Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force

Once again, thanks go first and foremost to my editors: Shelly Shapiro at Del Rey and Sue Rostoni at LucasBooks, who invited me to walk on the wild side of Coruscant again; to Leland Chee and the other galactic wonks who never got tired of continuity questions; a big shout-out to Maya Bohnhoff; and, as always, to George Lucas for the whole shebang.

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Introduction to the
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Star Wars: Republic Commando: Hard Contact

Introduction to the Old Republic Era

Introduction to the Rise of the Empire Era

Introduction to the Rebellion Era

Introduction to the New Republic Era

Introduction to the New Jedi Order Era

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The voices rose and fell around him, but he paid them little attention now. He had tried to be attentive initially, but hearing the word
smuggled
had spun Haninum Tyk Rhinann off into his own private mental debriefing, on a mystery he sought to unravel for reasons of his own. The case the others were discussing—the murder of an insignificant being involved in smuggling a particularly nasty variety of spice—was of importance only to the local prefect of police, Pol Haus. Which was another way of saying that, cosmically as well as locally, it was of no importance at all.

Rhinann was almost tempted to stick his fingers in his hairy ears to block out the grating sound of the prefect’s voice. There had been a time, back when he’d been the personal aide-de-camp to Darth Vader himself, when even letting such a thought cross his mind, even allowing the existence of admission of such poor etiquette, would have made all four of his stomachs turn acidic. Now he honestly had to admit that he didn’t care. He wished he had self-sealing earflaps like the Lesser Houdoggin of Klatooine, so that he could shut out the sound of the prefect as easily as closing his eyes allowed him to blot away the offensive sight of him.

A poorer excuse for a Zabrak he could not imagine. In his considerable experience as an Imperial functionary he had never known a member of that species
who was so impossibly
slovenly
. The police prefect’s hair—what there was of it—was in wild disarray, as if he had run his fingers through it repeatedly; his clothing was disheveled; his posture was relaxed to the point of slouching; his heavy-lidded eyes made him look as if he were about to fall asleep.

He recalled hearing a rumor once to the effect that the Elomin—his people—were the descendants of a group of Zabrak who had colonized the surface of Elom ages ago. Being in the prefect’s presence made him want to find whatever bescumbered ninnyhammer had started that calumny and hurl him into the nearest sun.

Rhinann sat farther back in the formchair of his workstation, noting sourly that his mind, like a child lost in a carnival labyrinth, had wandered even farther from the meander it had originally taken. He suspected that he was edging ever closer to losing his sanity. Not surprising, considering the company he kept.

He eyed the other beings in the austere living area with disdain. They were a motley group, to be sure. Besides the Zabrak prefect, who stood in the center of the room, there was the human—a Jedi in hiding, no less. Seated on one end of a low couch, he occasionally turned his head to look at the being seated at the other end—a Zeltron female, the very definition of trouble looking for somewhere to roost. The “team” was completed by a Sullustan “journalist” named Den Dhur—if one could call the sort of sensationalistic, headline-grubbing poodoo he wrote
journalism;
Rhinann had read some of his pieces in various online archives, and in his opinion comparing the little alien’s writing to the Huttese term for excreta was being charitable, to say the least—and, lastly, the cause of the original detour Rhinann’s mind had taken: the protocol droid I-5YQ, which everyone referred to simply as I-Five.

Rhinann’s eyes narrowed as he contemplated the
droid. I-Five had once belonged to Jax Pavan’s father, Lorn. Or rather, according to I-Five, had been partner and friend to Lorn Pavan. The clever mech had smuggled itself, Den Dhur, and the rare biotic panacea called bota to Coruscant in search of its partner’s son, Jax. The Force-sensitive boy had—depending on who was telling the story—either been surrendered to, or taken by the Jedi as a toddler. And although I-Five’s memory had been almost completely wiped, it had somehow recovered and completed its mission. Of course, it had taken two decades to do it …

These things Rhinann knew mostly as the result of his own careful research. What he guessed—no, the very idea of guessing gave him hives; he preferred to think of it as imaginative extrapolation—was that I-Five somehow completed a circle that included Jax, his deceased father, a mysterious Sith assassin, and the new Dark Lord, Darth Vader, whom Rhinann had recently served. What he knew through simple day-to-day experience was that I-Five was somehow, impossibly, more than a machine.

Fascinating as that was, however, it still didn’t address the pertinent question, which was: did the droid still have the bota, or had it already handed that over to Pavan?

The Elomin did not pretend anymore—even to himself—that his interest in the bota was commercial. He might have hidden behind that rationale if the newest member of their mismatched team—the Zeltron, Dejah Duare—hadn’t brought with her a dowry of almost unlimited funds. No, his interest was purely personal, but no less intense for that.

The literature he had found on the HoloNet had told him of the near-miraculous medicinal effects bota had on the sick and injured. Though those effects varied from species to species—including less-than-salutary
outcomes for some—still, according to the twenty-year-old records he’d dredged up from the mobile med units that functioned during the Clone Wars, bota was as close to a panacea as could be imagined. With few exceptions, it was all things to all species. When administered it would simply find what was wrong in a patient’s body and, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, cause it to be fixed.

Alas, this wonder was now no more than a wistful historical footnote; the bota plant evolved swiftly and, as it evolved, its properties changed. What had once been a closely guarded, much-sought-after medicinal herb was now merely an inconsequential weed … except to a select few.

Haninum Tyk Rhinann was one of those few.

The thing that made bota of such intense interest to Rhinann had nothing to do with its healing properties. Nor had he initially learned of that aspect of it from the HoloNet. He had—and it galled him to admit it, even to himself—gained early knowledge by eavesdropping on conversations between I-Five and Jax Pavan. In such a way he had learned of something bota could provide that the HoloNet did not catalog: a transcendent connection to the Force. Provided, of course, that the test subject had a sufficient level of midi-chlorians to make him Force-sensitive. Rhinann’s own midi-chlorian count was not quite enough to access the Force unaided, but it was just possible that, with the bota extract providing the requisite boost, he might.