Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights II Streets of Shadows - Michael Reaves [98]
Den, standing on tiptoe, was able to read the missive. “Well,” he said. “That’s serendipitous. Weren’t you just trying to build one of these?”
I-Five took the card and looked at it. “A standard onetime holoproj chip,” he said. “Nothing remarkable about either the writing style or the delivery mechanism.” He cocked a photoreceptor at the Jedi. “I assume this comes as unexpected largesse?”
“You might say that. I can’t imagine who could’ve—” Jax stopped abruptly, remembering the man he’d met yesterday at the Whiplash assembly. What had his name been—Typhon? About all Jax recalled of the man was that he’d sported an eye patch. Could this have come from him? He’d shown interest in the Velmorian weapon, after all.
“I met a man yesterday,” he said slowly, “who might be—” He stopped abruptly, struck momentarily silent by a sudden turmoil in the Force. Its origin was a psyche he’d encountered before, of that he was certain, even though he’d only experienced it indirectly. No Jedi—no one, in fact, with more than a smattering of midi-chlorians—could forget the impact of a will that strong.
Jax said, “Vader’s nearby.”
Den looked nervously around the crowded street, craning his neck in a futile attempt to see better. “Where?”
“Nearby is a relative term,” Laranth said. “But I’d put the probability of his being in a ten-square-kilometer radius at pretty high.” She gestured south. “In that direction.”
“Okay,” Den said. “So we’ll be going that way, right?” He pointed north.
Jax and Laranth both stood quite still; then Jax said, “He’s pretty upset. Not bothering to cloak his feelings at all.”
“Intriguing,” Laranth said.
“Not a word we want to be using right now,” Den said. “Shouldn’t we be pulling in our antennae, looking for a metaphorical rock to crawl under? Or maybe even a real rock? Instead of standing around here sticking out like a bunch of naked Jawas?”
“Don’t worry,” Jax said. “We’re not pushing. And he’s far too troubled to be aware of us.” He hesitated, then added, “It does make me wonder what could disturb the Dark Lord to such a degree.”
“Fine,” Den said. “Wonder while we wander north.”
With Volette’s murderer finally identified—and conveniently self-immolated—Den was looking forward to events taking a more leisurely pace, for a time at least. One very large pressure had already been lifted from them for the foreseeable future: Dejah had insisted on continuing their stipend indefinitely.
“I insist,” she’d told Jax, forestalling any protests he had been about to make. “You’ve set my mind easy insofar as Ves’s murder is concerned. He has left me more credits than I know how to spend—and coming from a Zeltron, that’s saying something. It would be my honor to subsidize you and the work you do.”
Jax, typically, had done his best to talk her out of the deal, but Dejah, bless her, had been adamantine. And when faced with the persuasive power of her biochemical and telempathic arsenal, his resistance, he’d admitted, had been pretty pathetic. So she had gone back to her conapt to pack before meeting them at the local spaceport, and Jax had gone back to the others with a bemused look on his face.
Thus they had “creds and a shed,” as the Ugnaughts put it, for the foreseeable future. And they had more than enough work to keep them occupied, between the UML and the investigations that Jax would no doubt keep getting them involved in. Den sighed. The chances of Vader locating Jax and bringing his booted heel down upon them all were still much higher than the Sullustan would have liked, which meant spacing as soon as possible was still the only sensible option. But he’d come reluctantly to realize that, for all their boasting of rationality, humans were most comfortable living in the nexu’s den. Actually, he thought, make that the nexu’s mouth. He’d come to terms with the lifestyle—mostly, at least—and it wasn