Jax Pavan Breaks with Xizor

Jax Pavan Breaks with Xizor marks the point at which Jax’s bargain with the Black Sun Vigo can no longer serve his attempt to reach Kantaros Station. A canceled voyage exposes the peril behind their alliance: Xizor’s effort to draw Darth Vader back to Imperial Center has intersected with a genuine assassination plot against Palpatine. Jax answers the reversal by confronting Xizor, tearing his way out of Tyno Fabris’s headquarters, and returning to the Laranth with a new destination: Toprawa.

The Mission Is Canceled

On the bridge, Captain Breck’s sudden change of manner alerts Jax before the captain explains what has happened. Breck receives a communication, turns to his navigator, and orders the ship secured; they are standing down. Jax is stunned, but understands the practical consequence before Breck confirms it: Xizor has pulled the plug, and the ship will not go to Kantaros. Breck has no explanation to offer, and says he did not ask for one.

The cancellation leaves Jax without the passage he needs for his effort to reach Kantaros Station. Rather than accept the decision at a distance, he goes to find Xizor. Den Dhur and I-Five have already worried that Jax may be heading into a confrontation with a Black Sun Vigo who nearly killed him. I-Five counters that Jax is no longer the man he was at their earlier encounter, but that confidence does not remove the danger: Jax is going to confront a powerful figure whose interests have abruptly diverged from his own.

Xizor’s Explanation

Jax enters the closed tapcaf through its locked front door and crosses the dark ground floor, passing employees who are polishing tables. Upstairs, two of Fabris’s guards try to stop him. The confrontation escalates as Jax uses the Force to throw one guard down the corridor; the other retreats, dragging her companion away. Jax continues through the building, reaches Fabris’s office, and rips its door from its hinges. Fabris is absent, but Jax senses four life forces concealed behind a tapestry, a door, and a wall.

When Jax finally faces Xizor, the Vigo explains the change in their arrangement. At Jax’s request, he had used his network of associates to bring Darth Vader back to Imperial Center by spreading apparently credible rumors that someone planned to assassinate the Emperor. The maneuver was meant to assist Jax’s larger objective. But one of Xizor’s captains, negotiating with a black-market supplier named Ash, heard an allusion to Palpatine being removed from the picture. The rumors, Xizor now admits, have turned out to be true.

Jax recognizes Acer Ash as a member of Whiplash and understands that Tuden Sal is proceeding with his plan. This is the decisive reversal: Xizor’s operation was built around a rumor, but an actual conspiracy has made the rumor dangerous. Xizor fears that the assassination attempt may be linked to an attempt to free Whiplash’s captured leader, Thi Xon Yimmon. If Yimmon’s liberator arrives aboard a Black Sun vessel, the Emperor could connect the rescue to Black Sun and to Xizor himself. Jax says he stowed away, but the explanation does not undo the political risk Xizor sees.

The Break with Black Sun

As Xizor lays out the danger, Jax understands why Den and I-Five objected to his dealings with the Vigo. His pursuit of his own objective has brought him deep into the logic of just business, where an alliance lasts only while it remains useful. Xizor senses that something has shifted in Jax and calls for Brank. With a comlink already open, Xizor has also alerted the sentients below; guards begin pounding up the stairs while others move through the building to cut off escape routes.

Jax turns the office itself into an obstacle course. He uses his lightsaber to cut down Fabris’s tapestries, dropping the heavy material across the remaining concealed doors, then unleashes a Force thrust that sends glass, metal, and wood flying into the bodyguards entering through the open office door. He reaches toward the ceiling, setting Fabris’s enormous chandelier quivering. The display is not merely an attack on the guards: the threatened ornament makes Fabris cry out from the doorway of his hidden room, revealing the value he places on the chandelier and giving Jax leverage over the room’s occupants.

Jax briefly deactivates his lightsaber. The guards relax, Fabris sighs with relief, and Xizor grows warm with the expectation of gloating. Jax then turns to the fortified stained-glass window and says he can fix the problem. A two-handed Force thrust blows the barred window outward and takes a large section of wall with it; colored glass scatters over the street in the morning light. In the stunned silence, Jax tells Xizor and his lieutenant that it is nothing personal, just business. He follows by wrenching Fabris’s chandelier from its mounts and bringing it down amid crystal and flame, then steps through the ruined window and lowers himself to the street with the Force.

Escape and Redirection

The escape leaves masonry, wood, and glass across the walkway and street. Jax sees people scrambling for cover or staring in disbelief, and senses no injured people nearby; he hopes that no one has been killed. His regret at the devastation contrasts with the force of his departure: he has made a destructive, unmistakable break, but does not treat the possible human cost as irrelevant.

Less than half an hour after leaving the spaceport, Jax returns to the Laranth at a run. Den sees a stony expression and does not know what to expect. Jax gives a direct order to prepare the ship for departure and names Toprawa as their destination, then goes aft. Den feels wild relief: Jax is back, and they will soon be among friends. As I-Five begins the pre-liftoff sequence with the single normal hand on his altered chassis, the immediate consequence of the confrontation becomes clear. The canceled Kantaros passage has become a changed course, and the crew is leaving together rather than continuing under Xizor’s arrangement.