Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force (2 page)

He’d long since come to accept, with the fatalism common to his kind, that he would die in poverty and misery, but he wanted to experience the Force just once before death. Just once, he wanted to be attuned to the power and pattern of the universe and not deaf as a dianoga; just once he wanted to have the power and presence
of mind and spirit to take out those responsible for his fall from grace; just once he wanted—

“I said, ‘Isn’t that pretty much what you discovered, Rhinann?’ ”

The Elomin blinked and turned to look at Jax Pavan, who, he realized, must have repeated himself several times to have raised his voice to that level. The young Jedi was usually soft-spoken and soft-edged—a manner calculated to make him seem unthreatening. Even now there was no anger in his voice, just bemusement.

Jedi did not get angry—or so they liked to tell everyone. It was Rhinann’s secret opinion that they got just as angry as the next being and simply hid it better. How could Pavan not be angry when the Dark Lord, allegedly responsible for his father’s death, kept sending assassins after him? How did one possibly not rage against the universe when—

“Rhinann?” Jax repeated, his dark gaze seeking the Elomin’s. His voice now held a touch of asperity.

“Pardon, I was contemplating a … an abstruse angle of another case.”

“If you could be bothered to contemplate the rather more immediate angles of this one,” said Pol Haus, “I’m sure we would all appreciate it.”

Rhinann blinked again, slowly and for effect, and let out a long, patient breath. “If you could repeat the question?”

Jax did. “I was telling Pol Haus that the data you uncovered indicated that the conduit through which Bal Rado was receiving spice had dried up just prior to his murder.”

“Ah. Yes. Precisely. We reasoned,” said Rhinann, bringing his mind efficiently back to the matter at hand, “that his reluctance to inform his buyer—”

“A Hutt named Sol Proofrock, if you can believe it,”
interjected Den Dhur from his seat in a window embrasure.

“As I was saying,” continued Rhinann tightly, “he was reluctant to inform his buyer—a Hutt with a variety of aliases—of this situation. Which caused him to try to cover it up while he sought a new source of spice—”

“Which, unfortunately for him, failed to materialize,” added the Sullustan.

Rhinann favored the short, stocky humanoid with his most disdainful glare. “Well of course it didn’t. Otherwise the pathetic fellow would likely still be alive. What
my
research indicates,” Rhinann told the prefect, wanting it to be perfectly clear that Den had had nothing to do with the solving of the case, “is that one of the smugglers Rado contacted about his little problem—one Droo Wabbin, a fellow Toydarian, as it happens—revealed his situation to the buyer.”

“That’s speculation, though,” Den interrupted. “Because you were unable to recover the contents of the message, all we know for certain is that Wabbin was in contact with good old Sol.”

I-Five, standing just behind the low couch Jax and Dejah were seated on, made a raspy mechanical chirp that was the protocol droid’s version of clearing its throat.

Rhinann ignored the subtle warning. “I suppose you think it’s pure coincidence that Rado ended up dead within a day of that message having been sent
and
coincidence as well that his loyal smuggler friend received a significant sum of credits to his private account in that same time frame?”

“I didn’t say that,” Den objected. “I merely noted that we don’t have titanium-clad proof that Wabbin’s windfall had anything to do with Rado’s demise. Though it does seem, you know, too much of a coincidence to be coincidental.”

“Too much of a coincidence to be coincidental?” repeated Rhinann disparagingly. He snapped his long fingers several times by way of applause. “Brilliant assessment.” He turned to address the prefect. “The fact is—”

“The fact is,” growled Pol Haus, straightening to his full height, “that I didn’t come here to listen to internecine squabbling over who knew what how. I came here to find out what you knew about the flow of spice in my jurisdiction. You
said
you had pertinent information.”

“We do,” said Jax Pavan quickly, including both squabblers in a quelling look.

“That’s good,” said Haus, “because what
I
have is a dead Toydarian ‘businessman’—and I use the term loosely—and a sudden glut of pure spice in the Zi-Kree Sector. A sector
my
research indicates is controlled by our multi-aliased buddy the Hutt. If you can’t provide me with good intel …”

Rhinann opened his mouth to reply and was incensed to see that Dhur’s pendulous lips were also opening. Then I-Five made that grating sound again, which was really just too much—to be censured by a
droid …

“We have provided you with only the most worthwhile intelligence, Prefect, I assure you,” insisted Rhinann, far more forcefully than he meant to.

“You’ve also provided me with a surfeit of complaints from local merchants about harassment, more ‘unknowns’ than should exist in any citizen’s files, and a trail of dead bodies. Perhaps I should be investigating
you
, not Sol Proofrock—or whatever our Hutt spice trader is calling himself these days.”

Before any of the open mouths in the room could utter a sound, Dejah Duare rose from the couch and raised a graceful, placating hand.

All eyes turned to her, all ears tingled in anticipation of her voice, all senses stretched toward her, involuntarily
desiring to lap up every effusion of her softly gleaming carmine skin—with the exception of Rhinann and Dhur, whose physiologies, though humanoid, were too alien to respond to Duare’s endocrine advantage. A good thing, too, judging by the besotted looks that came over Pavan and Haus. Rhinann even imagined for a moment that the droid’s photoreceptors brightened a bit, though he knew that was nonsense.

Like all Zeltrons, Dejah Duare exuded a rich potion of pheromones that she could guide willfully to affect the mood of her target audience. Right now she had brought all her resources to bear on Pol Haus.

