Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force (7 page)

Jax walked slowly, tentacles of Force-sense curling outward toward the walls of the densely packed resiblocks that rose to dizzying heights on either side. It was not the worst neighborhood in which to live. In fact, the
ornate stacks of conapts that lined the mews and looked out on the cul-de-sac plaza known as Poloda Place still wore a shadow of their original elegance. Their once gleaming walls were age-dulled and grimed, but there was a certain shabby respectability about the place that Jax felt was to their advantage. Most people who hid out from the Imperial eye went to the lowest levels of the city and dived into its deepest, darkest haunts. So when Imperial forces went shopping for criminals, that was the first place they looked. They did not often think of poking their noses into the more affluent areas around Poloda Place—usually a haven for artists and other creative types.

Until now, Jax reminded himself. Rhinann had told him of the shadowy personage who had been nosing about recently only one or two levels below. A human named Tesla. A man well versed in the Force.

An Inquisitor.

Jax felt himself tighten up reflexively at the thought, and wondered at the vagaries of fate. If Tuden Sal had fulfilled his promise to Jax’s father, he and Tesla might have been peers, possibly even friends. Now he was set at odds with a man he didn’t even know.

He reached the street and began to walk aimlessly, trying to process Sal’s proposal and the reactions to it of his teammates. Den, Rhinann, and Dejah were obviously dead set against the idea. That was understandable. They were afraid. It was just as understandable that I-Five, who felt no fear, was willing to entertain the idea.

Dejah’s alarm, however, had been palpable. He could still feel it tugging at him, imploring him. He wondered if it stemmed from the fact that the Zeltron’s late partner, the light sculptor Ves Volette, had been killed by a domestic droid. The droid, which belonged to the house-hold of one of Volette’s most loyal patrons, had somehow
come to reason that it must use deadly force to protect the interests of its mistress.

It made emotional sense in the abstract that Dejah should have a fear of droids, but somehow the theory felt wrong under her particular circumstances. The crimson-skinned Zeltrons were a markedly hedonistic species of humanoid, whose unique combination of exceptional beauty, empathic ability, and pheromone production made them often seem shallow. Dejah was not shallow. She had grieved the loss of her partner, and had stayed on Coruscant out of loyalty to the man who had solved his murder. It was surely that same loyalty, Jax reasoned, that caused her to argue so vehemently against Sal’s plan, and not an irrational fear of putting a droid in a position where it could kill. In the brief time she had been living with Jax’s team in their roomy conapt she had shown no uneasiness around I-Five.

He was flattered, Jax realized. Flattered that Dejah had become so attached to him that she had not returned to her homeworld as she had planned. He chided himself for the emotion. He’d gotten past the need to draw on the Force to counteract Dejah’s heady combination of pheromones and telempathic subtlety, but occasionally he caught himself having silly, almost adolescent thoughts about her. The fact that she had begged him not to leave the conapt just now, expressing fear for his life with the Inquisitors at large, had likely contributed to those thoughts.

He replayed their recent parting at the door of their apartment: her gazing up at him, worry on her lovely face, her deep red lips parted, her eyes glittering with fear, her hands fluttering between them like startled birds. He had felt her willing him to embrace her and had deflected the impulse, though perhaps not as successfully as he’d thought. It would have been the most
natural thing in the world to lean his head down and kiss her. It was a moment out of a romantic holovid.

He chuckled and shook his head.
Gotta watch that
.

He knew his Jedi discipline and the detached state it supported frustrated the empathic Zeltron, and he suspected she’d be pleased to know how attractive he found her. He was not numb to her pull—he felt it as a tingle on the skin, a flutter of his heart, a quickening of his pulse—but he was a Jedi, after all, and it took just a touch of the Force to deflect her attempts to influence him.

He looked up to find himself at a crossroads: left, right, up, down. Which way to go? He struck out at random, stepping into the down tube. As he slowly descended he found himself thinking, unaccountably, of Laranth Tarak.

