Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force (16 page)

He had finished his meal and was working on his third cup of caf when he felt watched. He looked up nervously,
his eyes drawn to a hooded figure at a booth across the way. The cowled head was turned partially away from him, and he was beset with the sudden fear that he was looking at an Inquisitor. The noise of the market seemed to suddenly grow in volume, and his face felt flushed and hot.

That’s ridiculous. Why should I be afraid of the Inquisitorius? I’m not a Jedi
.

Maybe not
, said a snarky voice from the back of his head.
But you know where one lives
.

What should he do? Get up and leave? Order another cup of caf?

The figure turned, presenting a comely profile, and Den slumped in relief. Then again, he could just invite her to join him. I-Five had suggested he make nice with Dejah Duare. Why not start now? She turned away from the booth, and he waved.

Seeing Den sitting in front of the café, Dejah seemed to hesitate; then, at his beckoning gesture, she came to take the seat opposite him.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he suggested, feeling utterly foolish.

“All right,” she said graciously. “A caf?”

He got up to place the order, returning to the table with a steaming beverage and a possible, though utterly lame, way of starting the conversation:
Hey, what do you think of our new boy wonder?
He set the cup of caf in front of Dejah, slid back onto his chair, and opened his mouth.

Dejah preempted him. “I’m worried about Jax,” she said.

“Why is that?”

Dejah folded her hands around the thermo-cup, making it appear as if the steam rose from her fingertips, and looked at him earnestly. “I’m terrified that I-Five is going to convince Jax to opt into Tuden Sal’s ridiculous … 
scheme. Do you have any idea of what that could mean?”

Didn’t I already have this conversation?
Den asked himself. Aloud, he said, “Well, it could put both I-Five and Jax in harm’s way. And us, by extension.”

Dejah took a sip of her drink and glanced up at Den through her lashes, which he could swear were getting longer by the minute. “Yes, by extension. But I was thinking more of Jax himself, the thing he holds most dear.” She leaned forward over the table and lowered her voice nearly to a whisper. “The continuation of his kind.”

“You mean the—” Den glanced around, then made a surreptitious gesture with one hand imitating someone wielding a lightsaber.

She nodded.

“What makes you think he’ll go for the scheme? I mean, there’s every reason
not
to do it—don’t you think?”

“Of course. Apart from the danger to himself, there’s the risk to the Whiplash, the others of his kind, and the boy. The fact that failure would even more deeply enslave us all. And failure,” she added, “is the most likely result.”

Den blanched. “I-Five seems to think it would work.”

“I-Five is thinking like a biological life-form, not a droid. It’s wishful thinking. The odds against him succeeding are astronomical. If there were only some way to make certain of his success, and of Jax’s survival.” She shook her head.

“I’m sure Five has a plan …,” Den said weakly.

She frowned. “Rhinann said the same thing. He talked about something called … um … bota—is that right? Yes, bota. He said it would make Jax invincible.”

Startled, Den snorkeled hot caf up his nose and went into a fit of sneezing and choking.

“Wind spirits bless you,” Dejah murmured after Zeltron custom, bowing her head almost into her cup.

“Thanks,” Den said when he could talk again. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Rhinann said that? He told you about the bota? I wasn’t sure he knew.”

“Yes, poor thing. He’s worried, too. He said the bota is the only real chance that Jax has to survive if I-Five and Sal go through with this ridiculous plan. If he’s able to take it at the appropriate time, he’ll be able to blow our enemy away.”

Den tried not to look stupefied. “Really? He said that?”

She nodded again. “So I asked him if he was sure the bota was where Jax could get to it easily, and he said he didn’t know. He had to trust that I-Five had done something with it to keep it safe.”

Den shrugged. “Well, sure. I trust I-Five, don’t you?”

She fixed him with a look that all but curled the rims of his ears.

Den exhaled explosively, feeling as if she’d gut-punched him. “Point taken. So you think I-Five’s not firing on all thrusters?” A delusional droid—was that even possible?

He remembered how Dejah’s partner had been murdered, and felt more blood drain out of his head.

