“Yes. A protocol droid.”
“What model?” asked I-Five.
“It’s a threepio.”
“That’ll do.”
“That’ll do what?” asked Den. He felt as if bolts of blasterfire were zooming back and forth over his head—a scenario that he had no trouble believing would be reality shortly.
Jax’s eyes were alight with something unhealthily close to excitement. He turned to Rhinann. “In about ten minutes, have the driver bring the airspeeder down to the front door.”
Rhinann gaped. “Land it in the courtyard? In plain sight?”
“Exactly. Instruct him to come up to this conapt. He’ll be taking our property agent and his client off to sign some papers.”
Rhinann disappeared back into his lair. Jax was in motion again, this time heading for his quarters. He beckoned I-Five and Den to follow.
“I can explain—” he said to Den, but the Sullustan interrupted.
“I’m sure you can,” he said. “What scares me is that the explanations are starting to make sense to me. Even when I’m sober,” he added, “which I devoutly wish I wasn’t at this point.”
“Be as that may,” Jax said, “you and I-Five are going to take our Koorivar friend to your office to sign lease papers.”
“I may have found a basic flaw in your ingenious scheme—namely, that I-Five is our Koorivar friend.”
“Not for long.”
The scariest thing about the whole maneuver was waking Kaj. Jax did this with his own Force threads tightly held, ready to shield any anomalies. As an added, though possibly useless, precaution, they carried the boy into the living room and placed him on a couch so that the light sculpture lay between him and the forecourt of Poloda Place. If the Inquisitor was still there and if the cloaking effect worked at that distance and if Jax didn’t have to resort to extreme measures to calm Kaj, they just might get him out without being detected.
As easy as navigating an asteroid field …
thirteen
Den felt as if an army of Inquisitors were stationed in the courtyard, just waiting to pounce on them. He kept his gaze on Kajin as they neared the external door and nearly jumped out of his skin when I-Five poked him in the back of the head.
“Showtime. Start your spiel.”
“Uh, yeah.” Den wiped his palms on the legs of his pants, cleared his unnaturally dry throat, and launched. “I’m pleased we were able to find a property that fit your exacting needs. My office will have the legal work drawn up by the time we get there.”
The faux Koorivar nodded eagerly and patted his hands together. “Excellent!” he said. “And how soon can I move my family in?”
The voice was I-Five’s, thrown expertly from the droid’s voice generator via tightband hypersonic beam, so that it seemed to be coming from the disguised Kaj, who had awakened by now and been pressed into service as part of their scheme.
“Oh, ah … well, pending a check of your funding, we should be able to have you in sometime tomorrow.”
“Very good. I’m pleased to do business with you.”
They had reached the airspeeder by then, and I-Five opened the doors for his passengers to embark—Kaj first, then Den. He had closed the doors and gotten into the driver’s seat when Den saw the Inquisitor. He was standing in the shadows of the building across the way, approximately where they’d seen him before.
Kaj stiffened, and Den knew he’d seen it, too.
“Kick it, Five,” he murmured. Then to Kaj, “It’s okay, kid. We’ll be out of here in a flash. Just sit tight.”
But Kaj wasn’t sitting tight. He had reached up and was trying to undo the seals on the back of his skinsuit’s headpiece. Den put his own hands up to keep him from succeeding.
“Kaj! Just calm down. If you’re calm, he won’t—”
“I can’t fight like this!” Kaj panted. “I have to get—this—off!”
The speeder lifted. Simultaneously, the Inquisitor came out of the shadows, his step halting, uncertain. Den suspected he was sensing something but wasn’t sure what it was.
The Inquisitor raised his hand, hesitated, reached again toward the rising airspeeder, and froze, his head swiveling away from them.
As the vehicle turned and soared upward toward the skylanes, Den watched the Inquisitor dash across the courtyard in the opposite direction, hurling himself into a Force leap that carried him up toward the resiblock’s communal docking stations.
