Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights 01_ Jedi Twilight - Michael Reaves [22]
Other, closer, lights flickered as well, all about him. Even down here, in this predominantly manufacturing district, one couldn’t escape the sensory barrage of floating advert-spheres and holo-billboards. Jagged, kaleidoscopic images pulsed at the edges of Nick’s vision as he cruised down the street, touting personal tri-dee images, sleazy HoloNet sites, even various illegal substances.
He wouldn’t have to put up with them for long, he told himself. It was now merely a question of finding the right building. He brought the vehicle to a dead crawl on automatic pilot, high enough to prevent any skim-jackers from getting impulsive ideas, and concentrated.
A Jedi, even a rank Padawan, would have no trouble piloting the skimmer, and probably carrying on a conversation as well, while using the Force to search for another Force-sensitive. But Nick was no Jedi; far from it. The ability to touch the Force might be encoded in his cells, but even if there were Jedi in his ancestry, whatever he’d inherited that powered the Force was evidently pretty anemic compared with that of his forebears. He’d seldom used the ability, back on Haruun Kal, for anything more than controlling akk dogs. Multitasking was out of the question. There were members of his ghôsh who had far more power than he, but the only Korunnai he’d known of who’d really been good at it had been Kar Vastor. And he had been steeped in the dark side.
One would think that it shouldn’t be that difficult; after all, how many Force-sensitives could there be on any given street in a sty like this, particularly after the overthrow of the Order? But Nick knew that Jedi usually were able to conceal their connection to the Force, and he assumed the few still alive would be more assiduous than ever about doing so. That would make it even harder to find Pavan.
All he could do was try.
The skimmer moved slowly along, Nick sitting upright, his face scrunched in concentration.
Nothing.
Nick sighed and went to Plan B, which consisted of asking the few locals he could manage to corner momentarily if they remembered seeing a human male, midtwenties, dark hair, et cetera, in the neighborhood. At first, it looked like this wasn’t going to be any more successful than trolling in the Force. But then he lucked out: he encountered a protocol droid, one of the 3PO line, that had obviously been downlevel a long time, judging by the patina of soot and grime that coated its once-alabaster armor. The droid belonged to a local Hutt gangster named Rokko, and, though initially reluctant, it finally searched its exhaustive memory banks and produced a list of ten humans with match probabilities to Nick’s description of Pavan.
The first one lived in a resicube just around the corner, a thirty-meter-tall block of dark gray ferrocrete. There was one door, heavily barred, and no windows. The flickering sign over the door proclaimed this attractive piece of real estate to be the Coruscant Arms. Nick brought the skimmer to a halt across the street. If this was where Pavan was bivouacking, the plight of the Jedi Order was worse than he’d thought.
He stepped out of the vessel and into something soft and malodorous puddled on the curbwalk. He couldn’t tell, in the dim light, what it was, which was probably just as well. A Kubaz slythmonger tried to sell him some Somaprin-3, but hastily reconsidered when Nick told him to “Use those feet before I burn ’em off, bug-nose.”
No doubt about it, Nick thought, it’s a glamorous life I lead.
There was