The Last Jedi

Nine


The Corsair—a small, independent freighter registered to a tiny consortium on Toprawa—landed at a satellite docking facility of the Westport that was geared to handle vessels of diminutive size. She nestled in among a dozen or so ships of the same tonnage on a landing platform and disgorged her crew—a human male with dark, unkempt hair, a Sullustan mechanic, and a pit droid that had been tasked with carrying their belongings.

To the casual observer the ship and her complement were ordinary and unworthy of any particular attention, but to those who had been keeping an eye out for just such an occurrence—the landing of a small ship out of Toprawa with a shiny new registry, for all that it seemed to have been buried in the system for five years—the event signaled the need for quick action.

And so, when “Corran Vigil” and his crew stepped into the terminal building with the intent of taking a turbolift to the deep sublevels, they met with an escort. A Zabrak official wearing a worn, dark long-coat and accompanied by two uniformed officers flashed credentials at them. Jax Pavan didn’t need to see the credentials. He knew whom he was dealing with.

“Corran Vigil? I need to take you in for questioning, if you don’t mind. Actually, even if you do mind.”

Jax stared at the other man. “May I ask what this is about?”

“There’s a little problem with the registration on your ship and a certain connection to someone who’s gone missing.”

Jax nodded, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

The Zabrak regarded him with wry amusement. “I do hope you’re not going to do anything rash, like try to run off on me. I assure you my associates here are used to that sort of thing. They rather enjoy a good run, in fact.”

Jax sighed. “Look, Prefect, I don’t know what this is about, but—”

“Come with me and you’ll find out.”

“Come where?”

“Imperial Security Bureau.”

Den Dhur let out a hiss of breath. “Great Mother of all …”

The prefect pointed a long grayish finger at him. “Language.”

He herded them into a lift and they shot down into the bowels of the terminal, exiting into a cavernous parking area. A pair of police speeders were drawn up to the curbing in front of the terminal’s transparisteel doors.

The two uniforms prodded the prisoners into the backseat of one of the vehicles, carefully locking the hatches from the outside. Then they saluted the prefect smartly, went to their own vehicle, and sped off. The prefect watched them go, then slid into the front seat of the aircar, started it, and took to the lanes.

He said nothing as he drove his passengers deeper and deeper into the duracrete canyons.

Finally, Jax spoke. “Prefect Haus, we’re clearly not going to the ISB. Where are you taking us?”

Pol Haus looked up into the monitor that gave him a clear view of the vehicle’s backseat. “Of course we’re not going to the ISB. What the hell would I be taking you to the ISB for? As for where we are going—we’re there.”

Even as he spoke, Haus pulled in behind an old police barrier and brought the aircar to a stop. Before them was a disreputable-looking building with a blackened façade and street-facing windows that looked like blank eyes. The prefect popped the locks on the doors of the police speeder. They opened with a hiss of hydraulics.

“Everybody out.”



Den’s heart was hammering in his throat as he climbed out of the police aircar and looked around. Haus had brought them to an abandoned transit terminal—some long-dead remnant of the planet-city’s mag-lev system. There wasn’t another sentient in sight—which did nothing to calm Den’s nerves.

“Is this the part where you pull out a blaster and frag all of us?”

Haus turned and looked down at him with an air of exasperated bemusement. “No. This is where I deliver you to interested parties.” He started walking in the direction of the ancient building, his coat fluttering around him like the wings of a hawk-bat.

Den looked up at Jax, who took a deep breath and strode after the police prefect.

“I-Five?” Jax murmured. “Keep a laser eye on him, okay?”

“Done,” said the droid, and Den knew he would be doing exactly that. One of the modifications he had made to his DUM chassis was to replace the light emitter next to his optic unit with a weapons-grade laser.

Pol Haus had sought their help a number of times in the past, and he had helped them in turn, drawing closer and closer to an alliance with Whiplash. But things were inside out now, and for all they knew Haus could be in the service of the enemy—might somehow even be the mole that had leaked their plans to move Thi Xon Yimmon. This fact was not lost on Den.

Jax’s mind was apparently moving along the same avenues, for once they were inside the abandoned terminal he asked the prefect, “What do you know about … the situation?”

“More than you’re probably comfortable with me knowing. This way.”

Haus led on past several long, deserted concierge counters and down a darkened concourse to what was clearly the entrance to a mag-lev embarkation platform. Den peered into the gloom of the tube. The walls were no longer gleaming and smooth, but neither did they look as derelict as he’d expected.

Haus pulled out a comlink and spoke into it. “I have a delivery for immediate pickup.”

There was a curt answer from the other end of the link.

