Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force (24 page)

“He brought himself here. I simply let him in.”

He gestured at the HoloNet node in the corner of his room. “I need to talk—”

“To Pol Haus? So you said. What are you going to do, give Kaj up to him?”

“No. Thi Xon Yimmon believes Haus is trustworthy. I want to give him a chance to lay out his ideas.”

“You’re going to betray that boy.”

Jax felt a stab of unease. “I would never do that. I hope you won’t suggest to him that I would.”

She seemed crestfallen and contrite. “I’m sorry. That was a stupid, indefensible thing for me to say. I’m … I’m just not used to feeling like this.”

She might have said more, but I-Five announced his presence with that peculiar throat-clearing sound he’d cultivated. With a last glance at Jax, Dejah excused herself and slipped out of the room past the droid, who watched her leave with an expression that somehow managed to be speculative.

I’m not used to feeling like this
. Jax suspected that meant the Zeltron was simply not used to being told no. She was used to getting her own way. He realized he was disappointed on two counts—disappointed in Dejah for directing her wiles at him and at himself for not realizing it.

Jax stowed his thoughts and looked at I-Five. He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, I-Five. I just can’t—”

“You don’t need to apologize to me, Jax. You don’t owe me—”

“I owe you my life several times over.”

“But you
don’t
owe me the sacrifice of your principles. You are a Jedi Knight. If you feel giving your approval of Sal’s plan is too close a brush with the dark side, then I would never ask you to make yourself part of it. I was merely going to observe that, whatever stand you take, I believe your father would be proud of you.”

Jax sat down heavily on the bed, suddenly feeling physically weary. And no wonder—he’d slept little in the last several days, barely remembered to eat, had played hide-and-seek with Inquisitors, done training sessions with Kaj, and gone for a walkabout with Laranth. Add to that all the emotional turmoil …

He sighed. “My father. Just once, I-Five, I wish I could ask my father for advice.”

I-Five’s reaction to the words was sudden and unexpected. He jerked upright, his optics going intensely bright, and said in a mechanical monotone, “Message Mode Ninety-nine. Recipient: Jax Pavan. Sender: Lorn Pavan.”

A tiny projection port on his chest plate activated, shooting out a beam of multicolored light that resolved into a full-sized hologram.

Jax found himself looking into his father’s face.

It was a face he knew and yet didn’t. He saw something of it when he looked at his own reflection, but the
cheekbones were a little broader, the chin maybe a bit stronger. Lorn Pavan’s hair was thick and dark, like his son’s—or rather, Jax’s was like his father’s. His eyes were a clear, dark brown.

“Jax,” said this ghost from the past. A pause, then, “Son.” The dark eyes sparkled with incipient tears. “Wow. I’m going to hope that you and I are sitting and watching this message together and having a good laugh, but I’m going to bet that we’re not. For whatever reason.”

He hesitated, rubbed the palms of his hands on his pants, glanced up. “Blast it, I-Five. This is harder than I thought.”

There was a momentary pause as Lorn gathered his thoughts before he looked up again. He was gazing into I-Five’s photoreceptors—Jax knew that intellectually, of course—but it seemed as if he were looking right at Jax.

“Okay, look. The thing is, I’m about to go after this guy—this Sith—and I wanted to—to leave you a message. Just in case … By the time you get this I’ll probably be up to my armpits in trouble—so what else is new?—and I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it to the Temple to see you.”

His gaze became suddenly imploring, almost desperate. “Look, Jax, I wish I could reassure you that I’ll come out of this alive. The truth is I’ll be lucky to come out of it in one piece, given this Sith’s predilection for taking heads.”

He took a deep breath, fidgeted, and wiped his palms again. “So you’re wondering why your old man has to go off and play hero. Why he has to try to take out an enemy that’s been pretty close to unkillable up till now. Well, it’s like this. I don’t want to be a hero. In fact, I don’t think there’s any way I could qualify as one no matter what I did. But someone I knew was the real article, and I kinda feel obligated to carry on where she left
off. Her name was Darsha Assant, and she was a Jedi. She was also the bravest soul I’ve ever known.”

Amazed, awed, Jax slid forward on the bed until he was on his knees before the hologram, seeing his father from the perspective of the small child Lorn Pavan believed he was talking to.

The hologram licked his lips, the tears in his eyes close to falling. When he spoke again his voice was rough with emotion. “I know that, given what you’ve probably heard about me, it’s hard to believe I could feel that way about a Jedi. Well, the Jedi be damned—I’m doing this for a friend, for Darsha. And because I want you to be proud of me.”

The message ended, the hologram seemingly sucked back up into I-Five’s holo-emitter, and Jax still knelt on the floor feeling … bereft.

His father had gone after a Sith. Had fought him and died. He had done it for love. For the friend he had just lost; for the son he had lost years earlier. He had done it because there was no one else who could or would.

“Jax?”

