against Yimmon and his cohort, the Emperor was simply throwing every mundane weapon in his arsenal at them.
Jax wanted to believe that these were the acts of a desperate tyrant who had just lost his most potent weapon. He wanted to believe it as much as he wanted to believe that Vader was gone. But …
The man who wouldn’t die.
He shook himself, realizing he had come to think of Darth Vader as inevitable … and immortal.
Whatever hideous truth lay behind that feeling, Jax could not let it distract him from the hard reality that the Empire wanted Whiplash dead and buried. The Empire, being the hierarchical beast that it was, figured this was best done by destroying the brains of the organization. But Yimmon—with his dual cortex and a personal cell of operatives that included a Jedi, a Gray Paladin, and a sentient droid—was a hard man to kill or capture. Still, the last attempt had come close. Too close. Way too close. It had taken out several storefronts and more than a dozen innocent citizens who happened to be too near a tavern that the Whiplash had used to pass messages.
Jax couldn’t shake the memory of the street in the aftermath of that attack. The bodies littering the walkway, the sharp smell of ozone in the heavy air, the photonic imprints of people on the walls of the buildings, reverse shadows caught at the instant of death. The hushed sense that the entire neighborhood was holding its breath, readying a roar of outrage … a roar that would fall on deaf ears.
Outrage against the Empire seemed futile; Jax had to believe it was not.
The decision to move the resistance leader from Imperial Center had been almost unanimous. The sole dissenting voice had belonged to Yimmon himself. Only a great deal of convincing had finally gotten him to agree that relocating their base of operations to Dantooine was the wisest move.
And none too soon.
Jax shook off the feeling of dread that threatened to settle over him. For the hundredth time that day, he opened his mouth to tell Laranth about the “summons” he’d gotten three days earlier from a Cephalon Whiplash informant. But caution and Den’s presence kept the words from his tongue.
“I’m going to go back and talk to Yimmon,” he said, rising. “Take the helm?”
Laranth nodded and slid into his seat. Jax turned to I-Five. “Ping me when we’re about to jump to hyperspace, okay?”
“You don’t trust us to enter the corridor correctly?” asked the droid.
Laranth merely looked at Jax through her large, peridot-colored eyes.
“Of course I trust you. I just need a front-row seat for the jump. Yeah, I know it’s not rational,” he added when I-Five made a testy clicking sound. “I just need to see the stars change. That all right with you?”
“As you wish,” droid and Twi’lek said in eerie unison.
Jax thought he heard Den Dhur chuckle softly.
He found Thi Xon Yimmon sitting at a duraplast table fashioned to look like wood. It looked like wood for no other reason than that Jax liked wood. On extended missions in space—which seemed to happen increasingly as resistance activity picked up and spread—he wanted to be reminded that somewhere there were worlds with forests alive and growing.
He had a real tree in his quarters—a tiny thing in a ceramic pot. It was a gift from Laranth and was many hundreds of years old, though it remained tiny. I-Five had shown Jax how the masters of an ancient art form called miisai trimmed and guided the branches. Jax had learned to do it using tiny tendrils of the Force. The practice had become a meditation. So, too, had going through the forms of lightsaber combat with his new weapon—a lightsaber he and Laranth had constructed using a crystal that had come to him from an unexpected source. The weapon’s weight was a comforting presence against his hip; no less comforting than being able to stow the Sith blade he’d been using.
He’d had no time to meditate in the last two days. He’d told himself it was because of their aggressive time line for moving Yimmon offworld. He knew better. It was because meditating led to thinking about the message the Cephalon had given him.
Time, for a Cephalon, was a somewhat malleable substance. “Plastic,” a philosopher or physicist might have said. Den called it “squishy.” Whatever modifier seemed most appropriate, it all came down to the same thing: Cephalons “saw” time as other sentients saw spatial relationships. Something