The Last Jedi

Six


He had to eat. He did it without half tasting what he put in his mouth. He drank copious amounts of the hot shig because it fooled him into thinking his mind was alert and working properly. He had to sleep, too, though he put it off for as long as he could. When he noticed that Den was doing the same thing, he opened his mouth to lecture, then closed it. Who was he to talk?

The tired mind wanders. If there is an unpleasant place for it to go, it will go there. Right now his was wandering down an avenue of thought that was all too disturbing. He had sent a terse, encrypted message to Tuden Sal on Coruscant, but as yet, there had been no reply. Jax didn’t know whether Sal had gotten it or not—or if he was even alive to get it.

Conjecture was futile. Jax decided to try meditation as an antidote. In the small but cozy quarters Aren had given him next to Den’s, he sat before the miisai tree, following its feathery boughs as if he were navigating a city canyon on Coruscant.

Following the flow of the Force.

There is no emotion; there is peace.

He’d thought exhaustion would be a form of peace. But Jax now realized the folly of eschewing sleep for the past thirty hours. He needed his mind to be clear and steady. If he was going to find Yimmon, he needed every faculty and power he possessed at his command—faculties that were presently shutting down.

There is no ignorance; there is knowledge.

He not only needed knowledge, he needed to be able to marshal it, recall it, use it. He was far from that—far from even knowing where to begin his quest for Yimmon.

There is no passion; there is serenity.

But he wasn’t serene. Passion roiled just below the surface—passion that had no practical outlet. What he wanted—to go back in time, to rewrite the last two days—he could not do. He tried to haul the burst of energy under control, to redirect it back to the path—to the tree. But his mind rebelled, urging him to do when there was no clear thing to be done.

There is no chaos; there is harmony.

There was nothing but chaos. Nothing. Jax Pavan, Jedi, was empty of anything but disorder and turmoil.

There is no death; there is the Force.

As a Jedi he had been taught that, at death, an individual became one with the Force. If that were true, might he not be able to feel Laranth through the Force in some small way? Again, he felt the urge to reach out in the hope that Laranth would reach back. He repressed the compulsion, fought it down. And he could no longer pretend that Darth Vader was the reason for his reluctance.

He felt the tears on his cheeks, warm and wet, just before the sobs racked him.



The “assistant” that Degan Cor gave Den was a kid. A Rodian kid. An orphan. Which meant that, as much as Den felt like refusing the offer, he didn’t.

Really, how did you say no to an orphan?

The kid had a droid that he’d built himself. He called it Candy because it was a “sweet tin can.” It had once been an old P2 unit but bore little resemblance to one now. The kid—his name was Geri—had replaced the P2’s turret with the head of an RX series pilot droid. Den thought “Bug-Eyes” was a far better name for the thing than “Candy,” but he wasn’t about to say anything out loud. He hardly had room to comment about the size of anyone else’s eyeballs—besides, it might hurt the Rodian boy’s feelings.

If the assistant wasn’t exactly impressive at first glance, the workshop he ushered Den into surely was. It was thirty meters long and roughly half as wide. The equipment and tools—though clearly scavenged from a variety of sources—were mostly state-of-the-art with a lot of upgrades and modifications, some of which would have been mind boggling even if Den hadn’t been nursing a sleep-deprivation headache that was unimpressed with the four hours of shut-eye he’d managed to get over the past two days.

The droid diagnostic station was extraordinary. It had not one but three artificial intelligence modules daisy-chained together in such a way that the operator could assess and repair a droid’s neural pathways in less than half the time it would take with one.

“That’s amazing,” said Den. “Degan put that together?”

“No. I did,” Geri said. There was no boastfulness in the simple admission. The kid grinned in that queerly Rodian way, the corners of his mouth turning up as the tip of his protuberant muzzle turned down. “Degan says I have a knack for machines.”

Hero worship. As Den recalled from somewhere in his misty past, it felt good to have heroes.

