Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force (28 page)

Tesla, still kneeling, looked up at his master. “What would you have me do, my lord?”

Vader beckoned his acolyte to rise. “I would have you arrange for the boy’s capture.”

“But … Lord Vader, his abilities—”

“Must be circumvented. There are ways we can do that—with an ally in the right place.”

“Have we such an ally, my lord?”

“It seems we do.”

Laranth volunteered to remove Kaj to the Whiplash headquarters. Jax at first insisted on going with them, but Laranth argued that his discovery of I-Five’s presence in the Force made consulting with Tuden Sal of greater importance.

“Don’t you trust me to get Kaj to Yimmon safely?” Laranth had asked him, her face an emotionless mask.

“Trust isn’t the issue. You have to know that. I trust you with my life.
Have
trusted you with it,” he added, meeting her gaze. “I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you if I hadn’t.”

“Then what is the issue?”

What
was
the issue? He wasn’t afraid for Kaj, really; the boy’s gut instincts had so far proven themselves effective at self-preservation. The issue was Laranth. It was for her safety that he feared.

He responded, somewhat lamely, “I just think two heads are better than one.”

Laranth opened her mouth to say something, then shook her head. “We’ll be fine, thank you.”

And so he’d sent them off to Thi Xon Yimmon while Dejah arranged for the removal of the light sculptures to the gallery in the Port Sector—with an escort of hand-picked police droids from among the Zi-Kree Sector security contingent, led by Pol Haus himself. The sculptures would take some time to arrive and to set up; until then
Kaj would be warded by more low-tech means. Based on the boy’s certainty that the Inquisitor pursuing him had lost his taozin artifact in the fall of debris on Gallery Row, Laranth had dispatched a swarm of the youngest Whiplash mudlarps—waifs who lived by pilfering and whose presence poking among the rubble would thus not be remarked upon—to find it. The dried and powdered taozin skin nodule wasn’t sufficient to cloak a power like Kajin’s from Vader if the former should have a major tantrum, so to speak, but Laranth was satisfied that it would do until she could remount the light sculptures.

Jax saw her and Kaj off with a sense of foreboding, and told himself it was merely because he and Laranth had something unfinished between them. He was experiencing the irrational human fear that he’d never get the opportunity to finish it.

He glanced at I-Five as the two walked side by side through Ploughtekal Market’s lowest level on their way to a meeting with Tuden Sal. A continuously shifting rainbow of neon splashed over the droid’s metal sheathing as they walked.
A being of many colors
, Jax thought philosophically. A being who was at the moment, he knew, also suffering from unfinished business. Den Dhur had left behind no message, no explanation, no indication of what he’d been feeling in the days before his departure. Even Laranth had said farewell from her medcenter bed before she’d left.

No
, he told himself,
you’re wrong on both counts
. Neither Den nor Laranth had been reticent about expressing their feelings about the course things were taking. He and I-Five had simply been too busy, too focused …

Who was he kidding? He’d been too
blind
to notice. And too muddled by Dejah’s veil of pheromones. That knowledge ate at him now, seeping into his soul. What
must Laranth have thought—for him to go in moments from that intimate touch they’d shared in the medcenter, to practically forgetting she existed.

He recalled the moment now and suspected he knew what had happened. Dejah had entered the waiting area outside Laranth’s room. With her telempathic abilities she would have felt that strong flare of sudden awareness, of emotion, when he’d entered the room, moments later …

He’d seen the look on the Zeltron’s face when he and I-Five had left for their assignation just now. She had been hurt and puzzled because she could feel him blocking her aggressively, allowing her to get no sense of his emotions. He’d felt some remorse for that back at the studio. Now, twenty minutes and several kilometers away, he no longer did.

That bothered him. It hinted that, though he blocked her with a strong and trained will, she was still able to affect him. He felt a tickle of anger, as much at himself as at Dejah’s meddling, and turned it aside.

There is no passion; there is serenity
.

Right
.

They reached their destination—a seedy dive that billed itself as an “inn.” Jax followed I-Five to the end of the main corridor where it took a left turn and opened onto a broader hallway flanked by what the proprietor termed “conference rooms.” The one in which they found Tuden Sal had just enough room in it for a low table and four hassocks. The table was arrayed with a selection of food that looked not at all appetizing to Jax, who was glad he’d remembered to eat something on their way through Ploughtekal. Even the provender offered by such dubious establishments as Max Shrekk’s “Mystery Meat” Pies Emporium looked better than the glop Sal was noshing enthusiastically on. Hard to believe
that this same man had been the owner of a popular upscale restaurant some two decades ago.

