has any idea how or even when it got there. The navicomp had been wiped clean.”
Jax touched the vessel again, trying to glean from it any sort of energy signature he might recognize—something that might suggest to him which of his fellow Jedi might have piloted the vessel. There was nothing identifiable, only a diffuse imprint. He took his hand away, wiped his palm on his tunic.
Aren stepped over to him and laid a hand on his arm. “We should go. You’ll want to contact your people on Dantooine and Coruscant.”
He pulled away from the Jedi vessel. “Where are we going?”
“Foothill. That’s where our headquarters is.”
“Foothill, Mountain Home—code names?” asked Den, who’d trailed them at a short distance.
“More like generic descriptors. There’s a network of subterranean passages that run under the spaceport and right up to the edge of town. We give them street names. It makes you seem a bit less shadowy when you can walk and talk openly in daylight about your super-secret underground township. People just think you’re talking about locations in Big Woolly.”
I-Five made a clicking sound. “Township?”
Aren looked at the droid remnant and smiled, as if talking to a bodiless machine was something she did every day. “You’ll see.” She turned and led them toward where the waterfall met the cavern lake, sending up plumes of mist.
“How was this all made?” Den asked.
Aren shook her head. “The big vault—we honestly don’t know. It was something we stumbled across at the beginning of the war. Most of the townward part we carved out of the rock and soil.”
She led them past work crews and pilots, who watched and sometimes waved. They crossed a wooden bridge that seemed to end at a ragged pile of boulders. Beyond those, screened from the cavern itself, was a pathway that ran around the perimeter of the cave on the outer shore of the lake. Aren turned left and led them right up to the waterfall. The pathway ran behind it and into a tunnel wide enough for the three of them to walk abreast.
Perhaps calling the Ranger outpost a “township” was too grand, but it was more than a mere bunker. There were branching corridors, storage rooms, living quarters, a dispensary/infirmary, a meditation chapel, and a small cantina of the type you might find aboard a space station.
The place was populated, if sparsely, with sentients from a number of worlds, though most seemed to be human. All found Jax and his companions of interest; all clearly knew Aren Folee well.
“Where are you taking us?” Jax asked as they reached an intersection with a second tunnel.
“That depends on you,” Aren said. “On how you feel. I can take you to quarters. You could rest—sleep for a while—”
“No,” said Jax, more sharply than he meant to. “I don’t want to sleep.”
“Eat, then?”
When Jax didn’t answer, Den said, “I don’t think either of us is hungry right now. What’s option number three?”
“I take you to Degan.”
“Degan?” I-Five repeated.
“Degan Cor. He and I share leadership here. I represent the Rangers. He represents other interested groups. Are you—that is, do you want to meet him now? I could at least show you to some quarters so you have a place to put your … your tree?” Her voice lifted questioningly.
Jax glanced down at the miisai—the only thing in his possession he needed a place for. Besides the clothing he wore, he now had exactly four other belongings: two lightsabers—the Sith blade an anonymous someone had given him and the new one he and Laranth had made—the pyronium that Anakin had given him long ago “for safekeeping,” and the Sith Holocron his father had bequeathed to him. These he carried on his person.
“I’ll keep it, thanks.”
She nodded, though she radiated bemusement.
“I’ll keep this, too, thanks,” said Den, lifting I-Five’s head. The wide corners of his mouth turned up in a smile, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes.
Jax realized, suddenly, that he wasn’t alone in his grief. How could he have felt that he was? He turned to Aren Folee. “We’ll need a droid tech, if you can spare one—to help us with I-Five.”
She gave the droid’s head a long look. “I thought that looked like an I-5YQ unit. It seems unusually … curious.”
“Long story,” Jax told her. “But Five is … more than just a droid. He’s been my companion and friend for—” He found himself unable to finish the sentence.
“I understand,” said Aren.
Though she couldn’t possibly have understood the relationship between man and machine,