Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force (8 page)

He pushed into the tunnel, senses groping before him as he moved. Once again, he suspected a trap, and once again he discarded the idea. He was, after all, effectively shielded from detection by his taozin-scale necklace.

The taozin were huge, segmented creatures that inhabited deep underground caverns beneath the planet-city and whose scales rendered their life force transparent to a Force-sensitive. Tesla’s synthsilk necklace didn’t possess enough of the rare and dangerously gotten substance to block him entirely from another Force-sensitive, but it was enough to scramble whatever emanations of the Force he leaked and render them almost unreadable. Jax Pavan—or any other trained Jedi—would have to work awfully hard even to get a fix on him.

He fingered the strand of synthsilk as he dived farther into the darkness of the passage, hastening toward its end. The rectangle of dim light grew ever larger. It was
hypnotic, so much so that when he reached the aperture, Tesla very nearly stepped across the threshold to his death. The floor beneath his feet ended abruptly, and he had a momentry impression of a gaping chasm hemmed by unending walls and a drop into sheer nothingness.

His reflexes were such that he was able to catch himself, but it was the wind that saved him, not the Force. A veritable maelstrom spiraled up from the abyss, ripping his cowl from his head and lifting him bodily, tossing him backward into the tunnel like a piece of chaff.

He lay against the wall of the tunnel for a moment, heart hammering, breath coming in short, staccato bursts that echoed harshly against the stone of the walls. Then he picked himself up and approached the end of the tunnel with care. He poked his head through the door to nowhere and looked out.

Above was a pale blur of eternal twilight. Below, he could see the vertical flank of the cloudcutter through which the tunnel bore disappear into darkness. Hundreds of yards away across the chasm stood another cloudcutter, its broad flanks sweating dank grime.

There was no one in sight and no place anyone could have gone. Anyone except a Jedi.

He looked up, reaching out with his Force sense. He stretched across to the far building. He angled a look down.

And there it was, far below and to his right: that tiny point of light, the barest whiff of the perfume of power, the merest tinkle of sound. Hair rose up on his half-shaven head and down the backs of his arms. He smiled.
Good try, Jedi
, he thought, and stepped from the aperture into thin air.

The Force lowered him like an invisible turbolift. The violent updrafts of the abyss buffeted him occasionally, tearing at his robes, but still he rode silently, swiftly, his senses on that spot where one building ended and another
began. The target had paused there below but suddenly began to move again, away from the chasm.

At the crumbling intersection of the two buildings—at a point where their buttresses seemed almost to intertwine—there was a gap. Just enough of a gap for a humanoid of Tesla’s size to pass through. Tesla jackknifed and threw himself through the air toward the gap, unclipping his lightsaber as he flew but not igniting it just yet. He erupted through the needle’s eye and into a cavern filled with rubble. His target had moved on ahead. He took only a moment to orient himself. The sheathing of the wall of the mammoth building on his right—the one from which he had dropped like a stooping raptor—had come away from the substrate and fallen in huge stone and duracrete panels against its nearest neighbor. What had once been a maintenance alley between the two had been transformed into a cavernous tunnel. But where the previous route had been narrow and human-sized with regular surfaces, this was a cave built by decay. Immense and asymmetrical, its ceiling ending in darkness far above his head, its uneven walls canted and uncertain, its floor littered with random chunks of rock and twists of durasteel eroded and fallen from the buttresses.

The wind sobbed inconsolably here, and the buildings seemed to groan and tremble at its passing. Above this there was another sound—no, not a sound exactly; more of a sensation, almost a
tingling
in the air.

Tesla hovered, perfectly still, listening, sensing,
feeling
. It was not the Force he felt, but some type of kinetic energy. He could feel it dancing across his cheeks and the backs of his hands, raising the narrow strip of red hair that ran from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck. A force field of some sort?

He moved slowly downward, senses probing the way before him, eyes watchful. His boots touched down
lightly on the rubble-strewn floor, and he strode forward. The cleft was about twenty meters long and ended in a dim wash of light that seemed to flicker and weave like the shadow of a fire. At random points along its length, dark apertures suggested other means of egress and regress. He eyed them suspiciously, but none of them held anything of note. Armored rats. Hawk-bats, perhaps. Nothing sentient.

