One pale hand reached out of the tattered cloak as if to try to arrest his headlong slide. Tesla smiled grimly and squeezed—then cried out in surprise and consternation as his feet were wrenched out from under him. He landed hard on his back, air driven from his lungs, and dropped his lightsaber.
He took only a second to recover, by which time his quarry was gone again. The boy might be young, but he was obviously no novice; Tesla would not allow himself to be lulled into stupid complacency again.
He picked up his lightsaber and hooked it to his belt, then went after the boy with both hands. This time he would not be deflected or caught off-guard. He would capture this prize for his master. Failure was not an option.
At the mouth of the energy corridor, he reached out anew with the Force, using one hand to restrict his target’s limbs and the other to haul him in. Concentrating his full attention on his task, he almost failed to catch the sudden movement of a five-meter-long section of fallen buttressing that swung suddenly toward his head.
Tesla whirled, using both hands to deflect the deadly length of metal. In his frustration and anger he did more than deflect it—he sent it flying. It hit the edge of one of the repulsor fields and exploded skyward. By the time it fell, hitting the ground with a shriek of metal on stone, Tesla was in motion, pursuing his elusive quarry into the wriggling corridor of energy.
It was an unnerving place—an ever-changing passage of creeping light and shadow through which the external world could be seen as if through a thick wall of gel. Now the walls were rippling toward him; now they flew away like a sac swollen by a breath of ionized air. Far above—forty stories, perhaps—he could see a thin sliver of twilight sky. Then that was wiped from view in the rippling distortions of the walls.
The sounds, too, were distracting; deafening screeches and roars, like metal sheets being ripped asunder, and his nostrils were constantly assaulted by the stench of ozone. He ran, using the Force to speed him along and deflect the billowing walls of the passageway. He tried nothing else until the boy was perhaps three meters ahead of him; then he reached out and tripped him. Or tried to … It was as if the boy could read his intentions and knew just when to defend himself; this time he simply lifted his feet from the ground and somersaulted up the passage several meters before turning, touching down, and doing something that changed Tesla’s mind utterly about the nature of their contest.
The boy reached into the transparent energy fabric of the repulsor field—something that should have been impossible—and literally wrenched out a blazing ball of energy, molding the mass of writhing static between his hands as if it were made of modeling gel instead of highly charged energy particles. Then he flung the blindingly bright ball at Tesla.
The Inquisitor whipped into a defensive position, erecting a barrier against the salvo. It seemed to matter little; it still took him by storm, knocking him backward almost to the entrance of the corridor. Only his own well-honed control of the Force kept him from tumbling out of control. He jackknifed in the air and came at the boy again, this time with his lightsaber lit.
He saw the boy’s face clearly as he charged. The cowl of his cloak lay back on his narrow shoulders, his hair floated wildly about his head, and his eyes were huge with fear and fury.
Feeling the youth’s anger, Tesla was exultant. He had a fleeting thought of what a prize this child would make for his lord, but the proud thought was swamped by survival instinct—and by his own wrath. He would not be bested by a mere boy! He roared aloud, using the Force to amplify the sound, and saw the teenager’s eyes widen farther.
Tesla was ready when the second ball of repulsor energy came flying at him. He raised his lightsaber to parry it—and was blown upward into the heights of the field tunnel in a flash of searing crimson light. At a height of seven or eight meters, he collided with a ripple in the energy barrier that deflected him downward again with just as much force. He came down on the gritty duracrete surface face-first, only just gathering the presence of mind to wrap the Force around him like a cocoon. It was all that kept him from breaking bones.
He levitated back to his feet, enraged, and threw back his own cowl. “Fool!” he roared at the retreating form. “I offer you freedom and you choose to hide with the vermin!”
The youth hesitated and turned. “You’re an Inquisitor.” His voice came to Tesla’s ears warped and tortured by the skittering, moaning sounds of the warring repulsor fields.
“So could you be, with your power.”
The boy’s unspoken scorn was immediate and powerful, as if it, like his unlikely ability, was fed by the Force. He started to turn away.
