Myriad experiences ripped through his mind like emotional shrapnel. There was no resisting it, no hiding from it. He felt every Caamasi on the planet die.
Dimly, a thousand light-years away, he heard Dejah shouting his name, felt his worried partner help him over to the davenport to lie down. But lying down or standing up made no difference; there was no escape or respite. It was all he could do to hang on to his self, to keep his consciousness from being torn to tatters and sucked into the maelstrom.
Finally, after untold eons of horror, it began to subside. Ves came back to himself, to his own focal point in the cosmos, shuddering and sweating, but alive and, by some miracle, still sane.
Deej was sitting beside him, worry creasing her brow. "Are you all right?" When Ves managed to nod weakly, she exhaled in relief. "What happened?"
"A memnis."
Deej looked at him. Being a Zeltron, she had some experience with empathic resonance, and she had been with Ves long enough to be familiar with the Michael Reaves 27
concept of shared memories. "I didn't know they could be that intense."
Ves briefly explained what had happened. His partner and friend looked horrified. "After such a shock, you can't put on the exhibit tonight. We must postpone. "
Ves shook his head. "No. It is more important than ever now that we open as planned. As long as one Caamasi
lives and can create, the Emperor has failed."
Ves lurched to his feet, his head feeling as if a comet had just impacted it. Dejah stood as well, offering her hand in concern, but Ves waved it off. "Offer my apologies to the clientele; tell them that illness prevents me from attending." He moved over to his workbench and activated the plasmatic flux inducer.
An oscillating hum quickly rose to the edge of hearing; a parabolic cone of blue light, a meter tall, materialized. Ves fed torsion into it, adjusted the ellipsis.
The flame of plasma twisted and gave a low, electronic moan.
Ves glanced at the wall chrono. "It's almost time,"
he said. "You'd better get ready to let them in."
Deej hesitated, then nodded in defeat. "All right. I suppose you know what you're doing." She exited, closing the door.
Ves concentrated on the torqued' spearhead of light. He added neon, krypton, xenon; the plasma flushed red, green, blue. He adjusted tinctures, spun the result through various arcs.
Simplicity—that was the key, of course. The emotional power lay in that. Dejah was right; Ves knew exactly what he was doing. He was building a cairn.
28 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows four
Jax breathed slowly, deeply, as Master Piell had taught him. With each exhalation he pushed his awareness out farther, letting the threads of energy that were his connection with the Force expand.
Many of the Jedi, his tutor had told him, had experienced their unification with the Force in various symbolic ways that they likened to aspects of the real world. For example, Master Piell had always found the metaphor of water best suited his link to it. Jax, on the other hand, felt and "saw" the Force as threads, or strings, stretching and reverberating through space and time, connecting everything. For him, to be aware of another's aura was to see the person swathed in a cocoon of variegated light or darkness. To sense something at a distance, tendrils of Force established themselves instantaneously between him and the object he sought. To augment his own physical powers, such as running or leaping, he let himself be lifted and carried by them, or used an invisible "lasso" to bring objects within reach. Now he sent those threads questing outward, probing and searching, until they encountered that which he sought.
Michael Reaves 29
As though it in turn sensed his contact, the floating remote droid let loose a volley of laser beams aimed at him, simultaneously zipping from one midair position to the next as it fired. Jax, blindfolded, whipped up the energy sword, countering each burst by knowing, before it was fired, which direction it would come from. One .. . two .. . three .. . four . .. five . . .
The sixth, and last, beam stung him painfully on the right side.
"Blast!" Jax pulled off the blindfold and spoke the deactivation code for the remote, which drifted to the floor. He sat down on the extruded lip of a wall couch and looked ruefully at the weapon in his hand.
"1 see it's remote one, human zero," a voice said.
Jax looked up to see I-Five in the doorway of the small, enclosed courtyard in which the Jedi had been practicing.
"I'm beginning to think that Laranth is right," Jax said. "The Jedi should have practiced more with other weapons." He grimaced. "Don't tell her I said that."
"On the other hand, no one but a Jedi could have blocked five out of six beams."
Jax shrugged. "It makes no difference if it's the sixth one or the first one that kills you. Dead is dead."
"I wouldn't know. I do know, however," I-Five said, "that you're much better with that sword than you think you are."
Jax glanced down at the weapon, saw his distorted reflection looking back at him from the blade's surface. "Yeah? How do you know th—?"
I-Five suddenly whipped up his left hand, index finger extended, and fired a laser beam at Jax. The beam 30 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows splashed off the ionized fire that suddenly coated the length of the blade, which Jax had automatically raised to block the beam.
"That's how," I-Five said. "The speed of light is just under three hundred thousand kilometers per second. You are currently seven-point-three meters from me. Your Force-augmented anticipatory reflex action is obviously working fine. You just have to let it."
Jax grinned. "You sure you're not carrying a Jedi Master template somewhere in that droid brain of yours?"
"Maker forbid. I'd like to think that even prepro-grammed mechanical intelligences are less rigid than the Jedi were."