Haus pocketed the device and turned to Jax and Den. “They’ll be here in a few moments. I just wanted to say …” He hesitated, and Den realized he’d never seen Haus show this level of diffidence—feigned cluelessness, irascibility, surliness even, but not hesitance. “I was sorry to hear about Laranth. Yimmon, too, of course, but …” He shook his shaggy head. “I’m just sorry. I know what it’s like to lose someone that close.”

Jax was regarding the prefect with solemn intensity. He held his gaze for a moment, then nodded. “Thank you.”

“You lost your smart-mouthed droid, too, did you?”

“He did not,” I-Five said crisply, “lose his smart-mouthed droid.”

The Zabrak stared at the little pit droid, then uttered a bark of laughter. “Glad to hear it.”

With a bow wave of cold, oily air and a soft whisper of brakes, a hovertrain glided out of the darkness of the tunnel and stopped at the platform. A door hissed open in the first car.

Pol Haus tilted his head at it. “All aboard.”

Den gawped. “We’re going to HQ on an old mag-lev?”

“Not exactly.” Haus herded them onto the train.

The interior of the vehicle had been stripped of its original passenger seating and now looked more like a vestibule in someone’s corporate offices. Before they could ask whom they were going to see, the door to the next car opened and Tuden Sal appeared.

The Sakiyan’s smile came nowhere near inhabiting his eyes. “Hello Jax, Den—I-Five?”

The droid inclined his head with a click.

“I wish we were reuniting under less …” Sal seemed at a loss for words. “Under less dire circumstances,” he finished, then gestured to the car behind him. “Welcome to Whiplash HQ. Come on in.”

Even as Sal led them into the second car, the train closed its doors and left the station. Den was surprised at that, but even more surprised that Pol Haus came with them into the inner sanctum.



They sat around a low table in the second car—Tuden Sal, Jax, Den, Pol Haus, and four Whiplash captains—a Togruta poetess named Sheel Mafeen, the Amanin owner of Sil’s Place, Fars Sil-at, a Devaronian songstress named Dyat Agni, and a human black-market trader named Acer Ash. I-Five stood between Jax and Den; Pol Haus had taken a seat to Jax’s right—the place Laranth usually occupied.

How long, Jax wondered, would it be before he stopped reminding himself of where Laranth would be or what she’d be doing if she were here?

“Do you have a sense,” Tuden Sal was asking him, “of how Vader might have known where you were?”

Jax shook his head. “None. Maybe they … Maybe it was the ship. She might have been compromised in some way. Maybe there’s a mole—”

“There were only six of us in the room when we made those plans. We swept the safe house for surveillance equipment before we pulled out. There was none.”

“None of us,” Fars Sil-at said, tipping his large head to indicate his fellow captains, “was aware of how Yimmon was getting offworld or when. And clearly the ISB had no idea where our previous headquarters was, else they’d have just come in and wiped us out. They’re not subtle that way.”

“What about your contacts on Toprawa?” Sal asked. “The Rangers. Could one of them or their associates have turned traitor?”

It was a horrific possibility, but a real one—and it made Jax shudder.

“Ostensibly,” he said slowly, “only a handful of people in the Toprawan operation knew about the move: Degan Cor, Aren Folee, a mech-tech named Sacha Swiftbird.”

“Folee could be the spy,” the Sakiyan mused. “She had a mission go belly-up on her last year. Her two accomplices were caught. She wasn’t.”

A chilling thought, but if the Ranger had betrayed them, wouldn’t Jax have sensed something in her bearing—even as he was now sensing the waves of tension and fear washing out from Tuden Sal and his confederates? Maybe not. Maybe not, given the emotional state he’d been in at the time.

“If one of them was a betrayer,” Sheel Mafeen suggested, “certainly Jax or Laranth would have sensed it.”

A wave of relief rolled over Jax. Both he and Laranth had met with Aren before their disastrous mission. Neither of them had sensed anything off about her then. If there was a spy, it was not the Antarian Ranger … or at least not that Antarian Ranger. There was still Sacha Swiftbird. She hadn’t been with the Rangers for that long, and she had tried to make a case for him bringing her back to Coruscant with him …

He looked into the faces of these comrades-in-arms and realized that this rampant distrust was, in part, his doing. It could paralyze them if they let it. They couldn’t let it.

“We have to trust someone, Sal,” Jax said. “If we’re going to get Yimmon back, we have to trust our allies because we’re going to need them … and they’re going to need us. There is … one member of Aren Folee’s group who might bear watching. I’ll make sure Aren is aware of it.”

“If,” the Devaronian repeated gruffly. “If we get Yimmon back. One must wonder what the odds of such a thing are.”

“You’ve chosen an interim leader, I assume,” I-Five said, calling abrupt attention to his diminutive presence.

