Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force (27 page)

And there was something else he did not understand. For a moment, as he struggled to free himself from the rubble, he had felt an odd new presence in the Force,
like an echo or a mirror image in an imperfect surface. When he had at last pulled free of the debris, he had seen only Jax Pavan, the droid, the Twi’lek, and the boy, all of whose signatures he had sensed before.

At first he’d taken it as Mas Sirrah’s death echo, then realized he had felt that, too—
after
this odd phenomenon. There was but one conclusion he could come to: the strange Force echo was from the droid, I-5YQ.

So Tesla had taken the moment of distraction caused by Sirrah’s suicidal ploy not to attack, but to flee.

It was galling, and he thought of following the outlaw Jedi and the peculiar droid, but that would only delay a complete report to Lord Vader. That was his duty, he told himself. As much as he thirsted for revenge, he understood that revenge must wait. He needed to report to his master. There was too much here he didn’t understand. He trusted Lord Vader would.

He shifted slightly on the ledge and a searing pain ripped down his side from ribs to hip. He realized only then that a piece of durasteel had pierced his side, and he was bleeding badly. Once again, he would need to be dragged to a healer.

He swallowed his shame at this second defeat, used the Force to slow the flow of blood, and sent out a call for help.

Jax decided they should make their way back to the studio through the rear of the apothecary, picking up Dejah and Rhinann on the way. The human proprietor of the business—large, impressive, and incensed by the damage to the front of her building—posed a minor problem, however.

“Are you one of them frippin’ ghosts?” She placed herself firmly in Jax’s path, hands on ample hips, and glared at him.

Jax frowned. “One of …”

“I believe she means the Inquisitors,” said I-Five placidly.

“No. No, I’m not. You can see—no robes.” He held his arms out from his body, emphasizing the ordinariness of his well-worn tunic, pants, and scuffed boots. What Inquisitor would be caught dead in such a mundane outfit?

“Well, they were sure fighting somebody,” the apothecary said dubiously. “Are you sure it wasn’t you?”

“We didn’t see who they were fighting,” Jax said, then added with a subtle change of tone, “and you didn’t, either.”

“
I
didn’t see who they were fighting,” the woman said.

Jax shrugged and smiled. He and his company hurriedly left out the rear of her shop and thence home by a
winding route. They could hear PCBU sirens blaring down the block as they stepped through the rear doors. The doors slid shut, cutting the sound off.

Pol Haus stood waiting for them.

“I thought you were going to keep the sector police out of it,” Jax said as they headed for the lift.

The Zabrak prefect raised his eyebrows. “I did. But when I intercepted a call from one Probus Tesla, an Inquisitor by trade, calling for assistance, I had to take a chance it was over and call my forces in. It’d be pretty suspicious if I hadn’t, wouldn’t it?”

Jax had to admit that it would.

Safely in the studio, there was only one question on Jax’s mind—one he was sure everyone else shared. He turned to Kaj, who sat in the sanctuary, and asked, “What did you do to that Inquisitor—and how?”

The boy shrugged, smiling wanly. “I used to have to bag swamp rats at home. Keep them out of the granary. You pop the alpha female in a sack and take her out in the swamp somewhere and her whole warren will follow. So I popped him in a sack. A very tiny sack.”

Dejah stared at the boy. “But how?”

Kaj’s smile wavered. “I … I don’t know. I’ve never done that before. I just—” He swallowed convulsively. “I just imagined catching the swamp rat and … look, it was an Inquisitor. What does it matter what happened to it?”

Jax drew in a breath. “
He
, Kaj. Not
it
. Inquisitors are people, just like us.”

The boy reddened and shook his head. “No. Not just like us. They’re evil.
He
was evil.” He went to his couch then and lay down on it, turning his back on the others.

Jax gestured for the rest of them to take their discussion upstairs and out of Kaj’s sight and hearing.

“What now?” Laranth asked when they’d reached the living room above the studio.

“Yes,” Rhinann echoed, “what now? Despite your Jedi manipulation of that storekeeper, you may well have blown our cover with your pyrotechnics—”

Jax wheeled on him. “My pyrotechnics? I wasn’t the one who took Kaj out of the gallery for walkies. Couldn’t you have just hidden him in the studio or one of the bedrooms?”

The Elomin’s face went blank. “Hidden him? Why—?”