The Twi’lek Jedi had been absent from his team for several months now, and while this wasn’t the first time he’d thought of her, it was the first time she’d come to his thoughts with such strength. He hadn’t seen her since the day she’d quit the team to work full-time with the Whiplash and its leader, Thi Xon Yimmon, a charismatic Cerean who—to hear his associates tell it—possessed the fighting prowess of a trained soldier and the wisdom of a Jedi Master.

Strange
, Jax thought. It hadn’t occurred to him before to wonder why Laranth had abandoned their group. He recalled she’d been impatient with him about something—he’d never discovered what, exactly—and there had been a moment when he’d visited her in the medcenter after her encounter with the bounty hunter Aurra Sing, when he’d wondered if their relationship was sliding toward …

He drew himself up short, recalling the day: Laranth lying on the medcouch, patched and tubed and pale, and him at her bedside, a roil of emotions turning him inside out.

Had there been a moment when she had read him and feared he had grown too attached to her? Or had she already felt the pull of Yimmon’s personality? Or both? Or neither?

He looked around and realized that his steps had taken him down into Whiplash territory. In fact, he was only a block or so from the charity in whose headquarters the group occasionally held clandestine meetings. It was one place of contact between the insurgent organization and those who needed its help.

It struck him, in that moment, that what he wanted most right now was Laranth’s take on this whole business … and her opinion of the trustworthiness of Tuden Sal himself. After all, they had only Sal’s word that he was really a new Whiplash member and that Laranth had sent him to their door. And even if she
had
sent him, that was no guarantee that his plan was sound.

Jax directed his steps toward the community kitchen that served as one of the Whiplash’s windows on the world. He was about three long strides from the door of the charity when an unseen compulsion abruptly settled violently about him like a bola, all but spinning him about. For several seconds he felt like a feather buffeted in a strong wind. He put a hand out and steadied himself against the façade of the nearest building, reaching out with his senses to locate the source of the disturbance.

Down. Down and to the west. That was
where
it was.

What
it was, was easy.

It was the Force.

Probus Tesla returned to Ploughtekal Market despite the fact that his target had been changed. After all, he reasoned, the droid and the Jedi he sought surely were in close proximity to each other. The droid belonged to Pavan, or so reports suggested.

Which led the young Inquisitor to wonder why his lord had changed the target in the first place. Find one, logic suggested, and you would eventually find the other. The Force had been telling him for weeks that a powerful sensitive was present in the environs of the marketplace. The chances of that being anything other than a Temple-trained Jedi were vanishingly slim. Tesla’s own Force sensitivity was the surest means of finding Jax Pavan, so why would Darth Vader set him on this detour instead? Was it a test, or was his lord simply guiding him to use his sense of the Force in a different way than he was inclined to do?

The idea set him back on his heels, mentally speaking. Perhaps it was not his ability that Darth Vader doubted, but his loyalty. Perhaps what was being tested was not his skill but his obedience.

The thought raised a tendril of shame. He had doubted Vader’s wisdom, if only for the briefest moment, and even as he went about seeking the protocol droid—asking questions of his contacts and sifting through the answers—he
was hoping to encounter the presence he’d come so close to touching mere days before.

He stood now in the shadow of a support pier listening to the marketplace chatter, sniffing its panoply of scents—greed, acquisitiveness, anger, satisfaction—tasting the subtleties of those emotions, hoping to encounter the vibrancy of the Force.

He experienced the Force that way—as scent, sight, sound, and savor. Every nuance of it thrilled his senses, playing darkly in his head, exploding on his tongue, dazzling his eyes with color and light. Because of the sheer power of those things, he’d had to learn at an early age to filter and control the impulses the Force evoked in him. It had been a lifelong struggle to work through the potency of those impulses, and he often wondered if all Force-sensitives experienced it in this way.

It was not the sort of question one was encouraged to ask other aspirants during Inquisitorial training. He had spoken of it to his master, of course, for he had to learn the discipline of his gift.

Master Kuthara had not commented on whether his particular experience of the Force was unusual or common. He had only said, “The Force flows through you, around you. You must learn to sail its currents and harness its winds without letting them swamp you or blow you off-course. Your discipline is a vessel, and you are the being whose hand is on the tiller.”