Sal shook his head. “We have determined that we must have not one leader, but many. Each with different spheres of responsibility. Pol Haus, for example, is chiefly responsible for intelligence and security.”

Jax turned to the police prefect. “He is?”

“It seemed to make the most sense,” said Sal. “He has insider knowledge of the workings of the ISB. And he knows how to keep us well hidden. This—” He gestured around them at the hovertrain. “—was his doing.”

Jax stifled a twinge of distrust. Pol Haus had been in a position to give them up repeatedly and hadn’t. He’d run interference for them, made sure the Imperial Security Bureau was looking the other way, hidden Whiplash operatives, and been in close contact with Jax and Yimmon. He’d had every opportunity to kill or capture them and hadn’t.

Still …

“So, you’re in all the way now?” he asked the prefect.

Haus nodded. “I’m in.”

“If this has proved one thing to us,” Sal said, “it’s that having all our credits in one bank doesn’t make sense. Our leadership needs to be redundant, and yet each of us requires a certain autonomy and a certain amount of overlap.”

Pol Haus was watching Jax intently. “Of course, now that you’re here, I, for one am perfectly willing to relinquish—”

Jax shook his head adamantly. “No. I can’t lead you. I can’t take Yimmon’s place. It’s because of me that we’re having to replace him. It’s up to me to get him back.”

“Is that even possible?” Sal asked. “As strong a mind as Thi Xon Yimmon has, Vader will eventually break him.”

“Yimmon wouldn’t betray the resistance,” Jax murmured.

“No,” Den said quietly. “But what if he doesn’t have a choice? Do we know what tech the Emperor’s got up his bloody sleeves? Do we even know what Vader is capable of?”

No, Jax didn’t know what Darth Vader was capable of. Aboard the dying Far Ranger he thought he had seen him fail to manipulate Thi Xon Yimmon’s mind and have to settle, instead, for manipulating gravity. Still …

“I’ve never known a Force-user as powerful as Vader,” he admitted. “Which only makes it more critical that we rescue Yimmon.”

Pol Haus slouched back in his chair. “How do you propose we do that? At the moment, we have no idea where they might have taken him. He could be here on Coruscant, or he could be at any Imperial stronghold. And if we do determine where he is, how do you propose we rescue him? There’s every chance that Vader will only use him as a trap to catch you. You’re the real prize, Pavan, and I think you know it.”

Jax was shaking his head. “No. He could have gotten me at the same time he got Yimmon. If he’d really wanted me—”

“You’re not thinking clearly, Jax,” said Den. “Laranth had just blown a hole in Vader’s vessel and shut down his stasis web. He was out of time. He thought we were, too. He thought the interstellar flux would take us out. It’s only thanks to Aren Folee and her crew that it didn’t.”

Den was right. Jax stared at his friend without seeing him. He didn’t have to kill me. He’d already done worse.

“Whatever Vader’s reasoning,” Sal said sharply, “we have work to do. We are in the process of scrapping our network and starting fresh. We have abandoned every safe house, every drop point, every pass-through, every escape corridor, because Thi Xon Yimmon could jeopardize every one of them.”

Anger flared in Jax’s heart. “He’d die first.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Jax stood as if the padded seat had shocked him. “Yimmon is your friend!”

The Sakiyan looked up at him wearily. “Yimmon was our captain. Our counselor. Our leader. We have to go on now as if he is gone for good. He’d expect it of us, don’t you think?”

Jax started to protest.

“Let me put it another way,” Sal said. “Do you think Thi Xon Yimmon would want us to jeopardize the entire organization to locate and rescue him? Sacrificing all other priorities?”

From the reactions of Pol Haus and the other operatives, Jax could tell this was not the first time they’d had this argument. There was anger at this nexus—contention. Haus was staring at something invisible on the curving wall of the train car, his horned brow creased in a scowl. Fars, Acer, and Dyat were nodding grimly; Sheel was looking down at her clasped hands.

Jax looked to Pol Haus. “You agree that we should … give up on Yimmon?”

“I do not,” murmured Sheel beneath her breath.

Haus put his hand over the Togruta’s to silence her as he met Jax’s eyes. “I think it’s safe to say that Yimmon would have argued that Whiplash needs to regroup, retool, and rethink its strategy—and do it quickly. We’re in the process of that now. And when that’s done—”

“When that’s done,” Sal said, his voice tight, “we need to strike at the Empire while they suppose us to be reeling from loss. This is a tragedy only if we allow it to be. If we view it instead as an opportunity to act in ways the Emperor would never expect us to, it will remain but a personal loss, not a loss for the Resistance. They suppose us to be a headless creature. But, as Pol Haus has suggested, we have six or seven heads where before we had only one. And each head is capable of directing the efforts of the body.”