“Prefect,” she said in a voice like sun-washed synthsilk, “surely
my
citizen file is an open book. Can you imagine that I’d associate myself with beings whose scruples I distrusted in the least?”

If Rhinann didn’t know better, he’d swear the Zabrak was blushing to the roots of his unkempt, thinning fringe of hair.

“With all due respect,” the prefect said, “this lot did ingratiate themselves with you during the investigation of your partner’s death.”

Dejah uttered a cascade of warm sultry laughter that, if visible, would have been the same dark crimson as her hair. “Ingratiated themselves! Now, Prefect, isn’t that understating the case? Jax and his team,” she added, turning a smiling gaze to the Jedi, “solved Ves Volette’s murder. And that is why I’ve chosen to ally myself with them. Each one of them is highly skilled at what he does. If Haninum Tyk Rhinann provides you with information, you can be certain it is both accurate and worthwhile.”

The prefect looked bemused and not a little befuddled. “Well, I suppose … that is, of course the information is worthwhile. I’ve never doubted it. And I honestly don’t care about the holes in your personal files as long as you
continue to provide that information.” This last was directed at Jax, who nodded his assurance.

“We’re happy to provide it, Prefect. In this case I think the intel points to Rado’s Hutt friend. I suspect what happened was that Wabbin had his own spice source and simply cut Rado out, making a separate deal with his buyer.”

As Jax continued, wrapping up the package neatly, Rhinann returned to his speculations about I-Five. Droids, he knew, were not supposed to have such capacities and capabilities as this one exemplified. Nor was it simply a matter of disabling a few limitations or reprogramming the synaptic grid processor with clever learning algorithms. Ves Volette, as it happened, had been slain by a “modified” 3PO unit that had retaliated against the Caamasi sculptor for causing distress to the Vindalian mistress he had served for decades. Plainly put, with some sophisticated modifications to its protective programming, the 3PO unit had developed an attachment to its owner.

I-Five had developed far more than that. And he—
it
, Rhinann reminded himself with irritation—had somehow developed it in the hands of a man who made his living as a black-market dealer in rare commodities. From everything Rhinann knew, the droid’s erstwhile “partner,” Lorn Pavan, had been many things, but a sophisticated programmer was not one of them.

Which begged the question: how had the protocol droid known as I-5YQ transcended its programming?

And why?

Haninum Tyk Rhinann, much as he hated to admit it, agreed with Den Dhur about one thing: some events were too much a coincidence to be coincidental, and just about every event to which he could now connect I-Five seemed to fall into that category.

The droid would bear watching. Very close watching.

  
PART I
  
SINS OF THE FATHER

The library was his favorite place in the entirety of the immense Jedi Temple complex. He went there to absorb data as much through the pores of his skin as through any study of the copious amount of information stored there. He frequently went there to think—but just as often he went there to
not
think.

He was there now—not thinking—and almost as soon as he recognized the place, Jax Pavan also realized that this was a dream. The Temple, he knew, was no more than a chaotic pile of rubble, charred stone, and ashy dust. Order 66 had mandated it, and the horrifying bloodbath that the few remaining Jedi referred to as Flame Night had ensured it.

Yet here he was in one of the many reading rooms within the vast library wing, just as it had been the last time he had seen it—the softly lit shelves that contained books, scrolls, data cubes, and other vessels of knowledge from a thousand worlds; the tables—each in its own pool of illumination—at which Jedi and Padawans studied in silence; the tall, narrow windows that looked out into the central courtyard; the vaulted ceiling that seemed to fly away into eternity. Even as his dreaming gaze took in these things, he felt the pain of their loss … and something else—puzzlement.

This was clearly a Force dream. It had that lucent, almost shimmering quality to it, the utter clarity of presence
and sense, the equally clear knowledge that it was a dream. But it was about the past, not the future, for Jax Pavan knew he would never savor the atmosphere of the Jedi library again. His Force dreams had, without exception, been visions of future events … and they had never been this lucid.

He was sitting at one of the tables with a book and a data cube before him. The book was a compilation of philosophical essays by Masters of the Tython Jedi who had first proposed that the Force had a dual nature: Ashla, the creative element, and Bogan, the destructive—light and dark aspects of the same Essence. The data cube contained a treatise of Master Asli Krimsan on the Potentium Perspective, a “heresy” propagated by Jedi Leor Hal that contended—as many had before and since—that there was no dark side to the Force, that the darkness existed within the individual.

Yes, he had studied these two volumes—among others. He supposed that all Padawans studied them at some point in their training, because all entertained questions about the nature of the Force and desired to understand it. Some, he knew, hoped to understand it completely and ultimately; to settle once and for all the millennia-long debate over whether it had one face or two and where the potential for darkness lay—in the Force itself or in the wielder of the Force.

When had he studied these last? What moment had he been returned to in his dream?

Even as he wondered these things, a shadow fell across the objects on the table before him. Someone had come to stand beside him, blocking the light from the windows.

He glanced up.

It was his fellow Padawan and friend Anakin Skywalker. At least he had called Anakin “friend” readily enough, but the truth was that Anakin held himself
aloof from the other Padawans. Even in moments of camaraderie he seemed a man apart, as if he had a Force shield around him. Brooding. Jax had called him that once to his face and had drawn laughter that he, through his connection to the Force, had known to be false.