The only sentient target he sensed was ahead somewhere in or beyond that wash of inconstant light. Tesla activated his lightsaber. The blade hummed to life, the color of a sunset he had once seen on his homeworld of Corellia. It was also the color of the lava flows on Mustafar. He moved forward with cautious anticipation.

The target had stopped.

The threads Jax followed were slender and impossibly bright, but they seemed to flicker and pulse as he trailed them down into the depths of Ploughtekal Market. When he reached the lowest levels of the structure that housed the rambling bazaar, they were little more than the ghosts of threads—like an afterimage burned into the retina.

They were on the point of vanishing completely by the time he dived into the warren of crevices in the towering resiblocks that roughly defined Ploughtekal’s borders. As he stood at the gaping mouth of one such crevice, several levels below where the marketplace petered out, he saw the threads break altogether.

He stood for a moment, trying to decide what to do next, then froze at the sudden sense of
presence
behind him. He swept his lightsaber into his hand, activated it, and spun 180 degrees in one smooth movement.

“I see I’m not the only one who’s had her aura tweaked today.” Laranth Tarak faced him from an alcove
in the dirty wall of the junction in which he stood. She had a blaster in each hand and holstered one of them as she stepped out of the alcove.

Over her shoulder Jax could see a set of steel rungs embedded in the alcove wall. Okay, not an alcove, then—a chimney or access tube. He used the trivial observation to hide his reaction to seeing Laranth so suddenly and under such circumstances, and couldn’t decide if he was excited or dismayed.

“You felt something, too?” he asked stupidly.

“I think I just mentioned that.” The green-skinned Twi’lek’s truncated left lekku shifted slightly on her shoulder and Jax had the irrational feeling that she was laughing at him, despite the fact that her mouth formed a familiar grim line … as it ever did. Also irrationally, he was finding it difficult to look away from her face.

He did so with a will, clipping his lightsaber back on his belt and nodding toward the crevice he’d been about to explore. “I lost it right here. What do you think it is?”

She shook her head, moving to peer into the darkness. “No idea.”

“Inquisitor?”

“I suspect most of them carry taozin wards these days,” she said.

“They what?” There he went, sounding stupid again.

She turned and looked at him, her eyes—which were the same rich shade of green as her skin—showing no amusement. “I noticed it about three days ago. I saw one of them plain as day about three levels up, snooping around in the bazaar. Saw him, but couldn’t
sense
him.”

Jax nodded.

“So, how … how have you been?”

She tilted her head to one side, right lekku curling slightly at the end, whatever that meant. He wished he knew how to read the sophisticated subtext that Twi’lek head-tails were said to convey.

“You can’t tell?” she asked.

“No, I …”

“I can tell how you’ve been,” she said cryptically, then jerked her head at the crevice. “You want to check this out or what?”

He nodded and let her precede him into the dark gap.

They’d gone maybe ten meters along its stygian length when Jax remembered that he’d thought of looking for her earlier. “Laranth,” he said quietly, “about Tuden Sal …”

“What about him?”

“You know him.”

“He came to us about three weeks ago. Got in touch with us through our contact at Sil’s Place.”

“Sil’s Place,” repeated Jax.

“A dive near the Westport. The Amani pubtender is an operative.”

“And you trust him?”

“I wouldn’t have helped him find you if I didn’t.”

He let that settle for a couple of beats. “Did he tell you
why
he wanted to find me?”

“He didn’t want to find
you
, exactly. He wanted to find I-Five. To repay an old debt, he said. He told me what he’d done … or rather what he failed to do.” Her voice was grim, cold. It took Jax back to the night he and the Gray Paladin had met in the ruins of the Jedi Temple complex amid the death and smoke and flame. She knew as well as he did that what Tuden Sal had failed to do may have been responsible, among many other things, for what they referred to as Flame Night. Responsible for the deaths of all those innocent Jedi and Padawans.

“Did he tell you how he plans to repay that debt?”

She shot a glance back over her shoulder. “I figured that was between him and I-Five.”