He had been about fourteen when that conversation had taken place and had suspected that his master experienced the Force in just such a way—as a current to be ridden. He had been naïve enough at the time to ask, “But wind and wave have no motive, do they, Master? We speak of an ill wind, but isn’t that just a pretty conceit? The wind and waves are random.”

“Your point?” his Falleen master had asked, oddly puzzled.

Tesla had grown used to Master Kuthara answering his questions before he could even frame them; the uncertainty thus expressed had been a bit unnerving.

“Can the Force be said to have dark and light sides? Winds are neither dark nor light; currents are neither dark nor light, they simply
are
.”

There had been a moment of suspended time in which he waited for his master to applaud his intuition, punish his audacity, or simply astound him with an answer of the utmost simplicity and profundity. He had more than half expected the latter. So the answer he got had stunned him.

“You disappoint me, Probus,” his master had said. “It is the most elemental of understandings that the Force is a duality. You have mouthed that duality yourself, apparently without understanding it. Light and darkness simply are. It is that elementary.”

Impulsively Tesla had blurted, “But isn’t darkness merely the
absence
of light? Light is made up of photonic particles. Darkness isn’t made up of anti-photons, is it?”

For that question he had been instructed to take his lightsaber and spend six hours practicing Shii-Cho—the most basic of combat forms.

Later, when he had lain on his bed aching with fatigue and numb with boredom, his master had come to him in an odd frame of mind—if not apologetic, at least conciliatory.

“You will understand in time, Probus,” he’d said, “that the Force is neither as simple nor as complicated as we want to make it. It falls into the realm of neither science nor mysticism. Its use is at once an art and a discipline.”

“Like sailing,” Tesla had suggested.

His master had nodded, a wry smile curving his thin
lips. “Like sailing. Or like learning to sort through and comprehend the world of the senses.”

Tesla sorted through his senses now: peering, scenting, tasting, listening, and still hoping that he would catch—

He raised his head and turned to look out over the marketplace, eyes narrowed. Through a veil of multicolored light he saw a flash of blue-white radiance moving away rapidly. The scent came next, pale and sweet and tangy at once. A sound that was almost musical danced and shimmered at the fringes of his hearing.

He smiled in anticipation and dived after the sensory ghost. The crowd of shoppers parted before him as people recognized the uniform of the Inquisitor—cloak and cowl of an indescribable hue that seemed to shimmer with phantom color, the Imperial crest upon one shoulder.

Across the width of the teeming square he trailed the bright target, determined not to lose it as it dimmed. He suspected the Jedi must have used the Force for something to have sent up such a vivid little flare just now. That puzzled him. It had puzzled him since the first time he’d picked up the telltale signature of a Force-user. A trained Jedi would surely know better than to give in to displays of power in so public a place, and it was hard to believe he would have need to.

This gave Tesla some pause; it was just possible, if not likely, that Jax Pavan was intentionally luring him somewhere.

He bit back a chuckle of dark mirth. That would be futile. Probus Tesla knew without ego—or nearly so—that his abilities were exceptional. He had been trained by one of the greatest masters in the College of the Inquisition, and he had earned his place in the Inquisitorius by utterly defeating that master.

Regrettable, that, and it had drawn from Tesla the
pledge that one day he would take Master Kuthara’s place in the college himself, training aspiring Inquistors. He would never, he promised himself, give any of them any knowledge of himself that could be used for his undoing. Oh yes, he’d come to understand well why it was best not to speak to others about one’s own relationship with the Force. To understand others’ sense of the Force was to understand how they could be defeated.

He was dismayed to realize that the sensory target was dimming still further—its scent was all but gone, its taste turned to dust, its music muted. Only the light of it pulsed at the fringes of his awareness from white to blue, paling against the mundane palette of the market.

He hastened his pace, zigging and zagging through the crowd until he reached a long, dark alleyway with a dim rectangle of light at its nether end. Gouged into the ferrocrete walls of the surrounding buildings, the alley seemed to lead nowhere. And yet this was where his quarry had gone.