Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights III_ Patterns of Force - Michael Reaves [1]
He recalled hearing a rumor once to the effect that the Elomin—his people—were the descendants of a group of Zabrak who had colonized the surface of Elom ages ago. Being in the prefect’s presence made him want to find whatever bescumbered ninnyhammer had started that calumny and hurl him into the nearest sun.
Rhinann sat farther back in the formchair of his workstation, noting sourly that his mind, like a child lost in a carnival labyrinth, had wandered even farther from the meander it had originally taken. He suspected that he was edging ever closer to losing his sanity. Not surprising, considering the company he kept.
He eyed the other beings in the austere living area with disdain. They were a motley group, to be sure. Besides the Zabrak prefect, who stood in the center of the room, there was the human—a Jedi in hiding, no less. Seated on one end of a low couch, he occasionally turned his head to look at the being seated at the other end—a Zeltron female, the very definition of trouble looking for somewhere to roost. The “team” was completed by a Sullustan “journalist” named Den Dhur—if one could call the sort of sensationalistic, headline-grubbing poodoo he wrote journalism; Rhinann had read some of his pieces in various online archives, and in his opinion comparing the little alien’s writing to the Huttese term for excreta was being charitable, to say the least—and, lastly, the cause of the original detour Rhinann’s mind had taken: the protocol droid I-5YQ, which everyone referred to simply as I-Five.
Rhinann’s eyes narrowed as he contemplated the droid. I-Five had once belonged to Jax Pavan’s father, Lorn. Or rather, according to I-Five, had been partner and friend to Lorn Pavan. The clever mech had smuggled itself, Den Dhur, and the rare biotic panacea called bota to Coruscant in search of its partner’s son, Jax. The Force-sensitive boy had—depending on who was telling the story—either been surrendered to, or taken by the Jedi as a toddler. And although I-Five’s memory had been almost completely wiped, it had somehow recovered and completed its mission. Of course, it had taken two decades to do it …
These things Rhinann knew mostly as the result of his own careful research. What he guessed—no, the very idea of guessing gave him hives; he preferred to think of it as imaginative extrapolation—was that I-Five somehow completed a circle that included Jax, his deceased father, a mysterious Sith assassin, and the new Dark Lord, Darth Vader, whom Rhinann had recently served. What he knew through simple day-to-day experience was that I-Five was somehow, impossibly, more than a machine.
Fascinating as that was, however, it still didn’t address the pertinent question, which was: did the droid still have the bota, or had it already handed that over to Pavan?
The Elomin did not pretend anymore—even to himself—that his interest in the bota was commercial. He might have hidden behind that rationale if the newest member of their mismatched team—the Zeltron, Dejah Duare—hadn’t brought with her a dowry of almost unlimited funds. No, his interest was purely personal, but no less intense for that.
The literature he had found on the HoloNet had told him of the near-miraculous medicinal effects bota had on the sick and injured. Though those effects varied from species to species—including less-than-salutary outcomes for some—still, according to the twenty-year-old records he’d dredged up from the mobile med units that functioned during the Clone Wars, bota was as close to a panacea as could be imagined. With few exceptions, it was all things to all species. When administered it would simply find what