Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights II Streets of Shadows - Michael Reaves [30]
Such disloyalty to the Empire could not be forgiven, even if his only alternative had been being reduced to a wisp of radioactive gas drifting forlornly across the devastated landscape.
His plight might not have been so bad, his eventual fate not as certain, had Vader been transformed into free-floating ions like the rest of the Lambda’s crew. But Rhinann had seen the telltale footage captured by the Far Ranger’s rear cameras, the instant in which a life pod had jettisoned from the shuttle at maximum speed. He hadn’t needed the calculations quickly performed by I-Five, which had given the occupant of that life pod a one-in-eight chance of escaping the immediate area and finding adequate shelter among the deserted protective husks of buildings farther from the blast site. The odds, the droid had hypothesized, would be improved to an unknown degree should the pod’s passenger happen to be a master of the Force.
Rhinann had believed then what he knew now to be true—that this was precisely what had happened. After all, this was Darth Vader. The monster was all but indestructible. Of that Rhinann was convinced, and knew he was far from alone in his judgment. Because, in addition to his augmented strength and reflexes, Vader seemed to be more powerful than anyone in that most mysterious and wonderful of intangibles: the Force.
The Force captivated Rhinann. He had devoured every scrap of information on it he could find—no easy feat, given Emperor Palpatine’s galactic ban on any and all hard data concerning the Force. After years of cautious study, the fascinated Elomin still had little idea of what it truly was. Most savants dismissed it out of hand, calling it a legend, a myth, a throwback to the sort of primitive religions that thankfully had all but died out in this modern, more enlightened era. Of course, none of them had felt an invisible noose tighten around their necks in concert with Vader’s slowly contracting fist. But Rhinann had, and he knew that, whatever else it might be, the Force was no myth.
According to the lore, both ancient and modern, that he had assimilated, the Force was a form of energy that could be controlled and manipulated by conscious will. There were two theories as to how this was possible, which Rhinann felt were not necessarily mutually exclusive. One was that the ability to access the Force was based on a kind of apperception precipitated and augmented by endosymbiotic cellular organelles called midi-chlorians. The other theory held that the Force itself somehow brought into being those same midi-chlorians in order to facilitate its connection and thus manifest itself to varying degrees of potency in various species and individuals. There was also evidence that it was hereditary, although a wide gene pool seemed to be required for it to flourish. Nick Rostu, a native of Haruun Kal, was supposedly descended, along with all the other Korunnai, from a seed population of Jedi shipwrecked there centuries ago. Yet that soldier’s connection with the Force had been weak. It would seem that midi-chlorians, and their resulting Force manifestation, did not increase their potency through inbreeding.
With great caution and stealth Rhinann had recently arranged to have his own midi-chlorian count tested. The results, carefully shunted and sliced through a plethora of servers and screens around the galactic information hyperlane, had at last come into his possession. As he had suspected, the number was pitifully low: a mere two thousand per cell on average. No one with such a low reading would ever feel the Force flowing through them. Although this merely confirmed