He was in hot pursuit of something, Den realized. Or someone …
Jax knew the ruse was in jeopardy when he felt Kaj’s psychic gasp of terror. He didn’t have to wonder what had caused it, but he knew that he had to act before Kaj did.
He bolted from the conapt, frightening Dejah and sending Rhinann into conniptions of gloom. He went up; the turbolifts were too slow, so he literally flew up the emergency stairs, touching down on the landings only enough to change direction for the next leap.
On the fifth level, he reached out and called to the Inquisitor in the courtyard below, exuding a thin, sharp whiplash of the Force calculated to get the dark adept’s attention. He got it all right. Jax felt the other’s interest as a sharp tug on his tether.
He cut the thread and leapt away, heading up to the next level … in the opposite direction from that which the airspeeder had taken. He let off two more short, sharp bursts of Force energy, then shut down and went literally to ground, taking a lift from the upper levels all the way down to the midlevels of Ploughtekal.
He waited there for some time, listening for other Force-users. When none materialized, he set off for Ves Volette’s studio.
Kaj, sans disguise, sat cross-legged in the center of the studio regarding the light sculptures with hopeful eyes. I-Five moved the last of them into place—the last currently functional one at any rate—while Den cataloged how many dormant ones and component parts were left in the sprawling studio.
These were nice digs, no doubt about it. Besides the three-story studio with its overlooking gallery, there were four private bedrooms, a library/workroom, a living room, and a large kitchen. A real kitchen—not just a food prep area with the usual nanowave and conservator. Apparently Ves Volette or Dejah had liked to cook.
Den found himself hoping that Dejah was the cook. If they relocated the entire team here … He caught himself. He might not be around that much longer. Depending on the answer he got from Eyar, he might soon be taking off for Sullust and leaving this dangerous, misbegotten, Inquisitor-infested hunk of real estate behind.
“Done with that inventory?” I-Five asked.
Den pulled himself forcibly out of his reverie and glanced down at the compad he’d been taking inventory on. “Yeah. Think so. We’ve got three more sculptures in the far corner that seem to lack power modules. A fourth that’s down a PM and a crystal, and component parts for maybe two more. I just don’t know if the parts list is complete. I found a log record that indicates he kept a small supply of crystals and a few PMs here, but I haven’t run across them yet.”
I-Five’s photoreceptors lit with surprise. “Pilfery?”
Den shrugged. “Or he hid them well. Those particular parts are pretty dear—both rare and expensive.”
He threw a glance at the boy within his circle of light sculptures. The rainbow of illumination reared above him into the vault of the ceiling, restless, ever moving, casting light and shadow on everything in the room.
Den shivered, feeling as if he was looking at an analog for their scary guest. Or maybe for the power he invoked. He tried to ignore the crawl of heat across his own face and asked, “Is it working? Can you tell?”
“No. We won’t be able to tell until we have a Jedi here to tell us it’s working.”
“Or an Inquisitor to tell us it’s not,” muttered Den.
“Will a Gray Paladin do?”
Den spun and stared up at the durasteel gallery that ran the length of the studio. Laranth Tarak stood looking down at them, eddying light from the sculptur
es playing over her, making her seem to flicker like a candle flame. The radiance shone on the polished railings of the gallery as well, making it look as if she stood on a bridge made of strands of light.
Den was surprised by how glad he was to see her. She represented, he realized, things as they had been, as he had wanted them to be. Sure, she was taciturn and unsmiling and unyielding and uncommunicative. None of that mattered, because she was also unambiguous. Laranth, Jax, and I-Five were the three people Den Dhur felt most at home with. In a bad situation, these were the people he wanted at his side, at his back.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I was in the neighborhood. I sensed an anomaly in the Force.”
Laranth left the gallery rail and descended, using the house grav-pad. Stepping off onto the studio floor, she sauntered over to them, her eyes on Kaj. The boy smiled a little nervously and waved at her. To Den’s utter surprise, she waved back.
“Interesting,” she said, gesturing to the light sculptures. “Wonder why we didn’t sense this Force-canceling property in them before now.”
