Jax Pavan Infiltrates Imperial Security Bureau Headquarters

Jax Pavan Infiltrates Imperial Security Bureau Headquarters is a covert reconnaissance mission driven by Jax’s attempt to trace Thi Xon Yimmon. With only hours before Darth Vader may move Yimmon or the Inquisitors guarding him, Jax enters the Palace District in a police disguise and makes his way into Flight Control. His disguise gets him through the Bureau, but Vader’s arrival on the landing platform brings Jax within the Dark Lord’s direct regard—and makes escape without detection the mission’s most urgent test.

The Search for a Lead

Jax’s decision follows news that a captain is holding, with no explanation, and his check of the chrono: five hours have passed. He decides to go to the Palace District and get close to Vader’s ship. If Vader has brought Yimmon to Coruscant, Jax reasons, he may be moving him to wherever he has sent the Inquisitors. Waiting until Vader lifts off would leave the group with little chance of tracing the destination and, as Jax sees it, only a shot in the dark.

I-Five warns that approaching Vader on the ground risks being sensed, but Jax argues that if Vader had already detected him, he would have come after him. He also believes the landing zone will not be crawling with Inquisitors because Vader has sent his most effective agents offworld. Jax needs to discover where they have gone. Den Dhur blocks the hatchway and calls the idea crazy; Jax presses him to let him leave, promising that a policeman in disguise will not be suspected of being a Jedi. Den reluctantly steps aside, though his misgivings remain.

A Police Courier Becomes an Inquisitor

Jax changes into a uniform and leaves the ship as Lieutenant Pel Kwinn, carrying a large diplomatic pouch toward the Palace District. The uniform gives him an official role suited to moving through a security complex; the pouch will conceal the next transformation. The mission depends not on a single disguise but on the ability to change the identity presented to different audiences as circumstances demand.

Inside the complex, the architecture itself complicates the passage. The Palace looms above its surrounding institutions, while the gallery Jax crosses contains a manicured courtyard, Imperial statuary, and surveillance cameras. As he starts down the steps, he feels a ripple in the Force. A hooded Inquisitor emerges from the control center. At such close quarters, Jax judges that he cannot simply pass without risking that an adept will sense something unusual about the policeman. The danger is sharpened by his uncertainty about Vader’s Force abilities after the bota: he cannot accurately gauge what the enemy may perceive.

Jax uses the cameras’ blind spots and the competing Force presences in the complex as cover. Between holograms of long-dead Imperial figures, screened from two holocams and blocked from a third by a bronze sculpture, he takes the hooded robe from the pouch and pulls it over his uniform. In seconds, Pel Kwinn disappears and an apparent Inquisitor steps out from between the displays. The disguise is both clothing and access: guards are reluctant to look closely at members of the feared Inquisitorius, allowing Jax to move through checkpoints without attracting the scrutiny his true identity would invite.

Flight Control and Vader’s Arrival

Jax enters Flight Control, a pristine room staffed by Imperial Security Bureau functionaries, and looks out through a vast transparisteel expanse over the landing stages. He can see the control tower, the walkway to the hangars, and the wing tips of a Lambda-class long-range shuttle. He reaches out through the Force to examine the vessel, feeling along it as if it were a model in his hands. The search yields no certainty that Yimmon is aboard: he may be somewhere in the building beneath Jax, or may not yet have been put on the ship. Jax realizes how urgently he wants to find him, but has no time to follow that thought.

The shuttle’s ramp extends. Two Imperial officers descend to wait at its foot, and a figure in black robes comes out of the walkway’s shadow. Jax turns toward the vessel as Darth Vader pauses to speak briefly with the officers. When Vader steps toward the ramp, he hesitates and looks up at the hooded figure on the walkway. Their faces are both obscured, one by a mask and the other by the Inquisitor’s hood, but Jax feels exposed under Vader’s regard. The encounter converts a search conducted at a distance into a direct, silent confrontation: Jax must maintain the role even as he wonders whether Vader knows who stands beneath the hood.

Escape and the Unresolved Test

Jax bows deeply to Vader, then resumes his slow, gliding walk and enters Flight Control on the opposite side of the walkway. He does not acknowledge the Inquisitors he passes on his way out, and they do not acknowledge him. The guards’ fear of the Inquisitorius helps him through the checkpoints; only after leaving the Bureau complex and crossing the plaza does he allow the pace of his escape to quicken. He returns to the Westport still wearing the borrowed identity, hoping he will stop shaking by the time he gets there.

Jax tells himself that Vader did not recognize him: if he had, Vader would have challenged him and would never have let him walk away alive; Jax believes he would have felt the recognition. That reasoning offers reassurance, not confirmation. The mission has secured a passage through the Bureau and an examination of Vader’s shuttle, but the supplied account does not establish that Jax discovers Yimmon’s location. Meanwhile, Den has waited for more than two hours, repeatedly checking the chrono until he forces himself to stop. Because he cannot sense the Force, he has no way to tell whether Jax is safe, discovered, or worse. The scene therefore ends with escape achieved but the central uncertainty intact.

Disguise as Method

The operation extends a pattern in Jax’s work: he builds identities from clothing, behavior, and the records that others might consult. At Big Woolly, he and Laranth Tarak pose as successful merchants, with Jax in a tailored synthsilk suit and black boots while Laranth’s merchant robes and orange lekku mantles conceal both her injured lekku and changes in her emotional coloration. At Pol Haus’s headquarters, Jax appears as an Ubese merchant, adopts the species’ mechanically amplified croak, and positions himself so surveillance devices cannot see his gloved hands. In Keldabe, he wears body armor, carries a blaster, alters the appearance of one eye with a contact lens, and assumes the persona of Corran Vigil, a contraband dealer whose false record I-Five has assembled from sources that can be accessed without raising alarms.

Those earlier performances clarify what is distinctive about the Bureau infiltration. Jax does not merely conceal his face; he coordinates appearance, conduct, cover story, and available information to manage what each observer can plausibly infer. In the Palace District, the decisive change is compressed into seconds: a police lieutenant becomes an Inquisitor because the surveillance layout gives him cover and the institution’s fear of its own agents discourages inspection. Yet the disguise cannot settle the question that matters most. Before Vader, Jax can control his posture and keep walking, but he cannot know for certain what the Dark Lord has perceived.