“I think that as much as I-Five loves Jax Pavan,” she said, “he loves his father’s memory more. Remember, Den—I-Fivewhycue doesn’t have the same sense of time that we have. He doesn’t forget anything—no matter how unpleasant the memory is or how long ago it was made. Organic sentients can count on the passage of the days, the months, and the years to create a comforting buffer zone that softens the reality for us, makes it bearable. Time heals all wounds—except those of droids. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a problem, since a droid has no emotional ties to the past. But once again,
I-Five’s sentience makes him unique. Lorn Pavan’s betrayal is as fresh to him today as it was twenty-odd years ago—or as fresh, anyway, as it was the moment he recovered that particular memory and realized what it meant.”

There were tears sparkling in the Zeltron’s eyes as she finished. Den realized his own eyes had grown moist and his breath had all but stopped in his throat. It had never occurred to him that there had to have been a singular moment in which that particular memory, as Dejah put it, had resurfaced for his friend, never to be put aside again. Nor had it occurred to him that the one way in which I-Five was all droid was in his capacity to relive his past in vivid, perfect detail. Combined with his ability to imagine and theorize like an organic, well …

He couldn’t even begin to imagine how much pain I-Five must be in.

Den drew in a long breath. I-Five may not have seen Lorn Pavan’s death in real time, but Den was willing to bet he’d imagined it time and time again. And because he was a droid he could not escape it, even in sleep, since droids didn’t sleep. The only other respite was temporary deactivation, which was not a real respite at all, since no subjective time was lost.

I-Five could not forget his loss, or gain perspective on it through the balm of years. Ever.

Which left only one course of action open to him.

“You think I-Five wants to avenge Lorn Pavan.”

“If someone destroyed I-Five, or killed Jax, wouldn’t
you
contemplate revenge?”

Would he? He liked to think that he’d only contemplate justice, but who knew? He considered the idea now and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I might, at that. Okay, so we may have a vengeful droid on our hands. What can we do?”

Dejah shrugged. “I don’t know that we can do anything before the fact, though I suppose we can try.”

“You bet we can.” Impulsively, the Sullustan reached across the table and put his hand over the Zeltron’s. “If the two of us, along with Rhinann, keep up a united front, and if we all vote down this mad idea, Jax
has
to listen, doesn’t he? Especially if you—you know—help out a little with that seductive sweat of yours?”

She cocked her head to one side and smiled in bemusement. “You
want
me to influence Jax?”

“In this case, yeah. And I’m perfectly willing to admit it’s a slimy, hypocritical thing to say, but I’m willing to say it: do your best. If it’ll keep Jax and I-Five out of deep ronto poodoo, I’m all for it.”

Dejah’s eyes twinkled at him, and she laughed, the sound trilling lightly in his ears before cascading down into a sultry purr. “You’re an odd one, Den Dhur,” she told him. Then her tone became serious again. “I suppose there’s a chance we could fail, even united, but … there’s always the bota.”

He nodded. Truth to tell, he didn’t like even thinking about bota—the very word conjured memories of Drongar and his time served on that plaguey world in vivid detail. The recollections might not be as realistic as I-Five’s, but they were more than enough for him.

“Rhinann thinks you have it,” Dejah said bluntly.

What—was she eavesdropping on private conversations now? He didn’t ask her that; instead he fell back on his usual refrain. “He said that?”

She tilted her head. A nod? A semi-nod? A maybe? Den wasn’t sure. The Zeltron was humanoid enough to share a great deal of body language with most hominid species, but there was always a chance of misreading something.

“Well, Rhinann is wrong,” he replied. “I don’t have it
and I don’t know who does. For all I know Five still has it.”

Dejah gave him another ear-curling look. “Our would-be assassin? That hardly seems wise.”

“Look, if that bota represents what you think it represents—the survival of the—” He made the lightsaber gesture again. “—then I-Five will hide it where it will come to no harm and do the most good—if he hasn’t done so already. Our job is to try to talk him out of Plan A so he doesn’t need a Plan B … agreed?”

He put out his hand as if to seal a business deal. She regarded the hand solemnly for a moment, then placed her own in it, sealing the bargain.

“Agreed.”

They parted then, Den shaking his head at the twisted situation. I-Five had been the one to suggest he forge an alliance with Dejah Duare and now they had forged one—against him.