Jax's smile faded. The droid projected concern.
"My apologies, Jax. Even protocol droids can be in-decorous at times. I was out of line."
"I'm not upset at your opinion. What gets to me is—you're right. Every living species in the galaxy knows that one either adapts or dies. It's not a difficult concept. Why didn't the Council understand it?
Why couldn't they recognize the danger until it was too late?"
"Assuming for the moment that the question isn't rhetorical," I-Five said, "all I can offer is an observation your father made once, more than twenty-five years ago. He was a Temple employee, as you know, and had an opportunity to observe his employers closely. Even before he became so biased against them for what he felt was your kidnapping, Lorn was under no illusions about Jedi stagnation and complacency.
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"He told me of references he'd found in datafiles to someone they called the Chosen One ... a being whose coming was foretold and said to be imminent, who would restore balance to the Force. Perhaps they were waiting for this being to come and accomplish for them what they were unable or unwilling to do for themselves. It was your father's opinion—and I've watched the behavior of enough organic sentients in my travels to heartily agree—that whenever they give up their own judgment to some sort of fanciful higher power, instead of looking for answers within themselves and their actions, they are the worse for it."
Jax nodded thoughtfully. Of course he had heard the rumors that Anakin Skywalker, protege of the noted Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi, was this Chosen One.
But Jax had no way of knowing. He had not been privy to such exclusive information. Only a rank-and-file Jedi, he had barely achieved Jedi Knighthood immediately before the Order's destruction. But it made as much sense as anything else in a galactic society gone mad. Though he had been one of the very few Padawans who had been able to call Anakin Skywalker friend, Jax had not been then, and was not now, under any illusions about the powerful young Jedi's mood swings. He remembered once sensing Anakin's aura, perceiving it as strands of blackest night stretching multidimensionally in every direction.
Wh
y hadn't the Council seen it, as well? Or had they just chosen to ignore it?
"You may be right," he finally told I-Five. "Or at least, partly right. I doubt we'll ever know for sure."
A sudden mental onslaught struck him, unexpected 32 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows and powerful enough to literally knock him to his knees. Something had just happened, somewhere in the galaxy. Something involving such monstrous pain and death that it had set the threads connecting him to the Force to vibrating like the Balawai Creation gong. He sensed millions upon millions of lives extinguished in some kind of global holocaust. Dropping the energy sword, he cupped his face in both hands and moaned.
"Jax?" I-Five's hands were made of hard alloy, yet their touch was gentle as the droid took him by the shoulders and turned him, leaning down to peer intently into his face. "Are you all right? What's happened?"
"Death." Jax was barely able to croak the word.
"Death's happened. The cry in the night. Mass destruction, somewhere. They're all. . . all. .
He couldn't finish the sentence. The crushing weight of the tragedy that had been thrust upon him barely left room enough for respiration. Somewhere, on some world in the known galaxy, millions upon millions of people had cried out as with one voice—and then had fallen silent, forever. Although the room still seemed to be spinning on its axis, he struggled to his feet. I-Five began to remonstrate, but Jax pushed past him and headed for the front room.
He hoped he was wrong. Hoped with all his heart that this massive disturbance in the Force had been due to something else, anything else. But he knew it wasn't so, and his certainty was given added corrob-oration when he saw Laranth's face. As expression-less and closed off as she could sometimes be, still he Michael Reaves 33
recognized the haunted look in her eyes. He knew it mirrored his own.
"Caamas," she announced tightly.
The location of the catastrophe was almost as great a shock as the initial psychic tsunami that had convulsed the Force only a few minutes previously.
Caamas? A world populated by beings who had repeatedly raised the bar for other species through their remarkable achievements in the arts and philosophy?
Jax stared in utter disbelief. It made no sense. The Caamasi were gentle, educated beings, for the most part. Their world was one of the very few to maintain a planetary militia instead of a regular professional army. Only someone as paranoid as Palpatine could possibly think that. . .
Jax realized then what it was, what it had to have been, and the realization left a sour taste of bile in the back of his mouth. Of course. Caamas was the perfect example, guaranteed to pound home the message that the Emperor was too firmly ensconced to be overthrown. His action would demonstrate that if he was crazy enough, or just plain cruel enough, to obliterate a world of scholars and artisans, what was there to stop him from doing the same thing to Corellia, or Alderaan, or Dantooine, or any of a thousand and one other planets?
Nothing whatsoever, as far as Jax could see. And that, of course, was the point.
He felt, to his surprise, a sudden surge of anger against the Jedi—against his own people. Why had they closed themselves off, shirked the duties and responsibilities that had been theirs for thousands of generations? If they hadn't, perhaps none of this 34 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows would have happened. If they had been more receptive, they might have sensed the threat in their midst before it struck. A burst of awareness that manifested itself through the Force with absolute surety. Suddenly Jax knew. He didn't know why, he didn't know if it had anything to do with the echoes of the dead and dying Caamasi still reverberating in his mind, he didn't know if it was totally unconnected and just a random flash of insight from the Force—but he suddenly knew one incontrovertible fact: Anakin Skywalker was still alive.