“That was my fault,” Dejah said quickly, her crimson gaze flickering to Pol Haus. “I was afraid maybe the prefect would come with force. Or that if you told him about Kaj, he’d want to take him in.” She looked up at Jax earnestly. “I didn’t want that to happen to him, Jax. I suppose it was silly of me …” She trailed off, lowering her eyes.

“It happened. We’ll deal with it,” Jax said. “But Rhinann is right about one thing. At the very least we will have called their attention to this area and invited closer inspection. We need to move Kaj again.”

“You could let me take him,” Pol Haus suggested.

Everyone turned to look at him.

He held up both hands as if to deflect their gazes. “I have no intention of turning him over to Vader. I realize,” he added, his eyes on Jax, “that I haven’t had sufficient time to prove my good intentions. Though I did help you today at some risk to myself.”

“Pardon me for saying this,” said I-Five, “but you might also have done that purely for the expedient of gaining our trust. When you called in the sector police to the scene of the ‘disturbance’ just now, you may also have given them this location.”

“I might have,” said Haus imperturbably, “but I didn’t. Forget I made the offer. But I’m here now. If I can help out with this …”

“Wherever we move Kaj,” said Laranth, “we’ll need to move at least some of those sculptures with him.
Which could look suspicious if they went to the wrong place. As it happens, I know of an art gallery that would make a perfectly fitting home.”

She was perched on the ledge of a wall niche in which one of Ves Volette’s colleagues had painted a mural in morphing pigments that framed her in a kaleidoscopic display of dancing color. Something about her being there bothered Jax, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

“You want to send him to Yimmon?” This from Pol Haus.

Jax glanced at him. “You … you know where—”

“Where the Whiplash is centered? Yes. And Thi Xon knows I do. Does that help set your mind at ease, young Jedi?”

Jax ignored the question, because he’d just realized what was wrong with the grouping in the room. “Where’s Den?”

The Sullustan always favored the highest seat in the room, which in their new environs put him where Laranth was perched. Jax recalled, suddenly, the too-neat room down the hall. The room with not a personal artifact in sight.

I-Five moved before Jax could, and was in the journalist’s quarters several seconds ahead of him. When Jax got there the droid was just standing in the center of the room, staring at its pristine neatness. It looked as if no one had ever slept in it.

“He’s gone,” said I-Five. “He’s really gone this time.” The droid seemed, for once, at a complete loss.

“I’m sorry, I-Five. I guess this is my fault. The vote …”

“No, it’s mine. He’s been considering leaving—going home to Sullust to marry Eyar Marath—for some time now.” I-Five set his shoulders in a very human gesture. “I should have anticipated it. I should have …”

“Talked him out of it?”

The droid emitted a tiny metallic sigh. “Not if it was what he really wanted. A home. A family. I suppose he’d fooled himself long enough that he had that here.”

Jax grimaced. “We’ve been a pretty dysfunctional family of late.”

“Yes. We have been.” I-Five turned his head to look at Jax. “But a family, nonetheless.”

Jax held his breath. There it was again—that odd Force echo. Just as he’d felt …

He put his hand on the droid’s gleaming shoulder. “Five, I can
sense
you. Right now. And before—in the street—just before you killed that Inquisitor. You felt … fear then. Fear for me.” As he said the words, as his memory played back the images and sensations, he knew it for truth. “Now you’re feeling pain. Loss.”

The droid’s head tilted slightly to one side. “Yes. I am.”

“Don’t you see what that means? You can’t just walk into Imperial headquarters unnoticed. You can be sensed through the Force, I-Five. You’d never get near the Emperor.”

“But you said it yourself: I was—
am
—feeling strong emotions. In Imperial headquarters I won’t be. I’ll be a good little protocol droid, going about my business—”

Jax put both hands on I-Five’s shoulders and met him eye-to-optics. “Until you get into the same room with the Emperor. Then what? Then can you promise me that you won’t feel anger? Loss? Pain? That the thought at the forefront of your mind won’t be to avenge my father’s death?”

“I can—”

“Promise me?
Because if you can’t promise me that in all honesty, I can’t let you do this thing.”

The droid literally shivered. “You can’t
stop
me.”