“I think they have to be tuned to a specific harmonic,” the droid said. “The pertinent question is, are they working?”
She turned her head to look at Kaj, tipping her head to one side. Her right lekku coiled slightly. Then she turned, picked up an electrospanner from a tray of tools, and rolled it between the two light sculpture stands closest to them. “Kaj—lift that.”
The boy looked at the spanner. It bobbed up from the floor.
“Hold it there,” Laranth told him. She walked the perimeter of the circle. After making a complete circuit, she had Kaj let go of the tool.
“A little gets through,” she told I-Five. “But very little. Still, if he were to do something major in there, who knows what might leak out.”
“It appears,” I-Five said, “that we’re going to have to do some adjusting.”
Laranth’s eyes widened. “Meddle with the art of a deceased master? Dejah’s going to allow that? I’m amazed.”
“Really, Laranth—sarcasm is so human an attribute.”
Laranth ignored him. “Is Jax coming?”
“Jax is here. Good to see you again so soon, Laranth.”
Den looked up to the gallery again. Jax was the creature of light and shadow this time as colors danced across his face and set his drab clothing metaphorically aflame. The Sullustan felt a little more secure now that two Jedi were in the immediate vicinity. Not much, but a little.
In the aftermath of Kaj’s hasty removal, Haninum Tyk Rhinann sat at his workstation feeling as if someone had immersed him in icy water. They had come that close—that close—to being discovered. Oh, he was sure that Pavan would deny this—if he ever returned from wherever he’d gone so precipitously. He would no doubt claim everything had been just fine, under control, and that there had never been any great danger of discovery. But in the proximity of that Inquisitor, Rhinann had felt the cold gaze of his erstwhile master.
He turned back to his workstation, desperately trying to herd his scattered neurons back into some semblance of order. He didn’t have the bota. Perhaps he was no closer to knowing who did, though he strongly suspected the little Sullustan. All that foot-dragging and naysaying was most likely just a smoke screen.
But suspicions did him no good at all. The Sullustan was currently out of reach, Inquisitors prowled the streets nearby, and the droid was preparing to put them between a rock and a rancor.
He tried to list his options. Rhinann truly believed that any crisis must be answered with a good list. Creating lists ordered the mind, calmed the blood, lowered the chaos level.
He could run now. That would be safest. But nearness to yet another Force prodigy had reminded him viscerally of what he was missing. That boy—that mere child—had killed an Inquisitor and had even caused Jax Pavan some concern. If he could experience but a fraction of what it was like to be possessed of such power …
He could bide his limited time and continue to press Den Dhur about the bota. He had already decided he would ask I-Five. He supposed a direct approach might yield better results.
He turned these ideas in his head for a moment, then blew another high note of exasperation through his tusks. What was he thinking? They had zero chance of remaining hidden from the dark gaze of Darth Vader. Certainly not with that boy radiating the Force every which way, and not with that obnoxious mech evidently determined to make a martyr of himself for Jax Pavan’s cause. One way or another, they were going to end up in Vader’s parlor, and when they did it would not be pretty. Vader would have Jax Pavan, Kajin Savaros, the sentient droid, the Sith Holocron, the pyronium, and the bota. Rhinann wasn’t sure what all that added up to, but he knew it wasn’t good. Vader held the winning array, any way he looked at it.
There was only one conclusion that made sense, unpalatable though it was. Rhinann reluctantly realized that he was simply on the wrong side.
fourteen
At 0350 hours, Den and I-Five prepared to retrieve Dejah and tend to the removal of the Togrutan female from Coruscant. In such cases, Dejah’s twin talents of telempathy and pheromone production were especially effective. She could not only create an atmosphere of emotional safety that would ease the client’s passage offworld, but also knew when that atmosphere needed to be bolstered and when it could be withdrawn.
It was agreed that Jax should stay with Kaj and work on the field generators of Volette’s light sculptures. To his surprise, Laranth elected to stay and help him.