Jax sat, while I-Five remained standing. The Jedi accepted a cup of steaming red leaf tea and sipped it, then set the cup down and said, “We have a problem.”

Sal’s eyes narrowed. “I heard about the ruckus down on Gallery Row. That was you, then?”

“During the
ruckus
, as you so quaintly put it,” I-Five told Sal, “Jax discovered that I generate a sporadic Force signature.”

Tuden Sal’s face was a stupefied blank. The first emotion to display there was disbelief. He looked at Jax. “You what?”

“I was under attack—” Jax began.

“An Inquisitor was half a second away from running Jax through. I prevented him. I was in the grip of rather strong emotions at the time.”

“Which I felt,” Jax added.

Sal gaped. “Strong emotions?”

“I was terrified of losing him, if you must know.”

“The long and short of it,” Jax said, “is that I-Five can’t guarantee he’d be able to keep his emotions in check if he got close to the Emperor. He’s not the ideal assassin you thought he was.”

Sal’s face flushed a darker shade of bronze. “You’re sure of this?”

Jax shook his head. “How can one be sure? But the fact that there’s a reasonable doubt of jeopardy is enough to call it off.”

The Sakiyan’s eyes narrowed again. “Are you the only one who felt it? Did Laranth sense it as well?”

“She was having her own difficulties at the time,” I-Five noted drily. “We were under attack by several Inquisitors.”

“I heard the rumor, but I didn’t believe it. You fought the Inquisitors—in the
open
?” Sal shook his head. “That’s
another strike against our plan. But perhaps that’s what you intended.”

Now it was Jax’s turn to stare in surprise. “Excuse me?”

“You’ve really been against this mission from the beginning, haven’t you? Why? Is it because of your father?”

Jax leaned forward. “What are you accusing me of, exactly?”

“It isn’t difficult to parse. You engage in a public battle with Inquisitors, thereby drawing attention to yourself
and
I-Five, then claim that, as a result, you can sense him through the Force.” He spread his hands. “No one else has claimed they can sense him.”

“That’s a ridiculous accusation,” said I-Five. “If anyone was going to bear you ill will over Lorn Pavan’s death, it would be me. And ultimately it was Senator Palpatine who had him killed, through the Sith assassin. Research tells me that the assassin, or at least a Zabrak with similar ritual tattooing, was later killed during a fight at a power station on Naboo, so there goes any chance for revenge against him. That leaves Palpatine.

“Jax didn’t engineer yesterday’s incident. We were drawn into a fight with the Inquisitors to prevent the capture of a friend.”

“Another Jedi, no doubt.”

“A potential Jedi,” said I-Five.

“Ah … or a potential Sith, then.”

Jax shifted uneasily, remembering the ease with which Kaj had sent the Inquisitor into oblivion. He’d felt the hot wash of hatred that preceded the act. “Not if we can help it,” he said. “But that’s neither here nor there. I did not blow our cover yesterday, nor am I making up what I felt. I-Five can be sensed through the Force. How, I don’t know …”

“He’s a
droid
,” Sal said. “He can act like a droid and—”

“
Act
is the operative term,” I-Five interrupted. “The only way for my intentions to be clear of falsehood would be if someone were to strip my cognitive module down to my basic programming kernel—”

“Ah! Of course!” cried Sal. “That’s what we’ll do.”

“In which case, I would no longer be able to carry out the directive,” I-Five finished. “My BPK does not permit me to injure a sentient being.”

Sal looked glum, then brightened as he snapped his fingers. “What if you had a handler? Someone who went with you and remote-switched off the BPK when you were close enough to the Emperor to complete the mission.”

Jax shook his head. “Too risky. At that last moment, when his sentient overlay was reinstated, it’s likely his module would overload and flare out.”

Sal shrugged. “But then it would be too late—for the Emperor, at least.”

“Yeah. And maybe too late for I-Five as well.”

Sal shrugged. “So what? The handler simply reinstates the program. A clean-slate override.”

