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“I owe you my life several times over.”

“But you don’t owe me the sacrifice of your principles. You are a Jedi Knight. If you feel giving your approval of Sal’s plan is too close a brush with the dark side, then I would never ask you to make yourself part of it. I was merely going to observe that, whatever stand you take, I believe your father would be proud of you.”

Jax sat down heavily on the bed, suddenly feeling physically weary. And no wonder—he’d slept little in the last several days, barely remembered to eat, had played hide-and-seek with Inquisitors, done training sessions with Kaj, and gone for a walkabout with Laranth. Add to that all the emotional turmoil …

He sighed. “My father. Just once, I-Five, I wish I could ask my father for advice.”

I-Five’s reaction to the words was sudden and unexpected. He jerked upright, his optics going intensely bright, and said in a mechanical monotone, “Message Mode Ninety-nine. Recipient: Jax Pavan. Sender: Lorn Pavan.”

A tiny projection port on his chest plate activated, shooting out a beam of multicolored light that resolved into a full-sized hologram.

Jax found himself looking into his father’s face.

It was a face he knew and yet didn’t. He saw something of it when he looked at his own reflection, but the cheekbones were a little broader, the chin maybe a bit stronger. Lorn Pavan’s hair was thick and dark, like his son’s—or rather, Jax’s was like his father’s. His eyes were a clear, dark brown.

“Jax,” said this ghost from the past. A pause, then, “Son.” The dark eyes sparkled with incipient tears. “Wow. I’m going to hope that you and I are sitting and watching this message together and having a good laugh, but I’m going to bet that we’re not. For whatever reason.”

He hesitated, rubbed the palms of his hands on his pants, glanced up. “Blast it, I-Five. This is harder than I thought.”

There was a momentary pause as Lorn gathered his thoughts before he looked up again. He was gazing into I-Five’s photoreceptors—Jax knew that intellectually, of course—but it seemed as if he were looking right at Jax.

“Okay, look. The thing is, I’m about to go after this guy—this Sith—and I wanted to—to leave you a message. Just in case … By the time you get this I’ll probably be up to my armpits in trouble—so what else is new?—and I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it to the Temple to see you.”

His gaze became suddenly imploring, almost desperate. “Look, Jax, I wish I could reassure you that I’ll come out of this alive. The truth is I’ll be lucky to come out of it in one piece, given this Sith’s predilection for taking heads.”

He took a deep breath, fidgeted, and wiped his palms again. “So you’re wondering why your old man has to go off and play hero. Why he has to try to take out an enemy that’s been pretty close to unkillable up till now. Well, it’s like this. I don’t want to be a hero. In fact, I don’t think there’s any way I could qualify as one no matter what I did. But someone I knew was the real article, and I kinda feel obligated to carry on where she left off. Her name was Darsha Assant, and she was a Jedi. She was also the bravest soul I’ve ever known.”

Amazed, awed, Jax slid forward on the bed until he was on his knees before the hologram, seeing his father from the perspective of the small child Lorn Pavan believed he was talking to.

The hologram licked his lips, the tears in his eyes close to falling. When he spoke again his voice was rough with emotion. “I know that, given what you’ve probably heard about me, it’s hard to believe I could feel that way about a Jedi. Well, the Jedi be damned—I’m doing this for a friend, for Darsha. And because I want you to be proud of me.”

The message ended, the hologram seemingly sucked back up into I-Five’s holo-emitter, and Jax still knelt on the floor feeling … bereft.

His father had gone after a Sith. Had fought him and died. He had done it for love. For the friend he had just lost; for the son he had lost years earlier. He had done it because there was no one else who could or would.

“Jax?”

He felt the touch