Just before he left, I-Five took Jax aside. “I expect my part in this will be completed by roughly twelve hundred hours. I have thus arranged to meet with Tuden Sal late this evening at the Sunset Cantina to give him our answer to his proposal.”
The words twisted Jax’s gut and made his lungs feel suddenly starved for air. “And what are you going to tell him?”
The droid tilted his head to one side and looked at Jax quizzically. “I said our decision and I meant our decision. You are a part of this, Jax. Therefore, when I return from this transfer, I think we should talk.”
“You realize those words are still scary even coming from a droid,” Jax replied. “You’d think a Jedi would be impervious to such things.”
“Why so?”
“We’re supposed to be centered, brave, in tune with the universe …”
“None of which supposes that you’re also numb or uncaring. Have you thought about it?”
Jax nodded. He had, mostly while he was supposed to be sleeping. Somehow the thought of I-Five assassinating the Emperor made him think of the bota. And he wasn’t comfortable thinking about the bota. It suggested another course to him altogether—one that was fraught with ambiguity and peril.
“I’m torn,” was all he said—though he was much more than that, he realized with a jolt. Ambivalence flooded him as if from an unseen cloud. He shook himself. I must have been too caught up in everything else that was going on to let it get to me.
That didn’t quite ring true. He’d thought about it whenever he’d lain on his bed in an attempt to sleep. It just hadn’t penetrated him until now. Not like this.
“I promise I’ll give it more concentrated thought. I know I need to. Can I ask what your thoughts are at this point?”
“You can ask,” said I-Five, then turned and went to join the others for the Whiplash mission.
Alone with Kaj and Laranth, Jax set his mind to learning the ins and outs of the photonic field generators in Ves Volette’s kinetic art. The boy watched, obviously impressed with the ability of the two Jedi to tinker with the devices’ mechanics.
“Is that part of your Jedi training?” he asked at one point.
“As a matter of fact, yes.” His attention on the guts of the sculpture, Jax moved a fibrous light-emitter array slightly and noted the corresponding movement of a fan of pulsing light in the air above his head.
Laranth said, “It looks as if aiming them is easy enough, but what ab
out increasing the frequency of the pulses?”
“Why would you need to do that?” Kaj asked.
“The more frequent the pulses, the more solid the wall. It’s like weaving a net. The more frequent or closer together the fibers of the net, the less gets through.”
Glancing at Kaj, Jax saw the light of comprehension dawn in his eyes. “I understood that,” he said. “So you worked on stuff like this in Jedi school?”
Jax and Laranth exchanged glances. “Every Jedi has to build and maintain his or her own lightsaber,” Jax told Kaj. “So we learn all the mechanics and physics of it. That’s everything from fashioning a hilt to selecting a crystal to putting it together with a field generator not unlike this one.” He nodded at the innards of the sculpture’s low, bowl-like duraluminum stand.
“But you didn’t build that lightsaber.”
Jax glanced down at the weapon hanging at the belt of his tunic. “No.”
“Doesn’t it make you feel strange to use that one? I mean, it’s red.”
Jax glanced at Laranth’s deadpan expression, then smiled wryly. “You mean because it’s what the Inquisitors use?”
“Well … yeah.”
“It does make me feel strange. I’ve been meaning to finish the one I started to build myself, but …”
But what?
“What’s stopped you?” Laranth asked. Her attention was on the selection of tools in Volette’s kit.
Good question. What had stopped him? “I didn’t have a power source that would resonate with the Ilum crystal to generate a coherent field.”
Kaj pointed at the open console on the light bowl. “Isn’t that one?”
The kid was quick, he had to give him that. Jax blinked at the core of the light sculpture. The circuit board Kaj indicated was indeed a resonating power source, and he’d known it for some time. He’d also known that these sculptures and their component parts were just sitting here, waiting. Why hadn’t he asked Dejah if he could use one of them? She’d offered to sell them for upkeep, let him tinker with them for Kaj’s sake, so why not a power source for his lightsaber?
Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force Page 15