“Then we’ve come to the right place,” said I-Five from under Den’s arm.

The Sullustan jumped. He’d forgotten the droid was there.

Geri’s grin curled farther up at the corners. “Got that right! Wait’ll you see the inventory.”

He crossed to a pair of metal doors at one end of the workshop and pushed them open, then beckoned to Den.

The kid was right. The “inventory” was incredible—droids and bots and parts thereof lined the walls of a room not much smaller than the workshop itself. Den had expected a mad jumble, but the parts were arranged neatly, if randomly. Heads and turrets, treads, legs, and arms were racked in a celebration of orderliness, but …

“Okay, I can see you’ve got a system,” Den said, “but I don’t quite—”

“They’re in Rodian alphabetical order,” Five said testily. “May we get on with finding me an appropriate vehicle?”

“Yeah,” Den said. He asked Geri, “Got anything in an I-5YQ?”

Proboscis wrinkling and head swiveling, Geri surveyed his inventory. “We don’t get much call for protocol droids here. Mostly I repair tech-bots. I have a 9T and a couple of 5Ys.” He pointed at a peculiar, stumpy-legged droid with long, slender arms and no exoskeleton.

“I’d look like a garbage snipe. Don’t you have anything more closely approximating my original body?”

“I have part of a LE-BO2D9. But only the torso, arms, and head. Mostly we’ve got arms and cortices. Those are the parts we use most.”

“Do you have the rest of that RX unit you used for your little friend there?”

Candy, who’d been sitting silently in the doorway behind them, let out a bleep of outrage at the adjective.

“Pardon,” said I-Five. “I meant no disrespect.”

Candy accepted the apology with a single chirp.

Geri was shaking his head. “Sorry. The head was all we salvaged.”

“I can empathize,” I-Five told the RX-P2 hybrid. It uttered a muted trill.

“What are your top three desired features?” Geri asked, sounding like a used-droid salesman.

“Strength, maneuverability, and modifiability.”

Geri considered this, then began prowling through the neat racks of bots and parts, muttering to himself.

Den, bored and bone-tired, glanced around the workshop. He found his gaze returning again and again to a shadowy corner of the room in which he could just make out someone standing and staring at him.

“Uh, Geri—who’s that?”

The boy looked up and followed his gaze into the shadows. He laughed. “That’s not a who. That’s a what. It’s a BB-4000.”

“A what?”

“Let me see it,” said I-Five.

Den picked up the droid’s head and carried it back into the corner.

Gazing at what stood there, Den frowned. It looked like a man in close-fitting dark blue coveralls. But it wasn’t a man. It wasn’t moving. Not a muscle. Not a breath. Not an eye flutter beneath the closed lids. It was weird.

He realized, belatedly, that it was standing in an open crate. A neatly printed label along one side read: bb-4000.

“This is a droid?”

Geri didn’t bother to look up from his rummaging. “It’s a Bobbie-Bot, an HRD—human replicant droid.”

“How,” asked I-Five, “in the seven hells of Frolix did you manage to get one of these?”

“We’ve got two. You’ve heard of LeisureMech.”

“Even I’ve heard of LeisureMech,” said Den. “They risked everything on the success of their human replicant series. Customers didn’t take to them, and LeisureMech went under.”

“Yeah, well, when they went under they sold off all their remaining stock. Degan got ours for a song. I think they’re pretty cool, even with—y’know—that whole weirdness about him being too human to feel like a droid and too inhuman to seem like a real person.”

“He is, indeed, pretty cool,” said I-Five. “Is he functional?”

“Nah. One of the reasons Degan got them so cheap was the lack of working processor units. They’re wired for brains—all the relays are in place to the frame and musculature—but there’s nothing in there.”

“Interesting,” I-Five said in a tone of voice that Den found far too thoughtful.

“Five, you don’t want one. They melt. Don’t you remember? Kaird told us he’d seen one melt.” Den shuddered at the memory. “In the Factory District, just before we—well, you, actually—blew the place up real good.”