“Return with me or die!”
The boy turned back, his gaze meeting Tesla’s so strongly that the Inquisitor heard it as a rending sound in his head and felt it as a searing pain behind his eyes. His heart pounded, his breath was suddenly constricted—he felt like a lidded vessel filling with some white-hot substance until it must surely burst. The fire gnats were crawling over him again, inflaming every nerve in his body.
“Leave me alone,” the boy said quietly, and the words sounded in Tesla’s head, each one like an icy dagger in his paralyzed brain. “Just leave me alone.”
Then suddenly he was free. He stumbled to his knees, fury and humiliation sweeping through him in waves. Tesla lifted both hands and fired a bolt of Force-lightning at the corridor just above the boy’s head, uncaring of the result. If the wretch would rather die than be taken by an Inquisitor, then so be it.
The lightning struck the rippling surface and bifurcated, each sizzling lash recoiling to strike again centimeters apart. They twinned again, then quadrupled.
Tesla cut off the flow of Force-lightning from his body, but it had little, if any, effect. Suddenly the corridor was filled with a dozen random lightning strikes, then twice that many. They were advancing on him in a trenchant storm, eating up the passageway before him. He couldn’t see what had happened to the boy; his figure was lost in the erratic pulses of light. Tesla threw up a defensive barrier and backed swiftly away from the advancing lightning. Surely, with its motive energy cut off, it would soon fade.
He kept moving, staying just ahead of the searing, draining discharges until he was certain the exit must be directly behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. It was not. In fact, only a meter or two farther along the passage, what had been an open passageway seemed to end in a pocket of charged and warped air.
He hesitated, heart thudding. How was this possible? The interstice in which he stood was formed by a cancellation effect. The two fields’ overlap was unstable, but the instability was linear. There was no way the two opposing fields could meet and meld in that way, no power that could—
He peered beyond the barrier, through the fluctuations in the cul-de-sac. Beyond them, out in the open debris field, he saw a lone figure standing atop a slab of ferrocrete. A figure with a bright mane of pale hair, rippling and warping as if viewed beneath the surface of a storm-tossed sea.
The dance of energy on the left side of his face alerted Tesla to the fact that he had hesitated too long. He had barely enough time to stiffen his Force shield against the lightning before it struck, exploding the tiny pocket of relative calm in which he stood—
When Jax first emerged from the cut into what passed for daylight at this level of the city, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. At the far end of the plaza, between the walls of two massive buildings, a pair of indistinct figures struggled within what looked like a writhing bowl of transparent, gelatinous light. It looked like the interstice between two force fields, but Jax had never encountered such a thing except in theory.
He glanced at Laranth, who gave the Twi’lek equivalent of a shrug, both lekku lifting slightly before settling again, the shorter one just brushing her shoulders.
That both combatants possessed the Force in abundance was obvious. They knocked each other off their respective feet several times before one hurled a ball of such brightness at the other that
it was painful for Jax to look at it, even from meters away.
Laranth stopped in midstride, peering at the unstable slot between the fields. “What was that? It didn’t look like Force-lightning.”
A second charged ball erupted toward the figure nearest the entrance to the flux. This time the would-be victim met it with his lightsaber—his bright crimson lightsaber.
“Sith,” hissed Jax under his breath as the repulsor fields lit up like a festival barge. “Or an Inquisitor.”
“Then who’s the other guy?”
“I’d love to know.” Jax activated his lightsaber and moved cautiously toward the fray, keeping low and moving from cover to cover, Laranth at his back.
They had reached a particularly large block of ferrocrete when the fault between the two fields erupted in a fitful blaze of blue-white light that seemed to grow exponentially.
“Now that is Force-lightning,” Jax murmured.
“From the Sith?”
“Must be. The other one just disappeared.”
