The Last Jedi by Michael Reaves

Author:Michael Reaves [Reaves, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-53896-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

thirty-two

The Delta-7 Aethersprite dropped out of hyperspace just within the orbit of the Fervse’dra asteroid field and moved into synchronous flow with the nearest body. Jax had considered his approach to Kantaros Station all during the four-day journey to the Both system. With Darth Vader on Coruscant, he had a window of opportunity, but possibly only a very narrow window.

The first order of business was to find the station. He had returned to where the station had been; it was not there now. He input the telemetry of the station’s last position, which he’d gotten from the Laranth’s navcom, into the starfighter’s system and had it extrapolate its current location.

He found it more or less where the navcom said it would be, and parked his ship on a slowly tumbling asteroid roughly one hundred klicks behind it in the flow of stone. He wedged the Aethersprite in between two projections of icy rock. That should be enough to preserve him from accidental detection, but if there were patrols that came this far out, or an approaching vessel overflew his position, his energy shielding would be useless. He set the ship’s sensors to their widest possible spectrum and brought their perimeters in to the point that gave him just enough time to scurry out of sight if anyone entered the area. This gave him decreased range, but increased sensitivity. A lone speeder, life pod, or drone would vibrate his sensor web.

Then, hands on the controls of the ship—ready to lift off at a moment’s notice—he settled into a meditative state, preparing to reach for Thi Xon Yimmon’s consciousness.

For a fraction of a second, his mind swerved to the idea Xizor had raised—that it would be easier to destroy Yimmon than to save him. Everything in Jax rebelled against the thought. Rebelled so emphatically that, for a moment, he was physically ill. He righted himself with a will, closed his eyes, and sank, once more, into meditation. He missed the miisai tree and found himself calling its shape to his mind’s eye.

Jax couldn’t afford detection, so he reached out delicately, carefully. He missed the tree at this point, too, because he had used it before to cloak his own Force signature. All he had now was the memory of the miisai, his native talents, and the skills he’d developed in training them.

And he had the Sith holocron.

In the stillness that came with the thought, Jax fetched the thing out of the inner pocket of his surcoat. As if his regard had touched off a response in the artifact, it warmed in his hand. When he closed his eyes, he could still see it as a locus of diffuse light and heat … a Force signature.

Balancing the holocron on his palm, he stretched out his energies with more confidence—long, trailing ribbons of the Force wove through the ambience generated by Ramage’s device and sought their goal.

He found Yimmon, at length, ironically, by using Vader’s seemingly random array of deflection fields to triangulate. He found it interesting that Vader didn’t realize that randomness was a chimera.

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