“Good times,” I-Five said softly. Then he continued: “Anyway, those were 3000-series droids. This is the next generation; a different design than the previous models. They gave up on genomic/algorithmic programming and cloning organs from synthflesh, and concentrated on neural net parallel processing, which greatly increased neural interaction and downgraded the development of killer memes. The downside was that it took longer and cost more—”

“But no disgusting puddles to get out of your carpet,” Geri finished. “Except it wasn’t the melting that killed LeisureMech. It was the ECD.”

Den shook his head. “The what?”

“Eerie Coulee Disorder,” said I-Five. “It refers to a pronounced sense of unease experienced by most humans and humanoids when they encounter a droid that appears almost, but not quite, human. Most humanoids are genetically programmed toward pareidolia, which is the ability to extrapolate complex images or sounds from simple stimuli; seeing a face in the clouds, for example. The Witch Nebula is a classic interpolation of—”

“He’ll go on like this for hours if you let him,” Den remarked.

“It’s kinda interesting,” Geri said. “But,” he continued, addressing the droid, “what’s your point?”

“My point is that the problem is easy to fix. It’s a simple matter of shade-shifting in subtle skin tones. The droid looks weird to sentients because his skin is too uniform a shade.”

Geri stared at him. “Huh. Y’know, that makes a lot of sense. Too bad you weren’t working for LM back then. Wonder why none of their engineers ever thought of it.”

“Probably,” said I-Five, “because they never asked a droid.”

“May I remind you,” said Den, “that your master power switch is still operational, and ever so much easier for me to reach?”

The droid uttered a mechanical snort, then asked Geri, “Did you find anything useful?”

“What? Oh, yeah. What about this?”

He lifted something out onto the floor. It was a ridiculously compact collection of metal rods and joints surmounted by what looked like a shallow soup kettle or an AT-AT pilot’s helmet. It barely came up to Den’s kneecaps.

“Uh,” Den said, “isn’t that a little … small?”

“Oh, sorry. Here.” Geri tapped the bot on the top of the its helmeted head and it unfolded itself, popping up to become recognizable as a diminutive but immensely strong DUM pit droid. Not much over a meter in height, the DUMs were used to repair aircars and Podracers … which Den suspected must be vanishingly rare on this densely forested part of Toprawa.

“How’d that get here?” Den asked.

“One of the Rangers used to be a champion Podracer down south. It’s a lot drier and desertier there,” Geri said. “Anyway, she was a race driver until she wiped out about two years ago. Lost an eye. She’s got an implant now, of course, but she gave up racing. This little guy—” He indicated the pit droid. “—got his neural net scragged in the same accident. One of the drivers came into the pit too hot.”

“So,” I-Five said, “it has no brain.”

“Yeah. Just the basic reflexes. I can fold him up and unfold him, order him to walk around, but that’s about it.”

“Strong, maneuverable, and modifiable,” mused I-Five. “And great manual dexterity—a plus if I’m going to self-modify. I’d say it will do just fine. Will my cortex fit under the helm?”

Geri considered this. “With some modifications. Of course, I could just mount your head on the chassis.”

Den stifled a chuckle. “That would be … interesting.”

“Yes,” agreed I-Five. “It would. And I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be invisible. Where we’re going, invisibility is a definite asset.”

“Well, great,” Geri enthused, rubbing his hands together. “Ready for a little science experiment?”

Den took a deep breath. “Look, Five. This is great for now, but … but you don’t want to—y’know—stay that way, right?” He inclined his head toward the little pit droid.

“Eventually, I should like to find my way back into a YQ chassis or something equivalent. But for now, this will do. Although I’d also like to take along some spare parts, Geri, if you don’t mind.”

Geri’s muzzle contorted into a grin. “Freezin’,” he said. “Let’s do it.”