The other one reappeared suddenly, shooting out through the narrow interstice at a height of at least two stories. Clear of the repulsor fields, he executed a perfect somersault in midair and landed on the slab of ferrocrete beside which Jax and Laranth sheltered. With a motion that suggested the closing of a curtain, the youth—for he couldn’t have been more than about fifteen or sixteen—closed the lips of the flux zone, sealing the Sith within. A heartbeat or two later, the fields blazed brighter than the noonday sun on Coruscant’s uppermost levels and gave a sound that made Jax think the sky was splitting. The concussion hurt his ears and buffeted him even in the lee of the ferrocrete block, and it knocked the boy from his high perch to the ground.
He wasn’t unconscious when Jax and Laranth got to him, but he was stunned. Aware of the other’s obvious power, Jax projected feelings of calm as he knelt beside him.
“That was a pretty neat trick you did with that field back there,” Jax said mildly. “Is that dead end going to last much longer?”
The boy blinked and shook his head.
“Then we’d better get you out of here. That Inquisitor’s going to be pretty mad when he comes to.”
“If he’s still alive,” Laranth murmured.
“Who are you?” the boy asked, confusion and fear intertwining in his voice and invading his gray eyes.
Jax held his lightsaber up between them, then deactivated it. “I’m a Jedi Knight,” he said. “My name is Jax.”
six
Jax and Laranth stopped to reconnoiter in the confluence of corridors where they’d met on their way to the Force eruption. The boy, who’d mumbled that his name was Kaj, seemed less dazed now. His eyes kept going to Jax’s lightsaber.
“Which way from here?” Laranth asked, jerking her head toward the alcove terminus of the shaft she’d descended earlier. “That comes out in Ploughtekal. Near the heart of it, in fact. If the Inquisitors are looking for our friend, the market might offer us the best cover. How did you come down?”
Jax grimaced. “I barely remember. Kaj here sort of swept me off my feet.”
“If you’re a Jedi, where’s your lightsaber?”
Laranth and Jax turned in unison to look at the boy. He actually blushed.
“Strictly speaking,” Laranth told him, “I’m a Gray Paladin. We have a somewhat different approach to a few things, lightsabers being one of them. A Gray Paladin isn’t married to a particular weapon. We simply use the Force through whatever tool we prefer. I like blasters.” She patted the pair holstered at her thighs. “Though I’ve been known to use a vibroblade from time to time.”
The boy turned his eyes to Jax. “Your lightsaber is red. His was red.” He flicked his gaze back the way they’d come. “How do I know you’re really Jedi—either of you? How do I know you’re not Inquisitors?”
Jax could feel the uncertainty and fear building up behind the pale eyes. Building toward panic. He’d already seen what this Force prodigy could do when panicked.
“I’m not,” he said. “Touch me. Use the Force to reach out and read me. I won’t stop you.” He saw Laranth’s eyes widen just before he closed his own and opened himself to this strange boy. He felt her trepidation as a cascade of cold lines down his back, felt the boy’s tentative touch as a cool tendril of uncertainty.
Blue. The Force manifested in Kaj as amorphous blobs, blue tending toward violet. Jax saw them in his mind’s eye reaching out for him, encircling him, probing.
After a moment the touch was withdrawn and he opened his eyes to see the boy looking at him, perplexed.
“What did you sense?”
“There’s no anger in you. No rage. I have so much and I have to fight it so hard sometimes. And he …” Again, the flicker of attention back toward the debris field with its possibly dead Inquisitor. “… he was like a furnace. He burned with it. Why are you so different?”
“Because I’m a Jedi,” Jax answered him. “Our Inquisitor friend is—something else.”
“A Sith?”
Jax glanced at Laranth. “What do you know about the Sith?” he asked Kaj.
The boy shrugged. “Legends. Myths.”
“Well, there are all kinds of Sith. As far as I know, an Inquisitor isn’t actually a Sith. But they do use red lightsabers. It’s a function of the crystal that’s used. Different crystals produce different colors.”
“So … it’s a choice you make.”
Jax and Laranth traded glances. “Yes,” Jax said. “Usually. Only I didn’t choose this lightsaber. The one I had, the one I built and trained with, was destroyed. This one”—he patted the hilt—“was given to me by … someone who knew I needed one.”
