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The answer, of course, was simple—he didn’t have to. He could just have the entire plateau scoured from orbit. Any Star Destroyer could generate the kind of concentrated firepower required for that. All it would take was a word from the Dark Lord to set the process in motion. And Vader had made it very clear to Nick that he would feel no pangs whatsoever if he had to give that word.

The subsonic vibration of the ion engines felt good; no flaws in the harmonics. She wasn’t a bad ship, all things considered. Her previous owners had taken good care of her, at least as far as the mechanics and electronics went. And a freighter was, to all intents and purposes, invisible—not by virtue of a cloaking device, but because there were so many of them, buzzing around the planet like fire wasps around a sweetpod tree, that nobody would notice one more.

Yes, a good ship. And she was all his. High adventure in the wild reaches of space! No more grubbing around in the urban chasms of Coruscant for him—he had a spacecraft now. He could go anywhere, do anything, be anyone he wanted. He could adopt a new identity, rename the vessel, head for the Outland Regions, make a new life for himself. He could be a spice smuggler on the Kessel Run, perhaps. Or join the Solar Guard of the Corbett Cluster. Or be a proton railer, running the tubes in some out-of-the-way star system …

The choices were limitless. The entire galaxy—those parts not yet under direct control of the Empire, anyway—was his to explore …

As soon as he turned Jax Pavan over to Darth Vader.

His choice. A wild, free life, roaming the space-ways … or imprisonment on the planetary prison of Despayre, forced to live with the knowledge that he had been responsible for the death of thousands of his family and compatriots.

Nick leaned forward and put his face in his hands. What was he going to do?

As Jax left the deserted lift station, he was feeling a welter of strange, conflicting emotions.

He had nothing against droids, and no particular fondness for them, either. They were simply machines, to be used for convenience. Truth to tell, he hadn’t had all that much experience with them. He’d spent nearly all of his life cloistered in the Temple, and droids just weren’t as ubiquitous within those walls as outside them. Most of the droids in the Temple were protocol units of either the 3PO or the 3D-4X lines, and all of them were quiet, efficient, and subservient, often to the point of obsequiousness. He could see someone becoming fond of one, the same way someone might prefer a familiar old skimmer to a brand-new craft. He supposed it was even possible for somebody to feel the same way about a droid as they might about a pet—to expect and depend upon its loyalty and devotion, and to be devoted to it as well.

But as far as he could tell, that wasn’t what the relationship between I-Five and Jax’s father had been. Instead, from the brief glimpse Jax had gotten by following the threads, Lorn Pavan had thought of the droid as an equal. As a friend. And, toward the final days of their association, as a brother.

There was something decidedly unnatural about it; it seemed almost perverse. The thought of his father considering a walking conglomeration of circuits and servos to be worthy of equal status with organics was, to put it mildly, disturbing. He knew nothing about his father, of course; his family had been the Jedi who had raised him. And he had no complaints about the job they had done; he had never lacked for love, or companionship, or authority. It was true that, when he’d been younger, he’d wondered about what his parents had been like, even fantasized about meeting them. But those had been the dreams of youth, and he was a youth no longer.

But now, when he thought he’d made his peace with their absence long ago, here came this droid into his life, casually dropping this bombshell. He knew one thing and one thing only about his father now—and that one thing seemed to indicate the man had been a mental case.