Jax shook him hard enough to rattle his frame. “This isn’t about independence and free will and the prerogatives
of a sentient. It’s about … it’s about
family
. It’s about me needing you because you’re all the family I have left. And inside that metal heart you hold the only image I have of my father. If you die—”

“I can put the hologram on a crystal—”

“But you can’t put
you
on a crystal! Look, you told me that I had to stay alive because I was needed. Needed to train a new generation of Jedi. Well, you’re needed, too. To help keep me alive.”

I-Five blinked, his photoreceptors going off and on quickly. Jax felt a pulse of emotion from the droid once again—stronger now than before. But it wasn’t fear or loss this time.

It was anger.

“If you go into Imperial headquarters leaking like that,” Jax said, “they’ll be on you in a Coruscant minute. It’s suicide.”

“Then I suppose we must come up with a different plan.”

“Maybe. But first, we have to move Kaj.”

“Then Jax Pavan still lives.” Darth Vader stood with his back to Tesla. His posture, like his voice, gave no indication of stress or inner turmoil. Only his gloved right fist, held at his side, worked rhythmically. The Inquisitor, fresh from the healer, was certain he could hear the tiny servo-mechanisms in the bionic digits click and hum with the motion. Was Vader intending to wrap those cybernetic fingers around his neck? Would the statement
Jax Pavan still lives
be Probus Tesla’s epitaph?

“Yes, my lord,” Tesla said. He made his voice as colorless as possible. “I felt it was best to bring report of these startling developments to you without delay. If it had been only Pavan I had to face—”

“You should be thankful, Tesla, that neither you nor your cohorts killed him. I would have been most displeased. And you were correct in assuming that this information is invaluable to me.”

Vader turned and regarded the Inquisitor with gleaming, featureless eyes. “You have done well.”

Tesla dropped to one knee, relief flooding him. “Thank you, Lord Vader. I am gratified.”

Vader made a dismissive gesture. “Clearly their combined forces are considerable—and unexpected. The depths of this young adept’s powers are unknown, which is to say they are incalculable.” The helmeted
head tilted slightly to one side. “You felt nothing when Mas Sirrah was taken?”

Tesla had never known his master to show any uncertainty. The thought that this adept’s abilities baffled his lord both intrigued and excited him.

“Nothing. It was as if he had been … erased.”

Vader nodded. “And you are certain this other phenomenon—this Force echo or reflection you spoke of—was the droid?” There was, to Tesla’s further surprise, a note of puzzlement in the deep, well-modulated voice.

“As certain as I can be.”

Darth Vader moved to stand directly before Tesla in a whisper of dark robes, looking down at him. Tesla saw his now-bald pate and scarred face reflected in the surface of his master’s lenses.

Vader extended a hand over the Inquisitor’s head. “Give me your thoughts, Tesla. Let me see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you sensed.”

In Tesla’s mind the rhythm of the words was a chant, an incantation. His lord meant to read him, to touch his mind directly. The very thought was intoxicating. He felt the touch within his mind and quivered with a strange elation.

He recalled the street, viewed from his perch in the buttress far above. The barrage of matter and energy that hit it. His fall into the wreckage. That strange tingle of his Force sense just before Mas Sirrah died. And then, what he beheld when at last he rose from the rubble—where he expected to see another Jedi, he saw instead the protocol droid.

Tesla knew a moment of doubt. Perhaps Pavan had created the echo?

“Don’t.” Vader’s voice was in his head now, reprimanding him. “Don’t edit what your senses told you.
Don’t qualify it. Jax Pavan is a Jedi—a Force adept. Was this the signature of a Force adept?”

It wasn’t, and Tesla knew it. He remembered the rest of it then, up to the point when he escaped the blasted street. When Darth Vader withdrew his touch, Tesla nearly wept with bereavement.

Vader was silent for a long while. Silent and unmoving. Then he turned and strode back to his cloaked window. The sun was setting, turning the tops of the cloudscraping buildings copper, their windows glittering like gems atop the scepters of giants.

“What have we found here, Tesla? A Jedi who eludes every attempt at capture—no, two—there is also the Twi’lek woman. Add to them a rogue adept with unheard-of abilities and a droid that possesses a Force signature …” He swung back to look at the Inquisitor. “I am more determined than ever to capture them. All of them. Other intelligence I have received leads me to believe that the boy is the key. If we have him, we will have them all.”