The Cathar paused a moment at this unexpected move; he was, however, completely confident in his ability to subdue any hostile interlopers. Given his size and strength, it was an assurance not misplaced.
But he had, in all probability, never faced a Jedi before.
Sele drew a poniard as long and heavy as the Jedi's leg. Ducking beneath a swing powerful enough to de-capitate a reek, Jax leaned forward in a long thrust that sent the tip of the flamesword through the Cathar's fur and a centimeter deep into his thigh.
Howling, the bodyguard stepped back and swatted at the smoke rising from his singed fur. When he looked up again, his expression was by itself enough to paralyze a typical opponent.
Now I remember the significance of the headband, Jax thought. It signifies him as the mightiest warrior of his clan. It figures.
Rushing forward, Sele brought the weighty blade of the poniard down in a swipe that would have cut the Jedi in half from crown to crotch—had it landed, which it did not. Dodging right this time, Jax feinted with the flamesword. His adversary sidestepped left; Jax whirled, leapt with the Force's aid, and brought the Velmorian weapon down. Flinching, Sele managed to block the blow, but the overflow from the sword seared a black streak across his right shoulder.
For the second time the Cathar let out a howl of pain.
Though he had lightly wounded his opponent twice, the Jedi knew that Sele had to land only one of his substantial blows to win the fight. He continued Michael Reaves 217
his strategy, using the Force to keep him just out of his foe's reach while letting the laws of physics work in his favor. At his mass and size, there was simply no way the Cathar could move as quickly or as nimbly as Jax, even without the Force's aid.
At last, smoldering like a house afire from more than a dozen slashing wounds inflicted by Jax's flamesword, Sele had no choice but to acquiesce to his opponent. The hulking creature bent one leg and bowed his head. He laid the poniard on the floor between them. "By the rules of the Blood Hunt," he said in a throaty growl, "I surrender to you all that I own and all that I am."
"Accepted." Breathing hard, Jax turned to face the still-seated and now obviously stunned figure of Spa Fon. The Lonjair was nowhere to be seen. "Bad business," Jax said. "Something like this could ruin your reputation if word got out." The fence didn't reply; he just sat and stared. "Don't you agree, Den?" Jax continued. "Den?"
Turning away from the seemingly paralyzed Nuknog, Jax searched the room with his gaze and the Force. Where was Den?
"Interesting thing, reputations. They're so often undeserved."
Stepping from behind the same dividing curtain that had earlier revealed the now chastised bodyguard, the Sullustan rejoined his companion. Squirming beneath his right arm but failing to break free was the Lonjair. With a flourish, Den dumped him in front of the Jedi.
"My friend, meet the real Spa Fon."
218 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows Jax looked from their supposed host down to the slightly built Lonjair. "You're Spa Fon?"
"Don't hurt me!" the Lonjair whimpered. Black spots of panic had broken out all over his body. His four eyes were rolling in so many directions at once that looking at them made Jax dizzy.
"I'm just a simple dealer in wanted goods," the bona fide Spa Fon whined. "I take but I don't harm.
Don't hit me, please!" Jax noticed that the thick patois the Lonjair had affected earlier had been replaced by perfectly understandable Basic. Off to the side, Sele growled something unflattering under his breath.
The unabashed display of cowardice on the part of his former employer forced the Cathar to look away lest he share in the Lonjair's shame.
Den gestured toward Jax. "My friend spoke the truth: we're not police. We're independent contrac-tors, doing a job. Except we don't hide behind a disguised droid." He looked contemptuously back at the bogus Nuknog. "Now, for the last time—how and why did you murder the artist Ves Volette?"
Four desperate eyes goggled up at the Sullustan and the Jedi. "I didn't, I didn't! Not I, nor any of my people! Sure, I wanted more of his light sculptures.
They're quick and easy money. But I swear, I steal but I don't kill!"
Jax leaned forward and reached out. The Force that he perceived as linear extensions of himself, as threads of purposeful intangibility, touched the pitiful creature lying before him. It took only a moment.
"He's telling the truth."
* * *
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"What now?" Den asked as they headed back toward the terminal.
"Back to our place," Jax said. "I have Rhinann engaged in some research on an unrelated matter that I want to check on."
Den shrugged. "Whatever." He checked his chrono.
"Just as well—it's almost happy hour."
220 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows nineteen
Rhinann sat before his access console, pondering his next action.
It had seemed a simple enough appeal from Jax: find out everything still extant about his father, Lorn Pavan, a small-time information broker, dealer in stolen goods, and, before that, clerical assistant employed by the Jedi Temple. All of this two decades and more in the past. A straightforward request for anyone save one of the Elomin, who were accustomed to seeing labyrinthine complexities and subterfuge beneath the surface of anything that seemed initially innocent. The fact that Jax had also enjoined him not to speak of this task to I-Five only added to Rhinann's suspicion. He had made it seem casual enough, like an afterthought—"Oh, and by the way . . ."—but his studied insouciance only made Rhinann the more wary of a hidden agenda. For an Elomin, the concern was never about being too paranoid—it was about being paranoid enough.