Michael Reaves 35
five
Death came for her in the mining tunnels of Oovo 4.
Aurra Sing was working in one of the branch tunnels, a narrow fissure in the black rock, barely wide enough for her to stretch one arm straight from the shoulder. The vein of zenium she'd been following for the last three days was running dry; she estimated that in less than a meter it would diminish to the point that it would no longer be cost-effective to keep mining.
She lowered her protective faceplate. Except for the dark gray-black circles around her eyes that made them appear deeper than they were, the skin of her face and body were as pure white as the veined marble the miners occasionally encountered in their dig-ging. The single thick shock of long reddish-brown hair gathered together by a band at the top of her skull was stunning by comparison.
She aimed the gasifier at the left side of the rock face, through which the lode of zenium stitched like a frozen bolt of purple electricity. The high-energy beam turned the rock into plasma almost instantaneously, and the incandescent gas was sucked away 36 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows through a hose woven of carbonite nanofibers, to be vented through shafts that perforated the strata between where she stood and the surface.
Sing gasified the remaining rock that encased the zenium. She struck the exposed sheet—which, though only a couple of centimeters thick, was as tall as she was—with a small sonic tool, finding the cleavage lines with skill born of years of practice. The zenium fractured into several smaller, roughly hexagonal pieces. These she gathered up and stacked in the ore carrier. Disconnecting the gasifier line, she loaded it into the carrier as well, then stepped on the plate and activated the repulsor.
As the carrier zoomed soundlessly back toward the main shaft, passing through brief flickering pools of light cast by sconces that alternated with stretches of utter darkness, Sing wearily checked her rebreather's status. The filter's diffusion index was still green, she noted, although it had long since declined from optimal.
She tried to remember how the galaxy's Outer Rim had looked from the observation deck of the pirate ship, so long ago. It had been many years. How many, Sing herself wasn't sure. She wasn't sure of a great many things about herself, including her age and her species. She knew her mother had been human, but her father's ancestry was a mystery. Those she had worked for, including Wallanooga the Hutt, had speculated that he had been Qiraash, Rattataki, Um-baran, perhaps even Anzati. Never mind that none of these Michael Reaves 37
could interbreed with humans without a certain amount of genetic tinkering, and that none of those genomes could account for her longevity. So her origins remained a mystery, even to herself.
The past held no interest for Aurra Sing. All that mattered was the now.
Over the course of a long and eventful life Sing had learned to conserve energy and bide her time when the situation she happened to find herself in was less than satisfactory. In this respect her longevity served her well. She had survived onerous conditions before, and would again. If she could not shoot or fight her way out of a situation, then she would simply and patiently outlast it.
After all, one did not become known as a hunter of Jedi by being reckless.
It was hard to believe that she had once nearly embraced the Jedi Code. The Jedi Master known as the Dark Woman would never know how close she had come to converting her headstrong young Padawan.
Had she not been kidnapped and taught the truth by the pirates—a rich irony, that—Aurra Sing might have been one of those sanctimonious wearers of sackcloth herself. And as a result, she might very well be dead now; just one more victim of Order Sixty-six, like the rest of the Jedi.
Well, good riddance to them. The only regret Sing had in that regard was that there were precious few left for her to hunt down and kill these days.
38 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows As she approached one of the ancillary shafts that connected with the surface, she began to see other beings. All were engaged in some aspects of zenium mining. An inescapable corollary of the activity was that none of them looked good. Even with the os-motic filters, zenium dust eventually found
its way into respiratory systems—be they lungs, stomata, trachea, or whatever. Breathe it long enough and you came down with pyroliosis, or "firelung"—a condition that literally consumed you from the inside. In humanoids it ate up the aveoli like so much dry acid: an extremely painful way to die.
This was one reason only the most incorrigible criminals were sent to Oovo 4. Outside the occasional Podrace to blow off steam, the daily routine stopped only when the prisoner died.
Ironically, the mines on Oovo 4 were among the few labor camps in the galaxy in which organics actually outlasted droids. Despite shielding, the zenium dust affected droids' perceptor systems almost immediately, causing them to crash into the mining equipment and one another. In contrast, it took the more resilient organics several years to wear out. Their presence in the mines was a matter of cost-effectiveness, not ethics.
She saw Karundabar, an old Wookiee who had been down in the hole for so long he had forgotten the crime that had initially landed him here. He was nearly bald, his hair having fallen out over most of his body through the years. She watched him dump a pile Michael Reaves 39
of ore plates into a lift tube that would take it to Receiving on the surface. Almost blind, to judge by the cataracts that filmed his eyes, he had followed the route so often that he didn't need to see to do the job.
As Sing dumped her own load of plates into another tube, she kept her senses on full alert. Her connection to the Force would warn her of any imminent assault, sometimes even before it was initiated. That, and her deadly reputation, had kept her alive all these months in this rancor pit. Both would continue to do so.
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