Laranth moved restively. “I hate to break this up, but we have a logistical problem—how to get Kaj onto friendly turf.”
“Yes, but which friendly turf?” Jax met her eyes, which made his stomach feel strange. “I can take him back with me, or you can smuggle him to Thi Xon Yimmon.”
“Yimmon has a lot on his plate,” the Twi’lek said. “I can’t conscionably give him yet another consideration without asking.”
Kaj, who’d been sitting against a pile of rubble, scrambled to his feet. “I’m not a consideration. I’m a Jedi. At least, I want to be a Jedi,” he amended when the weight of dual gazes fell on him. “I want to be trained. I want to—to learn to use the Force. To control it instead of having it … burn through me like it does. It—it scares me sometimes. The way I feel. The way it feels.”
He ran down, his hands tugging at his cloak, his eyes pleading. He looked and sounded so very young and fragile … which made what he’d done to the Inquisitor back there all the more astonishing.
I-Five’s words came back to Jax at that moment—what the droid had said about Jax being needed to train the next generation of Jedi. Perhaps that need was already presenting itself.
“We’ll take him to the conapt,” he told Laranth. “But be sure to give Yimmon a full report. Maybe it’s best for him to train with you, learn the ways of the Paladins.”
“Maybe it’s best he gets the high points of both philosophies,” said Laranth. “Circumstances being what they are, mutual exclusivity is a luxury the Jedi can’t afford.”
She was right, of course. They were stronger together than apart. Which brought Jax’s mind forcibly around to the fact of her leaving their team. He opened his mouth to say something about it, to suggest that she come back, but she was already moving into the alcove, craning her long, graceful neck to scan the vertical shaft with its inset hand- and footholds.
She flicked her green gaze back to Kaj. “Can you do a controlled leap when you’re not under attack?” she asked, and Jax thought that her lips curled slightly at the corners.
The boy moved to peer up the ferrocrete tube. He nodded. “I think so. At least I’ve leapt as high as that cross-shaft.” He pointed straight up.
Jax joined them in the small access, following the boy’s gesture to a point roughly ten meters u
p, where a durasteel catwalk skirted the shaft, halving its diameter.
“Good,” Laranth said. She drew one of her blasters. “I’ll go first. Follow me up.”
She leapt, reaching the metal platform easily and lighting on it with a soft tap of her booted feet. Kaj glanced at Jax, who nodded encouragingly, then followed, overshooting the catwalk by almost a meter. Laranth snagged his cloak and reeled him in before leaping away to a higher perch.
Jax took that as his cue to move, and joined Kaj on the catwalk. The boy peered at him in the twilight gloom, his eyes betraying fear.
“Won’t they feel us? The Inquisitors, I mean. Won’t they feel us using the Force?”
“Probably. But they certainly felt that big explosion you set off back there, and hopefully that’s where they’ll concentrate. It’ll take only a few seconds to reach the bazaar, and once we’re there, we can blend in. Now go on up. Laranth is waiting for you.”
They got him back to Poloda Place without incident. The market was, in fact, curiously empty of Imperial presence, and Jax, despite stretching to the limit of his Force senses, detected not even an Inquisitor—or, rather, the “hole” in the Force that would suggest the use of a taozin cloak such as some of the Inquisitors used to hide their presence from other Force-sensitives.
Jax was surprised when Laranth accompanied them all the way to the conapt. Rhinann and I-Five were both connected to the HoloNet when they entered the living area. Rhinann glanced up with obvious surprise, whether at seeing Laranth or their guest or both, Jax couldn’t say. I-Five’s photoreceptors blinked once, then settled on Kaj.
“Are Dejah and Den around?” Jax asked.
“Dejah Duare is out,” said I-Five in his obedient-protocol-droid voice. “Den Dhur is in his room composing a correspondence.”
Jax smiled at how jarring it was to have this particular protocol droid behaving in ways that were normal for a protocol droid. “It’s all right, I-Five. Kaj is … Kaj is a friend. And he’s a Force-sensitive. He just took down an Inquisitor single-handedly and unarmed.”
Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force Page 7