"Open channel," he murmured to the console. The holoproj responded by showing him the gateway to the HoloNet. Rhinann interlaced his fingers and pushed his palms out, limbering up his digits and Michael Reaves 221
cracking his knuckles. Then he bent over the instrumentation projection.
Five hours later he pushed back his formfit chair and stretched, feeling the muscles of his rhachis reluctantly unkink. He was too deep in thought to be aware of the trilling sound made by the passage of his breath over his vibrating tusks.
There was much to think about.
What he'd managed to put together was fascinating. Jax's father had been a minor-level accountant and file clerk for the Jedi until his two-year-old son had been found to have higher-than-normal midi-chlorian levels. The elder Pavan had been approached by representatives of the Council, who'd urged that young Jax be taken into the Temple as a Padawan.
It was, Rhinann knew, considered quite an honor to have one's child offered an opportunity to become a Jedi Knight. Even though it meant giving up that child forever to the cloistered corridors of the Order, few parents turned down the Jedi, because it also meant a secure, honorable, and purposeful life for their offspring, which was something all parents wanted.
Lorn and his wife, Siena, had resisted, however.
Though not rich, they were by no means destitute, and the thought of giving up their only child, even though it might be deemed in his best interests, horrified them.
Reports as to what happened next were conflicting.
Lorn had either quit his job or been let go, and the child Jax had been either taken by or given freely to the Order — although a grievance, filed by the parents, 222 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows was on the public record accusing the Jedi of what amounted to kidnapping. Rhinann got the impression that there had been collusion in high places to bury the story, even before Lorn's name was linked to the missing Neimoidian holocron. In any event, nothing had come of the grievance. Siena Pavan had left her husband not long after, and Lorn had begun a long downward spiral, literally as well as figuratively, that had eventually deposited him on the mean streets of Coruscant's underworld. Here he had met the protocol droid I-Five, and the two had begun their singular partnership.
All
this was public record—or had been before the data purge of anything having to do with the Jedi.
Even so, it had been relatively easy to suss out. The next stage of Lorn's saga, however, had been system-atically and thoroughly purged. The shunting, decryption, and maneuvering around countless pyrowalls had taken much time and patience. Rhinann had painstakingly applied enhancement and reconstruction of the various data bins, some of which had been removed from the vaults, leaving only quantum residual traces. At some points he'd had to rely on nodal seeker algorithms to reconstruct and best-guess the graph probabilities of the data conduits. It hadn't been easy; obviously the story he was trying so scrupulously to piece together had been thoroughly scrubbed, by orders from someone very much on high. He'd had to move cautiously indeed to avoid the myriad alarms, trip wires, and deadfalls that lay in wait around every virtual corner, and when he'd finally disengaged from the hunt, the story was still by and large piecemeal.
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The essence of it was simple enough—Lorn Pavan and his droid partner had come into possession of a data holocron containing intel concerning the Neimoidian trade embargo of the planet Naboo that had occurred twenty-three years previous. Rhinann wasn't able to ascertain the exact nature of the intel, but it was obviously severely compromising to at least one highly placed government official, if not more. In response to this, a death mark was issued on Pavan and, by extension, I-Five.
So far, his extensive and exhaustive reconstruction of past events had yielded little that hadn't already been vouchsafed by I-Five. What Jax was most curious to know was the identity of the mysterious assassin, as well as his employer. These data were buried the deepest, and took the most effort to exhume.
"I found nothing but rumor, essentially," he told Jax later. "The Imperial Security Bureau categorically condemns all such speculation as innuendo and calumny, and the slightest suspicion of illegal interest is enough to warrant an investigation by the Inquisitorius. My slicing past their pyrowalls did not activate any alarms, which is how I intend to keep it.
What I have discovered is everything I can get without putting us all at great risk. Don't ask me to investigate further; I won't chance a cerebral meltdown for you or anyone.
"I will tell you this once, and then I intend to forget it. Make of it what you will, but know that you didn't learn it from me. It is, at best, hearsay.
"A fragment of a sector police communique, dated, as closely as I can determine, approximately eighteen 226 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows years ago, from the time of the Naboo trade embargo, mentions the death of a Hutt nightclub owner and local racketeer, along with several of his minions, at the hands of a Zabrak assassin. The killer's targets were apparently a human male, most likely of Corel-lian or Alderaanian origin, and a protocol droid."
"I-Five and my father," Jax murmured.
"Almost certainly," Rhinann agreed. "They escaped, and were pursued by the Zabrak."
"That correlates with what I-Five told me. The thing he refuses to specify is the assassin's identity."
"If my suspicions are correct," the Elomin said,
"he had a good reason for not doing so." He paused.
"Tell me," Jax said. He felt the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck rising in anticipation.
Rhinann said, "The weapon used by the Zabrak was a double-bladed lightsaber. A red lightsaber."
Jax stared at him. "A Sith?"
The Elomin regarded him impassively. "You tell me."
"But—" Jax felt his mind whirling. According to Temple lore, a Sith Lord's lightsaber was always red, constructed by following an ancient, secret formula.
