Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights 01_ Jedi Twilight - Michael Reaves [123]
Den watched as the Elomin stepped into the lighted room. Haninum Tyk Rhinann was typical of his species: tall, angular, and bipedal. He wasn’t quite as hirsute as a Wookiee, but he came close. His nose tusks, stubby horns, and wide-set eyes all protruded from a fleshy lump that could only be recognized as a head because it sat on top of his short neck. He was depressed. This came as no particular surprise to Den or any of the others; Rhinann was always depressed. Formerly Darth Vader’s personal aide, he had fled the Dark Lord’s service, finding sanctuary at the last moment aboard the freighter Far Ranger with Jax and the others, just before the droid factory had been destroyed by the exploding reactor.
Rhinann, like the majority of his species, was a scrupulous, fastidious, meticulous, and punctilious being. For the Elomin, the reason and joy of life truly was in the details, and it had been that passion for order and precision that had convinced Vader to designate Rhinann his aide-de-camp. Unfortunately, along with that painstaking attention to minutiae came an outlook of extreme suspicion upon his life in general and his employer in particular. Den remembered reading somewhere that expatriated Elomin were prone to psychoses of various sorts—including, it seemed, paranoia. Rhinann had become convinced that Vader would sooner or later have him killed for some minor infraction or dereliction of duty, and it had been that fear as much as the very sensible desire to avoid imminent de-atomization that had driven him to jump ship.
Since then, Rhinann had been an unwilling fugitive. He yearned to return to his homeworld of Elom, but his share of the credits bequeathed by Kaird wasn’t nearly enough to persuade a merchant ship’s captain to carry one passenger all the way to a world on the Outer Rim, far from the trade lanes. And so he’d stayed with those who had rescued him. His exacting nature and near-fanatical attention to detail had easily dictated his job within the group; Rhinann was the go- to being, the procurer. Whatever was needed—from delicacies such as Geniserian sand monkey flambéed in foyvè oil to please a client’s epicurean palate to an outmoded widget essential for repairing an aging holoproj unit—Rhinann could put his hands on it.
Except, it seemed, a lightsaber.
“It’s not possible,” he said dolefully, in response to Jax’s query. “The weapons of the Jedi were destroyed along with the Jedi. There are rumors that some lightsabers remain in private collections of the extremely wealthy. But the only one that I am certain truly exists belongs to Darth Vader, and I doubt he’d part with it willingly.”
“Good call,” Den said.
“A crystal, then. I’ll build my own. It’ll be more in tune with my—”
“Adegan crystals, as well as Corusca, Ilum, and others, are all under strict trade and commerce interdiction, per the orders of Emperor Palpatine.”
“I’ll grow one, then.” But Jax didn’t sound quite as determined as he had a moment before, and Den was pretty sure he knew why. Although as recently as a couple of standard years ago, what he’d known about lightsaber technology and Jedi tradition would have rattled around in a green flea’s ear, he’d learned a lot since then from listening to Jax and Laranth, as well as from Barriss Offee, back in their days on Drongar. He knew that the use of naturally occurring crystals, as opposed to synthetic ones, was one of the ways Jedi had distinguished themselves from the Sith. The ostensible reason was that the synthetics weren’t quite as pure as the crystals mined from the caves of various worlds, and there was always the chance