Plenty of nuance to savor there, if you’re into irony
, he thought.

There was a certain amount of guilt in Jax’s concern for Dejah after the discovery of the light sculpture’s damping properties. He’d intended to talk to her directly after Rhinann had, but he’d been experimenting with the sculpture and hadn’t noticed her leaving the conapt. It wasn’t until he had satisfied himself in a small way that further experiments were warranted that he left Kaj meditating in his quarters and went looking for the Zeltron, only to learn that she had gone out.

“Did she still seem upset when she left?” he asked Rhinann.

“Upset?” The Elomin shrugged his bony shoulders. “I can’t honestly say. You know how Zeltrons are—they tend to be mercurial.”

“What was bothering her?” Jax felt odd discussing the issue with someone other than Dejah herself, but Rhinann
had
gone in to check on her …

Rhinann considered that for a moment, then said, “Well, as near as I can tell, she felt renewed bereavement because she supposed that her late partner was holding out on her—emotionally speaking, that is.”

“Hiding behind his creations.”

“Precisely. It made her realize, I think, that her understanding of her relationship with Ves Volette was fundamentally flawed. She felt … left out.”

“I hate to say it, but that may make her more inclined
to let I-Five and me tinker with the mechanics of the remaining light sculptures.”

“Unless she’s now fearing that
you’re
going to hide behind them, too.”

Jax smiled wryly. “I hide behind the Force. Or at least I’m pretty sure that’s the way she sees it. Well, I’m going to trust that she’ll realize it’s for the greater good.”

Rhinann merely tilted his head and shrugged.

Jax had turned and started for his room when every hair on his body stood on end. Something was happening within the confines of his room—something so anomalous he couldn’t grasp it. He had heard a blaster overload once—had heard the sound of it grow from a staticky buzz that made his teeth itch to a piercing whine that threatened to remove the top of his head. This was like that, but it was in his brain, in his bones, in his blood.

It was a buildup not of sound, but of the Force.

Jax leapt for the door to his room and flung himself inside. Kajin Savaros lay in the middle of the floor in a fetal position, hands to his head, eyes squeezed tightly shut, rocking back and forth while the Force built up within him like water behind a dam.

In all his years of training with Master Piell, in all the time he had been on his own, Jax had never encountered anything like this. He had no idea what to expect, no idea what to
do
. On the opposite side of the room the items atop his storage bench began to vibrate. Even as he watched, a hairbrush, a chrono, and a book of Caamasi poetry jigged their way to the edge and fell.

Jax was in motion again before they hit the floor, pushing the Force ahead of him as he dived for the writhing teenager. He wrapped Kaj in soft folds of the Force, projected soothing, velvet calm. Then he grasped the boy’s shoulders, his grip firm but gentle. He felt a
backlash almost immediately—a kick like a repulsor field. He pushed back.

A bottle of depil cream abruptly cracked, its viscous contents oozing free.

“Kaj!” Jax said, then more sharply, “Kaj! What’s wrong?”

The boy let out a wail that penetrated all the way to Jax’s soul.
“Alone …
alone!”

Grasping at straws, Jax said, “You’re not alone, Kaj. You have me now. You have Dejah and the others. You have the Force.”

“The—Force—is doing this—to me!” The words came out in painful bursts, the anguish behind them breaking on Jax’s mind like storm-driven wave and wind. “And Dejah—Dejah went away. She doesn’t like me!”

Is that what this was about—Dejah? Had she been feeding the boy so much emotional stimulus through her pheromones that her absence brought this on?

“Dejah likes you a lot, Kaj. And she’ll be back soon.”

There was the tiniest letup in the mounting tension—the screaming of Jax’s senses muting to a mere roar. Then the boy shook his head, his fisted hands pulling at his hair.

“Not soon enough. Not—soon—
enough.
” His eyes flew open and he reached up to grasp the collar of Jax’s tunic. “Make it stop, please, make it stop! It’s
burning
me!”

“What’s burning you?”

“The
anger
.”

“Who are you angry with?” Jax asked desperately. “What’s made you angry?”

“They sent me away … sent me here.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to come. If I’d stayed, maybe this wouldn’t have happened to me.”