“Not simply,” objected Jax. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with here. If ever a droid was more than the sum of his parts, it’s I-Five. I don’t want to take the chance of a reboot causing him to lose whatever part of him might go beyond code.”

Sal stared at Jax. “You’re not seriously suggesting that I-Five has a
soul
?”

“I’m suggesting that he might not be the same droid we powered down. And that’s not all. Emperor Palpatine is the head of the Sith Order. If you think the Inquisitors are deadly, the Emperor is exponentially more deadly. Quicker, more focused, more powerful. In that split second that I-Five’s BPK goes offline, the Emperor could very well sense it and retaliate before I-Five has a chance to do anything.”

“You don’t know that. Palpatine won’t be expecting anything. And the droid doesn’t need to be that close to him—a laser shot from the gallery when the Emperor is on the floor of the Senate, for example …”

“Such a scenario might possibly work, but there’s always Darth Vader to worry about.”

“But the droid could—”

“The droid could fall apart from metal fatigue waiting for you two,” I-Five cut in. “Let’s assume for a moment that we can get me past surveillance.” He looked at Sal. “What were you thinking?”

Tuden Sal was suddenly animated. “It’s a simple plan. And because it’s simple, I think it stands a high chance of success. Palpatine attends the Senate ‘debates’—bootlicking fests is more like it—on the last day of each week. The number of protocol droids in the Senate Hall at those times is mind-boggling. They’re everywhere—interpreting, carrying messages, serving tea—we should have no difficulty getting in as attachés of whatever delegation I-Five tells the security system we’re with.”

“And as the handler, where would I be?” Jax asked.

I-Five reacted strongly to that. “Jax, you can’t. You’re a Jedi. A wanted Jedi. Even if you wore a skinsuit, you’d be in danger of being read. You’d jeopardize the mission.”

Jax thought about it. “I could be one of The Silent, perhaps. They travel heavily enrobed and no one notices.” Then an epiphany struck him. “Got it. I’ll go in as an Inquisitor. Totally appropriate as a Force-sensitive.”

“And where would you get an Inquisitor’s robe?” the Sakiyan asked.

“I don’t know, but I’m sure Rhinann does. And I think I may even know where I can get some taozin. I already have a Sith blade.”

Tuden Sal nodded. “Yes. It could work. The citizens’ galleries have an unobstructed view of the Emperor’s Senate platform.”

“Which is protected by a repulsor shield
and
an EM shield,” I-Five objected, staring at Jax as if he’d gone completely mad.

“I’m a Jedi. I can defeat both.”

“Perhaps. But doing so will cause you to light up like a supernova to the other Inquisitors.”

Jax shrugged. “There’ll be too much pandemonium because the Emperor will be dead.”

I-Five’s photoreceptors met Jax’s eyes straight-on. “I,” said I-Five, “am supposed to be keeping you alive. Remember?”

“Then you’d better make it your best shot.” Jax turned to Tuden Sal. “Are you convinced yet that I haven’t been trying to sabotage your mission?”

The Sakiyan didn’t answer that; instead he said, “Palpatine’s next appearance in the Senate is in two days. Will that give Rhinann enough time to get an Inquisitor’s robe?”

Jax stood up. “Let’s find out.”

“You want me to get
what
?” Rhinann was aghast. As he had long suspected, the Jedi had completely lost his senses.

“An Inquisitor’s robe. Can you?”

“Preferably without alerting the entire Inquisitorius as to its destination,” I-Five added.

Rhinann fixed the droid with a baleful glare. “They won’t even know it’s missing. When do you need it?”

“Within the next two days.”

Rhinann felt the building sway around him. “That soon?”

“If you can’t do it,” Pavan said, “perhaps I’d better seek another source.”

Rhinann stiffened. No Elomin could stand to have his professional integrity thus impugned. He knew that Pavan knew this, and was using it to manipulate him,
but knowing that didn’t help. “I can do it. It’s just … so soon.” The Elomin moved to the HoloNet station in the living room and jacked in. “By the way,” he said as he began his egress into the Inquisitorius node, “I was monitoring the ISB traffic this morning. The droid has been made. The surviving Inquisitor sensed him during the incident yesterday.”

He saw Pavan and I-5YQ exchange glances, and felt a glow of satisfaction. “Hmm. Yes. A bit more alarming a prospect now, isn’t it?”