Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights 01_ Jedi Twilight - Michael Reaves [92]
“It’s—intermittent,” Jax continued. “Hasn’t happened often, but when it does—I feel like I’ve been blown out of an air lock without a vac suit.”
I’ll bet, Nick thought. It occurred to him that this might work in his favor; it would be easier to keep his agenda hidden if Jax wasn’t up to maximum thrust all the time. Immediately after having the thought, he felt a burst of self-loathing, which Jax apparently didn’t notice.
“Have you told the Paladin?” Nick couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“No—but I know she suspects. I’ll have to tell her, for the same reason I’m telling you. If my connection fails at the wrong time, you and she have to be able to step in and complete the mission. Understand?”
“Absolutely,” Nick said, the words tasting like ashes in his mouth. “We got your back.”
After a labyrinthine journey through darksome corridors and chambers, they entered, through a broken door panel, what seemed to have once been a control room—there were banks of consoles, overhead monitor screens, walls of electrical paneling, and various pieces of equipment. One wall was a large, transparisteel panel that looked out over what seemed to be a vast, mass-production assembly line. Everything had a vaguely antiquated feeling to it. The only light came from dim sconces; they cast a cold cobalt sheen on everything and everybody.
The room had been trashed. Panels had been ripped out, exposing electronic entrails; monitors had been smashed; pieces of equipment had been shattered against the floor and walls. There was a spiderweb crack radiating from the center of the transparisteel panel.
The evidence of the destruction testified to its savagery. Whoever or whatever had done this had done it with passion and hatred, and it had taken enormous strength to crack the thick transparisteel. Jax watched Den Dhur pick up a panel facing from the floor and examine it. Then, wordlessly, he handed it to I-Five. Jax saw the droid reach for the facing. His metal fingers closed on one edge, fitting exactly the imprint of the four durasteel digits that had ripped it from its setting.
Laranth looked at the plate that the droid held. “Feral droids,” she murmured.
PART III
FERAL CITY
thirty-seven
Nick was standing a meter away from the others, who were hotly debating the possible existence of the so-called feral droids. Jax, he noticed, still seemed resistant to any opinion or concept advanced by I-Five. Nick couldn’t help but think that Jax was wound way too tight on this particular subject. Why was he so worked up over a droid? It was true that, if I-Five was claiming self-awareness and true sentience, it would certainly shake up some comfortable beliefs about machine intelligence. But Nick didn’t see that it would rock his world too much. There were times when he thought a brain-damaged reek had more sentience than most so-called thinking beings.
He watched Jax, still finding it hard to believe that the latter’s link with the Force was slowly eroding. It certainly added an extra wrinkle to his traitorous assignment. Turning Jax over to Vader with the former at the height of his powers would be bad enough; handing him to the Dark Lord this way was little better than ramming a lightsaber through him right now. In fact, thinking about it, the lightsaber route was probably the more humane way to go.
He was at the point of decision, he knew—past it, in fact. He should have summoned Vader when they’d found Bug-Eyes in the Ugnaught slum, but things had happened too fast. Nick knew he couldn’t stall any longer, however; if he really was carrying a tracker somewhere under his skin, then right now it was relaying the fact that he was halfway around the planet from where he was supposed to be. Of course, the droid Bug-Eyes was here, too; nevertheless, Nick didn’t want to risk his ghôsh on the chance that Vader wouldn’t think he was running from the job.