Coruscant Nights_ Patterns Of Force Part 20

"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 case, young Jedi?"

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

The Sull.u.s.tan always favored the highest scat 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 Sull.u.s.t to nurry Eyar Marath-for some time now." I-Five set his shoulders in a very human gesture. "I should have antic.i.p.ated 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 s.h.i.+vered. "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."

Chapter Twenty-One.

"Then Jax Pavan still lives." Darth Vader stood with his hack 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 a.s.suming 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 exeited 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 b.u.t.tress 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 cloudsc.r.a.ping 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."

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 circ.u.mvented. 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."

Chapter Twenty-Two.

Laranth volunteered to remove Kaj to the Whiplash headquarters. Jax at first insisted on going with them, bur 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 Yimtnon 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 handpicked 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 certamty 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 a.s.signation 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 pa.s.sion; there is serenity.

Right.

They reached their destination-a seedy dive that hilled 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 ha.s.socks. The table was arrayed with a selection of food that looked not at all appetizing to Jax, who was glad he'd remembered to cat 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 nos.h.i.+ng 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.