“No. Not really. It’s a lot more complicated.”

He was about to explain just how complicated when the Force nearly yanked him off his feet for the second time that day. This time there was no question what direction the pull was coming from—the tether stretched away into the darkness of the crevice.

He didn’t have to ask if Laranth had felt it, too; the Twi’lek Paladin was already in motion. Jax unclipped his lightsaber and hurried to keep up.

Tesla stepped from the shadows of the fallen buttressing into light that was brilliant only in comparison with the midnight gloom he’d just traversed. The sight that met his eyes was confusing at first. Stretching away from him for perhaps a hundred meters was a debris field roughly twenty or thirty meters wide, formed by the gap between two massive resiblocks. It made what he’d just passed through look like a well-tended garden path; twisted lengths of duralumin and gigantic shards of transparisteel, some thicker than his body, lay like strange, misshapen skeletons over and around chunks of masonry and plasticrete. The two resiblocks on either side were apparently in an advanced state of decay, and this bizarre landscape was the result.

But there was more to it than that, Tesla sensed as he drew closer. The air here was charged with electrostatic energy that made every hair on his body stand on end and created strange creeping halos around the pieces of debris. As he continued to move, he found it more difficult, as if the very molecules of the air conspired to push him back. He realized that this was a repulsor field, subtly tugging and twisting due to an everlasting state of flux, which had, over the centuries, warped the huge pieces of various metals into the agonized postures that lay all about him.

Peering down the length of the cluttered swath, Tesla saw the source of the weird auroras. At the far end of
the wreckage a repulsor field generator thrummed, the subtle, light-bending contours of the region pressing against the canted walls of the buildings and coating them with shimmering iridescence. A faulty field generator would explain the state of flux that caused the visible effects. Under normal circumstances the field would be invisible.

He smiled. If his quarry had come in here thinking to escape him, he had erred grievously. That repulsor field would thrust back whatever approached too closely. The Jedi had come to a dead end, and the slice of darkness that marked an exit, which Tesla could just make out through the writhing veil of the energy barrier, might as well be on another world—he would never be able to enter it.

Tesla started forward again, his lightsaber at the ready. He was halfway across the open expanse when he saw a figure emerge from the crumble of rock and steel, to clamber up and stand atop a huge chunk of ferrocrete. Two things struck him simultaneously: One was that the figure thrown in relief against a rippling curtain of light was not Jax Pavan, but a teenage human boy with a wild mane of pale hair. The other was that there were two field generators—one on each side of the canyon formed by the two resiblocks. At a point just beyond where his unknown target stood the two fields overlapped, creating a sort of hole through which the boy doubtless intended to flee … unless Tesla did something to stop him.

That he
should
stop him was obvious. No, this was not Jax Pavan, but it was a Force-user of such power that he had drawn Tesla to him as a lodestone draws iron.

In the moment of decision, Tesla flung himself into the air in a graceful Force leap calculated to carry him
within striking distance of his quarry. But instead of landing at the foot of the ferrocrete block, he was met in midleap by a resilient energy barrier that slapped him to the ground. Hard.

He fell between a gleaming shard of transparisteel and a twisted spur of durasteel buttress, only his finely honed reflexes and a sweep of his lightsaber saving him from serious injury. He thought for an instant that he must have connected with the repulsor field, but realized the impossibility of that as quickly as the thought occurred to him. His quarry had been standing at the edge of the field—the barrier he’d struck had met him several meters from that verge. He hadn’t collided with the repulsor field; he had been struck down by the Force, wielded by someone who had remarkable strength in it.

Someone he could not afford to let get away.

He gathered himself and leapt again, up into the charged air of the ersatz canyon. He lit upon the block of ferrocrete as lightly as a bird, ready to fire a bolt of Force-lightning at his opponent.

His target was gone.

Tesla reached out with his senses toward the interstices of the two repulsor fields. He found his prey with eyes and the Force simultaneously. Two strides took him over the edge of the block of debris and down onto the ground behind it. Above him the energy fields pulsed and flickered, making him feel as if fire gnats crawled over his body. But directly before him was a warped corridor of safety—a buffer zone in which the opposing fields canceled each other out.