aboard,” Jax murmured. “He knows.”
Laranth made a noise that was half growl, half moan. “How can he even be here?”
“I don’t know. He just is.” Jax turned to look at her. “Man the dorsal weapons. Den, you take the keel battery—but first, get Yimmon into a life pod.”
“You know what he’ll say—”
“Get him into a pod.”
“What are you going to do?” Den asked. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Laranth wheel around and disappear into the main passageway.
“We’re going to try to squeeze between the Twins.”
Den closed his eyes. “I didn’t need to know that.” Then he fled the bridge, on his way to Thi Xon Yimmon.
“You’re serious?” said I-Five. “You really mean to dive between two disintegrating stars?”
Jax’s fingers flew over the navigational console, correcting course, setting speed. “Not exactly. Just close enough to two disintegrating stars to mask our signature. Then reorient and shoot off toward Dathomir.”
“Dathomir?”
“Can’t take a chance on leading him to Dantooine. Too risky.”
“And by ‘shoot off,’ I assume you mean leap to hyperspace. In the gravity eddies between a white dwarf and a blue giant.”
“Yes.”
“Which is immeasurably risky.”
Jax paused to throw his metallic friend a tight smile. “Didn’t say it wasn’t risky, Five. Just preferable to the alternative.” He put his hands on the copilot’s steering yoke. “Transfer the controls to my station.”
“Transfer, copy.”
Jax saw the status light at his station go green and punched the ion drive hard. They leapt forward right into the brilliant, spangled veil of matter and energy that stretched between the two stars. Behind them now—and above, below, and flanking—the Imperial vessels pursued, closing the net.
Jax had a magnified visual of the closest vessels that confirmed his suspicions: this was a large contingent of the Dark Lord’s 501s
t attack fleet, known as Vader’s Fist.
Which one? Jax wondered. Which ship was Vader on? He had no intention of reaching out to know for certain. Somewhere in the phalanx there was a flagship, of that he was certain. Possibly even that big cruiser that was now hanging back behind the smaller vessels—the ship whose gravity generators had no doubt sucked them out of hyperspace. It was the only ship of real size in the formation; the rest were frigates and attack corvettes with a few TIE fighters thrown in for good measure.
“You’re aware that this is suicide,” I-Five said.
“We don’t have a choice. Well, yes, we do—give up or fight. Neither decision is likely to result in any of us living to a ripe old age. Maybe we should have stayed on Toprawa.”
“Maybe we should have.”
Closer loomed the blue-white river of stellar matter. Closer drew the individual fingers of Vader’s Fist. Far Ranger bucked, then suddenly seemed to be flying through taffy. The thought was almost funny—the flow of substance between the stars was something in the nature of a cosmic taffy pull. And they might just end up as a small, crunchy bite amid the creamy starstuff.
Jax tilted the ship’s bow down and to port very slightly, skimming the shores of the stream. The ship fought him, trying to sail straight to the heart of the white dwarf. He held on, shooting between the dwarf and the giant, through the hurricane of hot plasma being siphoned off by the smaller, denser star.
It was like stepping into chaos. Far Ranger was buffeted by a howling inferno; the hull temperature spiked.
“Exterior temperature registering five thousand degrees,” I-Five reported.
Jax closed his eyes, letting the Force take him, imagining it as a web of freezing energy around the little freighter. He experienced something he had never felt before: as if the currents and eddies of energy between the two stars were linked through him like reins in his hands. He felt the currents, gently manipulated the reins, navigated the eddies.
“We’ll be out the other side in ten seconds,” I-Five informed him.
“Course is set. Go to hyperdrive on my mark.”
“Copy.”
Jax looked up at the chron in the heads-up display. “Mark in five, four, three, two, one—”
“Belay that!” I-Five said.
Jax felt it before he saw it. They came out of the binary storm into a pocket formed by another contingent of ships.
Proximity alarms screamed and Jax did the only thing he could do. He flipped Far Ranger end over end, intending to flee back the way they’d come. They’d have to leap from the matter stream. But the flaw in that plan became immediately apparent as a formation of five ships emerged from the Twins’ torrent.
Jax knew without probing that the one at the center of the formation carried Vader.
He hit the comlink. “We’re surrounded! Fire at will! Everything we’ve got!”
The response from Laranth and Den was immediate—laser and charged particle beams sprayed from the Far Ranger’s batteries. The barrage from the dorsal battery concentrated on the central ship in the enemy formation. Laranth knew who was on that ship and knew, also, that under no circumstances could they let him board.
They had one chance and one chance only, and that was to break the Imperial formation, get back into the tidal flow between the stars, and leap to hyperspace from there. It was beyond suicidal, but there was no choice—they could not let Vader board and take Yimmon.
Jax drove Far Ranger right at Vader’s flagship and felt a sick wash of dark amusement sweep over him just before the enemy opened fire. The first shots were a warning, missing the ship by kilometers, but they swiftly drew closer. In seconds, they’d be raining on the Far Ranger’s shields—shields that, even with the previous owner’s augmentation, could not come close to withstanding more than a few seconds of concentrated Imperial firepower. They would buckle, collapse, and then …
There was a ping and a pop of ambient light from the communications panel. I-Five reacted instantaneously, returning the ping. “Our escort has found us,” he said.