“Strike,” Jax repeated. “Strike how?”

Sal’s gaze touched briefly on the faces of his cohorts. “That hasn’t been decided yet. But it must be decisive and devastating.”

Jax spread his hands in a gesture of entreaty. “What would be more devastating than snatching Yimmon out of the Emperor’s grasp?”

Tuden Sal grimaced. “Perhaps if we had even a glimmering of where he is—”

“We have a glimmering,” said I-Five.

The assertion brought a sudden silence.

“Go on,” said Pol Haus.

“I traced the route Vader’s forces took to get in and out of the area they trapped us in. We’re fairly certain that some of the vessels—possibly even Vader’s—made a call on Mandalore, then went on from there toward the Mid Rim.”

“Some of the vessels?”

“The larger part of the legion came back to the Core. Yimmon may even be here on Coruscant at this very moment. If we put our forces into finding him—”

“We cannot,” the Devaronian growled, “throw everything into finding Yimmon. You are not even certain of his whereabouts. In truth, he may already be dead. And even if he is not, every resource we dedicate to finding him is a resource we do not have for other, larger tasks.” She ended her statement with her gleaming red eyes focused on Tuden Sal. “Is that not right?”

Sal shifted in apparent discomfort. “Dyat is correct. In your absence, Jax, we have … moved forward on plans to strengthen our contacts within the Imperial Security Bureau. If we have to curtail those efforts, we will lose any ground we have gained.”

“You have been gone,” Dyat told Jax, “for over a month. That is long enough to have thrown this entire organization into a turmoil from which we have only recently emerged. Consider the consequences, Jax Pavan, if Darth Vader has done this with the full expectation that we will, as you suggest, pour all our resources into retrieving our stolen leader.”

The words hit Jax like a physical blow. He sat down, feeling as if his legs had been swept out from under him.

“You’re right.” He leaned against the back of the seat, closing his eyes. “We can’t bend all our resources to finding Yimmon.” But without those resources, we’ll never get him back.

“Jax looks like he could use some downtime,” Pol Haus said brusquely.

“Of course,” said Sal. “If you don’t mind …”

Jax felt a touch on his arm and opened his eyes to find Pol Haus standing next to him. “Why don’t I show you and your team to your new quarters?”

Jax nodded silently and rose to follow the prefect into the next car. Den and I-Five brought up the rear. Haus led them through a lounge car that offered an open common area replete with food service machines and various seating areas. The car behind that was a sleeper with two private compartments accessed from a left-hand corridor.

“This one is Sal’s,” Haus nodded toward the first door on the right. “The next is one I use on occasion.”

They proceeded through the next car to a door near the far end. “Will that do for you, Den?”

The Sullustan shrugged and started to move in that direction. He hesitated and looked back over one shoulder. “Five? You coming with me, or …”

“I believe I will remain with Jax for the time being.”

Den glanced at Jax and nodded. “Good idea.”

When Den had closed his door, Pol Haus ushered Jax into his guest quarters. They were more than adequate, being about twice the size of the captain’s cabin aboard the Laranth. There was a bed that lowered from the wall, a seating area, even a small bar at which one might eat with a guest. I-Five entered first, checked the place over, and stationed himself by the door.

Jax just stood in the middle of the floor, feeling momentarily directionless.

“Not everyone agrees that we should write Yimmon off as lost,” Pol Haus said. “At least Sheel and I aren’t on board with the idea.”

“Factions?” I-Five asked.

Haus turned to look at the droid. “I wouldn’t go that far. Just … uncertainties. They’re not used to operating without strong leadership, but at the same time, they’re a bit leery of electing a single strong leader again.”

“The Empire seems to function with a single strong leader,” I-Five observed. “An absolute ruler, in fact.”

“The Empire’s leadership is in a position of power. The Emperor rules through secrecy and fear, while he has only one thing to fear himself … well, that is if he’s smart enough to fear it.”

“Vader.” The word dropped from Jax’s lips like a stone.

“Yeah. Vader. Am I right?”

Vader—the random element. “I’d like to give the Emperor more to fear,” Jax murmured.

Haus’s lips curled wryly. “Then you and Sal should be on the same wavelength.”

Jax roused himself and turned to regard the police prefect. “Should I be? Should I just leave Yimmon in Vader’s hands? Just move on?”

“What does that Force sense of yours tell you?”

“That I should not.”

“Can’t argue with the Force.” Haus sketched a salute and left the compartment.

Jax stared after him, aware that there was a wealth of subtext there that he was too weary to grasp.

“Lie down, Jax,” said I-Five, “before you fall down.”

He did, but just barely.