“I’m surprised you didn’t consider the Jedi starfighter,” said Degan. His voice was muffled and tinny due to the fact that he was lying inside the interceptor’s ion-exhaust manifold, aligning the baffles.

“Too small,” said Jax automatically. “It’s made to hold only a pilot and a droid.”

“I could mod it for you. We could make room for your Sullustan friend.”

This came from the engineer assisting Degan with the refit. Her name was Sacha Swiftbird. Swiftbird had been her alias during her Podracing days, and she’d kept it even after coming to the Rangers.

That puzzled Jax. She couldn’t have been much older than he was and had been forced into early retirement by a horrific accident—which she hinted had been no accident at all, but the vicious revenge of a losing driver—during a race. It had left her with a cybernetic implant where her left eye had been, and a silvery filament of scarring across her upper and lower eyelids. Right now both were covered by a thick lock of black hair. It was hard to understand why she’d want to keep the name that went with that dead life. Jax didn’t ask why. In fact, he found it hard to meet her pale gray gaze. Her scars reminded him of Laranth’s. The Gray Paladin, too, had been left with scar tissue—her personal souvenirs of Order 66 and Flame Night.

Jax shook his head, his gaze on the drive manifold. “I’m not really ready to advertise to the galaxy that I’m Jedi. And I don’t need fighting capability. What I need is stealth with speed and muscle. This is perfect.”

He could feel the woman’s regard for a moment more, before she shrugged and knelt to rummage in her toolkit. “Your call. But if I were you, I’d jump at a chance to fly that baby.”

“You’re not me,” Jax murmured, regretting the words the moment they left his mouth. Fortunately, Swiftbird didn’t seem to hear him—or if she did, she chose to ignore the jibe.

“Well, this may not be as sleek and piratical as the starfighter,” Degan said, pulling himself out of the interceptor’s manifold. “But it’ll hold your crew with room to spare, that’s for sure. And cargo as well, if you need it.”

“Yeah,” added Sacha. “And it’ll surprise the pants off anybody who mistakes it for a stock freighter.”

That it would, Jax suspected. “Are you sure you don’t need the ship more than we do?” Jax asked for the tenth time.

Degan paused in the act of wiping his hands on a towel, glanced at Sacha, then gave Jax a look that neatly penetrated tissue and bone and drilled straight into his soul.

“We’re all we, Jax. We’re all Whiplash, whatever we choose to call ourselves. Rangers, resistance, freedom fighters … It doesn’t really matter. We’re all on the same side. If you need the ship, you get the ship.”

Jax smiled his thanks, wishing that the expression were more than just a physical tugging of his lips.

“What are you going to call her?” Sacha asked.

Laranth. The name leapt to Jax’s mind so quickly, he almost spoke it aloud. “I … hadn’t really thought. I suppose I’ll let Den pick something.”



“Laranth.” Den said the name immediately when Jax asked him, later that day.

He stood with Jax, Degan, and Sacha on the landing pad beneath the soaring vault of Mountain Home, looking up at the interceptor. Seeing the sudden shuttering of Jax’s face—the cold remoteness of his eyes—he winced. “I-I mean, it seems like we ought to do something—”

Jax cut off a flare of sudden anger—at what or whom, he was uncertain. Maybe he was angry at the universe, or at the gods, or at the Force for abandoning them. For abandoning her. For putting Yimmon in the hands of Darth Vader and the Emperor.

Den started again. “I want to remember her, Jax. I want to honor her. I want—”

“You want her to still be here. So do I. But she’s not.” Jax closed his eyes, then added, “Laranth … is a good name.”

“I agree,” said a voice practically in Jax’s ear, “that a battle-ready, stealthy vessel such as this one would be a fitting recipient of Laranth’s name.”

Jax swung around. “Five?”

The little pit droid with I-Five’s voice had stalked across the landing pad with Geri following triumphantly in his wake. The odd-looking droid turned its single, oversized “eye” to the vessel, giving her a sweeping once-over. “She looks quite fit.”