“Which means we can find them,” Jax said. “Feed the coordinates to the life pods, then go to Yimmon.”
“You’re not going to abandon ship—”
“Only if we have to. Go!”
The droid sent the coordinates of their escort’s telltale and hastened from the bridge.
Jax looked up through the viewport. They were bearing down on Vader’s ships fast, and the four big fighters flanking him were tightening their formation. A blast of Imperial fire shook the little freighter, glancing off her shields. They were targeting the ion drive. Jax waited for a second shot to hit, then yanked the yoke hard over, sending Far Ranger into a tight spiral. If he’d timed it right, they’d fly—belly up—right beneath the flagship, slicing between it and its nearest neighbor.
If …
The barrage of fire from the gun batteries continued as they spun. To Vader it probably looked as if one of his shots had found its mark and sent the Whiplash ship out of control. If he wanted them, he’d have to reverse course and follow them back into the matter stream. If the Force was with them, he’d be too late.
Two klicks from Vader’s ship, Jax dropped Far Ranger’s bow a fraction more and dived toward the brilliant light. He reached for the hyperdrive controls.
And time stood still.
Jax felt as if he were diving into water. In one instant momentum was exchanged for a floating free fall.
They’d entered a stasis field.
Jax’s mind grappled with the idea. A large ship of the line could generate such a field, but for something as small as Vader’s cruiser to produce one was flatly impossible. His thoughts laboriously parsed the situation, aware of and frustrated by the field’s slowing of his neurons. Fortunately, his Jedi training helped him resist it—otherwise, he would simply have been frozen, in body and brain, and his next conscious awareness would have likely been seeing Vader looming over him.
Jax tried to focus. In order to escape the situation he first had to understand it. The explanation struck him as the ship’s spiral slowed further, and he studied the representative dots of the 501st’s ships arranged on the heads-up display. It came to him, then; the answer lay in their dispersement pattern. The stasis field was being generated by the five ships as a unit—spun among them like a spider’s web, each ship generating a section of the invisible strands as they flew in a pattern that was flawless and exact. That was likely attributable to the presence of Darth Vader—likely with a select group of his Inquisitors.
Jax threw the ship into reverse; the movement seemed to take forever. The hull groaned and shimmied, but they were held fast … and being drawn up toward the flagship. He’d figured it out, but too late to implement an escape.
Suddenly he could move again—subjective time was back to normal. He didn’t need the pinging instrumentation to tell him what had happened: the Dark Lord had abandoned the stasis field in favor of a more effective tractor beam. A mistake on his part that Jax would take full advantage of.
Jax triggered the comlink. “Abandon ship. All hands, abandon ship!” He activated the escape klaxon, scrambled out of the pilot’s seat, and headed aft.
The call to abandon ship echoed from Den Dhur’s headset. He was so focused on reorienting himself after the sudden cessation of their plummet toward ultimate doom that the sound of Jax’s voice shocked him. He tumbled out of the weapons station and onto the platform beneath the gimbaled chair.
The ventral battery was just below the forward cargo bay. Through the cowling, bursts of laserfire illuminated the keel with flashes of bright coherent light.
First a stasis field, then a tractor beam, he thought. Why, oh, why didn’t we keep some of the ionite?
Den hauled himself up the ladder, out of the battery, and into the cargo hold. He paused to orient himself. Jax had said to get to the life pods, but they’d be stuck in the tractor field just as effectively as the ship was … well, until Vader docked with
them for boarding.
The thought galvanized him. When Vader docked, the Imperials would have to lower their shields and force Far Ranger to lower hers, and they’d have to turn off their field for a moment. That would be all the time available in which to get the pods away and out of the tractor field.
I have to get aft.
Den’s thoughts imploded as the ship was rocked again by an external force. The bump was followed by the groaning of the hull. All the blood fled from Den’s brain. Instinct took over. He scrambled for the cargo bay hatch. He’d just reached it when there was a sound like the firing of a thousand thrusters. The lights flickered, then failed completely. The engines fell silent.
So did Laranth’s laser cannon.
It only now struck him that he’d been hearing her continued firing from the time he’d left his own post—until now. That was good, Den thought. Now the Twi’lek madwoman would have to abandon the kriffing ship. They were dead in space, no engines, no weapons, no life support—
He skidded to a halt as the realization hit him. No life support!
Den swallowed his fear, drew his blaster, and started cautiously down the long fore-and-aft passageway. He’d taken the precaution earlier of fastening his comlink to the collar of his jacket; now he thumbed it to I-Five’s frequency.
“Five? Den here. Come in.”
Silence … then, just when Den thought he might weep: “I-Five here. Where are you?”
“Just abaft the forward hold. You?”
“Amidships, lower deck, heading up. We’re being boarded. Port side, through the cargo bay.”
Den’s knees quaked. “On my way to you.” He turned and bolted for the nearest ladder.
He’d just stepped out onto the upper deck when the sound of groaning metal came again from his right. He choked back a yelp of sheer terror and took off toward the stern as fast as his short legs would carry him.
The Last Jedi Page 4