Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights II Streets of Shadows - Michael Reaves [76]
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, 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 systematically 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.
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