The Far Ranger was on full auto, following a course previously laid in that was taking Nick away from the Palace and back toward the Yaam Sector. He didn't feel up to piloting a child's kiddie cruiser around the yard right now, so he just sat back in the pilot's seat and stared at the endless cityscape passing below.
His mind felt like it had been punched full of holes-holes that let conscious thoughts drain from it as fast as they popped into existence. Or maybe it was just that the thoughts were too horrible to hold on to for any length of time.
The choice he'd been given was simple. That wasn't surprising; the big ones always were. He could betray Jax Pavan, lead him into a trap, and have him turned over to Darth Vader—
Or Vader would destroy his ghosh.
Nick hadn't believed it at first. Clan Rostu, his tribe, ranged over one of the largest highland plateaus on all of Haruun Kal, following their grasser herds, the great beasts that were the lifeblood of his people. How could Vader target a nomadic tribe?
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 concen¬trated 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 electron¬ics went. And a freighter was, to all intents and pur¬poses, 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 no¬body 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, re¬name 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, any¬way—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 fam¬ily 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 becom¬ing 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 fol¬lowing 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 con¬sidering 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 au¬thority. 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.
It might have been different had he just taken I-Five's statement at face value. It might have been easier to dis¬miss it, to label it some strange misfiring of the droid's synaptic grid, or a subroutine programmed as a bizarre joke. But he had looked with the Force. He had seen the connection between the man he knew was his father and
this... machine.
And, to be brutally honest, he'd also seen the barest suggestion that there might really be something more to I-Five.
Jax shook his head. This was something he most cer¬tainly didn't need right now.