Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights III_ Patterns of Force - Michael Reaves [87]
Laranth had half fallen against a slab of tilted masonry and was staring up into the empty air; Jax and I-Five raced to her side, hurling aside obstacles as they ran—Jax using the Force, I-Five using his innate strength.
Kaj breathed out a sigh of relief; the Twi’lek would be fine.
He swung back to his own target now … and found it gone. He swept the area with the Force, uncaring at that moment if every Inquisitor in the sector felt him.
It did no good. The Inquisitor was gone.
He let out a roar of rage that embedded a meter-long twist of durasteel in the nearby building.
Far up the street, Probus Tesla, propped painfully in a deep window embrasure, watched as the Jedi and the droid he had sought gathered their companions and disappeared from sight.
His first impulse when he had emerged from the rubble—where he had lain twisted painfully despite his effort to cocoon himself—was to continue the fight, to let his sheer rage empower him. But then he had seen that boy—that untrained adept—use the Force to … atomize Mas Sirrah. Destroy him so thoroughly that not even an echo of his Force signature remained. It was as if he had never existed.
In his entire tenure as an Inquisitor, Tesla had never seen the Force used in such a way.
And there was something else he did not understand. For a moment, as he struggled to free himself from the rubble, he had felt an odd new presence in the Force, like an echo or a mirror image in an imperfect surface. When he had at last pulled free of the debris, he had seen only Jax Pavan, the droid, the Twi’lek, and the boy, all of whose signatures he had sensed before.
At first he’d taken it as Mas Sirrah’s death echo, then realized he had felt that, too—after this odd phenomenon. There was but one conclusion he could come to: the strange Force echo was from the droid, I-5YQ.
So Tesla had taken the moment of distraction caused by Sirrah’s suicidal ploy not to attack, but to flee.
It was galling, and he thought of following the outlaw Jedi and the peculiar droid, but that would only delay a complete report to Lord Vader. That was his duty, he told himself. As much as he thirsted for revenge, he understood that revenge must wait. He needed to report to his master. There was too much here he didn’t understand. He trusted Lord Vader would.
He shifted slightly on the ledge and a searing pain ripped down his side from ribs to hip. He realized only then that a piece of durasteel had pierced his side, and he was bleeding badly. Once again, he would need to be dragged to a healer.
He swallowed his shame at this second defeat, used the Force to slow the flow of blood, and sent out a call for help.
twenty
Jax decided they should make their way back to the studio through the rear of the apothecary, picking up Dejah and Rhinann on the way. The human proprietor of the business—large, impressive, and incensed by the damage to the front of her building—posed a minor problem, however.
“Are you one of them frippin’ ghosts?” She placed herself firmly in Jax’s path, hands on ample hips, and glared at him.
Jax frowned. “One of …”
“I believe she means the Inquisitors,” said I-Five placidly.
“No. No, I’m not. You can see—no robes.” He held his arms out from his body, emphasizing the ordinariness of his well-worn tunic, pants, and scuffed boots. What Inquisitor would be caught dead in such a mundane outfit?
“Well, they were sure fighting somebody,” the apothecary said dubiously. “Are you sure it wasn’t you?”
“We didn’t see who they were fighting,” Jax said, then added with a subtle change of tone, “and you didn’t, either.”
“I didn’t see who they were fighting,” the woman said.
Jax shrugged and smiled. He and his company hurriedly left out the rear of her shop and thence home by a winding route. They could hear PCBU sirens blaring down the block as they stepped through the rear doors.