It had been thus ever since Darth Bane had instituted the Rule of Two, more than a thousand years ago. In addition, the Jedi had traditionally eschewed the use of double-bladed lightsabers. The style and color of the Zabrak's weapon, therefore, all but guaranteed his identity to be that of a Sith.
His father had been killed by a Sith. And I-Five had known this.
Michael Reaves 227
twenty
When they returned to Poloda Place, Den immediately noticed that I-Five was still jacked into the HoloNet. Plugged in, jacked in, turned on, wired up: however an organic chose to describe the condition, it was the mechmind state of oneness with other artifi-cial intelligences. Den knew that, while in that state, the droid could exchange information instantly, without having to first translate it to Basic and then back again. He could receive replies at the same speed, instead of waiting for the cybernetic equivalent of hours for an organic to finish a couple of sentences.
It did no good, the droid had told him more than once, to try to explain such things to organics. Even those with whom he had surrounded himself, who were smarter and more empathic than most, could at best only nod courteously and declare their understanding—when in reality it was plain they understood nothing, and that their comprehension was irredeemably restricted by the limitations imposed on their thought processes by the very nature of their protein-based synaptic connections. He gave them credit for trying, though—especially Den, who, like most of his kind, was sharp of mind as well as tongue.
228 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows Jax immediately met with Rhinann, and the two of them disappeared into an antechamber to talk. A few moments later Jax reentered the room, his expression grim. He crossed to the wall where the droid was jacked into the interface. "I-Five," he said tightly,
"we need to talk."
Something in his tone made Den take notice. It also got through to I-Five. The droid removed his digit from the interface socket and turned to face Jax.
The Jedi glanced at Laranth and Den. "Can we have the room, please?"
Laranth nodded and left. On the way out she grabbed Den by the shoulder. "Come on," she said.
Den thought briefly about resisting, but only briefly; the Twi'lek was much stronger than he was.
"No fair," he protested feebly. "If this is about the case, shouldn't we be there, too?"
"It's not about the case," Laranth said.
"How can you know?"
"You're a reporter," she said. "How can you not?"
I-Five said mildly, "How may I help you, Jax?"
Jax repressed an urge to grab and shake the droid, knowing that it would do no good. "The man who killed my father was a Sith. Why didn't you tell me?"
"What good would it have done?"
"What harm would it have done? As a Jedi in particular, I had a right to know."
"And now that you know," the droid said with maddening complacency, "what do you plan to do?"
"Well, I—" Jax paused, realizing that he'd formed no real course of action. "I'll find out if this Sith still lives," he said, somewhat lamely, "and—"
Michael Reaves 229
"And no doubt get yourself arrested and tortured by the Inquisitorius," I-Five finished. "It's a New Order out there, remember? If the assassin is still alive—a low probability, given the attrition rate in his kind of work—he is not the hunted. You are."
"He was acting under orders," Jax said. "Orders from very high up. Orders that may possibly have come from Palpatine himself."
"And?" When Jax didn't reply, the droid continued, "Do you dream of taking the fight to the Emperor? Weren't you the one who told me not too long ago that the very concept teeters on madness?
"You're doing everything one life-form can do, Jax.
A great deal more than most do. Would you throw it all away to avenge someone you never even knew?
"I knew Lorn Pavan better than anyone, I daresay.
I can call up memories of him that seem as real as you. And I'm certain he would tell you to let the past care for the dead."
"So you didn't tell me his killer was a Sith because you knew that I'd feel honor-bound, both as his son and as a Jedi, to bring closure to all this?" Jax shook his head in disbelief. "How? You didn't even know me at the time."
"I knew your father," I-Five s
aid. "And I came to know the Jedi over the years. And I saw the Zabrak.
Nothing could stop him. Lorn wouldn't have wanted you cut down like he was."
Jax's head was spinning. If there was the faintest possibility that a Sith did still exist, it was his duty as a Jedi to hunt him down. Added to that was the urge to avenge the father he never knew. But he had to admit that I-Five was making a lot of sense. As a Jedi, 230 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows his first duty was to help the people, not pursue personal vendettas. Also, the galaxy had changed: to be identified as a Jedi Knight now wasn't the automatic ticket to awe and respect that it once had been.
But he couldn't simply let it go...
I-Five said quietly, "I was wrong not to tell you everything, Jax. It's not my right to choose your path.
But now that you know, should you decide to investigate this further, I can at least help level the playing field." So saying, he opened the hatch to a small, hidden aperture in his chest plate, in what would be the upper left quadrant of a human's torso. He reached into the chest compartment and withdrew a small vial. After a moment, Jax recognized the clear tube, about the size and length of his index finger, as the vaporizer delivery ampoule for a non-invasive epider-mic injector commonly referred to as a skinpopper.
"This is, as far as I can determine, the sole remaining sample of bota extract in the galaxy," the droid said. "Bota was a broad-based ergogenic plant native to Drongar."
"I've heard of it," Jax said. "It was the reason the Separatists and the Republic fought there . . . until it mutated and became worthless."
"Yes. It is—was—what's commonly known as an adaptogen: a panacea that has various, mostly salutary effects on differing species. To Neimoidians it's a narcotic, to Hutts a psychedelic, to humans an antibi-otic, and so on.
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