He felt the touch on his shoulder and marveled anew at how gentle his metal companion—his metal
friend
—could be. He looked up into the droid’s face and said, “My father was a hero.”

“Yes. He was.”

Jax rose, realizing his face was wet. He wiped it on the sleeve of his tunic. “We’re going after the Emperor, I-Five.”

The droid’s display of surprise seemed to involve his entire body. “Why?”

“Because no one else can.”

  
PART II
  
THE TIES THAT BIND

Jax’s sudden reversal was inexplicable and devastating to Rhinann’s fragile peace of mind. He vaguely heard the whys and wherefores—something about a message from Jax’s father, a message that was no doubt a trick played by that wretched, conniving droid—but he tuned them out and went to his own quarters where he did the only thing he could think of that would both calm him and allow him some clarity of thought.

He made a list.

He itemized the reasons for and against I-Five having either hidden the bota or given it to various members of the team. Roughly half an hour of this pursuit left him with several strong possibilities. Too many, in fact.

First, hiding the bota made no sense at all. The recent forced move from the apartments on Poloda Place revealed the bankruptcy of that stratagem.

Second, it made no sense for the droid to keep the bota himself. He’d be a fool to carry it into enemy territory where it could be lost to the last person on the planet he wanted to have it.

Dejah’s reaction to his revelation about the bota rang true. He was positive that she’d known nothing of it before.

That left Jax and Den.

Den’s protests to the contrary, Jax could hardly be expected to resist the temptation of taking the bota, but
Rhinann suspected that I-Five—who was loyal to a fault—no doubt trusted the Jedi’s professions of self-control. In fact, I-Five likely believed that if his assassination attempt failed, Jax having the bota would be the only way to salvage the operation.

Den was leaving. Dejah had been sure he’d already left, but the Sullistan had made it clear that his mind was made up. Perhaps it was I-Five’s plan to have him take the bota with him wherever he was going. Certainly Rhinann could see a certain advantage to getting the substance away from people who were likely to come into close contact with Inquisitors, Darth Vader, or the Emperor. If the assassination plan went horribly awry, Den Dhur could pop out of hiding and get the bota to one of the Jedi or, failing that, use it as leverage to secure their release.

So which was it? The Jedi or the Sullustan?

He suspected the Jedi and hoped for the Sullustan, for surely it would be easier to get the substance away from the latter.

Rhinann considered his options. They were two: leave and forever give up the possibility of experiencing the Force, or stay and await an opportunity to remove the bota from whoever had it.

He had waited so long, borne so patiently with danger, served the “cause” so selflessly, that leaving now seemed a waste. Besides, escape was but an airspeeder ride away, thanks to a grateful soul within Black Sun whom he’d had occasion to befriend. The service came at a price, but it would be worth it. The airspeeder, which would bear him to the spaceport in less than an hour, was available at a moment’s notice, day or night.

Stay, then. He might even be able to persuade the carrier of the bota that giving him the stuff in a dire situation would be the best way to preserve it. Now, if only a dire situation would present itself.

“You shouldn’t be involved, Jax.”

Jax kept his eyes and mind focused on the little field generator he was in the process of prying from the light sculpture on the living room of their abandoned conapt.

“I’m surprised at you, I-Five. You saw that hologram my father left—”

“Actually, I didn’t. Lorn had put me in autonomic mode for its delivery. It was set to play when triggered by a certain phrase. One of the few ways I can still be manipulated like an ordinary droid.”

“Whatever—you heard me describe it. How can you listen to that and expect me not to be
involved?
My father wasn’t even a Jedi, and he went after a Sith warrior.”

“And died.” I-Five bit the words off as if saying them was painful. “I lost your father because of his foolish human heroics. I will not—”

“Five,” Jax cut in. “If my father hadn’t indulged in his foolish human heroics, if he’d let you go with him, you wouldn’t have been on Drongar to get the bota … and you wouldn’t have been around to introduce me to him. Now let me finish this or we may find ourselves making small talk with the Inquisitors.”

The droid subsided with a series of grumbles worthy of Rhinann. For some reason, it made Jax want to laugh. For all the danger they faced—which he had insisted on being an active participant in—for all the complications they’d embroiled themselves in, he felt an absurd lightness of spirit.

It was due in part, of course, to Lorn Pavan’s ghost-image in I-Five’s holographic data files. He felt connected to that long-dead man. He was a member of a family. He had seen his father’s face, heard his voice, and what had always been an abstraction to him had become real.

It raised questions in his mind, to be sure. Questions about the real necessity of removing Padawans from their families and creating a completely new context for them. Why couldn’t the Jedi have family
and
Force? If they were successful in removing Palpatine—in
killing
Palpatine, he corrected, unwilling to indulge in euphemisms—might there be a future Jedi Order in which Padawans were allowed both? A future in which there was enough allowance for diversity that even Gray Paladins might be willing to proudly call themselves Jedi Knights?