“So do you,” Degan said tentatively. “A bit, um, different than the last time I saw you.”

“Think of me as a work in progress.”

Sacha gave him a wry once-over. “You’re a bit more outspoken than Ducky was, too.”

“Ducky,” I-Five repeated.

“My pit droid. You’re wearing him.” She gestured at I-Five’s new armature.

“I hope it doesn’t distress you.”

“Nah. In fact, I’m happy to see his pitiful remains have been put to good use.”

Something in the tone of her voice and the tilt of her head made Den suspect the ex-racer wasn’t nearly so blasé as the remark implied. He crossed gazes with Geri over the top of I-Five’s new head—now level with his own. He’d left the little Rodian in the workshop supposedly working on some logistical problems caused by I-Five’s large cortex. Problems that—to the exhausted, emotionally drained Sullustan—had seemed insurmountable.

“I see you solved the braincase problem.”

The Rodian shrugged. “Yeah … well …”

“Geri,” said I-Five, “is a resourceful and creative young sentient.”

Geri grinned and ran a hand along I-Five’s carefully handcrafted braincase. He had created a sort of sagittal crest that ran from the front of the helm to the back in an elegant and gleaming ridge. “It’s got all sorts of shielding up in there, too, and a special shock mount. Not to mention that the crest is reinforced with tri-clad durasteel. If all else fails, he can serve as a battering ram.”

Geri’s ubiquitous droid, which had rolled up behind him on the platform, uttered a trill of what sounded to Den like mechanical laughter. I-Five swiveled his head to regard the other droid. “I fail to see the humor.”

“You would,” Den muttered.

Jax shook his head. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to your voice coming out of that …”

“Don’t get used to it,” I-Five advised him. “I’ve no intention of staying like this.”

He advanced toward the interceptor with a delicate whir of servos. Geri had certainly done a nice job on the mechanics.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I-Five said, addressing Degan, “but doesn’t the Helix-class freighter have an LBE flight computer?”

The mech-tech nodded. “Enhanced, of course.”

“Of course. Can you enhance it further to allow for direct interface with a second artificial intelligence?”

“Meaning you?”

“Meaning me,” I-Five said. “At least in my present incarnation.”

“It’s got a mount for an auxiliary R2 unit, but—”

“That should do nicely, I think.”

“But you’re not an R2 unit.”

“Not at the moment, no.” I-Five turned to Geri, gesturing toward the tunnels that led back to the underground facility. “I have an idea. Are you ready for some more science experiments?”

Geri’s face lit up and his eyes seemed to grow bigger—if that were possible. “Freezin’!” he enthused, and loped off toward his workshop with both droids in tow.

Jax watched them with an uneasy expression on his face. “Den, would you go make sure they don’t do anything that … can’t be undone?”

Den nodded, getting it. Things were changing a bit too fast for him, too. He followed his “assistant” and the droids from the cavern.



“So, what’s this plan of yours?” Den asked I-Five when they’d reconvened in the workshop.

“It is easier to show you than to tell you,” I-Five said, and reached up to release a catch on the underside of his helm. It flipped up to reveal a steel mounting cage suspended in a well behind the little droid’s optics. “Geri and I were able to place my synaptic grid cortex into this case, which will allow it to be moved more easily from one receptacle to another.”

Den just blinked at him. “That’s … um. Wow. So when you were talking about the R2 …” He trailed off as Geri steered just such a unit out into the center of the workshop under the bright lights of his operating theater. “You intend to interface directly with the ship through the astromech.”

“Isn’t that just freezin’?” Geri asked enthusiastically. “Man, I wish I had a droid who could think like this one.”

Candy’s bleat eloquently conveyed complete outrage.

“Freezin’,” Den muttered, and dived back into the work. Keeping his hands and mind busy distracted him from the hard reality of what it meant to return to Coruscant under their present circumstances.