Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [25]
Whistler’s mournful tone raised a lump in my throat. He tweetled and hooted a bunch of things after that, but I couldn’t figure out what he meant. I reached out and patted him gently on the dome. His pincer gently tugged on the sleeve of my jacket.
“I’ve just come from talking with Wedge and with Luke Skywalker. They both think my learning to train as a Jedi is the key to finding Mirax, but I think that will take too long. Part of me knows they are right, but another part doesn’t think Mirax can afford the time. I keep trying to think about what I should do, or what my father would do, but I have so many questions that need answering that I’m lost.”
Whistler toddled forward and toppled one of the stack of cans he had created. His dataprobe came out and sank itself into the dataport on the holopad. In an instant the image of my father, standing slightly taller than Mirax had, appeared frozen on the holopad. Whistler hooted insistently at me, but I couldn’t understand him.
“Slow down, slow down. What are you getting at?”
My father’s image faded, replaced by the glowing words, “All you have to do is ask.”
I was about to ask for a further explanation of that line, but the words struck a resonance inside me and I recognized them fairly quickly. Back before we had liberated Thyferra, before Thrawn and freeing the Lusankya prisoners, Whistler had informed me that my father had encrypted and loaded into him a holograph talking about my heritage. Whistler had said the message was recorded back before I joined CorSec. He’d been instructed to play it for me whenever I asked and could provide the encryption key.
I resisted listening to the message back then because I feared it would make me make choices that I didn’t want to make. If my father had urged me to become a Jedi, to seek out a Master and to train, I knew I would have. At the time that would have meant leaving the squadron and leaving Mirax and abandoning the former Lusankya prisoners. I couldn’t do that, so I set aside the idea of hearing what my father had to say.
After that, with Thrawn and everything else, I never got the chance to explore what my father had left for me. Mirax told me the message itself was not the last gift my father had given me. The last gift was the trust he showed in allowing me to choose when and if I listened to his message. I cherished that gift and while I knew I should listen to the message, by putting off the decision I made that final gift last longer.
Even as that thought bubbled into my brain, I realized that listening to the message would not destroy my father’s gift. His trust had been implicit in every aspect of our lives. My father had died in my arms and I had been powerless to prevent his death. Because of this I had allowed myself to imagine that in his last seconds of life he wondered where I was. He wondered why I had not been there to help him. I had to hope, for the sake of my sanity, that he knew I would have given my own life to save his. Somehow I did think that; I even knew it.
I smiled. “He recorded that message long before he died. It was never meant to be a legacy, but a failsafe. If something happened to him, I would not be left without information he thought I needed to know. And I need to remember that he never would have put me into a position to make a choice against my own best interests. I trust him in that, but by not listening to the message I’ve failed to act on that trust.”
I nodded to Whistler. “Please, play the message for me. Decryption code is Nejaa Halcyon.”
My father’s image reappeared and my throat tightened. He’d always been taller than me and, with me kneeling on the floor, I once again had to look up at him. His black hair had been closely cropped, his hazel eyes had golden highlights that sparkled. He wore that easy smile I’d see so often. I’d probably been sixteen years old when he recorded the message—he still had his powerful